Suspended Lives

Book excerpt: Suspended Lives explores the experiences of asylum seekers in the midwestern United States in vivid detail. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork among Cameroonian and other African asylum seekers, Bridget M. Haas traces the emotional and social effects of being embedded in the US asylum regime. Appealing to the United States for protection, asylum seekers are cast into a complex and protracted bureaucratic system that increasingly treats them as suspect. Haas shows how the US asylum system both serves as a potential refuge from past violence and creates new forms of suffering. She takes readers into the intimate spaces of asylum seekers’ homes and communities, in addition to legal and bureaucratic settings that are often inaccessible to the public. Poignantly foregrounding the lives and voices of asylum seekers, Suspended Lives exposes the asylum system as a site of multiple, yet often hidden and normalized, forms of violence. Haas also illuminates how asylum seekers respond to these harms to actively endure the asylum process.