Papers, an extraordinary book that tells stories of asylum seekers in France
Plus, book club this month on Alexander Chee’s Edinburgh
We arrived in Paris in 2013 and 2014, shortly before the migrant “crisis” began. A confluence of geopolitical catastrophes—civil wars in Libya and Syria, a new phase in the war in Iraq that saw the rise of the radical group ISIS—pushed millions of people out of their countries and in the direction of Europe. In 2015 alone, more than 1.3 million people sought asylum there, the largest number since World War II.
We tried our best to come to terms with the situation as we watched the influx of migrants fundamentally change the city, the country, the national politics. In the meantime, there were the related, if not directly linked, political crises in Paris, such as the Charlie Hebdo shootings and the November 2015 attacks, which further shifted the way people conceived of who was European and not European, French and not French. One of our dearest colleagues at our university, Ziad Majed, a leading expert and activist on the Syrian War, gave inspiring talks almost every day on the historical origins of the crisis and what we could do. The university sponsored a Syrian refugee to become a student; we supported students who worked directly with migrants. We think of those years as a daily education.
Violaine Schwartz’s powerful Papers feels like a reeducation. The book has jolted us into thinking about how we lived those years. What we learned wasn’t wrong, per se, but perhaps we missed the stories that truly mattered, missed the people right in front of us: in the park, on the street. Reading it, we felt the ache you get when you know you’ve neglected something crucial, passed up the possibility of connection. While we lived in Paris we learned about the geopolitics of migration, we learned about the historical origins of the refugee crises, we visited a university jointly occupied by migrants and students, we tried to start programs connected to immigration and incarceration. But we didn’t make that final leap of engaging directly with migrants, of learning their individual stories and the sorrows they had faced. As one French volunteer mentions in Schwartz’s book:
Everybody knows there are people drowning at sea,
kids sleeping under bridges,
violent and arbitrary arrests,
you just have to look around in Paris,
just turn on the TV,
but in a way, it’s all still an abstraction.
Three hundred thousand people.
It’s just a number.
Hard to put a face to it.
It’s better than not knowing, but it’s an abstract kind of knowledge.
Things take on meaning when you can put a face to them.
This is a democratic society.
Originally published in French in 2019, Papers centers the individual stories of migrants. A writer, performer, and musician, Schwartz was commissioned to record the stories of current and former asylum seekers in Besançon, a city on the Swiss border. She interviewed ten people seeking asylum, read their cases, and attended their hearings. In Paris, she met with other migrants and visited Français Langue d’Accueil, a language school and cultural center that provides comprehensive services to refugees. She also talked to the people working in such associations, and to people who were called more broadly to welcome migrants into their society.
Schwartz presents these stories in an innovative, absorbing way. They appear in a form that combines monologue and poetry. It feels “like” oral history but is more organized, lyrical, and spare. It has the sense of being both mediated and unmediated, edited and unedited, containing silences yet reaching to say the unsayable. Reading these people’s stories, you don’t feel shielded from what they’ve endured, nor do they feel like objects of the author’s manipulation, points to be scored in a debate. At the heart of Papers is a radical project of listening: “To just listen,” the author writes in her introduction. “To listen to those words and write them down.”
The resulting narratives have pushed us to reexamine some of the spaces we traveled through, how our own geography and experience of the city are so radically different from that of the migrant. “I used to walk through the Jardin Villemin every day but I never saw them,” admits a French Dari speaker who later creates an association offering services to help migrants integrate. (Dari is a variety of Persian spoken in Afghanistan.) We used to live a stone’s throw away from the Jardin Villemin; that’s where we took baby P. on our first stroll to a park. But we never saw “them” either.
Our reference points are different. We also lived not far from Gare de l’Est, the departure station for trains to cities in the east of France. For Afghan refugees, it’s a true landmark:
The day I arrived in Paris,
that day,
right away I looked for the Gare de l’Est train station because, on the way here, I had heard about a place with lots of Afghans called the Gare de l’Est.
Back home everybody knows about the park by the Gare de l’Est.
It’s more famous than the Eiffel Tower.
I talked to people there and little by little I found some friends.
I found out how I could take a shower, how I could get something to eat.
I slept on the street for six months.
Gare de l’Est appears again in the story of another Afghan migrant, who is taken to a nearby park and given a blanket:
What, there’s no bed for me? No camps? No gymnasiums?
I was truly surprised.
This wasn’t how I thought France would be.
How am I supposed to sleep outside in the cold?
You layer your clothes. Even if they’re dirty, it’s okay, it’s to protect yourself.
Otherwise you’ll get sick or even dead.
I did as he said.
I found a blanket and some clothes.
