Preface and Acknowledgements
There are few memorials to the victims of forced displacement. Refugees were—and are—the overlooked victims of modern politics. In part, this is because the mass movement of people has been normalized over the past one hundred years. People, usually in far away places, move; they are the flotsam and jetsam of conflict, the unfortunate victims of history, who only constitute a ‘crisis’ if they get too close to home. But in another sense, existential as well as political, refugees have always moved too close to what the more securely domiciled think of as home. As Hannah Arendt argued, although there are many reasons why one might become a refugee, once the thread between personhood and nation is cut, it is game over for any comfortable assumptions about civil, political, and human rights. Modern placelessness demonstrates how fragile everybody’s place in the world is.
This book gives an account of how that vulnerability appeared to a group of writers and thinkers who saw clearly that the ‘refugee crisis’ of the midtwentieth century was also a political and imaginative crisis of the most intimate meanings of citizenship and being. It began as a sequel to an earlier study of mid-twentieth century literature and law, The Judicial Imagination: Writing after Nuremberg (2011). Writing that book, it became clear that along with genocide and total war, it was the question of statelessness that preoccupied many writers and thinkers at mid-century. And for good reason: no matter how bold new terms for international and historical justice were in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the realpolitik of sovereign power meant that the world kept on making refugees. As the writers discussed in the pages that follow all understood, mass displacement was to be the twentiethcentury’s continuing atrocity.
In some parts of the world, including my own, it was possible to turn a blind-eye to the steady rhythm of departures and arrivals of this ongoing history for quite some time. Recently, that blind-eye has become a slammed door. If more proof were needed that the threat presented by mass displacement comes not from people who have no choice but to leave their
homes, but from the panicked insecurity of the rights-rich, we see it in today’s toxic mess of bile and bureaucracy, bad faith politics, and ethnonationalist posturing. Now, as in the mid-twentieth century, the consequences of what is in reality not a refugee crisis, but a crisis of moral and political citizenship, are dire—for everyone.
Oddly, perhaps, this might be why this has been an unexpectedly companionable book to write. Friendship, as Arendt also argued, takes on a special poignancy in hostile environments. I have benefited hugely from the conversation, reading, and writing of: Elizabeth Anker, Anna Barnard, Les Back, Simon Behrman, Bryan Cheyette, Sarah Cole, Stef Craps, Samuel Durant, Robert Eaglestone, Lara Feigel, David Feldman, Peter Gatrell, Matt Hart, Scott Jordan Harris,Tony Kushner, Kate McLoughlin, Marina MacKay, Itamar Mann, David Milne, Dirk Moses, Daniel Pick, Adam Piette, Denise Riley, Jacqueline Rose, Michael Rothberg, Matthew Taunton, Benjamin Thomas White, Daniel Trilling, Natasha Wheatley, and Marina Warner. I am especially indebted to Allan Hepburn for his keen and generous reading, and to Kate Jones for helping put the book together. Students on my Refugee Writing Masters course will recognize how important their commitment and cleverness were to the writing of this book.
Two groups of people have been particularly good at demonstrating the connections between refugees and many kinds of citizenship: my colleagues on the Refugee History project, Becky Taylor, Kate Ferguson, and Hari Reed, and my AHRC/ESRC Refugee Hosts collaborators, Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, Alastair Agar, Anna Rowlands, and Aydan Geatrick. Special thanks to Yousif M. Qasmiyeh.
Thanks to Jerome Kohn, the Hannah Arendt Bluecher Literary Trust and Yale Representation Limited for permission to reproduce Arendt’s poetry and translations; the heirs of Bertolt Brecht and Brecht Erben for permission to quote Brecht’s poems, and Curtis Brown Ltd for permission to quote Auden’s. Thanks too are owed to the excellent librarians from the University of East Anglia’s Special Collections; the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress; the John J. Burns Library, Boston College; Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth; and the Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University. Earlier, and now much changed, versions of chapters six and seven first appeared in Humanity and Textual Practice: thanks to editors, Samuel Moyn, Joseph Slaughter, Peter Boxall, and anonymous readers for the keen insights that tightened up my thinking at crucial moments.
