Journal Articles by Yousif M Qasmiyeh
Journal of Refugee Studies, 2010
In the current geopolitical context, religion, nationality and country of origin have increasingl... more In the current geopolitical context, religion, nationality and country of origin have increasingly become intertwined and politicized in relation to asylum, both as policy and as personal experience. Based on interviews conducted in the UK with a range of Middle Eastern Muslim asylum-seekers and refugees, this article proposes that regional and religious identity markers have grown to dictate interactions, be they real or imagined, with the host community. Throughout the article we explore the nature of changes in religious identity, identification and practice since interviewees applied for asylum in the UK. We also highlight the significance of a range of gendered factors and experiences, including childhood and growing up in the UK, effective masculinity and un/productive parenthood, in negotiating transformative political and legal realities. More broadly, our research suggests that UK-based Muslim asylum-seekers from the Middle East find themselves exposed to three intersecting vulnerabilities: firstly, their uncertain legal status; secondly, their voluntary or imposed religious identification as 'Muslims'; and lastly, their exclusion from established Muslim communities in the UK.
Migration and Society Online, 2019
Marking the launch of the inaugural issue of the Migration and Society journal, in this piece You... more Marking the launch of the inaugural issue of the Migration and Society journal, in this piece Yousif M. Qasmiyeh (Refugee Hosts’ Writer in Residence and Creative Encounters Editor of the new journal) sets out one of the aims of the journals’ Creative Encounters section; to problematise the notion of voice. The piece also presents five poems written by Mohamed Assaf – a young Syrian boy who currently lives in Oxford with his family and studies at Oxford Spires Academy.
Read the piece here: https://refugeehosts.org/2018/03/20/refugee-neighbours-hostipitality/
Accou... more Read the piece here: https://refugeehosts.org/2018/03/20/refugee-neighbours-hostipitality/
Accounting for the roles of local communities is a key aim of our RefugeeHosts project, and of the ‘Localisation of Aid’ agenda more broadly. However, as a result of the mainstream narratives that pervade the literature on conflict-induced displacement, efforts to properly engage with the local have been held back by a failure to fully recognise the role(s) of established refugee communities in responding to the needs of displaced peoples. In this piece, which was originally published in The Critique, the Refugee Hosts PI Dr Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, and our Writer in Residence Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, introduce a key concept for our project, what Fiddian-Qasmiyeh denominates ‘refugee-refugee humanitarianism’. In order to do so they also examine the meanings of hospitality and neighbourliness in the context of displacement from Syria, with particular attention to the meanings of these terms in Arabic. In addition to our ongoing attention to translation and language, the Refugee Hosts team will be gathering evidence about the roles played by established refugee communities so as to a) disrupt humanitarian narratives that frame refugees as passive recipients of aid, and b) to better inform policy, practice and further research into displacement, both in the Middle East and beyond. If you find this article of interest, please also see the suggested readings at the end of this piece.
Read the piece here: https://refugeehosts.org/2018/03/20/refugee-neighbours-hostipitality/
Read the Original Here: https://refugeehosts.org/2018/06/22/in-mourning-the-refugee-we-mourn-gods... more Read the Original Here: https://refugeehosts.org/2018/06/22/in-mourning-the-refugee-we-mourn-gods-intention-in-the-absolute/
How can there be a world apropos a camp? How can there be a camp apropos a world?
We repeat the repeated so we can see our features more clearly, the face as it is, the cracks in their transcendental rawness and for once we might consent to what we will never see.
They rarely return – those pigeons. The piece of wood that was meant to scare off the pigeons and entice them to return to their home landed by my feet. Not knowing what to do with it, I shut my eyes and threw it back in the direction of God…
Shadow, leave your body alone.
In cremating the shadow, we cremate time.
The name is the loneliest of things.
In what we cook we trace the hand. We glimpse its dried blood with every mouthful.
The refugee promises within his own means.
The camp, the allegorical of the allegorical.
What is recited is the voice and not the text.
In my camp, women slap themselves in funerals to never let go of pain.
Solitude, the spirit at home.
Who can see it to say: it is? Who has the eyes to say: it definitely is?
The pious are banging on the door. The pious have arrived to recite the name, a name like any other…
The camp in as much as it repeats time never acknowledges it as a divine authority.
The eternal in the camp is the crack. “The crack also invites.”
What is a camp? Is it not a happening beyond time?
A camp, to survive its happening, must become almost a camp.
It is what the hands contain at a juncture of their own making, never salient enough to be spotted by a passerby or a departing face. Nor is it close enough to be grasped by random fruit pickers humming bygone songs.
A life awaiting to grow behind itself.
A life on the edge of the edge.
The sublime in the camp, what it is? Can it not be the camp gestating with its impossible meaning?
His feet were in water and the hands were by his side as flat as nothing. While the tea was brewing, he prodded his father’s shoulder to ask about the number of graves he dug today.
In overthinking the position of the dead when all eyes are transfixed on the hole we bury time in the past.
Nothing can outlive Nothing when Nothing escapes not the idea of living, living like twigs left alone to decay under the sight of the mother tree.
Does the camp not have a gender?
What speaks in the camp is nothing but the foreskin.
Arise from water with the barest minimum of a thing like someone whose completeness is incomplete except in the bodies of God.
No shadow for water. They walk, as though they were hand in hand or towards each other’s feet, no one precisely knows where the cracks are taking them.
These are not headscarves but heads forever wrapped in themselves.
In mourning the refugee, we mourn God’s intention in the absolute.
A ponderous death. Bodies float above water. Clarity happens. Nothing or its birth?
Read the Original Here: https://refugeehosts.org/2018/06/22/in-mourning-the-refugee-we-mourn-gods-intention-in-the-absolute/
Read the Original Here:
https://refugeehosts.org/2018/06/26/the-hands-are-hers/
The hands are h... more Read the Original Here:
https://refugeehosts.org/2018/06/26/the-hands-are-hers/
The hands are hers – fractured urns of intimacy and anticipation.
They would cut, mend, darn, comb, bathe, clean, feel and above all submit themselves as seals of presence at the UNRWA distribution centres.
In this photograph, the face is outside the frame but the hands are certainly hers.
She is cutting runner beans, meticulously removing their fibrous ends and any impurities.
Her hands, the knife and the beans against the tin are the only elements in this landscape.
They all move in different directions and yet in total synchrony like a methodical machine.
The knife blade and the tin tray.
The hands and the beans.
The tray is the base, or more precisely the deathbed, for the fallen and everything perishable.
The hands are captured as close to and far from each other at the same time.
What is inextricable therein is sustained in the continuum of cutting, trimming and eventually the falling of the beans as singular and weakened parts.
The hands are certainly hers to the extent of complete dissolution and resurrection.
Read the Original Here:
https://refugeehosts.org/2018/06/26/the-hands-are-hers/
Read the Original here:
https://refugeehosts.org/2018/05/22/the-wall/
According to my father, t... more Read the Original here:
https://refugeehosts.org/2018/05/22/the-wall/
According to my father, this is the original wall of our old house which was erected in Baddawi camp in the mid-50s.
The wall is now an additional barrier between our neighbours and us. A distance that has been multiply plastered over time.
The subdued pink, contaminated by the white undercoat, was the colour my father used to paint the wall for the last time.
To my mother’s disappointment, whenever we leant on the wall some of the paint powder came off – as though everything were disintegrating then and now and for this act of disintegration to complete its course it had to travel with us.
The rusty colander and grill grate on the wall look deserted save from time.
Their only purpose is to occupy the wall.
The plastic clothes hanger suspended from the washing-line is a new addition to hold the damp cloths my mother uses daily.
From the rusty utensils to the hanger there lies a genre that can neither be crossed nor reconstituted.
In other words, it is only the shape of narrowness, as in genres, that is capable of redefining itself by itself.
Read the Original here:
https://refugeehosts.org/2018/05/22/the-wall/
Read the Original here:
https://refugeehosts.org/2018/06/05/to-the-plants-is-her-face/
The plan... more Read the Original here:
https://refugeehosts.org/2018/06/05/to-the-plants-is-her-face/
The plants which appear in this picture hinge partly on a short wall and partly on a used wooden chest of drawers primarily staged to encircle the entrance to the house and protect it from the curious eyes of passers-by. Or to ‘privatise’ part of the public space by appropriating it.
Underneath some of the pots, to the woman’s left, a recycled banner made of fabric, likely nylon, from a previous event that still bears the Arabic: … Palestine, Baddawi Camp, 8pm, All Welcome.
It is clear that the woman tending to the plants is the owner of the house. She waters the plants through a yellow hose that enables her to reach the other end without substantially altering her position.
Dressed in kohl-like blue, contrasted with a headscarf of a lighter shade of blue, she leans towards the first row of the plants with her back to the main road.
