Contemporary Representations of Forced Migration in Europe: Beyond Regime and Refuge 3031478312, 9783031478314

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LITERATURE, CULTURE AND HUMAN RIGHTS

Contemporary Representations of Forced Migration in Europe Beyond Regime and Refuge Edited by Fiona Barclay · Beatrice Ivey

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Human Rights Series Editor

Alexandra S. Moore Binghamton University New York, NY, USA

This series demonstrates how cultural critique can inform understandings of human rights as normative instruments that may at once express forms of human flourishing and be complicit with violence and inequality. The series investigates the role of genre and the aesthetic in shaping cultures of both rights and harm. Essential to this work is an understanding of human rights as at once normative and dynamic, encompassing egregious violations as well as forms of immiseration that have not always registered in human rights terms.

Fiona Barclay  •  Beatrice Ivey Editors

Contemporary Representations of Forced Migration in Europe Beyond Regime and Refuge

Editors Fiona Barclay French and Francophone Studies University of Stirling Linlithgow, UK

Beatrice Ivey Learning Design University of Leeds Leeds, UK

ISSN 2524-8820     ISSN 2524-8839 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Human Rights ISBN 978-3-031-47830-7    ISBN 978-3-031-47831-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47831-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Jasmin Merdan / Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Acknowledgements

The origins of this volume lie in a research project examining historical instances of Mediterranean forced migration. Led by Fiona Barclay, the project was funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and took place from 2018 to 2022. We would like to thank those who contributed to that project and shaped the ideas that led to this volume, including Sarah Bromage and Jane Cameron at the Pathfoot Art Gallery; Juliette Spire at the Écomusée du Grand-Orly Seine Bièvre, which loaned artefacts; and Anna Pantelia, who gave permission to exhibit her photographic work. A major conference on ‘Narratives of Forced Migration’ in 2019 brought together many of the contributors to this volume, and our thanks go to them and to the other authors who were commissioned to contribute chapters for the ideas and enthusiasm that they brought to the project, and for their creativity and support. We also gratefully acknowledge the AHRC funding that made it possible. The process of preparing the volume was made more challenging by the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, and we would like to thank the editors at Palgrave Macmillan, Lina Aboujieb and Saif Md, for their patience and support through the delays. We would also like to thank our colleagues at the universities of Stirling, Sheffield and Leeds for their collegial support during the preparation of this volume. Research during the pandemic was more atomised than usual and we are hugely grateful to our families; to Stephen, Mark, Cameron and Adam; and to Thom for their patience, forbearance and good humour. They have truly been part of the process. v

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Fiona Barclay and Beatrice Ivey Part I Art and Activism by and with Refugees  29 2 The Trojans Project: Therapeutic Drama from Syria to Scotland 31 Charlotte Eagar, William Stirling, Heba Alwadi, Essam Rabie, and Sana’a Al Froukh 3 Channelling  and Challenging the ‘imperative to tell’: Reflections on Negotiating Representations of Refugeeness from Practice-Based Performance Research 53 Catrin Evans 4 ‘To  live well is to story well’: Co-writing and Polyphonic Writing with Denmark’s Asylum Community 81 Helene Grøn 5 Life  in Detention: Journey and Border113 Pinar Aksu

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CONTENTS

6 Carceral  Witnessing and the Spatial Imagination135 Helen Brewer Part II Challenging Representations of Refugees 165 7 ‘She  is the meteor and I, her space’: Co-Becoming and Biopolitical Trauma in Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail167 Dima Barakat Chami 8 Unsettled:  Narrative Strategies in Exhibitions About the ‘Refugee Crisis’193 Hella Wiedmer-Newman 9 Archaeologies  of Nonentity in Aki Kaurismäki’s The Other Side of Hope219 Asha Varadharajan 10 Beyond  Objectifying the Humane: Memory in Media and Political Genres239 Siobhan Brownlie 11 Wolves  in the Sanctuary: Ecopolitics and Forced Migration in the Literature of the Anthropocene263 Peter Arnds 12 Remapping  the Borderlands of Britain: The Calais ‘Jungle’ and the Enduring Legacy of Imperial Frontier Policing287 Béatrice Blanchet Index311

Notes on Contributors

Pinar Aksu  is a theatre maker, human rights campaigner and a PhD student at University of Glasgow, UK. Her research explores the connection between art and law in migration, using art practices for social change and access to justice in migration. With years of experience supporting and working with people in the migration process, Pinar works with an integration network in Glasgow, coordinating projects for welcoming people seeking asylum in the community. Pinar worked with young people in the creation of an illustrated book called The Sea of Paperwork (2019), was part of the successful campaign for Right to Vote for refugees in Scotland and campaigns for Right to Work for people seeking asylum. With Active Inquiry theatre group, Pinar uses Theatre of the Oppressed methods to create social change and with World Spirit Theatre group to create plays with the aim of raising awareness of migration and the problems people experience in the UK system. As a human rights campaigner and someone with lived experience of migration, Pinar has been raising awareness of the issues related to asylum and migration on various platforms including writing news pieces, blogs and contributing to discussions. Sana’a Al Froukh  is a clinical psychologist and was a participant, writer and actor in The Trojans theatre project performed in Glasgow in 2018. Born in Syria, she came to Scotland in 2017 as part of the UK Government’s Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme for Syrians.

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Heba Alwadi  was a participant and actor in The Trojans theatre project performed in Glasgow in 2018. She was born in Syria but left, aged 13, to escape the war and came to live in Scotland in 2017 as part of the UK Government’s Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme for Syrians. She now studies psychology at Glasgow Caledonian University. Peter  Arnds  teaches German and Italian literature at Trinity College Dublin, where he is a professor and also a fellow. His publications include books on Wilhelm Raabe, Charles Dickens, Günter Grass as well as his recent monographs Lycanthropy in German Literature (2015), Translating Holocaust Literature (2015) and Wolves at the Door: Migration, Dehumanization, Rewilding the World (2021). Arnds has also translated Patrick Boltshauser’s novel Stromschnellen (Rapids, Dalkey Archive Press, 2014, nominated for the IMPAC, Dublin International Literary Award) and published a novel, Searching for Alice (2019). His current research examines the links between cultural production and species politics as well as the philosophy of walking in world literature. Fiona Barclay  is Senior Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies at the University of Stirling, UK.  Her research examines the postcolonial relationship between France and Algeria, with a particular focus on the population of European settlers who were forced to flee Algeria at independence in 1962. She is the author of Writing Postcolonial France: Haunting, Literature and the Maghreb (2011) and France’s Colonial Legacies: Memory, Identity and Narrative (2013). Béatrice  Blanchet teaches geopolitics and English studies at Lyon Catholic University (UCLy), France. Her research examines the construction of the emblematic figure of the intimate stranger in British political discourse and media representations, whether it be the cosmopolitan intellectual (symbol of exile), the activist (between subversion of norms and inclusion in a protest tradition), the local interpreter (influenced by his multiple and simultaneous allegiances) or the migrant (associated with liminal borderlands). She is particularly interested in the remapping of Britain’s symbolic and geopolitical borders against the backdrop of debates on multiculturalism and British identity (Britishness). She has published widely in leading journals such as Modern & Contemporary France and the Journal of European Studies.

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Helen Brewer  is an activist and architectural researcher based in London, UK.  She is a CHASE-AHRC funded PhD candidate in the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths University of London. Her work investigates the affective dimensions of migration, care and solidarity. Siobhan  Brownlie is Honorary Research Fellow in the Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies at the University of Manchester, UK, and she teaches at Le Mans Université in France. She has written three monographs entitled Memory and Myths of the Norman Conquest (2013), Mapping Memory in Translation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and Discourses of Memory and Refugees: Exploring Facets (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). She is the co-editor with Rédouane Abouddahab of the volume titled Figures of the Migrant: The Roles of Literature and the Arts in Representing Migration (2021). Dima  Barakat  Chami  is a migrant researcher and activist based in the UK. She is a research associate working at the University of Bristol on an ERC-funded project titled ‘Literary Activism in Sub-Saharan Africa: Commons, Publics and Networks of Practice’. As part of this project, she manages the Nigeria stream, where she researches Northern Nigerian literary activism. She received her PhD from the University of Leeds, where she researched Nigerian literature and migration. As a migrant activist, she also ran bibliotherapy group sessions with asylum-seeking and migrant communities in Leeds. Her current book projects include a monograph based on her doctoral research, tentatively titled ‘Biopolitical Citizenship: African Literature and the Question of the Human’, as well as a coauthored book on activist and research methodologies based on the ERC project at Bristol. Charlotte Eagar  is an award-winning filmmaker, award-winning former foreign correspondent, novelist and producer. She was inspired to cofound the Trojan Women Project, a combined psycho-social support and advocacy drama project for refugees, in 2013, through her work as a foreign correspondent and background as a classicist. She co-produced Trojans UK 22, a two-year national tour of the Trojans Project. Catrin Evans  is a theatre practitioner and arts-based researcher, with an expertise in creating performance through participatory and collaborative processes. She has worked extensively with Scotland’s leading theatre companies and was Artistic Director of socially engaged arts organization

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A Moment’s Peace between 2005 and 2021. Upon completion of her AHRC-funded practice-based doctoral studies from the University of Glasgow in 2020, Catrin worked at the University of Bedfordshire as a research associate on the Drawing Together project until April 2021, as well as providing dissertation supervision for Theatre Studies undergraduates at the University of West of Scotland. In 2021, she joined the Citizens Theatre as their Head of Creative Learning. Helene  Grøn  holds a PhD in Theatre Studies from the University of Glasgow, where she contributed to the Glasgow Refugee, Asylum and Migration Network, and is a Postdoc at the University of Copenhagen. She is also a writer and librettist, whose work has been performed by, amongst others, Scottish Opera, and published in Dark Mountain Magazine. Her monograph, Asylum and Belonging Through Collective Playwriting: ‘How Much Home Does a Person Need?’, was published by Palgrave Macmillan; other academic work has been published in journals such as Research in Drama Education and Scottish Journal of Performance. Beatrice  Ivey  is a Learning Designer at the University of Leeds. As a researcher in French and Francophone Studies her work explores the transcultural memory of French colonialism across literatures from France and North Africa. Essam Rabih  was a participant and actor in The Trojans theatre project performed in Glasgow in 2018. He left Syria in 2012 following the war; after several years in Egypt he came to Scotland as part of the UK Government’s Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme for Syrians. William  Stirling  is an award-winning filmmaker, theatre producer and writer. He co-founded the Trojan Women Project in 2013 and co-produced Trojans UK 22 a two-year touring adaptation of Euripides’ The Trojan Women with refugees of multiple backgrounds, with Charlotte Eagar. He was an aid worker in Bosnia in 1992 and a classicist by education, both of which provided the inspiration behind the Trojan Women Project. Asha  Varadharajan is Associate Professor of English at Queen’s University, Canada. She is the author of Exotic Parodies: Subjectivity in Adorno, Said, and Spivak. Her current research reconceptualises the category of the refugee and the meaning of displacement. Her most recent publications comment on the crisis of the humanities, the subaltern in

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contemporaneity, violence against women and the discourse of human rights, decolonizing pedagogy, postcolonial temporalities, humanitarian intervention and the legacy of The Frankfurt School. The most fun she has had writing was while composing her entry on Eric Idle for the Dictionary of Literary Biography. The most chuffed she has been lately was on receiving the Queen’s University 2021 Principal’s Promoting Student Inquiry Teaching Award. Hella  Wiedmer-Newman  is a PhD candidate at the eikones graduate school of the University of Basel. Her research focuses on the aesthetics and politics of memorial institutions and the role of contemporary art in post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina. She holds an MA in History of Art from University College London (2021) and a BA in Art History and Human Geography from the University of Toronto (2019). Her work has been published in ArtMargins and Spike Magazine.

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 5.4

Fig. 5.5 Fig. 5.6 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2

Opening performance of The Trojans, Platform Theatre, Glasgow, 2019. (© Charlotte Ginsborg) Ezel’s image chosen to articulate integration, 2023. Image by permission of Lillebut (makers of board game DIXIT) Example of prompt for the Guest Book and Jean Claude Mangomba Mbombo’s poem, 2023. (© Helene Grøn) Beach image, Lesbos, Greece, 2015. (© Pinar Aksu) The ‘Jungle’ camp, Calais, France, 2016. (© Pinar Aksu) A memorial bench in Glasgow to commemorate those who have lost their lives in the asylum system, 2022. (© Pinar Aksu) Outside Dungavel Immigration Removal Centre, Scotland, 2017. Picture taken during an organised protest outside the detention centre demanding the closure of all detention centres and for people to be based in their communities. (© Pinar Aksu) Prop used as part of the play, Where are you really from?, devised by World Spirit Theatre and Citizens Theatre in Glasgow, 2018–2019. (© Pinar Aksu) Leaves, 2021. (© Pinar Aksu) Screenshot, ‘The Hunger Strikers’ Demands’, Detained Voices (blog), 22 February 2018, accessed 15 January 2020 Protestors marching to the site of the noise demonstration at Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre, 2017. (© Helen Brewer)

32 73 96 116 120 123

127 130 131 143 146

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Fig. 6.3

Noise demonstration outside Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre, 2017. (© Helen Brewer) Fig. 6.4 Protestors making noise, 2017. (© Helen Brewer) Fig. 6.5 Protestors holding a banner, 2017. (© Helen Brewer) Fig. 8.1 Minimalist maze composed of black reflective acrylic walls, George Drivas, still from Laboratory of Dilemmas, 2017. (© George Drivas) Fig. 8.2 The head researcher shows off his lab, George Drivas, still from Laboratory of Dilemmas, 2017. (© George Drivas) Fig. 8.3 The board meets to discuss incorporation of the alien cells, George Drivas, Laboratory of Dilemmas, 2017. (© George Drivas) Fig. 8.4 Young Black South African woman lies in a boat donning colonial garb and a whip, Mohau Modisakeng, still from Passage, 2017. (© Mohau Modisakeng Studios) Fig. 8.5 Young Black South African man lies in a boat donning colonial garb and a cane, Mohau Modisakeng, still from Passage, 2017. (© Mohau Modisakeng Studios) Fig. 8.6 Julianne Moore in character in front of a green screen telling fragmented stories, Candice Breitz, still from Love Story, 2016. (© Candice Breitz) Fig. 8.7 Alec Baldwin in character in front of a green screen telling fragmented stories, Candice Breitz, still from Love Story, 2016. (© Candice Breitz) Fig. 8.8 The six original storytellers, each in front of their own green screen, tell their stories in full, Candice Breitz stills from Love Story, 2016. (© Candice Breitz) Fig. 8.9 The ship-wrecked fishing boat being transported to the arsenale to be installed there, Christoph Büchel, Barca Nostra, 2019. (© Christoph Büchel) Fig. 11.1 ‘The Wolves are Back,’ Rainer Opolka, 2016. (© Rainer Opolka)

147 148 149 198 199 201 205 206 207 207 208 213 269

CHAPTER 1

Introduction Fiona Barclay and Beatrice Ivey

Chapter The situation […] is not simply a ‘refugee’ crisis in terms of labelling the precarious situation of millions of displaced people but a crisis of refuge in the sense of apparently developed nations being able to convincingly articulate a political position to satisfy dissenting and divided domestic constituents. (Snow 2020, 170)

The Limitations of Art What are the possibilities and limitations offered by contemporary representations of forced migration? Russell T.  Davies’ six-part television series, Years and Years (BBC/HBO 2019), centres on the Lyons family, a

F. Barclay (*) French and Francophone Studies, University of Stirling, Linlithgow, UK e-mail: [email protected] B. Ivey Learning Design, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 F. Barclay, B. Ivey (eds.), Contemporary Representations of Forced Migration in Europe, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Human Rights, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47831-4_1

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conventional English family living in Manchester. Starting in 2019, it fast-­ forwards through 15 years, taking an increasingly dystopian look at the evolution of society as it cycles through the rise of populism, transhuman technology, environmental disaster, and the collapse of the international order in what Rodríguez and Romeo-Rodríguez (2021, 216) call ‘historical pessimism’. Davies delivers a character-driven vision of the future by showing these massive social upheavals through the eyes of the family’s four adult children. Central to the storyline is the relationship between Daniel Lyons (Russell Tovey) and his partner Viktor (Maxim Baldry), who fled his native Ukraine following its invasion by Russia and the subsequent persecution of homosexuals. Deported from the UK, Viktor is forced repeatedly to flee across Europe as state after state falls to nationalist and populist governments. When his final haven of Spain falls, Daniel and Viktor embark on a desperate attempt to return to the UK. Robbed by smugglers, they find themselves crossing the Channel on an overcrowded dinghy. While Viktor survives, Daniel drowns along with 16 others. Years and Years is notable for the way this example of dystopian fiction imagines the harm inflicted by future border regimes on the white European refugee subject, namely Viktor. Firstly, although its central storyline presents the growing hostility towards increasing numbers of refugees as a feature of the future—Viktor’s story is situated in 2026–2027—the scenes of summary detention and deportation, not to mention the sight of overcrowded small boats and abandoned lifejackets on the shores of the Mediterranean, were echoes of the news headlines of 2015. However, its relocation of the crisis to the waters of northern France was prescient: at the time of writing the closure of clandestine land routes and the absence of safe legal means of entry were forcing increasing numbers of people seeking asylum to undertake the dangerous Channel crossing, with more than 45,000 crossing in 2022, over five times the total in 2020 (Elgot 2023). The relocation of archetypal border crossings demonstrates how the confrontation between those attempting to access refuge and local border regimes is continually re-enacted at multiple sites around the edges of Europe, from Greece and Italy, to the Canaries, the UK, and Poland, Lithuania, or Latvia. Secondly, and as important, are the techniques used to make the viewer care about the social issues of this dystopian world, which are identifiably the issues of the assumed viewer’s own future. Years and Years is prescient in the framing of a refugee story surrounding the white, Eastern European subject, Viktor, years before the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine by

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Russia (although it was released after the 2014 annexation of Crimea). This narrative framing suggests the ostensible limitations to a British audience’s empathetic potential. Would Viktor elicit engaged responses if his character was a Syrian Muslim? Indeed, the warm reception that greeted the huge numbers of Ukrainian refugees arriving in Poland was in stark contrast to the experience of Muslim refugees attempting to cross to Poland from Belarus, following the Lukashenko regime’s false promises of a route into Europe in 2021–2022. While Belarusian troops cut barbed wire and pushed Syrians, Afghans, and Kurds over the border, Polish border guards refused entry, pushing them back into the freezing forests (Tondo 2022). Their experience foreshadowed that of people of colour, especially African and Indian students at Ukrainian universities, whose social media entries recorded the racism they experienced in attempting to flee the Russian invasion of Ukraine (Pietromarchi 2022). Simultaneously, Western media coverage of the first weeks of the invasion was widely criticised for the differentiation placed on empathetic depictions of white, Eastern European refugees who ‘look and live like us’, compared to that of Syrians fleeing conflict in the years following 2015 (White 2022). In other words, Years and Years reiterates Judith Butler’s questions posed in the wake of the Iraq invasion: ‘Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And, finally, what makes for a grievable life?’ (2004, 20). Finally, if Years and Years invites its audience to empathise with the plight of the white, Ukrainian subject, Davies further engages viewer empathy by presenting the refugee imperative through the eyes and experience of a middle-class English family. Viktor is not merely a Ukrainian refugee; he is, from the end of the first episode, Daniel Lyons’ lover and fiancé-to-be, and his experiences are mediated for the viewer through the responses of a UK citizen. Creatively this is extremely effective. When he is summoned and detained by the Home Office and summarily deported, it is Daniel’s incredulity at the brutal system that we hear and the effect of the deportation on Daniel that we see as his panic and powerlessness grow. It is Daniel’s naivety that causes them to be robbed and Daniel’s desperate plan to get Viktor out of Spain that leads to disaster. Viewers are encouraged to share Daniel and Viktor’s elation when the smugglers’ van appears on the French coast, and Daniel’s disbelief when they see the flimsy craft awaiting them: ‘Is that the boat?’. He is the viewer’s proxy, his comfortable middle-class English expectations repeatedly challenged by the brutal realities of British policy towards non-citizens. The family’s relationships present a picture of recognisable normality that invites the viewer to invest

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emotionally in the characters. Like the classic boiling frog, they appear not to notice the gradual evolution of society as it slides towards dystopia. Consequently, for the viewer invested in Daniel and his relationships the path to the final desperate attempt to find refuge is both credible and inevitable. The drama of the Channel crossing, from the panic as the inflatable boat is overloaded to the night-time noise of screaming, wind and waves which cuts intermittently to black, is juxtaposed with the eerie peace of the deserted beach the following morning. The overhead camera pans over the empty sands until it alights on tiny life-jacketed figures lying, pausing only when it finds the prone lifeless figure of Daniel lying next to an official marker, number 14, denoting his place in the still-life of the drowned. Ultimately, the framing of these scenes aims to expose the incongruity of the white middle-class British citizen dying a ‘refugee’s death’. This is underscored by the fact that Viktor survives. The melodrama of Years to Years seeks to shock its audiences by playing on the banal expectations of the necropolitical border regimes (Mbembé 2003): the refugee drowns, while the white observer survives in order to bear witness. It demands that the viewer interrogate their assumptions of who is expected to die in the act of clandestine entry. If Davies’ approach succeeds creatively in making viewers care about an issue that often appears far removed from everyday concerns, ethically it is hugely problematic. If the most effective way to create empathy is via a focus on white non-refugees to the exclusion of those actively seeking refuge, how will the inequities that silence those marginalised by global systems of oppression be addressed? If creative art reaches audiences of millions, what is the cost of presenting lost lives as entertainment? Entertainment may succeed in creating momentary empathy, but how might art create the lasting impact required to bring about meaningful change? How might those seeking refuge share their experiences, and how might those receiving those experiences go beyond empathy or the call to become ‘concerned citizens’? (Çelik Rappas and Benegas Loyo 2020, 65). As a television series centred around a (predominantly) white family and anticipating a dominant white, British audience, it reserves its emotion for the majority and offers only a limited voice to the sympathetic but relatively passive, marginalised foreigner. Years and Years demonstrates what is at stake in representations of forced migration: how do we in Europe imagine, represent, and advocate for shared humanity and solidarity in moments of profound crisis?