Right next to the Gare de l’Est, there’s a place where you can sleep under the archway of a building. Under people’s apartments.
A lot of Afghans used to sleep there.
Now they’ve blocked it off with metal fences. You can’t go there anymore.
I ran into three people there who I had met in Istanbul.
Only in France did I have to sleep outside.
In Istanbul I was in an apartment for refugees.
In Greece too, there were beds for us. Three euros a day.
It’s a whole industry.
In Italy there are big camps.
Only in Paris is there nothing.
Papers has changed our spatial awareness, broadening our geography of the crisis. Until we read this book, we had imagined the refugee crisis as primarily centered around the conflicts in Syria and Iraq; we’d linked it to the evils of the American invasion of Iraq and the subsequent repercussions it created.
But the book’s opening story comes from an Azeri orphaned by the Nagorno–Karabakh war that began in 1988. Another comes from a Mauritanian, forced out of the country in 1989 by anti-Black violence enacted by Saddam Hussein’s Baathist allies. (“They arrested all the blacks in the Mauritanian government,” she says, “and they killed, killed, killed. […] If you don’t want problems, get rid of all the blacks, Saddam Hussen said.”) Yet another comes from a teenager escaping notoriously murderous loan sharks in Kosovo. These stories make us think differently about the geographies and timelines of global displacement and forced migration. While we can hear the legacies of imperialism and Western colonialism behind all of them, they are not the sole drivers, nor is the United States the only major colonial power worthy of disdain here.
The narratives in the book have also made us rethink our relationship to time. In 2015 we were newly married, living in a new place and a new language, working at a new institution with teaching responsibilities for the first time. We were both working on our first books. Everything seemed possible. The migrants, for their part, talk about the asylum process as a state of endless waiting and uncertainty. One migrant from Ethiopia says:
Waiting.
That’s all you do.
He waits a year for his immigration hearing. When he arrives at his appointment, the state has assigned him a translator who speaks Amharic but not Oromo, his native language. Suddenly time accelerates: when he complains, the authorities tell him this hearing will be his only chance.
Much of this purgatory is man-made, created by bureaucratic systems that nobody can navigate. Years of work preparing a legal case thrown out the window on a technicality. Endless counters, forms, papers to fill out. And of course, as many of the stories attest, these people so often don’t have the requisite papers—birth certificates, passports—to move through the system. Some refer to themselves as having been “Dublined”—forced to apply for asylum in the European country where you landed. This is shorthand for the Dublin III Regulation, a cruel, tricky agreement by the EU to keep migrants from reaching their destination countries. Here’s one of the Afghans:
When I got to Paris, I went to the main Prefecture.
You’re not allowed to apply for asylum in France. You have to wait at least ten months, until your procedure with Hungary expires.
I had been Dublin Procedured.
Dublined to Hungary.
One day I received a deportation order.
I had to turn myself in at the Prefecture to be sent back to Hungary.
That day, I went into hiding.
For ten months I stayed in hiding.
I had to avoid getting arrested at all costs, or else it was back to Hungary.
Indeed, people go to horrifying lengths to avoid getting fingerprinted and sent back to where they came from. In Paris, when we were first learning about this, we showed students Sylvain George’s 2010 film Qu'ils reposent en révolte - Des figures de guerre, which follows migrants who have been trapped in Calais for three years, hoping to make it to Britain. In one of the most difficult scenes, some of them sit around a fire; at first it appears they’re just trying to stay warm, but then it becomes clear that they’re trying to burn off their fingerprints. Others use razor blades.”‘They are making us slaves, you know, slaves of their own country, by this fingerprint,” one says. Another chants and prays: “Some day Europeans will have to flee to Africa.”
Elsewhere, a French person hosting Issa, an underage migrant from Mali who was chosen by the elders in his village to find work in Europe and send money back home, wonders at the migrant’s existence in France, worrying that it may become a kind of purgatory:
He's starting to realize what's in store for him here.
And contrary to what they told him in his village, it’s no bed of roses.
It's a life of debt repayment through unskilled and thus poorly paid labor. A life in a shelter.
A bachelor’s life, at that.
The golden age of immigration is over, the years when, even if it was hard, there was a family reunification policy.
Not anymore.
It's a lonely life, scraping by on odd jobs and little hustles, living hand to mouth.
Forty years of that.
The stories in this book can be unrelenting: the horrors of ethnic cleansing, deaths at sea, harrowing trips in suffocatingly tiny spaces. But there are also stories of real hope, of empathy, of possibility. In a series of chapters titled “Of Hospitality,” we see French people grappling with the situation and extending a hand to help. They form associations like Français Langue d’Accueil to teach migrants French and help them prepare for their asylum interviews. They turn vacant rooms into homes for weary refugees. A retired military man mobilizes his community—against resistance—to convert an empty apartment into housing for ten members of an Iraqi Christian family forced to flee ISIS. Here’s Issa’s host:
I remember there was this old woman in Calais who was taking in people from the streets,
to her it seemed like the natural thing to do,
she was convicted of smuggling and sentenced harshly.
