Review

Comment

12 June 2023

4 min read

Listen to their stories: five good reads by refugee writers

The very least we owe refugees is the courtesy of listening to their stories. As World Refugee Day approaches, Krish Kandiah calls us to go beyond the headlines and recommends five good reads.

Krish Kandiah

Krish is a social entrepreneur partnering across civil society, faith communities, government and philanthropy. He founded The Sanctuary Foundation.

Two young brothers sit next to other, the younger looks to the elder.

Hamed Amiri, author of The Boy with Two Hearts, with his brother.

I heard them calling out to me as I walked down the street.

“Hey Paki, why don’t you go black to your own country?!”

I carried on walking. I was 14 years old, and I had heard it all before. In fact, I couldn’t remember a day when I didn’t face a similar verbal barrage at some point. It didn’t get any easier. It always hurt.

When you are told something over and over again, you can start to believe it is true. But I wasn’t from Pakistan. None of my family members were from Pakistan. I had been born in the Sussex County Hospital in Brighton. I had a British passport – as did my parents.

That group of people on the other side of the road were making judgments about me that were entirely wrong. I had to remind myself – like I did every day: they were the ones who were out of place, not me. They were the ridiculous ones, not me.

I flashback to that moment sometimes as immigration persists as a top news story. Most days in the media I hear someone say today’s equivalent of “Hey Paki, why don’t you go back to your own country?! The derision is there, the bigotry, the racism, the aim to exclude and to humiliate, the false assumptions and preconceptions.

It’s time to hear the other side of the story. Who are the refugees that are coming here? Why are they coming? What has happened to them to make them stay in a country that is not always as welcoming as it should be? How does it feel to be an asylum-seeker or refugee in the UK right now? For refugees who have faced not just verbal abuse but physical assault, threats of torture and death the very least we owe them is the courtesy of listening to their stories.

As we approach World Refugee Day on 20th June I would like to recommend you to spend some time listening not just to the polarising rhetoric but those about whom they are talking. The best way is to spend time in person with those who have been forced to flee their homes. The second-best way is to read books written by or about refugees. The following are some of the most powerful I have read recently:

The Lightless Sky by Gulwali Passarly

A book cover shows a the head and body of a person silhouetted against a dusty sky.

This beautifully written book will not only give you fresh insight into life in Afghanistan but will help you understand why there are unaccompanied asylum-seeking young Afghan boys in the UK. Gulwali explains his dangerous childhood in Afghanistan and why his family paid to have him taken out of the country. This book draws you into the world of a young boy proud of his heritage but fleeing a war zone that ripped his family apart. Gulwali’s journey takes him from the mountains of Afghanistan with his grandfather to a rollercoaster of a life in the UK and how he became a carrier of the Olympic torch and an outspoken advocate for refugee rights.

The Boy with Two Hearts by Hamed Amiri

A book cover collage shows two brothers above an outline of one of their heads against a desert background

I saw this gripping tale of Hamed and his family performed at the National Theatre in London. It begins with Hamed’s mother Fariba taking the brave decision to give a public speech against the injustices of the Taliban in Afghanistan. The Taliban issued an execution order against her which would likely have led to her death. The family sell their possessions and head out of Afghanistan to get anywhere they can to safety. There are added complications to their already challenging circumstances as Hussein, Hamed’s older brother needs urgent life-saving heart surgery. It’s a nail-biting story of love and loss told with grace as the family travel across seven countries to find sanctuary finally in Wales.

My Fourth Time, We Drowned by Sally Hayden

A boat used for smuggling migrants is paraded in a protest. Death notices of dead migrants are attached to the side

A boat used for smuggling migrants is paraded in a Berlin protest. Dead migrants are commemorated by death notices attached to its side.

Sally Hayden did not plan to write a book about the world’s most dangerous migration route but when she received direct social media messages from refugees imprisoned in a Libyan detention centre her life was turned upside down. This gritty story has won numerous awards for outstanding journalism and opens up readers eyes to the desperate situation faced by asylum seekers in the Middle East and Europe. Sally writes with great precision and detail and offers a candid and challenging picture of life for those forced to flee from countries such as Sudan, Eritrea, Syria and Afghanistan.

You Don’t Know What War Is by Yeva Skalietska

A book cover shows an illustration of a sunflower against a blue background.

Yeva Skalietska, aged 12, was sleeping soundly in her bed at her grandmother’s house when suddenly she was jolted awake by a noise that sounded like a car being crushed into scrap metal. She soon came to realise that a rocket attack was taking place in her home city of Kharkiv, Ukraine. Her gripping tale of those first few weeks of the Russian invasion told from a child’s perspective somehow brings home the reality of war in a most chilling and urgent way. It made me consider how my children would have dealt with all she had to go through.

No Place Like Home refugee book festival

If you would like to hear refugee authors such as the ones above telling their stories in person, the ‘No Place Like Home’ Literary Festival is taking place on World Refugee Day, 20th June, St Martin-in-the-Fields Church, Trafalgar Square. A full list of speakers, and tickets, subject to availability, can be found in this link.

No Place Like Home

Article

Comment

Education

Leading

26 July 2024

5 min read

Why I teach over my students’ heads

Successful teaching is a work of empathy that stretches the mind.

