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NY Review of Books, DECEMBER 6, 2018 ISSUE
Where Else Can They Go?
Molly Crabapple
Escaping Wars and Waves: Encounters with Syrian Refugees
by Olivier Kugler
Pennsylvania State University Press, 79 pp., $24.95
The Unwanted: Stories of the Syrian Refugees
by Don Brown
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 103 pp., $18.99
Threads: From the Refugee Crisis
by Kate Evans
Verso, 176 pp., $24.95
In 2016, the year Macedonia completely closed its borders to Syrian
refugees, I met a young Palestinian man named Walid in a squalid
army-run camp on the Greek island of Samos. I was writing a magazine
story on the conditions in such camps following the deal that March
between the EU and Turkey, which was intended to reduce the flow of
migrants into Europe. Since media permits were not forthcoming, I ended
up sneaking in through a hole in the fence. As I interviewed refugees,
Walid approached me.
He had been at the camp for nine months, he said, sleeping in a tent
inside a shipping container while the authorities figured out what to do
with a Palestinian who had been born in northwest Syria. In that time,
he’d seen a lot of reporters, but little change. “Do you think these
articles will do anything?” he asked.
I paused to think about it. “No,” I answered. “But it’s important to
keep a record.”
In the years that followed, I thought often about Walid’s question. Like
Olivier Kugler, Don Brown, and Kate Evans, who have each published new
books of comics journalism on the subject, I spent years covering the
mass movement of human beings that is referred to in Europe as the
“refugee crisis.” I was a Western journalist traveling freely on my
powerful passport, paid to document the misery of people whose passports
trapped them in poverty and war. I shared cigarettes with refugees in
tents in Iraq, Lebanon, and Greece. I listened to little boys talk about
the car bombs that killed their fathers. Mothers told me that drowning
in the Mediterranean would be better than one more day rotting in this
goddamn camp.
Like Kugler, Brown, and Evans, I sketched. We were some of the many
artists who created encyclopedic oral histories, carefully illustrated,
of the Syrians, Palestinians, Iraqis, and Afghans we had met. In our
sketchbooks, we wrote down their memories, homes, ambitions, sufferings,
former careers, and traumas. What did these documents add up to? I
wondered. Our articles changed nothing. Why should we be the ones
keeping the records?
In 2018, more nations than ever are shutting their borders and
retreating into hostile nationalism. This applies not just to Brexit
Britain or Trump America, but to the likes of India, which stripped the
citizenship of four million Muslims; Myanmar, which has driven out over
700,000 Rohingya since August 2017; and Turkey, where border police just
tortured a Syrian I know for attempting to seek refuge. Everywhere,
immigrants are demonized. Activists are arrested. Demagogues promise
walls. In times like this, chauvinists try to paint refugees as a
plague, as terrorists. Stories are one way to fight back.
I don’t know if these books will do anything. But records need to be kept.
It doesn’t surprise me that Olivier Kugler’s Escaping Wars and Waves:
Encounters with Syrian Refugees won this year’s European Design Awards
Jury Prize. This recreated sketchbook is artistically masterful. Kugler,
a German reportage artist, made illustrated interviews with refugees in
Iraq, Greece, France, England, and Germany from 2013 to 2017. While he
worked after the fact from photos he’d taken, each page has all the
energy of an image drawn on the spot. Kugler’s line is astute, sinuous.
He pulls the main characters out with color, but lets the background
details overlap and congeal. He records the half-drunk Arabic coffee,
the portable heater, the eloquent detritus of camp life. At their best,
sketchbooks like Kugler’s make readers feel as if they are sitting
beside the artist—watching the refugees climb onto the beach of the
Greek island of Kos after crossing the Aegean from Turkey, or smelling
the tea sold by a vendor in an Iraqi refugee camp.
Escaping Wars and Waves begins at the Domiz refugee camp in Iraqi
Kurdistan, where in 2013 Kugler stayed with Médicins Sans Frontières to
document their work. Two years later, MSF commissioned me to do the
same. Like Kugler, I visited the camp’s cinderblock shacks. We each sat
with refugees in a circle on the floor, and we each drew them while they
spoke. In Kugler’s book, their voices stand alone. He gives neither
analysis nor context. He is an artist, not a Middle Eastern specialist.
