Refugees, Refuge, and Human Displacement

By Ignacio López-Calvo and Marjorie Agosin

Every American is a descendant of either a Native American, and enslaved person, an immigrant, or a refugee. This book is devoted to the fourth category. The essays in this volume will study the concept of refuge as well as historical forced displacement and statelessness, trying to provide potential lasting solutions to the many problems associated with this situation. This volume is not only timely but expansive, as it moves from the pressing crisis of refugees to the crisis of humanity that seeks to find refuge.

From refugees to asylum seekers, from climate change to war, from historical uprootedness and displacement to today’s crisis of refugeeism, these topics are mobilizing humanities scholars to think about refugees with a new sense of urgency. This book demonstrates how interdisciplinary cultural approaches grounded in the humanities can transform refugee conversations so often dominated by political science, economics, and other disciplines. In doing so, the collection sets up far more inclusive refugee discussions and urges humanities thinkers to respond by taking the lead in the face of environmental and sociopolitical uncertainties.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781839982507

Book preview

Refugees, Refuge, and Human Displacement

Refugees, Refuge, and Human Displacement

Edited by Ignacio López-Calvo and Marjorie Agosín

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2023

by ANTHEM PRESS

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or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

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© 2023 Ignacio López-Calvo and Marjorie Agosín editorial matter and selection;

individual chapters © individual contributors

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022936483

A catalog record for this book has been requested.

ISBN-13: 978-1-83998-2-484 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-83998-2-489 (Hbk)

Cover Image: Hermosilla Rosenthal Family Collection of the Chilean Artist and Poet Carlos Hermosilla Alvarez, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S.A.

This title is also available as an e-book.

To María Teresa López Calvo and Áureo Rodrigo

To the memory of Elena Gascón Vera and Moisés Agosín

Contents

Introduction

Ignacio López-Calvo and Marjorie Agosín

Index

Introduction

Ignacio López-Calvo and Marjorie Agosín

"Modern Western culture is in large part

the work of exiles, émigrés, refugees."

Edward Said

When Ignacio López-Calvo and I began to ponder and think of this anthology based on the themes of refuge and refugees, we inevitably began to speak about each other’s past. Ignacio shared his daily life in Spain, his friendships, the richness of social life in his city and the ability to connect with strangers, such as a bartender or someone sitting next to us at the bus stop. I also shared with him my extensive Chilean family and how they show up unannounced without the typical formalities we abide in the America of the North.

We are both emigrants by choice and have found a home in an academic community in the United States, Ignacio in the west and I in the east, but our common points of reference always return to our own identities in Spain and Chile. We are both outsiders and insiders in the cultures we share. I am close to this theme since the majority of the generation of my great grandparents and grandparents were refugees from the Nazis and also from the Russian pogroms. This history, to cite Walter Benjamin, is part of the culture of our hearts. Since 2017, Ignacio has been working with Scholars at Risk, the organization mentioned in F. Javier Cevallos’ chapter, as the faculty representative from University of California, Merced. Responding to the urgency of the current situation in Afghanistan, he has led a campaign to bring a scholar at risk from Afghanistan (and his or her family) to teach or do research at his campus until it is safe for them to return to their country. This campaign helped an Afghani scholar at risk, a graduate student, to join the Interdisciplinary Humanities Graduate Group program at his university. UC Merced’s Center for the Humanities, for which he is the director, is coordinating this effort with other University of California campuses as well as organizations like Scholars at Risk and Scholar Rescue Fund, which have extensive experience with this type of work, including the vetting of scholars that will join us at different University of California campuses. This initiative will not only help safeguard academic freedom around the world, but, more importantly, it will also save the lives of some of our colleagues in Afghanistan and those of their families.

This collection speaks about what it means to come from somewhere else by choice or by force. How much of our identity do we bring forth, and what do we hide? How much do we censor ourselves? We have found a sense of commonality in all those who seek refuge and we become portable. We can be displaced from one country and yet be resilient to the reality we want to pursue. We also have in common our Spanish language and the familiarity of our customs. For those displaced and for artists, the loss of language becomes pivotal to the refugee story, but also to the story of irrevocable losses.

