Orient
Online ISSN : 1884-1392
Print ISSN : 0473-3851
ISSN-L : 0473-3851
SPECIAL ISSUE: Coexistence in the World of Abrahamic Monotheism: With Special Attention to Islam
Anxiety, Hope, and Enterprising Spirit: Refugees Arriving in Malta via the Mediterranean Route
Kuniko FUJIWARA
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2023 Volume 58 Pages 29-36

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Abstract

Some Syrian and Somali refugees, who flee via the Mediterranean route, reach Malta, one of the European countries. This paper focuses on the present anxieties and hopes of those asylum seekers living in a continuous timeline of suffering, based on research conducted in and around refugee detention facilities and refugee residential centres of Maltese Catholic monasteries. It will discuss the current situation of people whose daily life has become normalised as it is, their ongoing anxieties, their non-sharing of suffering and anxieties with the people of the host country, and the social-entrepreneurial movements working to find their way amid this situation. The study concludes that neither a change through the repetitive intrusion of the past into the present, as in a flashback, nor a narrative memory created in the present by recounting past events, but the creation of memories about past hardships based on present sufferings and anxieties and the mutual conceptualisation of a future based on the shared memories will lead to consider the compassionate co-design of a society of coexistence.

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