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Temporal statelessness and the oppressive liminality of perpetually unfulfilled hope: An examination of waiting in Basma Abdel Aziz’s The Queue
- Source: Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture, Volume 13, Issue 2, Oct 2022, p. 247 - 261
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- 30 Jan 2023
Abstract
Narratives of migration can be without movement. When people are suddenly internally displaced, for example, they become non-citizens in their former home countries and are unable to move, much less leave. In instances such as these, we suggest that it may be a temporal – rather than spatial – displacement that has occurred. In so doing, we examine one aspect of temporal displacement: the perpetual state of waiting as a potential tool of bureaucratic control. This is a tool that operates along an axis of hope and anxiety in what may be an attempt to keep people exactly where they already are. This state of waiting appears throughout Al-Tabuur (The Queue), a translated and fictionalized novel written by Egyptian author Basma Abdel Aziz. As illustrated here, Aziz’s novel challenges notions that migration inherently involves progress, and instead shows what can happen when both time and movement seemingly come to a still.