Paralyzed Lives, Unfulfilled Dreams: Syrian Refugee Portrayals in Contemporary Fiction
Refugees and the Media: Local and Global Perspectives, Springer Nature, ss.237-263, 2024
- Yayın Türü: Kitapta Bölüm / Araştırma Kitabı
- Basım Tarihi: 2024
- Doi Numarası: 10.1007/978-3-031-46514-7_13
- Yayınevi: Springer Nature
- Sayfa Sayıları: ss.237-263
- Kırklareli Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet
Özet
A bitter fruit of the Arab Spring that began in 2010 in Tunisia, the Syrian Civil War, has poisoned the lives of millions of people who have somehow tasted it, either at home or abroad. Since the outbreak of the war in 2011, thousands of innocent Syrian people had been killed at home either directly by the regime attacks, or while en route to escape the war yet remaining in the firing lines or indirectly victimized on their route to Europe passing through Turkey and Greece, all of which has one significant meaning for the millions of survivors whether still living in Syria, or Turkey, Europe or any other part of the world: trauma. It is the concept of trauma, I believe, that best explains the past but not fulfilled dreams and present disappointments of countless Syrian people in Turkey and Europe. With a wish to make their voices heard, their stories are registered, they look for people and states that will understand and support them, which corresponds to the “working-through” process in the literature, which is defined by LaCapra as:From this point onward, intending this chapter to contribute, in a small way, to the working-through process of millions of refugees and relying on the efficacy of literature in representing trauma and trauma victims, I examine how refugee trauma is represented at various genres of fiction; in Gratz’s children’s or young adolescent (YA) story Refugee (2017), in Lefteri’s The Beekeeper of Aleppo (2019), which appeals to adults, and Hosseini’s graphic novel Sea Prayer (2018), all of which offer us a holistic picture of the traumatized Syrians, portraying different age groups and different sexes, in order to understand what it means to see one’s house, city, environment is destroyed suddenly and irreversibly. It also considers what it means to leave immediately one’s beloved home and country in order to survive by taking all risks, what it means to be a second-class citizen for whom everywhere is unsafe and everybody is foreign, what it means to deeply suffer but not vent it to your beloveds, what it means to start dreaming again yet this time in a different land with different people, and, in brief, what it means to restart life in every sense by reformatting oneself. Before sketching out the representation of Syrians in the selected works, it pays to emphasize the critical role of literature as an important medium in communicating to the world the stories of physically and psychologically wounded Syrian refugees.