Rhoda Kanaaneh, The Right Kind of Suffering: Gender, Sexuality, and Arab Asylum Seekers in America (University of Texas Press, 2023).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Rhoda Kanaaneh (RK): Back in 1996, as a graduate student in anthropology in New York, I procrastinated my schoolwork by answering an email posted by a lawyer from Catholic Charities looking for a volunteer Arabic interpreter. She asked me to go with her to an immigration detention center in New Jersey where she would be meeting an Arabic speaking client for the first time. I did not know much back then about the process of applying for asylum nor had I even heard about immigration detention. When I read that asylum was given on five central bases, where individuals were persecuted in their countries because of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particularly social group, it sounded vaguely familiar. I soon learned that feminists and gay rights advocates were pushing to expand asylum to include people persecuted because of their gender or sexuality, often using the “membership in a particular social group” basis.
Aside from my initial cluelessness, my memory of that trip is hazy. I cannot clearly recall the face of the young Algerian man we traveled to see. But I have a distinct memory of sensing his palpable discomfort, his mumbling in a low voice I could barely hear, and him squirming over and over in his seat. He was visibly anxious while telling two strange women, the attorney and myself, about getting caught in Algiers with his boyfriend, being beaten by his father and stowing away aboard a ship that took him to Europe and then to Elizabeth, New Jersey.
My job was “just” to interpret. Aside from being bilingual, I had no formal qualifications or training. I quickly realized that interpreting was neither simple nor neutral. With my choice of words and with my demeanor that day, I strained to reassure the young man that despite the bars surrounding him he had done nothing wrong. The lawyer would be helping him apply for asylum and trying to get him released in the meantime from immigration detention. But she had to set realistic expectations; it would take months, or perhaps longer.
I continued to interpret on and off for asylum cases after that. When I responded to requests for volunteers, I knew little about whom or what the cases involved. By sheer coincidence quite a few centered on gender or sexuality. Over a dozen years later, I decided to make this volunteering a central focus of my anthropological attention. Being somewhat useful as an interpreter during what could become research appealed to me. If I would eventually write about the asylum seekers I met (with their permission of course), I would not be writing from some kind of neutral outsider’s standpoint, but as an advocate—though not a particularly powerful one—for their attempts to legalize their lives in the United States. That legal status was a privilege I myself enjoyed because of an accident of birth, being born to an American mother.
When I began this research in 2012, asylum was not yet the hot topic that it now is. The number of applicants was lower and an official asylum “crisis” had not yet been manufactured in the media; Muslim travel bans and caravan fear mongering would come later. My choice of topics appears more obvious today, but the rationale has been there from the start—to think critically about who can become an American, how, and why.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
RK: My book focuses on the experiences of four Arab asylum seekers who used gender or sexuality as a basis for their applications, following them as they navigated the twists and turns of an often ridiculous process. These four individuals from various backgrounds were relatively lucky; they were able to enter the United States on tourist visas, figured out they were eligible for asylum, and eventually found attorneys—mostly pro-bono— to help them apply. The lawyers provided much needed guidance to navigate a complicated and dysfunctional system. They helped the applicants frame their suffering in the most legally impactful way, though that process itself was traumatic, and advised them on the immigration system’s counter-intuitive measures of truthfulness and worthiness.
What is considered evidence that accounts of persecution are truthful is rather arbitrary. Suad, for example, had to memorize the number and exact sequence of what initially were a jumble of memories of police harassment in Sudan. Imposing this grid on her recollections made her more credible in the eyes of adjudicators. Some aspects of persecution are considered worthy of asylum, while other suffering, particularly economic hardship, needed to be set aside. Suad had to learn to deemphasize the economic consequences of the police incidents, particularly the loss of her job. Similarly, Fadi had to emphasize the homophobic motivations for his arrest and torture in Jordan while eliding related class and ethnic dimensions. Marwa showcased her private hardships as a lesbian in a Shiite family in Lebanon and downplayed her financial struggles.
