Abstract:

Human beings have always been in continuous movement looking for a better life or fleeing zones of danger. Nevertheless, in recent years the numbers of displaced people have soared and there is hardly a day without the “refugee crisis" being in public discussion. Refugees are either, or sometimes both, outcasts or persecuted in their homeland; thus, they are forced to flee enduring difficulties and hardships searching for some place where they would be welcome, only to be considered a threat to the social fabric and culture of the “host" country. This paper examines the plight of three children in the novel Refugee by Alan Gratz (2017) who face horrific journeys of seeking refuge and go through tragic hardships. Gratz narrates the story of Josef, a Jewish boy living in the German Nazi era in the 1930s, Isabel, a girl living in Cuba in the 1990s, and Mahmoud, a Syrian boy in 2015 Aleppo. The three children and their families are in a constant mode of movement enforced by the rejection they encounter at each border crossing in their journeys, thus caught in a perpetual state of liminality and “in-betweenness". In the analysis, the paper draws on the concepts of liminality and nomadism as defined by Arnold van Gennep (1960) and Deleuze and Guattari (1987) respectively.