But as in Joe Sacco’s Palestine (1993), Kugler’s sprawl of testimony
shows how these individual histories accumulate, blur, and shuffle.
Kugler especially shines when he draws Domiz’s small businesses. At
Domiz, as at most Middle Eastern camps, people know they will be staying
there a while. While they stay, they want to live. The UNHCR may provide
the bread, but refugee entrepreneurs hawk life’s roses in a dazzling and
desperate profusion. Domiz has wedding dress rentals and beauty parlors.
Cafés and satellite dish repair shops. Stores selling soccer trophies
and iPhone cases and nightingales. Djwan owns one such business, renting
sound systems. Lean and jaunty, he is a bit of an idol to the camp’s
boys, whom he teaches to breakdance and to rap in Kurdish. He makes
Kugler tea in his shop, and over six lavishly detailed pages, Kugler
unfolds Djwan’s past. Djwan the hipster DJ was once a sniper for the
Syrian Arab Army. He was conscripted for his mandatory military service,
but things went bad when his tentmate committed suicide. Djwan was
jailed and tortured for his friend’s supposed murder. After his family
bought his freedom, the army sent him to the front lines. When a rebel
rocket-propelled grenade hit a regime tank, his “friends…became ashes.”
He deserted just before a major rebel attack. “No one can say: ‘I am a
man and therefore I am not afraid,’” he says. “We were all scared.”
From Kurdistan, Kugler moves to Kos. While Greece was always a center
for irregular migration, refugees started arriving on the islands en
masse in 2015. Thousands came each day, crowding into life rafts with
outboard motors for the five-mile voyage from Turkey to Kos, then
coating the beaches with the now familiar iconography of deflated boats
and abandoned, often useless life jackets. Tourists fled, and aid
workers replaced them. Locals reacted occasionally with xenophobic
violence, but most often with astounding generosity and grace. Kugler
speaks to a Swiss woman who for seven years had run a souvenir stall on
Kos’s port. Now she has to move. Business is way down. “I am not angry
with the refugees,” she says. “I can understand their circumstances very
well. They are my friends.”
The Syrians who make it to Europe are more educated than those stuck in
Iraqi Kurdistan. After all, they had two thousand dollars to pay a
smuggler. In another world, a world in which one’s destiny was less
defined by one’s passport, they would be sipping frappés at the very
hotels whose proprietors now ban them from renting rooms. In Europe,
Kugler speaks with refugees who were once lawyers, doctors, medical
students, to a fashion designer whose artwork was destroyed by ISIS and
a teenage girl in a tank top who mourns her lost cat. The worst loss for
all these people is the loss of identity. Back home they were respected
professionals. Now cops call them monkeys while they beat them. “For us
Europe is not a dream land. It is not paradise, it is not heaven,” says
a young Syrian man who has spent the last seven months in a leaky tent
in the Calais Jungle, a refugee camp in France. But where else can he go?
The story ends in Kugler’s hometown, Simmozheim, Germany, where his
parents are helping a Syrian family from Deir ez-Zor adjust to their new
lives. While the Syrian mother and father share stories from the war
they fled, their kids crowd around. When their son Ahmed tells Kugler he
no longer has nightmares, he does so in “decent” German. Their
thirteen-year-old daughter, Nour, wants to be a nurse—and now goes by Nora.
This reminds me of another story of migration. Like the Syrians Kugler
covered, my great-grandfather fled the twin threats of military
conscription and political oppression—in his case, the anti-Semitic
oppression of tsarist Russia, where police sent his Bundist comrades to
Siberia, and where Jewish boys faced the draft starting at the age of
twelve. In 1904, Shmuel Chudozhnik’s boat landed on Ellis Island, where
a bureaucrat assigned him a new name, Samuel Rothbort, and he was reborn
as an American.
