Essay by Louise Cham
Art by Keira Innes
In his book Lived Refuge: Gratitude, Resentment, Resilience, critical refugee studies scholar Vinh Nguyen notes that “[f]or many refugees, matters of life and death hang on a single narrative” (xvi). As a determining factor for obtaining political rights and protection lies in how their lived experience of refuge-seeking is packaged into stories before a global audience of governments, aid organizations, and journalists, refugees “must learn to become storytellers” as they rebuild their lives in foreign communities (xvi). The prescriptive language of asylum and the “aid world” (Thien 24), though instrumental to claiming refugee status and demonstrating persecution to state and humanitarian authorities, is often reductive of the resilience and complexities of refugeehood. Told in a series of narrative fragments that journey between the protagonist’s memories of the Cambodian genocide as a child displaced from her hometown of Phnom Penh and her present life in Montreal, Madeleine Thien’s 2011 novel Dogs at the Perimeter establishes storytelling as an extension of the refugee experience through the voice of Janie, a researcher at the fictitious Brain Research Centre who finds herself confronted with the pain of her past three decades after fleeing the Khmer Rouge killing fields. Through analyzing the ways Janie and other characters in Dogs at the Perimeter employ metaphor to story their experiences of grief, loss, and war—first to cultivate hope amid violence and later to unpack trauma in a postwar reality—this essay will undertake the exploration of figurative language as a mechanism for survival, recovery, and ultimately expressing agency in refugee narratives. In examining the healing power of narrative, I suggest that metaphor, in its ability to bridge the concrete and the abstract, not only provides the means for characters to make sense of disorienting experiences of displacement and illness, but also defamiliarizes their stories, rendering them visible to outside perspectives made emotionally detached by the more clinical language commonly used to diagnose these experiences.
That possessing language is paramount to sustaining life is evident early on in Thien’s novel, with loss of language being presented under a fatalistic light as Janie recalls the brain disease of her senior colleague Hiroji’s patient, Elie. Rather than providing a definitive diagnosis in her description of Elie’s condition, Janie notes the changing qualities of Elie’s artwork at progressive stages of her illness, such as her paintings taking the form of photorealistic cityscapes where once they had been “mathematical and abstract … intense with colour and the representation of rhythm” (Thien 14). Much of the anecdote is composed of Elie’s own commentary about her deteriorating command of language; she dubs her temporary episodes of aphasia “[c]hampagne in the brain” (11) and expresses that she feels “at war” (14), drawing from the longstanding tradition of martial metaphors in medicine’s descriptions of pain. Loss of the capacity to perform activities that were once central to her identity marks the evolution of Elie’s illness, from having difficulty articulating the words of the Lord’s Prayer—“words she had known almost from the time she had learned to speak” (10)—at the onset of symptoms, to being unable to continue painting in the terminal phases. Janie’s attention to the patient narrative and tendency toward figurative language in her metaphor-rich account of Elie’s case align with the values of empathy and ambiguity tolerance Alan Bleakley advocates in his scholarship on the use of language and rhetoric in medicine. Positing the rejection of ambiguity as “the central trait of the authoritarian personality” (34), Bleakley argues that metaphor is intrinsically embedded in medicine, and that scientistic objectivist interpretations of the world, such as the view of pain as “just a neural pathway” (23), can significantly restrict understanding of the patient’s experience:
We need more than technical-rational thinking in medicine to deal with phenomena such as medically unexplained symptoms and complex and shifting symptoms such as those that occur in mental health contexts. The use of metaphor helps to better inhabit such landscapes. (34)
Carrying nuances in connotation, figurative language suggests meaning rather than dictating it. The inherent tolerance of ambiguity in this mode of expression allows for the sensitive portrayal of new or unfamiliar experiences, as well as accounts for the mutable nature of memory.
In the chapter “Rithy,” mythical stories shared with Janie by Bopha, a girl of the same age whom she befriends after being separated from her family by the Khmer Rouge, become a source of comfort and hope as they are stranded in the violent, oppressive environment of a children’s labour brigade. Considering the perception of metaphor—as “understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another” (5)—that George Lakoff and Mark Johnson offer in Metaphors We Live By, their landmark text on metaphor in conceptual thinking, myth can be interpreted as a form of metaphor. As a vehicle by which ancient cultures sought to explain natural and social phenomena, mythical narratives transpose real-life challenges, fears, and desires into a realm of fantasy. Bopha’s capacity to maintain optimism and a creative spirit while working on the reservoir, for instance, arises in part from her belief in the story her grandmother imparts to her about there being a “big book” containing the answers to “everything that had ever happened [and] everything that was coming” (Thien 123-124). By reimagining faith as something material, the metaphor of the book evokes a sense of certainty and control that moves Bopha to envision herself being able to one day turn the pages that spell all fates, as well as place trust in the kindness of a predestined future.
