Few Americans ask.<\/p>\n
If someone does ask, he gives them time to reconsider and wander off, perhaps under the pretense of seeking a coffee refill. He understands that, for most Americans, the complexity and the preposterous cruelty of the narrative will feel overwhelming.<\/p>\n
While a medical student, Salim served as a paramedic treating commonplace cases like heat stroke and ankle sprains until, in 2011, the country exploded<\/a> with demonstrations and state repression. In time, he made it to the US and began a public health graduate program. Now a doctoral candidate, he focuses on health systems and population health in conflict and post-conflict settings.<\/p>\n On this early evening in mid-December, Salim has accepted an invitation to a small holiday party on a tree-lined street near Union Square. His host, Arien Mack, is the Alfred J. & Monette C. Marrow Professor of Psychology Emeritus at The New School, which is down the block and where she has taught since 1970. Barely five feet tall, she\u2019s described by many as “formidable” and for the last half-century has had an up-close view of the tribulations and griefs of imperiled intellectuals. She has invited Salim and a dozen other endangered scholars to her home this evening in her capacity as founding director of the New University in Exile Consortium<\/a>. It\u2019s to be their first in-person gathering since the onset of Covid. Mack launched the Consortium in 2018 as an in-person and virtual meeting place for members of the intelligentsia peeling away from repressive countries. All her guests tonight fled their homelands to avoid imprisonment, assassination, or (in Salim\u2019s case) orders to join the perpetrators.<\/p>\n In the four years since its launch with fewer than a dozen member institutions, the Consortium has expanded to 60 colleges and universities in North America, Western Europe, the UK, the Middle East, and Sub-Saharan Africa–including 29 in the US\u2014all committed to hosting endangered scholars and enabling them to participate in the online weekly seminars. Over 100 lawyers, doctors, artists, and academics have come from 22 countries, including Afghanistan, Algeria, Azerbaijan, Brazil, Cambodia, Cameroon, China, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, India, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Palestine, Poland, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, Venezuela, and Yemen. Though Mack conceived of the program to sustain scholars in exile rather than literally rescue them, that role has changed since the fall of Afghanistan.<\/p>\n The scholars log in from all over the world for the weekly meeting. New members introduce themselves; then someone lectures on an academic topic\u2014often, but not always, related to world events. For these talented, credentialed, and displaced people, the Consortium makes it possible to keep their professional selves alive. They are scholars of literature and architecture, archaeology and political science, linguistics and philosophy, film studies and urban studies, indigenous people\u2019s history and Kurdish history, law and medicine, and other disciplines.<\/p>\n They all share expertise in another specialty, as well: how to not lose yourself under the pressure of dictatorship, how to draw a personal red line against the amplifying demands of a tyrannical government. Every Consortium member faced a critical choice back home: try to cling to their accustomed way of life or contend with the momentous consequences of resisting a system of oppression. All chose resistance; all lost their countries.<\/p>\n Now they try to cobble together new lives in the lands offering them sanctuary, without knowing whether to plan for a couple of years or for decades. Everyone longs to go home, where they have left behind loved ones, colleagues, and political allies, but the current regimes know their names and faces. Many have struggled with immigration paperwork, unsure when their visas will expire. For most, that depends on their work situation, but few have job security.<\/p>\n Heartsickness and despair are regular companions\u2014and for that, the Consortium offers solace. Before and after the weekly lectures, and by email in between, they share personal updates: good news like a job offer, a publication, or the birth of a child or grandchild; or bleak news, as in February 2020 when Consortium member Gubad \u0130badoghlu, PhD, from Azerbaijan, currently teaching at the London School of Economics, shared a video of his daughter being brutally attacked as she reported fraud at an election polling station in Azerbaijan. \u202f\u201cYou can see how it happen,\u201d he wrote. And he added a kind of a trigger warning: \u201cWho has heart problem, please don’t watch it.\u201d<\/p>\n From all over the world, scholars reacted with pain and grief. \u201cGiven how brave she clearly is, I am sure this will only further strengthen her will,\u201d wrote Saladdin Ahmed, PhD, a visiting professor of political science at Union College, originally from the Kurdish Autonomous Region<\/a> in Iraq. \u201cThere is nothing that scares the likes of [President Ilham] Aliyev more than the free human being who refuses to compromise\u2026Sooner or later, Aliyev will join the rest of the totalitarian leaders, who despite their desperate attempts to secure some sort of immortality are, as Arendt says, forgotten with a \u2018startling swiftness.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n These days, as they watch the American right flirt with fascism, many wonder What are these Americans thinking?<\/em> They\u2019re certain that citizens attracted to right-wing nationalism over liberal democracy\u2014in the US, Brazil, Hungary, Poland, Sweden, Turkey, Italy, wherever it\u2019s happening\u2014grossly misunderstand the nature of life under authoritarianism.