With the technical expertise of attorneys who helped them frame their narratives as the “right” kind of victim—expertise most asylum seekers do not access to—applicants such as Fadi, Suad, Fatima, and Marwa stood a chance to eventually (after much torturous delay and a dehumanizing process) legalize their lives in the United States. Together, the chapters paint a picture of a deeply flawed yet important system and tell us not only about the individual asylum seekers, but also about America and its gendered and sexed vision of the Arab world. Thanks to the diligent work of feminist and gay rights activists, the Unites Stated has slowly and selectively admitted and symbolically embraced asylum seekers like Suad, a circumcised well-educated woman from Sudan, or Fadi, a middle-class gay man from Jordan. In the process, they are represented as victims of timeless violence of which America is presumed free, simultaneously abdicating any involvement in the creation or exacerbation of conditions that drive displacement around the globe, and barring many others with similar experiences from those countries. I explore what this narrow path to asylum for a select few says about our politics beyond the asylum office or courtroom.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
RK: This book departs from my previous work in terms of its geographic focus on the United States, though I continue to think in it about Arab and Palestinian communities. The ubiquity of gender and sexuality-based cases among the pro-bono asylum applicants I encountered resonated with my long-standing interest in these areas and my sense that they are politically significant. Writing chapters that each focus on one individual allowed me to develop a more flowing writing style that reviewers have described as “cinematic,” “novel-like,” and an “intimate ethnography.”
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
RK: My hope is that this book is accessible to a wider audience beyond academia, to those who work in and around immigration and asylum as well as beyond. Readers learn about a few men and women from different backgrounds in the Arab world who struggle and strategize to carve out a space for themselves in the United States, using the limited legal opening of asylum. My aim in recounting these complex experiences was not to elicit pity, but some degree of identification. Readers are invited for a moment to walk in someone else’s shoes. Seeing the world from that angle— even if that view is brief and limited and heavily mediated by me—makes it harder to ignore the injustice of the asylum structure and indeed our immigration system overall. I hope it drives home the ultimate arbitrariness of the laws and borders that divide us.
Telling stories about the dysfunction of asylum and its toll on relatively privileged applicants may seem like an odd choice. Asylum seekers who attempted to enter the country through the US-Mexico border without visas were much more vulnerable. Trump introduced policies that significantly worsened the conditions of asylum and Biden has not only failed to reverse them but has added new obstacles of his own. Why write about a few relatively lucky asylum seekers who submitted their applications before this downturn? And why point out the shortcomings of a system that was recently transformed into something far worse? My answer is that it is now more urgent than ever to humanize asylum seekers. And it is urgent to do so for applicants from the region known as the Middle East who are often demonized in current political discourse, routinely suspected of being dangerous terrorists—particularly if they are men—for no other reason than their country of birth. Or they are viewed as the female or gay victims of said terrorist men. But Fadi and Suad’s lives are more complicated than that. They also have aspirations that may sound familiar to many readers, aspirations for things like a nice home, a good job, kind friends, and a stable life. Perhaps I am naive, but I see the accounts in this book of such struggles as an antidote to the dangerous stereotypes that fuel immigration politics.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
RK: I look forward to teaching a Palestine course at Fordham University in spring 2024.
Excerpt from the book (from Chapter 1, pp. 25-28)
When Suad lived in Sudan, she had been harassed on many occasions by the public morality police because of the way she dressed. On her way to work in the center of Khartoum, she would often pass by policemen who disapproved of the tightness of her trousers or the length of her skirt or her lack of a headscarf. Sometimes they pointed at her with their batons or yelled insults. On other occasions they stopped her and verbally chided her or even sent her back home to change her clothes and would not allow her to pass or to ride on the city bus. Once, a policeman hit Suad with a baton, though she remembers more the sting of the humiliation than the pain of the wood striking her body. According to the public morality law in Sudan, Suad could in fact be subject to flogging for such violations.
When Suad first told the McCormick lawyers (and me) about these incidents, she was visibly upset, and her sense of the injustice of what had happened was palpable. However, in order to include them in her asylum narrative, her lawyers had to impose two organizing frameworks on these accounts. First, they had to quantify the number of incidents of harassment and to establish the exact order in which they occurred. Second, they needed to frame Suad’s resistance to the dress code as political.
To start with, Suad’s lawyers wanted to know exactly how many times she had been stopped, as well as the dates and the details of what happened each time. Suad said that she was stopped many times over the course of several years, all more than two years earlier, so she could not remember the exact number, dates, or sequence. Her lawyers pressed her to do her best to estimate. As she struggled to organize her memories, four particular incidents stood out in her mind. She was not sure about their exact sequence but told them to the lawyers in a particular order that day. Once the incidents were quantified and written down by the lawyers, Suad then had to memorize that precise order with all of its details. She had to be able to answer questions such as “What happened on the third time you were stopped?” or “Describe the incident during which you were not allowed to board the bus.” They explained that she might be asked questions like this in court and if she could not replicate the exact number, sequence, and details, her “credibility would come into question.”
This task of memorizing the details of these incidents and their sequence took many hours of all of our time. The lawyers worried that the government attorney could try to slip Suad up by asking confusing questions about this. The ability to replicate the exact order of memories was clearly fetishized by the system as a test of truth-telling, even though the particular order being memorized was an artifact of the legal process. This forced Suad’s cloud of memories into a clear, linear order that then became the story that she then had to replicate perfectly in order to prove that she was credible.
