The Refugees

“I was the best stu­dent in my school, ex­cel­lent enough for my teach­er to teach me Eng­lish af­ter hours, les­sons I shared with my broth­er. He, in turn, told me tall ta­les, folk­lore, and ru­mors. When air­planes shrieked over­head and we huddled with my moth­er in the bun­ker, he whis­pered ghost stories into my ear to dis­tract me. Ex­cept, he in­sisted, they were not ghost stories. They were his­tor­i­cal ac­counts from re­li­a­ble sources, the an­cient crones who chewed be­tel nut and spat its red juice while squat­ting on their haunches in the mar­ket, tend­ing coal stoves or over­see­ing bas­kets of wares.”

The black-eyed women are sources of folklore and keepers of oral tradition. The narrator and her brother bond over the stories the brother relays from these women. By the end of the story, the narrator and her mother carry on the tradition of passing along ghost stories as a way of preserving cultural memory and healing from trauma.

“You died too,” he said. “You just don’t know it.”

The narrator reaches an epiphany about the trauma she endured when she was sexually assaulted by a pirate. Trauma has frozen her in time; she has metaphorically died. This implies that she is a ghost like her brother, even though she is still alive.

“Some­times this is how stories come to me, through her. ‘Let me tell you a story,’ she would say, once, twice, or per­haps three times. More of­ten, though, I go hunt­ing for the ghosts, some­thing I can do with­out ever leav­ing home. As they haunt our coun­try, so do we haunt theirs. They are pal­lid crea­tures, more fright­ened of us than we are of them. That is why we see these shades so rarely, and why we must seek them out.”

The narrator’s attitude toward ghosts at the end of the story allows her to feel more empathetic about her own past. The fact that she can hunt for ghosts without leaving home means she is mining her past for the traumatic experiences that make up these ghost stories. By telling these stories, she can “exorcize” the “ghosts” she held onto in her years of silence.