Listening to Refugee Women

I.

Surbhi

September 2017

The Refusal to Tell

Twenty-five or so women—physicians, professors, realtors—have paid $50 apiece for the opportunity to talk to refugee women and eat a meal prepared by them. Refugee women live in our neighborhoods and so, theoretically, we could talk to them as neighbors, but the $50 creates valuable layers between us and them so that we can talk but not too directly. $50 also provides the security of a framework—that we will have a context and a way of listening, receiving, and processing refugees’ stories—and the comfort of expectation, that a certain kind of story will be told, and we will know what to do with it.

I am at a fashionable Old Market apartment in Omaha, Nebraska, owned by an immigrant woman—a retired entrepreneur who has moved through the city’s philanthropy circles for many years. The entry into the event feels official: we sign permission forms for photographs and get name tags in English and in a language that no one bothers to specify. But inside, the energy is warm, informal. A group of women have congregated in one corner and are looking admiringly at the two women decked out in shimmering Indian clothes who stand at the center. A few white women are also wearing Indian attire or vaguely “ethnic” clothing. The invitation had instructed us to wear comfortable clothes as we would be required to sit on the floor. I am not wearing Indian attire, and neither are the other Indian immigrant women, at least none of us who have also paid the $50 ticket.

When the crowd scatters, I introduce myself to the two women. The admiring crowd looking these women up and down has left me discomfited, and as I stand closer to them now, I hope that they cannot see the sweat soaking my armpits or the red rising up my neck.  I ask the women their names. The older woman with the thick glasses is Q, and the younger woman is T, her daughter-in-law. They are from Nepal. We talk in scattered Hindi, exchanging basic information. They have been in the United States for around the same time as me—about fifteen years. The distance between me and them feels both close and wide—after all, we are Hindus from roughly the same part of the world—but I can see how different our journeys have been. I think about what has brought us together at this event, whether they were instructed to wear Indian attire just as I was instructed to wear “comfortable clothes.” My discomfort deepens when I reckon with the assumptions that the event makes, about what would appeal to the professional, “do-gooder” women of Omaha, enough to shell out $50 and donate perhaps a lot more.

After some time, we, the ticketholders, are invited to sit cross-legged on the floor. I try to understand the logic and wonder if that is how the women around me think that the women of the Third World sit. In that moment, a lot of other moments cohere. Once on a train from the Chicago suburbs to downtown, the train conductor struck up a conversation and then asked me where I was from. When I said that I am from India, his face betrayed a look of utter amazement, as if India was not of this planet altogether. He smiled and said, “You speak very fine English.” This is a common occurrence, as anyone of Asian descent will attest, but the words always tempt me into giving a spiel about the history of British colonialism or shouting that the image of India in the conductor’s mind, with forests, and elephants, and snakes was nothing like the modern and advanced India that I had lived in. When this happens all too frequently, one begins to realize the futility of these conversations.

Q has been asked to bring a “craft,” and she now sits on the floor with an unfinished basket made of thick plastic strings, trying to make a knot or two showing the women how the basket comes together. I have seen such baskets before. They are everywhere in India in local bazaars. But here, bathed in the admiring gaze of white Western eyes, the basket has become exotic, a curio. I look around at the other ticket-paying women of Indian descent and find a certain opaqueness. They are transfixed. I direct my gaze back at Q and her basket. We are never really told why Q is weaving the basket. Does she sell these baskets? Does she weave baskets to keep her loneliness at bay? Did she ever weave a basket when no one was watching?

Very quickly, I realize the weaving is supposed to be background noise for the real event of the evening—asking Q questions. Q rifles through the plastic threads sticking from the basket, fielding various questions from the audience about how they left Nepal, about her American present, and the refuge that America has offered her. Q is a woman of few words, but she seems to understand her audience—her story of the tough daily life in the mountains and how scared she was leaving her home leaves the audience spellbound. The air is thick with trauma and compassion. “But you are here now and doing better,” chimes in a white woman with contentment that still eludes my immigrant self.

