100 books like A Seventh Man

The history of refugees in twentieth-century Britain is hardly known. A map at the beginning of Unsettled reveals how many places in Britain feature in this history, all given the title ‘refugee camp’. Accommodation was in tents or in facilities that were repurposed including workhouses, holiday camps, wartime barracks, internment camps, air bases, and prisoner-of-war camps. Unsettled tells the story of life in these camps and is also about the impact of refugees and camps on local communities and the contexts in which refugees and local populations encountered each other. A striking finding is that homeless Britons sometimes lived in the camps alongside refugees. Unsettled is an unsettling read—it challenges the widespread forgettings of refugee camps in Britain and records a time before the state had the power to detain asylum seekers and deprive them of the right to work. 

Thinking about camps and incarceration brings me to Voices from the ‘Jungle’: Stories from the Calais Refugee Camp. I choose this book because it offers insights into the lives and aspirations of refugees who congregated in the refugee camp in the coastal town of Calais in northern France. As such, it is an antidote to much contemporary reportage of refugees as a faceless and anonymous mass. Their vivid first-person accounts testify to the violence and persecution from which they escaped, whether in Afghanistan, Eritrea, Sudan, or Syria, and their subsequent adventures and odysseys, including endless waiting for official decisions or for the opportunity to make their way to the UK to join family or friends. The camp and its residents have been much photographed, but most of these images give little idea of the extent to which the “jungle” became a vibrant community; juxtaposing images and words, as in… show more.

Making Refuge focuses on Somali Bantu refugees who were resettled in the town of Lewiston, Maine in the early 2000s. These refugees had been the focus of Besteman’s earlier research in Somalia in the 1980s. About a decade after Somalia plunged into civil war, Somali Bantus were being resettled in the United States, enabling Besteman to physically reconnect with them. One of the strengths of this book is that it provides rich historical context, giving the reader an overview of the different stages of the refugee experience: the events leading to war and displacement, life in refugee camps in Kenya, and resettlement in the United States.

Making Refuge is also one of the few books that gives ethnographic insight into the refugee resettlement process in the United States. Through its focus on the challenges faced by resettled Somali Bantus, who are Black and Muslim, it questions the assumptions underlying the… show more.

My final choice is a scintillating work of scholarship by Lyndsey Stonebridge, Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham. Entitled Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees, it draws upon a range of reportage, political theory, poetry, and other texts to ask challenging questions about the stance that modern states and citizens in Western societies adopt towards refugees who are sometimes described as distant strangers. By engaging with authors who are relatively well known, such as George Orwell, W.H. Auden, Simone Weil, Samuel Beckett, and the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, and with those who may be less familiar, such as the American journalist Dorothy Thompson (1893-1961) and the contemporary Palestinian Lebanese-born poet Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, Stonebridge insists that it is essential to portray refugees as deserving and demanding something other than charity or humanitarian concern no matter how well-intentioned. Instead, the appropriate response is to demand… show more.

Aira is one of the most interesting novelists alive today, a writer whose wit, energy, and unfailingly restless imagination ensure that his books never follow a straightforward path, and thus always surprise you. Ghosts, my favorite of those books, presents the story of a half-constructed luxury apartment complex, the ghosts who wander its beams and its floors, and the adolescent girl to whom they call. Recommended if you like your ghosts circumambulating and avant-garde.

Deported was one of the first books I read that fully explained the links between deportation and inequality, in both readable and evidence-backed ways.

I appreciate it for the way it uses riveting narratives from deportees themselves, to demonstrate how the unequal conditions of global capitalism spur migration in the first place, while inequality in the United States leads to the criminalization and deportation of men of color.

This book stands out to me in its focus on Black and Afro-Latinx immigrants from the Caribbean, a group known to be targeted by the US War on Drugs, who are often left out of the literature on immigration enforcement and deportation.

This book helped me to understand the reasons people choose to migrate—and, in particular, how big structural changes in the policies and law of the United States can lead to changes elsewhere that makes it hard to avoid migrating. It’s easy to focus either on the particular stories of individual people, or on the big picture of global economics; it’s a rare thing to see these two done together, and done in such a skillful way.

I like this book because is written as a fairy tale, but the story describes the real journey at the Mexican/ US border. A young rabbit named Pancho eagerly awaits his papa’s return. Papa Rabbit left two years ago to travel far away north to find work in the great carrot and lettuce fields to earn money for his family. When Papa does not return home on the designated day, Pancho sets out to find him and heads north.

This anthology contains many of the poems that first made me realise that grim working conditions among China’s underclass were producing an extraordinary cultural response.

The writers of these poems are people who’ve left their rural homes behind to seek a living in the nation’s big cities, places that need their labor but grant them only a chilly welcome. Their poetry, superbly translated here, is about the factory floor, the assembly line, the roar of machines: it’s about amputated fingers, fluorescent lights, ID cards, and tower cranes.

It’s also about homesickness, love affairs, lost hopes, and camaraderie. For me, the book’s most powerful poem is its last, written by Xu Lizhi, who worked in a Foxconn factory making parts for Apple, shortly before he committed suicide in 2014:

I swallowed an iron moon

they called it a screw

I swallowed industrial wastewater and unemployment forms

bent over machines, our youth… show more.

I love the narration of this book. It is rich, lush, and vibrant. Each scene is painted like the sky at sunrise. The main character Esperanza’s journey—from riches to rags, from pampered to grateful, from fearful to hopeful—is very satisfying.

Seeing the world through Esperanza’s viewpoint was heart-wrenching and eye-opening. The ending contains a delightful surprise, which, in my opinion, also makes for a great read.