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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 07/09/18, SPi
PLACELESS PEOPLE
PLACEL ESS
PEOPL E
W r i t i ng, R igh t s,
a n d R e f uge e s
LY N DSE Y STON E BR I DGE
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp,
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© Lyndsey Stonebridge 2018
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2018
Impression: 1
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contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
For the East End boys,

my dads,
Andy Carpenter and Dennis Stonebridge.
Preface and Acknowledgements
There are few memorials to the victims of forced displacement. Refugees

were—and are—the overlooked victims of modern politics. In part, this is
because the mass movement of people has been normalized over the past
one hundred years. People, usually in far away places, move; they are the
flotsam and jetsam of conflict, the unfortunate victims of history, who only
constitute a ‘crisis’ if they get too close to home. But in another sense, exist-
ential as well as political, refugees have always moved too close to what the
more securely domiciled think of as home. As Hannah Arendt argued,
although there are many reasons why one might become a refugee, once
the thread between personhood and nation is cut, it is game over for any
comfortable assumptions about civil, political, and human rights. Modern
placelessness demonstrates how fragile everybody’s place in the world is.
This book gives an account of how that vulnerability appeared to a group
of writers and thinkers who saw clearly that the ‘refugee crisis’ of the mid-
twentieth century was also a political and imaginative crisis of the most
intimate meanings of citizenship and being. It began as a sequel to an earlier
study of mid-twentieth century literature and law, The Judicial Imagination:
Writing after Nuremberg (2011). Writing that book, it became clear that along
with genocide and total war, it was the question of statelessness that pre-
occupied many writers and thinkers at mid-century. And for good reason:
no matter how bold new terms for international and historical justice were
in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the realpolitik of sovereign power meant
that the world kept on making refugees. As the writers discussed in the
pages that follow all understood, mass displacement was to be the twentieth-
century’s continuing atrocity.
In some parts of the world, including my own, it was possible to turn a
blind-eye to the steady rhythm of departures and arrivals of this ongoing
history for quite some time. Recently, that blind-eye has become a slammed
door. If more proof were needed that the threat presented by mass dis-
placement comes not from people who have no choice but to leave their
viii Pr e face a n d Ack now le dge m e n ts
homes, but from the panicked insecurity of the rights-rich, we see it in

today’s toxic mess of bile and bureaucracy, bad faith politics, and ethno-
nationalist posturing. Now, as in the mid-twentieth century, the conse-
quences of what is in reality not a refugee crisis, but a crisis of moral and
political citizenship, are dire—for everyone.
Oddly, perhaps, this might be why this has been an unexpectedly com-
panionable book to write. Friendship, as Arendt also argued, takes on a
special poignancy in hostile environments. I have benefited hugely from the
conversation, reading, and writing of: Elizabeth Anker, Anna Barnard, Les
Back, Simon Behrman, Bryan Cheyette, Sarah Cole, Stef Craps, Samuel
Durant, Robert Eaglestone, Lara Feigel, David Feldman, Peter Gatrell, Matt
Hart, Scott Jordan Harris,Tony Kushner, Kate McLoughlin, Marina MacKay,
Itamar Mann, David Milne, Dirk Moses, Daniel Pick, Adam Piette, Denise
Riley, Jacqueline Rose, Michael Rothberg, Matthew Taunton, Benjamin
Thomas White, Daniel Trilling, Natasha Wheatley, and Marina Warner. I am
especially indebted to Allan Hepburn for his keen and generous reading,
and to Kate Jones for helping put the book together. Students on my
Refugee Writing Masters course will recognize how important their com-
mitment and cleverness were to the writing of this book.
Two groups of people have been particularly good at demonstrating the
connections between refugees and many kinds of citizenship: my colleagues
on the Refugee History project, Becky Taylor, Kate Ferguson, and Hari Reed,
and my AHRC/ESRC Refugee Hosts collaborators, Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh,
Alastair Agar, Anna Rowlands, and Aydan Geatrick. Special thanks to Yousif
M. Qasmiyeh.
Thanks to Jerome Kohn, the Hannah Arendt Bluecher Literary Trust and
Yale Representation Limited for permission to reproduce Arendt’s poetry
and translations; the heirs of Bertolt Brecht and Brecht Erben for permis-
sion to quote Brecht’s poems, and Curtis Brown Ltd for permission to
quote Auden’s. Thanks too are owed to the excellent librarians from the
University of East Anglia’s Special Collections; the Manuscript Division,
Library of Congress; the John J. Burns Library, Boston College; Rauner
Special Collections Library, Dartmouth; and the Special Collections
Research Center, Syracuse University. Earlier, and now much changed, ver-
sions of chapters six and seven first appeared in Humanity and Textual Practice:
thanks to editors, Samuel Moyn, Joseph Slaughter, Peter Boxall, and
anonymous readers for the keen insights that tightened up my thinking at
crucial moments.
Pr e face a n d Ack now le dge m e n tsix
This book would not have been written without the crucial collegial
support (wine and fish dinners) of Cathie Carmichael and Claire Jowitt.
My editor at OUP, Jacqueline Norton understood what this book was
before I could. Jenni Barclay and Sarah Churchwell have kept me running
through the past few years: they are the wittiest, kindest, smartest, and best
of friends. My place in the world, always, is with Joe, Mizzy, and Shaun.
Contents
List of Illustrations xiii
Introduction: Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees 1
PA RT ON E R E A DI NG STAT E L E SSN E SS
One: Reading Statelessness: Arendt’s Kafka 29
Two: Hannah Arendt’s Message of Ill Tidings 46
PA RT T WO PL ACE L E SS PEOPL E
Three: Orwell’s Jews 73
Four: Simone Weil’s Uprooted 96
Five: Beckett’s Expelled 119
PA RT T H R E E SA N DS OF SOR ROW
Six: Sands of Sorrow: Dorothy Thompson in Palestine 141
Seven: Statelessness and the Poetry of the Borderline:
W.H. Auden and Yousif M. Qasmiyeh 166
Endnotes 187
Bibliography 221
General Index 239
Names Index 242
List of Illustrations
1. Affidavit of Identity in Lieu of Passport: ‘I wish to use this document in

lieu of a passport which I, a state-less person, cannot obtain at present.’
Hannah Arendt Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress,
Washington, D.C., Courtesy of Hannah Arendt-Bluecher Literary Trust. 6
2. View of the Gurs transit camp, 1940–41, United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum, courtesy of Jack Lewin. 47
3. Sketch of five women by Lili Andrieux, ‘Barracks Interior with
Bread and Two Bottles (Version II)’, 1940, United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum, courtesy of Lili Andrieux. 48
4. ‘Femme à Gurs’ [Woman at Gurs] by Lili Andrieux, 1940,
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy
of Lili Andrieux. 49
5. ‘But she is mad!’ Ingrid Bergman’s Irene looks down at the weeping
crowd from behind the bars of her asylum in the final scene
of Europe ’51. © BFI. 114
6. Opening scenes of Stromboli: Land of God, shot in Farfa-Sabina
refugee camp, north of Rome. © BFI. 115
7. ‘Dio Mio’/‘God, give me strength, understanding courage’.
Ingrid Bergman in final scene of Stromboli: Land of God. © BFI. 116
8. Samuel Beckett, manuscript notebook of ‘La Suite’, 1946. © The Estate
of Samuel Beckett, Samuel Beckett Collection, (MS.1991.001) Box 11,
Folder 9, John J. Burns Library, Boston College, reproduced by the
kind permission of the Estate of Samuel Beckett c/o Rosica Colin
Limited, London. 121
9. Samuel Beckett with the Irish Red Cross at Saint-Lô, 1945.
© The Estate of Samuel Beckett, Rauner Special Collections Library,
Dartmouth College, reproduced by the kind permission of the
Estate of Samuel Beckett c/o Rosica Colin Limited, London. 125
10. Refugees retraining, from Survey Graphic, special number ‘on the
challenge to democracy’ (1939). © The British Library Board, P.P.6392.
ebm, p. 41, courtesy of The British Library Board. 149
xiv List of I llust r at ions
11. Children ‘old beyond their years’ drinking milk in Gaza.

Still from American Council for the Relief of Palestinians,
Sands of Sorrow (1950). 154
12. Hind Husseini teaching girls at Dar-el-Tifl. Still from American
Council for the Relief of Palestinians, Sands of Sorrow (1950). 156
13. Baddawi refugee camp, Northern Lebanon. © Elena
Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, April 2016. 184
Introduction
Placeless People: Writing, Rights,
and Refugees
I have not felt that I entirely belong to myself any more. Something of my
natural identity has been destroyed forever with my original, real self.
I have become less outgoing than really suits me and today I—the former
cosmopolitan—keep feeling as if I had to offer special thanks for every
breath of air that I take in a foreign country, thus depriving its own people
of its benefit . . . On the day I lost my Austrian passport I discovered, at the
age of fifty-eight, that when you lose your native land you are losing
more than a patch of territory within set borders.
Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday1
Everywhere the word ‘exile’ which once had an undertone of almost

sacred awe, now provokes the idea of something simultaneously suspicious
and unfortunate.
Hannah Arendt, ‘Guests from No-Man’s Land’, 30 June 19442
S tefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday (1942) is possibly the saddest refugee
memoir of the mid-twentieth century. Jew, Austrian, European, Zweig
had been a popular novelist, playwright, biographer, and writer of intellec-
tual history. According to the statistics of Co-opération Intellectuelle, published
by the League of Nations, at one point he was the ‘most translated writer in
the world’.3 ‘It was pleasant to live here,’ he wrote of the Vienna of his youth,
‘in this atmosphere of intellectual tolerance, and unconsciously every citi-
zen of Vienna also became a supranational, cosmopolitan citizen of the
world’.4 By the time Zweig published his memoir, the ‘former cosmopol-
itan’ had become a stateless person, ‘a cruel condition . . . hard to explain to
anyone who has not known it himself. It is a nerve-racking sense of teetering
2 Place le ss People: W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s
on the brink, wide awake and staring into nothing, knowing that wherever
you find a foothold you can be thrust back into the void at any moment.’5
In February 1942, Zweig decided it was preferable to step into the void vol-
untarily, and ended his life, in a suicide pact with Elisabet Charlotte Zweig
in Brazil. The Zweigs had left England, their first country of exile, in 1940
when it became clear that like many Jewish, German, and Austrian refugees,
they might be interned as enemy aliens. ‘So,’ wrote the one-time ‘citizen of
the world’, ‘I belong to nowhere now, I am a stranger or at most a guest
everywhere.’6
Zweig’s autobiography records the moment when many of those in the
twentieth century who had thought of themselves as citizens of the world
discovered that they had become citizens of nowhere or, more precisely,
non-citizens, stateless, the placeless people.This book is about how the gen-
eration of writers and intellectuals that followed Zweig’s responded to the
emergence of this new category of person in the world: the modern refugee
whose history, as has recently become clear once more, is also the history of
the changing meanings of political and national citizenship in the later
twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
At the heart of this history is the spectre of rightlessness.When the place-
less people of the mid-twentieth century were pushed out of the old ‘trinity
of state-people-territory’ they also revealed how poor a protection natural
rights had turned out to be. Others in the world had long known that as a
big idea universal rights tended to only be as good as the political power
that chose—or not—to underwrite them. But now the realities of rightless-
ness boomeranged back to Europe, unleashing an anxiety that has charac-
terized debates about national and political belonging—and refugees—ever
since. The international human rights regime that was constructed out of
the ashes of World War Two attempted to lock the spectre of rightlessness
back up in a new bottle of universal legal and normative safeguards. This
chapter in the history of rights made extraordinary gains, but because the
self-determination of peoples was also part of that same package, little could
be (or was) done to prevent new generations of people being expelled,
pushed, or driven from their homes. As it became more and more difficult
to imagine a political and legal solution to the precariousness of modern
citizenship, the more those bold new laws intended to guarantee the rights
of all people regardless of where they were in the world began to circum-
scribe the kinds of legal and political existence those stuck or moving
between nation states were entitled to. Whilst the refugees of the 1930s and
W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 3
1940s raised the spectre of rightlessness in uncompromising terms, those