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Narratives of European Hostipitality This book collates reflections and essays exploring and critiquing notions of border ‘regimes’ but also of ‘refuge’ in contemporary representations of forced migration. As we prepared the volume, people seeking refuge from the horrors of the Syrian conflict constituted the major contemporary instance of forced displacement for Europe, and consequently it is the context for a number of the reflections in the chapters that follow. Since then, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has displaced millions of Ukrainians, many of whom have been offered refuge in private homes across Europe. Although now, only a few months after the outbreak of war, it is too early to know what the long-term outcomes of civilian mass displacements will be, the willingness of individuals to offer accommodation—and the reluctance of certain administrations, most notably the UK government, to waive visa requirements citing national security concerns—illustrates the extremes that greet refugees regardless of origin and ethnicity. The experience of Ukrainians, and that of the non-white residents of Ukraine who reportedly have not received the same welcome (Bulman and White 2022), demonstrates the enduring nature of displacement. In his famous essay, “Hostipitality”, Jacques Derrida examines hospitality as a conditional act of welcome which places requirements on the guest. ‘Hospitality limits itself at its very beginning, it remains forever on the threshold of itself’ (2000, 14); it is always a welcome offered on the basis of a particular regime of values and conditions. Derrida explores the interlinked epistemology of hostility and hospitality within cosmopolitanism wherein the guest-stranger must explain themselves to the hostile-host: ‘Hospitality is owed to the other as stranger. But if one determines the other as stranger, one is already introducing the circles of conditionality that are family, nation, state, and citizenship’ (2000, 8). In this sense, the extension of hospitality also entails processes of estrangement, othering, and paternalism; it highlights the expectations that accompany acts of hospitality. Derrida’s term ‘hostipitality’ helps us to interrogate and name some of the paradoxical intersections of discourse and practice that exist simultaneously within the national and supranational bordering enacted by European states and societies. We suggest that the forms of ‘hostipitality’ of the current European border regime are expressed through two poles of refuge and regime that condition the reception of refugees entering Europe. On the one hand, Europe claims to be the home of liberal humanism and the guardian of

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refugee rights as set out in international law. Such a position presents Europe and its peoples as a site of refuge. On the other hand, Europe continues to reflect the discursive modalities of imperial projects that not only shaped the modern European state but, through the mechanisms outlined by Edward Said, gave rise to influential and persistent conceptions of European identity defined in opposition to peoples in the Orient, Asia, and Africa. These discourses are frequently materialised in border regimes that cast peoples from the Global South as trespassers in the Global North, instituting increasingly restrictive practices that target racialised migrants. Refugees in Europe are ostensibly trapped between these opposing poles—of refuge and regime—that appear to condition public perception, exposing them to preconceived and calcified assumptions that harden around them from the very moment of their initial encounter with Europe. We investigate the different ways in which narratives about and by people who are categorised as ‘refugees’, ‘asylum seekers’, or ‘migrants’ encounter and resist the restrictive regimes of European bordering, and the parallel narratives of refuge. We start from the premise that both narratives can fail to fully convey the historical and political legacies of empire at work in displacement and dispossession. The questions of refuge and regimes of bordering currently being enacted by the dirigeants of Fortress Europe urgently demand a response. Being in part the consequence of the historical flows of migration created by Europe’s imperial expansions, they are not without precedent; nevertheless, today climate catastrophe and pandemic are widening the gulf between mobilities and immobilities on a global scale. These current geopolitical realities entwine fatally with the discursive legacies of colonialism. Debarati Sanyal (2019, 439) encapsulates the challenge when she notes that we must ‘historicize this interplay between refugee as victim and migrant as criminal, with its corollary logic of humanitarian detention for biopolitical security, in relation to prior histories of racialized violence such as slavery and colonialism’. How these questions of refuge and regime are made recognisable, legible, and visible mediated through cultural production and media representation will be the primary focus of the following chapters. By regime and refuge, we understand the overlapping systems of knowledge, bureaucracy, and mediatised visibility that condition the ways in which people are categorised as refugee, asylum seeker, migrant, or ‘illegal’ immigrant among others. We understand these dual narratives as being inherently connected to the continuities and evolutions produced by coloniality and the subsequent uneven development of the Global North and

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Global South or Minority and Majority Worlds.1 It might be observed that, in its focus on refuge and regime, the conceptual framework employed in this volume takes as its object Europe, its national and supranational policies, its populations, and above all, its imaginaries as presented in the following chapters. In this it runs counter to the widely accepted need to decentre the Global North in studies of migration. As a range of scholars (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2020a; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Daley 2018: 22; Grosfoguel et  al. 2015, 2016; Sager 2022, Pailey 2019; Vanyoro 2019) have observed, a comprehensive understanding of migration studies requires that we destabilise the Eurocentrism inherent in international policy-making, law, and what Fiori (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Fiori 2020, 183) refers to as ‘Western humanitarianism’. Such calls are not new—they stem from major interventions such as Chimni’s (2006) manifesto for Third World Approaches to International Law—but attempts to recentre the South have led to criticism of scholarly tokenism, including in citation practices, and of the homogenisation of notions of the ‘Global South’ that elide the variations and specificities of lived experience across vast tracts of the globe (Nasser-Eddin and Abu-Assab 2020). This is made more pressing by the global realities of contemporary migration, in which migration within the South represents the predominant element. In 2016 the UNHCR (2016) estimated that 67.7  million people had been forcibly displaced across the globe, a total that had almost doubled in a decade. As Laura Madokoro argues (2020, 23), the construction of a Global North imaginary relies on the underlying and pervasive assumption that refugees come from elsewhere to the Global North. The figures are stark: Europe, a continent of half a billion people, hosts fewer than 2.3 million refugees, whilst Lebanon, with a population of six million, hosts 1.5 million refugees from Syria alone (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Fiori 2020). Yet the Eurocentrism of international charities, agencies, and organisations remains entrenched, determined by their historical and ideological origins and by the location of the states which are their major donors. If David Owen asks What Do We Owe Refugees? (2020), when historicizing different forms of ‘refuge’, Alex Sager (2022) argues that the eurocentrism implied in the assumed ‘we’ of a European receiving society obscures the continuing violence enacted by those same societies and inflicted on ‘migrants’: 1  Minority and Majority Worlds are terms sometimes used to describe the fact that the majority of people live in Asia, Africa, and South America, while global wealth is concentrated elsewhere (see Alam 2008).

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While migrants are not a unified group and have many perspectives, most vulnerable migrants are likely to take issue with the question “what do we owe refugees?” and accompanying debates about the legitimate limits to Western states’ “generosity”. Instead, they would draw attention to the role of these states in forced displacement and how Eurocentric assumptions about their “liberal democratic” character effaces the ongoing history of foreign military intervention and colonialism.

As Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (2020b) notes, responses have assumed a variety of forms, from assessing the functioning of classical concepts within Southern paradigms, to studying migration within and to the South, and engaging critically with geopolitical modes of epistemic production. This volume adopts the latter approach, arguing that, on the one hand, the study of contemporary migration to Europe, while less significant in numerical terms than movements within the Global South, remains a valid object of study because of the tension that it exposes at the heart of societies that continue to focus on their histories as the originators of human rights, whilst disregarding the legacies and obligations of their colonial pasts. This tension is particularly concerning because the expansion of human rights legislation has been accompanied by a rise in xenophobia, to which successive governments have responded politically. As Ralph Wilde (2020, 157) notes, ‘Just as the scope of human-rights legal protection in general, and the legal protection accorded to certain migrants in particular, has expanded, so too have states become less willing to provide such protection’. Against this backdrop of populist xenophobia, this volume responds to the concentration of power around Europe’s borders by asking what art, and cultural production more broadly, created by artists from both North and South, does and might do to produce and shape the responses and understanding of audiences in the North. In the words of Ammar Azzouz, speaking about Syrians exiled from home, artistic production can play a key role in helping displaced people heal wounds of a lost homeland: ‘The road of struggle is so long and so much is needed to heal, recover and rebuild both our ruined homeland and ourselves. This new wave of creativity can help us to remember, and never to forget’ (2020, 194). This volume explores the reparative characteristics of art, while acknowledging that art is not inherently progressive, and that the contemporary artist faces the challenge of overcoming Western art’s long tradition of objectifying difference.

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Troubling Categories This volume sets out to interrogate assumptions about those seeking refuge and expose the false dichotomy between refuge and regime. By refuge, we refer to the assumption by which liberal European democracies present themselves as havens, but only for deserving and welcome migrants. In David Owen’s framing (2020, 7), refuge calls to mind two pictures: on the one hand, the ‘humanitarian picture’ which raises ‘a moral duty to prevent undeserved suffering’ and ‘the political picture’, on the other hand, which refers to the ‘obligation to redress the injustice of membership repudiation to which refugees are subject’. Both pictures, however, demonstrate the ways in which people become subjugated to systems of categorisation that dehumanise at the same time as they propose to prevent harm to vulnerable people. In this respect, refuge overlaps with concepts of migration ‘regimes’. Bernt (2019, 10) underlines the various proliferations of the term ‘regime’ within migration studies, international relations, and border studies. By regime, we do not seek to contribute an additional definition, but rather refer to the broader infrastructures, architectures, and logics of necropolitical borders that prevent people from accessing safety. Through a focus on the representations of refugees across theatre, visual art, literature, cinema, and media discourse, the following chapters of this book collectively interrogate the transnational situatedness of peoples negotiating, transgressing, and resisting the borders of contemporary Europe that reveals the intertwined relationship of ‘refuge’ and ‘regime’. In employing this approach, we reject the artificial binaries whose seductive convenience sees individuals imprisoned in ideological boxes. Breaking down the ideological constructs assigned to putative geographical zones also calls into question other categories that actively shape and constrain our understanding. The ‘refugee as victim’, passive, feminised, and grateful, requiring the paternalistic intervention of Western states and humanitarian organisations, and the ‘deserving refugee’ who makes a measurable contribution (economic, scientific, sporting, artistic, etc.) to their adopted home, thus justifying the economic resources made available to them, may appear to be positive categories. In reality, such images objectify refugees, creating an expectation of gratefulness on their part that denies them the space and agency to react fully and humanly to their experiences. These images jostle for space in the citizen imaginaries of liberal democracies alongside more threatening images of the ‘bogus asylum seeker’, terrorist

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or economic migrant. In search of headlines and clickbait, newspaper editors and right-wing politicians fret that the vast numbers of arrivals would overwhelm putative host states economically, through their demands for scarce resources, and culturally, through demands for religious and other customs that would somehow dilute or overwrite the nation’s identity, and call for the nation to be ‘protected’ against them (Macron 2021). Attempts to differentiate between the good, ‘deserving’ refugee and the ‘undeserving’ economic migrant have given rise to the bureaucratic regime that De Genova (2013) refers to as the ‘Border Spectacle’, which, through its intractable and labyrinthine processes, produces migrant illegality.2 The Border Spectacle institutes what Thomas Nail (2016) calls ‘junctions’ in flows; this seemingly neutral term translates the enforced experience of immobility and invisibility that characterises uncertain periods of existence for those held in indefinite detention in certain European states. Like a pulled thread that unravels a piece of fabric, close attention to labels and categories quickly causes them to fragment. Nadine El-Enany (2019, 30) points out that the legal classifications of migrant, asylum seeker, and refugee are artificial and historically contingent. They do not represent natural or predefined groups of people, but instead construct them. […] All people moving are migrants […] It is merely that the law grants some people rights, at least in theory, and others not […] The distinction drawn between migrants and refugees is both false and dangerous in reinforcing the idea that some migrants are worthy of humanisation, while others are not. (El-Enany 2019, 30)

Approaching the same question from an empirical angle, Alice Elliott (2020, 111) develops this point, arguing that the official distinction between forced and voluntary migration is in practice arbitrary, since many of the phenomena that characterise the circumstances of the ‘refugee crisis’—deaths at sea; makeshift rescue operations; rhetoric of invasion; stories of hope; race, class, and gender politics of inclusion and exclusion—apply also to the North Africans officially crossing the Mediterranean as 2  Alternative pathways, such as the UK Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme, which took 20,000 Syrian refugees direct from camps in the region replaced the bureaucratic processes of assessment with a range of support towards integration (housing, language, jobs, etc.). The approach foregrounded paternalism and ensured that individuals were firmly assigned with the ‘refugee’ label, an identity that many struggled with.

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economic migrants in search of new lives in Europe. The line between choice and compulsion is frequently blurred. Elliott (2020, 113) notes the power of hope in driving attempts to reach Europe and calls for an acknowledgement of the ‘pull’ of desire as an element of migrant agency, arguing that to paint all migrants as desperate reduces their humanity and deprives them of the full range of emotions, including the desire to travel, which privileged individuals take for granted. Moreover, it works to elide the histories of colonisation, imperialism, and slavery that frequently anchor migratory trajectories, in favour of dehistoricised narratives that fashion migrants as the pitiable objects of European largesse. More than a gesture of conditional hospitality, then, refuge is increasingly recognised as a form of justice that is a necessary response to the inequities resulting from centuries of European domination, and potentially as an act of reparation for global inequalities rooted in the history of empires and extraction from the Global South. James Souter (2014) suggests that a reparative form of asylum can take place if there is a causal link between the refugee’s former state and an external one. Souter only hints at the role of imperialism by arguing that asylum could be reparation for ‘past injustice’. For El-Enany, writing about the UK context, the link between imperialism and the present-day dispossession of refugees is more direct. While the vast majority of British asylum seekers are from former British colonies (El-Enany 2019, 134), the category of ‘asylum seeker’ only emerges in the post-imperial era, as other routes to entry rights for formerly colonised people to Britain were erased in British immigration law. If Empire was the mechanism by which the colonial centres benefited from the extracted labour, goods, and knowledge of the Global South, post-colonial migration to Britain may be perceived as a means to gain access to the ‘spoils of colonialism’ which are ‘located within the borders of Britain and manifest in the form of infrastructure, health, wealth, security, opportunity and futures’ (El-Enany 2019, 74). The British context is replicated across much of the Global North: when regimes of bordering are an extension of colonial looting, asylum can be understood as a means to access these resources in an unevenly distributed world. Sea-crossings in dinghies and other precarious vessels have come to be the archetype of the refugee journey to Europe, especially since 2015 as the highly mediatised movements of Syrian refugees were reinterpreted and re-presented in cultural production. We note that the history of sea-­ crossings is much longer and entangled with the histories of colonialism and globalisation. Nonetheless, the 2015 increase in asylum claims in

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Europe, accompanied by the war in Syria allowed a Eurocentric discourse of crisis to be associated with refugees and migration in general. The temporality of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ produced concomitant crises in terms of a reactionary border regime and short-term responses in terms of narratives of ‘refuge’. This short-term, acute temporality of perceived crisis belies the protracted regimes of violence and misery inflicted on people who are moving, and the continuities rather than ruptures in regimes of bordering in Europe. Daniel Trilling (2018) has argued that it is more accurate to think in terms of a ‘border crisis’ in which the necropolitical mechanisms of borders (within as well as on the edges of a sovereign state) purposefully manage the death of migrants through neglect and enforced destitution. For Nando Sigano, naming the movement of people across the Mediterranean in 2015 as a ‘crisis’ has ‘enormous implications on the kind of legal and moral obligations receiving states and societies feel towards them’ (2018, 457). One such implication of the crisis is the impression of the movement of Syrian refugees to Europe as a unique and isolated catastrophe, despite the fact that the numbers which grabbed media headlines in 2015 were merely part of a long-established movement between (formerly) colonised peripheries in the Global South to metropolitan centres in the North. In the post-war period, the trajectory across the Mediterranean had seen dispossessed European colonials seek refuge from the violence of decolonisation, followed by economic migrants, Arabs and Berbers from North Africa seeking better life chances in Europe. The hostility that greeted the arrival of both groups in Europe served to highlight the racialised elements circulating in attitudes, official and informal, towards arrivals associated with colonialism, regardless of strict ethnicity (Eldridge 2016). In fact, the tension between the post-Second World War human rights tradition and the hostile borders of ‘Fortress Europe’ is compounded by the colonial legacy of Europe’s past, with the Mediterranean marking the boundary between the imperial European powers and the lands and peoples which they violently colonised. While the 1951 Refugee Convention is most commonly associated with the end of the Second World War, scholars such as Lucy Mayblin (2014, 2017) and Ulrike Krause (2021) have linked the convention to the exclusion of colonised people. Krause (2021) explains that the roots of the 1951 Refugee Convention lay in its ‘colonial-ignorant’ founding, which established a narrow definition of refugees by privileging those in Europe. In other words, the development of international law through

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the 1951 Refugee Convention aimed to mitigate how refugee movements would affect Europe, rather than the rest of the world and those displaced in decolonised or decolonising states.

Resisting Refugee Narratability In order to overcome the administrative obstacles designed to winnow out the ‘undeserving’ migrant and seek asylum, people categorised as ‘refugees’ in Europe are obligated by officialdom to tell their stories. Who are they? Where did they come from? And why did they leave? Refugee narratives compel speakers to conform to prescribed and recognisable scripts of interloper, or victim, if can be suggested that the narratives is both integral to the asylum-seeking process in Europe. Narratives are dangerous, life and death, tools with which refugees have to navigate borders, national and internal. Recounted in a context of suspicion, stories become key evidence of authenticity, told and retold as an exercise in consistency more commonly associated with criminal suspects. As essential as the financial means that allows passage, via smugglers, across national frontiers, narrative practice becomes a currency that permits entry to the state’s internal border regimes. A vector giving access from hostility to ostensible hospitality, storytelling also becomes a central means by which refugees are encoded and made recognisable by a pre-existing but continually shifting set of values. It places on them the burden of proving their humanity in order to receive the patronage of hospitality: When ‘humanity’ itself is a category—the only visibility left to refugees— then calling on it uncritically and unhistorically is as likely to make those already in the twilight less, not more, visible. At worst, it requires a performance of suffering in order to validate not just the humanity of refugees, but of the rights-rich too. (Cox et al. 2020: 3)

If people on the move are constantly asked to narrate their lives so that they become legible to outsiders and therefore fit particular categories of recognisable subjectivity, narrating one’s story is less an act of self-­ liberation than a means of brokering one’s humanity in the service of others. Refugee storytelling is integral to bureaucracy of migration management and border control. In order to survive border zones, there is an expectation that people on the move must make public their stories

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in order to convince the border guards, bureaucrats, humanitarian agencies, and allies they encounter on the way. In her poetry collection on ‘migritude’, Shailja Patel explains the unilaterality of questioning for migrants from the Global South: ‘Questions cost us jobs, visas, lives. We watch and copy. We try to please’ (Patel 2010: 33). People categorised as refugees can only answer questions, they do not have the right to ask them. Refugee narratives may also travel beyond officialdom and state bureaucracy, where they take on new lives in the media or in broader cultural production. The sharing of refugee stories emerges from the phenomenon of witnessing. The emphasis on the sharing of testimony stands with human rights legislation as a legacy of the Second World War and its lessons and, as Annette Wieviorka (2006) has argued, have transformed attitudes towards victims and their suffering. While Wieviorka demonstrates the historian’s circumspection towards the emotion often linked with testimony, the perceived authenticity and eye-witness authority associated with the victim’s story and its power in amplifying the voices of those who have previously been silenced by violence and trauma has been of interest to many, amongst them scholars, artists, and humanitarians. In the process, however, testimony often becomes disconnected from the victim. The story may reach a wider audience, but the victim loses control of her story, and of the choice to tell it. Told and retold by others who often are not first-hand witnesses, it assumes an independent existence, evidence of otherness deployed for entertainment, distraction, or exoticisation. The creation and representation of testimony, the giving voice to hidden experiences, bears similarities with the act of artistic creation: it exposes the listener/reader to the experience of otherness. Derek Attridge (2004, 27) describes the act of literary creation thus: ‘Each time that I read what I have written, I undergo (though never in quite the same way) an encounter with alterity, which is to say the shifting and opening-up of settled modes of thinking and feeling’. The transformative potential that this represents has long been central to artistic and literary works, whose ability to develop and foster empathy in audiences is frequently lauded as a key feature of the humanities, with the suggestion that if only the reader could understand the perspective of the apparently ‘alien’ character, sympathy and solidarity would follow. In the context of refugee resettlement, artists and campaigners have drawn on these principles to elicit viewer sympathy for the sufferings endured. The result has been the development of certain recurring tropes, which Dominic Davies (2020, 177–78) refers to as ‘humanitarian disaster narratives’ which ‘attempt to mobilise

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empathy in their readerships and thus to lever tangible political action that translates into a less hostile, more hospitable reception of refugees by host populations—particularly in Western European countries’. These narratives, featuring suffering brown bodies who often include women and children, are promoted in miniature through the television appeals made in the UK by the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC), which appeals on behalf of major charities for individual donations for specific causes. The effectiveness of such narratives is demonstrated by the global Emergency Appeals Alliance, of which the DEC is a member, and which reports that DEC appeals have raised over £1.6  billion (Disasters Emergency Committee 2021). Short, emotive appeals that aim to elicit financial donations capitalise on the temporary nature of the emotional response hinted at by Attridge. Beyond the fund-raising potential of tear-jerking images, the capacity of art to elicit emotion finds support in scholarly institutions. Richard Rorty (1998) argues that it is the ability to feel so strongly for our fellows that distinguishes humans from animals, and that has driven the human rights project. His view is that focusing our energies on manipulating sentiments—what he terms ‘sentimental education’—should be encouraged because it is, for him as a pragmatic philosopher, the most effective means of overcoming division and violence by ‘expanding the reference of the terms of “our kind of people” and “people like us”’ (Rorty 1998, 177). In his view sentiment, rather than reason, is the most likely path to the utopia envisioned by the Enlightenment. Yet if his essay notes in passing the Eurocentric nature of the human rights project, it has less to say about the legacy which it has bequeathed to those he terms ‘Eurocentric intellectuals’. Cultural production may play a crucial role in disseminating and normalising recognisable ‘refugee stories’ but it does so according to dominant liberal humanitarian modes of storytelling that assert a particular set of values. These tend to produce narratives of benevolent and paternalistic modes of European ‘refuge’ that perpetuate ideas of ‘white innocence’— in other words, as extolling modes of refuge that are imagined as ‘outside and beyond racial hierarchies and racism’ (Seikkula 2021: 3; Wekker 2016). These modes are, inevitably, shorn of the historical legacies and obligations of colonialism, imperialism, and slavery. Refugee storytelling fits neatly with liberal humanist emphasis on the humanisation of the victimised as the most effective means of cultivating empathy and therefore solidarity between those seeking refuge and those purporting to offer it. However, some scholars question the efficacy of