This book would not have been written without the crucial collegial support (wine and fish dinners) of Cathie Carmichael and Claire Jowitt. My editor at OUP, Jacqueline Norton understood what this book was before I could. Jenni Barclay and Sarah Churchwell have kept me running through the past few years: they are the wittiest, kindest, smartest, and best of friends. My place in the world, always, is with Joe, Mizzy, and Shaun.
Introduction:
R T ONE R EADING STATELESSNESS
PA R T TH R EE SANDS OF SO RR OW
Statelessness and the Poetry of the Borderline: W.H. Auden and Yousif M. Qasmiyeh
List of Illustrations
1 Affidavit of Identity in Lieu of Passport: ‘I wish to use this document in lieu of a passport which I, a state-less person, cannot obtain at present.’
Hannah Arendt Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., Courtesy of Hannah Arendt-Bluecher Literary Trust.
2. View of the Gurs transit camp, 1940–41, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Jack Lewin.
3. Sketch of five women by Lili Andrieux, ‘Barracks Interior with Bread and Two Bottles (Version II)’, 1940, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Lili Andrieux.
6
47
48
4. ‘Femme à Gurs’ [Woman at Gurs] by Lili Andrieux, 1940, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Lili Andrieux. 49
5 ‘But she is mad!’ Ingrid Bergman’s Irene looks down at the weeping crowd from behind the bars of her asylum in the final scene of Europe ’51 © BFI.
6. Opening scenes of Stromboli: Land of God, shot in Farfa-Sabina refugee camp, north of Rome. © BFI.
7. ‘Dio Mio’/‘God, give me strength, understanding courage’. Ingrid Bergman in final scene of Stromboli: Land of God. © BFI.
114
115
116
8. Samuel Beckett, manuscript notebook of ‘La Suite’, 1946. © The Estate of Samuel Beckett, Samuel Beckett Collection, (MS.1991.001) Box 11, Folder 9, John J. Burns Library, Boston College, reproduced by the kind permission of the Estate of Samuel Beckett c/o Rosica Colin Limited, London. 121
9. Samuel Beckett with the Irish Red Cross at Saint-Lô, 1945. © The Estate of Samuel Beckett, Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College, reproduced by the kind permission of the Estate of Samuel Beckett c/o Rosica Colin Limited, London. 125
10. Refugees retraining, from Survey Graphic, special number ‘on the challenge to democracy’ (1939). © The British Library Board, P.P.6392. ebm, p. 41, courtesy of The British Library Board. 149
11. Children ‘old beyond their years’ drinking milk in Gaza. Still from American Council for the Relief of Palestinians, Sands of Sorrow (1950). 154
12. Hind Husseini teaching girls at Dar-el-Tifl. Still from American Council for the Relief of Palestinians, Sands of Sorrow (1950). 156
13. Baddawi refugee camp, Northern Lebanon. © Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, April 2016. 184
Introduction Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees
I have not felt that I entirely belong to myself any more. Something of my natural identity has been destroyed forever with my original, real self. I have become less outgoing than really suits me and today I—the former cosmopolitan—keep feeling as if I had to offer special thanks for every breath of air that I take in a foreign country, thus depriving its own people of its benefit On the day I lost my Austrian passport I discovered, at the age of fifty-eight, that when you lose your native land you are losing more than a patch of territory within set borders.
Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday1
Everywhere the word ‘exile’ which once had an undertone of almost sacred awe, now provokes the idea of something simultaneously suspicious and unfortunate.