who followed have tended to find themselves tumbling out of politics and
history and into, at best, an often precarious humanitarianism, at worst, a
zero degree or ‘bare-life’ existence.
In this book I return to the mid-twentieth century to recapture the scan-
dal of statelessness as it appeared to a group of writers and intellectuals who
lived its historical fall-out at first hand. Two, Hannah Arendt and Simone
Weil, were refugees themselves. It is not a coincidence that both women
were among the most direct critics of human rights in the twentieth cen-
tury. The others, George Orwell, Samuel Beckett, the American journalist
and refugee advocate, Dorothy Thompson, and W.H. Auden, all understood
deracination to be a symptom of political and historical failure. None were
content with ‘horrified humanitarianism’ (the phrase is Thompson’s).
Writing and thinking before human rights came to connote the worldwide
complex of governance over suffering we assume it to be now, these writers
remind us that far from being a ‘crisis’ affecting just the poor unfortunates
of the world, the history of placelessness is everybody’s history. On the day
Stefan Zweig lost his Austrian passport, he was not the only European to
discover that when you lose your native land, you lose far more than a patch
of territory within set borders.
Placeless People
There have always been refugees, but the forced mass displacement of
people in the twentieth century was something new. Eric Hobsbawm once
suggested that ‘genocide’ and ‘statelessness’ belonged together as the two
modern extremes that were ‘so unfamiliar that new words had to be invented
for them’.7 The Nazi genocide now defines the moral, political, and imagina-
tive limit of the age of extremes; mass displacement, on the other hand,
quickly lost its status as a modern extreme—if it really ever had it. Relatively
few people are legally classified as ‘stateless’ as the term has come to be
defined under international law since the 1930s, but until very recently, as far
as most in the West were concerned, the large-scale uprooting of people from
their homes, communities, and their citizenship was accepted as the price to
be paid for a world made up of sovereign states—not least because since the
end of World War Two that price has been most heavily paid in the Middle
East and the global south.8
Hannah Arendt was one of the first to understand that what looked like
a refugee crisis in reality was a crisis for the political and moral authority of
the European nation state, particularly for its historic claim to be the home
of the rights of man. ‘Future historians will perhaps be able to note that the
sovereignty of the nation state ended in absurdity when it began to decide
who was a citizen and who was not,’ she wrote shortly after her arrival in
New York in 1941; ‘when it no longer sent individual politicians into exile,
but left hundreds of thousands of its citizens to the sovereign and arbitrary
decisions of other nations.’9 To be left to the arbitrary decisions of other
nations was to be left, precisely, nowhere: to be stateless was to be rightless.
Arendt’s arguments about the impossibility of legislating for human rights
in a world of sovereign nations have recently resurfaced in the humanities
and social sciences, and are now regularly referred to in debates about refu-
gees, sovereignty, and the future of human rights. I begin this book with
Arendt first, because of her political and historical clarity on this point, but
also because of her less remarked deep literary and cultural understanding
of placelessness. Arendt understood the new statelessness to be existential as
well as political. Its emergence required new forms of thinking and imagin-
ation. Older paradigms of cosmopolitan exile would no longer do. The
world had turned. ‘Everywhere the word “exile” which once had an under-
tone of almost sacred awe, now provokes the idea of something simultan-
eously suspicious and unfortunate,’ she wrote in an article entitled ‘Guests
from No-Man’s Land’ in 1944.10 The Scum of the Earth (1941) was the title
Arthur Koestler gave to his autobiographical account of his refugee experi-
ence in France.11
Arendt was not about to concede to this fall into impotent wretchedness,
either as a political thinker or as a stateless person, which was why she
strenuously rejected the pathos of Zweig’s The World of Yesterday when she
reviewed it in 1943. His yesterday never was, she argued impatiently: ‘the
world that Zweig depicts was anything but the world of yesterday; naturally,
the author of this book did not actually live in the world, only on its rim.’12
If Zweig’s autobiography is one of the saddest stories to come out of twen-
tieth-century Europe, for Arendt this was because he so fatefully mistook his
world for the world. The cosmopolitan Europe in which writers came and
went freely, dipping into one another’s languages and cultures, a world
where the Jewish writer was welcome precisely because his worldliness so
captured the spirit of the times, was only true, insofar as it was true, on the
margins. ‘It was only in art that all the Viennese felt they had equal rights,
because art, like love, was regarded as a duty incumbent on everyone,’ Zweig
concedes at one point in his memoir.13 He was correct, Arendt notes, but
Zweig missed the political and, as it turned out, existential irony of having
in effect only fictional rights. World citizenship was a sham, particularly for
the Jewish writer: ‘this remarkable nationality that its members claimed as
soon as their Jewish origin was mentioned, somewhat resembles those mod-
ern passports that grant the bearer the right of sojourn in every country
except the one that issued it.’14
Arendt was referring to the famous Nansen passports. Administered by
the League of Nations and after 1938 by the Office for the High Commission
of Refugees in London, Nansen passports conferred international legality in
place of national citizenship. Originally designed for Russians fleeing the
Revolution, as interwar conflict grew, the passports were extended to other
refugees, including Greeks,Turks, and Armenians. For German and Austrian
Jews access to the passports was minimal and haphazard.15 Arendt herself
eventually carried an Affidavit of Identity in Lieu of a Passport, issued by the
United States (Fig 1). In effect, everybody knew that only national passports
carried any value worth having. ‘The passport is the most noble part of the
human being,’ wrote Bertolt Brecht in Refugee Conversations (1940):
It also does not come into existence in such a simple fashion as a human being
does. A human being can come into the world anywhere, in the most careless
way and for no good reason, but a passport never can. When it is good, the
passport is also recognized for this quality, whereas a human being, no matter
how good, can go unrecognized.16
This was a world hell-bent on shoring up the borders of nation states with
ever more baroque systems of bureaucratic control. Passports not people
were the real bearers of rights and human dignity, a poor, dishevelled and
devalued, secondary thing. Brecht could express everything about his pre-
dicament that Zweig failed to grasp in a few pithy lines because he under-
stood this corruption of human values to be thoroughly historical and
political; as much a part of the modern nation state as ink stamps, index
cards, filing cabinets, and population statistics. Brecht, Arendt also com-
plained in her review, along with Kafka, was conspicuously absent from
Zweig’s account of interwar literary history. It was no coincidence, as
I demonstrate in the first two chapters of this book, that it was to both
Kafka and Brecht that Arendt turned in order to think through the imagina-
tive terms of the new statelessness in the 1940s.
Fig. 1. Affidavit of Identity in Lieu of Passport: ‘I wish to use this document in lieu
of a passport which I, a state-less person, cannot obtain at present.’ Hannah Arendt
Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., Courtesy of
Hannah Arendt-Bluecher Literary Trust.
Zweig was in exile from a cosmopolitanism that was both marginal and
that had failed in its universalizing mission.‘Haven’t you got that yet?’ Joseph
Roth, the first and best chronicler of the lost lives of East European Jews,
wrote to Zweig as early as the October of 1933: ‘The word [the literary
word] has died, men bark like dogs. The word has no importance any more,
none in the current state of things . . . There is no “public arena” anymore.
Everything is shit.’17 Roth’s Wandering Jews (1927 [1937]) had documented
the tragic half-lives of those who had fled to Vienna and Paris from the pog-
roms of the 1920s. Like Arendt, Roth understood that so far as the Jews of
Europe were concerned, ‘today’ was not a violent break from a reasonably
good earlier twentieth century, but the brutal culmination of the epoch’s
uncontrolled economic expansion, moribund political forms, and growing
antisemitism: ‘that yesterday is not detached from today,’ as Arendt put it in
her review.18 The ‘trellis’ behind which Zweig had felt so secure in reality
was little different ‘from the walls of prison or a ghetto’.19 When ‘the whole
structure of his life, with its aloofness from civic struggle and politics broke
down,’ Zweig was left only with the ‘disgrace’ (Arendt’s word) of finding
himself as ‘suspicious and unfortunate’ as the next Jewish refugee.
The task of imagining a political institution that could grant all groups as
groups, including Jews as Jews, the ‘right to have rights’ would pre-occupy
Arendt for the rest of her life. Zweig’s blindness was not just the error of the
well-insulated parvenu; like many others, including those staring into the
nothing of statelessness, his melancholy, exquisitely rendered as it was, missed
the true historic tragedy behind his own exile. For the Jews of Europe the
‘refugee crisis’ of the 1930s, turned out to be the first act of the Nazi geno-
cide. But statelessness was never just a tragedy of one people; nor was its
history resolved by the formation of the United Nations and the imple-
mentation of a new human rights regime at the end of World War Two. The
placeless people of the mid-twentieth century brought with them a message
about the fate of rights and citizenship in a world fast spinning off its polit-
ical and moral axes, that has echoed, for all that could hear, across the past
eighty years to the refugee ‘crises’ of our own day.‘Today all European peoples
are without rights,’ Arendt wrote in 1941: ‘That is why refugees from every
nation, driven as they are from country to country, have become the avant-
garde of their own people. The world citizens of the nineteenth century
have, quite against their will, become the world travelers of the twentieth.’20
Thrown out of their worlds, to a large extent the placeless people had no
choice but to become the avant-garde of their people: a reluctant yet, by
necessity, innovative vanguard. This, in any case, was how Arendt responded
to her own statelessness: not by conceding to wretchedness, but by thinking
experimentally and radically, turning political and historical pariahdom into
a restless and creative virtue.21 As I show in the pages that follow, she was not
the only writer and thinker to grasp that the changed meanings of exile at
mid-century demanded new forms of political thought, creative imagin-
ation, and moral courage.
Writing
The scandal of statelessness and its provocations that occupied Arendt’s
generation have been lost to much twentieth-century literary history in the
global north. On the one hand, this is not surprising: the forms of modern
literature itself, its focus on estrangement, absence, ellipses, groundlessness,
otherness, the giddy freedoms and deep despair of rootlessness, were all nur-
tured by the larger history of alienation and deracination that since the end
of the nineteenth century had troubled Europe’s self-confidence in the pro-
ject of colonial capitalism. Modernist literature, in particular, often seemed
to peel itself free of the world, claiming in its own literariness an aesthetic
liberation from the constraints of territorial sovereignty. The modernist,
notes Caren Kaplan, ‘seeks to recreate the effect of statelessness – whether
or not the writer is, in fact, in exile’.22 And whilst modern literature drew
on the experience of exile, crafting new modes of fictional being out of its
depredations, that very intimacy also cast the political history of displace-
ment into the shadows.
But we should be more surprised, and perhaps more suspicious, about the
sublimation of large-scale forced migration into the condition of literature
itself. By the late twentieth century, literary theory recognized that the trauma
of the Nazi genocide had set new terms on how literature could represent
historical experience; an appreciation of the importance of testimony and of
listening to the unspeakable followed, as did a new attention to the ways in
which the forms of modern writing responded to history’s extremes.A similar
accounting of modern statelessness (Hobsbawm’s second extreme) has proved
more elusive. Part of this has to do with the fact that whilst statelessness is
abject, the universalizing human narrative of literary cosmopolitanism has
remained, for often perfectly good reasons, alluring.
After World War Two, efforts to re-invent literary universalism meant that
versions of modernist cosmopolitanism, usually Eurocentric, kept on
running well into the Cold War and beyond. The exiled writer as a melan-
choly observer of modern life persisted as a literary and cultural type even
as any late-Romantic innocence about the insights to be gained from a life
estranged had, in reality, long gone.23 At the same moment that exile flour-
ished as a cultural and literary trope in the Cold War West, new chapters in
the history of forced migration had already opened up in India–Pakistan,
Israel–Palestine, China, Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere. Paradoxically, the
very cultural humanism that aided the development of human rights in the
post-war West also concealed the ongoing rights scandal of the age. As new
borders created new legions of stateless people, as new battles were fought
in the name of self-determination, the terms of debate shifted away from
the inhumanity of political institutions—nation states, international treaties,
trade laws, international organizations—and towards the inhumanity of
man.The rightless (who kept on coming) receded into the mist of a human-
ism attempting to re-invent some kind of moral authority for the European
tradition even as its geopolitical power wilted (the working title for Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four was The Last Man In Europe).
It was not, of course, that post-war writers and critics did not know that
the historical terms of exile had changed. ‘[T]here is more than nationalist
mystique to the notion of the writer enraciné,’ George Steiner, himself a for
mer child refugee, wrote in his 1969 essay on Nabokov, ‘Extraterritorial’.
Like other post-war literary comparativists, including, most notably, Erich
Auerbach, Steiner was committed to disturbing remaining nativist claims
about national literatures with evidence of a longer, and implicitly far
richer, history of literary diversity and multi-lingual cross-fertilization. The
much-quoted closing lines of Steiner’s essay suggest that Nabokov’s late
modernism is the literary-historical correlative for modern refugee history:
A great writer driven from language to language by social upheaval and war is
an apt symbol for the age of the refugee. No exile is more radical, no feat of
adaptation and new life more demanding. It seems proper that those who cre-
ate art in a civilization of quasi-barbarism which has made so many homeless,
which has torn up tongues and peoples by the root, should themselves be
poets unhoused and wanderers across language. Eccentric, aloof, nostalgic,
deliberately untimely as he aspires to be and so often is, Nabokov remains,
by virtue of his extraterritoriality, profoundly of our time, and one of its
spokesmen.24
By being out of place, Nabokov is actually ‘profoundly of our time’. Steiner’s