She looks engrossed in what she is doing, with her right hand almost touching a pale leaf – perhaps to snap it off its mother plant.
The non-ordinariness of this scene does not lie in the co-presence between the canonical grey of the camp and the green exception, but precisely in its interruptive nature as an anomaly whose sole value is to overpower the norm in/of the camp to make it more visible and ‘normal’.
It is the “beauty” “at the expense” and never “in conjunction with” or “in accordance to” that matters in this photograph – a photograph whose meaning is that of the place.
Read the Original here:
https://refugeehosts.org/2018/06/05/to-the-plants-is-her-face/
Read the Original Here: https://refugeehosts.org/2018/05/08/there-will-always-be-a-vendor-before-... more Read the Original Here: https://refugeehosts.org/2018/05/08/there-will-always-be-a-vendor-before-and-after-the-picture/
It is a photograph of a coffee vendor in motion; of somebody who is familiar enough with the routes of the camp to roam them with relative ease.
The clanking of the cups, emanating from the collision of two porcelain cups – fragile but not too fragile – in the vendor’s hand, can still be heard or seen from beyond the picture.
But what is the clanking for? What does it signify amongst other signifiers, in a noisy context such as the camp where sounds continually fight for a space to be(come) sounds.
The truly inaudible clanking is nothing but a testimony of arrival into a place, a shibboleth, a different dialect.
The vendor will soon escape the picture or be pushed away by another.
However, somewhere, there will always be a vendor before or after the picture, or more precisely inside of it, boiling his coffee in silence.
Read the Original Here: https://refugeehosts.org/2018/05/08/there-will-always-be-a-vendor-before-and-after-the-picture/
Read the original here: https://refugeehosts.org/2018/04/25/a-daily-rhythm-inside-which-time-can-... more Read the original here: https://refugeehosts.org/2018/04/25/a-daily-rhythm-inside-which-time-can-grow/
Which is more intimate: the body in its absolute nakedness – concealed temporarily perhaps – or the nakedness in the thing, exposed or otherwise?
The place is a garage or a ground-floor room, a singular room with a small toilet, on the outskirts of Baddawi camp, occupied by some people, likely to be a young family, likely Syrian, likely present when the picture was taken.
But where were they exactly? What were they doing or not doing as the shutter induced the closure of the scene?
The weight of the two pairs of jeans, of different sizes, hung to dry against the black gate is palpable in the slight indentation or slope on the rope.
A red sheet, dotted with the outlines of white roses and leaves, guards the door – a sign of semi-normality and a marker of privacy to some extent.
A pair of slippers left obliquely on the threshold to separate, or so to claim, the public from the private hints at the presence of at least one person at the time.
The white wall, ceiling, and the makeshift washing-line, the black gates, the faded blue of the trousers, the red and white of the sheet, the brown-black slippers, the colours of things, people’s things, stillness and life – colours which are being borne horizontally, vertically and sideways in an attempt to sustain a daily rhythm inside which time can grow.
Read the original here: https://refugeehosts.org/2018/04/25/a-daily-rhythm-inside-which-time-can-grow/
READ THE ORIGINAL PIECE HERE: https://wordpress.com/post/refugeehosts.org/8287
Existence, as it ... more READ THE ORIGINAL PIECE HERE: https://wordpress.com/post/refugeehosts.org/8287
Existence, as it is, happens in the intentions of things.
A sign or signs piled on top of one another, barely separated by air and the narrowest of voids: white on blue or blue on white. There is a background – an undercoat – and then the words. But which is which? On the sign are arrows pointing to places, including to Baddawi camp. Names of old and new places neatly and orderly enclosed in this rectangular space. Positioned then adjusted to be made more visible to passers by and cars alike.
It is the Baddawi slope. The road that leads to everywhere and nowhere. The exact road which gave us and my mother trepidations as she stopped taxis on the main road going to Nahr Al-Bared camp. We would, upon my mother’s prodding, hide behind her. Most of the time seven little bodies clutching her dress, looking for a handful of cloth, most of the time ending up inadvertently clutching each others’ hands. The taxi driver would normally drive off the moment my mother would start asking him for a discounted fee: ‘They are little, treat them as one. All of them on one seat and myself on another.’
My mother, to secure a ride that does not go beyond our limited financial means, would contract us into one: one body made of seven heads like a mythical creature who only grows in the camp. Many self-subtracted to one.
The sign is new or at least it previously was not there. The first sign to point to “Baddawi camp” alongside other places. The first sign to have the word ‘camp’ within its folds – a piece of evidence to the existence of the camp. To the presence of a place whose name is validated by a correspondence, a genitive one, between the proper “Baddawi” and the noun “camp” and yet it is the latter which is always remembered. It is a camp despite the name.
READ THE ORIGINAL PIECE HERE: https://wordpress.com/post/refugeehosts.org/8287
Politics / Letters, Feb 2018
Read the full and original article here: https://refugeehosts.org/2017/09/15/the-multiple-faces-o... more Read the full and original article here: https://refugeehosts.org/2017/09/15/the-multiple-faces-of-representation/
The Multiple Faces of Representation
By Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, University of Oxford and Odile Ammann, University of Fribourg
The face of the Other – under all the particular forms of expression where the Other, already in a character’s skin, plays a role – is just as much pure expression, an extradition without defense or cover, precisely the extreme rectitude of a facing, which in this nudity is an exposure unto death: nudity, destitution, passivity, and pure vulnerability. Such is the face as the very mortality of the other person. 1
I
Representation is never a word. Its deceitful individuality is a precept to the repressed many.
II
Representation consists in trusting the eyes completely (but whose eyes?), privileging the face at the expense of the body – the body proper – whose dweller is never absent but absented.
III
Representation persistently leans on othering. It leans until its entire body is above the Other.
IV
To represent is to say, in the language of the absolute, loudly, so loudly, “this absence of the Other is precisely its presence as Other”.2
V
Representation has more than one face. In German, the verb ‘to represent’ can be translated by darstellen (to display, portray, express), by verkörpern (to embody), or by vertreten (to replace, act on behalf of).3 The third of these conveys the legal meaning of the word representation: to act on behalf of, with legally binding effects. Consequently, the many other layers of the word vertreten reveal the complexity and manifold connotations of this term. Such equivalents are ‘to be present besides others’; ‘to defend a point of view’; ‘to stumble’; and, finally, ‘efface’ and, thereby, ‘to bring into an unsightly state through stomping’.
VI
Representation lies precisely in detecting the face and presupposing its disfigurement. Without the face, the represented is not present by means of his sheer presence, but to a large extent is there(in) at the expense of his presence. These two propositions are what precipitate the finitude of the face. Indeed, the representer portrays it as a defining element that not only represents the whole, but equally nullifies it.
VII
Can a face with a body that is barely visible claim to be the face of an entity? Or is it the deferred face of a deferred body? The refugee face is both the animate and the inanimate of a face. It is the animate in its potential to be ‘such as’, ‘as’, and ‘like’ a human face. It is inanimate in its association with, inherence within, and clattering against the antithesis of a human – or simply the beast.
VIII
The verb ‘to represent’ has the clatter of a slap; of an abrasive touch that aggravates the touched and lingers. As it always touches the face and nothing else, it abates the distance between the slap and the face. Hence, this process can reach the status of an experience.
IX
‘To represent’ also consists in not giving the face time with itself. The representer manipulates it in a way that asserts its disappearance from its body. Despite the suggested neutrality of the infinitive ‘to represent’, representation always occurs in the past; the past of the past, the farthest past, as if representation were always akin to the ritual of burial, a burial normally preceded by an insignificant death.
X
The refugee is never the representer unless in death. The refugee dies alone, and this lonely death, singular and subjective, suddenly becomes that of all.
XI
But will this death retain the face in its fullness, in its entirety?
XII
The face of the refugee is no longer part of the proper body, but the trace of a presence. Everything returns to the origin, that is, the body.
XIII
The face is the only part deemed worthy of representation, regardless of the body.
XIV
The represented exists on his own, a shadow, an attained nothing, devoid of parameters. Like a scarecrow, veiled by twigs and straw, he scares off other strangers and guards the fields of the citizen.
XV
If the skin were to speak, it would utter the language of disappearance, not the nonexistence of the self, but the suddenness of the face’s image.
XVI
What if the refugee were born without a face?
** Read the full and original article here: https://refugeehosts.org/2017/09/15/the-multiple-faces-of-representation/
Refugee Hosts, Sep 5, 2017
Read the full piece here: https://refugeehosts.org/2017/09/05/refugees-are-dialectical-beings-par... more Read the full piece here: https://refugeehosts.org/2017/09/05/refugees-are-dialectical-beings-part-two/
*
Refugees are Dialectical Beings: Part Two
by Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, University of Oxford and Refugee Hosts Writer in Residence
To the ones who are en route, the ones whose stomachs are compasses and whose compasses are manifestos of nothing…
Refugees are dialectical beings
I
The aridity of a camp presupposes the aridity of life.
