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In the essay "Refugees," by Frances Fitzgerald, figurative language is used to explore and emphasize the deep divisions of a war-torn society. Fitzgerald's use of metaphors, allusions, and analogies take "Refugees" beyond life in war-torn Saigon and places reality remarkably close to home. This allusion drawn by Fitzgerald gives a true, but sad, picture of a shattered country.
Fitzgerald's setting of her essay is in Bui Phat, after the Viet Nam war. Fitzgerald tells of the struggle involved in attempting to put life back together after the devastation of war. A war that has created confusion, concern, death, disaster, and tossed out disoriented pieces of life that is the plague of cultural warfare. Another life, vibrant, glamorous, and age-less and even if only for a night and only for a select few is shown by Fitzgerald as she pens these words, "Every evening a girl on spindle heels picks her way over the barrier . . . and with a toss of her long earrings, climbs into a waiting Buick.” Fitzgerald's use of figurative language constructs a picture or idea of the obstacles that have been haunting every culture from pre-medieval times to the most sophisticated, snobbish, sniveling ultra-modernistic times of today. In every culture, war-torn or otherwise some things remain the same, never changing.
Obstacles are shown throughout Fitzgerald’s work depicting racial, religious, gender, and social barriers such as this passage, "the alleyway carpeted with mud winds back past the facade of the new houses into a maze of thatched huts and tin-roofed shacks . . . just across the river from the generous villas . . . White-shirted boys push their Vespas past laborers in black pajamas and women carrying water on coolie poles.” This stereotyped imagery of a lower class of people whether white, black, red or yellow has become more than a stigma; it is beginning to reach the height of total immorality.
Separation of Oriental-White, Black-Oriental, or Jewish-Catholic, Christian-Moslem or rich-poor overrides the realm of living one with another and places society against society. This is a very common problem that is just beyond the reach of the refugee. Fitzgerald shows this dilemma in this brilliant statement: "most of Bui Phat lives beyond the law, the electricity lines, and the water system, . . . amid the chaos . . . in a splendor of pastelfaced walls…”
In the early 1600's men voyaged across the seas in search of freedom to worship, work and live one with the other in peace and harmony. These men desired the chance to be equal yet individual. So as "the grandest ruins" of one generation to the next carves "its divisional insignia . . . the balance of the nation has changed, and the only freedom left lies behind closed doors. The images of war, terrorism, and riot bring an emptiness, an absence: the bare brown fields, the weeds growing in the charred earth of the village,” a feeling that Fitzgerald depicts of the homeless, poor, and prejudiced societies of today.
The cities are turning into war zones, campgrounds of tents, cardboard shelters, and newspaper blankets so volatile "that a single neglected cigarette or a spark from a charcoal brazier suffices to burn the settlements down,” taking all life in one great swoop. The devastation caused through inequality of race, gender or religion has brought back "a nation of villages and landed estates" a nation liberated of freedom.
Frances Fitzgerald's "Refugees" is a concise clear challenge, placed before all humankind, to accept life, culture and individual societies as one equal and welcome. Fitzgerald leaves the reader with an unquestionable allusion that this "is a country shattered so that no two pieces fit together.”
Each one of us a refugee, all part of a mammoth jigsaw puzzle scattered in the wind. And to which wind do we availeth the truth—the wind of freedom or the wind of oppression? Have we scattered the dreams of our youth on grounds unfertile? Have we deserted the heart and soul of our future? Have we overlooked the cardboard shelters, newspaper blankets and lonely bridges in our own backyards--Imagine there is no pain!
Works Cited
Fitzgerald, Frances. "Refugees". Reading Critically, Writing Well: A Reader and Guide. Eds. Rise B. Axelrod and Charles R. Cooper. 2nd ed. New York: St. Martin's, 1990. 152-154.
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