Refugees

In May, my sisters and I attended the world premier of Refugia at the Minneapolis Guthrie Theatre.  I hate to say it, but I was underwhelmed.  Although it was well produced and well acted and had a very interesting lobby display (of which I only got a glimpse), its earnestness was not sufficient to help it transcend its chaotic structure.  Apparently, a number of students and actors got together and created a series of vignettes that were only peripherally related.  The impetus for the exercise seems to be an attempt to address the current anti-immigrant political climate, and, as with most dogmatic art, it does not succeed very well artistically.  I especially had difficulty with the long soliloquies:  they neither advanced plot nor developed character.  Interesting in themselves, they had no obvious place in the drama.  Neither did some of the mime/dance pieces.  The dying polar bear in the tropics was especially confusing, albeit compelling.

That being said, Refugia did succeed on one level.  While I don't find myself thinking about the individual vignettes, I do find myself thinking about the entire concept of refugees.  It's a huge topic, which is perhaps the reason the play failed:  they tried to cover all the bases.  The books and short stories that work confine themselves to one story, or one group.   I remember trying to read Katherine Ann Porter's Ship of Fools, which was too grim for me to continue.  I remember the story in Julian Barnes' Short History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, wherein the even more grim tale of the "Voyage of the Damned" (AKA, the Voyage of the St. Louis) is recounted.  That was the terrible incident wherein over 900 Jews and other escapees from Nazi Germany were turned back at the Florida waters, after days of waiting to be let in.  They were sent back to Germany to die in concentration camps.  Unconscionable then, it's a story that continues to be played out today.  From Cuban boat people to those crossing the Mexican border, from Iran to Syria, in the course of my 58 years I've watched this tale over and over.  And, I'm not even politically aware:  there are so many more incidents out there, I know.

It's taken awhile for me to recognize this. I was 13 when I read Anne Frank's diary, and I picked it up because it was a Diary of a Young Girl, and she turns 13 in her very first entry.  I was stunned when I got to the last page to learn that she died in a concentration camp.  I thought it was fiction, and no, I'm not a Holocaust denier; I was just young and unaware of history.  I didn't know about the Holocaust.  I couldn't believe it was actually true. In some ways, I remain unable to comprehend the cruelty of man to man.

It crops up everywhere, from current debates about immigration to the fascinating tale of Beethoven's hair.(which was heirloomed in a locket and followed refugees over the border to Norway, where it waited out the war.)  Every generation has its own horror stories.  In fact, the refugee narrative goes back to Genesis:  Noah's ark is the tale of refugees. As long as there have been communities, there have been refugees, and the cost is incalculable. Families are separated, childhoods destroyed, cultures decimated. I remember Hodel in Fiddler in the Roof:  "Papa, God alone knows when we shall see each other again," and Tevye's reply, "Well, we will leave it in his hands."

Leaving literature and religion and myth aside, the story of the United States itself is one of refugees.  Not all immigrants were refugees, but many of them were, and we created refugees out of the indigenous populations:  refugees with no place to go. The tale continues:  the family of my current host's ex-husband were refugees from Korea. 

So, I think about this, and I think about what it takes to leave everything behind.  What was it like for my host's ex, for a teenager, to get on a plane, pretending to be going to school in Paris, leaving behind parents who in turn are making plans to escape with what they can carry?  They will meet again in Singapore and finally end up in New Orleans.  Why New Orleans, I ask, and my hostess has no answer.  It's just the first place that offered a visa to the military folks who were engineering the escape. But at least they had a place to go.  Syrian refugees and refugees on the St. Louis were not so lucky.

My nomad life is not such a tale.  While  I too have pared my belongings down to what I can carry, I am not separated from family and friends, and I still have access to people and things. I am not in personal physical danger; I am not forced to leave everything behind.  However, at the risk of sounding melodramatic, I must say that psychological danger is another thing, and the fear and distress and anger continue to follow me.  I cannot escape them, because I cannot escape the world. To that extent, yes, I am a refugee, seeking asylum from a scary political reality, hoping those other countries will not turn me away.

But in reality, I'm just a spoiled middle class white girl, living well and doing not much.  I am lucky to be able to travel and see wonderful things.  I have to force myself to recognize that, in a world where people are real refugees, I am playing at it.  After this year is over, I will come back and hopefully find a way to live a meaningful life.  And I'll be grateful that I have that possibility, that I'm not facing the grim reality of being a stranger in a strange land.