Agus Morales

Agus Morales is a Spanish poet and journalist who has spent the last several years covering wars and refugees in SE Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. We Are Not Refugees is his effort to capture the vastness of the crisis while taking it from the large abstractions of numbers to the particular experiences of people. There are about 68 million people who have been forced to leave their homes for many reasons, most often war and persecution.

We Are Not Refugees is organized into five sections that address the common questions most of us have about refugees with the stories of real people. He asks why they are fleeing, who are they, where do they live, how do they travel, and when do they arrive. His answers come from interviewing some two hundred people in fourteen countries.

Much of the story of displacement is told through the voices of the people he meets and interviews. This takes the narrative of this crisis away from the big numbers of faceless “refugees” to the individual exigencies of people, men, women, and children with whom we can and must identify.

Morales brings the magic of a poet to his writing in We Are Not Refugees. Using his art, he focuses on the essential point of his stories, the humanity of the people he interviews. As a poet, he understands the power of language and illustrates how it is used to separate us from each other. He points out that refugees seldom refer to themselves as refugees. He notes that people like to add modifiers like economic to qualify and disqualify refugees. He writes about how important the words are, though. For example, if you flee violence but stay in your own country, you’re an internally displaced person and have no international protection from the United Nations. Refugee is another important word because it offers protection while migrants have none. As a poet, he not only notes the legal power of these words but how effectively they are used to distance us from what is true of all, they are people.

If we can always remember to think of people who have been forced from their homes, whether they are legally called displaced persons, migrants, or refugees, as people first, as fellow humans, we will do a better job of demanding our national and international governments do a better job of treating them with dignity and humanity.

We Are Not Refugees is fascinating, inspiring, and heartbreaking. It is particularly shaming for an American when our selfish and xenophobic response has been so feeble while smaller, poorer countries do so much more. Calling ourselves a nation of immigrants seems like such hypocrisy when we are doing our level best to turn the tide against immigration and abandoning our obligations to asylees and refugees.

I received a copy of We Are Not Refugees from the publisher through NetGalley.

We Are Not Refugees at Charlesbridge | Imagine | Penguin Random House
Agus Morales author site
Agus Morales stories for 5W

★★★★
https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2019/05/04/9781623545321/… (lisätietoja)

We are not refugees is a poetically written novel that highlights the life and death struggles of refugees and migrants who have been displaced from their native lands. In an effort to find safety for themselves and their families, they set on a usually circular journey, often ending up in refugee camps set up by NGO’s or facing deportation orders to their native lands. The book is very thorough and covers many areas of violence and unrest, some of which I have familiarity with, and some I did not. The stories in the pages of the book are all at once uplifting and heartbreaking, as we learn the fates of some refugees who are fortunate to find asylum, while others become lost in the cycle of violence and endless nomadic movements. There are others still whose fate remains unknown as the turbulent nature of their existence cuts them off from contact with the outside world.

This novel is especially vital in today’s political world where refugee’s and migrants are vilified in the name of tipping a political scale in favor of candidates who exploit and expand fear’s of the electorate. For the refugees of the world, they only ask for acceptance, and a place they can safely raise their families. We learn they are not so different from the rest of us.… (lisätietoja)