Portfolio at NYU

Gabrielle Menezes's Book List

Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language, and Loss Ed, Andre Aciiman

This book consists on five essays edited by Andre Aciman. Although not directly related to refugees, it gives a poignant glimpse into what it is like to come to a strange land and live in exile. Eva Hoffman, whose family left Poland for Canada speaks of how her native language is suddenly useless. Aciman, a native of Alexandria, describes how he looks for his homeland abroad seeking the familiar in the strange.

Each of these people left their homeland, often not by choice. They movingly capture the tension of the life of anyone who has moved from their home country, embracing their new life but missing what they were forced to leave behind.

What the Critics said:

"Here, in these searching essays, is the modern Odyssey of exile, less optimistic than Homer's, yet strangely Homeric, too. Like Odysseus, each of these writers can lay claim to a home by telling a personal story well, even if that home and the language of the story has been borrowed. These letters of transit are naturalization papers, replete with adventure, eloquent and brave." --ROBERT FAGLES, Princeton University, translator of The Iliad and The Odyssey

"These reflective essays by writers working in exile, each moving in its own way, beautifully represent what must be a majority view among transplanted intellectuals: that one's first language constitutes one's person, one that no second language, no matter how thoroughly mastered, can ever fully replace. Happily these five professional authors complicate their case with the very brilliance of their contributions." --PETER GAY, Yale University, author of My German Question and Freud: A Life for Our Time

The Price of Indifference: Refugees and Humanitarian Action in the New Century By Arthur C. Helton Oxford University Press, 2002

This book is a great practical guide to refugees, and refugee policy. It makes very dense reading, but is well worth it. Helton is a well known refugee policy scholar. He elucidates current international and domestic law when he describes the responses states have had to modern refugees crises like the Former Yugoslavia, East Timor and Haiti. Asylum seekers are dealt with in particular using the example of asylum in Germany.

Human Rights Watch: 1998 NGO Background Paper

This is a great compilation of everything about detention in the US. There is a section on US law, international law and detention standards of the INS. The paper can be accessed on the Human Rights Watch web-site on docsmgmt.hrw.org/

The structure of the report is very clear. Human Rights Watch researchers had access to detention centers to write it. The conditions and the history of detention centers make really interesting background reading. The most interesting part for me was the discussion on the ethics of detention and grounds for detention under international law. Interspersed with this are testimonies of asylum seekers who had been detained in the US.

The website also contains other reports. An interesting comparison to the US is Australia, which also has mandatory detention. Published are alternatives to detention that Australia is considering.

Basic Documents in International Law, 5th Edition Edited by Ian Brownlie

This is a really useful book to have when looking up human rights. It contains copies of human rights treaties including the Declaration of Human Rights, the International Convention of Civil and Political Rights. The conventions relating to refugees, women and children are also here.

Brownlie, a celebrated British Barrister, has put in a nice summary before every treaty about the substance of the treaty, and a brief history that went into its making.