Refuge fragments,fragmentary refuge

Abstract

This experimental essay shows the ways that Somali Bantu refugees’ experiences of resettlement, especially their encounters with the bureaucracy of immigration and resettlement, fragment what for the refugees are meaningful wholes (such as families), as well as the sometimes creative, though often frustrated, ways they work to re-create wholeness and meaning in their new context. Revealing cognition and feeling in the moment, these fragments challenge the conception of refuge as relief or resolution, the end of the journey. Instead they expose just how fragmentary refuge is, where the fragments, like the experience of refuge, take the form of a puzzle that shows the precarity and uncertainty of refuge. But the stories told in these fragments also push back at their fragmentation by revealing how refugees puzzle through and attempt to control fragmentation, demonstrating the strength of refugee agency and the beautiful potency of their resistances.