4 - At Journey’s End: On Home and Belonging

Summary

Arrival to the Camps

There's more! There's more! They’re coming! They’re coming!

These words echoed throughout the camp one morning in early September 2017. It was just after dawn – the sand had muddied from the torrential monsoon rains the night before, the yellow-orange hue of the sun shining over the soggy terrain. In the distant horizon beyond the sandy expanse and just over the rice paddies, crowds of people emerged out of nowhere – first in tens, then in thousands, until their presence carpeted the entire landscape. Their sunken faces revealed the exhaustion of a prolonged journey, escaping unspeakable calamity only to be faced with an uncertain future. The refugees were hungry and drained, pacing through the scorching heat – some carrying the weight of their children, while others their elderly family members. Some were able to gather a few belongings and bare necessities from their homes in Myanmar at the last minute, which they wrapped inside larger knotted shawls that they carried on their shoulders, the knots clinging for dear life to stay secure. Many others brought nothing with them except the clothes on their backs. Many Rohingya women later recounted to me that they did not know their exact destination, but they ran nonetheless, out of necessity, following one another across dense forest lands until they had reached the camps in search of refuge.

As time passed and days trickled into weeks and then months, the camps became the only place of residence for nearly a million Rohingya refugees. Within this context, Rohingya women have had to negotiate and re-forge community ties as well as renew their understandings of ‘self ‘ (Bhabha 1994; Abusharaf 2005, 2009; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2014). Though estranged from their native homeland of Myanmar, a sense of ‘home’ has begun to emerge in the camps from the shared experiences of displacement, the social and cultural interactions that constitute the camps, and the routine activities that provide meaning in their everyday life. This chapter explores the narratives of Rohingya women after being uprooted from Myanmar and forced into refugee camps in Bangladesh. While having lost their homes in Myanmar, Rohingya women have been able to re-establish ‘community’ and traditions in the refugee camps, thereby creating a sense of home and belonging despite their predicaments.