Class Action August 2006 Books of the Month!

Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees

By Caroline Moorehead

Copyright 2005, 2006 by Picador

Human Cargo presents its readers with a needed exposure of the political implications of the treatment, aid and care of refugees and asylum seekers through personal stories and outside analysis. In the words of the author, Caroline Moorehead, this book is “a record of what happens to people when their lives spiral out of control into horror and loss, of the lengths they will go in order to survive, of the extraordinary resilience of ordinary men and women and children … and also an account of how the modern world is dealing with exoduses that far exceed in complexity and distance anything the world has known before." Written with prose filled with passion and hope, Human Cargo sets out to tell the stories that refugees and asylum seekers cannot themselves tell.

While directly working with African refugees in Cairo, Moorehead began gathering stories of civil war, flight, death, and survival. While tracking stories from as many places as Lebanon, Palestine, Mexico, Australia, and Guinea, Moorehead weaves in the history of modern refugee lawmaking. Moorehead discusses the irony of the West refusing to adequately fund or accept refugees and asylum seekers and stigmatizing economic refugees or “bad immigrants”, while needing migrant workers to maintain their economies. For Moorehead, the issue is not only a lack of funding, but the Western world indirectly condoning war.

Moorehead tells the stories of refugees who flee from conflict or torture— caused by civil war or economic upheaval. Upon their arrival to a new country they are often met with hostility, poverty, and a never-ending homelessness. Many refugees are sent to "temporary" camps to await asylum status, but their stay at these camps is seldom short and disease and poverty proliferate. Moorehead writes, "The prolonged detention of refugees, and particularly refugee children, comes close to torture. Protecting people who flee persecution is a responsibility all nation states must share if collective sovereignty is to have some moral worth." A man in a Palestinian camp writes, "No one is living as a human being should. No one meets even the minimum requirements." Moorehead reports that in the Palestinian refugee camps, "96 percent are said to live below the poverty line."

Moorehead always adds race to her analysis of the treatment and care of refugees. She writes, "…Thirty-three of the world's forty-one most indebted countries lay in Africa. Forty percent of the world's refugees, and 70 percent of its AIDS victims, were also African." Moorehead talks with Bertrand, an African refugee in England, who says after a friend and fellow refugee’s suicide,"He has become more aware of his own blackness in a white country, more conscious that to be black in northeast England is most often to be an asylum seeker, and that to be an asylum seeker is hardly to be a person at all."

While looking at the current status of refugees, Moorehead interrogates a post-September 11th world and the implications that event has had on refugee law. Moorehead writes, "Shortly after the attacks, on the orders of Attorney General John Ashcroft, the U.S. resettlement program, which in recent years had seen some 70,000 asylum seekers granted new lives in America, was frozen." Xenophobia and exploitation of refugees seems to be growing in a world where war and conflict between countries is on the rise. Moorehead quotes Matthew Gibney when she writes: "Why should something as arbitrary as where one is born determine where one is allowed to live?" That is the question that will loom in your mind after reading Human Cargo.

Since the second re-publishing of Human Cargo and the destruction of Hurricane Katrina, we can now take Moorehead's analysis on refugees one step further: What role will the U.S. continue to play in international refugee status, and what does it plan to do with the refugee citizens now within U.S. borders?

Gathering the Sun: An Alphabet in Spanish and English

By Alma Flor Ada

English translation by Rosa Zubizarreta

Illustrations by Simon Silva

Gathering the Sun: An Alphabet in Spanish and English is a colorful, poetic alphabet depicting the natural beauty found in the fields and the rich tradition and family life of Mexican farmworkers.  The bright illustrations gently allude to the struggles inherent in the migrant lifestyle while celebrating the strength found in family love and collective labor.

I must admit that I have a predisposition to roaming the children’s section of public libraries.  I enjoy doing this on my own—I often feel like an undercover child, disguised in an adult-like body—or in the company of some of my younger friends.  I first read this book on my own through a somewhat cynical lens, testing my limited knowledge of the English translations.  The English versions of the poems, as is to be expected, mask the slightly richer meaning that can be gleaned from the original Spanish, as I found in the poem “FarmWorkers”.  The original begins “Farmworkers nombre en ingles/para el pueblo campesino…” but is translated to “Farmworkers is the name we give/to people who work the land…” And in my first read-through, the deeply saturated hues in the illustrations masked some of the wonderfully telling nuisances that the scenes describe.

The second time that I read Gathering the Sun, I asked an eight-year old friend of mine to read it with me.  I suggested that I read the poems en espanol and he read them in English, but he wanted to be able to think about it while I read only the English.  I conceded, and we read through the book all at once.  Afterwards he commented on the beautiful pictures and pointed out some telling details that I had missed. 

“Zanahoria”, or “Carrot”, he noticed was accompanied by an illustration of a man carrying his son out of the carrot fields at the day’s end.  At first, my friend Preston thought the boy was crying, but on closer reivew he discovered that the boy was warn out and sleeping as his father carried him home.  We talked about how maybe the boy was helping his father pick carrots and how this was very different from our own experiences growing up as neither of us had to go to work with our parents to help them.  My young friend was a little defensive about this, and he pointed out that he had to do homework.  So we turned to the “Orgullo” page where a father is helping his daughter with her homework, and the mother is helping her son make tortillas.

We then began to notice lots of similarities that we had with the people and families in the book.  From reading under a tree with your dad to eating tomatoes (which Preston said made him particularly hungry).  We also both liked how two poems on the same page were often combined in the accompanying illustration because this added more to both stories.

There were tons more things we could have talked about, like who is “Cesar Chavez” (the ‘C’ and ‘Ch’ poem) or even how ‘ch’ is a letter in the Spanish alphabet.  But our collective attention span waned.  The lyricism in the words  (the English translations do well by retaining some of the buoyancy of the original Spanish) and illustrations, however, kept us occupied for a good twenty minutes in that first sit-down, and I suspect I could convince my fast-paced friend to read this book again with me in another week’s time.

View previous Class Action Book of the Month selections...

July Book of the Month: The Overworked American by Juliet Schor

June Book of the Month: More Money Than God by Steven R. Leder

May Book of the Month: Global Class by Jeff Faux

April Books of the Month: Classified and Strapped

March Book of the Month: Welfare Brat, A Memoir by Mary Childers

February Book of the Month: Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

January Book of the Month: Invisible Privilege: A Memoir about Race, Class, and Gender by Paula Rothenberg

View last year's Book of the Month selections...

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