Hannah Arendt, ‘Guests from No-Man’s Land’, 30 June 19442
StefanZweig’s The World of Yesterday (1942) is possibly the saddest refugee memoir of the mid-twentieth century. Jew, Austrian, European, Zweig had been a popular novelist, playwright, biographer, and writer of intellectual history. According to the statistics of Co-opération Intellectuelle, published by the League of Nations, at one point he was the ‘most translated writer in the world’.3 ‘It was pleasant to live here,’ he wrote of the Vienna of his youth, ‘in this atmosphere of intellectual tolerance, and unconsciously every citizen of Vienna also became a supranational, cosmopolitan citizen of the world’.4 By the time Zweig published his memoir, the ‘former cosmopolitan’ had become a stateless person, ‘a cruel condition . . . hard to explain to anyone who has not known it himself. It is a nerve-racking sense of teetering
on the brink, wide awake and staring into nothing, knowing that wherever you find a foothold you can be thrust back into the void at any moment.’5
In February 1942, Zweig decided it was preferable to step into the void voluntarily, and ended his life, in a suicide pact with Elisabet Charlotte Zweig in Brazil. The Zweigs had left England, their first country of exile, in 1940 when it became clear that like many Jewish, German, and Austrian refugees, they might be interned as enemy aliens. ‘So,’ wrote the one-time ‘citizen of the world’, ‘I belong to nowhere now, I am a stranger or at most a guest everywhere.’6
Zweig’s autobiography records the moment when many of those in the twentieth century who had thought of themselves as citizens of the world discovered that they had become citizens of nowhere or, more precisely, non-citizens, stateless, the placeless people. This book is about how the generation of writers and intellectuals that followed Zweig’s responded to the emergence of this new category of person in the world: the modern refugee whose history, as has recently become clear once more, is also the history of the changing meanings of political and national citizenship in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
At the heart of this history is the spectre of rightlessness.When the placeless people of the mid-twentieth century were pushed out of the old ‘trinity of state-people-territory’ they also revealed how poor a protection natural rights had turned out to be. Others in the world had long known that as a big idea universal rights tended to only be as good as the political power that chose—or not—to underwrite them. But now the realities of rightlessness boomeranged back to Europe, unleashing an anxiety that has characterized debates about national and political belonging—and refugees—ever since. The international human rights regime that was constructed out of the ashes of World War Two attempted to lock the spectre of rightlessness back up in a new bottle of universal legal and normative safeguards. This chapter in the history of rights made extraordinary gains, but because the self-determination of peoples was also part of that same package, little could be (or was) done to prevent new generations of people being expelled, pushed, or driven from their homes. As it became more and more difficult to imagine a political and legal solution to the precariousness of modern citizenship, the more those bold new laws intended to guarantee the rights of all people regardless of where they were in the world began to circumscribe the kinds of legal and political existence those stuck or moving between nation states were entitled to. Whilst the refugees of the 1930s and
1940s raised the spectre of rightlessness in uncompromising terms, those who followed have tended to find themselves tumbling out of politics and history and into, at best, an often precarious humanitarianism, at worst, a zero degree or ‘bare-life’ existence.
In this book I return to the mid-twentieth century to recapture the scandal of statelessness as it appeared to a group of writers and intellectuals who lived its historical fall-out at first hand. Two, Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil, were refugees themselves. It is not a coincidence that both women were among the most direct critics of human rights in the twentieth century. The others, George Orwell, Samuel Beckett, the American journalist and refugee advocate, Dorothy Thompson, and W.H. Auden, all understood deracination to be a symptom of political and historical failure. None were content with ‘horrified humanitarianism’ (the phrase is Thompson’s). Writing and thinking before human rights came to connote the worldwide complex of governance over suffering we assume it to be now, these writers remind us that far from being a ‘crisis’ affecting just the poor unfortunates of the world, the history of placelessness is everybody’s history. On the day Stefan Zweig lost his Austrian passport, he was not the only European to discover that when you lose your native land, you lose far more than a patch of territory within set borders.
