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A review by simlish
The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives by Viet Thanh Nguyen
5.0
The Displaced is absolutely one of the best things I've read all year. Most anthologies have stronger and weaker parts, but while I could pick out the absolute strongest essays in The Displaced, there's no way I could pick out a weakest one -- the quality is uniformly very high. It was absolutely much heavier reading than I was really capable of between obsessively checking the news, this election week, but it wasn't as hard to track as some heavy things are -- most of the essays are pretty short, so it was easy to get all the way through each one before my attention span crashed.
The contributors cover a wide swathe of experiences, both geographically and over time. My only complaint is that all of the writers were children when they became refugees -- there's one essay where the story of a man who became a refugee as an adult is told secondhand, as he was interviewed by the writer. It seemed like a strange oversight, and I know it's not for lack of adult refugees, so I wonder what went into that decision making. Since all of the writers were children when they fled, they were not involved in the decision making of fleeing, which feels like an important perspective. It shifts the focus pretty forcefully onto the assimilation/homemaking of being a refugee, which might have been the point, but I don't know, it just felt like a pretty glaring absence to me.
The main themes were the concept of home and how it's affected by statelessness, the way being a refugee lingers far past gaining a new permanent home, and what residents of host/destination countries project onto refugees. The concept of ghosts showed up repeatedly -- refugees as ghosts, homeland as a ghost, the past as a ghost. Ghosts showed up almost as often as the journey itself. While the exacts of each journey were obviously different, the emotional through lines were the same from essay to essay, person to person.
One thing I quite liked is that the forward starts with a request that reading this book not be all you, the reader, do to engage with refugee issues.
The contributors cover a wide swathe of experiences, both geographically and over time. My only complaint is that all of the writers were children when they became refugees -- there's one essay where the story of a man who became a refugee as an adult is told secondhand, as he was interviewed by the writer. It seemed like a strange oversight, and I know it's not for lack of adult refugees, so I wonder what went into that decision making. Since all of the writers were children when they fled, they were not involved in the decision making of fleeing, which feels like an important perspective. It shifts the focus pretty forcefully onto the assimilation/homemaking of being a refugee, which might have been the point, but I don't know, it just felt like a pretty glaring absence to me.
The main themes were the concept of home and how it's affected by statelessness, the way being a refugee lingers far past gaining a new permanent home, and what residents of host/destination countries project onto refugees. The concept of ghosts showed up repeatedly -- refugees as ghosts, homeland as a ghost, the past as a ghost. Ghosts showed up almost as often as the journey itself. While the exacts of each journey were obviously different, the emotional through lines were the same from essay to essay, person to person.
One thing I quite liked is that the forward starts with a request that reading this book not be all you, the reader, do to engage with refugee issues.