hyperbole forces the mid-century European refugee writer back into his-
tory: ‘no exile is more radical, no feat of adaptation and new life more
demanding.’ I say hyperbole not because the experience of forced (com-
pared to voluntary) migration is not the most extreme form of exile. It is,
unequivocally. But Steiner’s powerful rhetoric here is only implicitly evi-
denced in the reading of Nabokov that precedes this final paragraph. In
Steiner’s account, Nabokov is really less the symbol of the age of the refugee
than the symbol of a new generation of cosmopolitan modernists.The ‘writer’s
art is his real passport,’ Nabokov remarked in a 1967 interview; in Lolita (1955)
he described the Nansen passport that he himself had once carried as a
‘Nonsense Passport’.25 Nabokov’s placelessness is the very thing that enables
him to ironically distance himself from the nonsense of his times. It was a ges-
ture that was to be repeated in much post-war literature. ‘London in 1950
was full of displaced people,’ V.S. Naipaul wrote, with comic self-depreca-
tion, in the introduction to The Enigma of Arrival (1987), his classic dissec-
tion of the bleak remains of empire told through the eyes of a late colonial
migrant to England: ‘but because I was looking for the more settled society
of famous English writing I paid no attention.’26
It was Edward Said who called time on the sublimation of modern state-
lessness in his bitter and beautiful 1984 essay, ‘Reflections on Exile’ (also
discussed in chapter 1). ‘Exile’ reads the first line of that essay, ‘is strangely
compelling to think about but terrible to experience.’27 In terms that dir-
ectly echo Arendt’s earlier criticism of Zweig, Said asks again—demands
again—that we pay attention to the brute history of modern displacement.
Arendt’s and Said’s is a shared refugee history.The calamity of modern state-
lessness was not solved by the creation of Israel, Arendt wrote in The Origins
of Totalitarianism (1951), which merely created another generation of refu-
gees, the 700,000 and more Palestinian refugees.28 ‘Reflections on Exile’ was
written shortly after the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila
refugee camps in Beirut, considered a serious breach of the Geneva
Conventions by the UN Commission set up to investigate Israel’s role in
the atrocity in 1983.29 Said begins by quoting Steiner’s conclusion, but adds
a crucial qualification:
But the difference between earlier exiles and those of our own time is, it bears
stressing, its scale: our age—with its modern warfare, imperialism, and the
quasi-theological ambitions of totalitarian rulers—is indeed the age of the
refugee, the displaced person, mass immigration.
Against this large impersonal setting, exile cannot be made to serve notions
of humanism. On the twentieth-century scale, exile is neither aesthetically
nor humanistically comprehensible: at most literature about exile objectifies
an anguish and a predicament most people rarely experience first hand;
but to think of the exile informing this literature as beneficially humanistic,
is to banalize its mutilations, the losses it inflicts on those who suffer them,
the muteness with which it responds to any attempt to understand it as
‘good for us’.30
Mass displacement is the product of modern violence and oppression:

against ‘this large impersonal setting, exile cannot be made to serve notions
of humanism’. Note how far Said is here from the more familiar argument
that by ‘humanizing’ the nameless masses of political crimes, literature might
be doing some beneficial human rights work. On the contrary, to humanize
the inhuman is to lend dignity to a condition that by robbing people of
citizenship—of the right to exist in a community—has deliberately denied
them dignity. Said’s essay refuses to patch that indignity up.
At the centre of ‘Reflections on Exile’ is Joseph Conrad’s short story,
‘Amy Foster’, first published in 1901. Amy Foster is a young country servant
who falls in and out of love with Yanko Goorall, a Polish migrant, washed
up onto the Kent coast from his sunken ship. Said describes the story as
‘perhaps the most uncompromising representation of exile ever written’.31
As Jacqueline Rose has pointed out, ‘Amy Foster’ was a consistent point of
reference for Said, not least because of Conrad’s focus on how the mind
‘might take its bearings’ in the face of a world of mass cruelty: how we
might ‘know’ this world, for Rose, is the ‘crucial conduit between Said’s lit-
erary and political concerns’.32 Conrad’s story takes us back to the begin-
nings of modern migration history, and the first mass movements of modern
times.33 At the turn of the nineteenth century, tens of thousands of real
Yanko Gooralls passed, like him, through the hands of travel agents, or ‘traf-
fickers’, through Hamburg, en route to America where, they were told, as
Yanko is in the story, the ‘U.S. Kaiser’ had given them permission to work
and prosper.This history is also the background to Kafka’s first novel-length
work, Amerika (1927). As Tara Zahra demonstrates in her compelling history
of mass migration to the United States, The Great Departure (2016), this is
the moment when what Arendt would later describe as the transition of
exile into meaning ‘something suspicious and unfortunate’ really begins.
‘Between 55 and 58 million Europeans moved to North and South America
in the period 1846–1940,’ Zahra notes.34 The habits of ‘human dumping’
(her phrase) endemic to colonialism, spread across to the West.The question

of what rights could possibly mean in a world where the global movement
of labour and people buffeted against the bureaucracies of increasingly
defensive nation states also began with stories told by Conrad and others of
the ‘dread of an inexplicable strangeness’ that gripped both migrants and
their hosts.35
‘Amy Foster’ marks the moment when romantic ideas about exile began
to falter, but the story is also about a new state of mind—a weird, haunting
impenetrability that clings to the stranger as he arrives, uninvited, and
unknown. Conrad is indeed ‘uncompromising’ in his depiction of Yanko’s
unbearable wretchedness, the hostility with which he is greeted, his other-
ness, and his dismal death in a puddle in the yard of a Kentish worker’s cot-
tage. But what Said finds particularly uncompromising is how the tragedy
of the effort to communicate from within his aching loneliness and isola-
tion is played out formally in Conrad’s highly stylized, over-communicative,
prose: ‘Conrad took this neurotic exile’s fear and created an aesthetic prin-
ciple out of it . . . Each Conradian exile fears, and is condemned endlessly to
imagine, the spectacle of a solitary death illuminated, so to speak, by unre-
sponsive, uncommunicating eyes.’36 Something of this fear is also in the
singularity of Said’s own prose: ‘[b]ecause nothing is secure. Exile is a jealous
state,’ he writes, connecting the Conradian exile’s fears with those of the
Palestinian refugee in the 1980s.37 Is this brutal and uncompromising place-
lessness the same as the exile that has ‘taken its place as a topos or human
experience alongside the literature of adventure, education, and discovery?’
Said asks. ‘Is this the same exile that literally kills Yanko Goorall, and has bred
the expensive, often dehumanizing relationship between twentieth-century
exile and nationalism?’38 My answer in this book is no, it is not the same: the
dehumanizing history of placelessness took, and takes, other forms.
Like Arendt’s writing of the 1940s, ‘Reflections on Exile’ is a key text in
the literary history of modern statelessness because of Said’s refusal to con-
cede the political experience of mass displacement to literary humanism.
That refusal also distinguishes the work of the triptych of writers discussed
in the middle of this book: George Orwell, Simone Weil, and Samuel
Beckett. All three wrote about rootlessness whilst pressed up tight against
the mass upheavals of Europe in the 1940s. All three, although in tellingly
different ways, refused to concede the historical experience of displacement
to narratives of humanity. ‘Humanity’, Beckett wrote in 1946, ‘is about as
welcome as a ‘dum-dum bullet’: ‘There must be pestilence, Lisbon and
religious butchery, for people to think of loving one another, to fuck the
peace with the gardener next door, to put it plainly.’39 Beckett’s impatience,
like Arendt’s, was born of a political and moral recognition that the dis-
courses of humanity and human rights were a poor response to the radical
rightlessness of the age.
Again, ‘Amy Foster’ is prescient here. As much as the story is about the
agony of Yanko’s exile, it is also about the cruel compassion of modern
humanitarian sentiment. The subject of the story, after all, is not Yanko, but
Amy Foster, the simple and rather dull girl who alone reaches out to him.
‘I wonder whether he saw how plain she was,’ narrates Doctor Kennedy, ‘or
perhaps he was seduced by the divine quality of her pity.’40 Amy ‘fosters’
Yanko. But as she is as alone as he his, and as there is no context for her care
other than her own mildly desirous attraction to his suffering, hers is a
weightless and failed fostering. In the end, Amy kills him—passively, of
course, as divine pity can only kill its objects. The first winter after their
child is born Yanko falls ill; vulnerable, helpless, needy, he becomes stranger
still. ‘And she sat with the table between her and the couch, watching every
movement and every sound, with the terror, the unreasonable terror, of that
man she could not understand creeping over her.’41 She leaves him to die.
Amy’s compassion is ultimately as uncommunicative as the hostility of the
other villagers.
Later, Arendt would diagnose the caprice of humanitarian imagination as
structural to the historical and political circumstance of the modern refugee.
To be placeless is to be denied political sovereignty, it is thus to also become
strange to those for whom national citizenship is a given, albeit a given that
became increasingly uncertain as nationalism and totalitarianism took hold:
‘Since they [Jewish refugees] obviously do not belong to any other people,
they create an uncanny impression in their complete dependence upon the
compassion of others, in their naked mere-humanity, of something utterly
inhuman’ she wrote in ‘Guests from No-Man’s Land’.42 Mere humanity is
the last thing that will guarantee a person rights and recognition; on the
contrary being simply human, a person without a place, is the first step to
becoming inhuman. The ‘inexplicable strangeness’ that is at the heart of
Conrad’s 1901 short story, the ‘uncanny impression’ that the placeless person
brings with her in Arendt’s writing, are both about the anxieties of national
sovereignty in an age of mass movement. There is an important moral and
political lesson here that was appreciated by the writers in this book:
that compassion, empathy, and pity do not stand outside the story of the
modern refugee, but are fundamentally intrinsic to its unfolding—and

