Introduction: Speculative Belongings in Contemporary Arabic Migration Literature

Summary

In the opening scene of the short story ‘Lajiʾ ʿind al-Iskimu’ (‘The Arctic Refugee’), a weary narrator peers out of an igloo, surveying the Arctic landscape before him. The story, which was written by Sweden-based writer Ibrahim Ahmed, was published in the 1994 short story collection Baʿd Majiʿ al-Tayr: Qisas min al-Manfa (After the Bird’s Arrival: Stories from Exile). As such, it is an early iteration of the kinds of novels, short stories and plays of forced and precarious migration that are explored in this book, literary narratives that have been rewriting the meanings and forms of Arabic exile literature from the 1990s to the present. How did the narrator end up in the Arctic? Although he has tried, we find out, the narrator has not been able to apply for political asylum in any of the nations that he has travelled through. Forced to leave Iraq and later, Libya, he is then deported from Germany, Denmark and Sweden. In the dreamlike short story, he now finds himself yet a few more degrees north in an Arctic wilderness, a space that functions as an imagined ‘outside’ of the kind of community that he had expected to join. The narrator explains,

When I arrived at the Stockholm airport, the police interrogated me for hours and denied me asylum. I told them that I had come from Libya after the Libyans had terminated my work contract. They told me that Libya was a signatory of the 1951 Geneva Refugee Convention and that I should have applied for asylum there. I was too embarrassed to tell them that I had tried in vain with the Arab brothers to let me stay in their warm and vast country. I even reminded them of our blood ties, which they used to say were thicker than the ink of conventions. My truthfulness and naiveté had always plagued my life … I was expelled from Germany because I arrived there from Sweden, also a signatory of the 1951 Geneva Refugee Convention, and then from Denmark because Germany is a signatory of the Convention. Then I was expelled from Norway, a signatory of the Convention like the others. I began to wonder whether this Geneva Convention was written in ink or in mercury, on paper in elegant offices or on my grandmother’s gravestone.