Rebel Sisters
Page 38
The illness that sweeps through the refugee population in Alabast is based on the real-life cases of hundreds of refugee children in Sweden who, upon hearing that their families were to be deported, fell into coma-like conditions. For that aspect of this novel, I relied heavily on reporting done in 2017 by Rachel Aviv of The New Yorker. Relatedly, I drew from Patrick Kingsley’s work in The Guardian, reporting from Joshua Hersh in Virginia Quarterly Review, and others who have done the necessary work of chronicling the perilous, unfathomably brave journeys undertaken by those fleeing conflict zones and other arenas of oppression for what they hope will be a place where they can build a life for themselves and their families. A number of pieces shed light on how host countries treat their new arrivals, notably Mac McClelland’s investigation for The New York Times Magazine of a Turkish camp holding Syrian refugees; additionally, Jonathan Blitzer of The New Yorker documents in detail the tragically incomplete and often hostile attitude that US governmental policy has held toward Central American migrants seeking asylum in the United States.
For the story that Xifeng tells in Chapter 28, I relied upon the “China cables” series in The Guardian on the efforts by the government of the People’s Republic of China geared toward the repression of Uyghur Muslims, specifically their detention in camps in Xinjiang. Among the reporters in the series detailing the conditions in which that minority community is forced to live are Emma Graham-Harrison and Juliette Garside, Kate Lyons, Lily Kuo, and Tahir imin Uighurian, who, in one report, provides harrowing first-person testimony. Sarah Topol writes of the devastating toll of governmental policies on one family in particular in The New York Times Magazine. Ben Mauk, in a September 2019 issue of the London Review of Books, tells the story of several Kazakhs and Uyghur Muslims who suffered legal consequences not just as a result of their activism but also because of their ethnic identities. His work on the subject can also be found in The Believer. Matt Rivers and Lily Lee have written about the Xinjiang internment camps for CNN, and Isobel Cockerell’s exposé in Wired was immensely instructive regarding the ways in which the Chinese government’s surveillance apparatus has been utilized to facilitate the oppression faced by these communities in the Uyghur autonomous region. For how a surveillance apparatus may be similarly used in the United States, I recommend Mark Harris’s reporting on Palantir in Wired. All of the aforementioned writers were invaluable resources in my research, in ways both obvious and less so, and to them, I am grateful.
The Jungle referred to in Rebel Sisters takes its name from the Calais Jungle, a former migrant and refugee encampment in northern France whose population swelled in 2015 as a result of the European migrant crisis. Prior to its demolition in 2016, it was estimated to have held 8,143 people, according to a census conducted by UK-based NGO “Help Refugees.” The Jungle features in Gulwali Passarlay’s memoir The Lightless Sky and the documentary film L’héroïque lande, la frontière brûle (English title: The Wild Frontier). Additionally, filmmaker Sue Clayton made a film, Calais Children, which follows the lives of several children before and after the final camp eviction. Another invaluable piece of storytelling that informed some of the decisions I made in Rebel Sisters was the film L’escale (English title: Stop-Over), directed by Kaveh Bakhtiari. In it, Amir, an Iranian immigrant in Athens, owns a flat that other migrants pass through on their way to Western countries. Bakhtiari stayed in the flat of one of the characters and smuggled footage out to Switzerland every month to tell these stories.
What I’ve done with this book isn’t nearly as perilous and not nearly as brave, but I hope it is done in the same spirit: to draw attention to the plight suffered by so many who want simply what we—what I—have for so long taken for granted. A home.
Lastly, my unending gratitude to Jeannie Chan. For the Cantonese. And for all the rest.
All mistakes are my own.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tochi Onyebuchi holds a B.A. from Yale, an MFA in Screenwriting from Tisch, a Masters degree in Global Economic Law from L'institut d'études politiques, and a J.D. from Columbia Law School. His writing has appeared in Asimov's and Ideomancer, among other places. Tochi is also the author of Beasts Made of Night and Crown of Thunder.
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