ongoing—tragedy.
The ‘ethical turn’ in literary studies has placed a lot of emphasis on
‘responsibility’ and ‘obligation’ in recent years. All the writers in this book
understand rightlessness to be an ethical question, but, just as importantly,
indeed for most of them more importantly, each also insists that ethics
traffics with politics.That trafficking is often a matter of literary or aesthetic
form—of imagining statelessness and, importantly, the alternatives to
nationalist conceptions of political sovereignty. As such, the ‘rights’ in the
title of this book are also to be understood—as rights always have been
understood—as occupying a position between moral imagination and pol-
itics, and between ethics and history. As Derek Attridge argues elegantly in
The Singularity of Literature (2004), there is no necessary correlation between
the ethical work sometimes done by literature and the moral and political
judgments we may derive from our reading.43 But, in turn, these writers
remind us that there are moments in history that call for something more
robust than an ethics of response and encounter; moments when the infinite
demands of justice, Jacques Derrida’s ‘incalculable justice’, must be made
accountable within political and historical terms. Part of my argument in
this book is that for literary ethics to amount to something more than liter-
ary humanitarianism, it too must reckon with political and moral judg-
ment.44 Attridge argues that literature is often singular because its very
strangeness draws us into an encounter with otherness: the ethics of the
literary encounter exists beyond our sense of self-sovereignty, and to one
side of political agency. But—and this question is as pressing today as it was
in the mid-twentieth century—in a world of defensive nation states, uncon-
trolled ethno-nationalism, and barbaric bureaucracy—where can that ethics
possibly land? As Zweig discovered when the paper of his passport to
cosmopolitanism turned to dust, nowhere is the weightlessness of an ethics
of non-sovereignty more apparent than within the politics of historical
statelessness.
Rights
When Arendt used the word ‘stateless’ she was describing a diverse group of
people—refugees, political exiles, temporarily denaturalized citizens, those,
like many Jews, who had been stripped of their citizenship altogether,
thers, like Arendt herself, who were illegal immigrants. Out of place, these
o
people were also out of law, and out of political and historical time. In Ayten
Gündogdu’s words: ‘The stateless were rightless in the sense that they were
deprived of legal personhood as well as the right to action and speech.’45 In
the first two thirds of this book, I tend to follow Arendt’s generalization,
although legal and diplomatic fussing over the different kinds of status that
should be accorded to different types of placeless people was already a con-
spicuous feature of the debates within the international community that
would come to frame mid-century human rights.
In the interwar period, it was assumed that refugees were ‘persons who
had lost the diplomatic protection of their home governments without
acquiring another nationality’.46 Stateless people, on the other hand, were
understood to have no nationality de jure although, in reality many refugees
were de facto stateless. Whilst some, including two pioneers of mid-century
refugee studies, John Hope Simpson and R.Yewdall Jennings (both of whom
Arendt drew on in her own scholarship), insisted on maintaining the dis-
tinction, by the late 1930s others could already see that it mattered little how
one came to be ejected from legal and political representation, rightlessness
was rightlessness.47 At first blush, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human
Rights (UDHR), looked like it might offer a way through this problem with
the promise of universal human rights. Yet, as the drafters well understood,
the key to protecting rights was never actually going to be universal human
rights for all—that grander ambition came later.48 Rights had been ravaged
in Europe and elsewhere because the forces of ethno-nationalism, following
the practices of colonialism, had taken over the juridical and political func-
tions of the state, and had started administering mass murder and population
expulsions, as well as taxes and civic rights. Buttressing the freedoms neces-
sary to keep the state safe was thought to be the best protection against
tyranny. Unlike Arendt, Weil, or Orwell, post-war liberal thinkers, in histor-
ian G. Daniel Cohen’s words: ‘optimistically viewed citizenship, safeguarded
in time of crisis by international organization, as the natural guardian of
human rights.’49
Others, including the two giants of mid-century human rights, René
Cassin and Hersch Lauterpacht, pushed back hard, understanding clearly
that it would not take much for the politics of territorial sovereignty to go
to the bad once more. Both argued strenuously for the right of asylum to
be included in human rights law. In 1948, the year of the UDHR’s publica-
tion, Lauterpacht publicly lamented that the failure to grant asylum had
prevented it from comprehensively succeeding in its historical mission to

secure, as he later put it, the transformation of the individual from ‘an object
of international compassion into a subject of international right’.50
The local cause of that failure embodied the contradictions inherent in
attempting to legislate for the rights of all whilst also attempting to re-assert
the norms of territorial sovereignty. In an episode often told in human
rights histories, on 20 October 1948 the 3rd Committee of the UDHR
broke off its deliberations to listen to Ralph Bunche’s report on the refugee
crisis in Palestine. Bunche, later awarded the Nobel Peace prize (the first
African-American to win the prize) had taken over as UN mediator after the
assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte in September. He would leave
the post only six months later. For anybody attending the 108th meeting
of the UDHR Committee still feeling optimistic about the future of human
rights, Bunche’s account was a bitter dose of reality testing. The delegate
from Iraq remarked that the ‘committee would do better to take up this
concrete case of human rights violations than to spend hours debating
rights in the abstract’.51
To an extent the committee did just that, but the effects of those deliber-
ations were to prove equivocal for refugee history. On the one hand,
Lebanon, host to the largest number of Palestinian refugees, seized the
moment to argue for the right of refugees to return to their home countries
(now Article 13.2 of the UDHR). On the other hand, where earlier drafts
had granted the right to ‘seek and be granted’ asylum, Saudi Arabia and the
United Kingdom led the charge for an implicit and, as it turned out, disin-
genuous, strengthening of national immigration laws. Article 14 was watered
down to the ‘right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from
persecution’, an ‘ambiguous play of words’, as Lauterpacht pointed out
crossly, that effectively made a nonsense out of the right it seemed to prom-
ise: really you don’t need a right to ask for asylum, you simply ask for it;
equally, if the ‘right to enjoy’ really meant, as Mrs Corbett from the United
Kingdom argued when she introduced the amendment, the ‘right of every
state to offer refuge and to resist all demands for extradition’, why not sim-
ply say this, particularly given that international law already provided against
states having to grant extradition in cases of persecution?52
Some of the weaknesses of the UDHR were redressed by the 1951
Convention on Refugees, which set the terms for refugee law for years to
follow. Even here, however, as legal historians have argued increasingly for-
cibly over the last ten years, as those terms have battled against a new tide of
nationalism, the granting of refugee rights was in effect a lockdown that, at

its best, pushed placeless people into inhabiting specific and sometimes
limiting political and juridical categories, and at worse, threw them out of
those categories altogether.53 Elfan Rees, a Welsh theologian involved with
the Palestinian refugee aid effort described early drafts of the Convention as
being like ‘a menu at an expensive restaurant, with every course crossed out
except the soup – and a footnote to the effect that the soup might not be
served in certain circumstances’.54 Indeed, as it turned out, for the Palestinians
soup too was off the menu, as they were under the care of the United
Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNWRA) and so exempt.55
The 1951 definition of a refugee put careful historical markers around the
type of placeless person assumed by the Convention. Although the 1967
Protocol removed the original temporal and geographical restrictions, the
existential and affective connotations, as well as the legal terms, of being a
modern refugee have persisted. According to the Convention, a refugee is a
person who:
owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion,

nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is
outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear,
is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who,
not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former
habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such
fear, is unwilling to return to it.56
This is a capacious definition in legal and political terms, but it comes with
cultural and historical baggage. As much as it looked forward to future
brutal oppressions, the Convention’s focus on ‘persecution’ spoke directly to
recent European refugee history and to the Cold War; similarly, the emphasis
on ‘fear’ captured the terror of totalitarian persecution but not the agoniz-
ing anxiety of having nowhere to go, or of statelessness without term.
Legal history and literary history eventually ended up telling a very simi-
lar story about exile and statelessness in the post-war period: the exile, usu-
ally European, emerges as an individual of conscience and agency, a victim
of persecution who, nonetheless, is of his time; and the exile’s others, some-
times but usually not European, caught in the dehumanizing movements of
mass displacement whose existence is recognized neither by the humanism
of human rights nor (to recall Said) by literary history. Over the past thirty
years, this distinction has become blurred. As the West is again waking up to
the consequences of mass displacement, Lauterpacht’s dream of all being

subject to international law has spun further out of reach for the millions who
find themselves, once more, objects of international compassion—where
compassion now also means being subject to mass systems of humanitarian,
frequently militarized, administration within an increasingly volatile local and
global politics. Soup is still off the menu for all but the lucky minority.
The move away from a politics of rights, such as it was, to a least harm
humanitarianism has revealed again how vulnerable placeless people always
were even when international law was trying its best. Citizenship, as Arendt
and others understood, was the glue that stuck rights to ‘Man’ as an abstract
category. Once you have lost your citizenship, nothing is granted and every-
thing is to be proved—including, in a further cruel twist, how it was you got
to lose your citizenship in the first place. For the refugee, the route to
becoming a subject of international law has always been the pilgrimage of
the supplicant. As early as the 1938 Convention Concerning the Status of
Refugees Coming from Germany, refugees had to ‘prove’ that they no longer
had protection of the German government and were not leaving Germany
for reasons of ‘purely personal convenience’.57 The 1951 Convention refu-
gee had to demonstrate that her fear of persecution was ‘well-founded’.
Today, many refugees also have to demonstrate not only their persecution
but their fear too—suffering has to be seen to be believed.
For today’s refugee the process of gaining political and juridical recogni-
tion is essentially testimonial, as indeed, is the case for many victims of
human atrocity struggling to find historical, legal, and political recognition.
This would be fine were the law infallibly benign. As the ‘certificates of
trauma’ required by the French state to authenticate asylum claims show,
however, it is no longer (if it ever were) a simple matter to disentangle the
moral and affective force of trauma from institutions of legal and political
power. Far from expanding political understandings of what it means to be
a victim of historical violence—as did the groundbreaking testimonies of
Holocaust survivors in the trial of Adolf Eichmann—for millions today, the
requirement to demonstrate one’s trauma is a further obstacle to regaining
legal and political status. Didier Fassin has described the French certificates
of trauma as symptoms of contemporary ‘humanitarian reason’; a reasoning
that is strong on foregrounding human suffering but weak on the political
and historical causes of that suffering.58 In this context, it is difficult to keep
on arguing that an ethics based on response to trauma and suffering alone
is sufficient. It never was.
Refugees
For all the writers in this book, refugees were never simply refugees. This
was not just a case of seeing the human person behind the refugee category.
Refugees were not simply refugees because they opened up a space—at
once historical, political, and imaginative—for thinking and being between
nation states. We have become accustomed to assuming that this is a place
of pathos. The literary archive of modern statelessness is much more than
this. For writers and journalists, political theorists and human rights advo-
cates, philosophers and poets living through the mid-century—and most of
the authors in this book were many of these things at once—writing about
displacement was a powerful way of thinking about rights, citizenship, and
sovereignty at the moment when the question of what it meant to belong
to a nation, at least in Europe, was at its most vexed.
The question they all raise is as urgent now as it was, although very dif-
ferently, in the mid-twentieth century: what kind of political, legal, moral,
and psychic life might we imagine existing between national citizenship and
statelessness? Until lately, that question has been muted in literary history
and theory. Ten years after Said’s ‘Reflections on Exile’, Richard Rorty’s
influential call for the rights-rich to develop a new discourse of moral sen-
timents in the post-Cold War 1990s blew one last liberal wind into the sails
of modernist cosmopolitanism. Nabokov, for Rorty, was of his time not
because of his extraterritoriality, but because his ‘private irony’ re-described
human cruelty, delivering a valuable ‘lesson in style’ (Nabokov’s own words)
for liberals abashed at inequality but no longer persuaded by big theories of
political change.59 Solidarity with the rightless was still an aim, but it was a
chastened, and so necessarily ironic, kind of political identification that Rorty
urged, and one that did little to challenge the terms of Western sovereignty.
At the opposite extreme, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s engage-
ment with the question of the refugee and modern biopolitics has led
others to conclude that there is little point carrying on ‘infinite negoti-
ations’ with discourses of rights and citizenship, that we might even dispense
with political sovereignty altogether, and hedge our bets on post-humanism
instead.60 Agamben cut his critical teeth on the work of Arendt and Simone
Weil, as well as Kafka, and his thinking about the extent to which forms of
law have become forms of life is a presence throughout this book.
Nonetheless, with the notable exception of Weil, few writers at the time
were quite as fatalistic about the prospects for political sovereignty. For
Agamben, because sovereign power has always violently operated a divide
between bios (politically qualified life) and zoē (natural life), when the
mid-century refugee was ejected from categories of political and juridical
personhood she was always going to find herself on the perilous border
‘between nature, law and violence, as homines sacri, or sacred men who can
be killed with impunity’.61 As others have argued, however, there is nothing
inevitable about the fall into bare life for the refugee in Arendt’s account of
rightlessness.62 The European roots laid for universal rights in 1789 may
have withered by 1943—the date Arendt published her now famous essay
‘We Refugees’—but it did not necessarily follow that that was the end of
the idea of a politics based on the exchange of rights and power. ‘We are not
born equal; we become equal as members of a group on the strength of our
decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights,’ Arendt wrote in The
Origins of Totalitarianism.63
Thinking about how we might ‘become equal members of a group’ from
the starting point of historical groundlessness, for Arendt, and indeed for
others, included a bold, and often normative, role for the literary-historical
imagination. For the thinkers in this book, writing was a means of excavat-
ing the mind in transit between different modes of political and historical
belonging, as well as exploring the suffering of powerlessness. Before liter-
ary humanism could reassert its authority in the post-war period, before
modernist melancholy became the style for the mutilations of exile (Said
evokes Adorno in the closing pages of ‘Reflections on Exile’), and before the
literary humanitarianism of the empathetic reader of our own age, for those
who followed Europe’s refugee rat runs (Arendt, Weil, Beckett), lived in
refugee communities (Arendt,Weil, Beckett, Auden), lived in camps (Arendt
and Weil), advocated for refugees (Arendt,Weil, Auden,Thompson), worked
for the Red Cross (Beckett), and who watched the catastrophe of Jewish
statelessness turn into the catastrophe of Palestinian statelessness with dis-
may (all of the above), the task was to forge a style c apable of responding to
the new rightlessness.
For Arendt, historical imagination was foremost a matter of ‘adequacy
and response’: the writer must find a style that is adequate to her subject, a
response true to the history she is telling.64 When she wrote her master-
piece, The Origins of Totalitarianism, she defended her method by explaining
that she was writing about something she wished not to preserve, but to
destroy. Hence the importance of avoiding the language and structure of