Placeless People
There have always been refugees, but the forced mass displacement of people in the twentieth century was something new. Eric Hobsbawm once suggested that ‘genocide’ and ‘statelessness’ belonged together as the two modern extremes that were ‘so unfamiliar that new words had to be invented for them’.7 The Nazi genocide now defines the moral, political, and imaginative limit of the age of extremes; mass displacement, on the other hand, quickly lost its status as a modern extreme—if it really ever had it. Relatively few people are legally classified as ‘stateless’ as the term has come to be defined under international law since the 1930s, but until very recently, as far as most in the West were concerned, the large-scale uprooting of people from their homes, communities, and their citizenship was accepted as the price to be paid for a world made up of sovereign states—not least because since the end of World War Two that price has been most heavily paid in the Middle East and the global south.8
Hannah Arendt was one of the first to understand that what looked like a refugee crisis in reality was a crisis for the political and moral authority of the European nation state, particularly for its historic claim to be the home of the rights of man. ‘Future historians will perhaps be able to note that the sovereignty of the nation state ended in absurdity when it began to decide who was a citizen and who was not,’ she wrote shortly after her arrival in New York in 1941; ‘when it no longer sent individual politicians into exile, but left hundreds of thousands of its citizens to the sovereign and arbitrary decisions of other nations.’9 To be left to the arbitrary decisions of other nations was to be left, precisely, nowhere: to be stateless was to be rightless. Arendt’s arguments about the impossibility of legislating for human rights in a world of sovereign nations have recently resurfaced in the humanities and social sciences, and are now regularly referred to in debates about refugees, sovereignty, and the future of human rights. I begin this book with Arendt first, because of her political and historical clarity on this point, but also because of her less remarked deep literary and cultural understanding of placelessness. Arendt understood the new statelessness to be existential as well as political. Its emergence required new forms of thinking and imagination. Older paradigms of cosmopolitan exile would no longer do. The world had turned. ‘Everywhere the word “exile” which once had an undertone of almost sacred awe, now provokes the idea of something simultaneously suspicious and unfortunate,’ she wrote in an article entitled ‘Guests from No-Man’s Land’ in 1944.10 The Scum of the Earth (1941) was the title Arthur Koestler gave to his autobiographical account of his refugee experience in France.11
Arendt was not about to concede to this fall into impotent wretchedness, either as a political thinker or as a stateless person, which was why she strenuously rejected the pathos of Zweig’s The World of Yesterday when she reviewed it in 1943. His yesterday never was, she argued impatiently: ‘the world that Zweig depicts was anything but the world of yesterday; naturally, the author of this book did not actually live in the world, only on its rim.’12 If Zweig’s autobiography is one of the saddest stories to come out of twentieth-century Europe, for Arendt this was because he so fatefully mistook his world for the world. The cosmopolitan Europe in which writers came and went freely, dipping into one another’s languages and cultures, a world where the Jewish writer was welcome precisely because his worldliness so captured the spirit of the times, was only true, insofar as it was true, on the margins. ‘It was only in art that all the Viennese felt they had equal rights,
because art, like love, was regarded as a duty incumbent on everyone,’ Zweig concedes at one point in his memoir.13 He was correct, Arendt notes, but Zweig missed the political and, as it turned out, existential irony of having in effect only fictional rights. World citizenship was a sham, particularly for the Jewish writer: ‘this remarkable nationality that its members claimed as soon as their Jewish origin was mentioned, somewhat resembles those modern passports that grant the bearer the right of sojourn in every country except the one that issued it.’14
Arendt was referring to the famous Nansen passports. Administered by the League of Nations and after 1938 by the Office for the High Commission of Refugees in London, Nansen passports conferred international legality in place of national citizenship. Originally designed for Russians fleeing the Revolution, as interwar conflict grew, the passports were extended to other refugees, including Greeks, Turks, and Armenians. For German and Austrian Jews access to the passports was minimal and haphazard.15 Arendt herself eventually carried an Affidavit of Identity in Lieu of a Passport, issued by the United States (Fig 1). In effect, everybody knew that only national passports carried any value worth having. ‘The passport is the most noble part of the human being,’ wrote Bertolt Brecht in Refugee Conversations (1940):
It also does not come into existence in such a simple fashion as a human being does. A human being can come into the world anywhere, in the most careless way and for no good reason, but a passport never can. When it is good, the passport is also recognized for this quality, whereas a human being, no matter how good, can go unrecognized.16
This was a world hell-bent on shoring up the borders of nation states with ever more baroque systems of bureaucratic control. Passports not people were the real bearers of rights and human dignity, a poor, dishevelled and devalued, secondary thing. Brecht could express everything about his predicament that Zweig failed to grasp in a few pithy lines because he understood this corruption of human values to be thoroughly historical and political; as much a part of the modern nation state as ink stamps, index cards, filing cabinets, and population statistics. Brecht, Arendt also complained in her review, along with Kafka, was conspicuously absent from Zweig’s account of interwar literary history. It was no coincidence, as I demonstrate in the first two chapters of this book, that it was to both Kafka and Brecht that Arendt turned in order to think through the imaginative terms of the new statelessness in the 1940s.