And so when you keep hearing these stories over and over, you finally say to yourself:
And you? What are you doing about it?
I’m not religious. I’m not talking about compassion.
I’d say it’s more a question of fraternity. La fraternité.
Another version of this book—written in that knowing, cynical tone that we loathe—would have represented the role of the “helper” differently, casting it in a skeptical, ironic, or overly self-aware light. But in Papers the people who become makeshift tutors and novice activists feel just as human and complex as those trying to find refuge. Their stories are told in the same form, the same hybrid of poetry and oral history.
The intermixing of these stories—of citizen and asylum seeker, of “native” and foreigner, of those seeking refuge and those offering it—conjures a moving, tentative vision of what restoration might look like. Issa, facing down forty years of drudgery and forced labor, is taken by his host to the Musée des Arts et Métiers (one of our favorite museums in Paris):
He was fascinated by what he saw.
The printing system, the first presses.
He’s discovering things that we take for granted.
Things whose magic we've forgotten.
In the room with the measuring instruments, there's a mechanical model of the solar system from the seventeenth century.
An incredible piece of work with rotating gears, etc.
He said: It's beautiful!
And it's true, the object was beautiful, he just didn't know what it was.
So I explained the solar system to him:
That's the Sun and that's the Earth and you know the Earth revolves around the Sun.
Really?
Really.
And the Earth spins on its own axis too.
And so you explain planetary rotation, basically from scratch.
I don't know what he'd been taught before, but he was overcome with joy.
We wish this book had existed during our time in France. We would have put it in the hands of every student arriving in our classroom. We always wanted to do more while we were there but never knew quite where to start. Papers is a glimpse of what you can do to help, no matter where you live.
In short, go and read this book. It’s received a marvelous translation by Christine Gutman, and its beautiful watercolor cover, designed by James David Lee, is alone worth the price of admission. Full disclosure: the founders of the independent press that published Papers, Fern Books, are dear friends of ours. But trust us on this one: it’s an amazing book, perfect material for people teaching courses related to migration and for people wondering what they can do to be part of the solution. You don’t want to miss it.
Favorite Excerpts from Papers
This book speaks for itself. For that reason we share a few excerpts that give you a sense of its breadth and tone.
An asylum seeker from Afghanistan learns French in twenty days:
The situation is terrorful in Afghanistan.
Sorry, I mean terrible.
Why?
Because you’re Hazara.
Why?
Because you’re Shiite.
Why?
Because you’re honest.
We’re not guilty. We don’t make war.
That is why they kill us.
It was almost summer but still, it was hard.
I couldn't wait to apply for asylum in France.
I went to France Terre d’Asile, I stood in line and I got an appointment for twenty days later.
And then I thought: I have to learn French, very fast.
I bought a notebook and a pen to learn in the streets.
I asked people walking by, in English:
Hello, how can I say hello in French?
How do I say goodbye?
In Mauritania, a mother of six describes the violence of white Moors against Black people and how she lost her husband. One day he was arrested by the white Moors and went into hiding in a garage. Then Kuwait was liberated. “Everywhere there were husbands coming home that day,” she says. But racism persisted:
Alright, now back to work, I told him. There are thousands and thousands who are dead but you, you are still here. Light of my eyes. You must go to work.
So in the end he went back to work but he couldn’t do a thing.
He was the boss but he had lost all his power.
The white Moors were the ones giving the orders.
Cissé had to bow his head and that’s that.
It was unbearable for him.
Sometimes he refused to go to work.
Don't make trouble with the white Moors, I told him.
But he couldn’t help it.
I am not your slave. I am nobler than you. If you want to kill me, go on and kill me. I don’t care, but I will not walk behind you. Never, ever.
That is why we had to go into exile.
The Kosovan teenager, who has just turned eighteen and been kicked off his family’s visa, tries to appeal his deportation by making the case for why he should be allowed to stay in France:
The problem is they don’t even open your file. They don’t look.
They have their answer already.
My lawyer asked the Prefecture for a document stating that I was deported to Kosovo by the French police, but we haven’t been able to get it.
It is very, very shitty.
I went to the police,
Who told me to ask the Prefecture,
Who told me to ask the border police,
Who told me to ask the Prefecture.
Adding insult to injury, he is told that all his documents are fake:
But the judge says I never went back to Kosovo.
That I’m lying.
That it’s not true.
