Refugees and Representation: Introduction—The Mimesis of Diaspora

In keeping with the title we have chosen for this follow-up volume to the Special Issue “Ethics and Literary Practice I”, we frame our introduction and summary of the essays collected here with a brief archaeology of modern literary realism at its conjoined genesis in classical Greece and the ancient Near East; such contextualization serves as a prescient backdrop for the varied focus, across a compilation of thirteen articles, on refugees and their representation.

Composed between 1942 and 1946 while the author was exiled in Istanbul, Erich Auerbach’s magisterial work of hermeneutical philology, Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur, famously begins with a scar. In its opening line, Homer’s Odysseus is denominated polytropos, “of many turns”—a figure for both his signature cunning and the character of his return journey to Ithaca with its decade’s series of parékbases or deviations:

ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ

πλάγχθη, ἐπεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσεν:

Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of many turns, driven to wander

very greatly, after he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy.

Befitting the epic hero now turned refugee, the xenos or vagrant stranger entreating hospitality, whom Auerbach invokes in the opening chapter to his book, Odysseus is portrayed in the same verse as mála pollá plánghthê, “forced to wander very greatly”.1 The etymology of this phrase’s final word has been captured by Daniel Mendelsohn as, variously, “to turn aside or away from”, “to ward off”, “baffle or balk”, and “to embarrass or trip up”—all vicissitudes familiar to history’s myriad dépaysées, Auerbach himself included, as he was forced to abandon his position at the University of Marburg in 1935 due to anti-Jewish legislation once National Socialism seized power in Germany (Mendelsohn 2020, pp. 19ff and 41ff).

In contrasting (but also coordinating) Homeric and Biblical, vordergründig and hintergründig styles of mimetic narration,2 Auerbach juxtaposes chapter 19 of the Odyssey and Genesis 22, the akedah or “binding” of Isaac, which begins with God’s command to Abraham to take his son to the land of Moriah as an olah or “burnt offering”, serving Auerbach as a paradigmatic instance of the Bible’s purposeful opacity and recessed signification. As Abraham is “tried” during this episode (one of ten such ordeals, according to the rabbinic tradition), so hermeneutic engagement with this text is itself a matter of Versuchung, “trial” or “temptation”, as readers answer the continual call, distinctive to this scripture, to interpret. Thus, Rashi, the 11th c. rabbinic commentator from Troyes will often remark, Ein mikra ha-ze omer ela darsheni, “this scriptural text says nothing other than ‘interpret me’”. In contrast to Odysseus’s traumatic injury laid bare (Eurykleia’s recognition of the cicatrix above his knee which prompts a detailed parékbasis about the boar-hunting incident years earlier with his grandfather Autolycus), the internalized experience of aborted sacrifice itself is the wound recorded in Genesis, a “memory scar”, in Geoffrey Hartman’s poignant phrase, that runs oblique to the Hegelian view of history’s progressive flow whereby “wounds of the spirit leave no scars”.3

Directly or implicitly, a scarring that accompanies woundedness of spirit—the persistence of trauma—is the pivoting point for the majority of the essays about “the refugee” collected here. Refracted through the two foci of chapter 19—present indigence (even if only a feint one) and recalled trauma, and ostensibly just to highlight certain stylistic features of Homeric narrative—Odysseus’ story refracts not only the depredations visited upon Auerbach’s contemporary European culture but also his own odyssey of professional crisis and loss. Similarly, Auerbach’s analysis of the story drawn from the Hebrew Bible confines itself to the sole fragment from Genesis not only because its figurality for New Testament revision made it “one of several Biblical scenes forbidden across schoolrooms in Germany”,4 but also because it provided the locus classicus for medieval and later penitential prayer and poetry in times of persecution. The akedah thus serves as Auerbach’s own coded “nod to Jewish martyrdom”5 in immediate view of the Nazi persecution of European Jewry from forced exile in Istanbul.