In The Unwanted: Stories of the Syrian Refugees, Don Brown bolsters
Kugler’s layers of testimony with linear explanatory journalism. He
starts with the origins of the Syrian revolution, in the graffiti
written by fifteen teenagers in the dusty southwestern city of Dara’a,
then follows dutifully from their arrests, the resulting protests, and
the government crackdown to the well-known tableaus of bombed-out
buildings, refugee boats, and ISIS soldiers. It is a straightforward
story filled with maps and statistics, generous with the sorts of
definitions American audiences still need after decades of meddling in
the Middle East. He sketches a brief history of the Assad family’s rise
to power, compares Islam’s division into Sunnis and Shias to
Christianity’s division into Episcopalians, Methodists, and Baptists,
and provides a map of Syria for easy reference.
“Early on, I decided The Unwanted would focus on the refugee experience
and disregard information beyond that constraint except when necessary
for context,” Brown writes in the book’s epilogue. But his discussion of
the war’s origins are pages well spent. “Assad uses arrests and violence
to hang on to power,” Brown tells us at one point. “The lucky ones who
are eventually freed return with electric shock marks, cigarette burns,
and broken bones.” Later: “Assad drops barrel-bombs and destroys
buildings and people while anti-Assad jihadists take time out of
fighting to murder any who disagree with them.” To those familiar with
the Syrian war, this may seem simplistic, but without knowing this
background, how can a reader understand why Syrians continue to flee?
Brown draws simply, laying digital washes over his sketchy charcoal
line. At his best, he verges on the stark simplicity that comics can do
so well. In one double-page spread, he shows a Syrian family in
silhouette, sneaking across a Turkish border. With barely any detail, he
conveys it all: the trees that resemble smoke billows, the slumped
shoulders of the mom, the young child pulling on her father’s hand. Over
those three long panels you can feel the painful exhaustion of their march.
Whether they are Turkish border police or tortured activists, Brown’s
characters have mask-like, interchangeable faces. Their mouths are
ironic slits. Their eyes bulge cartoonishly or else are smudged holes,
burning with rancor. They are not individuals, but a mass. Brown tells
Syrian stories without names or identifying details. Sometimes this
works. After a refugee boat capsizes, a man floats alone in the
glittering Mediterranean. “I tried to catch my wife and children in my
arms. But one by one, they drowned,” he says. He could be any human on
earth.
Other times, this anonymity is less successful. A man tries to cross a
checkpoint with a piano strapped to his pickup truck. A masked Islamist
asks him: “Don’t you know that music is forbidden by Islam?” “They burn
the piano. It could have easily been the piano’s owner,” Brown writes.
But the same story was told by Ayham Ahmed, the famous piano man from
the refugee camp of Yarmouk in Damascus. During the war, this young
Palestinian musician became a YouTube star for posting videos of himself
playing amid the rubble of the district, surrounded by his singing
neighbors. He has been profiled by The New York Times and the BBC. It
makes little sense for Brown to leave out his name.
Since 2015, most Western journalists have focused on refugees in Europe,
but Brown spends time on the 90 percent of refugees who remain in the
Middle East. The fourth-largest city in Jordan is now Zaatari, a Syrian
refugee camp. In Lebanon, where Syrians make up over a quarter of the
population, they face widespread racism—one newspaper columnist accused
them of turning fashionable Hamra Street “black”—and work like animals
in the agricultural and construction industries, kids alongside adults.
“Kids pick potatoes, labor in textile factories, or wash dishes,” Brown
writes, across four harsh panels of toiling children. (In 2013, I
visited Syrians’ makeshift camps in the Bekaa Valley. Refugees lived in
tents made of billboard vinyl and burned plastic bags for heat.)
Over three million Syrians live in somewhat better conditions in Turkey,
but Syrian kids still beg on Istanbul’s Istiklal Avenue and Syrian
college graduates still toil in sweatshops. As for the Gulf, “the
wealthy Arab states of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, and the
United Arab Emirates offer the refugees no chance for resettlement,”
Brown notes.
To research The Unwanted, Brown visited three Greek camps in May 2017.
By then, the viral cry of “Refugees Welcome” had long since vanished.