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Rorty’s approach. Janna Houwen (2016, 50) takes issue with the outcomes of refugee-related art that seeks to create empathy, arguing that ‘it fails to acknowledge the distinct nature of suffering of refugees and … the incommensurability of the political status of European citizens on the one hand, and nationless refugees in camps on the other’. Put simply, the gap is simply too large to be bridged through representation. Indeed, this gap is fundamental to the European sense of identity: as Michael Taussig (1997) notes, for the operation of terror to be effective, it has to establish an assumption that bad things happen to others in spaces far away. As Çelik-Rappas and Benegas Loyo (2020, 75) observe, refugee bodies may be haunting, abject, absent, or corpses, but they are rarely depicted as existing within Europe. Moreover, they argue that an appeal to empathy may in fact have the opposite outcome to that predicted by Rorty. In this they draw on research from dictatorial Argentina, which found that the public projection of detention centres associated with torture and murder had the effect of horrifying the viewer whilst numbing them to the victim’s suffering for fear that identifying with the victim might lead to a shared fate. ‘In light of this’, they argue, ‘the use of suffering bodies and horrific stories by refugee art is not only “ineffective” in relation to the refugee crisis but can even be considered as part of a systemic problem’ (Çelik Rappas and Benegas Loyo 2020, 76). There is nothing inherently progressive about narrative and representation. As the following chapters show, discourses about refugees are routinely instrumentalised by politicians and media figures to manipulate the emotional responses of a host nation, to create fear, and to instil and deepen division. Part of the role of migrant allies is to expose the false and constructed nature of those narratives, countering false claims and offering corrections to widespread misinformation, and in some of the chapters that follow, contributors analyse the discourses latent within newspaper columns, parliamentary debates, and in documentaries and highlight the narratives that they contain about both refugees and host societies. Yet the emotional power of art remains a potent instrument in influencing host responses. Artistic interventions are not always successful as, for example, with Ai Weiwei’s 2016 attempt on the island of Lesbos to highlight the plight of refugees by recreating the infamous photograph of the drowned toddler Alan Kurdi. The image attracted widespread criticism from those who deemed it opportunistic and felt that by assuming the place of the dead refugee Ai, who is himself a political refugee, was turning the focus on himself (Amirkhani 2016; Çelik Rappas and Benegas Loyo 2020). His

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decision to do so drew attention to the irreconcilable differences in position between himself, as an international artist with the economic power and prestige to (continue to) travel internationally, and the child whose family’s powerlessness had led to his death. It is possible to critique the response to Ai Weiwei’s installation: the impact of the original image emanated in part from the European appearance of the child (Snow 2020, 170), whilst the response to the artist’s activism was in part due to the way in which the West has constructed and equated childhood with innocence and powerlessness (Rose 1992). Nonetheless, in substituting the body of the drowned toddler for that of the artist, the work decontextualised its meaning and signified it as replaceable in a way that many viewers of the original photograph found distasteful. Ai’s installation points to the dangers in allowing the artist or the host society to become the focus of the refugee experience. Consequently, in her calls for a recentring of the South, Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (2020b, 12) argues that we must move away from the assumption that analysis, interpretation, and production of knowledge about the refugee experience can only be done by researchers. Instead, there should be a move towards recognising the ways in which refugees themselves make sense of their experience, acknowledging that this understanding constitutes knowledge in ways that have not always been acknowledged in the past. Scholars continue to have an important role to play but an urgent aspect of that, according to Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (2020b, 12), lies in ‘identifying and challenging the diverse structural barriers—including academic, political, economic, cultural, and social ones—that prevent certain people’s understanding and worldviews from being perceived as knowledge’. The challenge that she sets out is to go beyond simply recovering the voices of those who for so long have been silenced, important as this is. It would involve creating ways to listen to what they have to say, accepting and taking it seriously as knowledge rather than simply ‘authentic memory’, understanding the implications, and finding ways to magnify and project that message in ways that would alter and remake the systemic obstacles that currently exclude such forms of knowledge. In the process, the refugee would be rediscovered as fully human, with what Liisa Malkki (1996, 398) terms ‘narrative authority, historical agency, and political memory’, thereby taking the first step towards throwing off the assigned identity of ‘refugee’ and being accepted on their own terms. Art plays a crucial role in this process. The 2019 play, The Claim, stages the exasperating misencounter between an asylum seeker in the UK and

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the two Home Office Officers (A and B) charged with assessing the veracity of his asylum claim. Although performed entirely in English, the play establishes that the asylum seeker, Serge, requires the service of an interpreter for his asylum ‘substantive’ interview. The selected interpreter (Officer A) is a white English man, profusely and disingenuously friendly, who talks over and consistently misinterprets Serge to Officer B.  Throughout this interview, Serge understands that his ‘substantive interview’ is more than an interrogation or a fact-finding activity. This is a performance of his selfhood. He asks himself, and therefore the audience, ‘What kind of act do they want?’ before settling into the truncated rhythm of the interrogation. The performativity of the asylum interview as assigning clear categories to the interviewee has disastrous consequences through mistranslation, wilful ignorance, bureaucracy, and racism. Disaster strikes when the interpreter mishears and misinterprets the word ‘gum’ for ‘gun’, transforming Serge’s story of trauma and victimhood into that of a perpetrator. It is implied that by the end of the performance Serge’s narrative has been mistranslated and misconstrued by the banal cruelty and incompetence of Home Office bureaucrats and office workers in a way that put an end to his claim. The nature of the ‘substantive interview’ is as such that narrative and misinterpretation of that narrative becomes a matter of life and death. In Ella Parry-Davies’ words, The Claim stages the ‘the performative nature of the immigration infrastructure in the United Kingdom’ (2021: 410). In this sense, the play allows for the audience’s gaze to go beyond the individual, experience-based narrative of the migrant, to reveal the structural conditions that allow these experiences. Consequently, the play also ‘activate[s] rigorous, structural possibilities for social change’ (419). Indeed, the staging of The Claim compels its audience to interrogate the ways in which ‘receiving societies’ are implicated in the violence enacted against people navigating the external and internal borders of the asylum process. The play is performed in the round, audience members are clearly lit and visible to performer and audience alike. The performance is at times interactive as Serge turns to a member of the audience to entrust them with his mobile phone. This staging implicates the audience as knowing participants in the slow violence of the asylum claim interview. The play is in English and therefore audience members bear witness to the unfolding disaster with a sense of tragic irony. The Claim raises questions of truth, veracity, and authenticity in the refugee story that are central to the concerns of this volume. What degrees of trauma and tragedy do

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refugees have to prove and narrate before they can be granted the right to live in dignity? How are onlookers implicated in ongoing forms of violence enacted against those seeking asylum while supposedly ‘safe’ within liberal democracies?

Overview of the Volume This volume sets out to interrogate assumptions about those seeking refuge and expose the false dichotomy between narratives of refuge and regime. While the predominant response to the increasing numbers of refugees seeking asylum in Europe has been to harden the borders (regime), on the one hand, or to stress the common humanity of those displaced (refuge), on the other, the chapters in this volume argue that both approaches produce a state of being in which refugees become objectified, othered, and reduced to abstracted vectors of the experiences of exile. Through a focus on the representations of refugees across theatre, visual art, digital installations, literature, cinema, political and media discourse, its chapters collectively nuance representations of refugees and migrants in order to theorise the transnational situatedness of peoples negotiating, transgressing, and resisting the borders of contemporary Europe. The overall goal is to expand our understanding of the forms and limits of border regimes and narratives of refuge in Europe. The following chapters attest to a diversity of methodological approaches and writing modes at work: some chapters are scholarly interrogations, others are more personal reflections and testimonials. The aim of this multimodal volume is to bring to the fore diverse voices, experiences, learnings, and epistemologies borne of displacement as it is refracted through artistic engagement as well as critical responses to representations of displacements in dominant discourse. The result is a chorale of voices speaking in different modes, each suggestive of how art, activism, collaboration, and even academic research, can crystallise, magnify, and project the knowledge forged in the heat and pain of displacement. This volume is divided into two sections. The first section ‘Art and activism by and with refugees’ asks how cultural representations of and by refugees themselves might challenge the legibility of the refugee subjecthood and challenge the limitations of such representations themselves. To this end, it opens with the voices of those who have lived experience of seeking refuge and of the realities of the hostile environment created by

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border regimes. Amplifying these voices where possible and ethical to do so is part of understanding how bordering and its malevolent effects function, and this section highlights examples of the co-creation made possible by refugees, artists, and activists working in concert. Yet the mechanisms by which cultural capital is produced and maintained create their own obstacles. We acknowledge our own institutions contribute to and perpetuate these hierarchical systems, and that the limitations of this volume are, in part, a consequence. Nonetheless, within these limitations we seek to analyse and unpick the discourses that produce dominant understandings of the refugee and their motivation, exposing the self-indulgent narratives propagated by institutions, organisations, and individuals located in sites of power and influence. In doing so we seek to listen to those who have sought refuge, to foreground the knowledge and understanding belonging to those whose worldviews are rarely sought, and to examine the structural obstacles to their acceptance. ‘Art and activism by and with refugees’ opens with a chapter co-written by the British producers and Syrian cast of The Trojans, a contemporary reworking of Euripides’ play, The Trojan Women, performed in 2019. The project uses Euripides’ text, which tells of the fate of the Trojan women in the aftermath of the fall of Troy, as a frame within which the Syrian refugee cast wrote their own bilingual Arabic-English script to tell their own experiences. As Sana’a Al-Froukh, a clinical psychologist who was also one of the participants, relates, the experience of workshopping the traumatic experiences of war and dislocation into a formal script functioned as a form of therapy for those involved. The project demonstrates the power of art to create a common space in which meaning can be made from the pain of contradictions and loss and to use an ancient Greek text familiar to both Syrian and British audiences to powerfully frame and communicate contemporary stories to audiences whose knowledge of migration may have been limited to televisual representations. Still within the spaces of contemporary theatre, Catrin Evans unpacks the potential harms and limitations within the ‘imperative to tell’ implied by refugee narratives in performances. Evans reflects upon the representations of ‘refugeeness’ in her own theatre-making and practice-based performance research. Her chapter investigates how the ‘aesthetics of injury’ and ‘imperative to tell’ prevalent in theatrical practice with and by refugees can be critically engaged with by practitioners directly. Extending the theme of the challenges and responsibilities of co-­ creation by refugees and non-refugees, Helene Grøn’s chapter takes up

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Behrouz Boochani and Omid Tofighian’s suggestions that living well means to story well in order to appraise her polyphonic writing with and by refugees in Copenhagen, Denmark. Reflecting on collaborative practices, Grøn discusses the strategies and considerations that must be undertaken to ensure co-writing might expand understandings of ‘living well’. Bearing witness is an important and recurring theme in scholarship focused on refugee experiences. In her reflective chapter Pinar Aksu, a human rights campaigner, writes about her experience as part of a witness bearing delegation in Calais, and her role as an arts practitioner. Her experience of working with theatre and other arts-based approaches leads her to advocate artistic participative methods as a means for people to explore their feelings and experiences without judgement or explanation. In the final chapter in this section, we turn to the experience of detention, where individuals are habitually silenced by the carceral practices of the state whose professed aim is ‘securitisation’, with all that that double-­ faced term implies. Using the work of the ‘Detention Voices’ collective, the activist and academic Helen Brewer examines the possibilities of resistance that persist within the border regime’s biopolitical capture and, following Debarati Sanyal (2019, 439), asks how we can ‘conceptualise the forms of becoming, existence, and persistence that emerge from within spaces of migrant detention’. Her work engages with the spatiality of detention and the detention estate and demonstrates the latent potential for resistance through the collaboration of detainees and activists. The second section, ‘Challenging representations of refugees’, asserts the need for geopolitically and historically situated analyses of the narratives surrounding people seeking refuge while negotiating European border regimes. The chapters examine artistic, political, and media representations of migration to Europe, those seeking refuge, and the so-­ called ‘refugee crisis’. Rejecting conventional depictions of passive recipients of pity or nebulous agents of threat, the contributors interrogate contemporary refugee representations within the political and cultural imagination of the histories and legacies of imperialism and the function of racism in contemporary border regimes. The overall volume takes a broad approach to ‘cultural representation’, departing from the principle that cultural production is entangled with media industries and political discourse. The chapters in the second section question the responses produced by representations of migrants across a range of media and genre to argue that other forms of solidarity and hospitality towards refugees in Europe and beyond must be possible.

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Dima Barakat Chami’s chapter approaches the challenges of ‘co-­ creation’ from the perspective of communally ‘becoming human’ in Chris Abani’s novella Becoming Abigail (2006). Focusing on Abigail’s encounter with the British state as an ‘illegal’ migrant, Chami responds to existing interpretations of the lyrical novella in terms of the biopolitical trauma inflicted by border regimes, by reading the text with an ethics of humanism grounded in Igbo cosmology. Such a cosmology confirms communal ways of being and becoming human that inherently challenges the logic of biopolitics enforced by the British state’s border regime. Hella Wiedmer-Newman’s chapter also challenges the putatively redemptive power of narrative. She examines the responses engendered by a range of art installations exhibited at the Venice Biennale and argues that they undermine and disrupt the binary aims of giving voice to the voiceless or representing the human condition by emphasising the links between knowledge production and reception. Her readings of a range of instances of contemporary visual culture probe the limits of artistic representation and question our assumptions about what art may achieve. Asha Varadharajan similarly takes up the challenge of evading the straitjacket of dichotomous responses, analysing the cinema of Aki Kaurismäki and using the figure of the ‘denizen’ to argue for the necessity of thinking ‘the refugee’ with rather than against ‘the citizen’. Her study of refugeedom in Finland opens up our conceptions of ‘bordering’, reminding us of the struggles taking place in areas of Europe that rarely appear in the headlines. Focusing on hegemonic narratives about refugees, Siobhan Brownlie examines the rhetoric surrounding people seeking refuge in two distinct genres—documentary and parliamentary debates—and considers whether the discourses allow any escape from the seemingly inevitable objectification of those seeking refuge. Among the dominant tropes used to depict refugees are animalistic metaphors, which is the focus of Peter Arnds’ chapter. He maps the impact of historical attitudes on contemporary attitudes, tracing images of the refugee and migrant through the literary figure of the wolf which, from nineteenth-century texts to the present day, has operated as a representation of the migrant threat of invasion. Indeed, as our Introduction makes clear, refugee policy in the West is indebted not only to the aftermath of the Second World War but, more

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insidiously, to the colonial and imperial structures of thought that continue to condition European approaches to the Global South. In her chapter, Béatrice Blanchet traces the colonial antecedents of migrant representations in British mainstream media and public debate on the Afghan interpreters who worked for the British army, and those seeking refuge following the West’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. By tracing the exclusionary policies and juxtaposed controls of the so-called Calais ‘Jungle’ back to the borderlands of colonial Afghanistan, she demonstrates how imperialist genealogies continue to shape and regulate the treatment and representations of those seeking asylum.

References Alam, Shahidul. 2008. Majority World: Challenging the West’s Rhetoric of Democracy. Amerasia Journal 34 (1): 88–98. https://doi.org/10.17953/ amer.34.1.l3176027k4q614v5. Amirkhani, Jordan. 2016. Between Citizenry and Privilege: Ai Weiwei and Bouchra Khalili. In Art Practical. 8: 1. Art + Citizenship, ed. Kara Q. Smith and Patricia Maloney. San Francisco: California College of the Arts. http://www.artpractical.com/feature/between-­citizenry-­and-­privilege/. Attridge, Derek. 2004. The Singularity of Literature. Abingdon: Routledge. Azzouz, Ammar. 2020. 2011, Reflections on a Ruined Homeland. City 24 (1–2): 178–194. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2020.1739414. Bernt, Matthias. 2019. ‘Urban Regimes’ and ‘Migration Regimes’: Contradictions, Connections and Potentials. Erdkunde 73 (1): 9–18. https://doi. org/10.3112/erdkunde.2019.01.03. Bulman, May, and Nadine White. 2022. Non-white Refugees Fleeing Ukraine Detained in EU Immigration Facilities. The Independent, March 23. https:// www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/ukraine-­refugees-­detention-­ international-­students-­b2041310.html/. Accessed 12 April 2022. Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. Çelik Rappas, Ipek A., and Diego Benegas Loyo. 2020. In Precarity and Prosperity: Refugee Art Going Beyond the Performance of Crisis. In Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes: From Crisis to Critique, Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society, ed. M.  Boletsi et  al., 63–79. London: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­36415-­1_4. Chimni, B.S. 2006. Third World Approaches to International Law: A Manifesto. International Community Law Review 8: 3–27.

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Cox, Emma, et al., eds. 2020. Refugee Imaginaries: Research Across the Humanities. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Davies, Russell T. 2019. Years and Years. BBC/HBO. Davies, Dominic. 2020. Crossing Borders, Bridging Boundaries: Reconstructing the Rights of the Refugee in Comics. In Refuge in a Moving World, ed. Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 177–192. London: University College London Press. De Genova, Nicholas. 2013. Spectacles of Migrant ‘Illegality’: The Scene of Exclusion, the Obscene of Inclusion. Ethnic and Racial Studies 36 (7): 1180–1198. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2013.783710. Derrida, Jacques. 2000. Hostipitality. Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities 5 (3): 3–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/09697250020034706. Disasters Emergency Committee, UK. 2021. Emergency Appeals Alliance. https:// www.emergency-­a ppeals-­a lliance.org/portfolio/disasters-­e mergency-­ committee-­uk/. Accessed 19 August 2021. Eldridge, Claire. 2016. From Empire to Exile: History and Memory Within the Pied-­ Noir and Harki Communities, 1962–2012. Manchester: Manchester University Press. El-Enany, Nadine. 2019. In (B)ordering Britain: Law, Race and Empire. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Elgot, Jessica. 2023. Channel Crossings: 45,756 People Came to UK in Small Boats in 2022. The Guardian, January 1. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-­ news/2023/jan/01/total-­of-­45756-­people-­crossed-­channel-­to-­uk-­in-­small-­ boats-­in-­2022. Accessed 13 March 2023. Elliot, Alice. 2020. Mediterranean Distinctions: Forced Migration, Forceful Hope and the Analytics of Desperation. In Refuge in a Moving World, ed. Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 111–122. London: University College London Press. Fernández-Rodríguez, Carlos, and Luis M.  Romero-Rodríguez. 2021. The Cinema of Cruelty in Streaming: Elements of Perversity in Chernobyl and Years and Years. Journal for Cultural Research 25 (2): 202–219. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/14797585.2021.1937250. Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, Elena, ed. 2020a. Refuge in a Moving World. London: University College London Press. ———. 2020b. Introduction: Recentering the South in Studies of Migration. Migration and Society: Advances in Research 3: 1–18. https://doi.org/10. 3167/arms.2020.030102. Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, Elena, and Patricia Daley. 2018. Conceptualising the Global South and South-South Encounters. In The Handbook of South-South Relations, ed. Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Patricia Daley, 1–28. Oxford: Routledge. Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, Elena, and Juliano Fiori. 2020. Migration, Humanitarianism, and the Politics of Knowledge: An Interview with Juliano Fiori. Migration and Society: Advances in Research 3: 180–189. https://doi.org/10.3167/ arms.2020.030114.

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Grosfoguel, Ramón, Laura Oso, and Anastasia Christou. 2015. ‘Racism,’ Intersectionality and Migration Studies: Framing Some Theoretical Reflections. Identities 22 (6): 635–652. Grosfoguel, Ramón, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, and José David Saldívar. 2016. Latin@s and the ‘Euro-American Menace’: The Decolonization of the U.S.  Empire in the Twenty-First Century. In Latino/as in the World System: Decolonization Struggles in the 21st Century U.S. Empire, ed. Ramón Grosfoguel, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, and José David Saldívar, 3–30. London: Routledge. Houwen, Janna. 2016. An Empty Table and an Empty Boat: Empathic Encounters with Refugee Experiences in Intermedial Installation Art. American, British & Canadian Studies 27 (1): 44–73. Krause, Ulrike. 2021. Colonial Roots of the 1951 Refugee Convention and Its Effects on the Global Refugee Regime. Journal of International Relations and Development 24: 599–626. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41268-­020-­00205-­9. Macron, Emmanuel. 2021. Allocution relative à la situation en Afghanistan. 16 August 2021. https://www.elysee.fr/emmanuel-­macron/2021/08/16/ allocution-­relative-­a-­la-­situation-­en-­afghanistan. Accessed 16 August 2021. Madokoro, Laura. 2020. ‘From Citizens to Refugees’: Japanese Canadians and the Search for Wartime Sanctuary. Journal of American Ethnic History 39 (3): 17–48. Malkki, Liisa H. 1996. Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistoricization. Cultural Anthropology 11 (3): 377–404. Mayblin, Lucy. 2014. Colonialism, Decolonisation, and the Right to be Human: Britain and the 1951 Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees. Journal of Historical Sociology 27 (3): 423–441. ———. 2017. Asylum After Empire: Colonial Legacies in the Politics of Asylum Seeking. London; New York: Rowman & Littlefield International. Mbembé, Achille. 2003. Necropolitics. Public Culture 15 (1): 11–40. Nail, Thomas. 2016. Theory of the Border. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nasser-Eddin, Nof, and Nour Abu-Assab. 2020. Decolonial Approaches to Refugee Migration: Nof Nasser-Eddin and Nour Abu-Assab in Conversation. Migration and Society: Advances in Research 3: 190–202. Owen, David. 2020. What do we owe to refugees? Cambridge, UK ; Polity Press. Pailey, Robtel Neajai. 2019. De-Centering the ‘White Gaze’ of Development. Development and Change 51 (3): 729–745. https://doi.org/10.1111/ dech.12550. Parry-Davies, Ella. 2021. Immigration Infrastructure Theatricalised in Illegalised and The Claim. Contemporary Theatre Review 31 (4): 409–421. https://doi. org/10.1080/10486801.2021.1969557. Patel, Shailja. 2010. Migritude. Los Angeles: Kaya Press.

