Between aggressive nationalism and rigid borders, the work of artists and writers has become even more important.
Between aggressive nationalism and rigid borders, the work of artists and writers has become even more important.
In 1991 and 1992, military campaigns against Rohingya in Rakhine Province Myanmar was given ancient Buddhist names, such as Operation Pei Thaya, which means clean and beautiful nation. It drove more than 200,000 Rohingyas into Bangladesh, an exodus that peaked in 2017. In the book of Habibur Rahman, First, they erased our name: a Rohingya speaks, co-authored by Sophie Ansel, he writes that as a 15-year-old, he often wondered whether he would ever reach adulthood or be murdered earlier. After so many young Rohingya men went missing, Habib tried not to think about it.
Rakhine to Nagorno-Karabakhi
Bangladesh shelters 1.1 million Rohingyas, but during her recent visit to India, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina said the refugees were a “huge burden” on her country, and she called on international organizations such as the United Nations to ensure their return. Was talking to Myanmar. This is easy to do, because the Tatmadaw, or Burmese armed forces, do not recognize the Rohingya and had to flee the land for this reason in the first place. what the maps and lines mean for those who are forced to flee, or live in exile, and Who doesn’t have land of his own?
The diaspora – the Rohingya in Bangladesh, or Uighurs, Palestinians, Armenians spread across the globe – are haunted by issues of borders and belonging. where is he going? Who will take them in? How will they be treated? The search as to whether such a refuge existed took anthropologist Maggie Paxson to a remote plateau in France in Vivrays-Lignon, where, as it turns out, ordinary people made their way to rescue hundreds of strangers, including Jewish children. Life has been put at risk. During World War II.
One of the most poignant accounts in his book, Plateau (2019) is the story of Lalik, an Azeri girl who falls in love with an Armenian boy, Arat. Soon, Lalik and Arat get married and live in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, a city surrounded by beautiful mountains. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, his life unraveled. The dispute between the two countries is over the mountains of Nagorno-Karabakh, which is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan but is closely associated with Armenia, and Lalik being an Azeri “fear, disgust, disbelief”.
explained | What is India’s policy on Rohingya?
Because Lalik is Azeri, Arat is beaten, “repeatedly, sometimes to a pulp”. They flee to Armenia, and when Arat has to sell each of his 2,000 books, “each of which he had read,” he breaks down and cries. The couple flees to Moscow with their two children, but things take a turn for the worse as they become “stateless people”. The family somehow manages to get out of Moscow and officially requests asylum in France. When Paxson meets them in the French village, they have lost their girl who was killed, and their boy is still in a state of panic. Villagers have normalized a dire situation, but the family is not at peace till the papers, bumazkiArrive which will make their stay in France official.
letter for help
During her travels in the border areas of India, Suchitra Vijayan ( midnight border, 2021) learned about the plight of Rohingya refugee Amir Hakim, who was lodged in Goalpara District Jail since 2009, for entering India illegally after fleeing violence in Myanmar. In desperation, he wrote to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees – the letter had been smuggled in by a friend – asking for help. Activists told him that most of the detainees were suffering from severe anxiety and depression. The fact that there was no indication of how long they would be kept in detention centers weighed heavily on them. Some wrote letters, others wrote lines about the home they had left behind, and were not sure about ever returning.
Uyghur writer Perhat Tursun, who was banished by the Chinese state, wrote a novel, backstreets (2022), Drawing on Uighur literary traditions, Sufi poems and world literature from Kafka, Camus to Dostoevsky. Translated by Darren Baylor, which provides context for the disappearance of both the author and his work, the story follows an unnamed Uighur man who arrives in the cold Chinese capital of Xinjiang and finds a temporary job in a government office. He wants to escape the pain of the countryside but is only faced with rejection and indifferent eyes. Tursan’s story about social violence and rejection of diversity is haunting.
stories in the area
Palestinian writer and lawyer Raja Shehadeh began walking the hill in the 1970s, unaware that he was walking through a vanishing landscape. his book, Palestinian walks (2007), which consists of seven rounds covering a period of 27 years occurring at different stages of Palestinian history, preserves in words the memory of the hills surrounding Ramallah. his memoirs, stranger in the house (2002), revolves around the story of a father and son relationship, but has political context in the background, and a feature that every Palestinian or anyone who has no rights over their home (land) now shares. Is: an intense sense of loss.
Is the hero’s vivid recollection a way to preserve a past that is being forgotten or intentionally erased and rewritten? In the Stalin era, Russian writers mastered the art of providing flexibility through memory and imagination. With aggressive nationalism and the re-evaluation of rigid borders in many parts of the world, the work of memory keepers, artists and writers becomes even more important.