The Rohingya Refugee Archive: Haunting, Survival, and Futurity

When Rohingya families fled Myanmar’s genocidal violence in August 2017, most carried only a few materials documenting the cultural lives they had built over generations in Rakhine State, a collective archive of their ancestral homeland. In the aftermath, the Tatmadaw burned their villages and expropriated their land. This displacement represented a rupture for the community and transformed the collective archive into a refugee one. Severed from their Rakhine and its cultural replenishment, the sole repositories of knowledge were the Rohingya themselves: walking archives. In the refugee camps of Bangladesh, the Rohingya have responded to this displacement (their physical erasure from their homeland) and this destruction of their archival materials (the burning of their documents) by nurturing and reconstituting an archive in exile of cultural and familial practices that exist both beyond and in place of the papers and certificates that regulated their presence in Myanmar. Within the bamboo huts and under the tarpaulin covering, Rohingya families protect cultural practices against state-imposed erasure, ensuring they pass them down to the next generation, to those boys and girls who have never seen or smelled Rakhine. The work of Rohingya photographers and the images they produce is one way this refugee archive is transmitted across generations.