Narrative Wayfinding: Author-izing Arab and Afghan Migration across Morphing Borderscapes

Abstract

Narrative Wayfinding: Author-izing Arab and Afghan Migration across Morphing Borderscapes takes a multidisciplinary approach to the study of narrative in the context of clandestine migration from the Arab world and Afghanistan to the EU. The dissertation argues that narration serves as a navigational tool for migrants as they traverse hostile locales and temporalities. Narrative craft allows migrants to captivate listeners and gain access to spaces and resources, and it also helps them process their own chaotic experiences. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, Narrative Wayfinding highlights migrant tales that reveal a breadth of spatiotemporal, cultural-linguistic, and psychospiritual transmutations. Each chapter addresses a specific type of morphing, from the issue of extraterritorial sovereignty to the phenomenon of passing as a member of an identity group that is not one’s own to questions of translation. Using the tools of close reading and comparative analysis, the dissertation considers both recent migration literature and a collection of interviews gleaned from my 2019-20 fieldwork in which I volunteered with asylum aid organizations in Greece.

Chapter One centers on Anthems of Salt, a 2019 Arabic-language memoir. Algerian author Larbi Ramdani narrates his failed attempt at passing as a Syrian refugee after he migrates clandestinely to Greece. I read Ramdani’s shapeshifting as a tactic (in Michel de Certeau’s sense) undertaken in response to the morphing of the EU borderscape, which selectively expands and contracts to facilitate the passage of goods and wealthy travelers while excluding poor migrants with “inferior” passports.

The second chapter explores temporal disruption in two recent works of Arabic fiction: Hoda Barakat’s Night Mail (2018) and Yousri Alghoul’s Gallows of Darkness (2021). In this chapter, I make a literary-studies contribution to existing anthropological scholarship that demonstrates the ways migrant temporalities are stretched and squeezed by state and international actors in attempts to quell unauthorized migration. I argue that narrative revelations of these temporal manipulations, along with migrant resistance to them, constitute a challenge to the nationalist temporality of triumphalism. Fiction provides a way to represent temporal experiences that migrants themselves are typically barred from articulating.

Chapter Three centers on stories of Afghan men who come of age throughout their migrant journeys. It compares Dari short stories by Asef Soltanzadeh and Sayed Eshaq Shojai to the lived experiences of two young Afghan interlocutors whom I interviewed in Greece. Focusing on the theme of separation from and reintegration into society and on interrogations of masculinity, I liken these narratives to the structure of the classical Arabic ode (qaṣidah), and particularly to brigand (ṣuʿlūk) poetry as theorized by Suzanne Stetkevych. I argue that these coming-of-age tales demonstrate the formation of a subject (in the Althusserian sense) that cannot be neatly attached to a modern nation-state.

The final chapter tackles issues of translation from the perspective of refugees who serve as interpreters for their fellow travelers. Drawing heavily on interviews I conducted in Greece, this chapter asks to what extent scholarship on literary translation theory can borrow from the rough-and-ready practices of “good-enough” interpretation that are common among those whom I call refugee-translators.

While Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller” posits that movement produces narrative, my dissertation makes an inverse assertion: that migrant narration can facilitate increased mobility. By forging new narrative pathways through violent and ever-morphing obstacles, unauthorized migrants unearth hidden connections between supposedly divided worlds.