“Europe’s—and the world’s—‘love’ buckles under the huge exodus,” he
writes, and the camps are a testament to this collapse. “The last visit
to a camp heightened the discomfort I’d experienced on my first
visit—that I was a voyeur to tragedy.” Nine months earlier, I had met
Walid in a camp much like these. They were then, and are now,
overcrowded hellholes. A river of sewage runs through the center of
Moria Camp in Lesbos, where 8,300 people crowd into a space meant for
3,100. In the fall of 2016, refugees from the Samos camp showed me
photos of food the army had served that was laced with maggots, and that
winter, a refugee froze to death in Lesbos. At least four other refugees
in Greece have ended up hospitalized after they tried to light
themselves on fire out of despair.
Brown is at his most damning when he describes how the world turned
against Syrian refugees. The friendly Germans offering water bottles
become a line of pinched white faces in a generic European capital,
shouting in unison: “Refugees not welcome.” Years pass. The razor wire
goes up in Orbán’s Hungary; ISIS murders Parisians in the Bataclan
attacks, further turning public opinion against the Syrians; Russian
bombs fall in Syria. Trump ascends to the American presidency. America
has bombed Syria since 2014. It has killed thousands of civilians and
leveled the city of Raqqa, where US troops are still stationed. Yet many
Americans remain ignorant of the country whose war has, more than any
other, shaped our decade. The last lines of Brown’s postscript read:
“There are about 5.7 million registered Syrian refugees. In the first
three months of 2018, the United States has accepted eleven for
resettlement.”
Unlike the books by Kugler and Brown, Threads: From the Refugee Crisis,
by the comics artist and activist Kate Evans, is not a Syrian story. It
is set in the Calais Jungle, a tent city in France where thousands of
refugees and migrants lived from January 2015 until October 2016, in
what Evans calls “a microcosmic Disunited Nations.” It is the story of
people from the poor world—Syrians, yes, but also Eritreans, Afghans,
Iraqis, Sudanese—pressed up against the boundaries of a country made
rich by exploiting the poor world. It is also the story of the
volunteers who came to Calais, including Evans herself. “What are we
doing, swanning about…, congratulating ourselves on our fabulous relief
effort?” she demands. This merciless self-examination is one of the
book’s finest qualities.
Threads starts off with lace—the Calais lace-making industry, to be
exact. In these first few pages, Evans draws dour girls who weave beauty
onto their bobbins, until the lace spins elsewhere, to form bomb blasts,
fences, walls. Lace borders nearly every page. Evans writes this memoir
in the cut-up style of a punk zine. She splices quiet moments spent
drawing children in the camp with vitriolic comments left on her blog,
where she posted the first chapter of what later became Threads. “This
cartoon could not be better propaganda for battlefield veteran Islamic
militant males invading Northern Europe if Lenin himself produced it”;
“these cute refugee babies grow into vile adults who want to destroy our
country.”
In a video interview posted online by her publisher, Evans notes that
she did not set out to be a journalist. “Journalists have a pretense to
objectivity. I have a strong commitment to telling the truth,” she says.
Threads is not an objective document, though it is a work of in-depth
journalism. As if to stress her subjectivity, Evans, unlike Kugler and
Brown, draws herself into her own work. She is on almost every page, an
enthusiastic pink-haired woman with a round guileless face and mournful
eyes. You see her giving out markers, buying food with friends to take
back to Calais, or talking to her kids. You hear her frustrations and
her fears. In a world where refugees are so often the objects of
observation, Evans turns her gaze inward. “My white privilege grants me
the job of guarding the tool tent,” she writes, during her first stint
in Calais. She demands to know the reasons behind “that dubious
metaphor, of refugees as a flood.” “What turned on the tap? The bombs
and the guns: the ones that we drop and we sell and we profit from.”
What is her responsibility? What is her complicity? What can and can’t
she fix?
Evans volunteered in the Calais Jungle for ten days in all—a weekend in
October 2015, and twice more in January and February 2016. She
represents a particular type of volunteer that became ubiquitous during
2015’s mass migration to Europe. They were not the employees of
international NGOs who collected large salaries to sit in
air-conditioned offices (in the camp at Samos, refugees decided “NGO”
stood for “never go out”). They did not wear branded T-shirts or talk
about “beneficiaries.” Instead, you met them running DIY kitchens just
outside of island detention centers, marching in protests, or playing
chess with Afghan kids in squats. They were often young, often punk, and
generally politically leftist, with anarchists heavily represented. They
believed in solidarity rather than charity. They asked what people
needed, worked spontaneously, and bought tents and oranges and kids’
books with their own money. A representative from Médicins Sans
Frontières told me that their work in Greece was magnificent.
