The Displaced - Viet Thanh Nguyen

The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

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In January 2017, Donald Trump signed an executive order stopping entry to the United States from seven predominantly Muslim countries and dramatically cutting the number of refugees allowed to resettle in the United States each year. The American people spoke up, with protests, marches, donations, and lawsuits that quickly overturned the order. But the refugee caps remained.

In The Displaced, Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen, himself a refugee, brings together a host of prominent refugee writers to explore and illuminate the refugee experience. Featuring original essays by a collection of writers from around the world, The Displaced is an indictment of closing our doors, and a powerful look at what it means to be forced to leave home and find a place of refuge.

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‘Call Me a Refugee, Not an Immigrant’: Viet Thanh Nguyen

The novelist on refugee literature and the concept of the “genius.”

By Jon Wiener

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Jon Wiener: You insist on being called a refugee and not an immigrant. Why is that?

Viet Thanh Nguyen: The immigrant idea in America is very strong. We call ourselves “a nation of immigrants”; it’s a part of our mythology that immigrants come here and achieve the American dream. Even at this moment in history, where the xenophobic attitudes that have always been present are reaching another peak, even people who don’t like immigrants nevertheless believe in that immigrant idea. But refugees are different. Refugees are unwanted where they come from. They’re unwanted where they go to. They’re a different legal category. They’re a different category of feeling in terms of how the refugees experience themselves. If you call yourself an immigrant here, you fit. People will want to hear your heartwarming story about getting to this country. If you say you’re a refugee, that’s the quickest way to kill a conversation, because people can’t relate to that. It’s easy for someone like me to pass himself off as an immigrant, to pretend to be an immigrant, but if I do that, I feel like I’m not speaking the truth. I feel that it’s necessary for people like me, who have benefited from being a refugee, to acknowledge our existence as such and to advocate for the new refugees today.

JW: You have a wonderful sentence about being a writer about refugees: “I keep my tattered memories of being a refugee close to me.” Why is that?

VTN: I keep those tattered memories close to me because it’s important to remind other refugees and other Americans that we exist. And also because it makes me more empathetic. It makes me feel for these new refugees and what they’re going through. Some former refugees out there are saying, “We’re the good refugees. We deserve to be here. All these new people from the Middle East, or Syria, for example, they’re the bad refugees. They’re different. We’ve got to close the door on these people.” I think that’s fundamentally wrong.

JW: The purpose of a book like The Displaced is to help us imagine the lives of refugees, but you say in your introduction that this imagining can lead us to deceive ourselves. What do you mean?

VTN: This is part of the problem with literature. Literature’s strength is built on empathy, both the empathy of authors and the empathy of readers who want to get to know other characters, other people from different places. This is a very powerful thing, but it’s also deceptive because it’s a luxury. We want to know about terrible situation X and sympathetic person Y, and when we’ve read their story, our hearts are warmed and our emotions are moved. But what happens if we don’t do anything? What happens if we just put down that book and pick up another book? What happens if we don’t get involved in an aid organization and donate money? What happens if we don’t call our elected officials? What happens if we don’t march in the streets? What happens if we don’t take action? I think that’s the danger of literature. As much as it awakens our feelings, it can also lull us into a sense of complacency that we’ve already done something simply by reading about someone’s terrible situation.

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Quote:

VTN: I keep those tattered memories close to me because it’s important to remind other refugees and other Americans that we exist. And also because it makes me more empathetic. It makes me feel for these new refugees and what they’re going through. Some former refugees out there are saying, “We’re the good refugees. We deserve to be here. All these new people from the Middle East, or Syria, [or Haiti] for example, they’re the bad refugees. They’re different. We’ve got to close the door on these people.” I think that’s fundamentally wrong.

Sao em nghi anh VTN này có vô Phố rùm nghe tín đồ của Trâm nói chuyện.

Chắc lớn luôn. :)