More than Just a Name Final Draft

Jack Foersterling

Professor Leake

WRIT 1733

More Than Just a Name

Having been in class for a total of 5 weeks now and having read, watched, researched, and seen first hand many different refugee stories my definition of a refugee and what their story entails has both remained true to, but also grown immensely from what my ideas at the beginning of the quarter were. Our first blog post focused on such an idea. Exactly what is a refugee? While we all have the definition fed to us by the popular media stories (starving African children come to mind pretty quickly) what most people fail to see is the very broad range of situations a refugee can come from. The definition I came up with at the beginning of the quarter is “A “refugee” in my definition is someone who changes location, from their physical home or homeland, by either force or on his or her own accord.” (Foersterling) For the next class we were to read the UNHCR report regarding the definition of refugees, which gave the following, “A refugee is someone who ‘owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country…” (UNHCR, 3) Now while I believe my definition and that given by the UNHCR are very close in description, we must also remember that the UNHCR definition was given at a 1951 convention dealing with the status of refugees, over 60 years ago. 60 years is a large amount of time for a single definition to still be held in place regarding a group of people. To put things into perspective, African Americans didn’t even have the right to vote until 13 years after this conference took place. While I believe the definition still holds generally true to the majority of those under refugee status, a modern convention on refugees would allow for a new definition of a refugee that involves all that has happened globally since the previous one.

            Now that I have gone over the working “definition” of a refugee through both my idea and what the actual legal parameters are, we can tackle what it means to have a “refugee story”. One of the main topics we have covered in class, the idea of a “refugee story” has very grey lines on what exactly it means, solely because there are so many examples of them that trying to cram them all under one overarching denotation. Much like any time one group of people is defined by their stereotype or general characteristics, there are still a very large portion of the common population that do not adhere anywhere close to the “norm” of their group. Take for example the common stereotypes of minority groups such as Latino Americans and African Americans. While we might try and reject the idea that there is the common “idea” of what both groups are like, whether we like it or not, they exist. Stereotypes have for decades plagued groups of individuals by describing their diverse culture in simplistic terms that grossly oversimplify the actions and beliefs.

            I believe that both the best and the worst thing for the sharing of these refugee stories in American culture, as well as world culture, has been the popular media. The second a war or genocide or other form of social persecution of people begins in a developing country today it is a media feeding frenzy for who can be on the scene fastest and getting coverage of the event unfolding. While at its core this does seem like a positive thing, media covering large world events that effect a large group of people, the modern media outlets have reached a level of coverage much more than just reporting the news to the general public. If you flip on the news today, any channel, it doesn’t matter if its on one side of the spectrum like FOX or the complete other side like CNN, you will see the same thing, the over dramatization and coverage of events. As a journalism major I have been engrained with the idea that we cover stories and make our lead titles something that will attract the largest audience. What does this for the average American media consumer? Horror stories. War in this country, famine in this one, murder in this city, scandal in the capital, etc. It is all the same, if it has a shock factor big enough, it will make front-page news guaranteed. There is no way any major news corporation will cover the story of a man who was reconnected with his lost father after 30 years over any story involving some form of violence or unjust actions. In the covering of refugees in African countries, the media almost doesn’t treat the victims as people. “A Southern Sudanese activist I interviewed on the U.S. East Coast commented on her own work with the Lost Boys of Sudan, critiquing the ways in which the media appropriated the boy’s suffering without emphasis on their daily struggle and the impact of war trauma and violence on their mental health and general well-being.” (Fadlalla, 106) Put in coverage that almost makes them seem like the animals out of a Sarah McLachlan ASPCA commercial, the refugees are put in a light that even the hardest criminal will feel pity for them. News broadcasters look for the biggest “sob story” when covering the refugees. As described in an article written regarding the resettling of Iraqi refugees in the greater Boston Area, the author says, “His life in America hasn’t been easy. But he’s safe, and he says that counts for a lot when you know how it feels to be kidnapped, beaten up by insurgents, and stuffed into a trunk” It is easy to see the author’s use of such deep and powerful language to entice a certain feeling from the reader. Like Deng said, there are plenty of stories that involve the typical, as Fadlalla describes, “…these Sudanese youth ate insects and grass, risked being eaten by jungle carnivores, and drank their own urine to survive” (Fadlalla, 102) recollections. However, like Deng also stated many refugee stories are fabricated for the media, “But now, sponsors and newspaper reporters and the like expect the stories to have certain elements, and the Lost Boys have been consistent in their willingness to oblige. Survivors tell the stories the sympathetic want, and that means making the stories as shocking as possible. My own story includes enough small embellishments that I cannot criticize the accounts of others.” (Eggers, 21) Much like we as college students did not technically “lie” to college admissions board about our accomplishments and what we did in high school, but it would be very easy to state that we all buffed up our best traits and stories and threw them to the front of the line to get the most attention. We, along with the refugees telling their stories are not simply lying, but more fabricating some of the truths to make our stories and our triumphs stand above the rest.

