The Pathetic Sorrow of Refugees

How do you tell the truth if the truth doesn’t make sense? Picture bodies tumbling from a boat, feet slipping on the slick, waves hushing screams, then waking to the sobs of a woman on the shore, her world in her hands.

Part of the problem with telling certain stories is not that people don’t care, but that life is often fragmentary and does not conform to the kind of narrative arc our brains demand. True events can be full of plot holes, weak character motivations, uneven pacing, and thematic disconnect. Sometimes you have to bend the truth to tell it straight. Or as Albert Camus said, “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”

But humans are predictable creatures. We like the truth bent, but bent in particular ways. This makes the task of writing somewhat easier, provided you follow the rules.

A good story opening is surprising. The mind is always flipping through the channels of sensory input and you want the reader to stop when your station comes up. One way is by asking a question you implicitly promise to answer. This activates the brain regions responsible for sustained attention—the dorsolateral and ventrolateral pre-frontal cortex. Congratulations, you’re talking to the PFC.

Now your story is intriguing.

But don’t answer the question yet. Be mysterious. Convince the reader you have something of value to share, but delay gratification. This activates the ventral tegmental area, or VTA, which is driven by curiosity—the question “what happens next?” That’s your page-turner.

Now your story is interesting.

Make sure also when you tug at their attention, you pull their heart strings too. Use an emotionally charged lede, such as a scene of refugees drowning as they rush the shore. Or a provocative headline. The Pathetic Sorrow of Refugees. Readers may wonder, what’s pathetic about sorrow? This activates the amygdala, giving your curtain-raiser some emotional flavor and making it more likely to stick in the mind. Enhance this effect by adding vivid sensory details to activate the hippocampus. A dead child, for example.

Now your story is memorable.

Remember also to write beautifully. This is not merely about crafting a pleasant turn of phrase for the sake of aesthetic splendor. A poetic flourish will stimulate the regions of the brain that process the rhythm, structure, and meaning of language—Broca’s Area and Wernicke’s Area. The poetry of your prose can focus more attention on what your words mean.

Now your story is meaningful.

Finally, invite the reader to imagine what may come next. This activates the default mode network, or DMN, which is involved in mind-wandering and constructing hypotheticals. This is what causes the imagination to drift off into a spiral of spinning possibilities. One method is to end with a hopeful cliffhanger.

Now your story is inspiring.

But not every tragedy is necessarily a good story. After his eight-year hiatus from writing, F. Scott Fitzgerald published Tender Is the Night and asked his old friend Ernest Hemingway to give him some feedback. Papa Hem told Fitzy:

We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it—don’t cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist—but don’t think anything is of any importance because it happens to you or anyone belonging to you.

But why do humans crave order and resolution in stories, particularly when reality denies us both? Why do we fall into believing that the scattered pieces of our own experiences conform more neatly to narrative principles than they usually do?

The suffering of refugees is often not so much about the fact that they have lost their home, but the gnawing uncertainty as to whether they will ever have another. This is rarely depicted because it often cannot be shoehorned into Aristotle’s three-act structure, Freytag’s pyramid, Campbell’s monomyth, or Vonnegut’s man-in-hole.

These stories end not with a period, but with an unsatisfying ellipsis.

Over the weekend, I published a longform story about a Ukrainian couple who used their experience as travel agents in Kyiv to navigate the logistical nightmare of becoming refugees—and carve out an improbable new life in Canada.

But for every family that finds their footing on foreign soil, there are many more who vanish into the blind spots of the media’s attention. They shuffle through the makeshift geometry of overcrowded shelters, struggle to find work in foreign lands, or are stranded in conflict zones where the map offers no exit. These stories are not often picked up by the press, in part because, as I have said, they lack the catharsis of resolution and the narrative arc that comforts the comfortable.

Resolution, after all, is a privilege of perspective, a trick of framing. The same systems that offer a lifeline to a lucky few also manufacture the conditions that trap so many in endless drift. And so, most of these lives fade into the noise of history, their struggles unmarked, their faces unnamed.

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Reflecting on so many people torn from home by the storm of war reminds me of Odysseus longing for Ithaca. The great theme of that poem is nostos, or returning, as in, a return to one’s childhood home, one’s native soil, or the feeling of home in the arms of your beloved. The word nostalgia literally means “the pain of returning,” perhaps because when we do return, we realize the impossibility of ever going back to the way things were. As the novelist Thomas Wolfe said, “you can’t go home again.”