There is, however, another more archetypical moment of leave-taking in the Abrahamic story-arc, less relevant for Auerbach’s immediate critical purposes, less in dialogue with the historical realities of a twentieth-century world at war, but more salient for, and in closer parallel with, Odysseus’ own fugitivity: the matter of refugees and their mimetic representation. This would be Mimesis in its guise as a coded meditation on exile, Auffassung und Darstellung (perception and representation) of the elsewhere and of the outside. The first of Abraham’s trials, just as Isaac’s binding marks the last, is—perhaps needless to say—but one of numerous instances of forced migration/alienation from Genesis through Chronicles.6 In the twelfth chapter of Genesis, the patriarch is commanded (just as in Genesis 22), לֶךְ-לְךָ lekh lekha, to “go forth (for, to, beyond) yourself”.7 Here, however, the departure is absolute, world-abolishing: “go from your land and from your kindred and from your father’s household to the land I will show you”—a string of multiple abandonments, each one its own excision from a “you”, together a compound of relinquishment.

Nachmanides (an 11th c. exegete) interprets the indeterminacy of God’s directive as a warrant for Abraham’s cumulative wandering before any divine promise is fulfilled in the form of a promised land: in Avivah Zornberg’s words, “an Abraham who is set on a course of total displacement, a series of encounters with mekomot, geocultural environments to be entered, known, and left” (Zornberg 1995, p. 75). Indeed, after Abraham’s journey there, the land that God shows him becomes a setting for famine, and he is forced to migrate once more. As Emmanuel Levinas differentiates the two disparate figures, where Odysseus (Ulysses) figures the movement of return, “who through all his peregrinations is only on the way to his native island”, Abraham models a move permanently outside and away, “un movement sans retour”—from self to altered self, or from self to other.8

Genesis 20:13 has Abraham say, “And it came to pass, when God caused me to wander from my father’s house”, putting him in close parallel with Odysseus.9 If Odysseus can exploit the polytropos quality of both his mind and of his wanderings, Abraham’s wholesale assumption of a nomadic, fugitive identity requires compensatory divine blessing—threefold, as spelled out by the very next verse; because, as Rashi comments, traveling-as-travail unsettles family life, reduces one’s wealth together with one’s renown, hence God’s promise of children, wealth, and a great name. From a generic perspective, Abraham’s wanderings might be seen as in no way singular, as noted by the novelist Marilynne Robinson: “To an observer his life might look like the life of any pastoralist, this stranger drifting through the countryside, looking for grazing for his herds” (Robinson 2024).10 But it becomes clear that hegira—his “going for himself”—whether as full-on leave-taking towards an unknown destination (Gen. 12) or towards impending but aborted tragedy (Gen. 22)—becomes a defining trait for him as both individual and “father of many nations”.

Unlike Odysseus, the fugitive husband and father (at least until he reaches Ithaca), Abraham’s departure, with its multiple forfeitures, is one of accompaniment, joined as he is by wife, nephew Lot, and all the souls he “made” (acquired, converted) in Haran. Like Noah and his entire household ten generations before, or Jacob and the sixty-six relations bound for Egypt two generations later, this is a whole family that migrates, the Western tradition’s first climate refugees. Abraham’s wife, we learn in 11:30, is infertile: וַתְּהִי שָׂרַי עֲקָרָה: אֵין לָהּ וָלָד vatehi Sarai akarah ein lah valad, “But Sarai was barren; she had no child”. Moreover, the biological condition of akarut—of fruitlessness and sterility—is also the condition that prompts the couple’s departure in the first place (the Hebrew verb stem also signifies forced displacement or extraction): they uproot themselves from what has become futile or no longer nurturing, their ongoing exile a paradoxical movement towards rejuvenation and belonging, as their migration forces them to “act out all the meanings of deracination, of disconnection, from a succession of pasts” (Zornberg 1995, p. 77). Abraham’s wanderings describe the condition of tiltul, of moving around haphazardly, distractedly,11 part of a whole complex of disturbances, says Zornberg (akarut (uprooting), keri’a (tearing), tiltul (distractedness), and teruf (alienated selfhood)), which underpin and pervade the refugee experience.