historical inevitability, or philosophical fatalism, and of crafting instead a
response that could register the singularity of new political phenomena.
Kant’s Einbildungskraft—the building of images by which to understand the
world—are crucial to this method. Exercises of imagination, for Arendt, cre-
ate the kind of thinking necessary to judge the world. In her writing about
statelessness, again image-building is central to her method. So too are fic-
tion and poetry. As a historian, Arendt produces an account of the modern
refugee as a symptom of a larger crisis about the meanings of citizenship and
sovereignty at mid-century. As a reader of literature, she looks to writing
both for critique and in order to imagine blueprints for a different politics
of belonging. This is what she finds in the failed story of the European
Bildunsgroman. The modern novel was a means by which Europeans could
imagine themselves into both national and cosmopolitan modes of citizen-
ship. As that dream broke, as Arendt shows through her readings of Rahel
Varnhagen and Franz Kafka, other forms of imagining begin to emerge.
Arendt’s famous call for a new politics of a ‘right to have rights’, I argue in
the first section of this book, was also forged, in part, out of her intense
engagement with literary, as well as political, modes of thinking in the 1940s.
She was not alone, although most exercises in imagining the future in the
1930s and 1940s were grimly dystopic rather than, as in Arendt’s case, cau-
tiously messianic. In 1933, H.G. Wells, author of one of the first twentieth-
century declarations of the rights of man, prophesized a world where the
problem of statelessness had been eradicated by the emergence of a world-
wide state, in his huge, and slightly tedious, The Shape of Things to Come
(1933). Orwell charged that Wells’ insulated late nineteenth-century middle-
class sensibility ultimately meant that he was ‘too sane’ to understand what
was really going on at mid-century. Perceptiveness about the reality of fas-
cism and totalitarianism belonged rather to those who suffered directly
under them, he argued, refugees, such as Orwell’s close friend, Koestler,
‘nearly all of them . . . who have seen totalitarianism at close quarters and
known the meaning of exile and persecution.’65 Orwell, who opens the
middle section of this book, knew that he was probably also ‘too sane’ to
know the meaning of exile.Yet in Nineteen Eighty-Four, a novel best known
for its indictment of the totalitarian mind, it is the image of a boat of Jewish
refugees being sunk in the Mediterranean that expresses the possibility of a
politics dependent neither on pity nor nationalism. Implacably anti-nationalist
and anti-colonialist, and often casually antisemitic, in this most literary of his
fictions, Orwell also dares to imagine another possible history for mid-
century statelessness.
Arendt later taught Orwell’s texts on her courses on twentieth-century
political experience at Berkeley, the New School, and Cornell.With Simone
Weil, both Orwell and Arendt understood there to be an intimate connection
between the rise of totalitarianism and not just war-forced migration but the
large-scale deracination caused by colonialism and reckless economic expan-
sion. ‘Whoever is uprooted himself uproots others,’Weil warned General de
Gaulle shortly before her death in England in 1943.66 If Orwell was too sane
to encounter the limits of exile, many have accused Weil of being too mad to
be a reliable political moralist.Yet not only has her understanding of rootless-
ness proved enduring,Weil also produced one of the most striking critiques of
mid-century human rights that we have. As much as the old Rights of Man,
the new rights advocated by the doctrine of personalism were there to be
fought for, contracted, defended; as such, she argued, they served the same
forces of expansion and domination that had torn so many from their
roots. Weil died before the UDHR drafters had begun their work, but she
would not have been at all surprised at the document’s failure to reconcile
its moral aims with the realpolitik of late and postcolonial state formation.
‘Humanity does not exist in the anonymous flesh lying inert by the
road-side,’ Weil wrote in one of her final denunciations of the misplaced
abstractions of mid-century humanism.67 In 1946, Samuel Beckett replied that
the road-sides trod by the nameless and placeless were exactly where
humanity now lay, but that one did not, like Weil, need an ethics of the
supernatural in order to see it. Beckett’s writing has long been praised for its
unique abstraction of human suffering. In his later works, such as Comment
C’est (1961), Catastrophe (1982), and Rough Radio II (1961) human cruelty and
torture are explicitly framed within the human rights politics of later twen-
tieth-century Europe: Algeria, totalitarian repression, the censorship of
writers are all explicit references. But Beckett’s engagement with what he
described in 1946 as ‘the time-honoured conception of humanity in ruins’
began much earlier.68 What Beckett had discovered with his work with the
Irish Red Cross in Saint-Lô, Normandy, was the same fissure identified by
Arendt between those who had nothing and those who had something to
give, between the rights-rich and the rights-poor.The characters who wan-
der through the three short stories that he first wrote in French, ‘La Fin’,
(between 1945–6) ‘L’Expulsé’ (October 1946), and ‘Le Calmant’ (December

1946) are both subject to a regime of humanitarian indifference (‘They
clothed me and gave me money’ read the first lines of ‘La Fin’) and restless
agents, stumbling in a stripped down French, groping for a new narrative.
These are the new clowns of the dark background of difference, ironists of
their own suffering, chroniclers of the gap that had opened up between the
placeless people and the rest of the world. Conrad’s Yanko Goorall finds his
voice in the intimate chatter of Beckett’s narrators: ‘You become unsociable,
it’s inevitable. It’s enough to make you wonder sometimes if you are on the
right planet.’69 Beckett, I argue in chapter 5, sets up the terms for a justly
uncomfortable engagement with the aesthetics of the very humanitarianism
that became necessary as the world struggled not only to legislate for, but to
conceptualize the new rightlessness.
Nowhere more enduringly did the mid-century struggle to legislate for
human rights crash into the politics of self-determination than in Israel/
Palestine to which I turn in the final section. One of the first to advocate for
the rights of Jewish refugees in the late 1930s, journalist and writer, Dorothy
Thompson scandalized U.S. opinion when she similarly campaigned for
Palestinian refugees in the late 1940s and 1950s.With Arendt,Thompson was
one of the first to grasp that the refugee crises of the 1930s was the symptom,
not the cause, of a nationalism that was ‘turning the world into a jungle.’
Refugees, she wrote in 1938, were ‘merely people forced to run away from
one part of the jungle to another part of it. Their personal tragedy can only
serve one great social purpose. They are and should be recognized as an
advancing crowd shouting a great warning:The jungle is growing up, and the
jungle is on fire.’70 There would be no solution to the refugee problem she
pointed out presciently just a year later,‘so long as the world was divided into
sovereign states’.71 Horrified humanitarianism would never be enough.
Thompson is important to the modern history of statelessness because she
insisted on seeing symmetries between the refugee histories of the Jews and
Palestinians that very few were willing to concede at mid-century. She drove
a moral and historical truck through the new human rights pieties—and lost
friends, work, and public confidence as a result.
Thompson’s story is also important—and a harbinger for what was to
follow—because in the end she could not think beyond the same terms of
political sovereignty that she identified as structural to modern statelessness.
The European nation state failed, she argued, the moment when national
identity became the organizing principle of state formation. As the United