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Pietromarchi, Virginia. 2022. More African Students Decry Racism at Ukrainian Borders. Aljazeera, March 2. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/3/2/ more-­racism-­at-­ukrainian-­borders. Accessed 23 March 2022. Rorty, Richard. 1998. Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality. In Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume III. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rose, Jacqueline. 1992. The Case of Peter Pan or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Sager, Alex. 2022. What if Refugees Designed Asylum? Blog of the APA. https:// blog.apaonline.org/2022/01/24/what-­i f-­r efugees-­d esigned-­a sylum/. Accessed 6 February 2022. Sanyal, Debarati. 2019. Humanitarian Detention and Figures of Persistence at the Border. Critical Times 2 (3): 435–465. https://doi.org/10.121 5/26410478-­7862552. Seikkula, Minna. 2021. Affirming or Contesting White Innocence? Anti-racism Frames in Grassroots Activists’ Accounts. Ethnic and Racial Studies 45 (4): 789–808. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2021.1897639. Sigano, Nando. 2018. The Contested Politics of Naming in Europe’s ‘Refugee Crisis’. Ethnic and Racial Studies 41 (3): 456–460. https://doi.org/10.108 0/01419870.2018.1388423. Snow, Tom. 2020. Visual Politics and the ‘Refugee’ Crisis: The Images of Alan Kurdi. In Refuge in a Moving World, ed. E.  Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 166–176. London: University College London Press. Souter, J. 2014. Towards a Theory of Asylum as Reparation for Past Injustice. Political Studies 62 (2): 326–342. Taussig, Michael. 1997. Magic of the State. New York: Routledge. Tondo, Lorenzo. 2022. In Limbo: The Refugees Left on the Belarusian-Polish border. The Guardian, February 8. https://www.theguardian.com/global-­ development/2022/feb/08/in-­limbo-­r efugees-­left-­on-­belarusian-­polish-­ border-­eu-­frontier-­photo-­essay. Accessed 24 March 2022. Trilling, Daniel. 2018. Lights in the Distance: Exile and Refuge at the Borders of Europe. London: Pan Macmillan. UNHCR, Global Report. 2016. https://reporting.unhcr.org/sites/default/ files/gr2016/pdf/Book_GR_2016_ENGLISH_complete.pdf. Vanyoro, Kudakwashe P. 2019. Decolonising Migration Research and Potential Pitfalls: Reflections from South Africa. Pambazuka News, 17 May. https:// www.pambazuka.org/education/decolonising-­m igration-­r esearch-­a nd-­ potential-­pitfalls-­reflections-­south-­africa. Accessed 1 November 2021. Wekker, Gloria. 2016. White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

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White, Nadine. 2022. The Racial Bias in Western Media’s Ukraine’s Coverage is Shameful. The Independent, 1 March. https://www.independent.co.uk/ voices/ukraine-­refugees-­racial-­bias-­western-­media-­b2024864.html. Accessed 23 March 2022. Wieviorka, Annette. 2006. The Era of the Witness. Trans. Jared Stark. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Wilde, Ralph. 2020. The Unintended Consequences of Expanding Migrant-­ Rights Protections. In Refuge in a Moving World, ed. Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 157–165. London: University College London Press.

PART I

Art and Activism by and with Refugees

CHAPTER 2

The Trojans Project: Therapeutic Drama from Syria to Scotland Charlotte Eagar, William Stirling, Heba Alwadi, Essam Rabie, and Sana’a Al Froukh

Chapter The Project’s Background and Aims  harlotte Eagar and William Stirling (Producers) C Mohammed walks centre stage in the half-lit auditorium. ‘I lived in a cellar for two years’, he says. He’s tall, six foot four, with knife-edge cheekbones and eyes that used to be dark with despair. He’s interrupted by a chorus of Syrian men and women, seated on blocks to either side: ‘No! No! You are too political!’ The second chorus shouts back: ‘Let him speak!’ Mohammed tells of searching for his father, in a suburb that had turned into a charnel house. ‘The children, the burnt women, the slaughtered families—I almost forgot about my father. My dead father … I almost

C. Eagar (*) • W. Stirling • H. Alwadi • E. Rabie • S. Al Froukh Glasgow, Scotland © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 F. Barclay, B. Ivey (eds.), Contemporary Representations of Forced Migration in Europe, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Human Rights, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47831-4_2

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forgot to grieve for you, my father’. He tells of being imprisoned and tortured for months on end, and all because he had the same surname as one of the revolutionaries. Mohammed was one of the cast of The Trojans, an adapted version of Euripides’ great anti-war tragedy, The Trojan Women, updated and starring and co-written by a cast of Syrian refugees resettled in Glasgow. Through a series of workshops, the Syrians worked their own stories of exile and loss into Euripides’ text. The play, directed by Victoria Beesley and adapted by the Glasgow-based playwright Mariem Omar, was first performed at Platform Theatre, Glasgow, in February 2019 (Fig. 2.1). It garnered four-star reviews and went on to perform at a Gala Night at the Pleasance EICC, part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe later that year, in front of an audience of 700 people, and with a speech made by Ben Macpherson, the Scottish Minister for Migration (EICC n.d.).  We started The Trojans project in Glasgow in 2018. The Trojans was the culmination of nine months of weekly drama workshops for Syrians, living in and around Glasgow, and the latest programme run by the NGO The Trojan Women Project (TWP) (Trojan Women Project n.d.-a). Founded in 2013, TWP was designed as a combined psycho-social support and strategic communications drama project originally for Syrian refugees, in

Fig. 2.1  Opening performance of The Trojans, Platform Theatre, Glasgow, 2019. (© Charlotte Ginsborg)

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order to both help refugees overcome isolation, depression, and trauma and raise awareness of the Syrian refugee crisis. We create both a process— regular workshops—and a product—a theatre or film production which is shown publicly. By putting on these plays, with refugee casts, and helping them work their own experiences into the text of the play, we are literally providing a platform to tell their stories to the world. The Trojan Women is set at the fall of Troy: all the men are dead and the women are awaiting their fate in the Greek camp. There’s no real plot, except that just when you think things can’t possibly get worse, they do. I remember listening to The Trojan Women in 1992 on the BBC World Service, after a summer of interviewing refugees in Bosnia, where I was working as a journalist, and thinking, ‘These stories in Euripides’ play are exactly the same as I’ve been hearing everyday: death, destruction, exile, loss, sexual assault, torture, etc.’ War is eternal, only the weapons change. According to tradition, Euripides wrote The Trojan Women as an anti-­war protest, after his home state of Athens conquered the neutral island of Melos—an independent democracy, like Athens—in 415, killed all the men and sold the women and children into slavery. Euripides then wrote this play, performed the following year at the Dionysia, the Athenians’ bi-­annual drama competition: it came second, the only time Euripides is recorded as not having won. In The Trojan Women, Euripides inverts the normal story of the Trojan War for his Athenian audience: all their Greek heroes, Ajax, Odysseus, Agamemnon, are the bad guys and the foreign ‘barbarian’ women are the goodies. As such the play is ideal for our purposes, as it places the audiences’ sympathy with the ‘other’. It is after all being watched by a host community who may have mixed feelings about the arrival of these importunate strangers in their midst. Correspondingly we have noticed that, especially in the UK, Syrian refugees were anxious to prove their credentials and explain why they were given preferential treatment in terms of benefits and housing. The participants identified very strongly with the characters in the play, and it became obvious that this was because they were living through the exile, dislocation, isolation, and loss of identity that is only an impending situation in the play. Some audience members have questioned whether a play from the ‘Western’ canon of literature is appropriate for people from the Middle East: why not some piece of Islamic literature? In fact, the play is not ‘Western’ in any more meaningful sense than that it was most successfully culturally appropriated by Western and Northern Europe. It was originally written in an Eastern Mediterranean culture, on a subject that is an Eastern Mediterranean myth (Troy was in Turkey), and was performed for

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centuries in the Greco-Roman theatres that dot Syria, Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, and the Eastern Mediterranean in general (the old Hellenistic world). It came to us poor barbarians in the North originally via the Roman Empire and was rediscovered over the course of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. The original texts had been kept safe in the libraries of the Caliphate and its successor states for the intervening centuries. To adapt the play to our current situation, Omar Abusaada, the original director—and all subsequent directors—chose to keep some of the main chorus speeches and the soliloquies, ripping out the rest of the play to allow the participants to insert their stories into the classical framework. The balance between modern and ancient text is one of the most touching and beautiful outcomes of these adaptations. Our first project—Syria: The Trojan Women—we produced in Jordan in the autumn of 2013, with an all-female cast of Syrian refugees who were living in lodgings in Amman, Jordan’s capital. We hired a UK-based Syrian refugee producer, Itab Azzam (who later won an Emmy for her film Exodus, about the Syrian refugees’ Mediterranean migration to Europe, discussed by Brownlie in this volume) (Saïd Foundation n.d.); Itab found us both a distinguished Syrian director, Omar Abusaada (Onassis n.d.), an expert in community theatre projects, and Yasmin Fedda,  an award-­ winning British-Palestinian film-maker, with Syrian family links, to document the process. This documentary, Queens of Syria, went on to be broadcast on BBC Arabic, feature in many festivals and win several awards, including the 2014 Abu Dhabi Film Festival’s prestigious Black Pearl Award for Best Female Director in the Arab World (IMDb n.d.; Yasmin Fedda n.d.), as well as having an academic life. As well as the creative production, a number of crucial elements developed organically out of the project in Jordan. For example, the project provided a crèche to encourage the participation of parents, particularly women with children. Wherever we run the project, participants are provided with food and per diems. We brought in a Syrian psychologist to monitor the project from the Amman-based Syrian practice, Syrian Bright Futures. The psychologist not only was available to talk to the women, but also ran play-sessions in the children’s creche once a week. These material provisions were critical to ensuring the success of the project. We ran the Jordan project very intensively with daily workshops for six weeks, then put the play on for two nights in Amman’s National Cultural Centre. The workshops consisted of warm-up exercises, followed by improvisation exercises, various technical workshops, and the sharing of

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stories in order to build trust and then build the text of the play. The workshops started with about sixty participants. After three weeks, the general workshops moved on to targeted rehearsals. At this point, the rehearsals only included those twenty-five women of the original sixty who wanted to perform on stage. The play was a success on a number of levels. From a humanitarian point of view we watched the women change from nervous, vulnerable individuals to happy, confident people with high enough self-esteem to demand a pay rise before going on stage. The cast became a surrogate family, functioning as a stand-in for the extended family groups of cousins, uncles, aunts, parents, and siblings common in Syria but dispersed by the upheaval of war. The women in our original project refer to themselves as the “Queens of Syria” and are still very much in touch and mutually supportive today, years after the original project. Meanwhile, from an artistic point of view the play received standing ovations and the story of the project received global press coverage, a key aim of the awareness-raising strategy (Trojan Women Project n.d.-b; Eagar 2014). Since 2013 we have run projects pretty much every year—but they are hard to get off the ground as each project has to be fund-raised for individually and we have no core-funding. In 2014, we produced an Arabic/ English language radio drama co-written and acted by a Syrian refugee team and supported by the UNHCR, We Are All Refugees (WNYC Studios 2015) which was initially broadcast on BBC Arabic and adapted by BBC Radio 4 as Welcome to Zaatari; this project included both women and men, as we had noticed that Syrian men were also becoming increasingly depressed (BBC 2015). In 2015, we produced the first ever Arabic adaptation of the musical Oliver! with a junior cast of Syrian refugees and under-privileged Jordanian children, supported by Sir Cameron Mackintosh, a culmination of a seven-month project of music and drama workshops for children produced in response to a demand by Syrian women in our original cast to ‘create a project for our children’ (Alameri 2015; CNN 2015). In 2016, we ran All the World’s A Stage, a lower profile two months of music and drama children’s workshops in Jordan, for the cast of Oliver! Later that year, we toured seven cities in the UK with a second version of the Trojan Women and half the original Syrian cast, as Queens of Syria, with the Young Vic (2016), to great acclaim, standing ovations, and five-star reviews, and a West End Gala Night finale to an audience of 1200  in the New London Theatre. In 2017, we ran Kaleidoscope, a series of radio drama creative writing workshops for

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refugees, in Glasgow, Heidelberg, and Aberdeen. Meanwhile, in Jordan, our Jordan-based team ran a legacy music project, funded by the World Food Programme, If Music be the Food of Love, where Syrian children composed and recorded a song about being a refugee (Dupire 2017). More recently, in our current Trojans UK 22-23-24 project, we have expanded the workshops and performances to include refugees and asylum seekers from all over the world: we are currently working with a group that includes Syrians, Palestinians, Ukrainians, Afghans, and even asylum seekers from Pakistan, Iran and Trinidad. They all find that the common bond of having fled persecution in some form and coming to the UK over-rides any cultural differences. Our Trojan Women therapeutic drama project works in two ways, by providing psycho-social support for refugees and raising awareness among the public in an empathetic way. Psycho-social support involves regular community workshops and group therapy. The project also supports those involved socially by providing community meals and simultaneous childcare for participants, as well as a small cash stipend. The process of working their own stories into a new script helps validate the participants’ experience. Putting the play on, at a high artistic level, not only literally provides a stage for the refugees to tell their experiences to the world, but also the audiences’ reaction (the spontaneous applause, tears, and standing ovations) help the participants psychologically: they realise that the audience empathises with what has happened to them. The project raises awareness through the theatrical performances in front of a live audience. Cast Q&A sessions, conversations, and audience questionnaires after the shows have made it clear that the play has made the audience view refugees in a new light, helped them get a new understanding of the circumstances under which the Syrians  (and now other refugees) have ended up in our country. The documentaries and theatrical performance films we make of our project multiply the project’s reach. The plays and workshops are always in demand but are very expensive to put on and—however good the plays are—can only be seen by a limited number of people and run for a limited amount of time. The cast, after all, are amateurs with their own lives to return to. But films are very portable—you can just send a Vimeo link—and can be seen by an infinitely larger number of people. These films have received academic attention (Eberwine 2019; Ziter 2017) and are available online (Trojan Women Project n.d.-c). In general, the project has received broad media attention as the result of a great deal of effort in our marketing and public relations.

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The  performance  of The Trojans has led to further collaborations through the media of theatre. From 2019, we have been running Enscripted, a regular black comedy drama workshop, an idea that came from one of our Syrian participants. The workshops were physical until the Covid-19 pandemic hit, and since then have been on Zoom. Working on Zoom allows us to incorporate many participants from our original projects in Jordan, who are now scattered all over the Middle East and Europe, as well as new participants in those regions. As mentioned above, we are now running Trojans UK 22-23-24. Since 2013, we have run projects almost continuously. It has been truly inspirational seeing the difference these projects have made to many of our participants’ lives through their empowerment, the opening of opportunities, and the forging of new and sustained friendships in the community. Since the project’s creation, we have learnt how to make projects fun and helpful for the participants, ensure artistic quality, find project funding, run the project safely including by anonymising the participants, and make it easily reproducible across different contexts to provide similar benefits. Regarding the production process, we have learned to run these projects for as long as possible, to work locally within core communities. We know that providing pastoral care and psychological monitoring is key. For our participants we have learnt that the projects tend to help participants overcome trauma, isolation, and depression. These bilingual projects assist them with their language skills and confidence and, crucially, they continue to offer new opportunities for the participants after the end of the production.

‘We Wanted the Scottish Audiences to Know That We Are Not Here on Vacation’ Heba Alwadi, Performer My name is Heba Alwadi. I am 21 years old and study Psychology. I left my country, Syria, when I was 13 years old. I witnessed the war break out in Syria when I was a child. It was horrific and hard for me. It was not easy to talk about any of the traumatic events that I've witnessed. I've always used to cry the minute I started talking about it. One day, my mum told me about a drama and a storytelling workshop over the summer. I was excited as I heard it's fun, light, and gathers nice Scottish and Syrian

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people together. I didn’t know that we will make a play as a result of the workshop; all I thought we will do is learn about storytelling. I never imagined I would end up in the theatre, talking bravely about my experience in the Syrian War. I always liked the idea of being in the theatre. I believe that acting requires a lot of creativity, courage, and it is a great tool to deliver our message and voice. The Trojans play shows particular events of the Trojan War that was waged against the city of Troy by the Greeks. It also shows the events of the Syrian war and excerpts of the migration journey that the Syrians lived. For me, The Trojans play was a platform for every Syrian, the family, the father, the child, the victim, the survivor, who supports and who is against the Syrian regime. Although I love performing in the theatre, I thought it was challenging. I thought I should be a professional actress to be successful on the stage. I was surprised when the directors told us that ‘You will tell your story in the theatre, just the truth, without changing it, and you don't need to be professional actors, we will help you through practice’. They really were amazing, they helped us through every little step and kept reassuring us. The experience of performing on stage was a challenge for me, which encouraged me to take it on. First of all, we had workshops that helped us to express our feelings. One of the greatest workshop sessions required us to draw a scenario that made a link between our lives in Scotland as migrants and our lives back in Syria. I still remember every detail of my scenario. I drew houses! In my life, as a child, I’ve changed tens of houses, in Syria, Jordan, and the UK. This exercise helped me to tell how grateful I am for having a warm and safe house here in the UK regardless of how much I miss my green, cosy room in my homeland, Syria. Other exercises included telling stories circulating in Syria that we usually tell children before bed or stories known from the Syrian heritage. After writing our stories, we as groups used to wear costumes and perform our stories in front of everyone, which was very cheerful and helped us to improve our acting skills. I never felt irritated or forced to explain my migration journey to others. I was happy to share it with everyone especially the Scottish audiences. Although sharing my story was so hard for me because it is very emotional, and I took a while to get through it. Unfortunately, the media doesn't always tell the truth or hold everyone's message and pain in the Syrian community. So, I felt it's our duty as Syrian survivors to tell our real story the way it is. So, I was really grateful for having the opportunity to sing my pain out loud through The Trojans play. I never imagined the

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outcome of telling the random details of our stories would be coordinated very well and make a great play. I was happy to tell others all the details about my experience. I left Syria when I was a child, so I let this little child tell her story the way it happened. The decision of what I would like to share or how I would like to share relied on the storytelling exercises we did with the directors at the beginning, where my story and others' stories were gradually told. First of all, we described the state of Syria before the war, including our celebrations, our religious rituals, our Syrian food, shops, popular games, and social life in Syria. We also described what Syria looked like in the morning and what it looked like in the evening and other warm details that aroused feelings in everyone who is from Syria and abroad. Some exercises required us to perform on the stage the nature of life in Syria before the war. That included performing the Syrian marriage rituals and what shopping is like in Syria. After describing life in Syria before the war, we had to tell our experiences during the war. This was the most difficult part during the journey of writing the scenario. To this day, there is still a debate between the Syrians about how, where, and why the war began. Everyone sees the matter from his own angle. Every Syrian has a unique experience different from anyone else. This difference made the play more distinct and covered the issue from more than one angle. I simply let the 13-year-old girl who witnessed the war tell her story. I was in school when I lived one of the most difficult days in my life during the war. My classroom was surrounded by glass when the shooting, bombs, and shelling started. The situation was really scary and terrifying. I was a little girl who saw fear in her teacher's eyes and realised at those moments of shooting that no one was able to protect her, even her teacher! On that day I was unable to think in a proper way, I just wanted to reach my mother. After hours of the siege, I was able to go home and see my mum. Although I had to take the risk and run in front of the tanks and all weapons directed at me. I was just a child who was amazed at how the army could raise his huge weapons with no mercy in front of those innocent children! Everyone from the cast narrated parts from their war experience, some of which were very cruel and painful. The day we decided to talk about the war events, the whole team cried! Everyone was missing his homeland and his family there. I think that the war left an open wound in every Syrian's heart. I believe that sharing our painful experiences with others during the workshops helped us to vent a little. Hearing other's stories and suffering brought us

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closer to each other than before. That let me see The Trojans play as a therapeutic experience as it helped us to unload our pain and share it with others. Also, we received great support from those around us and from the audience. One of the most difficult parts of the text formation was sitting in front of the camera and telling how I escaped from my country, Syria, to Jordan. The moment of recalling the details of that day was very difficult. I heard the sounds of tanks and shooting in my ears again. Everyone had to talk about how he or she left Syria and travelled to a new safe country. I spoke about the day I received the news that I had to leave my school and my home in Syria. It was very sudden, I didn't get to say goodbye to my best friends, not even my toys, my dresses, and my room. I left Syria in February 2013 and went to Jordan. My life in Jordan was never easy or very exciting so I did not share much of my life there. But my mother and I talked about the day we got a call to travel to Scotland. It was one of the best days of my life even though I had no idea how to live in Scotland. I even thought it was like Antarctica, very cold and devoid of people! But when I came here, I found nothing but warmth! I'm not talking about the warm weather, we all know what the weather is like in Scotland! But I found great warmth in the streets and corners of Glasgow. I had a great welcome from the Scottish people and found them very warm and friendly. In one of the workshops, the director asked us to write something about our arrival in Glasgow, and these are some of the lines of what I wrote: O warm city, I walk in your streets for hours, speak into your corners, and you always embrace me and share my hopes and prayers. I was tired, so tired, and today I am safe. Your landmarks are my home. You sing to me every day and fill my heart with hope.

