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Syrian Women and Polyphonic Testimonies in Exile
Abstract
The Syrian Civil War that broke in 2011 is an ongoing multi-sided struggle that led to the displacement of thousands of Syrian internally and internationally. Ozlem Ezer’s Syrian Women Refugees: Personal Accounts of Transition (2019) is based on the stories of nine exiled Syrian women who were forced to leave their homeland due to civil war. These nine interviewees are living now across three continents. Even though these women are not writers-per se, their stories as oral narrators impact how we can understand exile in the last few years. Syrian Women Refugees is a narrative artefact that depicts how women can collaborate with each other recording their stories of displacement. These stories show how displaced women can support each other in making their contrapuntal stories heard. Ezer herself is a Turkish scholar who has travelled extensively teaching and doing research in different parts of the globe. Thus, the exilic experience of Syrian women is the point of interest of this paper. Muslim women-especially if they are wearing the headscarf- and learning to learn a new language and speak it with an accent is definitely very challenging as they tend to be even more marginalized and liminal. These nine testimonies record the experiences of displacement of these liminal “abject” women. Taking Julia Kristeva’s theories of the abject as well as her concept of the “pleasures of exile,” I problematize the negative stigma associated with exile. I illustrate how the voices of these nine exiled women is a hopeful polyphony of adapting to life in new countries which eventually lead to transition and personal growth despite the turmoil the exiled person would have experienced.
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
Syria
Sub Area
None