Placed in conjunction with his “wandering greatly” (turning away from, being thwarted and tripped up) which rehearses Odysseus’s nomadic saga, along with the trauma, scarring, and recollected wounding which identify him in his guise as vagrant alien (that is to say, paired, on Auerbach’s model yet even more closely, with a Homeric counterpart), Abraham’s exilic moment figures for us the question of the foreign refugee in foundational texts from the eighth century BCE as both mimetically inaugural and central.12 We have harkened back to their conjunction here, as Auerbach paired them orthogonally at mid-century, because they link the representation of reality in the Western literary tradition in two of its earliest moments of portrayal to historical nomadic experience—in troubled flight from any one of numerous places, be it Eritrea or the Central African Republic or Somalia or South Sudan or Afghanistan or Central America or Myanmar or Ukraine or Venezuela or Yemen or Syria or Gaza (all in the here-and-now of 2024), toward uncertain arrival.

According to Galili Shahar, as Auerbach’s methodology of selecting literary extracts signifies “fragment” or “cut” itself as the sign of crisis of loss, so “the scar is the signature of Mimesis. It is the sign of German Jewish writing that was charged with an experience of pain, crisis, and exile–Europe, 1942” (Shahar 2011, pp. 616–17). Hier ist die Narbe, Auerbach avers, “perceptible to the senses”(Auerbach 2003)13. So, in turn, we might take license to amplify that dialectics of representation, the tension between allegory and history—as Auerbach’s personal mid-century travails signpost for us—to the uprooting and altered selfhood that represent universal, indeed immediately recognizable, hallmarks of migrancy.14 Here, right now is the wound, “here is the scar”. It is more than fitting, then, for our contemporary purposes, too, that along with the Greek loanword in the title itself, the first “foreign” word we encounter in Mimesis is the Hebrew הִנֵּנִי hinneni. It means “here I am” or “behold me here” or even, with a slight vocalic alteration, “I am here to…”, “hereby, I”—a figure for our positionality as witnesses, at the margins, of an ethics of reading.

Each of the following essays, programmatically or by implication, picks up from this common point of departure, whether through reflections on seventeenth-century devotional art in the context of contemporary tragedy, the politics of translating a memoir by an imprisoned Kurdish-Iranian journalist/asylee, or the “slow reading” of literary representation in selected migration narratives. The second of two Special Issues devoted to the problematics of ethics and literary practice, “Refugees and Representation” makes an especially exigent case for their linkage by directing our critical gaze to one of the prototypical and truly planetary problems of our day.15 Alongside, and in often concert with, the parallel ecological crisis of climate change (see, for example, Lysaker 2023), the vagaries of having to seek refuge—forced migrancy, travail, and homelessness—render mimesis a complex welter of both ethical and political choices for author-creators and their several kinds of audience alike.

Article Précis

1. In “Refugees and Representation: An Impossible Necessity”, Mieke Bal stages what she refers to as a fictional encounter between the work of Indian artist Nalini Malani and the novel No Friend But the Mountains (2018) by the Kurdish-Iranian writer Behrouz Boochani. The encounter Bal establishes explores what arguably lies at the heart of this Special Issue, the paradoxical task of “representing what cannot but must be (re-)presented”, i.e., the paradox of representing trauma. Bal’s desire to enable these works to speak to one another focuses on trauma in all its complexity, allowing her to distinguish constructively between instances of violence, trauma, and empathy. Alongside this, she explores the power of figuration, as an alternative to representation narrowly defined, in an attempt to say the unsayable in and through color. Here, Malani and Boochani momentarily meet: Malani, for whom in exile color is the primary tool, and Boochani, caught between a paralyzing loneliness and an inhumane crowdedness, whose words retreat to color (blue and gray) when representation and narrative fail. From this, Bal explores the “unfathomable distress” of the suffering of others, reminding us of the very worldly nature of trauma and the very different attitudes we can adopt to respond to it.

2. Francesco Zucconi’s “Regarding the Image of the Pain of Others: Caravaggio, Sontag, Leogrande” examines the recontextualization of two of Caravaggio’s most famous paintings at humanitarian events convened to draw attention to the European “migrant crisis”, the most infamous being the shipwreck of 3 October 2013 when at least three hundred and sixty-eight migrants lost their lives off the Isola dei Conigli. Drawing severally from a journal article by the Nigerian-American writer and photographer Teju Cole about the peregrinations of Caravaggio’s own life; Susan Sontag’s famous essay about the politics of looking; and La frontiera (2015) by Alessandro Leogrande, an investigation of the historical and political implications of migration and “the ways in which the life of those who are forced or wish to move is represented and considered”, the article puts witnessing in the dock in regard to both pictorial art and humanitarian visual culture. The (self)-critical process of “witnessing is understood here as a continuous questioning of one’s own position, and of the images or stories that are produced from it…that makes it possible to continue to denounce marginalization and suffering without becoming the accomplice of those who produce and reproduce it”.