The collective pity we are all invited to share in dissolve effortlessly into laughter as the guests pile their plates with the food that the women have cooked. Q and her daughter-in-law fade into the background as it is expected, mandated, decided that the guests will eat first. It reminds me of the custom at Indian weddings to let the groom’s side eat first so that in case the party runs out of food, it is the bride’s relatives who remain hungry and, in the process, hide the shameful reality of having fallen short. But I wonder why we were following this protocol at an event about community with refugees. Why were the refugees the “hosts” and the others the guests? Should it not be the other way around?

Five years later, I run into Q at a World Refugee Day event. She still has her thick glasses. Without a basket in hand and without the burden of having to tell a story, she is gregarious, even happy. She is moved when I tell her of my memories of the fundraiser from so many years ago. She is happy that someone remembered her. Her sense of loneliness washes over me. She lives with her son and his family in West Omaha. She cooks for them, but her health does not allow her to do much else. She tells me she is old, in the way my aunts do, referring more to exhaustion than age itself. She talks fondly of her young granddaughters and how busy they are with their schools and lives. There is a resignation in her voice. Her present life, especially the parts about her rather than her family’s success in America, had been decidedly absent from her responses to the women’s many questions at the “conversation with a refugee” event. But she perks up when we talk about Bollywood movies. When she mentions her favorite movie stars, I read the glint in her eyes as the pull of the past.

 Our circle of Bollywood talk grows bigger when we are joined by a recent Afghan refugee, NB, whom I had met a couple of months ago but had been unable to contact when I realized that I did not have her correct phone number. The happenstance reunion makes the moment feel precious. As we three talk about the life lessons gleaned from Bollywood movies, NB says she likes the song “Zindagi Ek Safar Hai Suhana” (“Life is a Pleasant Journey”) from the 1971 film Andaz. Q finds this enthusiasm contagious; she asks me and NB to sing the song. She records the impromptu performance on her phone and texts it to me. I want to meet her so that we can talk about the possibility of her doing an oral history interview with us. She tells me she is in ill-health. I understand. I tell her that I would love to meet her regardless. She stops responding to my messages and texts.

II.

Surbhi and Heather

April 2022-Present

Shared Terrain

We almost don’t meet NB.

We have volunteered to deliver Eid care packages to a few refugee women, but the agency has given us an incorrect phone number for her. We stand in the light drizzle of a cold spring day, frantically calling her apartment from the call box outside. We are ready to give up.

We have arrived at the apartment with a fair amount of anxiety. We have received funding to collect oral histories of refugee women. We have been wondering what it would mean for the refugee women to tell stories on their own terms, free from the expectations of government agencies, the media, and public service organizations. Instead of imposing our own framework, we begin by talking to the refugee women about what questions they would like to be asked.  We are nervous because our paths have rarely crossed with refugee women, and because we want to be transparent and fair about our multiple reasons for wanting to meet NB. Making our contact through an agency already situates us in a swirl of contradictions.

The agencies we have been talking to have impressed upon us the need to walk on eggshells around refugee women because they are traumatized. The image of walking on eggshells—seemingly innocuous, almost cliché— feels designed to restrain our actions at the subconscious level. We should not unknowingly or inadvertently reawaken “their Trauma.” The refugees’ Trauma, in this telling, is something precious, to be both carefully shielded and gingerly talked about. Part infant, part ogre, part armed terrorist, Trauma is always biding its time, and its omnipresence is not for us or the refugees to doubt. “We need to protect the refugees,” a woman at a service agency says, though it is not entirely clear what “we” are protecting the women from.

We are ready to return to the car when we are let in by a man who is also headed inside. He smiles when we realize we are going to the same apartment. He is NB’s husband. Inside, the apartment is bright and clean. Within minutes, there are croissants and nuts and tea on the table. NB laughs and tells us in halting Urdu (a language Surbhi understands and speaks) that she is feeling tongue tied as the limited Urdu she knows is not coming easily to her because of her happiness on having visitors to talk to.

