Answers: Refugees and Migrants in Fiction
This year Abdulrazak Gurnah, born in Zanzibar (part of Tanzania from 1964), was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for what the Swedish Academy called his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”. Gurnah was a teenager in 1964 when Zanzibar’s Arab Sultan was overthrown by African revolutionaries. Thousands of Arabs and South Asians were killed in the massacre that followed. Hailing from a family of Arab heritage that feared persecution, Gurnah left for Britain as a refugee in 1969. More from Gurnah on his arrival in Britain here. (Among the South Asian families that fled the upheaval in Zanzibar was that of Farrokh Bulsara, later known as Freddy Mercury)
Abdulrazak Gurnah has called on Europe to greet migrants with compassion rather than ‘barbed wire’. Taking my cue from the international recognition of Gurnah and his portrayal of the refugee experience, this quiz focuses on fiction that explores the travails of refugees and migrants.
Answers
1) Starting with Zanzibar and Abdulrazak Gurnah’s heritage, which country in the Middle East controlled Zanzibar from 1698 to 1861? A succession struggle after the ruler’s death in 1856 led to the British separating Zanzibar from the country in 1861. It was a major hub of the slave and spice trades and colonial powers jostled for control. Zanzibar became a British protectorate in 1890. Until the 1960s, a sizeable population with ties to the Middle Eastern country remained in Zanzibar. Which country? (refugees from Zanzibar played an important role in the modernisation of this country from the 1970s)
Oman. For a period in the 19th century Stone Town in Zanzibar was its capital. By the 1960s Oman was a desperately poor nation under its reclusive and ultra-conservative Sultan Said bin Taimur. There was only one paved road, access to electricity was limited and only five percent of the population could read. Refugees of Omani heritage fleeing Zanzibar after the 1964 massacre were widely accepted only after Said bin Taimur’s son Qaboos ousted him in 1970 with British support. Sultan Qaboos’ modernisation of Oman was aided by businessmen and professionals from Zanzibar.
2) Octavia E. Butler was the first Black woman to be acclaimed as a major science fiction writer. She was honoured with the Nebula and Hugo awards, the top American prizes in science fiction and fantasy writing.
The main protagonist in her dystopian novel Parable of the Sower leads a group of refugees who flee California, which is reeling under global warming, water shortages and mass unemployment. In the sequel Parable of the Talents (1998) her transplanted community confronts a newly-elected Christian fundamentalist president from Texas. What was the fictional president’s campaign slogan?
Make America Great Again (18 years before the Donald Trump campaign in 2016). More here and here. Recent profiles of Octavia E. Butler here and here.
3) The writer Sam Selvon’s father was a Tamil Christian from Madras and his mother an Anglo-Indian. Selvon’s pioneering novel The Lonely Londoners was published in 1956. It was a breakout novel depicting which immigrant community? (The Lonely Londoners was also a pioneer in how it used the lingo of the author’s native region, freeing future works from the shackles of ‘standard English’)
Immigrants to the UK from the Caribbean known as the Windrush generation. People who arrived between 1948 and 1971 have been labelled the Windrush generation, after the ship MV Empire Windrush which docked in Tilbury in 1948 with workers from the Caribbean to fill labour shortages in the UK. More about them and the recent controversy surrounding deportation threats here, here and here.
More about Sam Selvon here, here, here and here. While Indians who migrated to the British-controlled Caribbean as indentured labourers are largely identified as from what is now Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, there was a smaller Tamil community.
The Tamil presence is far more pronounced in the French Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe, through migration from the former French colony of Pondicherry (now Puducherry) and surrounding areas of Tamil Nadu. Multiple novels in French have dealt with the Tamil/Indian migrant experience, starting with Maurice Virassamy’s Le petit coolie noir (1972) from Martinique. The author and five-time member of the French Parliament from Guadeloupe, Ernest Moutoussamy developed the concept of ‘Indianite' (Indianness) in the 1980s with novels such as La Guadeloupe et son indianite and Aurore. Other writers (not of Indian origin) have since taken up themes surrounding migration from Tamil Nadu. A prominent work is the Martinican Raphael Confiant’s La pance du chacal (The Belly of the Jackal) which portrays the Dorassamy family’s long journey from Madurai. It was recently translated into English. More here, here and here.