The play has changed a lot in me. It helped me to gain the right of speech again. I started to feel less scared when talking about Syria, the war and the brutal events that Syrians have been through. We received great support from the Scottish audience and that was all that mattered to me. I guess The Trojans play did a great job in delivering our message. The audience was very friendly, sad, and sorry for what happened to Syria. I think the play helped them to understand more about our journey and beautiful heritage as well. One of my English teachers came to watch the play and he told me how moved he was; he cried a lot that day. He told me that he is very proud of what we did and that really meant a lot to me.

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The play also helped me to make great relationships; I gained Scottish, English, Russian, and Syrian friends. The text was written spontaneously and was very real; there were paragraphs of the text that were written so long ago that when we saw them in the text we were surprised. Our stories were combined together in a very smooth and wonderful way. The play was divided between English and Arabic language, which gave it a very beautiful diversity. The rehearsals for the play were not sad or emotional all the time. The play started by showing the audience a little about the beautiful mornings in Syria before the war. Syrian mornings before the war were filled with the sounds of singer Fairuz on every street corner and included the traditional Syrian breakfast and the scent of jasmine in the summer. And in the evening the city-cafes were filled with the laughter of men playing dice. We all in the cast enjoyed rehearsing these fun and cheerful parts of the play. I think it is important for artists and academics to understand when they collaborate with people who have experienced forced migration that migrants are hurt, have wounds, and went through very hard moments in their lives. So, it is worth it to hear out their pain, stories, and deliver their voice to everyone or at least encourage them to speak up about their stories. I believe that one of the most important rights that Syrians lost before and during the war was the right of speech. So, I really appreciate all the art projects that give migrants the opportunity to speak up as long as the migrant is safe. I believe that the more stories are told the more welcome migrants will have from Scottish audiences. When people tell their tragedies and tell honestly what they witnessed, it will help others to understand their pain and bring people closer together and that was one of our aims when we decided to do The Trojans play. We wanted the Scottish audiences to know that we are not here on vacation, we came here as refugees, we came here just to be safe and take Scotland as our homeland. I will always support art projects and academics who are keen to document the truth. I will also be always grateful to Scotland and the Scottish people for having us.

‘There is a little difference between love and pity’ Essam Rabie, Performer It was really a long journey that led me here to Scotland. Not an easy one at all, but full of life’s surprises, ups and downs, until I become a Syrian refugee here in my second land.

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Back to my homeland: I was born in Damascus in 1971 to a middle-­ class family, and we lived in a quiet and good area in Damascus. My childhood was quiet, happy, and peaceful. I studied in Damascus government schools which were of a good standard at that time. When I was young, it did not cross my mind that this safe country would witness the most violent wars in the world. During my early youth I was practising Taekwondo and later I became a national champion and got many medals. My parents were official employees who used to earn so little, and because this burden of life was so heavy, they passed away leaving me and my four siblings when I was only seventeen. After finishing high school, I joined the military and was trying to earn a living to support my small family. A few years later, I settled down in Lebanon where I studied international marketing and then I started a job with a Lebanese man whom I consider my godfather. Elias Akory was a wise, open, and supportive Christian man. The real starting point for the journey to success was thanks to my spiritual father; he taught me how to deal with others, how to understand politics, economics, and global trade. Above all, he helped me in my career to become an event and fairs organiser. In the early 2000s, I established my own company under the name Middle East Group for organising exhibitions and fairs in my lovely city Damascus. I started to gain success from each event, and I became well known in the field of business fairs all over the Middle East. My company then had branches in many Arab capitals such as Beirut, Cairo, and Manama. As a result of the nature of my business, I obtained government support through the Syrian embassies deployed in the Arab world and the Middle East, and that contributed to my status as a founding member of the Arab Union of Exhibitions and International Markets. As a regional director of this union, this gave me a semi-political status because politics and the economy are two sides of the same coin; then I became the representative of the Syrian Arab Republic in the League of Arab States. But my masterpiece, which I would be proud of all my life, was The Global Village in Amman, Jordan. It was a huge event sponsored by the King of Jordan in person and participated by more than forty countries with specialised villages for women and children, etc. … I got married and had two children; all my life was just perfect and sparkling, the same as Syria at that time. The fuse of war was lit in Syria 2011. Death, bombs, fear, and blood were all around. I couldn't handle the tears of my kids, so I decided to run away to Egypt. It was very hard for me to make a fresh start especially in a country

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like Egypt which had its own economic problems. Despite all my attempts to make a living, everything began to collapse and I lost all my savings. Life was so harsh. I faced the lack of money. I reached the brink of bankruptcy. I applied to the United Nations and after a few months my family and I were on plane towards Scotland. I couldn't forget how we were warmly welcomed by North Lanarkshire council. They gave us a new flat; finally, we were safe. My children went to school and started to make new friends. But the new life and the feeling of alienation overshadowed my relationship with my wife, and we began to face the fact that we could not continue together. The war didn't only destroy our country, but our relationship with each other too, which led to the ruin of many families. After our divorce I was completely lonely; my daughter and son were my only shelter. Safety is not enough to be alive. I was suffering from loneliness as if I was trapped behind the concrete walls of my flat. Our need to communicate with others by telling them what we feel and exchange thoughts with them is no less important than our need for water and food. Things were getting worse until the time I heard from one of the Syrians here about a project of creating a theatre group who used to gather each Saturday in order to practise and rehearse. First of all, it was the only way for me to break my isolation. I met new people: local and Syrian as well. Coaches taught us how to stand on stage and how to use our bodies to express our ideas. The place was a beehive: you could hear noise, laughter, and sometimes crying and at the end of the day we used to gather for a fresh and hot meal. Saturdays were a real fun day for me and my kids. Day by day, I found out that the script of The Trojans play was based on Syrian dialogues expressing their sufferings and all that they experienced either in Syria during the war or here in their new society and all its challenging aspects. They spoke aloud about the effects of being refugees. What difficulties they had, starting from learning the English language and ending with the integration into society in addition to their homesick feelings which could be unbearable. I will never forget the audience’s reaction the day of the performance: they clapped for about a quarter of an hour and I couldn't hold back my tears on stage. Although the project was telling miserable stories, it was received honestly and transparently because it reflected reality. It presented real and different point of views among Syrian refugees themselves. I think The Trojans project was more like psychotherapy for these people standing in front of the audience that made them more attuned to their

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circumstances. It made a bridge between the two societies; it really broke the ice. The host community got to understand the real reason for receiving refugees; they listened carefully to their stories and got the whole picture of their backgrounds, and they found out that those people were not threatening at all, they were just displaced individuals as a result of the severe war in Syria, victims of the long lasting armed conflict there. All of that led to the admission and acceptance of refugees as new partners in Scotland. Through The Trojans project we introduced ourselves perfectly to the locals and we were able to win their approval and love. I felt from the first moment I arrived as an asylum seeker and after my warm embrace and reception that it was everything they could afford. But The Trojans project made me feel that the issue was not a kind of sympathy or compassion, it was a sincere expression of love for the newcomers. There is a little difference between love and pity. For example, the social worker would do all her duties in an ideal way, but it couldn’t bridge the gap of one’s need for love in order to recover one’s self-confidence and sense of belonging. The Trojans project presented a real opportunity for refugees to feel that they got attention, care, and love, and that is exactly what I meant by being safe is not enough to be alive. We need love in order to integrate into our new society and new life. The project serves the issue of social security for both host country and poor refugees who escaped from countries suffering armed conflict through serious attempts to integrate them into society and not just be satisfied with merely receiving and providing shelter and food. But unfortunately, The Trojans project is a voluntary work from A to Z. It needs to have more light shed on it and to obtain enough support because it is able to transform refugees from being burdens to active individuals who depend on themselves to earn a living, not on benefits. All of this gives them enough of the psychological and emotional support that they had lost after their forced departure from their motherland. The Trojans project gave me a great gift by meeting Charlotte Eagar and Willy Stirling. They believed in me and tried all the time to give me their support in order to push me to rise up again. I can't deny that life became much better after getting to know them. They invited me with my kids to their home for dinner which gave me back the warmth of family. Finally, I have big dreams and projects in mind that I seek to achieve, such as organising a global village event here, and also, I have the faith that they will become real one day. This would be a way to return a favour to this host country, of which we have become an integral part.

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‘Art and Drama Are a Safer Way to Help Millions Understand the Worst Tragedy Ever in an Hour or So’ Sana’a Al Froukh, Performer I am a Syrian woman who got a new identity, and dignity, as a refugee after the war. One who forcibly lost her home and got many new ones instead. But I remain the same person I ever was. I’m a clinical psychologist and I went to Jordan after I left Syria. I had to flee with my children in 2013, as my husband, who is a writer and publisher, was arrested by the regime. My town—including my children’s school— came under sustained attack by Assad’s forces. Coincidentally, in Jordan I worked with Syrian American Medical Society and Syria Bright Future, the group of psychologists, founded by Syrian refugees, who monitored the first Syria: Trojan Women Project in Jordan in 2013. I came to Scotland with my children in June 2017 and live in Glasgow. My husband later joined us. I am requalifying as a psychologist in Scotland, at Strathclyde University. When I was in Jordan I heard about William and Charlotte’s productions. I liked the idea itself as it’s a simple and clear way to deliver the tragedy and keep people aware of what Syrians experienced. However, I could not join the play or the art activities at that time as they were in Amman while I was in Irbid. When I came to Scotland, I read the advertisement about a story-­ writing skills workshop in Glasgow on Facebook and went to it. There I met Charlotte, who was a friendly and supportive person. Also, I met Syrians: I was a new arrival with poor English, so seeing people from the same country was a relief. By the end of the second training day, I was amazed by the ways you can turn real stories into a play and a piece of art. I joined The Trojans play in Glasgow as an actor and a writer. I had no previous experience or involvement in any theatre activities before, but this time I could not prevent myself from being a part of the art. I wanted to join something different; I needed to talk as I remember. Drama techniques used by this project are extremely helpful for overcoming trauma, particularly because lots of people are hesitant to see a psychologist. I used to use psychodrama in group therapy when I was in Jordan. When I saw people performing their stories at a Trojans workshop I thought, ‘I want to be part of this’. The play is really a kind of evidence, of sorts, of our time in Syria and it’s a way to get across to people who may

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have questions about why we are in Scotland. At the end of the show, we talk about our real experiences, about life before and now in Scotland. We feel very happy here—and very safe. We have made friends; we can be ourselves and can work and study. … It is good to be part of the show and I’m grateful to have a platform to tell the story of suffering and pain we experienced, and how we came here to be safe. … We have freedom to talk in Glasgow that we didn’t have in Syria. The aim of the project matched my own values and beliefs about saving victims’ stories and giving them the right of speech. I wanted to express my feelings and speak out after years and years of living with fears and without human rights. I wanted to talk about my country that I missed a lot, about my dad and many other matters. I did not want to die without documenting my last hours in Syria and without giving my point of view about what happened so far. I think I was lonely and wanted to make friends as a new immigrant with five children. It seemed that we would share our own experience over the war and the journey that followed. Although I love writing and believe in the importance of documentation to save the truth, I did not expect that I would be a part of the play at all as I knew I did not like the idea of being on the stage. We started going to the practical workshops, doing some exercises and activities. My experience during the rehearsals had two sides to it. The first one was developing the timeline of everyday life before the war; drafting the description was the best part of the rehearsal. I loved the free way of writing my own experience, reading my private memories. Also, the trainer was a professional person with a lovely heart. Through these workshops, we created many scenes comparing the life before and after war, differences and similarities between Syria and Scotland. I remember a piece of my written letter saying: Dear Syria, I know these days you are sad and wounded, but I am sure you are not desperate, and do not miss your faith. I am here beside you, pray every day and every morning for you to be fine. Syria, you started for life, and you will get it someday. There is no darkness lasting forever, yet there are also stars. If peace be granted, I will send you all the peace of this earth, but as you know that is sought Stay fine. Scotland

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I love seeing Syrian friends and knowing more about how they integrated or still do with the new community. I enjoyed meeting some friends who have the same mentality as me, at that time this was something that I really needed for me. On the other hand, there were some challenges that I faced with people who are still al-Assad’s supporters, especially when they defended his criminal actions and denied his responsibility for killing innocent civilians. They were making excuses for him claiming that people are traitors to the leader of Syria. This made me frustrated about moving forward or expecting neutral, real descriptions expressing the voice of the martyrs, victims of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and their families who suffered a lot. It was frustrating for me to hear such testimonies in a country where we can talk freely and loudly and after facing the disaster. So, these people took a safe place that should have been given to the victims who were stuck at the camps. Hearing people talk like this made me hesitate too much. Eventually, after presenting the final descriptions and doing the rehearsals, I loved the live performances a lot because I could feel people be moved, sharing with me the pain of the other side of war. I could feel their support and see their tears for Syrian victims even though we weren’t perfect actors. This helped me to trust in a sense of humanity again after more than eight years of suffering, displacement, and disappointment. I have written about my last day in Syria where I was with my dad. I could do that without hesitating or feeling judged. This was something special for me personally. I will not forget that day at all, everything was stopped on my home stairs. My dad’s face, his eyes, and words, I can't forget what he said and how I felt about him. He said, ‘You will not come back, and I will not see you again.’ I said, ‘no, absolutely not’. I was scared, I didn't believe him by this time. The weather was really cold in February, the sun was red at the end of the day, but I didn't care, I just was trying to avoid this fact. I was praying inside my heart, I wanted to hug him, but I couldn't, why? Because this means I will not come back again, means he is right, and knows the future for both of us. My heart was broken, I had no choice, I had to save my children's lives. I looked into my dad’s eyes and said: ‘Dad, please wait for me, I will come in two months, please believe me one more time.’ He said again, ’You don't know these people, be strong and take care, then he left, just left…’

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The time stopped at this moment. Everything was getting dark; I couldn't feel anything, I looked at everything around me as the last time and it was. In the last six years I saw him on my phone screen four times, he touched my face then cried, this old and strong man was afraid to die. He asked me: ‘How are you? How are your kids?’ Then he cried, cried… I can't believe how the world changed as everything inside me. I had the longest and hardest day in my life with him alone on my stairs in that wheatfield.

The video is not like the theatre itself. I think I did not like seeing myself talking about my dad wearing that costume and crying. I like the discussions before and after the performance more, when we answered questions from the audience. This part gave us another chance to deliver our aim to more people and knowing more about some different sides. The play was for audiences aged over eighteen because of its sadness and the dark side of the war. For all who like to hear what happened there, on the other side of the Mediterranean. Who was killed and why? I think adults came along to know more about the modern barbaric dictator’s misery. I was looking for a new sense of meaning which might help me to keep trying after losing my identity. I was looking for a new family, mother, sisters. I wrote my part from the heart, because this is the time of moving backward and coming forward to heal my soul. I did not feel there is any expectation to share my own story and what I have been through personally, but being here and telling my experiences was my aim. I did not like how long these workshops took and would have liked it to be more serious. I know it does not work like that and I had to accept that. Why? After war, your life priorities become different and you do not like to waste your time or your life anymore. While lots of people do not mind doing so. I can’t say the workshops were the opportunity to say what I always wanted; I do not think I could integrate perfectly into the Syrian group itself. Sometimes, I was asking myself, is the problem me? Maybe yes. On the other hand, being the writer and the producer of what I present on the stage was the opportunity. Here I felt, yes, this is what I’m proud to say, this me, Sana’a and Syrians. I wasn’t scared about what people would say about me, I was not worried about being arrested or being held accountable for talking about the dictator and his genocide. I was proud of doing something for the forgotten victims. The theatre helped me to make the link between the two countries, Syria and Scotland, when we were asked to write down our experiences.

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To be in Scotland, you do not have to lose your identity as a Syrian, Arab, or Muslim. This is so important, feeling safe to be yourself, not what others want, and at the same time be a Scottish person because you love to be a Scottish person, not just to let Scottish people accept you. This is the thing named dignity, I suppose, to have the right to be a human that you choose away from the political. My Scottish and Syrian friends came to the play. They were so close to me as never before. I shared what I was worried about before arriving in Scotland, what it looked like and what was the most important thing to me and to my family. I shared the gratitude I feel about each one who helped me and supported anyone who needs support; I appreciate this more after all that I experienced. Also, when other people shared their experience about Scotland, I agreed with them and was happy paying attention to many friendly things. My heart is reassured. I can’t understand what people say, but I feel welcome! People visit me regularly, and they slow down when they speak so I can understand them. What a kind thing. And they are sorry about Syria … some of them cry. They care about us, and they like my children. I’m happy when we get hugs—we need that. They can read our eyes if we are sad and show that they care.

Understanding war survivors’ hesitation in trusting other people easily, cultural differences and the pain of needing acceptance, acknowledgement and respect from others are really important points. When someone has experienced forced migration, this means they will always feel slightly sad, carrying their homeland in their heart. But sometimes we must forget this to be able to live and continue our life. Through one of the play’s Q&A discussions I was asked: You may say all these beautiful things about this country, Scotland, and the people because you live here and have no choice to say more. My response was, ‘I love this type of real question. I do not think I’ll get hurt if I say what I think; I have not said the sky was blue and there were birds everywhere. Life is life anywhere with its challenges, but the freedom and the warm hearts are not. I can’t hide what I feel about those who supported me even when they were not sure what kind of person I am. Scottish people have the right to know how grateful I am’. The Trojans helped the participants to go back to and vividly relive their forgotten days, seeing themselves as they were and for some of them as

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they wanted. This play helped lots of them to talk and share their opinions about their previous homeland and hurt. It gave them the opportunity to express what homesickness looks like. This project gathered lots of isolated sad people together to say we miss being ourselves, talking and sharing our side of the story. Telling your story multiple times is a type of exposure therapy that helps the brain and the amygdala deal with the symptoms of emotional cognitive trauma and organises the complicated memories in a timeline. For participants of The Trojans, there was support for the group to keep the shared stories in a safe place, without making us feel like we are stopped or have to worry about judgement even when we have opposite political opinions from each other. I would say here, this looks like the safe place to hear your own voice as you remember what happened. Repeating this over and over in the rehearsals and upon the theatre stage gives the pain its recognition, and your voice the power to move on. You are the person who can manage the ‘hot’, traumatic memories, so that it is not the unreasonable situations which manage you.1 Gradually the body stops releasing the stress hormones which play the main role of keeping traumatic events active. Exposure therapy is a type of psychological therapy, with the opportunity to share with a group and then an audience; it helps people to overcome their fears and anxiety and support their hearts as they deserve. Discussing the written paragraphs of testimony within a group that is a kind of family is a means of cognitive self-regulation. Art and drama are a safer way to help millions understand the worst tragedy ever in an hour or so. It helps the coming generations to be proud of us as survivors, not victims. It was not easy, but it was safe and warm. This dialogue means a lot for me: Who am I? This was the first question I asked myself when I left Syria. My heart was in pieces—each part with someone, with some place. The biggest part of my heart was, and still is, with our dream of a ‘free country with dignity’. I am completely incapable of changing this reality. I live like I’m blind with broken feet. I cannot look at my homeland which is just stepping away across the Jordanian border. 1  Elbert and Schauer (2002) propose a model that draws a distinction between ‘cold’ memories, which consist of context and facts, and ‘hot’ memories, which consist of sensory information, cognitions, emotions, and physiological feeling. The aim of Narrative Exposure Therapy is to connect the ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ memories of the trauma, sometimes described as ‘weaving’ the two parts of the memory together.

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I don’t feel human … that I have the right to life. I carry the status of refugee now—a strange feeling. I don’t speak about Syria, or my dad—no one cares about them. I feel like a feather in this world. At any moment I can be thrown aside. Why? Because I am Syrian. The hardest thing for me is that my children have to live this way. I try to love this city, Amman, but I fail because I am scared all the time.

Compared to the place where I feel safe and welcoming, I said: One and half years here in Scotland—I share with Scotland my deepest thoughts. I speak to her a lot, and I know she is listening. She never refuses me.

The writing above summarised more than ten years of my life, pain, hopes, and loss. I wish I could say that there is no evidence that I was a feather and I said that just because I was depressed, but to be real we have to accept the truth and not cheat ourselves anymore. I do not want to adopt the tragedy of life, but this is the case after being a refugee. As it is important to get some peace and love.

References Alameri, Rua’a. 2015. Syrian Refugees Put Arab Twist on Oliver! Alarabia News. September 7. Accessed 20 October 2021.https://english.alarabiya.net/ variety/2015/08/25/Syrian-­Refugees-­to-­perform-­Dickens-­Oliver-­Twistmusical-in-­Amman-­. BBC. 2015. Welcome to Zaatari. Radio 4: 15 Minute Drama. BBC. Accessed 20 October 2021. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06rlk6n/episodes/ player. CNN. 2015. ‘Oliver’ with a Twist: Refugees Take on Classic. Amanpour. Accessed 20 October 2021. https://edition.cnn.com/videos/tv/2015/09/04/pkg-­ amanpour-­oliver-­musical-­refugees-­iaw.cnn. Dupire, Camille. 2017. Music Becomes ‘Food of Love’ in Live Performance by Syrian and Jordanian Children. The Jordan Times. October 15. Accessed 20 October 2021. https://www.jordantimes.com/news/local/music-­becomesfood-­love’-­live-­performance-­syrian-­and-­jordanian-­children. Eagar, Charlotte. 2014. Syrian Refugees Stage Euripides’ ‘The Trojan Women’. Financial Times. January 3. Accessed 20 October 2021. https://www.ft.com/ content/858d0bbc-­7205-­11e3-­bff7-­00144feabdc0. Eberwine, Paul. 2019. ‘Music for the Wretched’: Euripides’ Trojan Women as Refugee Theatre. Classical Receptions Journal 11 (2): 194–210.