The concrete is barely permanence. If you pay attention you will see the cracks in their souls.
At the farthest point in life – the point of no return – dialects become the superfluous of the body.
II
Camp (n): a residue in the shape of a crescent made of skin and nothing.
III
Time, when killed, has no mourners, only killers.
The camp has its own signature.
What it signs and countersigns is never the permanent.
The camp is what remains when the meadows of the instant desert us.
The foot without a trace is a god.
Those who are arriving at the threshold are not one of us. It will take them time to know who they are…
Nothing is as old as the archive that is yet to be written.
The archive is always written in the future. (After Derrida)
Were I in possession of an archive, I would bury it by my side and let it overgrow, upon my skin and inside my pores.
The enmity in the archive is the enmity of the intimate. By detailing the body, the archive loses its sight.
IV
I am absent or deemed absent. The fingers that I am holding before you, in your hand – a sullen hand – are mine and nothing else.
I wish it were possible to write the camp without the self.
In the camp, we surrender the meaning of the camp in advance.
The camp is the impossible martyr attributed to the meaning of ‘dying for’.
In the camp, going to the cemetery is going to the camp and going to the camp is going to the cemetery.
In Baddawi, reaching the camp only occurs through the cemetery.
Is the cemetery not another home, host and God?
V
In entering the camp, time becomes suspended between dialects.
The dialect that survives is never a dialect.
The dialectal subtleties in the camp are also called silence.
For the dialect to become an archive, no utterance should be uttered.
Who is the creator of dialects? Whose tongue is the shibboleth?
The dialect is a spear of noises.
Ontologically, the dialect is a being in the shape of a knife.
Only dialects can spot the silent Other.
VI
My cousins in Nahr Al-Bared have always defended their dialect to the extent of preserving it in their fists.
I used to be asked to raise my voice whenever I opened my mouth. As if voices were ethereal creatures with an ability to rise.
Voices are the earthliest of creatures. Not only do they wreak havoc on earth, they remain silent in death.
What is it that makes a dialect a knife?
Is the dialect not a mythology of the silent?
To exist in the singular means the death of the Other.
‘Dialects’ is not a plural; it is the anomaly of a condition that should have never been one.
VII
A ladder to God is the green in the cemetery.
VIII
In the camp, deserting the camp means summoning the certainty of the certainty. To this day, nobody has ever managed not to return.
Only in the camp do dialects outlive their people.
The untranslatability of the camp… We write it on parchments of time evermore, so it remains intact as a spectre when it is no more.
The dialect that survives on its own is that of the dead.
Dialects when uttered become spectres of time.
For us to hear ourselves we sign the covenant of the dialect.
A dialect always has a face – disfigured, a face nonetheless.
Where is the mouth in the testimony?
Those who come to us are never themselves in the same way we are never ourselves. When dialects descend upon the camp, the camp wails and ululates at the same time. In the presence of dialects, nobody knows what to do but to listen to the penetrating noise of the coming…
Is the dialect not the unavowable Other?
Refugees are dialectal beings.
Refugee Hosts, Sep 1, 2017
Read the original piece here: https://refugeehosts.org/2017/09/01/refugees-are-dialectical-beings... more Read the original piece here: https://refugeehosts.org/2017/09/01/refugees-are-dialectical-beings-part-one/
Refugees are Dialectical Beings: Part One
by Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, University of Oxford and Refugee Hosts Writer in Residence
The camp is a passing human, a book, a manuscript, an archive… Bury it; smother it with its own dust, so it might return as a holy text devoid of intentions.
Writing the camp-archive
I
Only refugees can forever write the archive.
The camp owns the archive, not God.
For the archive not to fall apart, it weds the camp unceremoniously.
The question of a camp-archive is also the question of the camp’s survival beyond speech.
Circumcising the body can indicate the survival of the place.
Blessed are the pending places that are called camps.
II
My father, who passed his stick on to me, lied to us all: I slaughtered your brother so you would grow sane and sound.
My mother, always with the same knife, cuts herself and the vegetables.
The eyes which live long are the ones whose sight is contingent upon the unseen.
III
God’s past is the road to the camp’s archive.
We strangle it, from its loose ends, so we can breathe its air.
Privileging death in the camp is the sacral of the refugee body.
Without its death, the archive will never exist.
In whose name is the camp a place?
It is the truth and nothing else that for the camp to survive it must kill itself.
IV
The transience of the face in a place where faces are bare signs of flesh can gather the intransience of the trace therein in its multiple and untraced forms.
The unseen – that is the field that is there despite the eye – can only be seen by the hand. After all, the hand and not the eye, is the intimate part.
The tense in our bones – the one that emerged in no time, but with the desire to be time – will always be ahead of us.
V
Green in the camp only belongs to the cemetery.
The veiled women crying at the grave are my mother and my sisters. Once, my mother wanted to bring the grave home with her.
In the solemnity of the place, faces fall like depleted birds.
In belonging to the camp, senses premeditate their senses.
Read the full piece here: https://refugeehosts.org/2017/05/23/refugee-refugee-solidarity-in-death... more Read the full piece here: https://refugeehosts.org/2017/05/23/refugee-refugee-solidarity-in-death-and-dying/
(Exhibited as part of the Tunisian Pavillion, 2017 Venice Biennale)
This reflection, and the photographs that accompany it, are part of a 4-year research project [www.RefugeeHosts.org] funded by the UK’s AHRC and ESRC examining diverse spaces of encounter between refugees from Syria and host communities in camps and cities across Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey. In the context of an overwhelming focus on tensions and/or acts of hospitality between the living, here we shift our attention to solidarity in death and dying, with the cemetery taking centre stage for both the living and dead, becoming the camp’s only fixity. Different refugees enter the camp, with the camp becoming both a gathering and a gatherer. The cemetery, too, echoes this duality.
*
Which is older: the camp or the cemetery?
At the core of Baddawi refugee camp, from its very birth, the cemetery has hosted the living and the dead. The arrival of the living to the camp, was traced by the arrival of the dead. From that core, the camp has grown, and so too have its residents. As time has passed, and as wars have led to new arrivals – Palestinians from other camps, Syrians, Kurds, Iraqis… – , the cemetery has outgrown its original space. The camp is denser, higher, narrower. And a second, a third,… now a fifth cemetery in Baddawi, for Baddawi and beyond.
Read the full piece here: https://refugeehosts.org/2017/05/23/refugee-refugee-solidarity-in-death-and-dying/
Read full piece here: http://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2017/05/02/12539/
In these poems, pub... more Read full piece here: http://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2017/05/02/12539/
In these poems, published in the Lebanese daily al-Akhbar under the overarching title “An Incomplete Diary”, the renowned Syrian poet Nazih Abu Afash dissects the benign indecisiveness of human nature by seeking refuge in the quietness and silence of words, his words, in the face of the noises generated daily by the ongoing war in Syria.
Abu Afash, like a lonely shepherd, counts his flock with no intention of committing remembrance to the act of existence per se, but to remind us of one thing: I am returning to die in the forest. The following are translations of this vulnerability into another form of vulnerability where contemplation can be as valid as involvement.
Read the full poem here: http://www.theabsenceofpaths.com/commission/pavillion
In arrival, feet ... more Read the full poem here: http://www.theabsenceofpaths.com/commission/pavillion
In arrival, feet flutter like dying birds
We think, sometimes, that they came from countless directions, from dim-coloured borders, from the raging fire that devoured them in the beginning, from absence... Here they come again, so invite them over to our death.
*
The refugee is the revenant of the face.
*
O refugee, feast upon the other to eat yourself.
*
In arrival, feet flutter like dying birds.
*
In the camp, time died so it could return home.
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Journal Articles by Yousif M Qasmiyeh
Accounting for the roles of local communities is a key aim of our RefugeeHosts project, and of the ‘Localisation of Aid’ agenda more broadly. However, as a result of the mainstream narratives that pervade the literature on conflict-induced displacement, efforts to properly engage with the local have been held back by a failure to fully recognise the role(s) of established refugee communities in responding to the needs of displaced peoples. In this piece, which was originally published in The Critique, the Refugee Hosts PI Dr Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, and our Writer in Residence Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, introduce a key concept for our project, what Fiddian-Qasmiyeh denominates ‘refugee-refugee humanitarianism’. In order to do so they also examine the meanings of hospitality and neighbourliness in the context of displacement from Syria, with particular attention to the meanings of these terms in Arabic. In addition to our ongoing attention to translation and language, the Refugee Hosts team will be gathering evidence about the roles played by established refugee communities so as to a) disrupt humanitarian narratives that frame refugees as passive recipients of aid, and b) to better inform policy, practice and further research into displacement, both in the Middle East and beyond. If you find this article of interest, please also see the suggested readings at the end of this piece.