The refugee, the emigrant and the expatriate share all these commonalities as if we live on a pendulum that moves from the past to the present. In times of despair and nostalgia, we return to our past. Ignacio and I wanted to compile this anthology because despite the many in the market that speak, filled with statistics and data, about refuge and a crisis or an impending one, they still fail to reveal the complexity of the refuge experience through the lens of humanism, literature. We want to show the refugee through the lens of a compassionate science.

In this volume, we have the voices of medicine and statistics, as well as poetry. We want to show the dramatic consequences of climate change, but also elucidate the lives of those who risk their lives leaving home on foot and in boats because staying at home means death. We want to showcase the individual as well as collective plight, and we believe that this anthology will address what the statistics do not reveal: the human cost of displacement even if it is out of choice and not due primarily out of economic adversity, famine or war.

As the late Argentine writer and professor at Princeton University Silvia Molloy said, Life is always necessarily a tale, we tell it to ourselves as subjects through recollection. We hear it told or we read it when life is not ours. This collection intends to pay close attention to the life that is not ours; to those who seek refuge in music while captive in a detention center in Santiago de Chile or to the refuge nuns sought during the early twentieth century in Peruvian convents in order to escape a world that would force them into marriage. Such essays accompany those on climate change and mental illness in a time of crisis and violence, with art as a path of healing. We also consider that this volume is timely as we are still experiencing the effects of the pandemic and the isolation of social life. We address how emigrants and refugees lose their social life and their culture.

The unity of this collection of chapters affirms the individual diversity in all disciplines and the commonality of medicine and the arts: healing and listening to music, climate change and the search for home. In poetry and neuroscience, we show how, instead of categorizing experiences, we all belong to one another. We convey the emotional aspect of displacement and want to pose the question, what does it mean to stay in a new home, and will it really become a new home? As Ignacio and I create this project, we intend to build bridges rather than fences. We intend to audaciously overcome the disciplines that are not separated but woven together from the sciences to the humanities. We want to share memories of displacements and homecomings, and only when we are able to cross these bridges, do we realize we are all refugees in search of refuge in music and literature, in the power of truth and in the landscape of ourselves.

There is a unique component to this anthology: the ways in which distinguished professionals in their respective fields are in dialogue with others. As an example, doctor Richard Mollica, a leading authority on refugees’ narrative of trauma, speaks from his knowledge and experience of nearly four decades as a psychiatrist, but also from his perspective as a humanist addressing ways in which we can heal. The authors chosen are engaged with the subject matter, but also with how this modern refugee crisis touches our world. The scientist and the humanist, the artist and the poet in this single volume speak to one another and find ways to illuminate the reader with existential questions: What does it mean to leave home? What to take? What to leave? What to hide? These ideas are beautifully expressed in a poem by German Jewish writer Gertrud Kolmar, when she says, Night comes, and I dive into the stars so as not to forget in my soul the way home.

In this collection, we ponder: What is our way home? Where is home? Do we return to it? Do we memorialize it through the complex act of our imagination? The concept of home touches in its individual sacredness, but also in its collective consciousness. We are able to think through these chapters on the subject of what it means to leave your dwelling places. Confucius believed that home with its sacredness and respect should be a model for the world, but what happens when this model is fractured?

The refugee experience explores what it means to be a part of a dislocated world as individuals rather than as mere statistics of this dislocation. Historian Christian Zwick writes about the voyages of Austrian Jews to the Caribbean and especially to Colombia. He vividly describes the historical complexity of Jewish migration to the Americas and then, with the avid eye of an historian who is familiar with oral history, he dwells into the fears and hopes of those occupying these ships. The anthology documents with historical accuracy the plight of refugees in many parts of the world, but also the intimacies of their trauma, their longings and their hopes.

