The Right Kind of Suffering
The Right Kind of Suffering
Gender, Sexuality, and Arab Asylum Seekers in America
Winner — 2024 Evelyn Shakir Non-Fiction Academic Award, The Arab American National Museum
An examination of Arab asylum seekers who feel compelled to package their tales of disenfranchisement and suffering to satisfy a deeply reluctant immigration system.
From the overloaded courts with their constantly changing dates and appointments to the need to prove oneself the “right” kind of victim, the asylum system in the United States is an exacting and drawn-out immigration process that itself results in suffering. When anthropologist Rhoda Kanaaneh became a volunteer interpreter for Arab asylum seekers, she learned how applicants were pushed to craft specific narratives to satisfy the system’s requirements.
Kanaaneh tells the stories of four Arab asylum seekers who sought protection in the United States on the basis of their gender or sexuality: Saud, who relived painful memories of her circumcision and police harassment in Sudan and then learned to number and sequence these recollections; Fatima, who visited doctors and therapists in order to document years of spousal abuse without over-emphasizing her resulting mental illness; Fadi, who highlighted the homophobic motivations that provoked his arrest and torture in Jordan, all the while sidelining connected issues of class and racism; and Marwa, who showcased her private hardships as a lesbian in a Shiite family in Lebanon and downplayed her environmental activism. The Right Kind of Suffering is a compelling portrait of Arab asylum seekers whose success stories stand in contrast with those whom the system failed.
This timely book humanizes refugees, particularly those from the Arab world, and will interest those studying gender and sexuality, asylum and refugee law, and Arab American studies.
The Right Kind of Suffering is an excellent study about the broken system of asylum for Arabic-speaking people. It would be an eye-opener for students and scholars of legal and gender studies, as well as cultural studies.
The Right Kind of Suffering privileges the detailed, experiential narratives of asylum seekers that are often missing from top-down analyses of asylum systems. Its compelling style and readability make it an ideal introductory text for undergraduate students and community members who are interested in learning about the American asylum system and the challenges faced by asylees before and after their refuge is granted.
[This book is a] valuable archive and accessible ethnography on the study of migration, border regimes, and asylum policies in the US… Kanaaneh retells the stories of her interlocutors with reflexive awareness of her positionality as an Arabic interpreter and an offspring of migrants herself, which provides the book with a priceless perspective for scholars and practitioners in migration, asylum politics, and queer migration studies.
[The author] uses incisive prose to not only depict her subjects' humanity with great sincerity but also expose how the smallest facets of bureaucracy affect the migrants' pursuits of dignified lives. The result is a text that is widely accessible to non-specialist audiences...Kanaaneh’s ability to guide the reader...makes the book essential reading for anyone who works in law, policy, or social services, or [with] refugees in any context…the depth of Kanaaneh’s reflexivity is a highlight throughout the book.
This book…contributes to the gendered dimension of asylum studies… It does so not by representing asylum applicants as mere precarious beings, but by highlighting their resilient struggles with the system. Kanaaneh's book is appealing research on migration.
Looking at gender, race, and nationality registers, Kanaaneh’s book carefully reveals systems of oppression facing Arab-speaking asylum seekers in the US in the past decades, allowing her experience as an Arabic interpreter during her postgraduate studies to guide this journey and bringing attention to the lived experiences of migrant and refugee communities arriving to the US from the Middle East.
Rhoda Kanaaneh’s scholarship is extremely nuanced and is a model for ethically engaged and sensitive research. Not only are her subjects interlocuters for her intellectual curiosity, but she also engages them as an advocate, translator, community service volunteer, fellow human, and even friend. This is laudable and represents the best of anthropological engagement with the world. The book will resonate deeply with many readers and put a mirror to their own experiences of migration and social recognition.
Rhoda Kanaaneh is an incredibly skilled writer who shows that to live a life in legal precarity requires tremendous resilience not only to cope with challenges such as extreme financial hardship, isolation, homelessness, and depression, but to persist during the lengthy asylum process. The Right Kind of Suffering thinks about the manner in which the War on Terror, anti-Muslim sentiments, and increasing border securitization affect the 'success' of refugee protection for asylum claimants with Muslim backgrounds whose cases touch on different challenges in the area of gender and sexuality.
Rhoda Kanaaneh has taught anthropology and gender and sexuality studies at Columbia University, American University, and New York University. She is the editor of Displaced at Home: Ethnicity and Gender Among Palestinians in Israel and author of Surrounded: Palestinian Soldiers in the Israeli Military and Birthing the Nation: Strategies of Palestinian Women in Israel.
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Narrow Pathways
- 1. “I’ve always been looking for my freedom”
- 2. “My life is a Bollywood film”
- 3. “I wish it was a happier ending”
- 4. “Many reasons to leave”
- Conclusion: Of Stories, Traumas, and Happy Endings
- Notes
- Index