Read the piece here: https://refugeehosts.org/2018/03/20/refugee-neighbours-hostipitality/
How can there be a world apropos a camp? How can there be a camp apropos a world?
We repeat the repeated so we can see our features more clearly, the face as it is, the cracks in their transcendental rawness and for once we might consent to what we will never see.
They rarely return – those pigeons. The piece of wood that was meant to scare off the pigeons and entice them to return to their home landed by my feet. Not knowing what to do with it, I shut my eyes and threw it back in the direction of God…
Shadow, leave your body alone.
In cremating the shadow, we cremate time.
The name is the loneliest of things.
In what we cook we trace the hand. We glimpse its dried blood with every mouthful.
The refugee promises within his own means.
The camp, the allegorical of the allegorical.
What is recited is the voice and not the text.
In my camp, women slap themselves in funerals to never let go of pain.
Solitude, the spirit at home.
Who can see it to say: it is? Who has the eyes to say: it definitely is?
The pious are banging on the door. The pious have arrived to recite the name, a name like any other…
The camp in as much as it repeats time never acknowledges it as a divine authority.
The eternal in the camp is the crack. “The crack also invites.”
What is a camp? Is it not a happening beyond time?
A camp, to survive its happening, must become almost a camp.
It is what the hands contain at a juncture of their own making, never salient enough to be spotted by a passerby or a departing face. Nor is it close enough to be grasped by random fruit pickers humming bygone songs.
A life awaiting to grow behind itself.
A life on the edge of the edge.
The sublime in the camp, what it is? Can it not be the camp gestating with its impossible meaning?
His feet were in water and the hands were by his side as flat as nothing. While the tea was brewing, he prodded his father’s shoulder to ask about the number of graves he dug today.
In overthinking the position of the dead when all eyes are transfixed on the hole we bury time in the past.
Nothing can outlive Nothing when Nothing escapes not the idea of living, living like twigs left alone to decay under the sight of the mother tree.
Does the camp not have a gender?
What speaks in the camp is nothing but the foreskin.
Arise from water with the barest minimum of a thing like someone whose completeness is incomplete except in the bodies of God.
No shadow for water. They walk, as though they were hand in hand or towards each other’s feet, no one precisely knows where the cracks are taking them.
These are not headscarves but heads forever wrapped in themselves.
In mourning the refugee, we mourn God’s intention in the absolute.
A ponderous death. Bodies float above water. Clarity happens. Nothing or its birth?
Read the Original Here: https://refugeehosts.org/2018/06/22/in-mourning-the-refugee-we-mourn-gods-intention-in-the-absolute/
https://refugeehosts.org/2018/06/26/the-hands-are-hers/
The hands are hers – fractured urns of intimacy and anticipation.
They would cut, mend, darn, comb, bathe, clean, feel and above all submit themselves as seals of presence at the UNRWA distribution centres.
In this photograph, the face is outside the frame but the hands are certainly hers.
She is cutting runner beans, meticulously removing their fibrous ends and any impurities.
Her hands, the knife and the beans against the tin are the only elements in this landscape.
They all move in different directions and yet in total synchrony like a methodical machine.
The knife blade and the tin tray.
The hands and the beans.
The tray is the base, or more precisely the deathbed, for the fallen and everything perishable.
The hands are captured as close to and far from each other at the same time.
What is inextricable therein is sustained in the continuum of cutting, trimming and eventually the falling of the beans as singular and weakened parts.
The hands are certainly hers to the extent of complete dissolution and resurrection.
Read the Original Here:
https://refugeehosts.org/2018/06/26/the-hands-are-hers/
https://refugeehosts.org/2018/05/22/the-wall/
According to my father, this is the original wall of our old house which was erected in Baddawi camp in the mid-50s.
The wall is now an additional barrier between our neighbours and us. A distance that has been multiply plastered over time.
The subdued pink, contaminated by the white undercoat, was the colour my father used to paint the wall for the last time.
To my mother’s disappointment, whenever we leant on the wall some of the paint powder came off – as though everything were disintegrating then and now and for this act of disintegration to complete its course it had to travel with us.
The rusty colander and grill grate on the wall look deserted save from time.
Their only purpose is to occupy the wall.
The plastic clothes hanger suspended from the washing-line is a new addition to hold the damp cloths my mother uses daily.
From the rusty utensils to the hanger there lies a genre that can neither be crossed nor reconstituted.
In other words, it is only the shape of narrowness, as in genres, that is capable of redefining itself by itself.
Read the Original here:
https://refugeehosts.org/2018/05/22/the-wall/
https://refugeehosts.org/2018/06/05/to-the-plants-is-her-face/
The plants which appear in this picture hinge partly on a short wall and partly on a used wooden chest of drawers primarily staged to encircle the entrance to the house and protect it from the curious eyes of passers-by. Or to ‘privatise’ part of the public space by appropriating it.
Underneath some of the pots, to the woman’s left, a recycled banner made of fabric, likely nylon, from a previous event that still bears the Arabic: … Palestine, Baddawi Camp, 8pm, All Welcome.
It is clear that the woman tending to the plants is the owner of the house. She waters the plants through a yellow hose that enables her to reach the other end without substantially altering her position.
Dressed in kohl-like blue, contrasted with a headscarf of a lighter shade of blue, she leans towards the first row of the plants with her back to the main road.
She looks engrossed in what she is doing, with her right hand almost touching a pale leaf – perhaps to snap it off its mother plant.
The non-ordinariness of this scene does not lie in the co-presence between the canonical grey of the camp and the green exception, but precisely in its interruptive nature as an anomaly whose sole value is to overpower the norm in/of the camp to make it more visible and ‘normal’.
It is the “beauty” “at the expense” and never “in conjunction with” or “in accordance to” that matters in this photograph – a photograph whose meaning is that of the place.
Read the Original here:
https://refugeehosts.org/2018/06/05/to-the-plants-is-her-face/
It is a photograph of a coffee vendor in motion; of somebody who is familiar enough with the routes of the camp to roam them with relative ease.
The clanking of the cups, emanating from the collision of two porcelain cups – fragile but not too fragile – in the vendor’s hand, can still be heard or seen from beyond the picture.
But what is the clanking for? What does it signify amongst other signifiers, in a noisy context such as the camp where sounds continually fight for a space to be(come) sounds.
The truly inaudible clanking is nothing but a testimony of arrival into a place, a shibboleth, a different dialect.
The vendor will soon escape the picture or be pushed away by another.
However, somewhere, there will always be a vendor before or after the picture, or more precisely inside of it, boiling his coffee in silence.
Read the Original Here: https://refugeehosts.org/2018/05/08/there-will-always-be-a-vendor-before-and-after-the-picture/
Which is more intimate: the body in its absolute nakedness – concealed temporarily perhaps – or the nakedness in the thing, exposed or otherwise?
The place is a garage or a ground-floor room, a singular room with a small toilet, on the outskirts of Baddawi camp, occupied by some people, likely to be a young family, likely Syrian, likely present when the picture was taken.
But where were they exactly? What were they doing or not doing as the shutter induced the closure of the scene?
The weight of the two pairs of jeans, of different sizes, hung to dry against the black gate is palpable in the slight indentation or slope on the rope.
A red sheet, dotted with the outlines of white roses and leaves, guards the door – a sign of semi-normality and a marker of privacy to some extent.
A pair of slippers left obliquely on the threshold to separate, or so to claim, the public from the private hints at the presence of at least one person at the time.
The white wall, ceiling, and the makeshift washing-line, the black gates, the faded blue of the trousers, the red and white of the sheet, the brown-black slippers, the colours of things, people’s things, stillness and life – colours which are being borne horizontally, vertically and sideways in an attempt to sustain a daily rhythm inside which time can grow.
Read the original here: https://refugeehosts.org/2018/04/25/a-daily-rhythm-inside-which-time-can-grow/
Existence, as it is, happens in the intentions of things.
A sign or signs piled on top of one another, barely separated by air and the narrowest of voids: white on blue or blue on white. There is a background – an undercoat – and then the words. But which is which? On the sign are arrows pointing to places, including to Baddawi camp. Names of old and new places neatly and orderly enclosed in this rectangular space. Positioned then adjusted to be made more visible to passers by and cars alike.
It is the Baddawi slope. The road that leads to everywhere and nowhere. The exact road which gave us and my mother trepidations as she stopped taxis on the main road going to Nahr Al-Bared camp. We would, upon my mother’s prodding, hide behind her. Most of the time seven little bodies clutching her dress, looking for a handful of cloth, most of the time ending up inadvertently clutching each others’ hands. The taxi driver would normally drive off the moment my mother would start asking him for a discounted fee: ‘They are little, treat them as one. All of them on one seat and myself on another.’
