«Refugee Day»

When you are interviewing refugees, each person you talk to has a different story that could come from a horror movie. So many people talk about seeing their families get murdered before their eyes. Then I go to Central Park, and people are talking about their third divorce and paying tuition.

Brandon Stanton

Taking Mum’s hand, I whispered "Are we really safe, here?”

(Walk in My Shoes)

Alwyn Evans

As long as there are people in exile, there will be people who want to get back to their native soil.

(The Goblins of Eros)

Warren Eyster

Because we were not in our country, we could not use our own languages, and so when we spoke our voices came out bruised. When we talked, our tongues thrashed madly in our mouths, staggered like drunken men. Because we were not using our languages we said things we did not mean; what we really wanted to say remained folded inside. trapped. In America we did not always have the words. It was only when were were by ourselves that we spoke in our real voices. When we were alone we summoned the horses of our languages and mounted their backs and galloped past skyscrapers. Always, we were reluctant to come back.

(We Need New Names)

NoViolet Bulawayo

It is as if families on the run are shattered by something other than just grenades. The flight and fear tears us apart and those parts land in all kinds of places - we don’t even know where. But we always try to find them afterwards.

(Tea-Bag)

Henning Mankell

When I arrived in America, though I had left the war physically far behind, in my mind, the soldiers were still chasing to kill me, my stomach was always hungry, and my fear and distrust kept me from opening up to new friendships. I thought the war was over when I left Cambodia, but I realize now that for survivors and all those involved, the war is never over just because the guns have fallen silent.

Loung Ung

But if the world measures a refugee according to the worst story, we will always excuse human suffering, saying it is not yet as bad as someone else’s.

Victoria Armour-Hileman

In our hearts we know that with a different fate, we, too, could be in the ranks of the dispossessed, stripped of our identities and belonging nowhere. The refugee becomes a sinister symbol of what can quickly happen once personhood is denied and people are transformed into disposable units of contemptible impediments to the greed or power-mongering of others.

(Person-Centred Therapy Today: New Frontiers in Theory and Practice)

Dave Mearns

Aunt Fostalina says when she first came to America she went to school during the day and worked nights at Eliot’s hotels, cleaning hotel rooms together with people from countries like Senegal, Cameroon, Tibet, the Philippines, Ethiopia, and so on. It was like the damn United Nations there, she likes to say.

(We Need New Names)

NoViolet Bulawayo

Leaving your country is like dying, and when you come back you are like a ghost returning to earth, roaming around with missing gaze in your eyes.

(We Need New Names)

NoViolet Bulawayo

Look at the children of the land leaving in droves, leaving their own land with bleeding wounds on their bodies and shock on their faces and blood in their hearts and hunger in their stomachs and grief in their footsteps. Leaving their mothers and fathers and children behind, leaving their umbilical cords underneath the soil, leaving the bones of their ancestors in the earth, leaving everything that makes them who and what they are, leaving because it is no longer possible to stay. They will never be the same again because you cannot be the same once you leave behind who and what you are, you just cannot be the same.

(We Need New Names)

NoViolet Bulawayo

Recognize yourself in he and she who are not like you and me.

Carlos Fuentes

There are times, though, that no matter how much food I eat, I find the food does nothing for me, like I am hungry for my country and nothing is going to fix that.

(We Need New Names)

NoViolet Bulawayo

Once a refugee, always a refugee. I can’t ever remember not being all right wherever I was, but you don’t give your whole allegiance to a place or want to be entirely identified with the society you’re living in.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

To play the country-game, we have to choose a country. Everybody wants to be the USA and Britain and Canada and Australia and Switzerland and them. Nobody wants to be rags of countries like Congo, like Somalia, like Iraq, like Sudan, like Haiti, and not even this one we live in - who wants to be a terrible place of hunger and things falling apart?

(We Need New Names)

NoViolet Bulawayo

No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.

(Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth)

Warsan Shire

The problem with English is this: You usually can’t open your mouth and it comes out just like that - first you have to think what you want to say. Then you have to find the words. Then you have to carefully arrange those words in your head. Then you have to say the words quietly to yourself, to make sure you got them okay. And finally, the last step, which is to say the words out loud and have them sound just right.

But then because you have to do all this, when you get to the final step, something strange has happened to you and you speak the way a drunk walks. And, because you are speaking like falling, it’s as if you are an idiot, when the truth is that it’s the language and the whole process that’s messed up. And then the problem with those who speak only English is this: they don’t know how to listen; they are busy looking at your falling instead of paying attention to what you are saying.

(We Need New Names)

NoViolet Bulawayo

They are safe but they are not in their homes. They are city-less. I think it’s just a disaster for everyone.

Teri Hatcher

We are not myths of the past, ruins in the jungle, or zoos. We are people and we want to be respected, not to be victims of intolerance and racism.

(Guatemala Nobel Peace Prize Winner, 1992)

Rigoberta Menchu

To all the survivors out there, I want them to know that we are stronger and more resilient than we ever knew. We survived, that should be enough but it isn’t. We must work hard to become whole again, to fill our soul with love and inspiration, to live the life that was intended for us before it was disrupted by war and horrors, and help rebuild a world that is better than the one we had just left.

Loung Ung

And when they asked us where we were from, we exchanged glances and smiled with the shyness of child brides. They said, Africa? We nodded yes. What part of Africa? We smiled. Is it that part where vultures wait for famished children to die? We smiled. Where the life expectancy is thirty-five years? We smiled? Is is there where dissidents shove AK-47s between women’s legs? We smiled. Where people run about naked? We smiled. That part where they massacred each other? We smiled. Is it where the old president rigged the election and people were tortured and killed and a whole bunch of them put in prison and all, there where they are dying of cholera - oh my God, yes, we’ve seen your country; it’s been on the news.

(We Need New Names)

NoViolet Bulawayo

When things fall apart, the children of the land scurry and scatter like birds escaping a burning sky....They will never be the same again because you cannot be the same once you leave behind who and what you are, you just cannot be the same....Look at them leaving in droves, despite knowing they will be welcomed with restraint in those strange lands because they do not belong.

(We Need New Names)

NoViolet Bulawayo

My mother used to say that rain here pours like a blessing, like a thick veil that parts to reveal the bride’s face. But nearly every day, when this rain parted, it revealed a long line of soldiers, like you, like death, marching toward us, and we would scatter with a practiced silence and hide.

(I Live Here)

Mia Kirshner

Just tell me one thing. What are you doing not in your country right now? Why did you run off to America, Darling Nonkululeko Nkala, huh? Why did you just leave? If it’s your country, you have to love it to live in it and not leave it. You have to fight for it no matter what, to make it right. Tell me, do you abandon your house because it’s burning or do you find water to put out the fire? And if you leave it burning, do you expect the flames to turn into water and put themselves out? You left it, Darling, my dear, you left the house burning and you have the guts to tell me in that stupid accent that you were not even born with, that doesn’t even suit you, that this is your country?

(We Need New Names)

NoViolet Bulawayo