“One night, the mortar launcher awakened superstition from its sleep and dragged it away with an F-16 saying, ‘I cannot exist . . . unless there is a refugee.’”
We celebrate the human spirit in those who surviving war-torn zones or climate disasters reach out for new homes or refuges in safer places. They are referred to as refugees. Yet, many people who are living without the fear of having their homes ransacked, burnt, bombed or annihilated because of reasons we don’t quite understand — for who could fully explain the logic of war, floods or fires — find it hard to allow the dispossessed shelter within the bounds of their safe haven. They get blamed for creating scarcities of resources.
“Is it our instinct to always blame the victim?” asks Ramy Al-Asheq in Ever Since I Did Not Die. We share more such questions from him and others in this special issue. He was born and bred in a refugee camp, eventually incarcerated and suffered till he found a safe haven. An account from Timothy Jay Smith on the plight of refugees who escaped to Lesbos from as far as Afghanistan and Iraq brings to the fore the crises faced by host countries too. Shaheen Akhtar’s short story takes us to a refugee camp for Rohingyas, people who have lived in the region of the Rakhine state from the seventh century but in the last few years have been facing violent displacement. A UN report gives out they are being beheaded, shot and burnt out of their homes.
We have poetry from a refugee from Ukraine who is trying to rebuild her life in Scandinavia, Lesya Bakun, and from Ahmad Al-Khatat of Iraq. Michael Burch brings in the story of Christ while talking of modern day refugees, given that he describes the Child as a ‘Palestinian’. Though did these borders drawn by political needs exist at that time? LaVern Spencer McCarthy questions laws and attitudes that nurture such fences while Ihlwha Choi of Korea talks of love and acceptance being the best balm for refugees — whether North or South Korean or Ukrainian.
The flowers are already in full bloom, In the hearts of the Northern and Southern Koreans, Also in the hearts of the people of Ukraine and Russia.
When will we find a way to get in touch with the same ‘flowers of love’ and acceptance for all humanity living on this beautiful green planet? Do we need to redefine our norms to let our species survive and thrive? Let’s ponder with these writers…
An excerpt from Ramy Al-Asheq’sEver Since I Did Not Die, translated from Arabic by Isis Nusair, edited by Levi Thompson. The author was born in a refugee camp. Click here to read.
Mister, They’re Coming Anyway: Timothy Jay Smith writes on the refugee crisis in Lesbos Island, Greece with photographs by Michael Honegger. Click here to read.
The Magic Staff , a poignant short story about a Rohingya child by Shaheen Akhtar, translated from Bengali by Arifa Ghani Rahman. Click here to read.
Our population crossed the 8 billion mark in November, 2022. As we move towards trying to hunt for alternative domiciles for our ever-expanding population, even in outer space, we still have to take into account the increased movement of people across the Earth in search of alternative homes driven by external circumstances or by personal needs.
Some have lost their homes and lands to war, some to climate emergencies and some moved out out of choice. Here we have collected narratives of past and present migrations, emphasising the fluidity of borders, despite the lines drawn artificially by manmade constructs. In an earlier interview, Anthony Sattin talks of nomadic migrations and the concept of asabiyya, or brotherhood, which tied humans to ideas and ideals instead of a piece of land mooted in Arabia by Ibn Khaldun in the fourteenth century. Has the time come to revive this concept with conflicts and the climate crises becoming real? As weapons, fire and water affect our habitats, one wonders if reverting to the concept of nomadic existence is not becoming a necessity… This small collection of writings will hopefully highlight the concerns.
In Belacan, Farouk Gulsara shares a narrative based on the life of a migrant in 1950s Malaysia. Clickhereto read.
Ujjal Dosanjh, former Minister from Canada and former Premier of British Columbia, talks of his own journey and learning as he migrated out of India to Canada. Click hereto read.
In Mister, They’re Coming Anyway, Timothy Jay Smith writes on the refugee crisis in Lesbos Island, Greece, in 2016 with photographs by Michael Honegger. Click here to read.
