Drowned in Silence: State-Engineered Erasure, Smuggling Economies, and the Perilous Maritime Journeys of the Rohingya in Habiburahman’s

Abstract

ABSTRACT

The Rohingya crisis in Myanmar illustrates how this Muslim minority community from Myanmar's Rakhine State, were driven to undertake the deadly sea voyages not by choice, but by the systematic destruction of their legal and human existence. Using Habiburahman’s memoir First They Erased Our Name, the study draws on Edward Said's theory of the Other and Hannah Arendt's philosophy of statelessness to show that the violence of the sea crossings was the direct consequence of state-engineered identity erasure. The Myanmar state's 1982 Citizenship Law stripped the Rohingya of legal recognition, leaving them without documents, rights, or protection and therefore uniquely vulnerable to exploitation by transnational smuggling networks. This paper argues that smuggling networks did not create Rohingya vulnerability rather they profited from conditions that the state had already manufactured. Habiburahman's memoir is read not only as a record of suffering, but also as a political and literary act of resistance. The paper concludes by calling for a fundamental reconceptualization of international responses to statelessness moving beyond humanitarian management toward the restoration of political membership and citizenship rights.