3. “The Slow Refugee: Transit as Stasis, Narrative Ethics, and Level Telling Fields” by Roy Sommer argues that the slow humanities (a cross-disciplinary challenge to an uncritical culture of speed) can contribute in helpful ways to exploring the tendency of migration theories to focus almost exclusively on movement (where transit is rethought as “a form of involuntary stasis or stagnation”). In this article, he adopts a methodology of slow reading (a notion of reading as a form of attentive listening) to reread and reconsider the study of migration narratives and migration fiction. Sommer reads Dave Eggers’s What is the What (2008) alongside Afghan activist and writer Parwana Amiri’s work My Pen Won’t Break But Borders Will: Letter to the World from Moira (2020) to investigate how collaborative storytelling helps to restore agency and authority in order to move beyond the “exemplary, documentary, and ambassadorial functions of vicarious storytelling”. In so doing, he challenges storytelling that speaks on behalf of, rather than with, others. The slow refugee that emerges from this rereading thus provokes new ways of thinking about forced migration (including both movement and stasis), and the acts of narrative solidarity that can accompany it.

4. In “On Representing Extreme Experiences in Writing and Translation”, Omid Tofighian (philosopher/translator) engages in conversation with Erlend Wichne (translation studies scholar, University of Agder, Norway) to explore Tofighian’s translation into English of Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison (2018). The session is important for many reasons, including for its focus on writing, translation, collaboration, and publishing through the lens of writing as a form of political resistance. Here, the refugee experience is mediated through Manus Prison (a neo-colonial Australian experiment of “illegal imprisonment…conducted by a liberal democracy”) understood as a “site of knowledge production”, and this experience is ultimately represented through complex “forms of shared knowledge produced between author and translator”. What emerges is an account of the shared and collaborative philosophical effort required to bring the work into being. Questions of the responsibility of translating the writing of others, the conditions that make translation possible, and of translation as a form of political activism structure these excerpts from the original exchange.

5. In “Writing: The Question as Revolt in Kristeva and Boochani”, Michelle Boulous Walker figures writing as a form of radical questioning with the potential to challenge authority, making possible both creative and critical thought in a time when the radical act of questioning, of putting a state or a regime or an ideology into question, is arguably under threat. By coupling writing with both questioning and revolt, the author is able to link two very different projects: Julia Kristeva’s exploration of the European tradition of revolt alongside Behrouz Boochani’s literary revolt against his incarceration in the refugee detention center of Manus Prison. Rereading and borrowing from Sartre’s oeuvre, Kristeva claims that we can think of European culture as a culture of questioning and of revolt, which, this essay argues, has implications for how we think of the kind of revolt Boochani’s writing achieves. Boochani’s revolt thus expresses a powerful contemporary response to the dark legacy of European culture, positioning the intimacy of the suffering body as a locus of what ultimately emerges as a protest and resistance directed externally to an unjust world in which he is illegitimately detained. In sum, reading Kristeva with Boochani gestures toward the legacy of European colonialism and the limits this places on Europe’s framing of what it means to question and to oppose.

6. His second essay in our volume, “Translation in Digital Times: Omid Tofighian on Translating the Manus Prison Narratives”, showcases the author in conversation with Anna Poletti and Onno Kosters (both from Utrecht University, the Netherlands). The focus here is on the nature of Tofighian’s English translation of Boochani’s unpublished Farsi original, as well as the Dutch and Kurdish translations of Tofighian’s English translation, and the eventual publication of the Farsi original. The exchange explores the difficulty of translating across the diverse genres of poetry, myth, epic, folklore, philosophical rumination, psychoanalytic analysis, activist prose, political commentary, journalism, and observation, and the “anti-genre” label Tofighian ultimately adopts to make sense of Boochani’s remarkable book. From here, anti-genre becomes the attitude of “horrific surrealism” (a mixture of horror and surrealism), the term Tofighian coins to chart the blurring between the realist horror and the psychological horror Boochani lives as a refugee (“illegal immigrant”) in the Australian-run offshore immigration detention center.

