IN THE FIRST PAGES of Genesis, Adam and Eve eat of the tree of knowledge and are cast out of Eden: the world’s first deportation. According to some inter-pretations, they separate from each other and live in different countries for a hundred years (the world’s first divorce), and Adam bemoans his banishment in verse (the world’s first poem). In the Russian Orthodox Christian tradition and in Islam, Adam’s threnody is the best known penitential verse: verily, exile is the most dreaded condition, the most worthy of lament. “Well known is Adam’s lament at being exiled from paradise,” goes an Urdu ritual keening, marthiya.
What happens when something forces us to leave our home? This year, the United Nations expects 117.2 million people to be displaced and made stateless in 134 countries and territories. Some of them will find shelter with relatives and friends and strangers, like many of the nearly 14 million people displaced by Putin’s war in Ukraine. Others will be rounded up into concentration camps and detention centers, like the thirty-nine men who were stopped at the U.S.–Mexico border and died at a holding facility in Ciudad Juárez in March 2023. Others still will enter the limbo of tent camps, of lean-tos and dugouts, of makeshift staging spots on beaches and wastelands and mountaintops, waiting for home, for arrival. Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel’s novel The Gurugu Pledge is about them.
We lived in the forest and cooked enough to still be standing. We gathered firewood … it would provide a little nourishment and warmth, and it was cold in the residence, much colder than on the banks of the River Ruo, where I was born, and saw others born, those I left behind to go in search of new rivers, different riverbanks. After eating, assuming there was anything to eat, we warmed our hands over the fire, curled up on our cardboard, or under our blankets, and settled down to listen to people’s stories.
“Despite its grandiose name,” Ávila Laurel’s narrator tells us, the residence “was really follows one such group.
