Digital Object Identifier
The Rohingya have been described as ‘the world’s largest stateless population’ and are in the midst of an urgent refugee crisis. In First, They Erased Our Name: A Rohingya Speaks (2018) the only available memoir in English by a Rohingya, Habiburahman, its protagonist, exposes the precarious, lived reality of his marginalised, ostracized community and reveals a hidden apartheid-like state in Burma (now Myanmar). This paper uses the frame of testimonial life writing to describe the generic classification of this text and embeds it within a larger existing global tradition of using nonfictional, subaltern narratives to shape public opinion on ongoing humanitarian crises and record events erased from official histories. Habiburahman’s account of atrocities is treated in this study not just as the story of an individual’s triumph against adversity but as a representative voice for a silenced people. The text shows the Rohingya community trapped within the intersection of statelessness, persecution, and racism, suggesting that the ‘vulnerability’ of a minority community itself is manufactured and enforced. This paper reads Habiburahman’s text as a strategic tool of survival, resistance and human rights advocacy. This aligns it with similar strategies adopted by individuals and communities from the margins of history and literature to ensure the continuation of their existence by generating empathy, awareness and meaningful action in distant ‘others’ worldwide.
Diptiman Gautam. “First, They Erased Our Name and the Politics of Witnessing the Rohingya Genocide.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 4, August 2026, pp. 207-234. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n4.12.
Open Access · CC BY 4.0 · Crossref DOI ·
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