We often think of refugees as outsiders, believing that we do not share much of their world, that they live among us as strangers. This visionary chapter collection will become a teaching moment for its readers, as we are all outsiders and insiders dislocated from our selves. This book shows what it means to write about what is lost and about what can be recovered. This is the importance of adding together the social sciences and medicine science with reflections from the artistic world and the humanities. What does it mean to seek refuge in music? How did women in Chilean concentration camps during the Pinochet dictatorship sing to one another? Cristián Montes speaks of these themes as Bárbara Mujica explores the writings of Spanish nuns in convents.

Indeed, literature and art can sometimes complement the social sciences in powerful ways. For instance, the series En camino (On Their Way, 2001, 2005) by the Argentine multidisciplinary artist Mirta Kupferminc evokes the theme of migration and uprootedness in evocative fashion.¹ The daughter of Holocaust survivors from Hungary and Czechoslovakia, Kupferminc was born and raised in Argentina, where her parents found refuge. She draws from this traumatic family history as inspiration for her art. In the 2001 black-and-white etching, odd figures line up carrying uprooted trees, some seemingly lost in their path, looking for a new home. Though a sense of agony permeates the scene, there is a look of determination in their faces, a will to resiliently face adversity. Perhaps fleeing persecution, a reluctant diaspora is forming. They carry their painful memories of home in the symbolic form of heavy uprooted trees and, in the case of two of the figures, also of cherished objects. Behind the figures, there is simply a black background, no paths, no roads, no destinations. Whereas the two figures on the left seem unencumbered and determined to continue the struggle, the other ones are having a harder time. The first four figures seem to be pulled back by the wind or the heavy weight of the trees they carry. Advancing, for these migrants or refugees, is challenging because of the weight of their past.

FIGURE 1 Mirta Kupferminc, En Camino, 2001.

The themes of expulsion, exile and fragmentation reappear in her 2005 collaboration with Mariana Sosnowski, also titled En camino. This time, going in the opposite direction and with a checked floor to walk on, a large figure advances with determination accompanied by two smaller, strange figures in the distance, one of which seems to be floating. Besides the memories and the heavy burden of their past, the refugees carry with them their native language to foreign lands. As Trinh T. Minh-Ha points out, the diverse Diasporas around the world live in a double exile: away from their native land and away from their mother tongue (12). Writing in one’s mother tongue can, therefore, work as a sort of refuge. In Minh-ha’s words, For a number of writers in exile, the true home is to be found, not in houses, but in writing (34). But there is also an element of hope, of future in these works; not everything is loss and defeat. After all, as Edward Said suggests: The essential privilege of the exile is to have, not just one set of eyes but half a dozen, each of them corresponding to the places you have been. … There is always a kind of doubleness to that experience, and the more places you have been the more displacements you’ve gone through, as every exile does. As every situation is a new one, you start out each day anew (48).

FIGURE 2 Still from Mirta Kupferminc and Mariana Sosnowski, En Camino, 2005.

Forced displacement, statelessness and the omnipresence of asylum seekers and refugees—innocent people uprooted from their homes by war, climate change, natural catastrophes, economic collapse, terrorism—have been one the most challenging problems for the international community for several decades. Only in 2019, almost 1,900 environmental catastrophes caused almost 25 new internal displacements in 140 countries and territories, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council. This number is three times larger than the displacements because of conflicts or violence. As a result, the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), the lead international United Nations agency coordinating refugee protection, continues to struggle to deal with so many simultaneous dire situations worldwide. But rather than organizations, such as UNHCR, governments have the power to make a difference with their empathy and generosity. Demonizing the victims, as some European politicians have done in recent years with Syrian refugees, or simply ignoring the crises can never be the response.

In reality, fewer than 1 percent of all the refugees in the world are resettled in Western nations. It is often within the national borders of the country in conflict or in the neighboring countries (themselves often enduring struggling economies and sociopolitical problems) where uprooted people tend to find refuge. Among the countries that have accepted the largest number of refugees are Turkey (2.5 million), Pakistan (1.6 million), Lebanon (1.1 million) and Iran (1 million). And the countries with the largest number of internally displaced citizens are Colombia (6.9 million), Syria (6.6 million) and Iraq (4.4 million). More than half of these refugees are children, and most travel alone or are separated from their parents.