Fig. 1. Affidavit of Identity in Lieu of Passport: ‘I wish to use this document in lieu of a passport which I, a state-less person, cannot obtain at present.’ Hannah Arendt Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., Courtesy of Hannah Arendt-Bluecher Literary Trust.
Zweig was in exile from a cosmopolitanism that was both marginal and that had failed in its universalizing mission. ‘Haven’t you got that yet?’ Joseph Roth, the first and best chronicler of the lost lives of East European Jews, wrote to Zweig as early as the October of 1933: ‘The word [the literary word] has died, men bark like dogs. The word has no importance any more, none in the current state of things . . . There is no “public arena” anymore. Everything is shit.’17 Roth’s Wandering Jews (1927 [1937]) had documented the tragic half-lives of those who had fled to Vienna and Paris from the pogroms of the 1920s. Like Arendt, Roth understood that so far as the Jews of Europe were concerned, ‘today’ was not a violent break from a reasonably good earlier twentieth century, but the brutal culmination of the epoch’s uncontrolled economic expansion, moribund political forms, and growing antisemitism: ‘that yesterday is not detached from today,’ as Arendt put it in her review.18 The ‘trellis’ behind which Zweig had felt so secure in reality was little different ‘from the walls of prison or a ghetto’.19 When ‘the whole structure of his life, with its aloofness from civic struggle and politics broke down,’ Zweig was left only with the ‘disgrace’ (Arendt’s word) of finding himself as ‘suspicious and unfortunate’ as the next Jewish refugee.
The task of imagining a political institution that could grant all groups as groups, including Jews as Jews, the ‘right to have rights’ would pre-occupy Arendt for the rest of her life. Zweig’s blindness was not just the error of the well-insulated parvenu; like many others, including those staring into the nothing of statelessness, his melancholy, exquisitely rendered as it was, missed the true historic tragedy behind his own exile. For the Jews of Europe the ‘refugee crisis’ of the 1930s, turned out to be the first act of the Nazi genocide. But statelessness was never just a tragedy of one people; nor was its history resolved by the formation of the United Nations and the implementation of a new human rights regime at the end of World War Two. The placeless people of the mid-twentieth century brought with them a message about the fate of rights and citizenship in a world fast spinning off its political and moral axes, that has echoed, for all that could hear, across the past eighty years to the refugee ‘crises’ of our own day.‘Today all European peoples are without rights,’ Arendt wrote in 1941: ‘That is why refugees from every nation, driven as they are from country to country, have become the avantgarde of their own people. The world citizens of the nineteenth century have, quite against their will, become the world travelers of the twentieth.’20 Thrown out of their worlds, to a large extent the placeless people had no choice but to become the avant-garde of their people: a reluctant yet, by
necessity, innovative vanguard. This, in any case, was how Arendt responded to her own statelessness: not by conceding to wretchedness, but by thinking experimentally and radically, turning political and historical pariahdom into a restless and creative virtue.21 As I show in the pages that follow, she was not the only writer and thinker to grasp that the changed meanings of exile at mid-century demanded new forms of political thought, creative imagination, and moral courage.
