I recently read three novels with a similar theme: Chris Cleave, Little Bee; Mohsin Hamid, Exit West; and Jenny Erpenbeck, Go, Went, Gone. The three authors from England, Pakistan, and Germany, respectively, all write about refugees from the Middle East or Africa in the West.
Each of the novels makes the point that the boundaries we establish between nations and between the West and developing nations are arbitrary, often cruelly so, and that one of the often-overlooked casualties in creating these boundaries is the humanity of well-to-do westerners.
The authors made me think about how much energy that I and people like me put into obscuring and ignoring the profound and undeserved privileges that benefit us and the powerful economic and political forces devoted to maintaining these cruel advantages. Beginning to dismantle these privileges and cruelties is not the work of an afternoon. But profound benefits await those who start trying, not least of which are a much deeper sense of our common and vulnerable humanity.
Hamid puts it this way: "we are all children who lose our parents, all of us, every man and woman and boy and girl, and we too will all be lost by those who come after us and love us, and this loss unites humanity, unites every human being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry and yet too often refuse to acknowledge in one another, and out of this Saeed [one of the novel's protagonists] felt it might be possible, in the face of death, to believe in humanity's potential for building a better world. . . ."
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