My mother, to secure a ride that does not go beyond our limited financial means, would contract us into one: one body made of seven heads like a mythical creature who only grows in the camp. Many self-subtracted to one.
The sign is new or at least it previously was not there. The first sign to point to “Baddawi camp” alongside other places. The first sign to have the word ‘camp’ within its folds – a piece of evidence to the existence of the camp. To the presence of a place whose name is validated by a correspondence, a genitive one, between the proper “Baddawi” and the noun “camp” and yet it is the latter which is always remembered. It is a camp despite the name.
READ THE ORIGINAL PIECE HERE: https://wordpress.com/post/refugeehosts.org/8287
Introduction by Prof. Lyndsey Stonebridge, and Yousif M Qasmiyeh's poem, 'Writing the Camp Archive'
The Multiple Faces of Representation
By Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, University of Oxford and Odile Ammann, University of Fribourg
The face of the Other – under all the particular forms of expression where the Other, already in a character’s skin, plays a role – is just as much pure expression, an extradition without defense or cover, precisely the extreme rectitude of a facing, which in this nudity is an exposure unto death: nudity, destitution, passivity, and pure vulnerability. Such is the face as the very mortality of the other person. 1
I
Representation is never a word. Its deceitful individuality is a precept to the repressed many.
II
Representation consists in trusting the eyes completely (but whose eyes?), privileging the face at the expense of the body – the body proper – whose dweller is never absent but absented.
III
Representation persistently leans on othering. It leans until its entire body is above the Other.
IV
To represent is to say, in the language of the absolute, loudly, so loudly, “this absence of the Other is precisely its presence as Other”.2
V
Representation has more than one face. In German, the verb ‘to represent’ can be translated by darstellen (to display, portray, express), by verkörpern (to embody), or by vertreten (to replace, act on behalf of).3 The third of these conveys the legal meaning of the word representation: to act on behalf of, with legally binding effects. Consequently, the many other layers of the word vertreten reveal the complexity and manifold connotations of this term. Such equivalents are ‘to be present besides others’; ‘to defend a point of view’; ‘to stumble’; and, finally, ‘efface’ and, thereby, ‘to bring into an unsightly state through stomping’.
VI
Representation lies precisely in detecting the face and presupposing its disfigurement. Without the face, the represented is not present by means of his sheer presence, but to a large extent is there(in) at the expense of his presence. These two propositions are what precipitate the finitude of the face. Indeed, the representer portrays it as a defining element that not only represents the whole, but equally nullifies it.
VII
Can a face with a body that is barely visible claim to be the face of an entity? Or is it the deferred face of a deferred body? The refugee face is both the animate and the inanimate of a face. It is the animate in its potential to be ‘such as’, ‘as’, and ‘like’ a human face. It is inanimate in its association with, inherence within, and clattering against the antithesis of a human – or simply the beast.
VIII
The verb ‘to represent’ has the clatter of a slap; of an abrasive touch that aggravates the touched and lingers. As it always touches the face and nothing else, it abates the distance between the slap and the face. Hence, this process can reach the status of an experience.
IX
‘To represent’ also consists in not giving the face time with itself. The representer manipulates it in a way that asserts its disappearance from its body. Despite the suggested neutrality of the infinitive ‘to represent’, representation always occurs in the past; the past of the past, the farthest past, as if representation were always akin to the ritual of burial, a burial normally preceded by an insignificant death.
X
The refugee is never the representer unless in death. The refugee dies alone, and this lonely death, singular and subjective, suddenly becomes that of all.
XI
But will this death retain the face in its fullness, in its entirety?
XII
The face of the refugee is no longer part of the proper body, but the trace of a presence. Everything returns to the origin, that is, the body.
XIII
The face is the only part deemed worthy of representation, regardless of the body.
XIV
The represented exists on his own, a shadow, an attained nothing, devoid of parameters. Like a scarecrow, veiled by twigs and straw, he scares off other strangers and guards the fields of the citizen.
XV
If the skin were to speak, it would utter the language of disappearance, not the nonexistence of the self, but the suddenness of the face’s image.
XVI
What if the refugee were born without a face?
** Read the full and original article here: https://refugeehosts.org/2017/09/15/the-multiple-faces-of-representation/
*
Refugees are Dialectical Beings: Part Two
by Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, University of Oxford and Refugee Hosts Writer in Residence
To the ones who are en route, the ones whose stomachs are compasses and whose compasses are manifestos of nothing…
Refugees are dialectical beings
I
The aridity of a camp presupposes the aridity of life.
The concrete is barely permanence. If you pay attention you will see the cracks in their souls.
At the farthest point in life – the point of no return – dialects become the superfluous of the body.
II
Camp (n): a residue in the shape of a crescent made of skin and nothing.
III
Time, when killed, has no mourners, only killers.
The camp has its own signature.
What it signs and countersigns is never the permanent.
The camp is what remains when the meadows of the instant desert us.
The foot without a trace is a god.
Those who are arriving at the threshold are not one of us. It will take them time to know who they are…
Nothing is as old as the archive that is yet to be written.
The archive is always written in the future. (After Derrida)
Were I in possession of an archive, I would bury it by my side and let it overgrow, upon my skin and inside my pores.
The enmity in the archive is the enmity of the intimate. By detailing the body, the archive loses its sight.
IV
I am absent or deemed absent. The fingers that I am holding before you, in your hand – a sullen hand – are mine and nothing else.
I wish it were possible to write the camp without the self.
In the camp, we surrender the meaning of the camp in advance.
The camp is the impossible martyr attributed to the meaning of ‘dying for’.
In the camp, going to the cemetery is going to the camp and going to the camp is going to the cemetery.
In Baddawi, reaching the camp only occurs through the cemetery.
Is the cemetery not another home, host and God?
V
In entering the camp, time becomes suspended between dialects.
The dialect that survives is never a dialect.
The dialectal subtleties in the camp are also called silence.
For the dialect to become an archive, no utterance should be uttered.
Who is the creator of dialects? Whose tongue is the shibboleth?
The dialect is a spear of noises.
Ontologically, the dialect is a being in the shape of a knife.
Only dialects can spot the silent Other.
VI
My cousins in Nahr Al-Bared have always defended their dialect to the extent of preserving it in their fists.
I used to be asked to raise my voice whenever I opened my mouth. As if voices were ethereal creatures with an ability to rise.
Voices are the earthliest of creatures. Not only do they wreak havoc on earth, they remain silent in death.
What is it that makes a dialect a knife?
Is the dialect not a mythology of the silent?
To exist in the singular means the death of the Other.
‘Dialects’ is not a plural; it is the anomaly of a condition that should have never been one.
VII
A ladder to God is the green in the cemetery.
VIII
In the camp, deserting the camp means summoning the certainty of the certainty. To this day, nobody has ever managed not to return.
Only in the camp do dialects outlive their people.
The untranslatability of the camp… We write it on parchments of time evermore, so it remains intact as a spectre when it is no more.
The dialect that survives on its own is that of the dead.
Dialects when uttered become spectres of time.
For us to hear ourselves we sign the covenant of the dialect.
A dialect always has a face – disfigured, a face nonetheless.
Where is the mouth in the testimony?
Those who come to us are never themselves in the same way we are never ourselves. When dialects descend upon the camp, the camp wails and ululates at the same time. In the presence of dialects, nobody knows what to do but to listen to the penetrating noise of the coming…
Is the dialect not the unavowable Other?
Refugees are dialectal beings.
Refugees are Dialectical Beings: Part One
by Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, University of Oxford and Refugee Hosts Writer in Residence
The camp is a passing human, a book, a manuscript, an archive… Bury it; smother it with its own dust, so it might return as a holy text devoid of intentions.
Writing the camp-archive
I
Only refugees can forever write the archive.
The camp owns the archive, not God.
For the archive not to fall apart, it weds the camp unceremoniously.
The question of a camp-archive is also the question of the camp’s survival beyond speech.
Circumcising the body can indicate the survival of the place.
Blessed are the pending places that are called camps.
II
My father, who passed his stick on to me, lied to us all: I slaughtered your brother so you would grow sane and sound.
My mother, always with the same knife, cuts herself and the vegetables.
The eyes which live long are the ones whose sight is contingent upon the unseen.
III
God’s past is the road to the camp’s archive.
We strangle it, from its loose ends, so we can breathe its air.
Privileging death in the camp is the sacral of the refugee body.
Without its death, the archive will never exist.
In whose name is the camp a place?
It is the truth and nothing else that for the camp to survive it must kill itself.
IV
The transience of the face in a place where faces are bare signs of flesh can gather the intransience of the trace therein in its multiple and untraced forms.
The unseen – that is the field that is there despite the eye – can only be seen by the hand. After all, the hand and not the eye, is the intimate part.
The tense in our bones – the one that emerged in no time, but with the desire to be time – will always be ahead of us.
