Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For
and
Omar El Akkad’s What Strange Paradise

Refugee narratives reflect the fact that refugee status depends on the stories displaced people tell about their circumstances. How the crisis that has caused their displacement is narrativized determines their legal status and afterlives. The figure of the refugee is thus inextricably associated with crisis: crisis as what generates refugees; as what refugees themselves engender; and as a variously configured spectacle in the public sphere that produces a range of affects, including humanitarian intervention. Using Tima Kurdi’s The Boy on the Beach, along with the photograph the title alludes to, as a point of departure, this paper pivots around the mutually implicated tropes of crisis and spectacle as they are inscribed in Canadian refugee narratives. Specifically, it examines the aesthetics and narrative strategies through which Quy in Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For and Amir in Omar El Akkad’s What Strange Paradise refuse to remain caught within the spectacle of crisis that they embody.

Smaro Kamboureli is the Avie Bennett Chair in Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. The author of On the Edge of Genre: The Contemporary Canadian Long poem and of Scandalous Bodies: Diasporic Literature in English Canada, winner of the Gabrielle Roy Prize for Canadian Literary Criticism, she has edited and co-edited many volumes, including Lee Maracle’s Memory Serves: Oratories. As Canada Research Chair Tier 1 at the University of Guelph (2005-13), she founded and directed TransCanada Institute; its collaborative agenda resulted in seven scholarly volumes that she has co-edited, including Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies (with Robert Zacharias), Critical Collaborations: Indigeneity, Diaspora and Ecology in Canadian Literary Studies (with Christl Verduyn), and the more recent one, Land / Relations: Possibilities of Justice in Canadian Literatures (with Larissa Lai). Her most recent publications include “Diaspora” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature and a bilingual English / Italian edition, in seconda persona, of her 1985 poetry book, in the second person.