Refugee Memoir

Three years ago, award-winning actress Angelina Jolie took on a radically different role as a Goodwill Ambassador for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Here are her memoirs from her journeys to Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Pakistan, Cambodia, and Ecuador, where she lived and worked and gave her heart to those who suffer the world's most shattering violence and victimization. Here are her revelations of joy and warmth amid utter destitution...compelling snapshots of courageous and inspiring people for whom survival is their daily work.

After following her mother to the US at a young age to pursue economic opportunities, one woman must come to terms with the ways in which systematic racism and resultant trauma keep the American Dream inaccessible to Black people. In the early '90s, young Tiffanie Drayton and her siblings left Trinidad and Tobago to join their mother in New Jersey, where she'd been making her way as a domestic worker, eager to give her children a shot at the American Dream. At first, life in the US was idyllic.

Six. That was the number of people killed every minute of every hour of the day for 100 days. The dead lay there mutilated, raped, disfigured, and dismembered. They were strewn across the African countryside, piled up in empty churches, and thrown in the lakes and rivers. Authored by one of the survivors, We Were Royal Refugees is the gripping and heart-wrenching true story of the horror, loss, forgiveness, and triumph of a family in one of the worst tragedies in modern history, the Rwandan genocide.

lhan Omar was only eight years old when war broke out in Somalia. The youngest of seven children, her mother had died while Ilhan was still a little girl. She was being raised by her father and grandfather when armed gunmen attacked their compound and the family decided to flee Mogadishu. They ended up in a refugee camp in Kenya, where Ilhan says she came to understand the deep meaning of hunger and death. Four years later, after a painstaking vetting process, her family achieved refugee status and arrived in Arlington, Virginia.

I Did Not Miss the Boat is the coming of age story of an adolescent girl who struggled to help her family & assimilation into a new country while searching for her own identity. From surviving the vast South China Seas, pirate raids, and uninhabited Indonesian islands to surviving high school and family life, Lea Tran did not experience a typical American upbringing.

Before the Soviet invasion of 1980, Enjeela Ahmadi remembers her home - Kabul, Afghanistan - as peaceful, prosperous, and filled with people from all walks of life. But after her mother, unsettled by growing political unrest, leaves for medical treatment in India, the civil war intensifies, changing young Enjeela’s life forever. Amid the rumble of invading Soviet tanks, Enjeela and her family are thrust into chaos and fear when it becomes clear that her mother will not be coming home.

In 1996, when Akuch Kuol Anyieth is five, her mother flees to Kakuma with her children, intent on finding safety and freedom for her family, while her husband stays behind in South Sudan to fight in the civil war. The family spends nine years in the camp, eking out an existence amidst famine, disease, unbearable heat and chronic violence. Despite their suffering, Akuch never loses hope or her sense of humour. She’s a bright student who loves learning and does well at the local school.

Zakia and Ali were from different tribes, but they grew up on neighboring farms in the hinterlands of Afghanistan. By the time they were young teenagers, Zakia, strikingly beautiful and fiercely opinionated, and Ali, shy and tender, had fallen in love. Defying their families, sectarian differences, cultural conventions, and Afghan civil and Islamic law, they ran away together only to live under constant threat from Zakia's large and vengeful family, who have vowed to kill her to restore the family's honor.

Memories of an Italian Holocaust refugee as told to his son.

In My Parents, Aleksandar Hemon tells the story of his parents' immigration from Bosnia to Canada - of the lives that were upended in the Siege of Sarajevo and the new lives his parents were forced to build. As ever with his work, Hemon portrays both the perfect, intimate details (his mother's lonely upbringing, his father's fanatical beekeeping), and a sweeping, heartbreaking history of his native country, from the rule of Otto von Bismarck to the massacres that shocked the world. It is a story full of many Hemons, of course.

"I saw many killed. I almost starved. But I escaped to refugee camps in Thailand and eventually made it to the U.S." Thus begins Leth Oun's poignant and vivid memoir. A survivor of the Cambodian Killing Fields—having spent a torturous three years, eight months, and ten days imprisoned by the Khmer Rouge—Oun thrived in America, learning English, becoming a citizen, and working as an officer in the United States Secret Service Uniformed Division. In A Refugee's American Dream, Oun shares hard memories of Cambodia, where his father was executed, and his family enslaved in labor camps.

A Syria-born dancer offers his deeply personal story of war, statelessness, and the pursuit of the art of dance in this inspirational memoir.

This is the true story of a male couple's quest for a life in the West...one is American, the other is Iraqi. The American learns about gays in the Middle East and human trafficking as he helps his partner escape from Turkey by raft, sneak their way into Athens, and seek asylum in Amsterdam.

Set against a backdrop of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, the reign of Nazi Germany, and the entire course of World War II in Europe, American Shoes recounts the tumultuous childhood of a young American girl and her family trapped within a country that turned against itself, where human decency eroded and then vaporized. Forced to grow up in the midst of endemic fear stoked by a ravenous madman, American Shoes portrays the breakdown of a society from a child’s point of view, deep inside a land where millions of law-abiding citizens were targeted as threats, and then removed for extermination.

Cyrus Jaffery has been on the move for as long as he can remember, rarely pausing to reflect. As a child, he was forced into exile and had to learn his own way, first in Pakistan and then the United States. After college, he was swept up in the whirlwind of marriage, starting a family, forming a business, and ceaselessly working to grow his personal and professional endeavors. In the process of writing this book, Cyrus realized that what keeps him moving is a hunger to make a difference, to be counted, to be part of something bigger than himself.

In 1975, 13-year-old Lan Cao boarded an airplane in Saigon and got off in a world where she faced hosts she had not met before, a language she didn't speak, and food she didn't recognize, with the faint hope that she would be able to go home soon. Lan fought her way through confusion, and racism, to become a successful lawyer and novelist. Four decades later, she faced the biggest challenge in her life: raising her daughter, Harlan - half Vietnamese by birth and 100 percent American teenager by inclination.

From the ruins of refugee camps to a makeshift attic turned home, life hasn't always been crystal clear for one of the nation's capital's hottest radio personalities and influencers, Sunni and the City.... In her topsy-turvy journey, Sunni walks us through the raw challenges of her life as an immigrant, chasing the American dream, being haunted by the past, finding a new identity, and building a future.

I 2013 flygter den kurdiske journalist Behrouz Boochani ud af sit fødeland Iran. Efter en farefuld færd over havet bliver han samlet op og indespærret på Manus Island, en ø i Stillehavet nord for Papua Ny Guinea. I fem år holdes han ulovligt interneret i asylcentret Manus Fængsel. "Kun bjergene er min ven" er hans vidnesbyrd. Smuglet ud af lejren én sms ad gangen er bogen en unik insiderfortælling og en litterær kraftpræstation i mange genrer. Den er også en oprørsk stemme, der vidner om trods, håb og menneskelighed i et umenneskeligt system.

Beyond the Sand and Sea is an extraordinary and inspiring book for anyone searching for pinpricks of light in the darkness. Meticulously reported over three years, it reveals the strength of a family of Somali refugees who never lost faith in America - and exposes the broken refugee resettlement system that kept that family trapped for more than two decades and has turned millions into permanent exiles.

Into the maelstrom of unprecedented contemporary debates about immigrants in the United States, this perfectly timed book gives us a portrait of what the new immigrant experience in America is really like. Written as a "guide" for the newly arrived, and providing "practical information and advice", Roya Hakakian, an immigrant herself, reveals what those who settle here love about the country, what they miss about their homes, the cruelty of some Americans, and the unceasing generosity of others.