Writing Refugee Experiences with Truth, Not Pity

There’s a dangerous temptation when writing about refugees: to reduce them to victims. It happens even with the best intentions. You want to evoke empathy. You want readers to feel the pain, the struggle, the injustice. But in doing so, you risk flattening the human being behind the experience. I’ve seen it often. I’ve read novels that mean well, but I forget that every refugee is not a tragedy. They’re a person.

So, if you’re wondering how to portray refugee experiences, the answer isn’t in shock value. It’s in honesty. In dignity. In letting the character speak before the politics do. I’ve never written a refugee character as a statement. I write them because I’ve lived adjacent to displacement all my life because it shaped my own voice long before I became a writer.

The Refugee Is Not the Crisis; They Survived the Crisis

Too often, stories focus only on the moment of escape: the war, the border, and the camps. But what happens after that? The long silence. The new language. The disorientation of safety. The loneliness of starting over in a world that treats you like an echo.

To portray refugee experiences well, you must move past the event and into the aftermath. That’s where the emotional depth lives. That’s where your reader starts to understand not just what was lost but what’s still at stake.

In Palmyre pour toujours, I didn’t write about physical escape. But the feeling of cultural displacement, of watching your heritage be destroyed from afar, that grief is very real. Many refugees carry both wounds: the personal and the cultural. Their story is not just one of movement but of memory.

Avoid the “Grateful Refugee” Trope

Refugees are not here to make others feel better. They are not plot devices meant to teach Western readers about “resilience” or “hope.” And yet, that’s how many books portray them: humble, polite, endlessly thankful.

Let me be clear: some refugees are thankful. Others are angry. Some are confused, traumatized, optimistic, ashamed, determined. In other words, they are human. If you’re serious about learning how to portray refugee experiences, then you must allow your characters the full range of emotion. Don’t ask them to behave better than anyone else just because they’ve suffered.

Let the Refugee Be More Than Their Journey

In Guard Thy Heart, Paul Ollenson isn’t a refugee. But the emotional arc he goes through, the feeling of not belonging, of searching for something lost, of rebuilding after an internal collapse, mirrors many of the psychological realities that displaced people experience. You don’t need your character to have crossed a border to write a refugee’s heart. You need to understand what exile feels like on the inside.

That’s the key: your character must have a life outside the label. They may be a mother. An artist. A former teacher. A young girl who loves drawing birds. A man who misses his morning coffee from back home. These details don’t dilute the trauma; they make it matter more. They remind the reader that something beautiful was interrupted. Not erased.

Research Is Essential, But So Is Listening

Read testimonies. Watch interviews. Visit community centers. Talk to people if they’re willing. If they’re not, respect the silence. Some stories are not yours to tell.

One thing I’ve learned in writing across borders is that representation is not a performance. It’s a responsibility. The process of understanding how to portray refugee experiences begins long before the first sentence. You have to ask yourself: Why am I telling this story? What do I hope the reader will understand that they didn’t before?

And if the answer is just “to raise awareness,” go deeper. Refugees don’t need awareness. They need accuracy. They need to be shown as a whole.

Language Matters More Than You Think

How your character speaks matters. Do they mix languages? Struggle for words? Use humor to mask discomfort? Silence is just as powerful. A character who says very little can still tell you everything if you give the space to listen.

Language carries memory. If your character thinks in Arabic but speaks in broken English, let that friction appear on the page. Let the pauses, the mistranslations, and the internal commentary emerge. It adds texture. And more importantly, it adds truth.

Let the Reader Sit With Discomfort

Don’t wrap it up neatly. Real refugee stories often don’t have tidy endings. Families remain separated. Asylum is denied. Cultures are lost. And yet, people still love. Still dream. Still argue over dinner and send WhatsApp messages back home.

The best fiction allows space for discomfort, not for the sake of drama, but for the sake of honesty. If you’re writing about war, exile, or statelessness, don’t be afraid to show the parts that don’t resolve. That’s where the truth lives.

Don’t Speak for Refugees. Write With Them in Mind.

When I write, I don’t imagine faceless readers. I imagine people I’ve met. Friends who fled with nothing. Elders who never left but lost everything anyway. Children born in other countries learn to speak Arabic through bedtime stories.

If you want to know how to portray refugee experiences, start there with love. Not pity. With respect. Not projection. With the understanding that stories are not just tools. They are lives.

And once you begin to see that, you’ll write characters that feel real. Not because you gave them a tragic past. But because you gave them a future.