V
Green in the camp only belongs to the cemetery.
The veiled women crying at the grave are my mother and my sisters. Once, my mother wanted to bring the grave home with her.
In the solemnity of the place, faces fall like depleted birds.
In belonging to the camp, senses premeditate their senses.
(Exhibited as part of the Tunisian Pavillion, 2017 Venice Biennale)
This reflection, and the photographs that accompany it, are part of a 4-year research project [www.RefugeeHosts.org] funded by the UK’s AHRC and ESRC examining diverse spaces of encounter between refugees from Syria and host communities in camps and cities across Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey. In the context of an overwhelming focus on tensions and/or acts of hospitality between the living, here we shift our attention to solidarity in death and dying, with the cemetery taking centre stage for both the living and dead, becoming the camp’s only fixity. Different refugees enter the camp, with the camp becoming both a gathering and a gatherer. The cemetery, too, echoes this duality.
*
Which is older: the camp or the cemetery?
At the core of Baddawi refugee camp, from its very birth, the cemetery has hosted the living and the dead. The arrival of the living to the camp, was traced by the arrival of the dead. From that core, the camp has grown, and so too have its residents. As time has passed, and as wars have led to new arrivals – Palestinians from other camps, Syrians, Kurds, Iraqis… – , the cemetery has outgrown its original space. The camp is denser, higher, narrower. And a second, a third,… now a fifth cemetery in Baddawi, for Baddawi and beyond.
Read the full piece here: https://refugeehosts.org/2017/05/23/refugee-refugee-solidarity-in-death-and-dying/
In these poems, published in the Lebanese daily al-Akhbar under the overarching title “An Incomplete Diary”, the renowned Syrian poet Nazih Abu Afash dissects the benign indecisiveness of human nature by seeking refuge in the quietness and silence of words, his words, in the face of the noises generated daily by the ongoing war in Syria.
Abu Afash, like a lonely shepherd, counts his flock with no intention of committing remembrance to the act of existence per se, but to remind us of one thing: I am returning to die in the forest. The following are translations of this vulnerability into another form of vulnerability where contemplation can be as valid as involvement.
In arrival, feet flutter like dying birds
We think, sometimes, that they came from countless directions, from dim-coloured borders, from the raging fire that devoured them in the beginning, from absence... Here they come again, so invite them over to our death.
*
The refugee is the revenant of the face.
*
O refugee, feast upon the other to eat yourself.
*
In arrival, feet flutter like dying birds.
*
In the camp, time died so it could return home.
*
A Sudden Utterance is the Stranger
By Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, University of Oxford
I
The moon is the birthmark of the refugee.
His birth equates to the mauling of his entire body.
Nothing is anomalous about the wound.
While waiting, we bite our nails and flesh.
Once I dreamt in God’s language. In my extreme ecstasy, I swallowed my tongue.
*
Read the full poem here: https://refugeehosts.org/2017/04/25/a-sudden-utterance-is-the-stranger/
Accounting for the roles of local communities is a key aim of our RefugeeHosts project, and of the ‘Localisation of Aid’ agenda more broadly. However, as a result of the mainstream narratives that pervade the literature on conflict-induced displacement, efforts to properly engage with the local have been held back by a failure to fully recognise the role(s) of established refugee communities in responding to the needs of displaced peoples. In this piece, which was originally published in The Critique, the Refugee Hosts PI Dr Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, and our Writer in Residence Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, introduce a key concept for our project, what Fiddian-Qasmiyeh denominates ‘refugee-refugee humanitarianism’. In order to do so they also examine the meanings of hospitality and neighbourliness in the context of displacement from Syria, with particular attention to the meanings of these terms in Arabic. In addition to our ongoing attention to translation and language, the Refugee Hosts team will be gathering evidence about the roles played by established refugee communities so as to a) disrupt humanitarian narratives that frame refugees as passive recipients of aid, and b) to better inform policy, practice and further research into displacement, both in the Middle East and beyond. If you find this article of interest, please also see the suggested readings at the end of this piece.
Read the piece here: https://refugeehosts.org/2018/03/20/refugee-neighbours-hostipitality/
How can there be a world apropos a camp? How can there be a camp apropos a world?
We repeat the repeated so we can see our features more clearly, the face as it is, the cracks in their transcendental rawness and for once we might consent to what we will never see.
They rarely return – those pigeons. The piece of wood that was meant to scare off the pigeons and entice them to return to their home landed by my feet. Not knowing what to do with it, I shut my eyes and threw it back in the direction of God…
Shadow, leave your body alone.
In cremating the shadow, we cremate time.
The name is the loneliest of things.
In what we cook we trace the hand. We glimpse its dried blood with every mouthful.
The refugee promises within his own means.
The camp, the allegorical of the allegorical.
What is recited is the voice and not the text.
In my camp, women slap themselves in funerals to never let go of pain.
Solitude, the spirit at home.
Who can see it to say: it is? Who has the eyes to say: it definitely is?
The pious are banging on the door. The pious have arrived to recite the name, a name like any other…
The camp in as much as it repeats time never acknowledges it as a divine authority.
The eternal in the camp is the crack. “The crack also invites.”
What is a camp? Is it not a happening beyond time?
A camp, to survive its happening, must become almost a camp.
It is what the hands contain at a juncture of their own making, never salient enough to be spotted by a passerby or a departing face. Nor is it close enough to be grasped by random fruit pickers humming bygone songs.
A life awaiting to grow behind itself.
A life on the edge of the edge.
The sublime in the camp, what it is? Can it not be the camp gestating with its impossible meaning?
His feet were in water and the hands were by his side as flat as nothing. While the tea was brewing, he prodded his father’s shoulder to ask about the number of graves he dug today.
In overthinking the position of the dead when all eyes are transfixed on the hole we bury time in the past.
Nothing can outlive Nothing when Nothing escapes not the idea of living, living like twigs left alone to decay under the sight of the mother tree.
Does the camp not have a gender?
What speaks in the camp is nothing but the foreskin.
Arise from water with the barest minimum of a thing like someone whose completeness is incomplete except in the bodies of God.
No shadow for water. They walk, as though they were hand in hand or towards each other’s feet, no one precisely knows where the cracks are taking them.
These are not headscarves but heads forever wrapped in themselves.
In mourning the refugee, we mourn God’s intention in the absolute.
A ponderous death. Bodies float above water. Clarity happens. Nothing or its birth?
Read the Original Here: https://refugeehosts.org/2018/06/22/in-mourning-the-refugee-we-mourn-gods-intention-in-the-absolute/
https://refugeehosts.org/2018/06/26/the-hands-are-hers/
The hands are hers – fractured urns of intimacy and anticipation.
They would cut, mend, darn, comb, bathe, clean, feel and above all submit themselves as seals of presence at the UNRWA distribution centres.
In this photograph, the face is outside the frame but the hands are certainly hers.
She is cutting runner beans, meticulously removing their fibrous ends and any impurities.
Her hands, the knife and the beans against the tin are the only elements in this landscape.
They all move in different directions and yet in total synchrony like a methodical machine.
The knife blade and the tin tray.
The hands and the beans.
The tray is the base, or more precisely the deathbed, for the fallen and everything perishable.
The hands are captured as close to and far from each other at the same time.
What is inextricable therein is sustained in the continuum of cutting, trimming and eventually the falling of the beans as singular and weakened parts.
The hands are certainly hers to the extent of complete dissolution and resurrection.
Read the Original Here:
https://refugeehosts.org/2018/06/26/the-hands-are-hers/
https://refugeehosts.org/2018/05/22/the-wall/
According to my father, this is the original wall of our old house which was erected in Baddawi camp in the mid-50s.
The wall is now an additional barrier between our neighbours and us. A distance that has been multiply plastered over time.
The subdued pink, contaminated by the white undercoat, was the colour my father used to paint the wall for the last time.
To my mother’s disappointment, whenever we leant on the wall some of the paint powder came off – as though everything were disintegrating then and now and for this act of disintegration to complete its course it had to travel with us.
The rusty colander and grill grate on the wall look deserted save from time.
Their only purpose is to occupy the wall.
The plastic clothes hanger suspended from the washing-line is a new addition to hold the damp cloths my mother uses daily.
From the rusty utensils to the hanger there lies a genre that can neither be crossed nor reconstituted.
In other words, it is only the shape of narrowness, as in genres, that is capable of redefining itself by itself.
Read the Original here:
https://refugeehosts.org/2018/05/22/the-wall/
https://refugeehosts.org/2018/06/05/to-the-plants-is-her-face/
The plants which appear in this picture hinge partly on a short wall and partly on a used wooden chest of drawers primarily staged to encircle the entrance to the house and protect it from the curious eyes of passers-by. Or to ‘privatise’ part of the public space by appropriating it.
