Trading Heimat for Fremdes Land

April 20, 2021 10:15 AM

"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 (2 comments total)

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 [2 favorites]

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