295 Blog Post 5

            Life goes on. Sometimes it seems like maybe that’s all it does. In fact, that very endurance, that drive to perpetuate itself no matter the obstacles, is one of the ways that we define life.

            That’s what struck me about Exit West as I started reading it. It wasn’t the horrors of a city on the brink of collapse. It wasn’t the cruelties that Saeed, Nadia, and those around them witness. No, you can find people facing the worst of the world in a lot of books. What struck me was the way that Hamid focused on how, even amid the chaos, life went on. The very first page of the book offers up something of a thesis for the novel: “It might seem odd that in cities teetering at the edge of the abyss young people still go to class—in this case an evening class on corporate identity and product branding—but that is the way of things, with cities as with life, for one moment we are pottering about our errands as usual and the next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does,” (Hamid 1-2).

            This sentence brought me up short. It’s true, undoubtedly so, and yet it’s not something we think about often. When I consider the current crises in the Middle East, I don’t consider that even as bombs fall, people still have to shop for groceries. When I think about enforced curfews and stray bullets in the street, I don’t think about how these things complicate young love. It’s easy to remember how war poses a threat to people’s lives, but easy to forget how it poses a threat to the way they live.

            It reminded me of a video I saw last year, one in which John Green—the young adult author and YouTube star—visited the Azraq refugee camp in Northern Jordan. He told the stories of several young Syrians who had been forced to flee their countries, their homes, and their lives to escape the war. The biggest thing about Green’s story that has stuck with me since is the way that so many of the refugees carried old cell phones with them to keep photos of friends and loved ones—many of whom they will never see again—close to them. I hadn’t realized, before watching that video, just how important photos are to those who have little else. Even more than that, though, it reminded me how much I take my own phone for granted. The miracle of modern technology only seems frivolous until we have to fight for it.

            And yet the refugees in the Azraq camp and in Exit West do not simply stop. The do fight for it, and they continue to do the everyday things they have always done. They wash clothes. They cook food. They play with the children who have made it through the day, and they pray for them to make it through another. Saeed and Nadia fall for one another. Saeed and Nadia go their separate ways. Life goes on and they are still human. Perhaps that is what’s missing in so many of our narratives about what it means to live in monstrous times and places. Not the horrors, but the dishes that still need washing and the relationships that still form and break apart and the young people who still go to class. Maybe we should stop thinking of them first and foremost as refugees. I don’t mean that we shouldn’t think of them as refugees at all. I mean that maybe we should try and remember that their lives don’t simply stop or pause or have less meaning than those of us who have not had to leave everything behind. We should stop thinking of them as though that need to flee has somehow subsumed their humanity and all the other things they are. If they are only refugees to us, instead of school teachers and insurance workers and engineers who have been forced to become refugees, then it is too easy to think of them as separate and alien, to build walls between us and them.

           In truth, all of these thoughts feel woefully inadequate and misguided. I do not know enough, do not understand enough, do not have the right questions to ask. But I have this final worry that I will leave off with: I fear that we need to stop thinking that the apocalyptic puts a stop to the quotidian, because otherwise it is too easy to ignore the apocalyptic all around us. It is too easy to pretend it cannot happen to us, or that those it happens to do not deserve all we can give them.

(If you're interested in the John Green video, the link is here.)