Writing
The scandal of statelessness and its provocations that occupied Arendt’s generation have been lost to much twentieth-century literary history in the global north. On the one hand, this is not surprising: the forms of modern literature itself, its focus on estrangement, absence, ellipses, groundlessness, otherness, the giddy freedoms and deep despair of rootlessness, were all nurtured by the larger history of alienation and deracination that since the end of the nineteenth century had troubled Europe’s self-confidence in the project of colonial capitalism. Modernist literature, in particular, often seemed to peel itself free of the world, claiming in its own literariness an aesthetic liberation from the constraints of territorial sovereignty. The modernist, notes Caren Kaplan, ‘seeks to recreate the effect of statelessness – whether or not the writer is, in fact, in exile’.22 And whilst modern literature drew on the experience of exile, crafting new modes of fictional being out of its depredations, that very intimacy also cast the political history of displacement into the shadows.
But we should be more surprised, and perhaps more suspicious, about the sublimation of large-scale forced migration into the condition of literature itself. By the late twentieth century, literary theory recognized that the trauma of the Nazi genocide had set new terms on how literature could represent historical experience; an appreciation of the importance of testimony and of listening to the unspeakable followed, as did a new attention to the ways in which the forms of modern writing responded to history’s extremes. A similar accounting of modern statelessness (Hobsbawm’s second extreme) has proved more elusive. Part of this has to do with the fact that whilst statelessness is abject, the universalizing human narrative of literary cosmopolitanism has remained, for often perfectly good reasons, alluring.
After World War Two, efforts to re-invent literary universalism meant that versions of modernist cosmopolitanism, usually Eurocentric, kept on running well into the Cold War and beyond. The exiled writer as a melancholy observer of modern life persisted as a literary and cultural type even as any late-Romantic innocence about the insights to be gained from a life estranged had, in reality, long gone.23 At the same moment that exile flourished as a cultural and literary trope in the Cold War West, new chapters in the history of forced migration had already opened up in India–Pakistan, Israel–Palestine, China, Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere. Paradoxically, the very cultural humanism that aided the development of human rights in the post-war West also concealed the ongoing rights scandal of the age. As new borders created new legions of stateless people, as new battles were fought in the name of self-determination, the terms of debate shifted away from the inhumanity of political institutions—nation states, international treaties, trade laws, international organizations—and towards the inhumanity of man.The rightless (who kept on coming) receded into the mist of a humanism attempting to re-invent some kind of moral authority for the European tradition even as its geopolitical power wilted (the working title for Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was The Last Man In Europe).
It was not, of course, that post-war writers and critics did not know that the historical terms of exile had changed. ‘[T]here is more than nationalist mystique to the notion of the writer enraciné,’ George Steiner, himself a former child refugee, wrote in his 1969 essay on Nabokov, ‘Extraterritorial’. Like other post-war literary comparativists, including, most notably, Erich Auerbach, Steiner was committed to disturbing remaining nativist claims about national literatures with evidence of a longer, and implicitly far richer, history of literary diversity and multi-lingual cross-fertilization. The much-quoted closing lines of Steiner’s essay suggest that Nabokov’s late modernism is the literary-historical correlative for modern refugee history:
A great writer driven from language to language by social upheaval and war is an apt symbol for the age of the refugee. No exile is more radical, no feat of adaptation and new life more demanding. It seems proper that those who create art in a civilization of quasi-barbarism which has made so many homeless, which has torn up tongues and peoples by the root, should themselves be poets unhoused and wanderers across language. Eccentric, aloof, nostalgic, deliberately untimely as he aspires to be and so often is, Nabokov remains, by virtue of his extraterritoriality, profoundly of our time, and one of its spokesmen.24
