The Horizon is an Imaginary line: A Refugee Story written by Bani Gill and Radha Mahendru deals with the struggle for survival of refugees who had to flee their homelands to save their own lives. Team Viva reports
A refugee’s fight within is as intense as the one that rages in the outside world. So it is for Maryam, the semi-fictional character of The Horizon is an Imaginary line: A Refugee Story. A young Somalian refugee in India, Maryam realises that “what she had seen in Bollywood films was a lie….the people are cruel who judged her even without knowing her.”
Authored by Bani Gill and Radha Mahendru, the book with illustrations provides a fast-paced but deep account of the life of refugees who are always conscious of their looks, clothing, skin colour, for fear that it would elicit hatred from the natives. So what makes a person a refugeeIJ, “There is not a single answer to this question. It’s basically the circumstances in the home country and the reasons vary from your religious to regional and to your sexual identity or sexual violence. There is a big difference between a refugee and a migrant. Migrant is someone who makes a conscious choice to leave his country, seeking a better life. But a refugee is someone who has no choice but to move and save his life,” says Radha. The semi-fictional book is published by Khoj International Artists Association and the illustrator for the book is Pia Alize Hazarika.
It was in 2015, during the launch of Coriolis Effect exhibition at Khoj studio that included artworks by Indian and African artists that Bani and Radha reconnected on a personal basis. Before that, both were already engaged in conversations with a diverse set of migrants seeking refuge and asylum in India. Bani is doing PhD on migration and refugee flows from Africa to India and Radha is monitoring Khoj’s community-based art projects in Khirkee, where most of the Africans live. “Our friends and collaborators, Fatima, Koofe and Hafez were integral to this process. It was through their narratives and experiences that Maryam emerged and developed through a series of storytelling workshops held across a span of four months. For many of them, a lot of whom have grown up in India, even access to basic amenities-becomes complicated by their racialised and ambiguous legal status. These textured stories prompted us to engage with the graphic form that would allow for flexibility of perspective and tone while communicating the emotional struggles of unbelonging, waiting and being in a state of limbo,” says Bani.
She says, “Do what you want others to do for you. We have to realise and acknowledge that we are also racists and have to take progressive steps to address this.” When asked about living like an alien in one’s own country Bani says, “It’s happening in India right now. Whenever we are promoting the idea of one nation, one has to raise the question that whose nation is this or who are the people who belong to and don’t belong to it. There are regions in India which have been under constant tension and the people there are living in fear. This has happened many times; during emergency, Punjab insurgency, demolition of Babri Masjid and Godhra riots, to name a few. Some incidents came to light just because the media reported it. There are atrocities committed against Dalits or Adivasis every day, but people look at them as something normal.”
So how do we develop awarenessIJ Says Bani, “We need to start from the top and then reach the bottom. We have to sensitise the law and policy makers on the issues and the people as well. Even in India we may feel as an outsider when we move from one part to the other. There is nothing that we can exactly call as an Indian, our look has no similarity and we speak different languages. We need to own up our cultural diversity and behave accordingly. In India the biggest challenge is caste which is racist in many ways. India is not just the roti eating, North Indian Brahmanical society. It’s many countries and that is the beauty of it.”
When asked on the impact of racism on the younger generation of refugees, she says that people growing up with a low self- esteem is most problematic. The way you look, the language you speak, or the cloth you wear shouldn’t define you. Radha believes that anybody can be an outsider at some point of time. “The moment you become an outsider is when you see yourself through someone else’s eyes. What makes the life of a refugee more complicated is that they don’t have support of their country, don’t have a pan card and hence not able to open a bank account. Pakistan, lebanon and turkey are the greatest refugee taking countries, not the US as we think. It’s a global South.”
“When we already have a product in mind we would fit our knowledge into that. For the book we deviated from that, and produced something which is valuable, she concludes.