Living an Uncertain Future: Temporality, Uncertainty, and Well-Being among Iraqi Refugees in Egypt

Abstract

While displacement has always involved the refiguring of space, scholars of forced migration have recently begun to consider how temporality might be crucial to an understanding of displacement. In this article, I consider the interplay of temporal and spatial uncertainty in the experience of exile for Iraqi refugees in metropolitan Cairo. By examining how Iraqis understand displacement as uncertain and how this uncertainty is a cause of significant distress, I show that an attunement to temporality can help us to understand refugees' experiences of displacement. Iraqi refugees spoke of exile in Cairo as 'living in transit'-a condition in which disjuncture between their expectations about exile and its realities contributed to an altered experience of time in which the future became particularly uncertain and life was experienced as unstable. One solution sought by refugees is resettlement, a process that often renders the future even more uncertain, at least in the short term.

A life in waiting: Refugees' mental health and narratives of social suffering after European Union border closures in March 2016

“…The powerlessness and uncertainty they experienced concerning the asylum decision was often identified as the main cause of their current distress. Studies have shown that asylum processes often generate uncertainty that has negative implications for mental health (Brekke, 2010;El-Shaarawi, 2015). A study of asylum seekers in Australia showed that psychological wellbeing is dependent on the certainty of a predictable future, documenting a substantial decrease in symptoms of PTSD, anxiety, and depression in the four months following the granting of refugee status to asylum seekers (Silove et al, 2007).…”

“…Recent studies among refugee populations in camps or in transit concerned populations in a transit situation for years outside Europe (Akinyemi et al, 2016;El-Shaarawi, 2015;Hoffman, 2011), or mainly used epidemiological surveys as methods (Bastin et al, 2013;Crepet et al, 2017). The present study responds to the call made by Kienzler (2008) and others for mixedmethods studies of refugee mental health (Weine et al, 2014).…”

A geopolitics of trauma: Refugee administration and protracted uncertainty in Turkey

“…“Protracted uncertainty” (Horst & Grabska, , p. 1) and prolonged waiting affect refugees’ health and well‐being. Al‐Shaarawi's (, p. 49) study of Iraqis in Cairo highlights that the stresses caused by “Instability, related to the difficult conditions which disrupted refugees’ imagined life trajectories and made the future difficult to conceptualize, led to tiredness, worry, sadness and other psychological and cognitive/emotional problems.” Similarly, Biehl () shows how living in Turkish cities for prolonged periods of time causes psychological distress for refugees.…”

Citizens‐in‐Waiting, Deportees‐in‐Waiting: Power, Temporality, and Suffering in the U.S. Asylum System

“…Here, life was not merely “on hold” but disappeared from view. Sarah's narrative brings into relief “the interplay of temporal and spatial uncertainty” (El‐Shaarawi , 38). That is, if asylum seekers were challenged to emplot their lives—to provide temporal coherence—in an effort to render lived experiences meaningful, they also simultaneously struggled to emplace themselves and bring meaning to the physical space they occupied.…”