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EICC. n.d. What’s On—The Trojans. EICC. Accessed 20 October 2021. https:// www.eicc.co.uk/whats-­on/the-­trojans/. Elbert, Thomas, and Maggie Schauer. 2002. Burnt into Memory. Nature 419: 883. https://doi.org/10.1038/419883a. IMDb. n.d. Queens of Syria (2014). IMDb. Accessed 20 October 2021. https:// www.imdb.com/title/tt3603948/awards/?ref_=tt_awd. Onassis. n.d. Omar Abusaada. Onassis.org. Accessed 20 October 2021. https:// www.onassis.org/people/omar-­abusaada. Saïd Foundation. n.d. BAFTA Award for Said Foundation Student. Saïd Foundation. Accessed 20 October 2021. http://saidfoundation.org/news/ bafta-­award-­for-­said-­foundation-­student/. The Trojan Women Project. n.d.-a. The Trojans Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The Trojan Women Project. Accessed 20 October 2021. https://www.trojanwomenproject.org/the-­trojans-­glasgow. ———. n.d.-b. Press: Syria Women Project. The Trojan Women Project. Accessed 20 October 2021. https://www.trojanwomenproject.org/syria-­trojan-­women. ———. n.d.-c. Support our work by watching our films. The Trojan Women Project. Accessed 20 October 2021. https://www.trojanwomenproject.org/ screenings. WNYC Studios. 2015. Soap Opera Dramatizes Lives of Syrian Refugees. The Takeaway. January 21. Accessed 20 October 2021. https://www.wnycstudios. org/podcasts/takeaway/segments/soap-­dramatizes-­lives-­syrian-­refugees. Yasmin Fedda Website. n.d. Queens of Syria. Yasmin Fedda. https://yasminfedda. com/Queens-­of-­Syria. Young Vic. 2016. Queens of Syria. Young Vic. Accessed 20 October 2021. https://www.youngvic.org/whats-­on/queens-­of-­syria. Ziter, Edward Blaise. 2017. The Syria Trojan Women: Rethinking the Public with Therapeutic Theatre. Communication and the Public 2 (2): 177–190.

CHAPTER 3

Channelling and Challenging the ‘imperative to tell’: Reflections on Negotiating Representations of Refugeeness from Practice-Based Performance Research Catrin Evans

Introduction Over the course of the last 30 years, analysis of artistic work made with, by, for, and about refugees has gone from being ‘scattered and sometimes hard to find’ (Balfour 2013, xxi), to forming an increasingly divergent field of study. In particular ‘work on the intersections between performance and asylum has proliferated’ (Cox and Wake 2018, 141), with literature concerning itself with staged dramas, autobiographical or verbatim shows, live art and film, as well as activism in the form of theatrical

C. Evans (*) Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, Scotland University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 F. Barclay, B. Ivey (eds.), Contemporary Representations of Forced Migration in Europe, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Human Rights, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47831-4_3

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interventions. Consequently, the arts and cultural sectors—as well as the academic fields associated with them—have become significant contributing forces to ‘refugeeness’ (Suzuki 2016, 1) perpetually representing, misrepresenting, and re-imagining the complex narratives of people’s bureaucratic and social experiences of forced displacement. This chapter focuses on one of the most pressing representational issues within this expanding field of refugee arts and performance work: staging suffering. It offers an analysis of the ways in which this issue emerged within two Glasgow-based participatory performance projects that formed part of my doctoral studies fieldwork during 2017–18. In Project 1, I took on the role of lead theatre practitioner on a multi-artform community arts initiative. In Project 2, I took on the role of community participant in a dance and integration project. In both projects, I was positioned as Artist-­ Researcher and it is from this perspective that the chapter is narrated. To set the scene for the analysis that follows, the chapter starts by offering an overview of the key critical literature and theoretical ideas framing the issue. It then proceeds to offer three further sections that draw upon Thompson’s critique of the ‘imperative to tell to tell’ (2011, 56), Salverson’s concerns around an ‘aesthetic of injury’ (1999, 35), as well as Jeffers’ theoretical work on ‘bureaucratic performance’ and the emergence of the ‘endearing refugee’ (2012, 44), to interrogate how staging suffering consistently arose and was negotiated with as a knotty, uncomfortable issue across both projects I worked on. The first of these sections focuses on Project 1 and the creative methods that were facilitated in an attempt to push against aesthetic representations of individual suffering. The next section moves on to Project 2 to explore the burden of representation and its relation to positionality through an analysis of collaborative practice. Finally, the chapter returns to Project 1 to offer insight into a performance intervention formed out of a project member’s lived experience, that demonstrates participatory arts potential to move beyond archetypes when creative exploration—rather than utility—is prioritised. Throughout the chapter, I follow Salverson (1999) in asking how the participatory performance world can attend to the stories and experiences of those navigating the system without reproducing configurations of power that compound individuals in simplistic terms as the ‘injured’ (51). How can an ‘analysis of the power relationships’ (Choules 2007, 461) that exist when artists are paid to enter a space with the predetermined goal of seeking out stories from a community be critically acknowledged? I contend that one way is for artists and scholars to reflect on these questions

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from within their own work, to openly share and grapple with the ethical, artistic, and social implications of staging stories of, or in resistance to, suffering where it permeates artistic creativity. It is in this spirit of critical reflection that this chapter has been written. My analysis throughout the chapter is philosophical in nature and my tone is deliberately ethnographic, supported by the inclusion of extracts from my research journal (Evans 2017). I write in what Thompson (2011, 7) defines an ‘affective register’, one that is ‘both practice-based and analytical’. I do this as a way of acknowledging my position, as well as my subjectivity within this research. My own narrative here is combined with extracts from written and spoken material created during workshops. In addition, I include extracts of transcripts from recorded conversations with participating project members, the majority of whom were actively navigating the asylum system as we worked together. These verbatim contributions have deliberately been presented in a denaturalised form (Bucholtz 2000, 1461). Participating project members are referred to using pseudonyms; ones that I invited each person to choose, in an attempt to encourage those involved to situate themselves within the research on their own terms. I have enjoyed adopting these pseudonyms, some for their playfulness and some for the stories and emotions attached to people’s choices. All pseudonyms are italicised. I have also chosen to adopt pseudonyms when referencing staff members or other artists associated with either of the projects. I do this to offer parity in how individuals within the chapter are presented, and in the knowledge that staff and artists receive ongoing credit for the work they did on the projects elsewhere in the public domain.

Critical Responses to the Staging of Suffering The expansion of the interdisciplinary field of refugee performance, as well as the attention being paid to it specifically in Europe (Cox and Wake 2018), coincides with a burgeoning interest and concern about global migration trends towards the Global North. Within the UK in particular, it is expanding alongside the Conservative Government’s ever-more inhumane Hostile Environment policies. As such, the critical dialogue surrounding refugee performance is fraught with contradictions and ethical complexities (Balfour 2013). It has been championed as a space to search for ‘creative’ and ‘humane solutions’ to ‘the unprecedented, sweeping, and systematized political and economic violence of the “new world

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order”’ (Sellars 2014, xii). Similarly, theatre in particular has been positioned as a site where audiences can be encouraged to consider refugees ‘as new co-members of a national community’ (Cox 2014, 47) and as spaces where the artistic content can ‘phenomenalise the political’ (Garner 1994 in Hazou 2008, 185). It has also been situated as a space for ‘performative agency’ and where the ‘formation of political identities’ (Bhimji 2016, 83) can be worked out. Jeffers (2012) identifies the unique thread running through it to be its capacity to function as ‘a tool for education and awareness-raising about refugees in ways that have opened up possibilities for empathy, solidarity, and even political action’ (43). Scholars caution, however, against creating a mythology about the power of artistic representation (Balfour and Woodrow 2013). Due recognition must be given to the fact that artistic projects are rooted in a context whereby narratives of trauma and exceptionalism dominate the framing of refugee experience (28). As such, regardless of the thematic or stylistic focus of artistic work, ‘the testimonies/life stories/narratives of refugees are framed and defined before a word is spoken or a gesture made’ (28). As Jeffers (2012) describes it, narratives are constructed against a backdrop of ‘bureaucratic performance’ (13), whereby individuals seeking asylum are perpetually ‘compelled to produce’ a story that does enough to ‘convince the authorities of their right to stay’ (p.13) both within the context of the asylum interview and across everyday life. Within the majority of ‘theatricalized refugee narratives’, this has given rise to ‘a victimhood-hope dialectic’ (Cox 2012, 118), whereby the prevailing image of refugees presented to audiences are ones of victims, desperate to escape yet determined to survive. The restrictive scope of this image has resulted at times in the industry wilfully ‘ignoring or downplaying the complexities involved’ in individual experiences (Jeffers 2012, 44), as well as the role of the immigration systems producing such conditions. Dennis (2008) too warns that whilst the arts sector ‘shores up the promise of mutual understanding and the redemptive power of empathy’ (212) it is often in danger of confining the ‘refugee subject’ into a ‘particular conception of representation’ (212). Jeffers pushes further to argue that in an attempt to circumnavigate negative perceptions, the performing arts sector has not just shied away from presenting complicated representations of forced migration. It has instead cumulatively constructed the archetype of the ‘endearing refugee’ (Jeffers 2012, 44). This fictional person is presented on stage as suitably gifted, traumatised, vulnerable, resilient, hopeful, and always grateful

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of the support offered to them. Transgressions, including ‘resistance and resourcefulness’ (46) are, she argues, strategically avoided within the narrative of the endearing refugee. She states, ‘practitioners tread a precarious line between producing validation, on the one hand, and victimhood, on the other’ (143), which in turn contributes to and compounds the good/ bad, deserving/undeserving binary (Sales 2002) that dominates much media coverage on migration. In the field of participatory arts—which this chapter is most concerned with—the work being created with and by refugee communities is under the additional pressure to be ‘transformational, resilient and empowering’ in response to the climate of fear generated by mainstream and far-right depictions of those forced to flee (Phipps 2017, 15). Often this translates into an expectation within community arts projects to offer participating individuals an opportunity to tell their story. Framed as an empowering and healing process, often tied in with a social justice agenda, the positive outcome of speaking about one’s experience in front of an audience is a narrative supported as much by artists and participants themselves, as it is within funder-facing, impact-driven conversations. And yet, it is within these very participatory arts settings that Salverson (1999) first expressed her concerns about a phenomenon she coined an ‘aesthetic of injury’ within the field of refugee performance (35), one which positions the ‘refugee’ storyteller in the role of the injured, and by default the one in need. This approach to representation within participatory settings not only defines the terms by which participating individuals will engage or contribute before any creative work has even begun; at the other end of a process it limits the choices an audience has for relating to the work by presenting ‘an uncomplicated portrayal of victims and heroes’ that can result in a position of voyeuristic burden (Salverson 1999, 35). Following this analysis Edmondson (2005) draws attention to how the creative fascination with injury and trauma has moved beyond it simply being staged to activate humanitarian concerns. It has escalated into being a marketable product that NGOs and charities utilise to, in the instance she analyses, secure funding. Consequently, Sophie Otiende (Costello and Boswell 2019) enquires: [t]hink about the power that organisation holds over this victim, and then think about consent. Think about whether that victim, that survivor, would actually be able to give proper consent about telling their stories?

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In challenging the relationship between survivor and NGO, Otiende draws attention to the risk of perpetrating a form of narrative exploitation. Jeffers suggests that when associated with arts projects this search for ‘the “right” kind of refugee story’ (2012, 46) has often seemed to be more about securing resources for a producing organisation (46), rather than necessarily the empowerment or agency of those involved. Thompson contends that the conflation of processes of self-­ empowerment with recounting narratives of suffering, emerged through the coupling of the applied arts ‘with communities that have suffered crisis or violence’ and ‘the field of trauma studies’ (2011, 9). Thompson problematises this relationship, first by drawing together a critique of the development of trauma studies itself, which was initially developed in the USA with veterans of war and has since been inappropriately universally applied. It has been understood and used by theatre practitioners in trauma relief contexts, almost generically regardless of cultural, historical, or political context. Subsequently he argues that this framework for understanding trauma has ‘led to the prescription of “telling one’s story” as the preferred method and necessary precondition for “relief”, “liberation” or “healing”’ (45). In turn, this has fuelled a fixation from the Global North on the act of speaking as healing and recovery, which is in danger of disregarding other forms and methods of dealing with one’s experiences. He argues that within many arts projects, the space for silence or other culturally specific practices of expression have been eliminated or at least treated as suspicious (67), in favour of verbal psychoanalytical traditions of communication. What may have started as ‘the imperative within the survivor’ (57) in some contexts has shifted, through the reinforcement of trauma literature, to being ‘an imperative without’ (57) in all contexts. And so, what Thompson refers to as an ‘imperative to tell’ (56) manifests with arts professionals creating conditions where individuals feel ‘they must speak’ (59), with the focus being on suffering, on victimhood, and on vulnerability, whether they might want that or not. The potential impact of this approach is that individual and community experiences become sensationalised and fetishised in the name of concern (Boo 2007 in Lemke 2010, 101) but that these practices neglect to engage in a critical analysis of power—with the artists or the audiences. Instead it risks compounding existing imbalances and upholding processes embedded within the ‘commodification of Otherness’ (hooks 1992, 21) that further objectify the so-called stranger (Ahmed 2000). The danger of this

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‘testifier and witness model’ (Thompson 2011, 62) is that this approach positions the urge of (often) white artists and audiences in a European context, as more urgent than the well-being, dignity, and agency of the individual or communities being portrayed. There are, of course, more and more projects, productions, and artworks that are creating performance in direct opposition to the trends described above. Most often these occur when a project is led or co-led by practitioners with lived experience themselves. This turn in attention is succinctly articulated by the Australian organisation RISE which published a ten-point document for artists with no lived experience of being a refugee to consider before embarking on work within the field (RISE 2015). Much of the activity that counters the trend is yet to be widely analysed within academic research, though scholars increasingly signpost that there are examples that refuse to defer to ‘the more common strategy of staging the silenced voices of refugees’ and are instead choosing to direct the audiences’ attention towards ‘the illness and violation of the body politic’ (Jeffers 2012, 65). Cox (2015) suggests that this in turn dismantles ‘the idea that audiences are entitled to be convinced, via theatricalized “evidence”’ (228). It marks a shift in focus, one that is steadily re-directing audience attention towards ‘the performativity of political apparatuses and discourses’ (Cox and Wake 2018, 143) to expose instead where and how harm is being created. Regardless of these shifts, the staging of suffering remains a common frame for refugee representation and trying to better understand the ethical and artistic complexities of provoking an imperative to tell or utilising an aesthetic of injury for an effective purpose (Thompson 2011, 6) is what this chapter concerns itself with.

Resisting the Presentation of Individual Suffering At an early planning meeting for Project 1, co-lead artist Haree and I spent considerable time reflecting upon the following Project Outcome developed by the producing organisations, as part of their funding bid: ‘Participants are enabled to have a voice and respond to media headlines about refugees with their own stories and experiences’. (Project 1 Project Outcomes)

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It became clear that we had both previously encountered versions of the aesthetic of injury, where the reality of participants ‘having a voice’ was that their stories were exploited and trust was broken. One instance had been described to me as part of my initial scoping research for my doctoral thesis: They explained that the film-artist rarely appeared during the process and then suddenly, near the end, was talking about making a film about them. ‘They were expecting us to say everything inside us. And then when we saw the film many of us were shocked. The artist had used sections of the interview we had asked them not to, and shown people’s young families, which again they had asked not to’. She explained that they hadn’t seen the final film until the public showing, leaving no space for objections. (Evans 2017)

This example and other similar experiences that Haree spoke of enabled us to articulate a shared discomfort with the approach implied within the Project Outcome described above. People’s stories were being asked to respond directly ‘to media headlines about refugees’. Despite not being articulated in the project’s written brief, discussion with the project producers made clear that they hoped these stories would help counter negative headlines dominating the UK media landscape, or at least support the more sympathetic narratives circulating across Scotland’s media. Consequently, Project 1 was being positioned, on some level, as a myth-­ busting project that could contribute to more positive messaging around refugees and those seeking asylum. Haree and I were wary that those involved in our project might be required to fit into the performance archetypes of the endearing refugee (Jeffers 2012, 44) or the good/deserving refugee. If each person’s story  needed to be convincing enough to combat negative representations, or to provide an ‘emotional hook’ (Otiende in Costello and Boswell 2019) for the wider work of the organisation, where was the space for complexity within the project—for transgression, aggression, or rebellion? What if someone’s experience reinforced a narrative that connected to a negative stereotype? From an aesthetic perspective, could symbolism or abstraction or nuance emerge if a story sets out to be told in order to counter another narrative? To refer back to Thompson’s work, where is the space for, or the acceptance of silence, or ‘the possibility that silence could be a form of expression, coping, resistance and celebration of living’ (Thompson 2011,

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68)? What space is there to experiment with artistic forms and mediums? The pressure for artistic expression to have a utility makes authentic collaborative processes more challenging because the creativity and play within an artistic space becomes directed, rather than exploratory. If the Project Outcome had been prescribed as part of an explicit marketing or PR-focused community project this tension might not have existed. However, in a collaborative participatory arts space, where creative practice is about experimenting with self-expression, the imperative to tell was potentially very restrictive. Consequently Haree and I made a concerted effort to find creative strategies that challenged the aesthetic of injury or the presentation of the endearing refugee. Our first attempt at this utilised media archives to collate a large selection of newspaper footage covering a spectrum of recent coverage around issues of migration. Packed around six metres of table, the group were presented with an equally long blank canvas that they were to develop into a collaborative artwork that speaks to media representation. Each person held a stack of photocopied newspaper coverage, a pair of scissors, and the materials required to transfer the ink from the coverage onto the material. Each group member was asked to select coverage that resonated with them. We made it clear that no one was going to have to divulge their connection with this coverage. This was to be a collective response and we wanted them to act instinctively. We invited people to tune into their emotional and bodily responses, so as to move ‘past a scripted telling of painful events and into more reflective engagement’ (Guenette 2009, 86). Before transferring their chosen coverage to the material, there was a key step in the exercise that we hoped would speak to the group on both a symbolic and aesthetic level. We invited everyone to take their scissors and to cut through the coverage in any way that inspired them and to reconfigure the pieces into a new collaged image. We encouraged them to take pleasure in the act of creating a collaged set of new images distanced from their original hegemonic meaning, to find new meaning or affect through abstraction. Haree, the visual artist, explored pictorial composition with the group, encouraging everyone to think less about what their final collated image might ‘say’ and more about what it might invite an audience or viewer to see afresh. Once they had spent time composing their image the group was encouraged to transfer their work onto the large canvas, where it would again be re-framed through its relation to the other work created around it. Very simply, and in the words of the 1980s

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Scottish post-punk band Orange Juice, this exercise was an invitation to ‘rip it up and start again’. To complete the exercise, we took the fabric off the table and displayed it to the group. We invited everyone to walk alongside it, taking their time to look deeply at what they saw; to allow themselves to feel their response and reflect upon what they had created together. In this moment, the atmosphere tangibly shifted. After hours of noisy chat and laughter, the room became tinged with something closer to sadness. Gathering into a circle, we asked everyone who felt comfortable to do so, to articulate how this piece of work they had created made them feel about the media and its depiction of migration. The following words were spoken: Provoked Aware Concerned Sad Hostile Gives Information Unrealistic Depressed So difficult Exploiting Sad Unfair Distanced

Despite the quietly anarchic intentions behind the exercise, it was clear that the dominant narrative of negativity would not easily be reclaimed. What was shared in these closing moments demonstrated that the group had been affected in ways we had not intended. In reaching for Guenette’s (2009, 86) more reflective engagement, that pushed beyond testimonial disclosure, it seemed we had brought everyone in the space to an overwhelming feeling of negativity. Would any attempt to critically interrogate this difficult and oppressive theme ultimately result in a sense of defeat? Bishop (2012) might accuse our concerns here of falling into an ‘insidious’ trap of ‘over-solicitousness’ where ‘idiosyncratic or controversial ideas are subdued or normalised’ in an attempt to pre-determine ‘what people are capable of coping with’ (26). She may be right. Our fear of upsetting or re-traumatising individuals underpinned the delivery team’s reflective discussions at the end of the session and throughout the remainder of the

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project. We were conscious that, although we were inviting project members to engage in a collaborative arts process, it would be ‘insidious’ to pretend that we were all co-creators, with equal power. Our concern here was ethical and rooted in a commitment to a ‘care-­ full aesthetic’ (Thompson 2015, 438). Were artistic outcomes that left us informed, but dejected, the most stimulating art we could make? How could we take what Bishop (2012, 26) terms this ‘unease, discomfort or frustration’ and experiment with it, to reach ‘a more complicated access to social truth’? Thompson (2011) argues that ‘the actual work of social change is bound up in how we create, who creates and when we create art’ (11). It was through this early session that we were provoked to critically interrogate how we would ensure that this principle permeated our exploratory practice. We determined that any effect that the project might have on challenging perceptions of media representation must be carved out through working methods that enable those who are often categorised as the subject of media narratives to become authors of their own artistic stories. This was less about ‘irreproachable sensitivity’ (Bishop 2012, 26). This was about wanting to find ways to control the narrative, instead of being dictated to by the narratives that were already in place and dominating discussions. This went on to manifest across the project, in part, through an ongoing exploratory relationship with the physical object of newspaper, whereby it became a tool for our aesthetic inquiry rather than our theme. The texture, sound, and behavioural properties of the material led to newspaper being manipulated for collages, sculptures, and even for dancing. These interactions shifted the voyeuristic gaze away from ‘the refugee’ and towards the construction of the image of refugee, raising questions about authorship, interpretation, and power. hooks asserts that critical pedagogy must ask questions of power. Here we followed her into a space of critical creativity as we turned our collective attention towards ‘the issue of voice. Who speaks? Who listens? And why?’ (hooks 1994, 40). As part of this exploration, the notion of multiple truths, multiple stories, and multiple perspectives became a key feature of Project 1. In response to conversations about what it felt like to continually be represented by somebody else, we tasked project members to work in small groups to construct images they felt showed the way the media portrayed the figure of the ‘asylum seeker’, ‘refugee’, and ‘migrant’. We invited project members to think and discuss, not just what images the media show, but how the media constructs the narratives attached to these images.