<\/p>\n Mack\u2019s guests this evening do not share that misunderstanding.<\/p>\n When Salim ducks<\/span> out of the winter dusk into the fifth-floor wide-windowed carpeted apartment in a landmark building on West 12th Street, elegant appetizers and aperitifs await. Adorning the walls are Matisse lithographs, a Charles White painting, and other original works. Fresh flowers abound, and guests wearing oven mitts are careening with platters from the kitchen to the dining room table. Superintending the event is Arien Mack\u2014a human rights crusader, tireless, snippy, and selectively empathetic, a Ruth Bader Ginsberg type in a wool skirt and sweater. The slightly left-of-center part from which her dark brown hair falls and cups her face has been her style for decades. If she\u2019s asked for her birthdate, a bit more than ninety years ago, she laughs and dismisses the question: \u201cThat was a long time ago!\u201d<\/p>\n In her living room, \u00e9migr\u00e9s and New School faculty members sit in a circle of sofas, armchairs, and dining room chairs, balancing dishes of finger sandwiches, grapes, and soft cheeses. Salim, bobbing his head in greeting like a kid, fills a plate and finds a seat. He\u2019s the youngest Consortium member here this evening and looks it, with his tousled hair and earnest manner. But he finds he has more in common with this shipwrecked group than with anyone else he\u2019s met in America. The terrifying and brutal path he was forced down in his country had felt uniquely his own, or at least uniquely Syrian, until, taking in the experiences of these colleagues, it dawned on him that the struggles for democracy, freedom of expression, and justice took similar forms everywhere.<\/p>\n To the left of Salim in the circle is Teng Biao, 49, once one of the leading human rights lawyers in China and now one of the world\u2019s leading Chinese dissidents. He sits very still, speaking only if addressed directly, evidently content to let everyone else talk first, and at length. Biao has been honored by governments and human rights organizations worldwide for his courage. He defended victims of torture, forced abortion, forced labor, contaminated vaccines, police brutality, and religious persecution. Over the years, as he ignored government orders to stop, the reprisals escalated from harassment to censorship to disbarment to beatings on the street to house arrest to kidnapping by the security police to torture. The authorities forbade him to speak at Hong Kong\u2019s 25th-anniversary<\/a> observation of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 2014, But he did anyway. “Our lives have the suffering of 1989 in them,\u201d he told the crowd. \u201cBut as the Hongkongers have avowed: YOU CAN\u2019T KILL US ALL!\u201d The crowd roared its assent.<\/p>\n Later that night, unsure he\u2019d be able to survive another period of imprisonment, he deferred to his supporters and escaped the country.<\/p>\n Binalakshmi \u201cBina\u201d Nepram, 48, once one of India\u2019s significant voices for indigenous rights and for gun control, is seated on the sofa, wearing a softly gleaming raw silk skirt and matching shawl. She comes from Manipur, a long-ago independent Asiatic kingdom like Nepal or Bhutan on the far side of the Himalayas; it has been under martial law<\/a> since 1958. Bina co-founded the Control Arms Foundation<\/a> of India and later the Manipur Women Gun Survivors Network<\/a>, to offer support to the growing ranks of bereaved indigenous mothers, widows, sisters, and daughters, whose family members were killed by state or military occupiers. Like Biao, she persisted against escalating official warnings, specifically in her pursuit of justice for the family of a college student murdered in a road-rage incident by the son of a high government official. She didn\u2019t relent until a deputized armed squad broke into her house in Manipur. She wasn\u2019t at home and never returned. Instead, she fled to Delhi, learned the hit mob had followed her to the capital, accepted a one-way plane ticket to New York bought in haste by her friends, ran through the airport, and didn\u2019t breathe easily until the cabin door closed.<\/p>\n Tonight, Bina is telling the group what happened next. \u201cThis is where my life took a different turn,\u201d she says. \u201cWhen I first arrived here, in May 2017, I had no family, I had no one.\u201d Eventually, she was awarded an 18-month fellowship at Connecticut College. \u201cI felt such peace there,\u201d she says. \u201cIt was in the middle of nowhere. And it had this European feel, very quiet, pristine. And I fell in love with it, until I realized that\u2014once the wine and cheese stopped\u2014I was left alone. I was so alone. I felt so alone I took refuge in the library because I could hear students\u2019 voices. There were three Indians teaching at the college, from my country. But they couldn\u2019t place me; they were like, \u2018How did you arrive here?\u2019 My story negated their image of India. The whole year and a half I was there, they didn\u2019t even invite me for a cup of tea. No one invited me for a meal. For us in India, anyone who comes\u2014it could be anyone\u2014we just say, \u2018Come in. Have a cup of tea. Have a meal. Stay over.\u2019 That hospitality is always there. So it was astonishing to me.\u201d<\/p>\n When Connecticut College became one of Mack\u2019s inaugural Consortium members, Bina was invited to participate. The Consortium saved her life, she says. \u201cI feel I\u2019m part of a global family now.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.motherjones.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/1123_exile_section_break_3.png?w=150\")
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