Living Within Hyphenated Paradoxes - The Canadian Adolescent Refugee Experience

In 2018, the Canadian government admitted 46,500 refugees. This followed a remarkable record resettlement of Syrian refugees in Canada from 201517, with just under half aged 17 or younger. This dissertation addresses how adolescent refugees negotiate the issues and aftermath of living in civil unrest, war, migration, transitory states, refugee camps, and resettlement. I analyze published memoirs and vlogs by Canadians who were adolescent refugees when they arrived in this country. By highlighting the life stories of ten Canadians who experienced varying degrees of refugee-ness, I argue that these asylum seekers contend with paradoxical claims to their subjectivities. While witnessing conflicts and camps traumatizes these young people, they successfully achieve independence and greater stability after settling in Canada. Shifting cultural practices informed by their native and host countries are factors that influence refugees sense of identity liminalities: being too young, too old, not westernized enough, not native enough, lacking schooling and wanting academic accolades.

Readings of their narratives informed by psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory show that young refugees employ ancestral coping mechanisms, intellectualization, and sublimation to make meaning from their experienced losses and grief. Fanons and Saids theories address the violent colonial context of exile and alienation. Anna Freud and Winnicott explain the internal mechanisms of resistance. In the native land, children inherit epistemologies of coping to survive and make sense of the atrocities they witness. During escape plans, young asylum seekers come to face their greatest fear and reality of losing their loved ones and voices. The disorganized and inhumane conditions of refugee camps further develop an inferiority complex. For the fortunate ones who make it to Canada, they must navigate through refugee boards, schools, and formalities that position them as outsiders. Ultimately this dissertation provides a platform for the various socio-political complexities and challenges (acculturation, enculturation, racism, sexism, relationships, learning) that adolescent refugees must bring to a functional cohesion as they form a sense of self and stability from the chaotic marginal world they are emerging from.