Indian Idol plays on the TV as we talk. They are recent refugees from Afghanistan. They don’t say anything about the conditions of their arrival, just five months before, after Kabul fell to the Taliban. Somehow, in this utterly foreign city, everyone in the family has carved out a groove and settled into it. NB works at a fast-food place, and her husband drives for Uber. In Kabul, she had worked in an administrative office while he had worked in the government. The older daughter, who was training to be a diplomatic translator in Afghanistan, is continuing her degree in New York. Two teenage sons work at a convenience store and another daughter has found a job in an office. The youngest daughter is attending school. They feel stymied by the American system, which does not recognize that people displaced in war cannot produce transcripts. The sons were already in college in Kabul, but without transcripts, at least one of them will need to pursue a GED. Coming to America has meant stepping down the academic ladder. When Surbhi mentions an acronym that she had heard from an immigrant stranger on a Chicago train—USA means “you start again”—the son doubles over in laughter. We laugh together for what seems like an inordinately long time. It’s not so much the humor of the joke as its quick release of the bubbling realization of the absurdity and arbitrariness of the American system. The laughter cushions the high-velocity impact of the American Dream hitting American reality.

As for NB’s stories, they remind us of the futility, if not the harm, of walking on eggshells in the first place. In our first visit with her, she shows us pictures of her garden in Kabul, a riot of color, rimmed with red roses. A sweet-faced terrier—NB’s “wolf,” no matter how many times we gently correct her—grins into her camera lens. She brings out a book of poetry in Dari, written by her brother who now lives in Norway. During another visit, she reads her own poems to us, one about her mother, another one about the tsunami of 2005. In our latest visit with her, she talks about her dreams, about the paths not taken. She talks about her love of mountains, wishing she climbed the heights, or plumbed the depths as an archaeologist, excavating humanity’s hidden treasures.

The world appears vast when we are with her.

Refugee agencies and refugee research talk about Trauma as if they have met it at conferences. They say they can clearly define what it does, what it looks like, and what its next moves will be. When we talk to NB, trauma does not feel certain, knowable, or defined. Instead, it feels shapeshifting, hard to name, out of focus. Her humor, love, solidarity, anger, escapism, hope, despair, rapture, joy, laughter, survival make us look harder and deeper.

Similarly, the word “refugee” does not capture anything that is essential to her. A label that fixates on her immediate displacement does not account for the displacements that came before, in her case from Afghanistan to Pakistan. A label based on her most immediate trauma of displacement does not capture the traumas that came before—the death of her brother at the hands of the mujahideen or the loss of her first-born or the traumas that she feels as a citizen of the world, such as the tsunami of 2005, an event that occurred far from her geographically but close to her consciousness. The word “refugee” does not capture the way she threads the events on the world stage, including Mandela’s imprisonment or Gandhi’s assassination, to her desire to write her life story. History is a font for her desires. “I might not be a lofty historical figure like Gandhi,” she says, “my station in life might be small, but I also want to write my story so that the next generations can know who I was and how I lived my life.”

There are certain touchstones in NB’s conversations, points that she returns to every time she talks to us, as if she were leaving behind a trail for us to follow, if we can see the markers. Each conversation refers to her favorite Bollywood stars—the playback singer Lata Mangeshkar and screen icons Dilip Kumar and Shah Rukh Khan. Her fandom is not limited to their movies; she is captivated by their life struggles. She draws courage from Lata’s songs; they are her guides through life. Shahrukh Khan’s success in Bollywood, despite his outsider status, assures her of her own successful future in the U.S. She wants to travel to India to see the actor’s home.

NB’s expressions of affection toward us are her second touchstone. She returns to them often, hailing us into different relationships of love. When she says to us, “You see me; you hear me,” we are tempted to interpret that as her lauding our presence. She says these words in an earnest tone, her face lit up with contentment. We are tempted to think that we have done something noble by acknowledging her humanity in a world that treats her as invisible and marginal. Self-righteousness feels like an easy trap at that moment. Then the admonition of Joseph R. Slaughter, scholar and the Executive Director of the Institute for the Study of Human Rights, comes to mind. The generosity is not ours, but NB’s. She has extended us the grace of imagining us as people with the capacity to listen to her words and respond to her worlds. In those words, she tells us that her humanity is not contingent on our recognition of her or on our research question. It is not about us “taming” her trauma, but about her inviting us into her stories.