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The tableaux that  he groups performed for one another revealed an overwhelming sense of the pressure caused by binary opinions the group perceived in the media world surrounding them and their stories. Almost every image reflected the striking presence of individuals navigating a world that welcomes you with one hand and pushes you away with the other, revealing the atmosphere the individuals in the group felt they were living within. It was the meeting point between negative and positive, welcoming and unwelcoming that revealed itself as the pressure point where the struggle takes place. Reflective discussion at the end of the session revealed that this conflict extended far beyond media representation. Although quick to say that Scotland and Scottish people were very friendly (a sentiment project members seemed to want to stress throughout my research), the group communicated a shared agreement that conflicting messages surrounded them in their everyday lives. Cited as a significant source of stress, this spoke directly to what Khosravi (2009) refers to as living within ‘hostile hospitality’: partly caring, partly punitive; partly endangering (deportation), partly saving…; partly forced, partly empowering; partly a site of hospitality, partly a site of hostility. (53)

Khosravi specifically theorises detention practices, but the description he offers resonates with the complex and stressful conditions enacted within the project members’ tableaux. The asylum seeker, often portrayed as ‘in need of guidance’, is simultaneously constructed as the ‘adult responsible for his or her deeds and choices’ (53), with no acknowledgement of the wider economic and social global (as well as local) factors that determine their current circumstances. This conflicting web of welcome and exclusion was further articulated by the group through a writing exercise done in response to their tableaux. Upon seeing each tableaux every group member was asked to finish the statement ‘I see…’. As with previous exercises we encouraged the group to look beyond the literal, and to look deeply, inviting the group to listen with their eyes (Back 2007, 100). Often applied to the researcher in the room, and their observations about ‘the unsaid’ in an interview context, this term resonates with the way we invited group members to pay ‘attention to nuances, silences, embodied feeling, and also making links with wider social justice’ (Foster 2016, 6).

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As the session came to a close, we invited project members to share the sentences they had written. As we listened to them read aloud, it became clear that what was emerging was a collective poem: I see a family standing in a queue I see an administrator I see suffering and fear I see some people are happy I see talk of danger I see stop I see someone waiting and the traffic light is green I see praying I see someone working I see a family I see a student I see stop I see people who are worried I see the meaning of risk and fear to get to safety I see someone who is angry—she is screaming I see excitement I see that they are very nervous I see happiness I see fear I see someone taking a photograph I see sad people I see right people I see danger I see some people who are sad I see someone stopping someone else I see STOP I have seen joy and happiness I have seen perseverance I see happy

A new piece of artistic work was created with the group, journeying towards a process of collective knowledge-forming. Leavy (2015, xi)

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contends that through arts-based research we find connections ‘with those similar and dissimilar’, that we ‘open up new ways of seeing and experiencing and illuminate that which otherwise remains in the dark’. This collective poem shed light on the reality of living within the social conditions of hostile hospitality, of navigating what I went on to suggest we refer to in Scotland as the welcome-unwelcome dialectic (Evans 2020). This reality is punctuated in this poem by the violent repetition of STOP, but importantly for this discussion, it stands in direct contrast to a singular narrative of trauma. For it was a multiplicity of voices that made up this story: different perspectives, generations, nationalities, and languages combined to present a contradictory and complicated vision of emotions and experiences. Weeks later the group worked with sound artist Kia to make their poem into an audio track. Spoken by a chorus of voices, this gave aural form to a commitment to multiplicity. Months beyond that, Precise, Ezel, Sami, Bold Solicitor and Mary performed an edited version of the piece as part of our final performance in the project’s culminating event. What emerged was a ‘micrology’ (O’Neill et al. 2002; O’Neill 2008) of images and flashes of stories that allowed project members to engage their audience in what O’Neill describes as ‘the politics of feeling’ (O’Neill 2010, 2013). Whilst never expecting any of the group to provide extensive personal testimony, the multi-voice poem was able to ‘provide a fuller understanding of lived cultures’ (101) but avoided the imperative to tell. This felt closer to what Jones (2002, 1) describes as ‘the melding of many authoritative texts, many realities’ and ‘prodding the participants to create their own truths’ through their recollection of aural memory. By embracing the multiplicity of experiences contained within these intersecting realities, the project disrupted the lure to stage a singular convincing bureaucratic performance. Halfway through Project 1, project member Faith said to me ‘I love that you have never asked me to tell my story’. It was an uninvited comment but one that resonated with me deeply, given the critical thinking I had been engaging in around these ideas, and the fact that the project was on some level asking her to share her story. ‘Why?’ I asked, and she replied: we carry so much with us inside our hearts and every day we are refugees or asylum seekers to someone here we are ourselves

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This space for silence, the invitation not to speak that Faith identified and that Thompson advocates for, became a source of personal pride within Project 1.

Examining the Burden of Representation During my time with Project 2, the producing organisation’s Director Reem reflected on why she does the community work that she does: what I have learned from life is that if you haven’t experienced something yourself you’re never going to believe it

Reem regularly narrated her own story on local and national platforms, sharing the bleakest as well as the most triumphant aspects of her lived experience. It was my understanding that her unflinching approach when sharing details of her own experiences with these public audiences is dedicated to bringing them as close to believing it as possible. Witnessing Reem speak in public I recall the theoretical discourse of Cummings (2016), whose analysis of the field of refugee performance draws attention to the emotional investment required to deliver bureaucratic performances, as well as the personal strength needed to carry the burden of representation: When scholarship on refugee theatre considers empathy, it tends to focus, not surprisingly, on the audience’s empathy or on whether or not the style of the performance encourages that kind of engagement. (162)

Cummings suggests that this focus has led to scholars overlooking the empathic requirements of the storyteller (whether that be in a theatre performance, a talk delivered at a charity AGM, or answering questions in a Home Office interview). Cummings (185) demands more attention be paid to the labour of the teller. This is not just the labour that telling requires, but the labour required to simultaneously interpret an audience’s response, ‘empathically evaluating the listener, and assessing the risks and rewards for particular strategies’. Watching Reem as she confronts and shares her experiences, it is apparent that her testimonies are rooted in her agency. In many respects, she embodies Thompson’s description of

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individuals that speak from ‘the imperative within’ (2011, 57). However, in light of Cumming’s theories Reem’s efforts can be understood as ‘empathic labor’: that which a ‘storyteller undertakes in order to imagine her audience and create a performance that will move them’ (Cummings 2016, 162). Reem’s ability to undertake ongoing empathic labour in the form of recalling her own narrative demands explicit recognition, and the work she does with it to impact people, arguably is extracted by external factors. Reem’s words might not be mined by an artist or an organisation, but they are compelled out of her by her ongoing commitment to supporting and advocating for individuals within the asylum system, combined with her awareness of the broader social and political injustices that lead to individuals seeking asylum. She shares and labours; labours and shares to expand support and political will for those trapped within the system. She is not speaking of her pain ‘to permit a form of self-realisation’ (Thompson 2011, 156); instead she focuses on inspiring an ‘ethical response’ from her audience—it is ‘a call to action’ made ‘not in a cognitive but in an affective register’ (156). This reading of Reem’s relationship to the re-telling of her own experiences recognises that Thompson’s imperative to tell operates on a macro-extraction level and is fuelled by the very injustices that the political climate creates. She speaks so that others will not have to. Reem articulated a different stance to the idea of creative projects negotiating with an aesthetic of injury, from myself and Haree (Project 1 lead artists). Leading the development of the dance project alongside dance artist Nic, Reem was clear from the outset that, although the majority of the movement work would focus on the joy and strength offered by intercultural exchange, portraying suffering would be an important component of the work. Her insights into how affective and effective this mode of storytelling can be enabled her to engage its power. This intention, and the inevitable complexities accompanying it, manifested most poignantly in a dance duet that ultimately became the opening scene of the final performance. The dance saw two project members engage in a duet that responded to Jackie Kay’s poem Glasgow Snow, commissioned by the Scottish Refugee Council in 2013. The dance interpreted the poem’s story of a woman, ‘found in the snow, in Glasgow’ who, lost to the despair of seeking asylum, is aided and supported by the actions of ‘a girl’ who ‘took [her] under her wing’ Kay, 2014). Unmentioned in the poem, our dance performance positioned the ‘kindness of that stranger in that winter snow’ as a white Scot. During the

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dance she bore the physical weight of the asylum-seeking woman, who was played by a Black South African community dancer. Directing the work, Reem was clear it was imperative for the dancer portraying the refugee to be seen as vulnerable. For audiences to be persuaded that they have a moral responsibility towards New Scots arriving in the city and to trigger their action, the dancer was asked to show herself to be in need of saving. Initially I was concerned that the piece was in danger of fostering what Danewid (2017) perceives as a ‘general problematique, endemic to both left-wing activism and academic debate’; that of offering up performance signifiers which foster ‘a colonial and patronising fantasy of the white man’s burden’ (1675). Before this could take root, however, project members and the lead dance artists made a case for the dance to be interpreted differently. It was suggested that instead of ‘the refugee’ being carried, perhaps a more equal distribution of burden and power between the two dancers would better reflect reality. It would, they argued, be ‘closer to what was happening in the room’ (Evans 2017) in terms of how ‘local’ and New Scots developed relationships when attending the producing organisation’s activities. In turn, other project members intervened, reinforcing Reem’s argument that the necessity for a clear victim in need of help was ‘closer to what was happening in the real world’ (Evans 2017). From their perspective, the vulnerability of ‘the refugee’ needed emphasis to make the rest of the dance piece, which symbolised communities coming together, more emotionally compelling. This critical debate was revisited numerous times during the project and consensus had not been reached by the time of public performance. What had emerged in the room though, was a complex engagement with Cox’s ‘victimhood-hope dialectic’ (2012, 118). One that understood this performance trope could be critically engaged with as a tool by which to persuade and activate an audience’s response, and one that needed careful management to avoid erasing the fluid exchange that takes place between settled and newly arrived individuals that the group felt was more authentic. After the project, Ninilia, who performed in the dance, articulated to me how she and her dance partner had physically negotiated the tension held within these two positions: there was an emphasis that we made on trying to make the actual duet itself not seeming as though I was relying on her because I was meant to present myself as

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you know the refugee who couldn’t really do things herself and both of us were like we are not doing that so we did kind of play against it I was lifting her sometimes she was lifting me she would pull me and I would pull her so it was like this relationship building where we were helping each other rather than this literal because I know myself I would have been uncomfortable with that narrative as well

The discomfort Ninilia describes, her fear of presenting ‘the refugee’ stripped of resistant qualities and personal agency (Jeffers 2012), and the efforts made by the two dancers to offer a more nuanced picture of this encounter in the snow,  embody the representational risks involved in choosing to stage suffering. Simultaneously though, the experience demonstrates the rich potential of engaged collaborative practice, where distinct opinions and creative drives engage in critical dialogue to move towards a performance and aesthetic outcome that sustains complexity. While Reem was clear about her position from the outset, space was made available in the workshops for the dance to evolve and be influenced by the collaborators in the room. In the final performance the language of movement came to signify the importance of, and strength found in, relationships of reciprocity. The spoken poem was able to focus the audience’s attention on a woman strategically stripped of her agency by the Home Office: another figure, sum, unseen, another woman sent home to danger, dumb, afraid’. (Kay 2014) By holding these two representations in one space simultaneously, the dance managed to contain both a picture of what was possible when meaningful connections are made between people, and what can happen when the full force of the asylum system’s biopolitics of failure asserts itself upon individuals. Rather than engaging with ‘matters of empathy, generosity and hospitality’ (Danewid 2017, 1675) as a means of disconnecting from ‘questions of responsibility, guilt, restitution, repentance, and structural reform’, the dance that was eventually

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presented to an audience was working to use matters of empathy to direct our gaze towards these structural injustices. It is fundamental to note that neither dancer involved in telling this story had any experience of seeking asylum. During the project I never witnessed any project member being invited to disclose their experiences as part of the creative exploration. Whilst there were many moments where individuals would speak about their asylum cases, these tended to be in the spaces in between the creative practice, over tea and biscuits. In the workshops there was never an imperative to tell. Instead the project focused on our physicality, inviting stories, cultures, and personalities to be expressed through movement rather than speech. The only pressure to present an aesthetic of injury was applied by Reem upon two project members whom I believe she felt were—perhaps in an act of artistic solidarity—able to carry that burden. Discourse, a key critique is equally concerned with the ‘who’ constructing the aesthetic of injury as with the aesthetic itself. For one artist I spoke to—who referred to the trend as ‘tragedy porn’—it was ‘insiders’ (Cox 2014, 22) refusing to reflect upon ‘privileged position’ (Choules 2007, 461), serving careers, organisational agendas, and white saviour causes that were seen to be doing harm: artists and producers, without direct lived experience, creating and staging work with no critical consciousness of the ramifications of this particular aesthetic trend. What she advocated was an artistic field better represented by makers and organisers with lived experience. Not because they instinctively know the best ethical route to take when making work but because, to return to Cumming’s analysis, it would be they who could best understand how to confront, share, and assess the risks involved in the telling of a story, in whatever artistic form or style was used. In Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag (2003) ponders who has a right to view images of extreme suffering. ‘Perhaps’, she suggests, it is only: those who could do something to alleviate it—say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken—or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be. (34)

A similar sentiment can be applied when considering the re-construction of suffering within arts processes. Should it be only those with the lived experience of the pain of forced migration who should guide how that

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pain is explored? While Reem did not seem to explicitly grapple with the discomfort that Haree and I experienced in our own relationships to staging stories of suffering, I would contend that there is less urgency or need for her to do so. Reem has spent the last 20 years of her life, not just recalling her own experiences but labouring through the complex empathic work required in sharing one’s suffering. She understands, both materially and emotionally, the impact of placing her story in front of audiences, and so by implication she has an insight into how suffering, as an artistic concept, might be wielded to achieve both an affect, and an effect. And for Cox’s so-called insiders, like myself? It is not for me to necessarily submit to the role of bystander, witness or, at worst, voyeur, but to understand that my desire to act requires a more in-depth and challenging interrogation of one’s ethical and instinctive register. One must first engage with what Choules (2007, 463) determines is a social justice discourse predicated on an interrogation of privilege and a ‘radical refocusing of the issue and explicit analysis of power’. And, if one decides to proceed, it must be done, not with a sense of entitlement to hear or share somebody else’s story, or in fact to ‘give a voice to’ another person’s experience, but upon the principle that one’s role is to utilise one’s artistic abilities to join in voice with those who choose to artistically express.

Artistic Interventions as Self-representation The final section of this discussion turns attention towards a short performance piece created for Project 1’s culminating public event, which brought together two artistic interventions instigated by project member Ezel. The first moment surfaced in response to the following visual image which Ezel selected when asked (by me during a research session using methods akin to Photo Elicitation) to contemplate what his personal experience of integrating into Glasgow looked and felt like (Fig. 3.1). This is what having no English was like; letters floating around him in the sky, unreachable, sometimes recognisable but out of his control. Fading in and out. Jumping around. He’d try and reach them, but they’d disappear. He talked about going to the library most days and finding books in English that he recognised. He said he studied philosophy back home, and so he searched out philosophical books that he knew well. And he read them in English. At first, they were just floating symbols but slowly he said he was able to catch the letters and eventually he was able to put them in an order he could understand. (Evans 2017)

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Fig. 3.1  Ezel’s image chosen to articulate integration, 2023. Image by permission of Lillebut (makers of board game DIXIT)

The dramatic strength of this visual metaphor and his explanation stayed with me for months afterwards. And, so sure of its theatrical potential, as we approached our final event, I was prompted to ask Ezel if he would develop this image into a performance through the use of projection. As we began working on the performance piece, I recalled a workshop from earlier in the process, where project members had played with

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written projection on their bodies. We had utilised extracts of short poetic pieces written by project members, to explore the aesthetic of holding narratives on our bodies. During the session Ezel had been dissatisfied by the text we had available and instead went over to my computer and wrote something new. He wrote the word ‘Invincible’ and then walked in front of the projector. This was an act of impulsive creativity and expression that caught the breath of everyone in the room: He stands in front of us. Just him and that word. Invincible. Right there for us all to see. On his body. Of his body. He looks straight out at us, then he looks down at the word. This happens a few times. He is smiling. He’s pleased with himself? Or is he embarrassed perhaps? No, I don’t think so. I think he said exactly what he wanted to say. He laughs and walks off stage. Leaving the word, and us, hanging there for a moment. (Evans 2017)

What he did in that moment was to take control of letters and words. The very thing he felt he had said he was unable to do upon first arrival in Glasgow. Woolley suggests that representations of forced migration and displacement ‘cloud as much as they clarify’ (2014, 3). Yet there are some occasions where the insight held within an image illuminates with no ambiguity. The word ‘invincible’ is not a description one hears being used when referring to refugees, certainly not in mainstream discourse. We hear the word ‘vulnerable’ a lot, we hear ‘resilient’, we hear ‘human’, we hear ‘in need’. But we very rarely hear a word that evokes such a sense of power, a sense of strength, and a sense of defiance. I recognise that fiction can provide a space for the exploration of statelessness (Woolley 2014, 19) and recognise the value in scholars such as Woolley focusing on artists who fictionally respond to ‘the crisis’ rather than artists who self-represent. However, Ezel standing in front of the rest of the group with the word ‘Invincible’ hovering over his body demonstrates that aesthetically bold and revelatory artistic interventions will be found when people are invited to experiment, rather than prescribe. It was a beautiful and challenging moment and one that I felt compelled to help develop for an audience to witness. With the support of an animator, and a choreographer, and in conversation with myself and Haree, Ezel went on to bring these two artistic interventions together. Here, I offer a short description of the final performance:

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Ezel turns away from the audience and faces the projection screen at the back of the stage. Letters begin appearing on the screen. Tumbling across the space and then disappearing. We see Ezel following them, at first with his eyes and then he begins to try and catch them before they tumble out of sight. He struggles but slowly begins to control them, at first spelling out ‘I am’ before finally commanding all the letters. He spins them and eventually they begin to take shape into a word. The audience reads: ‘I am invincible’. He turns to the audience and reveals his t-shirt, which until this moment has been hidden underneath his hoody. Lit up in bold on his t-shirt is that word INVINCIBLE. After a moment looking down at his body, Ezel looks at the audience. Satisfied, he exits. (Evans 2017)

Woolley suggests that the ‘the violently marked body of the asylum claimant’ (2014, 135) is often regarded by the Home Office as an indicator of authentic suffering. Whilst there are exceptions, the reliance upon the marked body as a symbol of credibility is often replicated rather than deconstructed within theatrical performance. Conversely, Ezel’s performance pushed back against this fetishisation within the asylum process, rejecting the notion of his body being required to be a ‘document’ (134) of his suffering. Instead he commanded the inscription placed on his body, taking ownership of what his body can say and do, as well as how it is viewed by an outside eye. Moreover, through a moment of misdirection Ezel’s performance offered a counterpoint to the very theatrical tropes that Woolley identifies. Just as the words were swirling in front of the audience there was a moment where it looked like the sentence would read ‘I am invisible’. This misdirection was noted by many audience members as the catalyst that shook them from what they thought was expected of them, to extend their sympathy: a theatrical transaction that audiences engaged in refugee performance are perhaps most accustomed to. A declaration of invisibility would have equated to an admittance of vulnerability or victimhood. It would have reinforced the need for audience validation; for the audience to see him. But Ezel was not interested in being seen or validated in that way. Discarding the endearing refugee and refusing the creative imagery that pathologises the binarised figure of ‘the refugee’, Ezel enacted what Bhimji refers to as a ‘performative resistance’ (2016, 84). He pushed against the ‘invisibility, isolation, and disconnectedness’ (84) imposed by states and institutional processes, as well as the very narrative forms being imagined by others seeking to represent him.

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Abram (1997, 256) argues that: [a] story that makes sense is one that stirs the senses from their slumber, one that opens the eyes and the ears to their real surroundings, tuning the tongue to the actual tastes in the air and sending chills of recognition along the surface of the skin.

In light of this, Ezel’s performance can be viewed as making sense to those that witnessed it. For instance, when he first performed it for the project members in rehearsals there was a lot of empathetic nodding and laughter, with many people vocalising their recognition of the experience Ezel was giving voice to. As he reached for the letters, we were experiencing the ‘affective register of participatory arts’ (Thompson 2011, 116), which sees shared moments of creation lead to an understanding between those present in the room. As such this offers an insight into language learning that goes beyond being able to communicate in day-to-day life; to access spaces of education and work; or being able to navigate bureaucratic processes. In his story about language, Ezel spoke of being able to take the floating symbols and make sense of them. In this respect, language can provide oneself with the tools for self-definition by which to publicly present oneself on one’s own terms—whether that be on stage or in spaces of everyday interaction. Some months after this performance was publicly presented, I had the opportunity to witness how the sensemaking of this performance had become an embodied piece of learning for one of our audience members. As I crossed the road in central Glasgow a young woman with her own experience of the asylum process, shouted at me as she crossed the other way ‘I am Invincible’. I looked up at her to hear; ‘I tell everyone about that moment’, she said. ‘I am invincible too, that’s what I thought when I saw it. I really needed that word’. We were going in opposite directions and the traffic lights were changing so that is where our conversation ended, but her reaction has stayed with me. She brought to life Abram’s contention that: [t]o make sense is to release the body from the constraints imposed by outworn ways of speaking, and hence to renew and rejuvenate one’s felt awareness of the world. (1997, 256)

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Through Ezel’s declaration on stage, the young woman had found at least one of the words she needed to allow her to enact her own performative resistance in everyday life. And in that lies creativity’s potential. It can create new words, new knowledge, and new ways of understanding to help us position ourselves within the world.