7. “‘In the First Place, We Don’t Like to Be Called ‘Refugees’: Dilemmas of Representation and Transversal Politics in the Participatory Art Project 100% FOREIGN?” by Anne Ring Petersen highlights an art project consisting of 250 life stories of individuals who were granted asylum in Denmark between 1956 and 2019. As an experiment in visual culture as well as dialogic praxis, 100% FOREIGN? imagines “a collective portrait and multivocal narrative that inserts citizens of refugee backgrounds into the narrative of the nation, thereby expanding the idea of national identity and culture”. The article’s title quotes the first sentence of Hannah Arendt’s 1943 essay “We, Refugees”, setting the stage for the defining question of how to represent “the refugee” in the context of a postmigrant society, with an emphasis on the ethical problematics of “democratic participation, recognition, and belonging”. As a theoretical scaffolding, the article puts Arendt’s essay about the ethics of alterity in conversation with Trinh T. Minh-ha’s concept of speaking nearby and the feminist concept of transversal politics outlined in Marsha Meskimmon’s Transnational Feminisms and elaborated further by Nira Yuval-Davis. In the author’s concluding words about the singular opportunity afforded by this participatory art project in Northern Europe, “it gave those willing to listen some new answers to the question of what citizenship is, and what civic ethics from the perspective of the refugee can bring to a postmigrant society”.

8. Azade Seyhan’s “Perpetual Exile: Legacies of a Disrupted Century” foregrounds the transnational dimension of modern German literature by bringing two respective literary histories and literary genres of exile into dialogue: the Exilliteratur of Lion Feuchtwanger (one of several prominent German authors who immigrated to Southern California during the Second World War); the 1944 novel Transit by Anna Seghers, who escaped Nazi-controlled territory through wartime France and made a new exilic home in Mexico City before returning to Germany; and the emerging literature of hyphenate German (“Bindestrich-Deutsche”) writers, as exemplified in essays by the Iranian-German poet SAID. Certain transits in this cross-generational dialogue are fortuitous; thus, the author’s choice to place SAID in conversation with Feuchtwanger is explained by the fact that they resided at different times in the same place—520 Paseo Miramar, Pacific Palisades—where their destinies crossed. In other respects, the essay’s correlation of Seghers’s Transit with Feuchtwanger and with fellow expatriates Thomas Mann and Hannah Arendt underscores the importance of language and translation in exilic conditions as mutually informing reference points. Although dictated by different circumstances and historical imperatives, the two genres of Exilliteratur authors and transnationalism alike exemplify a shared set of ethical implications and cautionary tales.

9. “Representation of Whom? Ancient Moments of Seeking Refuge and Protection” by Elena Isayev revisits the terrain provisionally outlined in our introduction: the mimetic art of Late Antiquity. Since “there is no ‘mass’ of refuge seekers, to whom a single set of rules could apply across time and space” in the Greco-Roman representational corpus, a more obvious political sense of “representation” comes to the fore in the attempt to reclaim or interpret this past. The question thus becomes not only “representation of whom” but also, on whose behalf or in whose name? Refugees and asylum seekers, as we understand these terms against a contemporary horizon, did not constitute a “distinct category” of person, thus complicating our own initial move of correlating Homeric and Biblical figures as generically such. The article’s aim is not “to shape into existence an ancient refugee or asylum seeker experience. Rather, it is to highlight what may be lost by pressing a multiplicity of experiences within narratives of victimhood and the confines of such labels as refugee, asylum seeker, and even perhaps the displaced”. Even if ancient cultures share with ours the wide-spread experiences of “exclusion, precarity and the threat of violence”, the choice to reproduce familiar mythic figures and scenic constructions depicting such individualized conditions was “based on their capacity to display affinity with a particular sociocultural knowledge system and, potentially, political affiliations, whether that of Pan-Hellenism or Imperial Rome”. The article concludes by stressing the relevance of ancient context for current concerns as “the need to critically address the damage of exceptionalizing the refugee, even when it is well meaning”.