Her words “you are like my sister,” addressed to both of us, establish our point of shared ground. In this and another sentence that she uses often— “I love all people; I love Americans; I love Indians”—NB speaks back to all those well-intentioned scholars and feminist organizations that ascribe to Western audiences of refugee stories special powers of empathy and a unique humanitarian stance and sensibility. She loves because they—and we—are human; not because any of us are superhuman. The very thought lays bare the tissue-thin nonsense of the do-gooders’ ethos and the experts’ pronouncements. They, and we, have been exposed. NB sees us. She hears us. She already knows that she is our equal because here we are, we three: vulnerable, at risk.

III.

Heather

June 2022

Every Little Bird

 C does me a great service by reminding me that I really have no idea about which of the women are “reluctant to talk,” “keen to connect,” “don’t feel they have a story to tell,” etc.  I am not sure what need this quick labeling fulfills for me, but I have surely missed openings to communicate out of deep respect for the boundaries that the women have not actually drawn.

At some point in the conversation, C tells me that she believes that women’s life experiences are important sources of knowledge and that she knows some things about the world that others should hear. Her barriers to writing her life story are immense, and she enumerates them to me: she does not know the procedure for writing books; she is not a native speaker of English; she has three young children at home, scant access to childcare, and an unsupportive spouse. C walks on eggshells while juggling her responsibilities, and the world around her, including me at first, does not see her as an author. I share Anne Lamott’s “bird by bird” approach to writing. We agree that much of life is best lived bird by bird.

C says she lived bird by bird through a very long period of displacement, family separation, and resettlement in the U.S. Cultivating strength and a will to live within chaos and violence has made her a diligent incrementalist. This is her point of access to telling “her story” which she describes as the stuff from which she is making a good future. Her older children give her hope and pride in her radical resourcefulness. She shows me iPhone videos of her son’s college graduation just a few weeks before. There is radiance in that family that I want to know more about. I also note C’s timeline: not a chronological sequence of unfolding events, but a flow across time that rushes into deep recesses of terror, pain, and loss and reemerges quickly, coursing back toward the current of life-giving sources, even if momentarily.

We are laughing at some of the more outrageous dance moves in the video from the graduation party when B appears in my peripheral vision. B has been working with refugees for decades. Dealing with the rough edges of life, she has developed the ability to say the bitterest thing with the widest smile. She carries a passport from the land of global citizenship that legions of white women like her seek but never find. I know the enchantments of this place but have yet to locate it on the map. B always ensures that the eggshells are the thickest where she walks, so that her gait appears light-footed, all starbursts and heartbursts and brilliant flows of color from hand-dyed natural fabrics, beads and bangles and other embellishments from afar. She had introduced us to C several weeks ago at a gathering open to refugees and non-refugees alike.

Hearing the laughter in our conversation as a distress signal— a sign to the Trauma-centered that things had gone awry—B floats over to facilitate communication between me and C. Some form of defense surfaces in me immediately—of the project, of my conversation with C, and of myself as a practitioner and a person. I smile and greet her warmly to override the emerging defensiveness and to override my shame at my defensiveness. I want to protect this moment but am unsure of my right to do so. I am concerned about my suspicions of B, and I am concerned about B. And then I am concerned about my self-surveillance and the ease with which my attention shifted from C to me.

As I return to the surface, I hear myself saying, “C and I were just talking about doing big things in life one small thing at a time, like her son has done and has now graduated.”  B turns to C and asks, “I do not know much about your family. What is your son’s name?”

C responds. B, as if realizing this name is a point of information she would need to refer to, asks C to repeat it and spell it as she writes it in her flowery cloth-bound notebook. She stands there barefoot, in her multicolored attire, scribbling furiously.