An excerpt from Ramy Al-Asheq’sEver Since I Did Not Die, translated from Arabic by Isis Nusair, edited by Levi Thompson. The author was born in a refugee camp. Click hereto read.
Ujjal Dosanjh, former Minister from Canada and former Premier of British Columbia, discusses his autobiography, Journey After Midnight – A Punjabi Life: From India to Canada, and the need for a world with less borders. Click hereto read.
Professor Fakrul Alam discusses his new book of Tagore translations, Gitabitan: Selected Song-Lyrics of Rabindranath Tagore. Click here to read.
Translations
Tagore’sMusalmanir Galpa(A Muslim Woman’s Story) has been translated from Bengali by Aruna Chakravarti. Clickhere to read.
Masud Khan’s poem,In Another Galaxy, has been translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam. Click hereto read.
Wakeful Stays the Door, a poem by Munir Momin, has been translated from Balochi by Fazal Baloch. Click here to read.
Songs of Freedom: An Ordinary Taleis a narrative by Nandani based on her own experiences, translated from Hindustani by Janees. These narrations highlight the ongoing struggle against debilitating rigid boundaries drawn by societal norms, with the support from organisations like Shaktishalini and Pandies. Click hereto read.
“Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them…”
— TS Eliot, ‘Four Quartets: Burnt Norton’(1936)
Humans have always been dreamers, ideators and adventurers.
Otherwise, could we have come this far? From trees to caves to complex countries and now perhaps, an attempt to reach out towards outer space for an alternative biome as exploring water, in light of the recent disaster of the Titan, is likely to be tougher than we imagined. In our attempt to survive, to live well by creating imagined constructs, some fabrications backfired. Possibly because, as George Orwell observed with such precision in Animal Farm, some perceived themselves as “more equal”. Of course, his was an animal allegory and we are humans. How different are we from our brethren species on this beautiful planet, which can survive even without us? But can humanity survive without Earth? In science fiction, we have even explored that possibility and found home among stars with the Earth becoming uninhabitable for man. However, humanity as it stands of now, continues to need Earth. To live amicably on the planet in harmony with nature and all the species, including our own, we need to reimagine certain constructs which worked for us in the past but seem to have become divisive and destructive at this point.
Ujjal Dosanjh, former Minister in the Canadian cabinet and former Premier of British Columbia, in his autobiography, Journey After Midnight – A Punjabi Life: From India to Canada, talks of regionalism as an alternative to narrow divisive constructs that terrorise and hurt others. He writes in his book: “If humanity isn’t going to drown in the chaos of its own creation, the leading nations of the world will have to create a new world order, which may involve fewer international boundaries.” We have a candid conversation with him about his beliefs and also a powerful excerpt from his autobiography.
An interview with Professor Fakrul Alam takes us into Tagore’s imagined world. He discussed his new book of Tagore translations, Gitabitan: Selected Song-Lyrics of Rabindranath Tagore. He has brought out a collection of 300 songs translated to English. In a bid to emphasise an inclusive world, we also have a translation of Tagore’s ‘Musalmanir Galpa’ (A Muslim Woman’s Story) by Aruna Chakravarti. A transcreation of his poem, called ‘Proshno or Questions’ poses difficult challenges for humanity to move towards a more inclusive world. Our translation by Ihlwha Choi of his own Korean poem to English also touches on his visit to the polymath’s construct in the real world, Santiniketan. All of these centring around Tagore go to commemorate the month in which he breathed his last, August. Professor Alam has also translated a poem from Bengali by Masud Khan that has futuristic overtones and builds on our imagined constructs. From Fazal Baloch we have a Balochi translation of a beautiful, almost a surrealistic poem by Munir Momin.
We travel to Andaman with Mohul Bhowmick and further into Sierra with Meredith Stephens. Ravi Shankar travels back in nostalgia to his hostel and Kathleen Burkinshaw dives into the past — discussing and responding to the media presentation of an event that left her family scarred for life, the atomic holocaust of 1945 in Japan. This was a global event more than seven decades ago that created refugees among the survivors whose homes had been permanently destroyed. Perhaps, their stories are horrific, and heart wrenching like the ones told by those who suffered from the Partition of India and Pakistan, a divide that is celebrated by Independence Days for the two nations based on a legacy of rifts created by the colonials and perpetrated to this day by powerbrokers. Aysha Baqir has written of the wounds suffered by the people with the governance gone awry. Some of the people she writes of would have been refugees and migrants too.