On the morning that began the Great War between the Greeks and the Trojans, the invading armies of Hellas descended on the sons of Troy with all the psychopathic savagery of a Russian battalion tactical group. If you read Virgil, he makes plain the devastation of this ancient war and the horrors inflicted on regular folk. But Homer, writing eight centuries before, focuses instead on the glory of godlike warriors and has little interest in mortal suffering. Even when he evokes the sacking of cities, the burning of homes, or the desecration of bodies, this is all just staging for the battle.

Yet this is also what makes certain moments in Homer so moving. Virgil offers up so much agony it becomes cloying, but it hits harder when Homer pierces his own poetic tapestry on the valor of war in order to show us mighty Achilles, weeping like a baby, as a frail old man begs for the return of his son’s corpse. Similarly, despite his flaws as a war correspondent, Homer mines the nostic pain of Odysseus to unearth the resonant anguish of anyone who has ever been far from home.

“I long—I pine, all my days—to travel home and see the dawn of my return,” Odysseus cries, collapsed on the shore, “tormenting himself with tears and sighs and heartache, his home’s desire consuming him.”

The Ukrainian language conjures more gravitas with its term for homesickness—tuha za domom. Literally, this means “longing for home,” with domom taken from the Latin domus, as in dominion, domicile, domestic. But instead of sickness, they speak of sorrow, or tuha, a word related to the Russian toska, which can convey a crushing sense of hopelessness and existential despair.

In Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov embodies toska as he spirals into blackened madness after hacking two women to death with an ax. His toska gnaws away at his sanity, exposing a sickness of the soul that no rationality can heal.

An even better examples comes from Anton Chekhov’s short story Toska, about a cab driver in St. Petersburg named Iona Potapov who struggles to cope with the recent death of his sweet young son. He desperately tries to talk with the people he meets while doing his work, hoping to tell someone, anyone, how shattered he is, and hoping that by sharing his pain with another person, he might find some peace.

Except he never does. No one listens and, in the end, he tells his horse.

That’s the kind of quiet resignation to an unfulfilled life that is so emblematic of Chekov’s work. But also, the refugee. The Ukrainian Odysseus, and the country’s national poet, is inarguably Taras Shevchenko, who was forcibly exiled to a remote military garrison in the Ural Mountains for his anti-tsarist writings. During this time, he often wrote about his deep longing for Ukraine and the scenes of his childhood.

When I am dead, bury me
In my beloved Ukraine,
My tomb upon a grave mound high,
Amid the steppes untamed.

But of course, Ukraine was not the same when he finally returned to it in 1859, almost 20 years after his arrest. As for the Trojans, after their war they become a lost tribe while Homer’s wandering king spends 20 years on his odyssey homeward, only for his long-awaited arrival to be painfully nostalgic in exactly the way described above.

Interestingly, Homer frames Odysseus, a commander of the invading army, as a deeply sympathetic figure. What we remember of this story, often indirectly since few of us ever bothered to read it, is that the wise and just Odysseus, the man of reason who counseled Achilles and tempered his wrath, was thrown off course by the capricious god Poseidon.

But in truth, it was Zeus who initially threw Odysseus off course—for good reason.

After leaving Troy, the first thing Odysseus and his men did was sack the Ciconian capital of Ismarus. The Ciconians had been allies of the Trojans, so the Greek king slaughtered the men and took their wives as war prizes. But when he tried to run away, his men instead got drunk and started massacring sheep and cattle along the beach. Disgusting by their conduct, Zeus drove them off course as punishment.

You might therefore think Odysseus would be a better metaphor for Russian troops, but I think instead of Ukrainians, because unlike the wandering Trojans, most Ukrainian refugees have had to find their own way. And because every Ukrainian refugee knows the nostic pain of the wandering king of Ithaca.

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When Russia invaded, the first thing I did was start looking for flights. The journalist Geoffrey Cain called to ask if I was headed over, and we planned to make our way to Kyiv together, then to the frontlines. But along the way, I decided that rather than cover the action, I wanted to tell a different kind of story. More Virgil, less Homer.

In my experience, it’s better to wait for the fury of war to pass so that people have time to process their thoughts—and to speak with a journalist. I wanted to meet people who had reached safety, made sense of things, and had a story they wanted to share. Two weeks later, I was in Warsaw, then Lublin, near the Ukrainian border.

Crossing into Lviv wasn’t hard, but stories of journalists abandoning cars and trekking for days to get back out again gave me pause. Rocket strikes were a constant threat. In Lublin, I saw refugees pouring into the city and met volunteers working tirelessly to pack supplies.