James K.A. Smith

James is a philosopher, cultural critic and author.

A blackboard covered in chalk writing and highlights.

James's chalkboard.

I’ve been teaching college students for almost 30 years now. As much as I grumble during grading season, it is a pretty incredible way to make a living. I remain grateful.

I am not the most creative pedagogue. My preference is still chalk, but I can live with a whiteboard (multiple colors of chalk or markers are a must). Over the course of 100 minutes, various worlds emerge that I couldn’t have anticipated before I walked into class that morning. (I take photos of what emerges so I can remember how to examine the students later.) I think there is something important about students seeing ideas—and their connections—unfold in “real time,” so to speak.

I’ve never created a PowerPoint slide for a class. I put few things on Moodle, and only because my university requires it. I’ve heard people who use “clickers” in class and I have no idea what they mean. I find myself skeptical whenever administrators talk about “high impact” teaching practices (listening to lectures produced the likes of Hegel and Hannah Arendt; what have our bright shiny pedagogical tricks produced?). I am old and curmudgeonly about such “progress.”

But I care deeply about teaching and learning. I still get butterflies before every single class. I think (hope!) that’s because I have a sense of what’s at stake in this vocation.

I am probably most myself in a classroom. As much as I love research, and imagine myself a writer, the exploratory work of teaching is a crucial laboratory for both. I love making ideas come alive for students—especially when students are awakened by such reflection and grappling with challenging texts. You see the gears grinding. You see the brow furrowing. Every once in a while, you sense the reticence and resistance to an insight that unsettles prior biases or assumptions; but the resistance is a sign of getting it. And then you see the light dawn. I’m a sucker for that spectacle.

This is how the hunger sets in. If you can invite a student to care about the questions, to grasp their import, and experience the unique joy of joining the conversation that is philosophy.

Successful teaching is, fundamentally, a work of empathy. As a teacher, you have to try to remember your way back into not knowing what you now take for granted. You have to re-enter a student’s puzzlement, or even apathy, to try to catalyze questions and curiosity. Because I teach philosophy, my aim is nothing less than existential engagement. I’m not trying to teach them how to write code or design a bridge; I’m trying to get them to envision a different way to live. But, for me, it’s impossible to separate the philosophical project from the history of philosophy: to do philosophy is to join the long conversation that is the history of philosophy. So we are always wresting with challenging, unfamiliar texts that arrive from other times that might as well be other planets for students in the twenty-first century.

So successful teaching requires a beginner’s mindset on the part of the teacher, a charitable capacity to remember what ignorance (in the technical sense) feels like. To do so without condescension is absolutely crucial if teaching is going to be an art of invitation rather than an act of alienation. (The latter, I fear, is more common than we might guess.)

Such empathy means meeting students where they are. But successful teaching is also about stretching students’ minds and imaginations into new territory and unfamiliar habits of mind. This is where I find myself especially skeptical of pedagogical developments that, to my eyes, run the risk of infantilizing college students. (I remember a workshop in which a “pedagogical expert” explained that the short attention span of students required changing the PowerPoint slide every 8 seconds. This does not sound like a recipe for making students more human, I confess.)

That’s why I am unapologetic about trying to teach over my students’ heads. I don’t mean, of course, that I’m satisfied with spouting lectures that elude their comprehension. That would violate the fundamental rule of empathy. But such empathy—meeting students where they are—is not mutually exclusive with also inviting them into intellectual worlds and conversations where they won’t comprehend everything.

This is how the hunger sets in. If you can invite a student to care about the questions, to grasp their import, and experience the unique joy of joining the conversation that is philosophy, then part of the thrill, I think, is being admitted into a world where you don’t “get” everything.

This gambit—every once in a while, talking about ideas and thinkers as if students should know them—is, I maintain, still an act of empathy.

When I’m teaching, I think of this in a couple of ways. At the same time that I am trying to make core ideas and concepts accessible and understandable, I don’t regret talking about attendant ideas and concepts that will, to this point, still elude students. For the sharpest students, this registers as something to learn, something to be curious about. Or sometimes when we’re focused on, say, Pascal or Hegel, I’ll plant little verbal footnotes—tiny digressions about how Hannah Arendt engaged their work in the 20th century, or how O.K. Bouwsma’s reading of Anselm is akin to something we’re talking about. The vast majority of students won’t be familiar with either, but it’s another indicator of how big and rich and complicated the intellectual cosmos of philosophy is. For some of these students (not all, certainly), this becomes tantalizing: they want to become the kind of people for whom a vast constellation of ideas and thinkers are as familiar and present as their friends and cousins. This becomes a hunger to belong to such a world, to join such a conversation.

This gambit—every once in a while, talking about ideas and thinkers as if students should know them—is, I maintain, still an act of empathy. To both meet students where they are and, at the same time, teach “over their heads,” is an invitation to stretch into new terrain and thereby swell the soul into the fullness for which it was made. The things that skitter just over their heads won’t be on the exam, of course; but I’m hoping they’ll chase some of them for a lifetime to come.

This article was originally published on James K A Smith’s Substack Quid Amo.