Today, there are more than 68 million displaced people worldwide. In Asia, almost three million Afghan refugees have been fleeing war for three decades. And after 40 years of persecution and discrimination, which was unfortunately ignored by the international community, over 700,000 Rohingya people were denied citizenship in their own country and forced by Myanmar authorities from Rakhine State into Bangladesh. Thousands, including women and children, were killed in Myanmar, and many who were victims of mass rape are now in need of psychosocial services. Bangladesh, a poor country with limited resources, has generously opened its doors to this vulnerable and persecuted population. Yet Rohingya refugees are still suffering, and children have no access to education.

In South America, according to the UNHCR official website, four-and-a-half million Venezuelans now live abroad (650,000 are asylum seekers), mostly in other Latin American and Caribbean countries (especially Colombia, Peru and Brazil). They had to escape poverty, violence and insecurity, creating the largest exodus in Latin America and one of the world’s largest displacement crises in recent history. Many are without documentation or permission to stay, which makes them vulnerable to exploitation, trafficking and xenophobia. In Central America, Honduran and Salvadoran drug cartels and gangs, along with political persecution and human rights abuses in Nicaragua, have created more than 830,000 refugees.

In Africa, the UNHCR website reports, there are one million Somali refugees. In addition, violent clashes between armed groups in the Central African Republic, one of the poorest countries in the world, have created more than 593,000 new refugees in neighboring countries; 600,000 people have been displaced within the country. Political unrest in Burundi has provoked an economic downturn, with extreme hunger and disease outbreaks, which are responsible for the creation of over 343,233 refugees now living in Tanzania, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This forgotten refugee crisis is the lowest funded in the world.

In the Middle East, the UNHCR website adds, the Iraq War left more than three million people displaced inside the country and 260,000 more left for other countries, fleeing violence and systematic rape. It has been estimated that 11 million Iraqis need humanitarian assistance (1.5 million of them have taken refuge in Kurdistan). More than 190,000 Yemenis have fled war at home, seeking asylum in neighboring countries, and over 22 million need humanitarian assistance. After a decade of armed violence, 5.6 million Syrians have also fled from their country and millions more were displaced and remain trapped within the national borders, in need of protection and shelter, making it one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.

Many in Europe became alarmed, and some politicians took advantage of the presence of Syrian refugees in their country for their own political benefit. Yet numerous studies have shown how refugees can actually provide an economic boost in the host country when they are given legal status and encouraged to be part of the labor force and the local economy.

The Covid-19 pandemic, which has worsened the situation for refugees worldwide, has also brought crises (such as collapsed supply chains) to the West that are, unfortunately, common in other areas of the planet. In fact, there is a lot to learn about crisis management and resolution from these non-Western experiences of epidemics, natural catastrophes, war and other extreme situations in refugee camps all over the world.

These so-called refugee crises are often the result of failed migration politics. In the Europe of the twenty-first century, refugees continue to be abandoned at sea, families die in shipwrecks and tear gas is being used against them with impunity. As Trinh T. Minh-Ha explains,

The myopic view that the refugee problem is Their problem and one on which Our taxpayer’s money should not be wasted is no longer tenable. The tragedy of tidal waves of people driven from their homes by forces beyond their control keeps on repeating itself as victims of power re-alignments, cross-border hostilities and orgies of so-called ethnic cleansing continue to grow to alarming proportions, and detention camps proliferate on the world map without drawing more than fitful sporadic attention from the international community. (46)

The suffering of refugees in the outskirts of Europe has unfortunately become routine, normalized by generalized indifference. The world recently learned about the humiliation and blackmail suffered by refugees in Moria, on the Greek island of Lesbos, after their camp was burned down on September 8–9, 2020. A total of 13,000 refugees were living in the Moria refugee camp (in quarantine because of Covid-19), the largest in Europe. Of these, 9,000 were forced to relocate to a new camp by the sea, a former shooting range of the Greek Army. They were told that unless they moved to the new camp, they would receive no food or medical attention, that they would lose their rights; they were told that unless they moved to the new camp, the procedures to move away from Lesbos would be stopped. Unnecessary suffering everywhere, pregnant women were seen living outside with no food or water. Even worse, in a recent article, The New York Times disclosed that the Greek government has been turning back refugees by abandoning them at sea:

The Greek government has secretly expelled more than 1,000 refugees from Europe’s borders in recent months, sailing many of them to the edge of Greek territorial waters and then abandoning them in inflatable and sometimes overburdened life rafts. Since March, at least 1,072 asylum seekers have been dropped at sea by Greek officials in at least 31 separate expulsions. (Kingsley and Shoumali, n.p.)

This type of forced displacement, as is well known, not only can worsen a deteriorating self-esteem and moral but can also produce long-lasting psychological disorders among refugees beyond the point of resettlement. Unfortunately, as Mai-Linh K. Hong points out,

Today’s refugee regime—the global infrastructure of international and domestic laws, institutions, and legal processes that contour refugee flows—serves mostly a gatekeeping function for wealthy nations, mitigating the costs of refugee crises while fulfilling the humanitarian needs of a tiny percentage of the 70.4 million people who live in indefinite, forced displacement worldwide. Nevertheless, the dominant cultural narratives about the refugee regime that circulate in the Global North are narratives of salvation that center the self-proclaimed rescuers of refugees, or narratives of threat by an encroaching tide of refugee Others. These narratives mask a legal system that sets nearly impossible conditions of survival for refugees—most of whom do not even meet the legal threshold to qualify for protection. And yet refugees, who have dire needs and minimal power, often possess little more than their stories with which to fight for survival. (34)

These stories are among the sources of inspiration for this book. But beyond numbers, individual stories can also illustrate the tragedy. As is well known, the United States government turned down the visa application of the teenaged German-Dutch diarist of Jewish origin Anne Frank (1929–1945). While in hiding from 1942 to 1944, this most famous victim of the Shoah wrote Het Achterhuis ( The Diary of a Young Girl , also known as The Diary of Anne Frank, 1947), where she documented her life during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands during World War II. One cannot help but wonder what a fascinating life Anne Frank could have had, how many more path-breaking books could she have written had she received the visa she applied for. How many more talented, innocent young people like her are we losing today and how many more will we be losing in the next decades?

In an interview published in the academic, online journal Transmodernity in December 2020, the Saharawi intellectual and activist Bahia Mahmud Awah, talking about the source of inspiration for his 2015 poetry collection Versos refugiados (Refugee Verses), states: I was looking for that human condition that any exile needed, the solidarity of others.² That human solidarity that refugees need also inspires this chapter collection. The chapters in our volume study the concept of refuge as well as particular cases of historical forced displacement and statelessness, trying to provide potential lasting solutions to the many problems associated with this situation. This volume is not only timely but expansive, as it moves from the pressing crisis of refugees to the crisis of humanity that seeks to find refuge.

The two chapters that open the volume are of a more theoretical nature. The first one looks at the concept of refuge as a metaphor for empathy in human behavior. Drawing from shared aspects of Plato’s and Nietzsche’s approaches to social identification, Anne Ashbaugh’s "Human Rights across Borders: Oikeiôsis and the Ethics of Sanctuary" examines strategies for restoring enduring empathy and an accompanying willingness to extend human rights across borders. Ashbaugh asks the following questions: Is it possible to experience and motivate in others to value human life without valuing all life? Have human rights become through alienating practices only citizen rights? Outside the law of a given land, what protects and supports life? To address these questions, her chapter discusses two myths and two affirmations that express powerful reasons to proffer refuge and extend empathy, not only toward human beings but also toward all living beings and toward the earth.

