ABSTRACT
The context of the book is global. However, for this chapter, the study zooms in on Syria, which has produced around five million refugees dispersed across the globe in the last seven or eight years. To understand the postmodern refugee, the chapter argues for the essentiality of examining the refugee’s past as well as the present. Presented as a case study on a specific refugee “crisis”, the chapter paves the ways for other similar examination of another crisis in another country. More specifically, this chapter relies on writers who are refugees in the sense that they have been persecuted in their home country and decided to exile themselves as a consequence, like Samar Yazbek and Nihad Sirees. Because of the scarcity of translated works, this chapter will widen the selection of books in order to historically contextualize the predicament of the writer across borders. The chapter will bring into the discussion Syrian writers who before 2011 wrote ceaselessly against the Syrian dictatorship, but who cleverly and allegorically sent messages of dissent in their works and called for a social revolution making their works a living testimony that speaks not only to the past but also speaks to Syria’s current situation as a war-torn country, like Sa’dallah Wannous, Khalid Khalifa, and Mustafa Khalifa.