States, by contrast, was formed of citizens not peoples, its democracy was
more robust (Arendt, to an extent, thought so too). What Thompson could
not and would not see was that the terms of that citizenship could be as
easily racialized: one of her less persuasive arguments against Israel was that
its very existence questioned the ‘loyalty’ of American Jews. The refugees of
the mid-century might have upset much that had been assumed about
rights and the nation state—except for the fantasy that some states are more
immune from the politics of exclusionary racism than others.
For one brief moment in the mid-twentieth century Palestine/Israel
raised the question of what a rights-based citizenship without nationalism
might actually look like—for Arendt, this was precisely the wager that was
raised by the new statelessness. To a large extent, that question was closed
down by the exigencies of the Cold War, late and postcolonial conflict. As
many were quick to grasp, rights-based universal humanism, however well
intentioned, was not going to prevent others from stumbling into voids of
statelessness similar to those which swallowed up Stefan Zweig and his
wife in 1942.
Placeless People concludes with a study of two poets from different ends of
the same history of exile and displacement: Auden, whose voluntary 1939
departure from England coincided with the first convulsion of national
frontiers in Europe, its colonies, protectorates and mandates, and the Oxford-
based Palestinian,Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, whose writing captures the reality of
today’s borderline living with an original clarity. Auden loops us back to
Arendt, not just because the two became close friends in New York, but
because his writing, like hers, is a thought experiment in imagining differ-
ent forms of human and political belonging. But the last word of the book
goes to Qasmiyeh whose remarkable 2008 poem, ‘Holes’, brilliantly refuses
to authenticate his own suffering for the benefit of others. Arendt would
have recognized in this rejection of the terms of literary humanitarianism a
powerful claim, not for the cast-off entitlements of others, but for the ‘right
to have rights’.
* * *
Placeless People opens in 1933 on the border between Germany and
Czechoslovakia, as Hannah Arendt enters a safe house and slips into state-
lessness. It ends in Baddawi refugee camp on the northern border of
Lebanon, established in 1955 and home today for not only second and now
third generation Palestinian refugees, but Syrians, Kurds, and Iraqis too.
I offer only a limited historical snapshot of the modern literary history of
statelessness that is, by definition, massive, and which contains within its
largely untouched archive the early history of our current moral and polit-
ical failures. Missing from these pages are the stories and texts of the Germans
forced on the march in the wake of World War Two, or the 15 million or so
who later crossed out of the Soviet region; the Chinese pushed between the
Revolution and Japanese occupation; the Indians who found themselves in
Pakistan, and the Muslims in India, who all experienced the violence of
state formation at bloody first hand; the Algerians pushed into camps by the
French—sometimes the same camps that Arendt and her colleagues had
been put in; the Yugoslavians, both those reluctantly pushed back into Tito’s
domain (often to their deaths) and those fleeing a new chapter of European
ethno-nationalism in the 1990s; the Hungarians of 1956; the Vietnamese; the
Ugandan Asians—and these are just some of the forced migrations of the
twentieth century alone. We need to read, listen, and compare these refugee
writers today not only to acknowledge statelessness for the modern trauma
that it was and is, but also to learn from what this archive reveals about the
prospects for different kinds of political citizenship that might still exist.
At the beginning of the modern age of human rights the best writing did
not simply describe a new reality—the reality of the wretchedness of the
refugee or the pathos of the permanent exile—but registered that a world
which has accepted that simply by dropping into the gaps between nation
states people could become political and juridical non-persons has already
torn the fabric of reality in an outrageous way. As Carol Batchelor from the
United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) put it in a
review of the 1954 Convention on the Status of Stateless Persons: ‘Proving
statelessness is like establishing a negative. The individual must demonstrate
something that is not there.’72 Placeless People concludes that we need now to
reconnect with a moral imagination bold enough to demonstrate that the
people who are not here are, in fact, everywhere.
PART
ONE
Reading Statelessness
one
Reading Statelessness
Arendt’s Kafka
B efore the house on the border, stand a woman and her mother. ‘Come
in, come in,’ whispers the landlady at the threshold. Through the door,
the woman and her mother can see a table laid for supper, and beyond that
another door, just ajar, open to the dark.They enter and share the meal with
the landlady and her family. After they have eaten, she beckons the two
women towards the second door, at the back of the house. ‘Here, now you
go,’ she hisses. They cross the second threshold and are bemused to find
themselves standing outside the law.
The story of how Hannah Arendt and her mother, Marthe, fled across the
Germany–Czech border in the spring of 1933 is Kafkaesque in even more
senses than it might first appear. Arrested while researching antisemitic
‘horror propaganda’ at the Prussian State Library for Kurt Blumenfeld and
the German Zionist Organization, Arendt had escaped by persuading her
unusually kind interrogator of her innocence. Arriving at the border, the
women were aided by a friendly family whose house had a front door in
Germany and a backdoor into Czechoslovakia. They entered as guests, and
departed stateless.1 Arendt would later remark that Kafka’s world became
‘rather uncannily adequate to the reality’ which became lived experience
for millions in the 1940s.2 In her own case, that experience was to cut deep
into her clear-sighted analysis of how the then new category of statelessness
put an end to one dream of universal rights at mid-century.
This has all been well told recently, and today Arendt’s writing on rights,
refugees, and statelessness are an authoritative and well-established part of
the human rights canon.3 Less commented upon is the fact that her cri-
tique of rights was forged, at least in part, from her reading of fiction and,
in particular, from the work she did on Kafka in the mid 1940s; in other
words, at precisely the same moment she was working on the essays that
would eventually form the basis of her now famous the ‘Decline of the
Nation State, and the End of the Rights of Man’ chapter in Origins of
Totalitarianism. In that chapter, Arendt argued that the rights of men had
ended the moment when the European nation state succumbed to nation-
alism. People had rights only so long as nations recognized them as citizens;
rights, unlike refugees, did not travel.
Arendt is one of Kafka’s most audacious ‘creative readers’.4 Newly arrived
in New York, writing furiously and copiously, about refugees, Jewish pol-
itics, the future of Europe and Palestine, she used Kafka as a ‘thought
experiment’ to think about both the rightlessness she was experiencing
and analyzing, and its negative, a different kind of political and ethical
community, a possible future. Until very recently Arendt’s reading of Kafka
was a missing chapter in post-war literary histories of trauma and exile, late
modernism, and critical theory. In what follows, I suggest that her 1940s
essays on Kafka offer important insights for grasping how the history of
the novel form is connected to shifting (and shifty) definitions of legal and
political sovereignty in the mid-century and beyond.
The banality of exile

Narratives of exile, of flight and cunning, quest and return, run through
literary modernism, but the stories of modern refugees that emerged in the
mid-twentieth century brought something new with them. ‘Everywhere,’
Arendt wrote in a 1944 article, ‘the word “exile”, which once had an under-
tone of almost sacred awe, now provokes the idea of something simultaneously
suspicious and unfortunate.’ The article was called ‘Guests from No-Man’s
Land’.5 Because the new refugees were treated as national limit cases, they
threatened ideas about citizenship; because the world of nations could not
normalize the conditions of the stateless without jeopardizing their own
definitions of sovereignty, they remained in limbo. Placeless, the new strangers
carried with them the threat of legal and political freefall; objects of pity and
contempt, they brought with them a uniquely wretched message about
the fragility of rights in an age of nationalism. The shift from a concept of
inalienable rights to the ambivalent humanitarianism that has been so
conspicuous in modern times began with the transformation of exiles into
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"At all events," she pursued, "now that your excuse is no longer a good
one, you will come this week to dinner, will you not?"
He would, of course, and watched the yellow motor drive away in the
autumn sunlight, wishing rather less for the order from the minister of war
to change his quarters than he had before.
CHAPTER VI
ORDERED AWAY
He had received his letter from the minister of war. Like many things
we wish for, set our hopes upon, when they come we find that we do not
want them at any price. The order was unwelcome. Sabron was to go to
Algiers.
Winter is never very ugly around Tarascon. Like a lovely bunch of fruit
in the brightest corner of a happy vineyard, the Midi is sheltered from the
rude experiences that the seasons know farther north. Nevertheless, rains
and winds, sea-born and vigorous, had swept in and upon the little town.
The mistral came whistling and Sabron, from his window, looked down on
his little garden from which summer had entirely flown. Pitchouné, by his
side, looked down as well, but his expression, different from his master's,
was ecstatic, for he saw, sliding along the brick wall, a cat with which he
was on the most excited terms. His body tense, his ears forward, he gave a
sharp series of barks and little soft growls, while his master tapped the
window-pane to the tune of Miss Redmond's song.
Although Sabron had heard it several times, he did not know the words
or that they were of a semi-religious, extremely sentimental character which
would have been difficult to translate into French. He did not know that
they ran something like this:
"God keep you safe, my love,
All through the night;
Rest close in His encircling arms
Until the light."
And there was more of it. He only knew that there was a pathos in the
tune which spoke to his warm heart; which caressed and captivated him and
which made him long deeply for a happiness he thought it most unlikely he
would ever know.
There had been many pictures added to his collection: Miss Redmond at
dinner, Miss Julia Redmond—he knew her first name now—before the
piano; Miss Redmond in a smart coat, walking with him down the alley,
while Pitchouné chased flying leaves and apparitions of rabbits hither and
thither.
The Count de Sabron had always dreaded just what happened to him.
He had fallen in love with a woman beyond his reach, for he had no fortune
whatsoever, nothing but his captain's pay and his hard soldier's life, a
wanderer's life and one which he hesitated to ask a woman to share. In spite
of the fact that Madame d'Esclignac was agreeable to him, she was not
cordial, and he understood that she did not consider him a parti for her
niece. Other guests, as well as he, had shared her hospitality. He had been
jealous of them, though he could not help seeing Miss Redmond's
preference for himself. Not that he wanted to help it. He recalled that she
had really sung to him, decidedly walked by his side when there had been
more than the quartette, and he felt, in short, her sympathy.
"Pitchouné," he said to his companion, "we are better off in Algiers,

mon vieux. The desert is the place for us. We shall get rid of fancies there
and do some hard fighting one way or another."
Pitchouné, whose eyes had followed the cat out of sight, sprang upon
his master and seemed quite ready for the new departure.
"I shall at least have you," Sabron said. "It will be your first campaign.
We shall have some famous runs and I shall introduce you to a camel and
make you acquainted with several donkeys, not to speak of the historic
Arab steeds. You will see, my friend, that there are other animals besides
yourself in creation."
"A telegram for mon capitaine." Brunet came in with the blue envelope
which Sabron tore open.
"You will take with you neither horses nor dogs."
It was an order from the minister of war, just such a one as was sent to
some half-dozen other young officers, all of whom, no doubt, felt more or
less discomfited.
Sabron twisted the telegram, put it in the fireplace and lighted his
cigarette with it, watching Pitchouné who, finding himself a comfortable
corner in the armchair, had settled down for a nap.
"So," nodded the young man aloud, "I shall not even have Pitchouné."
He smoked, musing. In the rigid discipline of his soldier's life he was

used to obedience. His softened eyes, however, and his nervous fingers as
they pulled at his mustache, showed that the command had touched him.
"What shall I do with you, old fellow?"

Sabron and Pitchouné
Although Sabron's voice was low, the dog, whose head was down upon
his paws, turned his bright brown eyes on his master with so much
confidence and affection that it completed the work. Sabron walked across
the floor, smoking, the spurs on his heels clanking, the light shining on his
brilliant boots and on his form. He was a splendid-looking man with race
and breeding, and he combined with his masculine force the gentleness of a
woman.
"They want me to be lonely," he thought. "All that the chiefs consider is

the soldier—not the man—even the companionship of my dog is denied
me. What do they think I am going to do out there in the long eastern
evenings?" He reflected. "What does the world expect an uncompanioned
wanderer to do?" There are many things and the less thought about them,
the better.
"A letter for Monsieur le Capitaine." Brunet returned with a note which
he presented stiffly, and Pitchouné, who chose in his little brain to imagine
Brunet an intruder, sprang from the chair like lightning, rushed at the
servant, seized the leg of his pantaloons and began to worry them, growling,
Brunet regarding him with adoration. Sabron had not thought aloud the last
words of the telegram, which he had used to light his cigarette.
"... Nor will it be necessary to take a personal servant. The

indigenes are capable ordonnances."
As he took the letter from Brunet's salver he said curtly:
"I am ordered to Algiers and I shall not take horses nor Pitchouné."
The dog, at the mention of his name, set Brunet's leg free and stood
quiet, his head lifted.
"Nor you either, mon brave Brunet." Sabron put his hand on his
servant's shoulder, the first familiarity he had ever shown a man who served
him with devotion, and who would have given his life to save his master's.
"Those," said the officer curtly, "are the orders from headquarters, and the
least said about them the better."
The ruddy cheek of the servant turned pale. He mechanically touched

his forehead.
"Bien, mon Capitaine," he murmured, with a little catch in his voice. He

stood at attention, then wheeled and without being dismissed, stalked out of
the room.
Pitchouné did not follow. He remained immovable like a little dog cut
from bronze; he understood—who shall say—how much of the
conversation? Sabron threw away his cigarette, then read his letter by the
mantelpiece, leaning his arm upon it. He read slowly. He had broken the
seal slowly. It was the first letter he had ever seen in this handwriting. It
was written in French and ran thus:
"Monsieur:—My aunt wishes me to ask you if you will come to