  While the major media outlets do have their faults (just like any large corporation these days) they do assist in what their true purpose was initially intended for, informing the general public of worldly events and happenings. Without them we would have little to no idea what is happening two states away from us let alone what is going on in the Middle East and Africa. Without the popular media covering stories of refugees and their struggle, there would be nowhere close to the amount of help going to them from American sources as there is now. Everything starting from the UN to other world-wide help and support groups down to local organizations that hold small fundraisers to send money to African and other refugees would not be at all as effective as they stand today without the assistance of the major media covering the events that occur in the places they are helping. While both sides of the coin can be debated for whether or not the mass media and its coverage of refugees either hurts or helps the telling of their stories, I do believe that the stories would not be able to be told without it.

            What I have noticed in reading, watching and researching about refugee stories is that their largest detriment is that they forget the individual, the person. They instead focus on the large group, summarizing the stories of many into the story of one. It is not until you search out stories such as God Grew Tired of Us, of Beetles and Angels, and What is the What all you find are stories without names. There is no Deng, no Mawi, no John Buhl or Panther or Daniel, all that they use is “refugees”. There is no personality to this word “refugee” it is a blank faced title given to characterize such a large and diverse group of people, many times, who could not be more different. African refugees, Asian refugees, even Native American refugees, are we saying that all of these people are the same? Refugees deserve the right to the name they were given at birth, not the one they were given when they were forcibly removed from their country against their will. They are people, just like you and I, it doesn’t take much reading to see that. Mawi describes in his book the perils of growing up in the suburbs of Chicago not only as a refugee, but mostly just as a child. I share so many similar experiences with him in this respect. No, I did not move from an African refugee camp to America at a very young age, but I did deal with bullies, I dealt with school, I dealt with my parents, I dealt with girls. While our backgrounds may be completely different and we have experienced things the other may never even imagine, we still share such a solid common ground. While one of us has the technical denotation as a refugee and the other is just a white middleclass suburban kid, we both grew up here, we’re both, and I proudly say this, Americans.

            Overall, there should be no reason that refugees should be defined by their legal status and title, they should be defined by their actions, and their individual stories, not those about their entire group. They tell these stories for a reason, to hold this sense of individual. As Deng said, “Whatever I do, however I find a way to live, I will tell these stories. I have spoken to every person I have encountered these last difficult days...I speak to these people, and I speak to you because I cannot help it. It gives me strength, almost unbelievable strength, to know that you are there. I covet your eyes, your ears, the collapsible space between us. How blessed are we to have each other? I am alive and you are alive and so we must fill the air with our words. I will fill today, tomorrow, every day until I am taken back to God. I will tell stories to people who will listen and to people who don't want to listen, to people who seek me out and to those who run. All the while I will know that you are there. How can I pretend that you do not exist? It would be almost as impossible as you pretending that I do not exist.” (Eggersa, 115) We must choose to break outside what is simply given to us instantaneously through mass media that hits us in waves every second in todays fast paced society, we must not simply take the story given to us and move on. We have to look at the individual and not the group. We have to see people, not just “refugees”, because it’s more than just a name.

Works Cited

Asgedom, M. (2002). Of beetles & angels: a boy's remarkable journey from a      refugee camp to Harvard. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co..

Eggers, D. (2006). What is the what: the autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng            : a novel. San Francisco: McSweeney's.

UNHCR. (2012, September). Protecting Refugees and the Role of UNHCR. UNHCR, September 2012. Retrieved March 19, 2013, from https://blackboard.du.edu/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_tab_group_id _2_1&url=%2Fwebapps%

Fadlalla, A. (2009). Contested Borders of (In)humanity: Sudanese Refugees and     the Mediation of Suffering and Subaltern Visibilities. Urban Anthropology,           38(1), 80-113. Retrieved March 23, 2012, from https://blackboard.du.edu/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_tab_group_id=  _2_1&url=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fexecute%2Flauncher%3Ftype            %3DCourse%26id%3D_208109_1%26url%3D