A poignant narrative about refugees who flock to the Greek island of Lesbos by Timothy Jay Smith with photographs by Michael Honegger, both of whom served at the shelters homing the displaced persons, cries out to halt wars and conflicts that displace them. We have multiple narratives of migrants in this issue, with powerful autobiographical stories told by Asad Latif and Suzanne Kamata. Paul Mirabile touches on how humans have adopted islands by borrowing them from seas… rather an unusual approach to migrations. We have an essay on Jane Austen by Deepa Onkar and a centenary tribute to Chittaranjan Das by Bhaskar Parichha.
The theme of migrants is echoed in stories by Farouk Gulsara and Shivani Shrivastav. Young Nandani has given an autobiographical story, translated from Hindustani to English by Janees, in which a migration out of various homes has shredded her family to bits — a narrative tucked in Pandies Corner. Strange twists of the supernatural are woven into fiction by Khayma Balakrishnan and Reeti Jamil.
I would like to give my grateful thanks to our wonderful team at Borderless, especially to Sohana Manzoor for her fabulous artwork. Huge thanks to all our gifted contributors and our loyal readers. Borderless exists today because of all of you are making an attempt to bringing narratives that build bridges, bringing to mind Lennon’s visionary lyrics:
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one
Refugees landing at Lesbos. Photographs by Michael Honegger
Memories of Lesbos, 2016.
Sunrise over the Mediterranean. The island’s hills brighten as the chug of boat engines can be heard over the lapping waves. These aren’t your typical Greek fishing boats returning from a night at sea, but a flotilla of black rafts, nine total carrying some 400 refugees to land on the north coast of Lesbos Island. Under five miles off the Turkish coast, Lesbos has become a beachhead for a flood of refugees that has come as unannounced as a tsunami, and for which local communities are even less prepared.
There has always been a trickle of refugees across the narrow channel. In the ten years that I have been coming here, every week I would find one or two rafts abandoned on the beach with ten or so life jackets or paddles. Until recently, most had been young men from Afghanistan and Iraq, escaping wars they didn’t want to fight, who would later be spotted on a road walking the forty miles or so to the island’s capital, Mytilini, to be processed and transferred to a camp in Athens. In the whole country, the number of such migrants has increased five-fold over the same period last year; but for the islands offshore Turkey, the numbers have risen far more dramatically. On Lesbos, the count has gone from a few dozen a month to over two thousand in one three-day period alone.
A surge in Taliban-led violence in Afghanistan, the rapid spread of the barbaric Islamic state in Iraq, and Syria’s devastating civil war have sent millions fleeing for their lives. Over half of the Syrian population has been displaced, and now accounts for half or more of the new arrivals. Often members of the middle class—teachers, IT specialists and engineers—more often Syrians come as families, forced to leave when their children’s school was bombed; or if from Aleppo, when their neighbourhood was razed. On the whole, Syrians have more money than others, but that doesn’t mean much when they have nothing else but the clothes they are wearing.
Refugees in Lesbos. Photographs by Michael Honegger
Some Afghani refugees have walked from as far as Kabul, taking weeks to hike over Iran’s mountains and cross the length of Turkey to its west coast. The odd Syrian has flown to Istanbul, and taken buses to where, even if he or she has money, still has to hide in forests, waiting for days until his turn for the ‘trafficker’ to bundle him aboard a rubber raft. With the craft’s captain (usually one of the refugees) given an hour of training, they are launched for Greece with nothing more precise nautically than a pointed finger.
It’s a harrowing journey for everyone, not the least because of the real risk of capsizing their overloaded rafts even in light seas—sometimes purposefully. The traffickers instruct them to slash their pontoons if the Greek Coast Guard approaches to keep from being turned back to Turkey, which inevitably tosses forty-some non-swimmers into the sea with a crew of only four frantically trying to save them. Ironically, the Coast Guard’s mission is not to turn them back, but to ensure their safe arrival.