us for a little musicale to-morrow afternoon. We hope you will be
free, and I hope," she added, "that you will bring Pitchouné. Not that
I think he will care for the music, but afterward perhaps he will run
with us as we walk to the gate. My aunt wishes me to say that she
has learned from the colonel that you have been ordered to Algiers.
In this way she says that we shall have an opportunity of wishing
you bon voyage, and I say I hope Pitchouné will be a comfort to
you."
The letter ended in the usual formal French fashion. Sabron, turning the
letter and rereading it, found that it completed the work that had been going
on in his lonely heart. He stood long, musing.
Pitchouné laid himself down on the rug, his bright little head between
his paws, his affectionate eyes on his master. The firelight shone on them
both, the musing young officer and the almost human-hearted little beast.
So Brunet found them when he came in with the lamp shortly, and as he set
it down on the table and its light shone on him, Sabron, glancing at the
ordonnance, saw that his eyes were red, and liked him none the less for it.
CHAPTER VII
A SOLDIER'S DOG
"It is just as I thought," he told Pitchouné. "I took you into my life, you
little rascal, against my will, and now, although it's not your fault, you are
making me regret it. I shall end, Pitchouné, by being a cynic and
misogynist, and learn to make idols of my career and my troops alone. After
all, they may be tiresome, but they don't hurt as you do, and some other
things as well."
Pitchouné, being invited to the musicale at the Château d'Esclignac,

went along with his master, running behind the captain's horse. It was a
heavenly January day, soft and mild, full of sunlight and delicious odors,
and over the towers of King René's castle the sky banners were made of
celestial blue.
The officer found the house full of people. He thought it hard that he
might not have had one more intimate picture to add to his collection. When
he entered the room a young man was playing a violoncello. There was a
group at the piano, and among the people the only ones he clearly saw were
the hostess, Madame d'Esclignac in a gorgeous velvet frock, then Miss
Redmond, who stood by the window, listening to the music. She saw him
come in and smiled to him, and from that moment his eyes hardly left her.
What the music was that afternoon the Count de Sabron could not have
told very intelligently. Much of it was sweet, all of it was touching, but
when Miss Redmond stood to sing and chose the little song of which he had
made a lullaby, and sang it divinely, Sabron, his hands clasped behind his
back and his head a little bent, still looking at her, thought that his heart
would break. It was horrible to go away and not tell her. It was cowardly to
feel so much and not be able to speak of it. And he felt that he might be
equal to some wild deed, such as crossing the room violently, putting his
hand over her slender one and saying:
"I am a soldier; I have nothing but a soldier's life. I am going to Africa

to-morrow. Come with me; I want you. Come!"
All of which, slightly impossible and quite out of the question,

nevertheless charmed and soothed him. The words of her English song,
almost barbaric to him because incomprehensible, fell on his ears. Its
melody was already part of him.
"Monsieur de Sabron," said Madame d'Esclignac, "you are going away

to-morrow?"
"Yes, Madame."
"I expect you will be engaged in some awful native skirmishes. Perhaps
you will even be able to send back a tiger skin."
"There are no tigers in that part of Africa, Madame."
The young soldier's dark eyes rested almost hostilely on the gorgeous
marquise in her red gown. He felt that she was glad to have him go. He
wanted to say: "I shall come back, however; I shall come back and when I
return" ... but he knew that such a boast, or even such a hope was fruitless.
His colonel had told him only the day before that Miss Redmond was
one of the richest American heiresses, and there was a question of a duke or
a prince and heaven only knew what in the way of titles. As the marquise
moved away her progress was something like the rolling of an elegant
velvet chair, and while his feelings were still disturbed Miss Redmond
crossed the room to him. Before Sabron quite knew how they had been able
to escape the others or leave the room, he was standing with her in the
winter garden where the sunlight came in through trellises and the perfume
of the warmed plants was heavy and sweet. Below them flowed the Rhone,
golden in the winter's light. The blue river swept its waves around old
Tarascon and the battlements of King René's towers.
"You are going to Algiers to-morrow, Monsieur de Sabron?" Miss

Redmond smiled, and how was Sabron to realize that she could not very
well have wept there and then, had she wished to do so?
"Yes," he said. "I adore my regiment. I love my work. I have always

wanted to see colonial service."
"Have you? It is delightful to find one's ambitions and desires satisfied,"

said Miss Redmond. "I have always longed to see the desert. It must be
beautiful. Of course you are going to take Pitchouné?"
"Ah!" exclaimed Sabron, "that is just what I am not going to do."
"What!" she cried. "You are never going to leave that darling dog
behind you?"
"I must, unfortunately. My superior officers do not allow me to take

horses or dogs, or even my servant."
"Heavens!" she exclaimed. "What brutes they are! Why, Pitchouné will
die of a broken heart." Then she said: "You are leaving him with your man
servant?"
Sabron shook his head.
"Brunet would not be able to keep him."
"Ah!" she breathed. "He is looking for a home? Is he? If so, would you
... might I take care of Pitchouné?"
The Frenchman impulsively put out his hand, and she laid her own in it.
"You are too good," he murmured. "Thank you. Pitchouné will thank
you."
He kissed her hand. That was all.
From within the salon came the noise of voices, and the bow of the
violoncellist was beginning a new concerto. They stood looking at each
other. No condition could have prevented it although the Marquise
d'Esclignac was rolling toward them across the polished floor of the music-
room. As though Sabron realized that he might never see this lovely young
woman again, probably never would see her, and wanted before he left to
have something made clear, he asked quickly:
"Could you, Mademoiselle, in a word or two tell me the meaning of the

English song you sang?"
She flushed and laughed slightly.
"Well, it is not very easy to put it in prose," she hesitated. "Things sound
so differently in music and poetry; but it means," she said in French,
bravely, "why, it is a sort of prayer that some one you love very much
should be kept safe night and day. That's about all. There is a little sadness
in it, as though," and her cheeks glowed, "as if there was a sort of
separation. It means..."
"Ah!" breathed the officer deeply, "I understand. Thank you."
And just then Madame d'Esclignac rolled up between them and with an
unmistakable satisfaction presented to her niece the gentleman she had
secured.
"My dear Julia, my godson, the Duc de Tremont." And Sabron bowed to
both the ladies, to the duke, and went away.
This was the picture he might add to his collection: the older woman in
her vivid dress, Julia in her simpler gown, and the titled Frenchman bowing
over her hand.
When he went out to the front terrace Brunet was there with his horse,
and Pitchouné was there as well, stiffly waiting at attention.
"Brunet," said the officer to his man, "will you take Pitchouné around to
the servants' quarters and give him to Miss Redmond's maid? I am going to
leave him here."
"Good, mon Capitaine," said the ordonnance, and whistled to the dog.
Pitchouné sprang toward his master with a short sharp bark. What he
understood would be hard to say, but all that he wanted to do was to remain
with Sabron. Sabron bent down and stroked him.
"Go, my friend, with Brunet. Go, mon vieux, go," he commanded

sternly, and the little dog, trained to obedience as a soldier's dog should be,
trotted reluctantly at the heels of the ordonnance, and the soldier threw his
leg over the saddle and rode away. He rode regardless of anything but the
fact that he was going.
CHAPTER VIII
HOMESICK
Pitchouné was a soldier's dog, born in a stable, of a mother who had

been dear to the canteen. Michette had been une vrai vivandière, a real
daughter of the regiment.
Pitchouné was a worthy son. He adored the drums and trumpets. He

adored the fife. He adored the drills which he was accustomed to watch
from a respectable distance. He liked Brunet, and the word had not yet been
discovered which would express how he felt toward Monsieur le Capitaine,
his master. His muscular little form expressed it in every fiber. His brown
eyes looked it until their pathos might have melted a heart of iron.
There was nothing picturesque to Pitchouné in the Château d'Esclignac

or in the charming room to which he was brought. The little dog took a
flying tour around it, over sofas and chairs, landing on the window-seat,
where he crouched. He was not wicked, but he was perfectly miserable, and
the lovely wiles of Julia Redmond and her endearments left him unmoved.
He refused meat and drink, was indifferent to the views from the window,
to the beautiful view of King René's castle, to the tantalizing cat sunning
herself against the wall. He flew about like mad, leaving destruction in his
wake, tugged at the leash when they took him out for exercise. In short,
Pitchouné was a homesick, lovesick little dog, and thereby endeared
himself more than ever to his new mistress. She tied a ribbon around his
neck, which he promptly chewed and scratched off. She tried to feed him
with her own fair hands; he held his head high, looked bored and grew thin
in the flanks.
"I think Captain de Sabron's little dog is going to die, ma tante," she
told her aunt.
"Fiddlesticks, my dear Julia! Keep him tied up until he is accustomed to

the place. It won't hurt him to fast; he will eat when he is hungry. I have a
note from Robert. He has not gone to Monte Carlo."
"Ah!" breathed Miss Redmond indifferently.
She slowly went over to her piano and played a few measures of music
that were a torture to Pitchouné, who found these ladylike performances in
strong contrast to drums and trumpets. He felt himself as a soldier degraded
and could not understand why he should be relegated to a salon and to the
mild society of two ladies who did not even know how to pull his ears or
roll him over on the rug with their riding boots and spurs. He sat against the
window as was his habit, looking, watching, yearning.
"Vous avez tort, ma chère," said her aunt, who was working something
less than a thousand flowers on her tapestry. "The chance to be a princess
and a Tremont does not come twice in a young girl's life, and you know you
have only to be reasonable, Julia."
Miss Redmond's fingers wandered, magnetically drawn by her thoughts,

into a song which she played softly through. Pitchouné heard and turned his
beautiful head and his soft eyes to her. He knew that tune. Neither drums
nor trumpets had played it but there was no doubt about its being fit for
soldiers. He had heard his master sing it, hum it, many times. It had soothed
his nerves when he was a sick puppy and it went with many things of the
intimate life with his master. He remembered it when he had dozed by the
fire and dreamed of chasing cats and barking at Brunet and being a faithful
dog all around; he heard again a beloved voice hum it to him. Pitchouné
whined and softly jumped down from his seat. He put his forepaws on Miss
Redmond's lap. She stopped and caressed him, and he licked her hand.
"That is the first time I have seen that dog show a spark of human
gratitude, Julia, He is probably begging you to open the door and let him
take a run."
Indeed Pitchouné did go to the door and waited appealingly.
"I think you might trust him out. I think he is tamed," said the Marquise
d'Esclignac. "He is a real little savage."
Miss Redmond opened the door and Pitchouné shot out. She watched
him tear like mad across the terrace, and scuttle into the woods, as she
thought, after a rabbit. He was the color of the fallen leaves and she lost
sight of him in the brown and golden brush.
CHAPTER IX
THE FORTUNES OF WAR
Sabron's departure had been delayed on account of a strike at the

dockyards of Marseilles. He left Tarascon one lovely day toward the end of
January and the old town with its sweetness and its sorrow, fell behind, as
he rolled away to brighter suns. A friend from Paris took him to the port in
his motor and there Sabron waited some forty-eight hours before he set sail.
His boat lay out on the azure water, the brown rocks of the coast behind it.
There was not a ripple on the sea. There was not a breeze to stir as he took
the tug which was to convey him. He was inclined to dip his fingers in the
indigo ocean, sure that he would find them blue. He climbed up the ladder
alongside of the vessel, was welcomed by the captain, who knew him, and
turned to go below, for he had been suffering from an attack of fever which
now and then laid hold of him, ever since his campaign in Morocco.
Therefore, as he went into his cabin, which he did not leave until the
steamer touched Algiers, he failed to see the baggage tender pull up and
failed to see a sailor climb to the deck with a wet bedraggled thing in his
hand that looked like an old fur cap except that it wriggled and was alive.
"This, mon commandant," said the sailor to the captain, "is the pluckiest
little beast I ever saw."
He dropped a small terrier on the deck, who proceeded to shake himself