But wasn’t it the French police who came to take me away?
Not true, they tell me.
And the document they gave me at the border?
The document that says that on January 6, 2016 I left Kosovo for Serbia.
We know how things work where you’re from. It’s a fake.
And the new passport I got there?
It’s a fake.
And the doctor’s certificate saying I’d been beaten there?
Same. It’s a fake.
And the photo of me on Facebook where you see me in my hometown, Prizren?
It’s a fake.
That’s absurd. I don’t even know how to fake a Facebook photo.
The narrator of the opening story, born in Armenia to Azerbaijani parents, remembers when “there was no conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, there were even intermarriages.” But when she was thirteen, her parents were killed in a pogrom. ”I just wanted to join my parents in death,” she writes. She continues:
So I ended up with Rima.
With Rima I was homeschooled, because I couldn’t go out, I had no papers, it was war every day and I had Azeri blood in my veins.
Forget all that, Rima told me.
Erase that word from your head.
Azeri.
It’s over.
We’ll say you’re Armenian, we’ll say your parents went to Russia to work, we’ll say I’m watching you, you’ll go out as little as possible.
There was a big library in her apartment.
I just read all day long.
Read and learned.
I had nothing else to do.
Except sometimes when we went to see her cousin, he was my age.
But that wasn’t very often.
It was the books that held me up.
It was the books that saved me.
Rima was single, she was happy to have me around, we got along well.
She didn’t replace the emptiness but we got along well.
She explained to me that not everyone in the country wanted to kill me.
Not all of them.
Because every night I thought:
Will it happen again?
Like in the village?
Like that day?
I went home, there was nothing left.
No house.
No one.
Nothing.
I have no photos.
I have nothing.
Nothing left of my parents.
Sometimes I try to dream to see if I remember their faces.
I don’t.
I see different faces every time.
I’m your mother, I’m your father, they say in my ear, but how do I know?
I’ve lost the key to knowing where I come from.
It burned with everything else.
But you have to keep going.
You can read all of this chapter here.
Some links:
We loved this piece by Taiwan Plus News about indigenous Tao people in Orchid Island building a boat to cross the sea to the Philippines.
Thanks to musicologist David Wilson for the terrific meditation on language learning in Taiwan. “After decades of Taiwanification, standard Mandarin is no longer a prerequisite for getting ahead in life,” he writes. “As such, an ever shrinking proportion of young people take the time to mask their Taiwanese accents.”
We’ve been very much enjoying Kerim Friedman’s Triptych, a newsletter that delivers three items to your mailbox three times a month. Kerim is an anthropologist based in Taiwan. His latest triptych led us to Ustad Noor Bakhsh, the Pakistani musician going global in his seventies. (Listen to the video embedded—as one person says, it’s “virtuosic, full of spiritual energy.”)
This searing Harper’s piece by Krithika Varagur explores how couples in Nigeria often break up if their hypothetical child has a risk of getting sickle cell anemia. Varagur asks, “What is worth sacrificing to be with the person you love?”
An interview with Jacob Mikanowski for the History Extra podcast on his brilliant new book, Goodbye, Eastern Europe.
The wonderful Jake Lamar has a book coming out in the United States, Viper’s Dream. Inventive and fast-paced, it’s set in the jazz scene of mid-century Harlem.
If you’ve missed previous posts on asylum and immigration, read guest essayist Kevin Pham on his parents’ journey from Vietnam and our interview with Julia Valero at RAICES, Sofia Kalogirou at The Florence Project, and Nicole Ramos at Al Otro Lado. For a perspective from Taiwan, read our piece on the Burmese community in Taipei and our guest essayist Bonny Ling’s moving piece about the 700,000 migrant workers in Taiwan.
Book Club: Alexander Chee’s Edinburgh and Melissa Fu’s Peach Blossom Spring
It was so satisfying to talk to everyone about JoAnn Tompkins’s What Comes After, exploring restorative justice and the Quaker faith. Our next book club is on Alexander Chee’s Edinburgh and it takes place Friday, July 28th at 6 PM EST / Saturday, July 29th at 6 AM Taiwan time. In August we’ll read Melissa Fu’s Peach Blossom Spring. You can reply to this email for the Zoom link. All are welcome!
Excited to learn that a copy of this book is sitting on a shelf at an independent bookstore in Soho right now/ A week or so ago, roughly 1000 migrants were bussed to a building, retrofitted, I suspect, for tech companies that never came, not far from where I live in Brooklyn. Volunteers with these languages needed: Creole, Spanish, Russian, French. Conditions are bad, by design: the Mayor wants the message to be: Keep moving. You don't want to stay in NYC.
This is so beautiful—thank you for sharing this gift today.