10. In “Exilic Roots and Paths of Marronage: Breaching Walls of Space and Memory in the Historical Poetics of Dénètem Touam Bona”, Geoffroy de Laforcade examines the work of Afropean anthropologist, philosopher, and art curator Dénètem Touam Bona. Bona’s Fugitive: Where are you running? focuses on the liminal, unarchived figure of the maroon (escaped slave) in the Northern and Southern Americas within a tradition of Caribbean historical poetics, e.g., Édouard Glissant and Michel Trouillot. For Touam Bona, marronage becomes “a mode of invention, subterfuge and utopian projection”, a “perpetual art of dodging”. “Fugue” and “refuge” serve as conceptual pivoting points, along with the metaphor of the liana, “a long-stemmed tropical vine that climbs and twines through dense forests, weaving relation in defiance of predation, to evoke colonized and displaced peoples’ subterranean evasion of commodification…cultural erasure, and ecological annihilation”. The article sketches a suggestive resemblance between marronage in Touam Bona’s work and the fugitive practices of displaced people against the background of contemporary capitalism—an illustration of what the author calls “transgressive commonalities” that link contemporary experiences of fugue and refuge with the unique case of Haitian self-liberation.

11. Moritz Schramm’s “Dancing with the Sniper: Rasha Abbas and the “Art of Survival’ as an Aesthetic Strategy” considers the short stories of Syrian journalist and writer Rasha Abbas, which the article reads as emblems of empowerment, autonomy, and survivability. In light of the reflexive turn in migrant studies that aims to complicate migrant and non-migrant, native and foreign, past and present polarities; eschew the “cult of authenticity”; and, in short, “demigrantize” the field of migrant or refugee literature, Abbas’s fiction explores “how to create space for marginalized voices and perspectives while simultaneously avoiding reproducing traditional representations and ascribing the ‘migrant’ and ‘refugee’ labels to predefined positions in society [by] replacing them with novel and imaginative escape routes”. As a number of her works have appeared in translation even before being published in Arabic, Abbas’s work dramatizes the politics of heteroglossia, of moving between old and new languages, and thus establishing a fluid space within “a field of cosmopolitan literature that extends beyond binary distinctions”. The article calls this space “Post-Otherness”, which has found a particularly fruitful home in Berlin’s Postmigrantisches Theater and the state-funded Maxim Gorki Theater in the center of the German capital, where several of Abbas’s stories have been staged recently. In her work, the transition from refugee to citizen exchanges the logic of integration and assimilation for “the conflation of the distances and times… between the Other and the imagined community of non-migratory Europe”.

12. Ellen Wendy Kaplan’s “Refuge and Resistance: Theatre with Kurds and Yezidi Survivors of ISIS” examines theatrical efforts under the auspices of the Springs of Hope Foundation for Relief and Development in Iraq (SOHF). In particular, the essay focuses on two embryonic initiatives of applied theater—participatory, inclusive, and non-didactic—in Iraqi Kurdistan designed to revitalize arts and culture among the Yezidi and broader Iraqi Kurdish communities in the wake of the 2014 genocide by the Islamic State. With occasional reference to thinkers like Elaine Scarry, Hélène Cixous, and Emmanuel Levinas, and influenced by the work of Augusto Boal’s Image and Forum Theaters, the author recounts her own own experience with a theater program launched in 2022 at SOHF, in addition to the Me-T—The Middle East Theater Project begun in 2020 at the University of Duhok. The essay rehearses some of the challenges and opportunities of theater as social practice in zones of conflict and contestation.

13. While not illustrative of ethics in concert with literary practice per se, “Together We Prepare a Feast, Each Person Stirring Up Memory” by Ed Stevens, Anna Khlusova, Sarah Fine, Ammar Azzouz, and Leonie Ansems de Vries treats representation more broadly understood as material culture against the background of cuisine and its communal preparation: food as the engine and focal point of social exchange. Through a series of interactive online cookery classes led by refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants, in concert with researchers and artists, all under the aegis of the UK charity Migrateful, an exercise in collaborative storytelling was initiated by the authors, whose outcomes illuminate a unique conceptual amalgam of refugee representation, food, and belonging, co-creative storytelling, and virtual engagement. The results offer “a ‘recipe’ for what [the authors] hope to be a more meaningful and ethical model of engagement activity that builds on this learning”.