vigorously and bark with apparent delight.
"No sooner had we pushed out from the quay than this little beggar
sprang from the pier and began to swim after us. He was so funny that we
let him swim for a bit and then we hauled him in. It is evidently a mascot,
mon commandant, evidently a sailor dog who has run away to sea."
The captain looked with interest at Pitchouné, who engaged himself in

making his toilet and biting after a flea or two which had not been drowned.
"We sailors," said the man saluting, "would like to keep him for luck,
mon commandant."
"Take him down then," his superior officer ordered, "and don't let him
up among the passengers."
* * * * * *
*
It was a rough voyage. Sabron passed his time saying good-by to France
and trying to keep his mind away from the Château d'Esclignac, which
persisted in haunting his uneasy slumber. In a blaze of sunlight, Algiers, the
white city, shone upon them on the morning of the third day and Sabron
tried to take a more cheerful view of a soldier's life and fortunes.
He was a soldierly figure and a handsome one as he walked down the

gangplank to the shore to be welcomed by fellow officers who were eager
to see him, and presently was lost in the little crowd that streamed away
from the docks into the white city.
CHAPTER X
TOGETHER AGAIN
That night after dinner and a cigarette, he strode into the streets to
distract his mind with the sight of the oriental city and to fill his ears with
the eager cries of the crowd. The lamps flickered. The sky overhead was as
blue nearly as in daytime. He walked leisurely toward the native quarter,
jostled, as he passed, by men in their brilliant costumes and by a veiled
woman or two.
He stopped indifferently before a little café, his eyes on a Turkish

bazaar where velvets and scarfs were being sold at double their worth under
the light of a flaming yellow lamp. As he stood so, his back to the café
where a number of the ship's crew were drinking, he heard a short sharp
sound that had a sweet familiarity about it and whose individuality made
him start with surprise. He could not believe his ears. He heard the bark
again and then he was sprung upon by a little body that ran out from
between the legs of a sailor who sat drinking his coffee and liquor.
"Gracious heavens!" exclaimed Sabron, thinking that he must be the

victim of a hashish dream. "Pitchouné!"
The dog fawned on him and whined, crouched at his feet whining—like
a child. Sabron bent and fondled him. The sailor from the table called the
dog imperatively, but Pitchouné would have died at his master's feet rather
than return. If his throat could have uttered words he would have spoken,
but his eyes spoke. They looked as though they were tearful.
"Pitchouné, mon vieux! No, it can't be Pitchouné. But it is Pitchouné!"

And Sabron took him up in his arms. The dog tried to lick his face.
"Voyons," said the officer to the marine, who came rolling over to them,
"where did you get this dog?"
The young man's voice was imperative and he fixed stern eyes on the
sailor, who pulled his forelock and explained.
"He was following me," said Sabron, not without a slight catch in his
voice. The body of Pitchouné quivered under his arm. "He is my dog. I
think his manner proves it. If you have grown fond of him I am sorry for
you, but I think you will have to give him up."
Sabron put his hand in his pocket and turned a little away to be free of
the native crowd that, chattering and grinning, amused and curious and
eager to participate in any distribution of coin, was gathering around him.
He found two gold pieces which he put into the hand of the sailor.
"Thank you for taking care of him. I am at the Royal Hotel." He

nodded, and with Pitchouné under his arm pushed his way through the
crowd and out of the bazaar.
He could not interview the dog himself, although he listened, amused,

to Pitchouné's own manner of speech. He spent the latter part of the evening
composing a letter to the minister of war, and although it was short, it must
have possessed certain evident and telling qualities, for before he left
Algiers proper for the desert, Sabron received a telegram much to the point:
"You may keep your dog. I congratulate you on such a faithful
companion."
CHAPTER XI
A SACRED TRUST
His eyes had grown accustomed to the glare of the beautiful sands, but
his sense of beauty was never satisfied with looking at the desert picture
and drinking in the glory and the loveliness of the melancholy waste.
Standing in the door of his tent in fatigue uniform, he said to Pitchouné:
"I could be perfectly happy here if I were not alone."
Pitchouné barked. He had not grown accustomed to the desert. He hated

it. It slipped away from under his little feet; he could not run on it with any
comfort. He spent his days idly in his master's tent or royally perched on a
camel, crouching close to Sabron's man servant when they went on caravan
explorations.
"Yes," said Sabron, "if I were not alone. I don't mean you, mon vieux.
You are a great deal, but you really don't count, you know."
Before his eyes the sands were as pink as countless rose leaves. To
Sabron they were as fragrant as flowers. The peculiar incense-like odor that
hovers above the desert when the sun declines was to him the most
delicious thing he had ever inhaled. All the west was as red as fire. The day
had been hot and there came up the cool breeze that would give them a
delicious night. Overhead, one by one, he watched the blossoming out of
the great stars; each one hung above his lonely tent like a bridal flower in a
veil of blue. On all sides, like white petals on the desert face, were the tents
of his men and his officers, and from the encampment came the hum of
military life, yet the silence to him was profound. He had only to order his
stallion saddled and to ride away for a little distance in order to be alone
with the absolute stillness.
This he often did and took his thoughts with him and came back to his
tent more conscious of his solitude every night of his life.
There had been much looting of caravans in the region by brigands, and
his business was that of sentinel for the commerce of the plains. Thieving
and rapacious tribes were under his eye and his care. To-night, as he stood
looking toward the west into the glow, shading his eyes with his hand, he
saw coming toward them what he knew to be a caravan from Algiers. His
ordonnance was a native soldier, one of the desert tribes, black as ink, and
scarcely more child-like than Brunet and presumably as devoted.
"Mustapha," Sabron ordered, "fetch me out a lounge chair." He spoke in

French and pointed, for the man understood imperfectly and Sabron did not
yet speak Arabic.
He threw himself down, lighted a fresh cigarette, dragged Pitchouné by

the nape of his neck up to his lap, and the two sat watching the caravan
slowly grow into individuals of camels and riders and finally mass itself in
shadow within some four or five hundred yards of the encampment.
The sentinels and the soldiers began to gather and Sabron saw a single
footman making his way toward the camp.
"Go," he said to Mustapha, "and see what message the fellow brings to
the regiment."
Mustapha went, and after a little returned, followed by the man himself,
a black-bearded, half-naked Bedouin, swathed in dust-colored burnoose and
carrying a bag.
He bowed to Captain de Sabron and extended the leather bag. On the

outside of the leather there was a ticket pasted, which read:
"The Post for the —— Squadron of Cavalry—"

Sabron added mentally:
"—wherever it may happen to be!"
He ordered bakshish given to the man and sent him off. Then he opened
the French mail. He was not more than three hundred miles from Algiers. It
had taken him a long time to work down to Dirbal, however, and they had
had some hardships. He felt a million miles away. The look of the primitive
mail-bag and the knowledge of how far it had traveled to find the people to
whom these letters were addressed made his hands reverent as he
unfastened the sealed labels. He looked the letters through, returned the bag
to Mustapha and sent him off to distribute the post.
Then, for the light was bad, brilliant though the night might be, he went
into his tent with his own mail. On his dressing-table was a small
illumination consisting of a fat candle set in a glass case. The mosquitoes
and flies were thick around it. Pitchouné followed him and lay down on a
rush mat by the side of Sabron's military bed, while the soldier read his
letter.
"Monsieur:—
"I regret more than ever that I can not write your language
perfectly. But even in my own I could not find any word to express
how badly I feel over something which has happened.
"I took the best of care of Pitchouné. I thought I did, but I could
not make him happy. He mourned terribly. He refused to eat, and
one day I was so careless as to open the door for him and we have
never seen him since. As far as I know he has not been found. Your
man, Brunet, comes sometimes to see my maid, and he thinks he has
been hurt and died in the woods."
Sabron glanced over to the mat where Pitchouné, stretched on his side,
his forelegs wide, was breathing tranquilly in the heat.
"We have heard rumors of a little dog who was seen running
along the highway, miles from Tarascon, but of course that could
not have been Pitchouné."
Sabron nodded. "It was, however, mon brave," he said to the terrier.
"Not but what I think his little heart was brave enough and
valiant enough to have followed you, but no dog could go so far
without a better scent."
Sabron said: "It is one of the regrets of my life that you can not tell us
about it. How did you get the scent? How did you follow me?" Pitchouné
did not stir, and Sabron's eyes returned to the page.
"I do not think you will ever forgive us. You left us a trust and
we did not guard it."
He put the letter down a moment, brushed some of the flies away from
the candle and made the wick brighter. Mustapha came in, black as ebony,
his woolly head bare. He stood as stiff as a ramrod and as black. In his
child-like French he said:

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Placeless People: Writings, Rights, and

Refugees Lyndsey Stonebridge

The Wealth of Refugees: How Displaced People Can Build

People Forced to Flee: History, Change and Challenge

Sisters and Sisterhood: The Kenney Family, Class, and

Philosophical, Literary, and Poetic Writings James D.

Margaret Cavendish: Essential Writings David Cunning

Henri Bergson: Key Writings (Athlone Contemporary

Zhu Xi: Selected Writings Zhu Xi

Making Refugees in India (Oxford Historical Monographs)

LY N DSE Y STON E BR I DGE

For the East End boys,

Preface and Acknowledgements

There are few memorials to the victims of forced displacement. Refugees

viii Pr e face a n d Ack now le dge m e n ts

homes, but from the panicked insecurity of the rights-rich, we see it in

Pr e face a n d Ack now le dge m e n tsix

List of Illustrations xiii

Introduction: Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees 1

1. Affidavit of Identity in Lieu of Passport: ‘I wish to use this document in

xiv List of I llust r at ions

11. Children ‘old beyond their years’ drinking milk in Gaza.

Everywhere the word ‘exile’ which once had an undertone of almost

2 Place le ss People: W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 3

1940s raised the spectre of rightlessness in uncompromising terms, those

4 Place le ss People: W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 5

6 Place le ss People: W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 7

8 Place le ss People: W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 9

10 Place le ss People: W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s

By being out of place, Nabokov is actually ‘profoundly of our time’. Steiner’s

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 11

Mass displacement is the product of modern violence and oppression:

12 Place le ss People: W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s

(her phrase) endemic to colonialism, spread across to the West.The question

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 13

14 Place le ss People: W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s

modern refugee, but are fundamentally intrinsic to its unfolding—and

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 15

16 Place le ss People: W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s

prevented it from comprehensively succeeding in its historical mission to

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 17

nationalism, the granting of refugee rights was in effect a lockdown that, at

owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion,

18 Place le ss People: W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s

the consequences of mass displacement, Lauterpacht’s dream of all being

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 19

20 Place le ss People: W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 21

destroy. Hence the importance of avoiding the language and structure of

22 Place le ss People: W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 23

(between 1945–6) ‘L’Expulsé’ (October 1946), and ‘Le Calmant’ (December

24 Place le ss People: W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s

identity became the organizing principle of state formation. As the United

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 25

30 Place le ss People: W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s

The banality of exile

"Pitchouné," he said to his companion, "we are better off in Algiers,

"You will take with you neither horses nor dogs."

Pr e face a n d Ack now le dge m e n tsix

List of Illustrations xiii

Introduction: Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees 1

1. Affidavit of Identity in Lieu of Passport: ‘I wish to use this document in

11. Children ‘old beyond their years’ drinking milk in Gaza.

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 3

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 5

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 7

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 9

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 11

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 13

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 15

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 17

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 19

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 21

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 23

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 25