“What does that name mean?”

“What was your mother’s name? “When did you get separated?”

“And what was the name of the camp…?”

B records every one of C’s responses, each one correctly spelled and fully annotated with follow-up details. I have not moved from my place on the rug, but I have been reseated in B’s impromptu masterclass in drawing information from refugee women. I did not take notes.

“I write it down,” she explains to C in slow, simple English, “so that I remember.” She taps the pen to her head as she leans forward a bit, making sure the whole of the three-syllable word comes across.

C nods in understanding. She answers every question, delivering correctly spelled fact after correctly spelled fact while I observe from the periphery, uncertain whether I was meant to learn something profound about C or to absorb a lesson in “how to talk to refugees.” We had traveled a long distance from C’s origin point: the memoir she dreamed of writing in her own voice, and in her own hand.

Epilogue

Surbhi and Heather

July 21, 2023

The morning together with NB is a reunion. Heather has flown in from Hawaii, where she is now based. NB has moved from her previous apartment to a more spacious one. Her work is farther away, requiring her to walk and take a bus, but she feels more settled in here. Surbhi has planned the meeting with NB, emphasizing that we are meeting up to talk and that NB should not go to the trouble of doing anything special.

NB insists we have tea and offers us plates with cookies and muffins and nuts. She tells us about how she perfumes her tea with ginger and cardamom. She shows us pictures on her phone of her sister who has traveled from Europe to be with their mother. Even though she does not put it into words, we know how painful it must be for her to not be able to visit. She shows us pictures of her sister’s trip to Bamiyan, the site of Buddha statues that the Taliban destroyed. The lake surrounding those Buddha voids is a brilliant blue; it is beautiful in spite of the signs of violence and loss.

In between these conversations of longing for her country and her mother is the reality of the dangers she faces in her present-day work and commute. Making sure that her kids are out of earshot, she shares with us that one day when she was walking down a subterranean pedestrian bridge, two men hurled stones at her. She did not know but guessed that they might have been into drugs or had mental health issues. She emerged shaken but otherwise fine, but she had no help or guidance and felt clueless about what to do in a situation like this. With her limited English, it would be hard for her to communicate on a 911 call. She attended a community meeting between refugees and the police but felt hesitant to recount her experience on the pedestrian bridge because of fear not of the police but of the other refugee women. She was afraid that if she recounted her experience in front of others, she would be judged for not covering up, or for working in a public space.

At the end of the visit, we make plans to travel together from Omaha to Hawaii to visit Heather. NB remembers the pictures of mountains and birds that Heather has sent to her in the past year. She has a vision of Hawaii in her mind. She tells us that she has money saved up. She calls us “three best friends.” She wants to keep a memory of this special moment and we take a picture on her couch. The light from her back window darkens the figures a bit but there is light enough to see our smiles.

For a world built around an eagerness to listen to, or catch a glimpse of, refugee Trauma, our conversations with NB can feel perplexing, even illegible. These conversations flow far outside the receptacles that researchers and the public have built for refugee stories. The hierarchies and gaps between us are real but so are the connections. We cannot build an unadulterated framework or grind an unwarped lens. We are in the mess. Resisting the mess won’t change it. Guarding ourselves from its ego bruises will not clear space for those who are silenced by it. Sometimes all we can do is sit in our chairs, or on a rug, or in the grass with the refugee women. What emerges in those moments may not be the stories about the trauma of the past or the visions for the future that we might expect, or even desire. The stories may not heal the trauma or get them a job at the factory, but the stories of the moment are the ones about the realities we are co-creating. Refugee women may have nothing, but they, like all of us, share equally in the present moment.

The meanings of NB’s words “I love all people” continue to proliferate. They are not a call to join hands or to pretend to understand each other. They are certainly not a cry for sympathy or help, or a display of childlike wonderment at the great big world she inhabits. They are a call to settle into the moment, in the time and in the place where our story of that first meeting with her is unfolding in real time.