Paper Short Abstract:

It explains how pain has hunted in the Syrian refugees’ bodies and stole their future. This painful process starts with a pang that comes from the past and is embodied in a swallow of saliva. Death in exile turned the pang into pain as a choke-up.

Paper Abstract:

Exile is a space for revolutionary aspirations, whereas exile is also a space for punishment. It is a space where people feel in pain emotionally and physically. The body is the surface of the pain, and the emotional suffering is embodied in it in various forms.

This proposal explains how pain has hunted in the Syrian refugees’ bodies and stole their future. The data is collected from ethnographic work conducted over nine months in Germany and the UK.

This proposal draws from the hauntological approach to understand the temporal dimensions of the Syrian refugees. Hauntology refers to the failure of the future to materialise as imagined, repeating the past and extending the present.

I argue that the Syrian refugees' body is haunted by pain. The pain starts with a pang that comes from the past. Pang is embodied in the emotional swallow of saliva, a brief but intense moment of emotional pain. The death traced them to exile. Experiencing death in exile turned the pang into pain, which haunts their bodies and embodies constant choke-up, which leads to a melancholic present and temporal mourning, accepting the present as it is, and losing the future that they wanted.