To drive the importance of this memorization of details home to Suad, the lawyers explained to her that her initial asylum application had been rejected in part because of an inconsistency in the date of her firing. Suad’s written narrative said she was fired from her job in August, and she had said during the interview that she was fired in September—that small difference of one month had signaled to the asylum officer that Suad was not credible! Indeed, according to US law, the ability of the applicant to repeat information consistently is used to determine credibility, regardless of whether an inconsistency goes to the heart of the claim or is a tangential detail. Such high stakes of course made Suad quite worried, and she mastered the sequence once she understood this expectation.
But this memorization was a tricky task and not something anyone would naturally do. Moreover, the lawyers warned Suad not to recite the sequence mechanically. She had to achieve a delicate balance between being well prepared and being over-rehearsed. The Immigration Equality manual for asylum lawyers insists, “You should never give the client the questions to ‘study.’ . . . if he [sic] memorizes the ‘correct’ answers, his testimony will sound rote and unconvincing.”
The second thing the lawyers had to do was to establish that these incidents of harassment were motivated by Suad’s political opinion. At the first few meetings, the lawyers asked Suad why she had refused to comply with the dress code required by the police. Her initial reaction was that the clothes made her feel uncomfortable. The lawyers followed up: “Uncomfortable physically or ideologically?” Suad looked a bit confused. She responded, “I’m not sure what you mean; I think it’s both.” The lawyers explained that the word “uncomfortable” was too mild: “The judge will not give you asylum if the Sharia dress code was just annoying to you.” The following meeting, the lawyers asked her the same question, and Suad answered, “I was more comfortable walking and working at the lab in trousers.” An asylum expert from an NGO who was in attendance that day flat-out told Suad that this was not a convincing argument.
The lawyers asked, “Were you trying to make a political statement that women have a right to wear what they want?” Suad said, “No, I was not trying to make a political statement. I was not affiliated with any political party.” This threw the lawyers for a loop. They had difficulty connecting the personal to the political without Suad explicitly doing so herself. Indeed, they were wise to be concerned, as courts have tended to label punishments suffered by women, including those for “refusing to conform to societal norms,” as “‘private’ matters outside the scope of asylum law.” They discussed among themselves in English how to proceed. Suad interrupted: “Guys, I want to put your minds at ease. I’ve always felt strongly about women’s rights and, if someone told me wear this or don’t wear that, I would react very strongly because my freedom was being limited.”
Through this process, Suad learned to articulate her rebelliousness and the many instances of dress-code defiance as a feminism-inspired political conviction. This was not a lie or a fabrication—it was a particular framing of the issue that made it legally impactful. Within the asylum system, a woman who risks being flogged dozens of times for defying the dress code in Sudan, as Suad did, needs to say she defied it because of “political opinion” rather than because “I didn’t like it.”
Suad had more frequent run-ins with the morality police after graduating from college and as she got older. When asked why, she explained that the Sharia police had been headquartered near her new place of work. The asylum expert told Suad that this was not a good argument because it would mean she didn’t need asylum: she could just go work or live in a different neighborhood in Khartoum. Suad was also told to avoid bringing up differences between regions in Sudan. This is an example of geographic homogenization in the asylum context: applicants are incentivized to flatten their accounts of their countries by presenting them as oppressive everywhere, all the time. Over the course of the many meetings with her lawyers, Suad learned to emphasize the stronger arguments and to use a vocabulary recognized by the system as political opinion. Her first (failed) application read, “I wore skirts sometimes to avoid harassment and about twice a week I wore pants,” while her new affidavit stated, “I continued to refuse to comply with the dress code despite harassment.”
But this memorization was a tricky task and not something anyone would naturally do. Moreover, the lawyers warned Suad not to recite the sequence mechanically. She had to achieve a delicate balance between being well prepared and being over-rehearsed. The Immigration Equality manual for asylum lawyers insists, “You should never give the client the questions to ‘study.’ . . . if he [sic] memorizes the ‘correct’ answers, his testimony will sound rote and unconvincing.”
My point is not that there is fraud or lying. All of the elements of this drama were present from the get-go. But they had to be staged in a new way, thanks to the assistance of her lawyers—assistance that Suad was fortunate to have and that most asylum seekers don’t have access to. The lawyers advised her on the most impactful way to answer a question: truthfully, but in the most legally relevant way and using language recognized by the system. As a reporter described it, there are “magic words” that applicants need to use. Most asylum seekers who do not have the advice of a lawyer on this coded language are at a serious disadvantage.