for the youth of Doro falls somewhere between a call for respect for oneself and one’s community, and the essential need to defend oneself: his words wouldn’t seem out of place in a Huey Newton speech. He emanates authority; he’s come with some other young residents in the camp, who wait for him to take a seat before they do.
Esmail has brought one of the participants in the programme with him, a 20-year-old girl called Sandy. She’s wearing a light pink hair wrapper and earrings in the shape of a cross. While Esmail speaks, she looks down at her hands, shy or perhaps deferring to his authority. But when she and Esmail give me a demo, her countenance changes. They begin with their hands at their sides, then join their palms above their heads before erupting into movement I can barely describe, settling into a warrior-like position with a balled fist stretched out front: a jewel in one of Esmail’s rings, shaped like a tiger, glints. They then return with their hands by their sides, and bow.
“I feel much stronger and happier since I’ve started the programme,” says Sandy, “especially when I’m teaching the younger girls.” It’s a remarkable outcome: the material conditions in Doro are harsh, and prospects for the future even more so. The term ‘shit life syndrome’, used to describe poor mental health outcomes for Americans and Brits living through years of austerity, doesn’t begin to describe the reality of such camps. I’m reminded of Dr Samah Jabr, chair of the Palestinian Ministry of Health’s mental health unit, who coined the term ‘chronic traumatic stress disorder’ when talking about Palestinians’ mental health: there’s no stability, no ‘post’-trauma, in which harm can be worked through. Academics call this aspect of the refugee experience ‘liminality’; others would likely describe it as limbo.
Esmail, intuitively, seems to have hit on a solution that helps his counterparts identify themselves by their strengths – in the face of the very real risk of danger – rather than their vulnerability profile. Life in camps is marked by infantilisation. Humanitarian actors decide what food to distribute, what clothes to provide, which vocations they should train refugees on. Though humanitarians are – at least theoretically – engaged in an act of benevolence, they are also accountable to no one. In humanitarian governance, there are no citizens who can vote out the governing actor or protest its actions. There are only beneficiaries, conceived of as passive recipients rather than contributing to those around them.
Esmail’s martial arts programme acts as an antidote. The principles of martial arts, as Esmail explains to me, centre around self-control, flexibility, and inner tranquillity: