Literature written by migrant authors can challenge biased narratives and provide a more nuanced perspective on migration
This op-ed was written by Adaora Raji, who was an applicant of Salzburg Global’s writing residency program. We are now excited to publish her piece, as it is closely aligns with the priority areas of the Salzburg Global Center for Education Transformation.
Migration stories make for catchy newspaper headlines and suspense-filled news broadcasts. These stories focus on the familiar tales of harrowing journeys, courage, strength, alienation, or an inevitable doom.
However, migration narratives from mainstream media tend to be conflict-based and negative, thus creating unbalanced news coverage. The block print of newspaper headlines and the glare of television cameras constantly saturate readers and viewers with stories and images of people fleeing the Global South to settle either temporarily or permanently in the Global North.
In these news stories, those who are migrating from the Global South to the Global North are referred to as migrants, war victims, or asylum seekers, and their movement is considered problematic to the host country. Those migrating from the Global North to the Global South, especially when privileged in terms of citizenship, education, or wealth, are referred to as expatriates; their movement is assumed to be essential in solving the needs of the receiving country.
How do we fill these gaps created by the unbalanced media coverage of migration? Beyond the headlines and news stories, we can turn to fiction novels to gain a nuanced, robust, and in-depth understanding of issues surrounding the complexity of migration.
These issues can include transgenerational migration and identities forged during the process of leaving one’s homeland to find a new one. The authors who are first, second, or third-generation migrants or authors who are witnesses to the migrant condition use fiction as a microscope to examine migration in intricate detail.
Through narrative techniques, plot, and characterization, they provide relevant cultural identities, ideologies, and perspectives often overlooked by statistical data and mainstream media. They also engage with difficult moral and political questions surrounding visa processes, migration laws, residence permits, refugee rights, and deportation.
For instance, in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, through the character Obinze's deportation, Adichie paints a stark and unsettling reality of the privileged travel right of those bearing passports from a high index country versus the travel struggle of those bearing passports from a low index country when she narrates:
“...in the coolness and din of that airport, men and women and children, travellers and cleaners and security guards, watched him, wondering what evil he had done. He kept his gaze on a tall white woman hurrying ahead, hair flying behind her, knapsack hunched over her back. She would not understand his story, why he was now walking through the airport with metal clamped around his wrists because people like her did not approach travel with an anxiety about visas…”
In Exit West by Mohsin Hamid, Hamid chooses not to focus solely on the pains and perils of migration. He uses the speculative element of magic realism to weave the story of a borderless stateless world where the characters can move through “secret rectangular black doors” that transport them to different places in an instant. Hamid’s use of magic realism allows the reader to envision a world where there are no strict borders and a future where distance and laws are not barriers to migration.
In Hamid's interview with Berkeley News, when asked to juxtapose the use of portals and doors to step into other countries in his novel with the complexity of the current migration system existing in the world, he replied succinctly:
“It could be as easy as stepping through such doors - It costs so little to move a person around the world. It is our choices that have made it difficult for people to move. The doors are already there. We have simply locked them and made them dangerous.”
From Rodaan Al Galidi's “The Leash and the Ball” to Chris Cleave’s “The Other Hand”, and from Dina Nayeri’s “The Ungrateful Refugee” to Christy Lefteri’s “The Beekeeper of Aleppo”, along with works like Amy Tan’s “The Joy Luck Club”, numerous migrant novels introduce us to the diverse but complex system of migration.
Migrant fiction thus serves as an important tool that not only challenges the negative stereotypes surrounding migration but is also used to anchor the issues of migration in a nuanced, open, and honest manner.
Adaora Raji is a content producer and scriptwriter. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Broadcast Journalism from the University of Benin in Nigeria. Her short fiction stories have appeared in Fictionable, Lolwe, Arlington Literary Journal, Midnight and Indigo Literary Journal, the Coachella Review, the Bookends Review and as first runner-up in the 2022 Kendeka Prize for African Literature.
