Reimagining the Rohingya: Remembering and Reconstituting Home in Britain

What constitutes home for the Rohingya who, having fled from a genocide in Burma, are reconstructing life in Bradford, Britain? What is the architecture for those who are, at best, considered as “guests” to host their community and others? This beautiful contribution by Nasrynn Chowdhury is the achievement of six months of dialogue with The Funambulist throughout the second half of her architecture thesis.

Within the expansive lifeworlds undergoing forced migration, the displacement of the Rohingya community in and outside Burma, marked by a continuum of genocide, expulsion, and statelessness, emerges on the geographic peripheries. Despite being described as “one of the world’s worst humanitarian and human rights crises” by the UN Refugee Agency in 2018, the last three decades of mass violence, looting, burning and destruction of villages experienced by this predominantly Muslim ethnic minority has somehow managed to evade much attention, outrage and action. As a consequence, the Rohingya have been vigorously and continually displaced, “sent ricocheting between rural and urban desperation” as described by South African author Rob Nixon (2010). In response, my research and project explores the ways in which the Rohingya – as a community that continues to navigate and negotiate complex landscapes shaped by displacement – remember, reconstitute, and reimagine home across their trajectories.