4) This fictional character retired as chief of police in his country in 1904. During World War I he was forced to leave for England as a refugee and ended up in the fictional village of Styles St. Mary. Who and which country? (in creating this character, the author was influenced by the sudden arrival of refugees from this particular country)
Hercule Poirot and Belgium. More here and here. A group of Belgian refugees moved to Agatha Christie’s neighbourhood during World War I. Christie’s first Poirot novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles was published in Britain in 1921.
5) Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide published in 2004 was the first work of fiction in English to dwell extensively on one of the worst massacres in independent India, the scale of which is still little known outside the region where it took place. While there is no precise death toll because of an official clampdown, survivors say thousands of refugees were killed as police encircled an island in 1979. Where?
Marichjhapi in the Sundarbans in West Bengal. Refugees, mostly Dalits, who had initially stayed in East Pakistan after Partition and were forced to flee in later years, were resettled far from Bengal in the arid Dandakaranya region of central India. Politicians from the Communist-led Left Front had promised them space in West Bengal but ignored their plight after coming to power in 1977. Many refugees on their own established themselves in remote places like Marichjhapi. The Communist government implemented an economic blockade of the island on January 26, 1979, India’s Republic Day. The police crackdown and massacre followed soon. More here, here, here and here.
6) Do Log in Urdu and Hindi was this poet’s first novel. It begins with a truck leaving the town of Campbellpur with refugees in 1946 as British India is set to be partitioned. The author translated it himself into English under the name Two (English version was published in 2017). Who?
Gulzar. More here and here on the poet, author and filmmaker.
7) The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat is set in the border town of Alegria in the 1930s. Hewing close to real-life events, the novel depicts the massacre of thousands from one country who were working in the relatively better off neighbouring country. People were rounded up based on how they pronounced the word for ‘parsley’ and this massacre orchestrated by a dictator in 1937 is known as the Parsley massacre. Others fled across a river at the border known as Massacre River (from an earlier massacre). Name the two countries.
Haiti and Dominican Republic. More about the Parsley Massacre here and here. Thousands of people with Haitian ancestry are still in legal limbo in the Dominican Republic, while others were deported in recent years. More here and here. More about the Dominican Republic’s longtime dictator Rafael Trujillo, who orchestrated the massacre here and here.
8) Judith Kerr, the author of the popular children’s book The Tiger Who Came to Tea also published a trilogy of semi-autobiographical novels based on her childhood experiences as a refugee forced to flee her home country. The title of the first book published in 1971 was based on a stuffed toy she had to leave behind. Name the book.
When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit. More here, here, here and here.
9) A Professor at the University of Southern California, his 2015 debut novel won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. He was himself a refugee, forced to leave the country of his birth when only four. The book starts with events in 1975. The fictional narrator flees to the U.S. but remains a spy for the country that he leaves, embedded with refugees finding their way in the U.S. Name the book and author.
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen. More here and here. Nguyen wrote about America’s ‘obligation to help Afghans in mortal danger’ soon after the fall of Kabul this August.
10) Novelist Isabel Allende was herself a refugee, living in Venezuela for 13 years after the 1973 coup in Chile by General Pinochet. The two main protagonists in her 2019 novel A Long Petal of the Sea are refugees fleeing Spain during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s as Francisco Franco seized power. The fictional couple made it to a ship organised by a real-life Chilean diplomat that took about 2,000 refugees to Chile. Who is the diplomat who chartered the ship? (He is a globally well-known figure though not as a diplomat)
Pablo Neruda. More here and here.
11) She earned international acclaim through her second novel published in 2006. Its title comes from the flag of an independence movement, which was crushed in a brutal civil war that raged between 1967 and 1970. Among the themes of the book is internal displacement as wounded refugees escape in a train. In real life, both the author’s grandfathers died in the conflict. She drew upon her family’s own experiences for the book. Name the novel and author.
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. ‘Yellow Sun’ is from the flag of Biafra, the short-lived entity whose secession from Nigeria led to a brutal civil war. More here, here and here
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