Underneath some of the pots, to the woman’s left, a recycled banner made of fabric, likely nylon, from a previous event that still bears the Arabic: … Palestine, Baddawi Camp, 8pm, All Welcome.
It is clear that the woman tending to the plants is the owner of the house. She waters the plants through a yellow hose that enables her to reach the other end without substantially altering her position.
Dressed in kohl-like blue, contrasted with a headscarf of a lighter shade of blue, she leans towards the first row of the plants with her back to the main road.
She looks engrossed in what she is doing, with her right hand almost touching a pale leaf – perhaps to snap it off its mother plant.
The non-ordinariness of this scene does not lie in the co-presence between the canonical grey of the camp and the green exception, but precisely in its interruptive nature as an anomaly whose sole value is to overpower the norm in/of the camp to make it more visible and ‘normal’.
It is the “beauty” “at the expense” and never “in conjunction with” or “in accordance to” that matters in this photograph – a photograph whose meaning is that of the place.
Read the Original here:
https://refugeehosts.org/2018/06/05/to-the-plants-is-her-face/
It is a photograph of a coffee vendor in motion; of somebody who is familiar enough with the routes of the camp to roam them with relative ease.
The clanking of the cups, emanating from the collision of two porcelain cups – fragile but not too fragile – in the vendor’s hand, can still be heard or seen from beyond the picture.
But what is the clanking for? What does it signify amongst other signifiers, in a noisy context such as the camp where sounds continually fight for a space to be(come) sounds.
The truly inaudible clanking is nothing but a testimony of arrival into a place, a shibboleth, a different dialect.
The vendor will soon escape the picture or be pushed away by another.
However, somewhere, there will always be a vendor before or after the picture, or more precisely inside of it, boiling his coffee in silence.
Read the Original Here: https://refugeehosts.org/2018/05/08/there-will-always-be-a-vendor-before-and-after-the-picture/
Which is more intimate: the body in its absolute nakedness – concealed temporarily perhaps – or the nakedness in the thing, exposed or otherwise?
The place is a garage or a ground-floor room, a singular room with a small toilet, on the outskirts of Baddawi camp, occupied by some people, likely to be a young family, likely Syrian, likely present when the picture was taken.
But where were they exactly? What were they doing or not doing as the shutter induced the closure of the scene?
The weight of the two pairs of jeans, of different sizes, hung to dry against the black gate is palpable in the slight indentation or slope on the rope.
A red sheet, dotted with the outlines of white roses and leaves, guards the door – a sign of semi-normality and a marker of privacy to some extent.
A pair of slippers left obliquely on the threshold to separate, or so to claim, the public from the private hints at the presence of at least one person at the time.
The white wall, ceiling, and the makeshift washing-line, the black gates, the faded blue of the trousers, the red and white of the sheet, the brown-black slippers, the colours of things, people’s things, stillness and life – colours which are being borne horizontally, vertically and sideways in an attempt to sustain a daily rhythm inside which time can grow.
Read the original here: https://refugeehosts.org/2018/04/25/a-daily-rhythm-inside-which-time-can-grow/
Existence, as it is, happens in the intentions of things.
A sign or signs piled on top of one another, barely separated by air and the narrowest of voids: white on blue or blue on white. There is a background – an undercoat – and then the words. But which is which? On the sign are arrows pointing to places, including to Baddawi camp. Names of old and new places neatly and orderly enclosed in this rectangular space. Positioned then adjusted to be made more visible to passers by and cars alike.
It is the Baddawi slope. The road that leads to everywhere and nowhere. The exact road which gave us and my mother trepidations as she stopped taxis on the main road going to Nahr Al-Bared camp. We would, upon my mother’s prodding, hide behind her. Most of the time seven little bodies clutching her dress, looking for a handful of cloth, most of the time ending up inadvertently clutching each others’ hands. The taxi driver would normally drive off the moment my mother would start asking him for a discounted fee: ‘They are little, treat them as one. All of them on one seat and myself on another.’
My mother, to secure a ride that does not go beyond our limited financial means, would contract us into one: one body made of seven heads like a mythical creature who only grows in the camp. Many self-subtracted to one.
The sign is new or at least it previously was not there. The first sign to point to “Baddawi camp” alongside other places. The first sign to have the word ‘camp’ within its folds – a piece of evidence to the existence of the camp. To the presence of a place whose name is validated by a correspondence, a genitive one, between the proper “Baddawi” and the noun “camp” and yet it is the latter which is always remembered. It is a camp despite the name.
READ THE ORIGINAL PIECE HERE: https://wordpress.com/post/refugeehosts.org/8287
Introduction by Prof. Lyndsey Stonebridge, and Yousif M Qasmiyeh's poem, 'Writing the Camp Archive'
The Multiple Faces of Representation
By Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, University of Oxford and Odile Ammann, University of Fribourg
The face of the Other – under all the particular forms of expression where the Other, already in a character’s skin, plays a role – is just as much pure expression, an extradition without defense or cover, precisely the extreme rectitude of a facing, which in this nudity is an exposure unto death: nudity, destitution, passivity, and pure vulnerability. Such is the face as the very mortality of the other person. 1
I
Representation is never a word. Its deceitful individuality is a precept to the repressed many.
II
Representation consists in trusting the eyes completely (but whose eyes?), privileging the face at the expense of the body – the body proper – whose dweller is never absent but absented.
III
Representation persistently leans on othering. It leans until its entire body is above the Other.
IV
To represent is to say, in the language of the absolute, loudly, so loudly, “this absence of the Other is precisely its presence as Other”.2
V
Representation has more than one face. In German, the verb ‘to represent’ can be translated by darstellen (to display, portray, express), by verkörpern (to embody), or by vertreten (to replace, act on behalf of).3 The third of these conveys the legal meaning of the word representation: to act on behalf of, with legally binding effects. Consequently, the many other layers of the word vertreten reveal the complexity and manifold connotations of this term. Such equivalents are ‘to be present besides others’; ‘to defend a point of view’; ‘to stumble’; and, finally, ‘efface’ and, thereby, ‘to bring into an unsightly state through stomping’.
VI
Representation lies precisely in detecting the face and presupposing its disfigurement. Without the face, the represented is not present by means of his sheer presence, but to a large extent is there(in) at the expense of his presence. These two propositions are what precipitate the finitude of the face. Indeed, the representer portrays it as a defining element that not only represents the whole, but equally nullifies it.
VII
Can a face with a body that is barely visible claim to be the face of an entity? Or is it the deferred face of a deferred body? The refugee face is both the animate and the inanimate of a face. It is the animate in its potential to be ‘such as’, ‘as’, and ‘like’ a human face. It is inanimate in its association with, inherence within, and clattering against the antithesis of a human – or simply the beast.
VIII
The verb ‘to represent’ has the clatter of a slap; of an abrasive touch that aggravates the touched and lingers. As it always touches the face and nothing else, it abates the distance between the slap and the face. Hence, this process can reach the status of an experience.
IX
‘To represent’ also consists in not giving the face time with itself. The representer manipulates it in a way that asserts its disappearance from its body. Despite the suggested neutrality of the infinitive ‘to represent’, representation always occurs in the past; the past of the past, the farthest past, as if representation were always akin to the ritual of burial, a burial normally preceded by an insignificant death.
X
The refugee is never the representer unless in death. The refugee dies alone, and this lonely death, singular and subjective, suddenly becomes that of all.
XI
But will this death retain the face in its fullness, in its entirety?
XII
The face of the refugee is no longer part of the proper body, but the trace of a presence. Everything returns to the origin, that is, the body.
XIII
The face is the only part deemed worthy of representation, regardless of the body.
XIV
The represented exists on his own, a shadow, an attained nothing, devoid of parameters. Like a scarecrow, veiled by twigs and straw, he scares off other strangers and guards the fields of the citizen.
XV
If the skin were to speak, it would utter the language of disappearance, not the nonexistence of the self, but the suddenness of the face’s image.
XVI
What if the refugee were born without a face?
** Read the full and original article here: https://refugeehosts.org/2017/09/15/the-multiple-faces-of-representation/
*
Refugees are Dialectical Beings: Part Two
by Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, University of Oxford and Refugee Hosts Writer in Residence
To the ones who are en route, the ones whose stomachs are compasses and whose compasses are manifestos of nothing…
Refugees are dialectical beings
I
The aridity of a camp presupposes the aridity of life.
The concrete is barely permanence. If you pay attention you will see the cracks in their souls.
At the farthest point in life – the point of no return – dialects become the superfluous of the body.
II
Camp (n): a residue in the shape of a crescent made of skin and nothing.
III
Time, when killed, has no mourners, only killers.
The camp has its own signature.
What it signs and countersigns is never the permanent.
The camp is what remains when the meadows of the instant desert us.
The foot without a trace is a god.
