Picture is from the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center (Exhibition organized by Yeshiva University Museum and the Leo Baeck Institute – New York | Berlin.)
Back in 2007, when I first started teaching ESL to refugees, my boss invited me to accompany him to a conference in Washington DC, hosted by our resettlement affiliate, USCRI (US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants). The conference was at a hotel in Dupont Circle. I had dinner one night in Georgetown and another at a Palestinian restaurant. I met resettlement staff from agencies around the country who were originally from around the world: Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Iran, Cuba. These were the days when resettlement was solidly a bi-partisan--humanitarian and patriotic--concern, not an indication of somehow being "woke." My memories are hit and miss but I remember a sculpture of Marilyn Monroe outside my hotel. My boss and I took a couple hours to wander the National Mall, marveling over the self-confidence of those massive marble monuments in such contrast to the vulnerability of the refugee experience and the warm human connections in our work.
One important moment from that conference: I was in a breakout session led by a Somali-American woman and former refugee (I wish I remember her name), who was doing human rights and advocacy work. The time slot must have been up against some big name because only a couple of us were there. I probably asked for teaching advice. We were specifically talking about older refugee women who spoke no English. She gave me a directive: "Your job is to listen."
At that time we had Somali Bantu and Liberians in our ESL classes in Providence, including a number of women who had been peasant farmers before they gathered their families and fled for their lives. "Pre-literate" was the term we used, though I doubted they'd ever learn to read. One of the women had gotten down on the floor during class and crawled under a table. That moment revealed the room in a new way: a confined space, no windows, 4 off-white walls, folding tables set up conference-style with a gap in the center; a white board, that pungent smell of dry-erase markers, a closed door. Plus a 42-year-old white guy making marks on the board and pointing to them while asking everyone to repeat a random set of sounds. So many layers of abstraction! And not an ideal space for learning job skills or for reassembling the pieces to build a new life. My job is to listen.
I've been reading (actually listening on audio) to a mysterious book, by WG Sebald called Austerlitz. It's a story about surviving displacement and building a life out of the ruins of the Holocaust (a word never used in the book), and then trying over a lifetime to make some sense of it all. At heart I think it's a book about listening.
The book starts with the narrator meeting a stranger named Jacques Austerlitz and the two connect over European architecture, especially public buildings like train stations, forts, libraries, monuments. The language is rich, though the details are a bit mind-numbing, especially since Jacques scrupulously avoids anything personal. I kept wondering why this stranger is saying all this? And what is it about this listener--the nameless narrator--that makes a stranger so talkative? Is he genuinely interested? Isn't he bored?
It turns out that there is a quality in the narrator's way of listening, that eventually, over 30 years later, makes it possible for Jacques to go beyond architectural facts and tell the story he is discovering about himself and was trying to tell all along. Jacques figures out that he was one of the 10,000 Jewish children sent to safety in England, called the Kindertransport, during the Nazi occupation of Europe. All the early architectural details begin to resonate, enough that I started the book over and re-listened several times. I usually speed up the pace of audiobooks. This one I slowed down. After a while, I realized that listening was probably the whole point of the book. How do we learn to listen, especially to fragmented nonlinear stories? What kind of listening unlocks spaces for trauma survivors to put the puzzle pieces of their own stories together?
Anybody can listen, of course. It's more an act of will than special training or creativity or vulnerability. It does take openness and, as Matt Rowland Hill puts it (in an essay in Unherd that I happened across on the internet about Sebald), "self recession." You can't take center stage if you're engaged deeply in listening.
And it's not easy or second-nature even with those we love. Hill writes that Primo Levi wrote in The Drowned and the Saved "that almost all concentration camp survivors experienced a similar recurring dream: they had returned home and with passion and relief were describing their past sufferings, addressing themselves to a loved person, and were not believed, indeed were not even listened to.”
Your job is to listen.
But let me circle back around to our work at Beautiful Day. Considering the barriers we're navigating, and our production activities, and our mission of job-training, it might not be accurate to call what we're doing listening. Pre-listening, maybe. The communication isn't usually verbal, but here's a fairly common occurrence: one of our new trainees--often one of the older women--will enter our kitchen with her guard up, looking distant, stone-faced. Some cover their faces or stare at the floor around me. But then, after a few weeks, sometimes all at once, the stone expression melts. There's a smile or giggle or a broad grin that needs no explanation.
I love these moments. They are not because of me. We have a team of people extending hospitality in a work context, which builds trust. When we don't necessarily share language, literacy, culture, age, gender, or faith, then we at least have work. Production lets each person contribute something essential. Together we accomplish something tangible. So work becomes an opportunity for shared laughter and trust: a form of pre-listening. If providing a space for that to happen was all we accomplished at Beautiful Day, then I think it would be enough. We rarely hear peoples' stories but I know they are important and need to be told someday, and we would all benefit by becoming the kind of people who are able to hear them.
Anyway, I wanted to share a bit of what I'm reading and thinking about and how this connects to our daily work with refugees and other displaced. Especially during this time when our field and and so much else in our world is entering a period of noise and disruption. Watching a resettlement system that took 50 years to build getting dismantled in months is heartbreaking. People's lives and hopes are suddenly slamming into a brick wall, all because (as I see it) we, in the richest nation in the history of the world, suddenly decided we're too poor to be part of the solution. Our country and our media are full of shouting without much listening.
Beautiful Day is doing okay right now financially, but this is because the bulk of our funding is private or self-earned. Our Afghan Women's Project, which is the closest thing we have to a "listening project," is federally funded through the state. So far the funding seems to be okay, though we haven't yet begun invoicing for expenses incurred last September, so there are no guarantees. If that funding disappears we will need to scramble. Despite the challenges and unknowns, I'm savoring this work. I feel lucky to do it. I've really grown to love it and the team I do it with and the people we serve.
One brief section of Sebald's book suggests that the narrator, like Sebald, is German and not Jewish and likely from a military family. Thus, he or his family are probably complicit in the sufferings of Austerlitz. This adds a new dimension to the act of listening. What emotional and spiritual risks will we need to take in order to listen when we are complicit in a storyteller's suffering? What will we discover or need to face about ourselves? And when does engaging with or sharing that story risk twisting it through our own self-protective blind spots? These are some of the questions we may encounter as our own government takes a more combative and dismissive stance towards refugees and immigrants. Or, as seasoned well-established immigrants (i.e., nearly all of us), blame their problems on new arrivals. It's become a noisy time when so many are shouting. It's probably always easier to double down than to turn around, but shouting won't help anyone to tell their story. I'm pretty sure listening is the right place to start.
