Practicing Oral History Among Refugees and Host Communities

Marella Hoffman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351011310
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historiografía

Practicing Oral History among Refugees and Host Communities provides a comprehensive and practical guide to applied oral history with refugees, teaching the reader how to use applied, contemporary oral history to help provide solutions to the 'mega-problem' that is the worldwide refugee crisis.

The book surveys the history of the practice and explains its successful applications in fields from journalism, law and psychiatry to technology, the prevention of terrorism and the design of public services. It defines applied oral history with refugees as a field, teaching rigorous, accessible methodologies for doing it, as well as outlining the importance of doing the same work with host communities. The book examines important legal and ethical parameters around this complex, sensitive field, and highlights the cost-effective, sustainable benefits that are being drawn from this work at all levels. It outlines the sociopolitical and theoretical frameworks around such oral histories, and the benefits for practitioners' future careers. Both in scope and approach, it thoroughly equips readers for doing their own oral history projects with refugees or host communities, wherever they are.

Using innovative case studies from seven continents and from the author's own work, this manual is the ideal guide for oral historians and those working with refugees or host communities.

PART I

What Is Being Done around the World

1

HOW ORAL HISTORY CAN IMPROVE OUTCOMES FOR REFUGEES AND HOST COMMUNITIES

Kurdish refugee Behrouz Boochani – a gifted journalist, filmmaker, human rights activist and poet – was unlawfully imprisoned by the Australian government from 2014 onward for four years. His crime? Applying to them for political asylum. His prison was cut off from the world, on the very remote Manus Island in the Pacific Ocean. Almost miraculously, he managed to smuggle out his irrepressible words and images to the wider world via his mobile phone, and they have been meticulously stitched back together by others to produce his award-winning book, No Friend but the Mountains and his award-winning film Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time. In an interview, Behrouz explains:

I always imagine the world map. I imagine a tiny island and a prison on the tiny island. It is where I am at this moment. Three years ago, when the local people attacked our prison and killed a person and injured 100 people, the guards took us to a soccer ground outside the prison. That was the first time we had been out. They gathered 900 men on the soccer ground for a night. On that dark night I was looking at the sky, and I felt that there was no place in the world for me. They even took away my prison. I felt that I do not even belong to the Earth, and I was looking to the sky and imagining another planet …

I think we are human and do not have any shelter but humanity. We have to trust in humanity (…) I belong to this world and to the humans beyond the political borders (…) I am a stateless person, but I am a free man because the Earth is for me, I belong to nature, belong to mountains, oceans, seasons, jungles, deserts and I belong to those societies where I have breathed with them, smiled with them, cried with them or lived with them. I am a free man.¹

I had the privilege of contacting Behrouz to tell him that his words would reach you, reader, here on this page of this book. A powerful Western nation did all it could to make it impossible for him to communicate with you or anyone else. But his ingenuity and hope found a way to send out his words of peace, releasing them like birds and hoping they might reach you to open a wider dialogue with you. This book will be your bridge to many people like Behrouz, and it will equip you to make real contributions to both local and planetary dialogues around the refugee crisis.

International law currently defines a refugee as ‘someone who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion’.² Today, 68.5 million people are forcibly displaced around the world – by far the largest number ever. They include:

• internally displaced persons who have had to flee to another part of their own country to escape harm or persecution;
• asylum seekers who fled to a foreign country to apply for political asylum on the grounds that they would face persecution if sent back to their own country.

If an asylum seeker’s application is accepted, they then become legally recognized as a registered refugee, entitled to international assistance and protection. But if an asylum seeker’s request is refused, they can be deported back to their country of origin. Among the 68.5 million people forcibly displaced around the world at the moment, 25 million have political asylum, 3.5 million are awaiting asylum application responses and 40 million are still seeking resettlement.³ Wars in the Middle East have opened floodgates of displacement over the past few years. But Latin America is predicted to be facing a refugee crisis comparable to that of the Syrians, with over 5 million displaced in Venezuela, Colombia and Central America.

