Response to Rolling Blackouts, by Sarah Glidden
It’s funny that they call you a refugee, as if you’ve found refuge. But you’re always on the move, so it’s not like you’ve really found refuge yet. But that’s the first thing you learn as a refugee: how to wait in line. How to be patient. - Rolling Blackouts, Sarah Glidden
I remember where I was when Trump announced the first Muslim ban. I was sitting with a friend at Innisfree Poetry Bookstore in Boulder, CO, waiting for another friend to perform. I scrolled through Facebook distractedly while we waited together, until I read the news. Even now, I can’t quite explain it, but the closest I can come is to say I felt sick. Nauseous. Anxious. On the verge of a panic attack. Tears were already surging their way out of my body when I told my friend quietly that I had to go and caught the next bus home. There, I cried for hours until I finally read the news that a court had ruled against the ban. As we know now, that was nowhere near the end of the struggle, but at that moment it was enough for the panic and despair to subside long enough for me to fall asleep. I remember reading about the lawyers showing up at airports, and the frenzied thoughts of going to law school so I could help in this way too. I didn’t know what else to do. What could I, a graduate student in creative writing, do to help?
I am, of course, still searching for this answer, but in the immediate aftermath one possible answer came to me when an international NGO I used to work with posted a new program calling for volunteers at a refugee camp in Greece. I initially intended to go for a month, and ended up staying for five. One of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made was to stick to my teaching commitment in Colorado and leave Greece last December. Since I’ve come back home, and found myself economically bound to stay where I am for the moment, I’ve returned to this question, a question whose answer was simple, if not easy before: go, volunteer, bring back what you learned. But how to share what I’ve learned? How can I use writing to turn the tide in the refugee crisis? What can I do to help?
I bring up this context because reading Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Iraq, and Syria, grapples with these same questions and brings them to the forefront for me once more. In 2010, graphic novelist Sarah Glidden traveled to Turkey, Iraq, and Syria with a group of journalists from the Seattle Globalist to seek answers to the question, “What is Journalism?” The result is this beautiful graphic narrative, released in 2016. When I first found out about this book, I was shocked, thinking her travels had been in the past two years; really, she went to Syria? When I found out the nonfiction narrative was now eight years old, I was at first disappointed; how would this reflect the current reality, when, in 2010, Syria was a prominent host of refugees and now is the home country of one of the largest groups of refugees and displaced people in the world?
It turns out that these questions were not lost on Glidden in the completion of this graphic narrative. It begins benignly enough, as Glidden contemplates the nature of journalism and her role in it as she departs on a two-month trip with her friends to cover stories about Iraqi refugees and internally displaced people. Their progressive mindset is complicated by the presence of a childhood friend who served in the U.S. Army in Iraq. This conflict comprises most of the first part of the book, as they all meet up in Turkey and plan out the stories they seek to pursue for the rest of the trip. I flagged the section set in Turkey as an excellent primer for the refugee crisis, especially a recorded interview with a UNHCR representative. The Iraq section is one of the longest, providing a brief history of the complicated tensions between Kurds and Arabs, within and beyond Iraq’s borders, and the impact of the Iraq war from numerous Kurdish and Arab Iraqi peoples’ perspectives. Throughout, Glidden presents, with both a self-reflexive eye and comfortingly soft watercolors, a painstakingly faithful representative of her travels and conversations with her peers and the people she meets overseas.
Where the narrative starts to levy its most powerful punch for me, is in the section set in Syria. In 2010, Damascus, Syria’s capital, was a thriving, modern city. Snow, not ash, fell as the group conducted interviews with displaced Iraqis seeking refuge in Syria. Knowing what Syria is now, knowing that I met friends in the Greek refugee camp that had fled from Damascus specifically, made this one of the most poignant and difficult parts of the book for me to read.
It reminded me of when I brought Rebecca Solnit’s “Letter to a Dead Man” to my first session of a composition class I taught in Colorado last spring. I brought it in part because I wanted to feel hopeful in our dark historical moment, but also because it was problematic in its own ways and would, I expected, foster meaningful dialogue. Quite simply, the piece, written in October 2011, didn’t hold up in January 2018. After reading it aloud as a class, I broke the ice in the conversation, opening up space for the students to critique as well as resonate, explaining that this was a hard piece for me to read because I have so many friends that I care deeply for who now have refugee status after fleeing Syria. The promise of the Arab Spring that Solnit wrote so eloquently about has undergone an ugly, brutal contortion in Syria, with a seemingly unending civil war that’s cost hundreds of thousands of lives and produced thirteen million refugees and displaced people. The country that was once known for its hospitality to refugees -- even though they were not legally obligated to, since they never signed the UN 1951 Refugee Convention and 1967 Protocol updates -- is now the largest producer of refugees and displaced people in the world. The Iraqi refugees living in Syria have now mostly fled back to hostility, violence, and instability in their home country, and countless others living in Syria, whether citizen or refugee, have fled to Jordan, or are stuck along the Balkan route in Turkey, Greece, or Italy. Less than one percent have been resettled in new home countries, meaning almost all are living in refugee camps, squats, or slums, often in countries openly hostile to immigrants and refugees, and nearly always in vastly under-resourced situations that erode human dignity, lack in safety, and drive people, even children, to contemplate suicide.
From the moment I realized this book was set in 2010 and about Iraqi refugees, I feared it wouldn’t resonate, that it would have been made irrelevant by the passing of time and dramatically shifting circumstances in Syria. I was wrong. While there is no one singular “refugee experience,” there are, as Glidden highlights for us, so many stories to be told -- according to the most recent counts by the UNHCR, in fact, there are currently over 25.4 million refugees with stories to be told.
In a section called “Home,” Glidden reflects, albeit briefly, on the Arab Spring that began not long after she returned home. “Their situation has gotten even worse, and there’s nothing we can do about it. It feels like all that work was for nothing. It’s not even relevant anymore,” she laments to her friend, the journalist Sarah Stuteville. She responds, “The situation changing doesn’t make what they told us any less important….The best we can hope for is that the story gets passed along. The way the reader uses that story to understand the world is up to them.”
While, as a poet, essayist, and artist (rather than a journalist), I take a different view on my role in this crisis, this section resonated deeply with me nonetheless. I think we can hope for more, for better, or at least to strive for more, strive for better. However, there is something important in recognizing that one’s work might not reach many people, but that ripple effects do, in fact, exist. As a person who studies written communication and how it can be used to build a better world, I do believe that we can cause change through telling stories, and that there are a myriad of ways to do so. I don’t deceive myself into thinking that a single story I tell will end the war in Syria, but I do know that sharing voices of refugees, immigrants, and otherwise displaced people will ultimately help, and not hurt, the work of easing this crisis. As a friend and colleague of mine, who continues to work with refugee youth in Greece, told me recently, “There are thousands of people still arriving in Greece every year and mainstream media has stopped covering the crisis that is still occurring there. People can do so much by simply not forgetting that these youth are even there.”
I don’t forget, and neither does Glidden or her journalist friends. And so, in the face of such dire circumstances and staggering human cost, we persist in our work, we persist in our compassion, we persist in sharing and amplifying the voices of marginalized people around the world. Our work may not end the crisis outright, but nothing will ever change if we don’t do the work. Glidden’s Rolling Blackouts reminds us to keep. doing. the. work. Even when it seems irrelevant, even when it seems hopeless, persist. Even as we doubt our individual impact, to ask ourselves, as her friend Sarah relayed to her, “Is it better that this story is out there in the world than if it wasn’t? If the answer is yes, then you do it.”