Workshop: “I Don’t Even Know Monrovia in the First Place”

The small West African country of Liberia was devastated by a fourteen-year-long civil war from 1989-2003. More than half of the country’s population was displaced either internally or forced to take refuge outside of Liberia. Many people spent varying amounts of time, from a few months to more than a decade, living in neighboring African countries like Guinea, Cote d’Ivoire, Sierra Leone, Ghana, and even Nigeria. This extended time outside of Liberia, especially for those who left as youth and children, impacted life trajectories, family disintegration, and even sentiments of nationalism and belonging. This paper is a work-in- progress which explores how bodies displaced due to the civil war are reconstituted in various ways, both by nation-states engaged in refugee management and by Liberian citizens themselves attempting to make sense of their lives and identities. Based on individual interviews conducted with forty Liberian immigrants in the Pittsburgh area, along with six years of participant observation, this paper examines some of the experiences of displacement that interviewees shared as well as how displacement affected their attitudes towards both their West African host countries and Liberia. This paper takes a critical approach to embodiment to examine its intersections with displacement and belonging in the larger context of social crisis.