Salman Rushdie, in his 1991 essay ‘Imaginary Homelands’ (not included here; instead he has a short story), asserts the right of migrant writers to draw on their ethnic roots as inspiration for their art, affirming that the geographical distance from their homeland may provide new angles with which to investigate reality. This seems an apt source of inspiration for the three dozen international authors – some household names, others not – featured in this slender yet ambitious volume. While not all pieces may appeal to every taste, read in sequence the book forges a memorable impression. As migration is a ubiquitous human experience, readers, regardless of background, can relate to the simultaneous representation of historical hardships and the accompanying moments of compassion that make such stories so compelling.

As Rushdie argues in ‘Imaginary Homelands’, the artistic explorations by migrant writers are necessarily politicised, as is, surely, the delicate task of curating a collection of texts intended to convey a balanced global perspective on the intricacies of migration. While editor Dohra Ahmad acknowledges in her introduction that the selection is subjective and incomplete, the omission of certain countries, authors, and narratives is striking. For instance, the current Australian refugee crisis is overlooked (an excerpt from Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend But The Mountains [2018] would have been a welcome inclusion), as are migrants to and from the State of Israel (Ayelet Tsabari’s 2019 memoir The Art of Leaving would have been an appropriate choice). The juxtaposition of works by authors from different times and places, however, draws a continuum between diverse experiences, exemplifying Michael Rothberg’s theory of multidirectional memory, which suggests that establishing a link between the Holocaust, colonialism, and slavery – all of which are represented in this book – may validate other marginalised groups’ demands for justice.

As a whole, the anthology offers an enlightening and enriching read. Some highlights include pieces by young writers with whom I was unfamiliar, whose evocative language and imagery remained with me long after I had moved on to other parts of the book. This includes Canadians Shauna Singh Baldwin and Djamila Ibrahim, as well as London’s inaugural Young Poet Laureate, Warsan Shire, who writes: ‘I do not know where I am going, where I have come from is disappearing, I am unwelcome and my beauty is not beauty here. My body is burning with the shame of not belonging, my body is longing. I am the sin of memory and the absence of memory.’

Mena Abdullah’s stunning short story ‘The Time of the Peacock’, which explores how the narrator’s Indian heritage informs her identity and world view as a young Australian-born child, stands out, as does Zadie Smith’s brilliant engagement with Shakespeare’s Sonnet 127 (‘In the old age black was not counted fair’) through the eyes of a black high-school student, in the excerpt from her novel White Teeth (2000).

While the blending of literary genres varies the pace and provides a broader range of responses to the complexity of migration, the fact that the genre of each piece is not clearly indicated is confusing. It might have been more effective to organise the pieces by literary genre rather than under Departures, Arrivals, Generations, and Returns. Given the current fluidity of genres, it may be a testament to the quality of the works when fiction is so vivid it reads like non-fiction and non-fiction is as beautifully rendered as fiction.

The anthology concludes with ‘A Conversation’ by Pauline Kaldas, recounting a conversation between a husband and wife who migrated to the United States from Egypt in their youth. Forty years later, the husband tries to persuade his wife to return to Egypt. Sceptical, she responds: ‘These are dreams. No one lives like a king there. You remember only the beauty of things … you follow a dream that no one else can see.’ This statement resonates with Gaston Bachelard’s understanding of the ways in which memories of our first childhood home contribute to our poetic imagery, as articulated in his Poetics of Space (1957):

The great function of poetry is to give us back the situations of our dreams. The house we were born in is more than an embodiment of home, it is also an embodiment of dreams … The house … furnished the framework for an interminable dream, one that poetry alone, through the creation of a poetic work, could succeed in achieving completely.

This constitutes the ultimate contribution of The Penguin Book of Migration Literature: the poetic works it contains give expression to deep-seated memories and feelings, such as nostalgia for one’s homeland and a sense of never truly belonging despite great efforts at assimilation, while documentary studies by historians and social scientists can only ever allude to such emotional weight.

In her foreword, Haitian-born American writer Edwidge Dandicat quotes Toni Morrison’s 1993 Nobel Prize lecture, which encouraged writers to reveal ‘what it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew.’  The authors included in this collection have embraced this mandate, offering works that forcefully contend with this critical and timely subject matter, bringing the issue to the forefront of public consciousness. The Penguin Book of Migration Literature should promote empathy for the plight of migrants worldwide, reducing the anguish experienced by those undertaking such fateful journeys in future.