The second one, Yael Siman’s Violence, Internal Displacement and Refuge: The Case of Mexico, explains how internal displacement and refuge are experiences that are still differentiated legally and politically, but highly overlapping on the ground. Both internally displaced persons and refugees leave their home in fear of violence, transit through dangerous roads and are not recognized by their own states or others. In the Americas, adds Siman, Mexico stands out as a country with generalized violence and a high number of forced migrants. Recent violence in various localities conducted by state and non-state actors—including criminal groups and drug cartels—has provoked thousands of victims and collective forced displacements of civilians. Displaced persons stay in Mexico or become transborder subjects who inhabit social and political spaces of marginality, danger, stigma and lack of legal protection. In most cases, return remains only an imagined possibility. Thus, Mexico faces a humanitarian crisis of multiple and prolonged displacements that requires immediate attention.

The following three chapters turn to the Jewish diaspora, the Shoah and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. In their beautifully poetic essay Re-storying the Venice Ghetto: The Refugee in Times of Global Crisis, Amanda K. Sharick and Katharine G. Trostel explore how the Venice Ghetto led to a generative dialogue about the system of cultural exchange and the anxiety around containing the other that emerged in 1516, as Jewish bodies were removed from the city’s center by literally encircling them on a kind of make-shift island surrounded by watery canals, connected to the urban space only by bridges and boat. Sharick and Trostel present three case studies of how artists, architects and authors engage in the imaginative practice of world building, as they re-code and re-story the narratives that circulate around the space of the Ghetto. Together, they illuminate a new constellation of memory—a kind of reverse excavation where we start from the traces and absences—following these currents to recall the multiple lives and crises that have crossed the space. According to this chapter, the Ghetto allows us to tell old stories anew. The artifacts explored call attention to these absences, imploring us to bear witness to a 500-year-old site whose lessons continue to profoundly resonate in the present, compelling us to envision new and more just futures: the ruins of a boat carrying migrants in 2015 whose presence calls into question what it means to be a sanctuary city; a poem by the late artist-in-residence Meena Alexander, composed from within and inspired by the Ghetto, which connects the body of a twenty-first-century migrant seeking refuge to the sixteenth-century Jewish poet and Ghetto dweller Sarra Copia Sullam; and an experimental architectural project, GHETTO: Sanctuary for Sale, which imagines a new relationship between tourist and refugee, learning lessons from an old history as it envisions a Venice that embraces its title of civic city.

In the chapter Jewish families from Vienna in the Southern Caribbean during the Shoah, Christian Cwik and Verena Muth describe the diaspora of Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust from Vienna to the South Caribbean. We learn that only some 5,000 Jews, out of the approximately 200,000 who lived in Vienna in early 1938, survived the Shoah. No longer welcomed as citizens after the Anschluss in March 1938, for most Jews who managed to escape the choice of exile depended on different issues, including family ties, professional relationships, visa options and coincidence. This chapter narrates different stories of Viennese families who managed to flee to Colombia as well as to Trinidad and Tobago, analyzing the diverse reasons for their flight, the routes into exile, the integration process and subsequent migrations.

In turn, in the chapter When a Loaf of Bread was not Enough: Unsilencing the Past in Gaza, Sara Roy sheds light about the current humanitarian crisis in Gaza, analyzing its connection to the history of the Palestinian struggle. The first Palestinian uprising or Intifada (1987–1993), claims Roy, was a watershed event in Palestinian history but one that remains largely unknown to most Palestinians, the majority of whom were born almost two decades after the uprising began. Her chapter examines why the first Intifada was so pivotal. Drawn from extensive fieldnotes that the author recorded when she and her husband lived in Gaza during the second year of the Intifada (1988–1989), she describes some of the transformative changes that occurred in Palestinian society at the time and the ways that society unified to withstand deepened repression (the nature of this repression is also addressed). In her view, the changes that emerged during the uprising formed the (unacknowledged) basis of subsequent social and political action on the part of Palestinians and reshaped the nature of the Israeli–Palestinian crisis.