One woman turned her home into a shelter. Her driveway was filled with vans all loaded with diapers, coats, and food. Inside, people slept on every available inch. I met a German man in the kitchen who told me he drove 10 hours to pick up refugees from the border and take them to safety in Germany, after which he turned right around and did it again. And again. And again. I interviewed a mother who had fled with her daughter and broke down weeping as she asked me whether I thought she would ever see him again. Did I have any information about the front lines? Anything that wasn’t in the news? Did I think Putin would win? Could I check on her husband?

There it was, the search for meaning even when the facts defy resolution. This was the pathetic sorrow of refugees. Not tragic, because according to the ancient Greeks, a tragedy is something bad that befalls someone because of their own behavior. What happens to Odysseus is tragic. What happens to Hamlet is tragic. But when something bad befalls someone because of an injustice, something that is not their fault, this conjures sympathy and the word for this is pathos, or “suffering.”

Technically, the term for “injustice” is adikia, but to speak of adikian suffering is to describe the unjust nature of the cause, whereas pathetic suffering describes the impact on the heart of the listener.

I spent hours and hours listening to heartbreaking stories. By the end of each day, I was exhausted and depressed. I couldn’t adjust to local time fast enough either. In my first week, I slept a total of two nights. In truth, it wasn’t just the time difference that stole my rest, but the stories that filled my head with everything I was hearing day in and day out. I was trapped in the imagined hell of other people’s tragedies.

But I was uplifted by the beauty and warmth of the Polish people who welcomed these refugees. The stories of Russian violence were unspeakable, but the stories of Ukrainians helping Ukrainians on the road, and of Poland and so many other countries treating these people with such love, not only made me feel better, but turned my hellish trip into one of the most beautiful experiences of my life.

I ended up writing for The Nation about how the Polish people opened their arms to Ukrainians—and whether it would last as their charity began to strain the Polish infrastructure. I also wrote for New York Magazine about how a therapist saved a woman’s life by giving her over-the-phone confidence training and meditation guidance. The woman eventually got up the nerve to flee with her mother and daughter, ensuring the survival of three generations.

I was enormously proud of these stories, but I also came back with an armful of recorded sessions, many of which have never seen the light of day, and some of which are heartbreakingly lovely. Even so, not all of them fall together in narrative form, and I am at a loss as to what to do about this. Eventually, some of these stories will probably find their way onto these pages, in one form or another.

But the problem lingers in my mind. Chekov believed that every major detail in a story must amount to something. “If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall,” he wrote, “in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off.”

This concept is known as Chekov’s gun. But others, including Papa Hem, thought this was ridiculous because life doesn’t always make sense in this way. Hemingway famously came up with iceberg theory, also known as the theory of omission, which emphasizes the importance of narrative economy, much like Chekov’s gun, but without the need to make things make sense. As Hemingway famously stated:

If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows, and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.

In other words, you can leave things out. Sometimes, you can leave the reader wondering what the hell is going on, and make no effort to resolve the question. His short story “Hills Like White Elephants” is a classic example.

What, then, does a storyteller do about this problem? How do you make sense of utterly senseless violence, or should you not even try? One of my favorite poets, the Greek writer Constantine Cavafy, wrote a poem titled “Ithaca” in which the place becomes a metaphor for life’s journey. He writes:

When you set out for Ithaca, ask that your way be long, full of adventure, full of instruction.

The journey itself is more meaningful than the destination. Or as the existentialists would prefer to say, the meaning you take from life is the meaning you give to life. In speaking with refugees whose stories were often wildly incoherent, I have found this to be profoundly true. Humans are storytellers as a species, and storytelling is, among many other things, the balm that soothes our searching souls. Viktor Frankl was right, man’s search for meaning is not simply a matter of curiosity, but of resilience.

In the end, perhaps the storyteller’s job is not to impose structure, as Chekov proposed, but to honor the fragments and find meaning in the chaos. Not to tie up loose ends, but to gather together the pieces and hold them up, just as they are.

Because with Odysseus, as with life, we too often find that sorrow is not bound by tidy endings or heroic triumphs, and that the stories we tell about such things need not “make sense” in such a way. In fact, when they don’t, there is a valuable message to be learned. Namely, people often don’t know what their story means until they get to the telling of it. Like a dream, life is a set of random images that flash before the mind and are assembled into a plot post hoc as we awaken. Meaning lies not in the resolution that may never come, but in the telling—and listening—with others.