Similarly, Janie finds solace from the war-affected life she describes as being “littered with traps [and] unanswerable questions” in the fabled exploits of her favourite heroes, from the Hindu deity Hanuman to Bopha’s made-up Chantou: “[I]t was Bopha who first taught me how to escape from myself in this way, disappearing into the souls of other people, both the real and the imaginary” (122-123). Janie’s account of endeavouring to become detached from the self is reminiscent of the Khmer Rouge cadre Prasith’s claim: “We are nothing but waterways” (95). The characters’ perception of identity as being highly fluid, along with their expression of a desire to either depart from or erase entirely the figure of the self, emerges, not merely as a side effect of dissociation from the stress of living under military rule, but as a strategic response to the authoritarian regime’s efforts to reduce individuals to passive subjects. Although Prasith is echoing Angkar’s vision of building Cambodian society anew at “Year Zero” when he advises Janie’s brother, Sopham, that they must “let the sand wash away so that everything that remains will be clearer, stronger” (95), he thoroughly understands the necessity of reinventing the self to surviving under the Khmer Rouge regime, having had to adapt his character to be able to follow through with acts of brutal violence and avoid suspicion as a cadre. In accordance with Bleakley’s position that “[l]anguage is not some abstract thing that is accessed to conceptualize our embodied life, but rather … a tangible medium through which we experience and make sense of embodiment” (30), the kinds of metaphors the characters develop to see their own selves amid the chaos of war go on to inform how they interact with others and navigate decisions to achieve survival. Sopham adopts the name “Rithy” at a Khmer Rouge reeducation camp with the understanding that this new persona is disposable, an outgrowth of the self meant to “survive for a little while, and then … disintegrate” (106). Drawing on his mother’s explanations of the “pralung,” which in the Khmer language is “something like the idea of the soul,” Sopham notes that “the people who survived the longest in prison were the ones who had too great a pralung, too many souls, for it took so long to remove them” (108). This narrative situates the primary factor of survival within the body, and thus inspires in Sopham the belief that escape and refuge are possible even as he is bound to a claustrophobic environment of Khmer Rouge oppression.
The notion of the body as a container of fragmented identities, while constructive to helping characters endure unfamiliar challenges during wartime, complicates the refugee struggle to build a coherent narrative from their experiences in the afterlife of war. Nguyen speaks to this quest for meaning when he upholds that “[r]efugee resilience is to continue living, via storying, in the world loss has created” (78). In order to overcome the oppressive sense of having “too many selves [that] no longer fit together” (139), Janie must explore alternative approaches to storying her survivorship, metaphors that offer new angles to revisit and reflect on her past. When she applies ideas from Italian philosopher Giulio Camillo’s memory theatre to reframe the way she considers her present self in relation to all of her past selves, for instance, the expansive quality of the metaphor vehicle allows Janie to also begin to address her hopes for her future:
Bopha’s imaginary book came back to me, but now her book was something that I could enter. The pages would remain, like a library, like a city, holding the things I needed to keep but that I could not live with. If such a library, a memory theatre, existed, I could be both who I was and who I had come to be. I could be a mother and a daughter, a separated child, an adult with dreams of my own. (Thien 147)
The way this multidimensional model of the self builds on Bopha’s tale of the book of answers, providing the means for Janie to realize Bopha’s dream of one day feeling the book in her hands—that is, surviving the war, being able to look back on the events of the past, and forming the conclusion that this survival must have been fated—evokes Lakoff and Johnson’s assertion that “metaphors can be self-fulfilling prophecies” (156). Suggesting that, when a metaphor is offered as “a guide for future action,” “[s]uch actions will, of course, fit the metaphor,” the linguists make the case that this in turn “reinforce[s] the power of the metaphor to make experience coherent” (156). The hybrid metaphor of Bopha’s imaginary book and Camillo’s memory theatre as a repository of Janie’s memories is particularly effective for guiding her process of coping with trauma, owing to the formal properties of the book and library. While these structures are capable of housing a substantial amount of information, the material is categorized and shelved away in a system that prevents overwhelm. Just as a book cannot be read in full at a glance, Janie need not bear the weight of working through her trauma all at once, but is free to adjust the pace of her reading, skip pages and return to them, and even visit and leave the library as she feels comfortable—this repositioning of recovery as an ongoing process that she is able to exert a level of control over emerging as an avenue for her to restore and reconnect to her agency.
Whether employed to aid self-soothing, conceal elements of truth, or fill gaps in her understanding of both her own experiences and that of others, the metaphors that compose Janie’s story of refuge pave her path toward healing as they name and give shape to her silent grieving. Musing on the capacity of modern medicine to address suffering, her colleague Hiroji surmises that perhaps surgeons of the future will be able to, “with disturbing precision, destroy a whirlpool of memory, an entire system of feelings,” but that “in the meantime it’s like taking a hatchet to a spider’s web” (232). As a vital device for bringing into focus the invisible wound of trauma, metaphor assumes functions of medicine for the figure of the refugee, whose experiences of displacement, loss, and violence often elude literal representation. The role of figurative language in aiding survival and healing in Madeleine Thien’s Dogs at the Perimeter points to storytelling as critical to sustaining the basic conditions for life, as well as being incredibly expansive, as demonstrated by the journey of discovery that springs from Janie’s narrative fragments as her use of metaphor grants new meaning to the past.
Works Cited
Bleakley, Alan. “Metaphors, once down and out, make a comeback.” Thinking with Metaphors in Medicine: The State of the Art, 1st ed., Routledge, 2017, pp. 22-41, doi:10.4324/9781315389448.
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1980.
Nguyen, Vinh. Lived Refuge: Gratitude, Resentment, Resilience. University of California Press, 2023, doi:10.1525/luminos.166.
Thien, Madeleine. Dogs at the Perimeter: A Novel. Vintage Canada, 2016.