Ventriloquism in Refugee Boy

I don’t have much new to say about Tanzania, and it’s a little hard to write intelligently while Swahili rap music is blasting outside of my window (never mind that it’s 2:30am—or that the song’s chorus is “Mambo vipi [what’s up?] I’m a star” over and over again…) but I do want to talk about this book I just finished reading, Refugee Boy, by Benjamin Zephaniah. I picked it up from the awesome bookstore, having already finished all three fiction books I brought with me and not really wanting to delve into Mamdani’s Citizen and Subject yet (though now that I’ve also finished both of my new books from the bookstore, I guess I have to…) Anyways, I got it because I’ve been on the hunt for stories from a refugee’s perspective, preferably those told in the voices of refugees themselves.

Zephaniah isn’t actually a refugee, and I don’t think he’s from Africa, but it’s still interesting to see him try to represent the refugee experience through the fictional story of an Ethiopian-Eritrean boy. Alem is persecuted in both Ethiopia and Eritrea for having mixed parents until his father leaves him in Britain, where an organization helps him find a foster family and apply for political asylum. Zephaniah writes in the introduction,

For Refugee Boy I borrowed from the many stories that I have heard, and created a story that I believe many refugees would recognize. I would hope that anyone who reads the book would think before they accuse refugees of looking for a free ride. We all want to live in peace, we all want the best for our families. The Celts, the Angles, the Saxons, the Jamaicans are all refugees of one sort or another. What kind of a refugee are you? And what are you scared of?

Since I just spent a semester reading autobiographies/first-person narratives and dealing with these questions of representation, I noticed that Zephaniah borrows from autobiographical tradition in a couple ways. First, in claiming that refugees will recognize themselves in this story, he establishes that he has some right to speak for them. This is a lot like the way Rigoberta Menchu speaks for indigenous Guatemalans, except for the fact that she was actually an indigenous Guatemalan and Zephaniah isn’t a refugee (but the latter doesn’t claim that this is his experience). The second thing he does is claim that the reader will recognize herself as well—encouraging us to engage in autobiographical reading as we go (and since we’re all refugees, that means that he is too, and therefore it’s ok for him to speak on their behalf). Just like an autobiographer, Zephaniah runs into the tension between individuality and generalizability, but in order to assert his authority, he has to prioritize generalizability.

(Uh, ok, judging by the sounds outside, I think someone is killing a cat. Am a little concerned.)

I have to give Zephaniah a lot of credit for recognizing the limits of his ability to speak for his character. The book is written almost entirely in the third-person, and while we do hear a lot of Alem’s point of view/inner thoughts, the author backs off at really emotional moments that are clearly outside of his personal range of experiences. Usually bad news comes in a letter and Alem gets to read it and react before we find out what it is. The author doesn’t try to express how Alem is feeling during traumatic moments: we see his physical reactions but the emotions behind them aren’t explained to us. We have just as much insight into his well-being and psychological state as the nice British foster family he lives with does.

But there are two chapters written in the first person: the first is his testimony, given to two people who work for an organization called the Refugee Council (this organization really exists and its contact information is given at the back of the book, which gives a slight impression that the book is meant to be an advertisement), and the final chapter, entitled “Let Me Speak.” These chapters both begin with “My name is Alem Kelo” (which is also the last line of the book) – a bold way of saying “this is my voice,” given that it isn’t, in fact, the voice of Alem Kelo. I don’t have a problem with the first of the two chapters, since it reflects the amount of information that would be available to the judge deciding his case. This is the only time in the asylum process when the voice of the refugee is allowed to come through: when they are explaining why they are refugees. They are only allowed to use their voices to self-define as refugees.

The final chapter is a bit trickier for me. It’s a statement asserting the personhood (as opposed to the mere refugee-ness) of the protagonist: “Look at me, look at all the things that I am capable of, and think of all the things you could call me – a student, a lover of literature, a budding architect, a friend, a symbol of hope even, but what am I called? A refugee.” This is the only time when I think it’s a bit of a problem for Zephaniah to manufacture the voice of a refugee, in part because Alem in the story shows no desire to make political speeches of this sort and is pushed into doing so against his will.

There are four poems at the end of Refugee Boy, in a section called “Refugee Writes.” Not totally clear if these poems were in fact written by refugees or are also fictionalized, but I’m inclined to believe the former. I don’t know why, but for some reason poetry seems to be the vehicle of choice for refugees’ voices.

There’s a lot of scholarship about how refugees are silenced by virtue of their being labeled “refugees,” and there’s even some scholarly literature about how that scholarship excludes refugees’ voices, but so far I have yet to find anyone who really engages with texts written by refugees – except for poetry. Peter Nyers’ Rethinking Refugees is a great example of a book that excoriates other scholars for not effectively taking the opinions of refugees into consideration, but then only devotes a few pages to looking at a couple of poems written by refugees. (N.b. it’s also a great example of a book that should never have been published without a real editor going through it: Nyers completely misinterprets international law, and writes such NONSENSICAL CRAP as “For instance, conflict within the refugee community and between refugees and the local community surely represent a qualitative difference than does the presence of agents of genocide.” Gahhhhhh!). Anyways, my point is that for some unknown reason, either refugees don’t write anything other than poetry or nothing else they write is ever publicly available.



In terms of the political aspect of the story, the book is a call to think about the way we treat asylum seekers and immigrants. Zephaniah writes, “When I hear politicians saying that we are being ‘flooded’ by refugees, I always remind myself that each ‘refugee’ is a person, a person who for some reason has left everything they know and love to find safety in a strange and sometimes hostile country.” This is definitely a perspective that gets drowned out in the xenophobic reactions to outsiders who dare to enter our zones of privilege. Sorry, but we don’t have any more of a right to safety because we happen to have been born in a certain place at a certain time.

Zephaniah partially succeeds in showing the inhumane way in which refugees are treated, but probably doesn’t go far enough. The book is a children’s story, a fact which doesn’t diminish it in the slightest, but I do think it’s convenient that Zephaniah gets to use the child to embody the innocence of the refugee population. Alem is kind of a poster-boy for refugees (“look at this cute, intelligent, well-behaved, innocent little child! How could you possibly advocate for kicking him out!?”) Because Zephaniah chooses to use this plot device, he probably doesn’t really convey the confusion and overwhelming-ness of the process of applying for asylum: most of these complications are dealt with by the Refugee Council and a lawyer. And I can only imagine how difficult a process it is… I mean, even the much, much easier tasks of renewing my green card and applying for American citizenship have been frustrating and a bit confusing (and I am incredibly privileged for a number of reasons, especially including the fact that I don’t look or sound like a foreigner). For some insight on the experiences of immigrants in the US, look here and here and here and here. I’d also highly recommend the movie “The Visitor” which deals with some of the same issues.