Two-thirds of all the world’s refugees have been displaced for over three years, and half for over ten years. By 2015, 51% of refugees were children. Most were separated from their parents and fleeing with other relatives or friends, or travelling alone. Over half of refugee children are not in school.⁴ Unfortunately, the current global figure of 68.5 million displaced is set to balloon when climate change starts making whole regions of the world uninhabitable in the decades ahead. As one United Nations (UN) report puts it:

The age of environmental migration is upon us, and the world is woefully unprepared for it (…) areas threatened range from Bangladesh and Nigeria to New York City and Washington, DC (…) this is a global problem threatening developed and developing countries alike.⁵

A Global Surge of Innovation

Even if you have some prior knowledge about refugees or about oral history, this book will show you both through lenses that may be relatively new to you. Despite – or because of – the unprecedented numbers displaced now, there is actually an exciting climate of innovation and lateral thinking around refugee issues. As Oxford University’s Professor Alexander Betts puts it: ‘The humanitarian system is at a crossroads. With growing needs and finite resources, creative solutions are urgently needed’.⁶ In one of his recent reports, part one is called ‘The Rethink’ (with sections on ‘Rethinking Ethics’, ‘Rethinking Assistance’ and so on) and part two is called ‘The Remake’.⁷ Overall, the message from the world’s leading experts, both at design and delivery levels, is that:

• ‘The refugee system was created 50 years ago, and is nowhere near fit for purpose in a fast changing, globalized world’.⁸
• Only new relationships and partnerships can tackle the scale and complexity of the problem.
• Every single person in the world – with any skill or idea in any field – is invited to respond to this need with their own creative innovations.
• Only a whole society, 360-degree approach can work, both locally and globally.
• Only deeply participatory approaches will work, i.e. listening to service-users and community members, and involving them in designing services and policies; top-down solutions won’t fit.

So the UN – together with all the major agencies designing and delivering refugee services – have put out a formal call to the whole world, inviting everyone to contribute their ideas to a movement called ‘Humanitarian Innovation’, which they consider to be the only way forward.⁹ This book is reaching out to you as part of that call, giving you tools to respond in your own unique way, wherever you are.

Consider, for instance, the creativity that refugees themselves are showing in their use of the simple, free resource that is language. Refugees have realized that replacing one tired, overused word with a fresh one can sometimes unleash huge new resources. They are teaching us that one of the easiest, cheapest and most effective improvements we can make to the refugee crisis is to start by changing the story, simply by changing our vocabulary. For instance, there are networks of Syrians online who now refer to themselves not as refugees but as Syrian expatriates. (On the spectrum of all English-language terms for those who live in a foreign country, this is the most high-status, while refugee is surely the lowest. For instance, ‘expatriate’ is the word the British have always proudly used to refer to themselves only, when they choose to live abroad.) Meanwhile, some host communities have learned to swap the term refugee for newcomers. Those resettled in Berlin are often referred to now as New Berliners, a term replete with all the resources these new residents can bring to the old city. Refugees receiving asylum from Canada are proudly welcomed by the Canadian government as New Canadians. The term inherently clarifies too that the former refugee must now adopt the shared values and responsibilities of Canadian citizenship: they can’t import with them a set of incompatible values from their old country. Those have to be traded in, in exchange for their new Canadian identity.

The field of migration studies too has improvised some important new ways of looking at people and place that are not just academic jargon. They include concepts like the ‘transnational’, the ‘translocal’, ‘localization’ and even ‘glocalization’. Other new perspectives include the ‘No-Borders’ movement, ‘thinking through oceans’, and concepts like the ‘Refugee Nation’ and the ‘Refugee Economy’. We will unpack all these ideas as we move through our chapters. For instance, the ‘transnational’ is a perspective that ignores national boundaries to trace instead the connections that cross or transcend them, such as travel-routes, export-routes and other lines of international communications and relationships. The ‘transnational’ is clearly an indispensable perspective when describing the networks, movements and relationships of migrant diasporas, which can stretch right around the globe, well beyond a little country of origin.¹⁰

The ‘translocal’ is a subset of the ‘transnational’ approach.¹¹ The translocal zooms in on the tight weave of connections that may link up two localities that are far apart geographically. An example could be the rural parts of the island of Sicily off southern Italy and the Bronx area of downtown New York where so many Sicilian migrants settled across the twentieth century. Though so far apart both in distance and in landscape style, the two localities are densely bound through links of migration, family relationships, regular journeys in both directions, gifting relationships and exchanges of money, as well as through the resulting ties of language, culture and collective memory. Another example of translocality would be the intense relationship between the tiny village port of Lampadusa in southern Italy and the sub-Saharan African villages, whose youth, seeking a better economic future in Europe, are dumped in their thousands upon Lampadusa by people smugglers.

Another example of a potent reuse of language is the online movement called ‘Not just a refugee’.¹² On a related website, forcibly displaced persons upload their photo and an account of their professional background, offering their skills to the world under the banner ‘I’m not a refugee, I’m … a musician’, ‘...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Figures
• Series Editor Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• PART I: What Is Being Done around the World
• PART II: Doing Your Own Oral Histories to Improve Outcomes for Refugees or Host Communities: The Step-by-Step Guide
• Appendices
• Glossary: Some Key Concepts Used in this Book
• Index