Booking Passage

Introduction: Refugee Encounters (16/07/08)

by Eva Oddo

Booking Passage was the name chosen to collect a number of talks by authors at the London Literature Festival, held this month at the Southbank Centre. The ‘passage’ was migration (forced and voluntary), displacement, travel; crossing borders, in short. Paradoxically, however wide this theme may seem, it turns out to be rather restrictive, as Choman Hardi, a poet of Kurdish origin who took part in the event Refugee Encounters, pointed out. Authors with varying styles, themes and genres (a memoir vs. poetry vs. novels, at the Refugee Encounters event) end up being boxed together under the migrant/refugee label, when this may not be the central element of their writing or even a large part of who they consider themselves to be. The restrictive nature of the ‘migrant’ (or the “you’re not from around here, are you?”) label also makes for inaccuracy, so that, again, at the Refugee Encounters event the Chinese author Xiaolu Guo also spoke of her wonderful prose, which was very welcome, but, in fact, she is not a refugee, but a Chinese woman living in Europe out of choice.

In London it seems strange to focus on people’s migrant natures, and it goes against what the city stands for. After all we are all struggling against the hardships that large cities throw up, while at the same time getting off on all that they have to offer. Rather, it would be enriching to garner all these disparate experiences to talk about wider and, I dare say, more ‘universal’ themes, such as love, material possessions, memory. The theme of migration appears to be a rather lazy way of grouping authors together, and it stays on the surface, when surely literature should be about going deeper.