Ahead of them, the journey will still be hard. They don’t know it yet. Their dream—their safety—is their first footstep in Europe. It’s only one step in a perilous journey that will take them to processing centers, overcrowded camps, and force them into the hands of other traffickers, more malevolent than anyone else they have met on their way, who, for extortionist prices, promise to get them to Germany or Austria—the current popular destinations.
That emotional first step on European soil can’t be overestimated. As their rafts slide ashore, it’s a celebration. The journey has ended and they have arrived safely. Regardless of their wariness of what’s next, they scramble ashore, some feeling the need to run a short distance from the water; but others, overcome with their first sense of security in years, weep, embrace each other, believing—rightfully—that they have made it to a better place. Certainly a safer one.
It’s different, too, from what they imagined. There is little officialdom at this northern point of the island. No police to register them, no information other than the latest rumours that their rescuers—sometimes the Coast Guard, sometimes local volunteers—can pass on. Frequently they don’t know where they landed, only that they need to register with the police to get in the long line to be processed.
Where are the police?
Seventy kilometers away.
Will there be a bus?
Maybe.
Maybe?
Probably not. But maybe. It changes daily.
What do we do?
Walk.
Walk? My wife is pregnant. My boy is three years old.
I’m sorry. Walk.
The rules, and the probability of a bus, change daily. It’s not because of some great inefficiency by Lesbos’ government, though the elimination a few years ago of village mayors to create a central authority in Mytilini has complicated providing services as essential as portable johns at the bus park where people are often stranded for several days. Earlier this week, that meant thirty persons crowded into a bus shelter on a chilly and rainy night; among them, eight children and five women—two of them pregnant.
While it was foreseeable that the Syrians would mass in camps just over the border in Turkey, it was far less predictable that they would become such a massive wave of refugees headed for the West. If someone saw it coming, that message never got to frontline Lesbos. It might not have mattered if it did. The country is bankrupt. Local officials can hardly provide basic services, let alone cope with an explosion of refugees. International NGOs haven’t caught up with the crisis either.
Local volunteers are making extraordinary efforts to meet the rafts on arrival, and ensure that they have food, water, clothing, shoes, and even Pampers because there are so many infants. Of course, not everyone agrees on what assistance, if any, should be provided.
Most refugees don’t plan to stay in Greece. Some will, of course, but the locals, seeing first-hand the dimension of what is happening, are starting to ask the bigger picture questions: What does it mean for Europe? Who are these people, coming from war-torn countries, possibly armed because in war zones people have weapons? How many refugees can be absorbed before fundamentally changing the culture of Europe itself?
Closer to home, the concerns take on an economic aspect. What if tourists stop coming because they don’t want to be confronted with the plight of refugees, as some reports suggest has started to happen on other islands? No one denies they need water and food, but what beyond that might actually encourage the next groups to make Molyvos their destination? Tents? Toilets? The worry is that if the refugees, using their cell phones, report back to those following in their footsteps that they are being helped, even more people will come here.
The refugees expect to be met and confronted in some way. The lack of even one policeman in my village, or the absence of a bus to take them to Mytilini, puzzles them. A couple of days ago, a few staged a sit-in, blocking traffic on the road in the village, demanding to be arrested and taken to Mytilini. It lasted only as long as it took to convince them that there really was no one in authority who could arrest them.
One of the young men asked me why not a policeman? Why not a bus? I told him that Greece was a poor country, but he didn’t buy it. His was poorer.
I tried the argument: There are too many of you. The village can’t cope. You are sending messages back that here you get water, food, and until a few days ago, we had a small camp where you could sleep. Now too many people are coming.
He shook his head sadly at my obtuseness.
Mister, they’re coming anyway.
Photograph by Michael Honegger
Timothy Jay Smith, writer, wanderer and philanthropist, has traveled around the world many times collecting stories for his novels, screenplays and stage plays.
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