Wednesday, December 14, 2016

Human Cargo: A Journey among Refugees by Caroline Moorehead

Human Cargo: A Journey among Refugees by Caroline Moorehead
 Journalist Caroline Moorehead constructs heart-wrenching advocacy for the plight of the world’s refugees which transcends mere statistics and politics.
“The modern age is an age of exile.” The persistency of nightly news coverage concerning refugees has produced “refugee fatigue” if you will, where the monumental proportions of the problem has robbed the discussion of the personal names, faces, and tragic stories unique to the individual. This is something the author wishes to remedy by traveling to the caves of Bamiyan, the airport terminal in Dubai, the internment camps worldwide to gather and share the experiences of the affected. Her two-year investigation results in a new understanding of cause, conflict, displacement and ultimate despair which is far too often referred to in a sterile homogenous group. By refusing the ambiguous generalizations of the global crisis, Moorehead lends a sympathetic ear to single-stories like those told by “The Lost Boys of Cairo,” “Sicily’s Boat People,” and Guinea’s camp residents who feel “Little better than Cockroaches.” The reader cannot help but be moved by the author’s emotive prose when learning of “Mira” who had to leave an infant on a snowy roadside to die when fleeing the Taliban. The reader meets not only those who are forced to leave, but also those like “Nasir” who after being exiled from his native home has chosen to return after many years in the West. The author weaves her narrative from a well-stamped passport, not from the comfort of distance our geographic isolation usually promotes. Giving powerful voice to those for whom “no return to a fixed place is possible,” Human Cargo ventures beyond pessimistic depictions or polemics, towards the promise of an improved condition.
Human Cargo: A Journey among Refugees provides a much-needed treatment that challenges the global morality by which it is measured relational to its treatment of the dispossessed. 

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