Those who are arriving at the threshold are not one of us. It will take them time to know who they are…
Nothing is as old as the archive that is yet to be written.
The archive is always written in the future. (After Derrida)
Were I in possession of an archive, I would bury it by my side and let it overgrow, upon my skin and inside my pores.
The enmity in the archive is the enmity of the intimate. By detailing the body, the archive loses its sight.
IV
I am absent or deemed absent. The fingers that I am holding before you, in your hand – a sullen hand – are mine and nothing else.
I wish it were possible to write the camp without the self.
In the camp, we surrender the meaning of the camp in advance.
The camp is the impossible martyr attributed to the meaning of ‘dying for’.
In the camp, going to the cemetery is going to the camp and going to the camp is going to the cemetery.
In Baddawi, reaching the camp only occurs through the cemetery.
Is the cemetery not another home, host and God?
V
In entering the camp, time becomes suspended between dialects.
The dialect that survives is never a dialect.
The dialectal subtleties in the camp are also called silence.
For the dialect to become an archive, no utterance should be uttered.
Who is the creator of dialects? Whose tongue is the shibboleth?
The dialect is a spear of noises.
Ontologically, the dialect is a being in the shape of a knife.
Only dialects can spot the silent Other.
VI
My cousins in Nahr Al-Bared have always defended their dialect to the extent of preserving it in their fists.
I used to be asked to raise my voice whenever I opened my mouth. As if voices were ethereal creatures with an ability to rise.
Voices are the earthliest of creatures. Not only do they wreak havoc on earth, they remain silent in death.
What is it that makes a dialect a knife?
Is the dialect not a mythology of the silent?
To exist in the singular means the death of the Other.
‘Dialects’ is not a plural; it is the anomaly of a condition that should have never been one.
VII
A ladder to God is the green in the cemetery.
VIII
In the camp, deserting the camp means summoning the certainty of the certainty. To this day, nobody has ever managed not to return.
Only in the camp do dialects outlive their people.
The untranslatability of the camp… We write it on parchments of time evermore, so it remains intact as a spectre when it is no more.
The dialect that survives on its own is that of the dead.
Dialects when uttered become spectres of time.
For us to hear ourselves we sign the covenant of the dialect.
A dialect always has a face – disfigured, a face nonetheless.
Where is the mouth in the testimony?
Those who come to us are never themselves in the same way we are never ourselves. When dialects descend upon the camp, the camp wails and ululates at the same time. In the presence of dialects, nobody knows what to do but to listen to the penetrating noise of the coming…
Is the dialect not the unavowable Other?
Refugees are dialectal beings.
Refugees are Dialectical Beings: Part One
by Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, University of Oxford and Refugee Hosts Writer in Residence
The camp is a passing human, a book, a manuscript, an archive… Bury it; smother it with its own dust, so it might return as a holy text devoid of intentions.
Writing the camp-archive
I
Only refugees can forever write the archive.
The camp owns the archive, not God.
For the archive not to fall apart, it weds the camp unceremoniously.
The question of a camp-archive is also the question of the camp’s survival beyond speech.
Circumcising the body can indicate the survival of the place.
Blessed are the pending places that are called camps.
II
My father, who passed his stick on to me, lied to us all: I slaughtered your brother so you would grow sane and sound.
My mother, always with the same knife, cuts herself and the vegetables.
The eyes which live long are the ones whose sight is contingent upon the unseen.
III
God’s past is the road to the camp’s archive.
We strangle it, from its loose ends, so we can breathe its air.
Privileging death in the camp is the sacral of the refugee body.
Without its death, the archive will never exist.
In whose name is the camp a place?
It is the truth and nothing else that for the camp to survive it must kill itself.
IV
The transience of the face in a place where faces are bare signs of flesh can gather the intransience of the trace therein in its multiple and untraced forms.
The unseen – that is the field that is there despite the eye – can only be seen by the hand. After all, the hand and not the eye, is the intimate part.
The tense in our bones – the one that emerged in no time, but with the desire to be time – will always be ahead of us.
V
Green in the camp only belongs to the cemetery.
The veiled women crying at the grave are my mother and my sisters. Once, my mother wanted to bring the grave home with her.
In the solemnity of the place, faces fall like depleted birds.
In belonging to the camp, senses premeditate their senses.
(Exhibited as part of the Tunisian Pavillion, 2017 Venice Biennale)
This reflection, and the photographs that accompany it, are part of a 4-year research project [www.RefugeeHosts.org] funded by the UK’s AHRC and ESRC examining diverse spaces of encounter between refugees from Syria and host communities in camps and cities across Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey. In the context of an overwhelming focus on tensions and/or acts of hospitality between the living, here we shift our attention to solidarity in death and dying, with the cemetery taking centre stage for both the living and dead, becoming the camp’s only fixity. Different refugees enter the camp, with the camp becoming both a gathering and a gatherer. The cemetery, too, echoes this duality.
*
Which is older: the camp or the cemetery?
At the core of Baddawi refugee camp, from its very birth, the cemetery has hosted the living and the dead. The arrival of the living to the camp, was traced by the arrival of the dead. From that core, the camp has grown, and so too have its residents. As time has passed, and as wars have led to new arrivals – Palestinians from other camps, Syrians, Kurds, Iraqis… – , the cemetery has outgrown its original space. The camp is denser, higher, narrower. And a second, a third,… now a fifth cemetery in Baddawi, for Baddawi and beyond.
Read the full piece here: https://refugeehosts.org/2017/05/23/refugee-refugee-solidarity-in-death-and-dying/
In these poems, published in the Lebanese daily al-Akhbar under the overarching title “An Incomplete Diary”, the renowned Syrian poet Nazih Abu Afash dissects the benign indecisiveness of human nature by seeking refuge in the quietness and silence of words, his words, in the face of the noises generated daily by the ongoing war in Syria.
Abu Afash, like a lonely shepherd, counts his flock with no intention of committing remembrance to the act of existence per se, but to remind us of one thing: I am returning to die in the forest. The following are translations of this vulnerability into another form of vulnerability where contemplation can be as valid as involvement.
In arrival, feet flutter like dying birds
We think, sometimes, that they came from countless directions, from dim-coloured borders, from the raging fire that devoured them in the beginning, from absence... Here they come again, so invite them over to our death.
*
The refugee is the revenant of the face.
*
O refugee, feast upon the other to eat yourself.
*
In arrival, feet flutter like dying birds.
*
In the camp, time died so it could return home.
*
A Sudden Utterance is the Stranger
By Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, University of Oxford
I
The moon is the birthmark of the refugee.
His birth equates to the mauling of his entire body.
Nothing is anomalous about the wound.
While waiting, we bite our nails and flesh.
Once I dreamt in God’s language. In my extreme ecstasy, I swallowed my tongue.
*
Read the full poem here: https://refugeehosts.org/2017/04/25/a-sudden-utterance-is-the-stranger/
Refugee Hosts’ Writer in Residence, the Palestinian poet and translator Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, is interviewed by The Beacon’s Adam Mazarelo. They discuss issues surrounding identity, the politics of space and architecture and narratives as they relate to refugees and refugee camps, and, in particular, their relation to Yousif’s home camp of Baddawi in North Lebanon.
You can listen to the podcast here: https://soundcloud.com/user-951209983-279640904/palestine-poetry-and-identity-politics-yousif-qasmiyeh-ht18. To read and listen to Yousif’s poetry and other interviews visit www.refugeehosts.org
[In addition to being Refugee Hosts’ writer-in-residence,] Qasmiyeh is currently a doctoral researcher at the University of Oxford, where he is writing about conceptualisations of time and containment in Arabic and English “Refugee Literature.” His poems and translations in both English and Arabic have appeared in numerous journals, including Modern Poetry in Translation and An-Nahar, one of Lebanon’s leading daily newspapers.
As writer-in-residence for the Refugee Hosts Project, he contributes poetry, translations, and essays that draw from his childhood in and visits to Baddawi camp. Located in North Lebanon, Baddawi camp has been home to Palestinian refugees since the 1950s and in more recent years to refugees from Syria. In this episode, recorded in Oxford, we discuss writing the camp, poetry’s ways of seeing, and the signs that death leaves in the camp to remember, revisit, and translate
This episode features the poem “In arrival, feet flutter like dying birds,” which was featured in the 2017 Venice Biennale and can be read, along with other poems and translations by Qasmiyeh, here: https://refugeehosts.org/2017/05/17/in-arrival-feet-flutter-like-dying-birds/.
Staying Alive is an original podcast series produced and hosted by Adriana X. Jacobs, with editing by Danielle Beeber and Danny Cox, and music by The Zombie Dandies. Support for this podcast comes from the John Fell Fund. For more information about this episode, including materials that didn’t make it into the final cut, visit the podcast website www.stayingalive.show.
The podcast was originally posted here: http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/episode-8-death-leaves-signs.