By being out of place, Nabokov is actually ‘profoundly of our time’. Steiner’s hyperbole forces the mid-century European refugee writer back into history: ‘no exile is more radical, no feat of adaptation and new life more demanding.’ I say hyperbole not because the experience of forced (compared to voluntary) migration is not the most extreme form of exile. It is, unequivocally. But Steiner’s powerful rhetoric here is only implicitly evidenced in the reading of Nabokov that precedes this final paragraph. In Steiner’s account, Nabokov is really less the symbol of the age of the refugee than the symbol of a new generation of cosmopolitan modernists.The ‘writer’s art is his real passport,’ Nabokov remarked in a 1967 interview; in Lolita (1955) he described the Nansen passport that he himself had once carried as a ‘Nonsense Passport’.25 Nabokov’s placelessness is the very thing that enables him to ironically distance himself from the nonsense of his times. It was a gesture that was to be repeated in much post-war literature. ‘London in 1950 was full of displaced people,’ V.S. Naipaul wrote, with comic self-deprecation, in the introduction to The Enigma of Arrival (1987), his classic dissection of the bleak remains of empire told through the eyes of a late colonial migrant to England: ‘but because I was looking for the more settled society of famous English writing I paid no attention.’26
It was Edward Said who called time on the sublimation of modern statelessness in his bitter and beautiful 1984 essay, ‘Reflections on Exile’ (also discussed in chapter 1). ‘Exile’ reads the first line of that essay, ‘is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience.’27 In terms that directly echo Arendt’s earlier criticism of Zweig, Said asks again—demands again—that we pay attention to the brute history of modern displacement. Arendt’s and Said’s is a shared refugee history.The calamity of modern statelessness was not solved by the creation of Israel, Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), which merely created another generation of refugees, the 700,000 and more Palestinian refugees.28 ‘Reflections on Exile’ was written shortly after the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut, considered a serious breach of the Geneva Conventions by the UN Commission set up to investigate Israel’s role in the atrocity in 1983.29 Said begins by quoting Steiner’s conclusion, but adds a crucial qualification:
But the difference between earlier exiles and those of our own time is, it bears stressing, its scale: our age—with its modern warfare, imperialism, and the quasi-theological ambitions of totalitarian rulers—is indeed the age of the refugee, the displaced person, mass immigration.
Against this large impersonal setting, exile cannot be made to serve notions of humanism. On the twentieth-century scale, exile is neither aesthetically nor humanistically comprehensible: at most literature about exile objectifies an anguish and a predicament most people rarely experience first hand; but to think of the exile informing this literature as beneficially humanistic, is to banalize its mutilations, the losses it inflicts on those who suffer them, the muteness with which it responds to any attempt to understand it as ‘good for us’.30
Mass displacement is the product of modern violence and oppression: against ‘this large impersonal setting, exile cannot be made to serve notions of humanism’. Note how far Said is here from the more familiar argument that by ‘humanizing’ the nameless masses of political crimes, literature might be doing some beneficial human rights work. On the contrary, to humanize the inhuman is to lend dignity to a condition that by robbing people of citizenship—of the right to exist in a community—has deliberately denied them dignity. Said’s essay refuses to patch that indignity up.
At the centre of ‘Reflections on Exile’ is Joseph Conrad’s short story, ‘Amy Foster’, first published in 1901. Amy Foster is a young country servant who falls in and out of love with Yanko Goorall, a Polish migrant, washed up onto the Kent coast from his sunken ship. Said describes the story as ‘perhaps the most uncompromising representation of exile ever written’.31 As Jacqueline Rose has pointed out, ‘Amy Foster’ was a consistent point of reference for Said, not least because of Conrad’s focus on how the mind ‘might take its bearings’ in the face of a world of mass cruelty: how we might ‘know’ this world, for Rose, is the ‘crucial conduit between Said’s literary and political concerns’.32 Conrad’s story takes us back to the beginnings of modern migration history, and the first mass movements of modern times.33 At the turn of the nineteenth century, tens of thousands of real Yanko Gooralls passed, like him, through the hands of travel agents, or ‘traffickers’, through Hamburg, en route to America where, they were told, as Yanko is in the story, the ‘U.S. Kaiser’ had given them permission to work and prosper. This history is also the background to Kafka’s first novel-length work, Amerika (1927). As Tara Zahra demonstrates in her compelling history of mass migration to the United States, The Great Departure (2016), this is the moment when what Arendt would later describe as the transition of exile into meaning ‘something suspicious and unfortunate’ really begins. ‘Between 55 and 58 million Europeans moved to North and South America in the period 1846–1940,’ Zahra notes.34 The habits of ‘human dumping’