Still, Evans does not spare their failures. In one harrowing scene, an
organization decides to distribute kids’ clothes from inside a
transparent-walled arts center known as the Good Chance Dome. It’s
supposed to be a photo op, but turns into a fiasco. As the destitute
refugees shove, volunteers guard all-too-visible boxes of clothing. “The
Good Chance Dome has been so many things…but always, always, it has been
a place of welcome,” Evans writes. “Now we’re…trying to keep people
out.” As tensions build, the plastic dome collapses. Evans jokes darkly
that she could have drawn the scene as a cartoon for the Daily Mail.
Governments increasingly criminalize volunteers like Evans—not just in
Europe, but also in the United States. In January 2018, the US indicted
Scott Warren, a volunteer with No More Deaths—a faith-based humanitarian
group in Arizona that provides aid to immigrants on the southwestern
border—on federal charges including conspiracy and harboring
undocumented immigrants. According to the complaint, Warren gave them
food, water, and shelter for three days. If convicted, he faces up to
twenty years’ imprisonment. Evans documents police violence, but their
panoply of restrictions are somehow even more galling. In Dunkirk,
police ban volunteers from taking dry bedding into the camp. Later, they
ban bread. Children huddle outside the fence, eating their bread in the
rain. In Calais, police destroy the frail infrastructure of housing,
youth centers, distribution spots, and restaurants that refugees and
volunteers have built together, which Evans calls “a monument to human
ingenuity and charity, however desolate and desperate it may be.”
Though Threads reads as a sort of diary, Evans focuses on the refugees
she meets: a tiny girl, delighted to get an orange; the bored young guys
who flirt and talk smack; the pregnant mother who has just been slapped
by a riot cop. Evans’s best friend in camp is Hoshyar, an Iraqi Kurd
with an intelligent graciousness. Hoshyar shares an eight-foot shack
with his friend, uses a sliver of broken glass as a shaving mirror, and
cherishes cooking for Evans in his makeshift kitchen. For the past four
months, he’d been trying to catch a ride across the Channel on the
bottom of a truck, so he could join his uncle in Croydon, in south London.
When Evans meets him, even his little shack has been marked for
destruction by the French authorities. He will have nowhere to go.
Naively, Hoshyar puts his hope in British politicians. “Didn’t you know?
Immigrants are always feared, always vilified. They hate you Hoshyar.
They think you’re a terrorist”—Evans thinks this, but does not say it.
As the date of destruction draws closer, and the prospect of paying an
impossible sum to people smugglers becomes more tempting, Hoshyar begins
to give in to despair.
Nor can Evans keep Calais’s violence from affecting her. A migrant dies
on the train tracks while presumably trying to sneak into England.
Police beat a young man while she watches, then force Evans to delete
her photos of the incident. “Blood is thicker than all the water in the
English Channel, and the Rhine, and the Mediterranean, and the Tigris
river,” she writes, but perhaps the greatest pain she feels is the guilt
for not being able to take her friends from the camp with her. In the
year Evans spent drawing Threads, she went back and forth to England. A
piece of paper confined her friends to the Jungle. She flashed her
passport, and the police let her cross.
In her essay “We Refugees,” Hannah Arendt wrote, “Nobody wants to know
that contemporary history has created a new kind of human beings—the
kind that are put into concentration camps by their foes and internment
camps by their friends.” Nearly eighty years later, the world has come
no closer to ensuring the rights of a human without a country. Mostly,
governments propose quarantine. Internment camps grow in Tornillo,
Texas, in Lesbos, in Zaatari, and in Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh. It won’t
work. Each year, the world grows warmer. The oceans rise. Wars are
fought for ever-scarcer resources. If the wealthy West worries about one
million Syrians, what will it do with millions of climate refugees?
“While the bombs still fall, and the bullets still reign, there will be
refugees at Calais,” Evans writes. “Hope springs eternal: people looking
for that good chance, that one chance, however slim.”
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