Trading Heimat for Fremdes Land
April 20, 2021 10:15 AM   Subscribe

"It’s hard for people who have never experienced it to truly grasp what it means to lack proper documents." --From On Being an Outsider: Words by Charles Simic, Photos by Romeo Alaeff [excerpted by LitHub from the book In Der Fremde]
posted by chavenet (4 comments total) 16 users marked this as a favorite
 
The Right to Belong, Atossa Araxia Abrahamian
Indeed, statelessness carries a whiff of anarchy. In the 1920s, lawyers at Geneva’s Institut de Droit International believed in eradicating statelessness not for ethical reasons, but because it challenged the order of things. After all, documenting populations and their comings and goings has, historically, been the prerogative of governments looking to exert control; the passport was invented to keep people in, not let them out.

Literature from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries likewise tends to portray stateless people as morally compromised degenerates. Edward Everett Hale’s story “The Man Without a Country” (1863) is a parable about patriotism and integrity centered on a soldier who renounces ties to the Union during the US Civil War and lives to regret it; B. Traven’s The Death Ship (1926), in which a sailor loses his passport and is forced into indentured servitude on a leaky, filthy cargo ship, “portrayed the dehumanizing consequences of political dispossession and the implicit violence of modern bureaucracy and police power,” as Siegelberg writes. (Unsurprisingly, both stories involve wayward sailors adrift on the high seas; the League of Nations memorably referred to the stateless as the “helpless flotsam and jetsam of society.”)

The visibility of these narratives in popular fiction speaks to the importance of questions about sovereignty and statehood at the time. By contrast, refugees and asylum seekers have taken precedence in contemporary fiction and popular nonfiction. From Mohsin Hamid’s novel Exit West (2017), whose protagonists have a definite (if unnamed and depressing) homeland, to Behrouz Boochani’s detention-center memoir No Friend But the Mountains (2018), and even Jeanine Cummins’s provocative American Dirt (2020), the problem isn’t that people don’t have citizenship papers. It’s that their papers aren’t the right kind.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 10:50 AM on April 20, 2021 [3 favorites]


I enjoyed that Simic piece, thank you.
posted by Orlop at 11:34 AM on April 20, 2021 [1 favorite]


Charles Simic is extraordinary and one of my favorite poets in the English language. His poems combine joy in life, surrealism, and a bleak and funny cynicism. I saw him in person at a conference where he was doing a reading and it was an interesting dissonance to realize that someone who writes such fluent English still has an accent.

That bleak, funny cynicism also characterizes a Serbian friend who has become an American citizen. When we would complain about the “former guy” in the White House, he would say, “You Americans know nothing.”
posted by Peach at 6:12 PM on April 20, 2021


On top of the question of documentation in Simic's essay is the question of statelessness. I've been thinking about statelessness a lot. I read some Hannah Arendt over the past 4 years. Having experienced statelessness after WWII, like Simic, it was a recurring theme in her writing. From Masha Gessen:
Sixty-nine years ago, Hannah Arendt wrote a phrase that has gradually become one of her most quoted and often interpreted: “the right to have rights.” The phrase summed up her skepticism about the concept of human rights—those rights that, in theory, belong to every person by virtue of existence. But how are these rights guaranteed? For that, Arendt suggested, one had to be not only a person but also a citizen. In other words, while the rights in the light-blue book might indeed “belong” to me, I can claim them because I also have the dark-blue passport.
Birthright citizenship is in our Constitution in the US, although there are of course people who want to take it away. I am floored by how many countries do not grant it, allowing children to be born into their country who may well be stateless, depending on the citizenship of their parents. Those stateless children can be exploited, abused, ignored, or just neglected as they grow into stateless adults. It is a terrifying injustice of our world, and I don't really know how to fix it.
posted by hydropsyche at 8:46 AM on April 21, 2021 [1 favorite]


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