While Sharick and Trostel’s chapter had already analyzed a poem, the following four chapters concentrate even more on cultural production. Thus, Howie Tam, in his chapter "Refugee Racial Form, Vietnam War Legacies, and Late Liberal affects in Freiheit, Little Fish, and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous," analyzes the refugee as a racial form of late capitalism in the global context. Triangulating three cultural texts across three continents—Rowan Woods’s Little Fish (2005, feature film, Australia); Jan Speckenbach’s Freiheit (2017, feature film, Germany); and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019, novel, USA)—his chapter explores how the refugee has been racialized into a palliative counterpoint to the violence of Western late capitalism’s unsustainable living conditions. After demonstrating various expressions of this racial form and meditating on its meaning, Tam examines how the refugee figure can challenge, rather than celebrate, this representational regime and deliver compelling critiques of the precariousness of identity formation and life under globalized capitalism.

For her part, Rocío Quispe-Agnoli, in Writing as Shelter: Refuge and Poetic Space in Hispanic Women’s Writings, addresses refuge as a poetic space, a place of emotional experiences, expectations and anticipations in the writings of Hispanic women authors. Building on Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1958), this chapter examines the actions and reflections about the search and exploration of shelter in the act of writing in the works of Teresa de Cartagena, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Soledad Acosta de Samper and Gabriela Mistral. They wrote about searching for a place, within or beyond the literary text, that would provide safety and survival from the jealousy and rejection of detractors and prosecutors. In their writings, one reads refuge as a literary topic, a desired personal goal and as the act of writing.

Bárbara Mujica, in "Finding Refuge in Your Own Castle: Teresa de Ávila’s Las Moradas," extends the concept of refuge to convents of nuns during colonial times in Spain and Latin America. As she explains, Teresa de Jesús (also known as Teresa de Ávila) lived in a time of religious, social and political upheaval. As an ecstatic, a woman, a reformer and the daughter and granddaughter of conversos (Jewish converts to Catholicism), Teresa was often the focus of censure. However, she learned to find spiritual peace in her own soul. For Teresa, God was the ultimate refuge from the cares of the world, and prayer provided the entry into the depths of the soul, where God resided. She expresses her ideas in Las Moradas (sometimes translated as The Interior Castle and sometimes as The Mansions), which is structured around the metaphor of the soul as a castle made entirely out of diamond and consisting in concentric circles, in which there are many rooms. Through the process of recollection, the soul moves into itself, through the circles, gradually detaching itself from worldly concerns. In the innermost circle, it may meet God in mystical union, although union is not guaranteed. Ultimately, Mujica explains, the mystical experience is galvanizing, leading not to inertia, but to activism, creativity and social engagement.

Now switching to music and singing, Cristián Montes Capó, in Singing as a Refuge in Times of Trauma, reflects upon the importance of music for humans and the ways in which it can become a type of emotional and existential refuge during difficult times. He explores the concept of refuge in its various meanings and levels of significance. After visualizing the importance of music in the face of extreme situations that human beings have suffered over the course of the twenty-first century, the chapter turns to the book Antes de perder la memoria (Before the Memory is Lost) by Ana María Jiménez and Teresa Izquierdo. In this extensive narrative, the two women reveal how music and the songs they sang in whispers in the night helped them survive their long confinement at the Villa Grimaldi detention/torture center and, later, how it held a place in their memory, tied to the human rights violations perpetrated by governmental agents during Chile’s military dictatorship (1973–1990).

Moving on to the field of medical humanities, the next two chapters turn to the topics of refuge for healthcare practitioners and health issues affecting global refugees. In their chapter The Shamanistic Enclave: Building a Refuge for Healthcare Practitioner, Richard F. Mollica, Maria Leister and Laurie L. Charlés concentrate on how to care for medical caretakers. As they explain, if burn-out among healthcare practitioners was high (beyond 50 percent) before the Covid-19 pandemic, currently, the physical and emotional exhaustion of healthcare staff is at dangerous levels, with many doctors and nurses choosing to leave medical practice. Structural racism and health disparities are a component of this burn-out crisis. Their chapter addresses the possibility of creating in the healthcare setting—hospital, clinic, halfway house, nursing homes, veteran’s centers—a refuge and sanctuary for