Conclusion Throughout this chapter, I have drawn attention to how staging suffering was an issue present across two arts projects. I have demonstrated that an aesthetic of injury and the imperative to tell are recurring and powerful practices that circulate around participatory projects with those categorised as refugees. I have worked to untangle some of the ethical and representational challenges, as well as the aesthetic opportunities, that emerge when artistic processes resist and challenge the theatrical archetypes. I have sought to demonstrate how creative practices can be developed to offer what project member Bold Solicitor described as ‘indirect’ routes into creatively exploring themselves, rather than the narratives that are assumed to define them, whilst also trying to construct performances to be witnessed by an audience. By offering an insight from within the practice, I have asked questions about the ‘how’ of participatory arts practice and contributed to discussions about ‘who’. I believe these are ideas that must be critically engaged with by practitioners directly, not left for theoretical analysis outside of the workshop room. It is in this synergy between theory and practice that this chapter makes a constructive and critical contribution to the expanding field of refugee performance practice and analysis, as well as reinforcing the need to consistently interrogate the unique impacts of representation.

References Abram, David. 1997. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-­ Than-­Human World. New York: Vintage. Ahmed, Sara. 2000. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. Oxfordshire: Routledge. Back, Les. 2007. The Art of Listening. London: Bloomsbury. Balfour, Michael. 2013. Preface. In Refugee Performance: Practical Encounters, ed. Michael Balfour, xxii–xxvii. Bristol: Intellect.

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Balfour, Michael, and Nicholas Woodrow. 2013. On Stitches in Balfour. In Refugee Performance: Practical Encounters, ed. Michael Balfour, 1–20. Bristol: Intellect. Bhimji, Fazila. 2016. Collaborations and Performative Agency in Refugee Theater in Germany. Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies 14 (1): 83–103. Bishop, Claire. 2012. Artificial Hells: Participatory Arts and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso. Bucholtz, Mary. 2000. The politics of transcription. Journal of Pragmatics 32: 1439–1465. Choules, Kathryn. 2007. The Shifting Sands of Social Justice Discourse: From Situating the Problem with “Them,” to Situating it with “Us”. Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 29 (5): 461–481. Costello, Amy, and Frederica Boswell. 2019. The Ethics of Nonprofit Storytelling: Survivor Porn and Parading Trauma. Non-Profit Quarterly. https://nonprofitquarterly.org/the-­e thics-­o f-­n onprofit-­s tor ytelling-­s ur vivor-­p orn-­a nd-­ parading-­trauma/. Accessed 1 September 2019. Cox, Emma. 2012. Victimhood, Hope and the Refugee Narrative: Affective Dialectics in Magnet Theatre’s Every Year, Every Day, I Am Walking. Theatre Research International 37 (2): 118–133. ———. 2014. Theatre and Migration. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2015. The Politics of Innocence in Contemporary Theatre about Refugees. In Twenty-First Century Drama, ed. Siân Adiseshiah and Louise LePage, 213–235. Palgrave Macmillan. Cox, Emma, and Caroline Wake. 2018. Envisioning Asylum/Engendering Crisis: Or, Performance and Forced Migration 10 Years on. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 23 (2): 137–147. Cummings, Lindsay B. 2016. Empathy as Dialogue in Theatre and Performance. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Danewid, Ida. 2017. White Innocence in the Black Mediterranean: Hospitality and the Erasure of History. Third World Quarterly 38 (7): 1674–1689. Dennis, Rea. 2008. Refugee Performance: Aesthetic Representation and Accountability in Playback Theatre. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 13 (2): 211–215. Edmondson, Laura. 2005. Marketing Trauma and the Theatre of War in Northern Uganda. Theatre Journal 57 (3): 451–474. Evans, Catrin. 2017. Doctoral Research Journal (Fieldnotes). Unpublished. ———. 2020. The Arts of Integration: Scottish Policies of Refugee Integration and the Role of the Creative and Performing Arts. PhD Thesis, University of Glasgow. Foster, Victoria. 2016. Collaborative Arts-based Research for Social Justice. Oxfordshire: Routledge.

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Guenette, Francis. 2009. Time Line Drawings: Enhancing Participant Voice in Narrative Interviews on Sensitive Topics. International Journal of Qualitative Methods 2009 8 (1): 85–92. Hazou, Rand. 2008. Refugitive and the Theatre of Dys-appearance. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 13 (2): 181–186. hooks, bell. 1992. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press. ———. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as Practice of Freedom. Oxfordshire: Routledge. Jeffers, Alison. 2012. Refugees, Theatre and Crisis: Performing Global Identities. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Jones, Joni L. 2002. Performance Ethnography: The Role of Embodiment in Cultural Authenticity. Theatre Topics 12 (1): 1–15. Kay, Jackie. 2014. Glasgow Snow. https://www.amnesty.org.uk/files/2019-­01/ Glasgow Snow by Jackie Kay.pdf?s2LZXjHsLFl6M0kknINUbqKafrpif4PJ=. Accessed 9 March 2020. Khosravi, Shahram. 2009. Sweden: Detention and Deportation of Asylum Seekers. Race and Class 50 (4): 38–56. Leavy, Patricia. 2015. Method Meets Arts: Arts-Based research Practice. 2nd ed. New York: The Guildford Press. Lemke, Sleglinde. 2010. Facing Poverty: Towards a Theory of Articulation. Amerikastudien / American Studies 55 (1): 95–122. O’Neill, Maggie. 2008. Transnational Refugees: The Transformative Role of Art? Forum: Qualitative Social Research. 9 (2): 59–81. ———. 2010. Asylum, Migration and Community. Bristol: The Policy Press. ———. 2013. Prostitution and Feminism: Towards a Politics of Feeling. Cambridge: Polity Press. O’Neill, Maggie, Sara Giddens, Patricia Breatnach, Carl Bagley, Darren Bourne, and Tony Judge. 2002. Renewed Methodologies for Social Research: Ethno-­ Mimesis as Performative Praxis. The Sociological Review. 50 (1): 69–88. Phipps, Alison. 2017. Research for CULT Committee – Why Cultural Work with Refugees. In Depth Analysis. Brussels: European Parliament, Policy Department for Structural and Cohesion Policies. RISE. 2015. 10 Things You Need to Consider If You Are an Artist Not of the Refugee and Asylum Seeker Community. RISE. http://riserefugee.org/10-­ things-­y ou-­n eed-­t o-­c onsider-­i f-­y ou-­a re-­a n-­a rtist-­n ot-­o f-­t he-­r efugee-­a nd-­ asylum-­seeker-­community-­looking-­to-­work-­with-­our-­community/. Accessed November 2015. Sales, Rosemary. 2002. The Deserving and the Undeserving? Refugees, Asylum Seekers and Welfare in Britain. Critical Social Policy 22 (3): 456–478. Salverson, Julie. 1999. Transgressive Storytelling Or an Aesthetic of Injury: Performance, Pedagogy and Ethics. Theatre Research in Canada. 20 (1): 34–51.

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Sellars, Peter. 2014. Foreword. In Theatre and Migration, ed. Emma Cox. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador. Suzuki, Moe. 2016. Performing the Human: Refugees, the Body, and the Politics of Universalism, in University of Oxford Working Paper Series, No.117. Oxford: Refugee Studies Centre. Thompson, James. 2011. Performance Affects: Applied Theatre and the End of Effect. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2015. Towards an Aesthetics of Care. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 20 (4): 430–441. Woolley, Agnes. 2014. Contemporary Asylum Narratives: Representing Refugees in the Twenty-First Century. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 4

‘To live well is to story well’: Co-writing and Polyphonic Writing with Denmark’s Asylum Community Helene Grøn

‘Start here’ ‘Start here: I am my own lawyer’, The Banker states, setting up her story which details her journey through what she calls ‘the deadly asylum system of Denmark’ (2022a, 13). ‘Start here: The camps make inactivity the only thing that happens’ (2022, 13). Playing with the reader’s perception of beginning by repeatedly dwelling on ‘start here’, The Banker underscores the many stops and starts and the demand for self-reliance (‘I am a pocket lawyer’ 2022, 13) when navigating the asylum process. The story maps how The Banker has mothered in two different worlds, that of Denmark and that of the camp. The sections on Denmark describe the support of a system in which ‘it is possible to get the best of parenting, and the best of working life, “because the government supports you to do both”’ (2022a,

H. Grøn (*) University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 F. Barclay, B. Ivey (eds.), Contemporary Representations of Forced Migration in Europe, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Human Rights, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47831-4_4

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13), a statement undermined by the uncertainties and hindrances of parenting as an asylum seeker. I ‘start here’ to reflect this chapter’s preoccupation with the possibilities of co-writing with and alongside Denmark’s asylum population. The contextual backdrop was the invitation extended to Trampoline House, a Copenhagen refugee justice community centre, to contribute to the Documenta 15 art festival held in Kassel, Germany. For the 100 days of the festival, Trampoline House recreated their artistic and communal practices through performances, workshops, and events. The artistic team, of which I was part, was a mix of refugees, asylum seekers, and people with citizen privilege, whose artistic work all aimed for asylum justice. A fundamental part of being able to partake physically in the festival relied on border practices, meaning that only some of the artistic team and the Trampoline House community could travel. When we did travel, our visa processes and administrative tasks were different, obliging mostly those with asylum experience to jump through bureaucratic hoops to get their ‘fremmedpas’, their ‘stranger’s passport’. The respective workshops and projects for Documenta 15 sought to disrupt the exclusionary principles of asylum policy, seeking creative ways to bring together demographics who are not allowed to cross borders across borders, nonetheless. The following describes two writing processes: Firstly, I reflect on critical and creative writing workshops I conducted with collaborator Jean Claude Mangomba Mbombo, a poet and human rights activist. From these workshops, we created Guest Books, which were filled with the writing from the workshop and prompts for the museumgoers to reflect on and respond to. Secondly, I think about writing stories in close collaboration with two residents living in Avnstrup Asylum Centre. One was Ali Gholami, a father, a volunteer driver and translator, and a resident in Avnstrup. The other is a woman who has chosen the pseudonym ‘The Banker’. At the time of our writing together, The Banker lived and mothered between Avnstrup Asylum Centre and the city where her partner with residency lives. These stories became part of what we took to Documenta 15, but they were mainly written to be a part of the visAvis— Voices on Asylum and Migration magazine, which was printed by the lumbung press in Kassel and subsequently published online. I start by offering a methodological proposition that takes Halleh Ghorashi’s ‘polyphonic writing’ in tandem with performance writing and

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with Miranda Fricker’s notion of ‘epistemic injustice’.1 Following a contextualisation of the Danish asylum system, I reflect on the writing workshop and Trampoline House’s contribution to the Documenta 15 festival, focusing especially on the Guest Books and on the possibilities of polyphonic writing across spatial and political divides. The last section thinks about Boochani and Tofighian’s suggestions that living well means to story well in the context of writing The Banker and Gholami’s stories for visAvis. Some sections of this chapter are written in an autoethnographic register to engage with the creative outputs of a co-writing process. I tie the link between polyphonic writing, autoethnography, and ‘living well’ as the writers of Autoethnography do: ‘the stories we tell enable us to live and to live better; stories allow us to lead more reflective, more meaningful, and more just lives’ (Adams et al. 2014, 1). As such, they propose that autoethnographic method already stages the dialogical tension between speaking from oneself and engaging with ‘culture(s), politics and social research’ (2014, 1). At the same time, I hold on to Hugo Letiche’s point that polyphony ‘demands relationship and difference’ (2010, 262), specifically when it comes to writing and co-writing across legal differences. This autoethnographic register thereby strives to be ‘open to multiple possible rejoinders, next moves, and questions’ (Letiche 2010, 263) and to underline that this chapter is only possible to write because of the collaborations with Jean Claude, The Banker, Ali Gholami, the Documenta 15 artistic team and those living in Denmark’s asylum camps. I therefore ‘start here’ by dedicating this chapter to them and positioning them as its key knowers and artistic creators.

Polyphonic Writing, Performance Writing, and Epistemic Injustice In Behrouz Boochani’s award-winning No Friend But the Mountains, detailing his time in the Australian offshore detention facility Manus Prison, Boochani’s translator Omid Tofighian reflects: ‘after meeting 1  I thank Mette Obling Høeg for suggesting the work of Miranda Fricker. I also thank her and Karen Vedel and Anne Ring Petersen for engaging with me in further conversation about this work.

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Behrouz, I’ve come to realise how integral narratives are to living life well’ (2018, 375). Boochani positions art as a humanising force in the face of a political apparatus that continually orders the asylum seeker into spaces and narratives of extra-legality. Similarly, the Refugee Tales project, a collaboration between the Gatwick Detainee Welfare Group and prominent UK-based writers, is a movement away from ‘a debate that criminalises/ Human Movement’ (Herd and Pincus 2016, v) and towards the ‘better imagined’ (Smith 2021). Miranda Fricker’s notion of ‘epistemic injustice’ helps envision the role of stories in imagining better and living well: Fricker addresses instances of injustice specifically around how an individual ‘conveys knowledge to others [and makes sense of] social experiences’ (2007, 2). Epistemic practices are then inevitably ‘connected with social power’ (Fricker 2007, 2), meaning it is not only about who can be ‘knowledge holders’ (Lenette 2019, 5), but also about who has ‘appropriate understandings of their experiences ready to draw on’ (Fricker 2007, 148). Hermeneutical inequality shows how those who hold powerful social positions are both more likely to have adequate language with which to word their lives, but also to be received with understanding. Those in more marginal positions, like refugees and asylum seekers, then often have experiences that are ‘obscured from understanding owing to prejudicial laws in shared resources for social interpretation’ (Fricker 2007, 147). Laying bare the shared stakes, Fricker notes how this poses the risk of ‘collective hermeneutical impoverishment’ (2007, 148), because there will inevitably be experiences in need of understanding without adequate interpretive or expressive frames. Boochani’s attention to the limitations of mainstream political and journalistic language essentially responds to the collective hermeneutical impoverishment surrounding his socio-political experience: ‘the official language only refers to [Manus] as an “offshore processing centre”, but for us, the incarcerated refugees, it is real prison’ (Boochani and Tofighian 2019). Boochani understands how narrative can draw the line between what is spoken or written officially, and what is lived and written in situations like his. Having literary and creative language available is not only a matter of adequate reflection of reality, but also for continued living: ‘the only people who can overcome and survive all the suffering inflicted are those who exercise creativity’ (Boochani 2018, 128). Positioning the ‘better imagined’ and the potential for living life well within Boochani’s and The Banker’s texts might seem dissonant: while creativity can certainly be

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a tool for survival in situations that remain resistant to political and legal change, what is being imagined better? Lyndsey Stonebridge’s reading of Hannah Arendt outlines the examination of statelessness and rightlessness beyond the spheres of politics. Statelessness in Arendt’s thinking is ‘existential as well as political’, meaning that it needs ‘literary and cultural understanding [and] new forms of thinking and imagination’ (Stonebridge 2018, 4). While much has changed since Arendt’s postwar reflections, her attention to ‘how migration is authorised by states’ and ‘how it is experienced by individuals’ (Cox 2021, 2) remains relevant, making the historical parallel continually instructive (Woolley 2016, 377). Arendt’s reflections on the confluence between the philosophical and political life of statelessness foreground how imagining better and living well might be a matter of reorienting epistemic and hermeneutical practices towards ‘the capacity to imagine a future’ (Cox 2021, 2). If epistemic injustice serves as a framework to level the impoverishment of hermeneutical and interpretive stances when listener and teller do not have words for a social experience, then it might also speak to instances of attempted narration when stories are legally and politically co-opted. Both Gholami and The Banker narrate moments of impossible telling: Gholami writes of his journey by boat like this: ‘When I remember this situation, I lose myself, but it is part of my story’ (2022, 83), while The Banker notes that ‘[l]ife in the camps is unexplainable. I have no explanations of why I am not allowed to go to school, to go to work, or really do anything’ (2022, 13). In both instances, the not-knowing is narrated to show where the gaps in knowledge and interpretive frames are, not just in the context of their lives, but in the broader framework of their political situatedness. Both The Banker and Gholami’s stories document imagining a better life for their children. As such, they are challenging some of the rhetoric alive in political discourses guessing at the motivations of people seeking entry to Europe. The Banker states: ‘it is not everyone who likes movement’ (2022, 12). Indeed, for her, movement requires prior thinking and imagination before it can become a reality: ‘Moving is something you think before you do, and it is not easy to think about or to do it’ (2022, 12). Describing the dangers of entering ‘fortress Europe’ (UNITED n.d.), Gholami asks: ‘Why would I put my children in this situation? Why would I take the risk if I had another choice?’ (2022, 83). In both cases, the line between imagining a better future and living in a process of waiting is drawn by counter-narrating an implicit political rhetoric. The Banker

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shows how migration is an imaginative process before it is a physical reality, and that it is not everybody who wishes to undertake it in the way governments or authorities might presume, whereas Gholami shows how the danger of entering Europe alone speaks to the nuances of knowledge and experience often neglected in mainstream and journalistic language. Ghorashi uses polyphonic writing both as a methodology for writing with migrant and refugee women, but also to produce texts that can rethink ‘the authority of authorship’ (2014, 60), gesturing towards coproduction. Polyphonic writing then ‘involves the ways that the production of knowledge is negotiated throughout the process of writing by giving agency to the multiple voices that it constitutes’ (2014, 60). This move towards a wider understanding of collectivity and authored responsibility is echoed in Refugee Imaginaries: the writers remark how representations of forced displacement are never only about refugees, but rather the ‘whole complex set of historical, cultural, legal and ethical relations that currently tie all of us—citizens of nation-states and citizens of humanity only—together’ (2020, 4). Producing texts from this perspective not only unsettles the authority of authorship, but also thinks about the outer circumstances and relationality of textual production. The field of performance writing has explored some of the tensions of how writing already performs through and beyond its textual manifestations. Poet John Hall suggests that writing is performative not least when it ‘retain[s] its thickness, drawing you in to the act, as it were, of language’ (2013, 24). In Ric Allsopp and Julieanna Preston’s editorial for the Writing and Performance special issue of Performance Research, they ask how performance and writing connect to think about ‘how a text can be conceptualised, written, presented and figured with equal or more contingency and responsiveness to temporal and corporeal happenings, and vice versa’ (2018, 2). Drawing polyphonic and performance writing together might then be able to address textual productions that happen across the complex sets of relations outlined above, but it might also show how writing is porous to the impacts of the spatiotemporal conditions under which it is produced; in short, text infused with ‘the same respect for live-ness that unfolds spatially as it does textually’ (Allsopp and Preston 2018, 2). As the sections below will detail, writing with The Banker, Gholami, and people living in camps required the crossing of space; it required writing in between and while doing other things, as well as finding continual ways of communicating in situations that make a gradual creative process challenging. These are not solely extra-textual realities, but also make their way onto the page.

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For example, The Banker writes: ‘every letter you get is threatening and full of demands. “If you don’t sign here, you get deported”, “if you don’t go there, you get deported”’ (2022, 15). She thereby reaches for thick descriptions that denote an outward reality of being ordered around, while bringing attention to the effects of a language encoded by threats. Turning specifically to the genres of refugee writing, Anna Bernard offers that while ‘refugee writing is inseparable from the question of literary craft’ (2020, 66), some genres of writing ‘lend themselves more readily to activism or can be produced more easily in difficult circumstances’ (66). Dwelling on texts produced through interviews that are subsequently ‘edited and performed by non-refugee artists for an implied audience of other non-refugees’ (67), Bernard notes potential ‘problems of voice, substitution and identification’ (2020, 67). I take Bernard’s reflections into the descriptions of the project below, but I here position myself as a non-refugee editor within this process as follows: my work is between the University of Copenhagen and being a long-time community member of Trampoline House, where I have volunteered and conducted creative, research, and activist projects. I have travelled to conferences and to Kassel with these texts, which highlights the exclusionary principles of position and nationality. I cross borders easily, a privilege afforded to me by whiteness, a Danish passport, and the wider ways I am supported by academic affiliations and holding citizenship in a welfare state. Taking and expressing this position provides a backdrop to the ethical and creative challenges of co-writing across legal relations explored in what follows, but it also intersects more widely with both this chapter and the book’s reflections on the possibilities and limits of refugee representation.

‘B/ordering’: Trampoline House and the Danish Asylum System a prison has better conditions than asylum deportation centres Sjælsmark and Avnstrup. (Gholami 2022, 81)

In November 2022, the local unit for the Nordic and Baltic countries of the UNHCR wrote a report with a series of recommendations for Denmark to strengthen refugee protection. This report builds on a prior letter written nearly two years before, containing 16 recommendations for Denmark to ensure the quality of protection for those arriving and those who have refugee status. In both letters, the UNHCR focuses on the ‘paradigm

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shift’ in Danish politics, ‘which changed the protection focus in Denmark from supporting integration and inclusion to a focus on primarily emphasising the hoped-for short duration of protection’ (2021, 4). In practical and lived terms, this has meant that residence permits were granted only on a temporary basis, that the rules for family reunifications were tightened and subject to continual change, and that subsidies for newly arrived people were significantly lowered, symbolically changing the name from ‘integrationsydelse’ (integration service) to ‘selvførsørgelses—eller hjemrejseydelse’ (self-maintenance or return service) (Ingvorsen 2019). Making refugee protection temporary and placing the responsibility of integration on the individual are some of the measures the UNHCR report criticises. The continual review of protection needs means that people with refugee status have to renew their residency permits every two years. This goes against the focus on self-integration and maintenance set out by the government in the first place: the temporariness and frequent reviews ‘undermine refugees’ sense of security, creating anxiety and uncertainty which hinders their integration process’ (UNHCR 2022, 3). Although the government holds that they strive towards creating a more humane asylum system (Løvkvist 2023; Frederiksen et al. 2022), the letter also targets Denmark’s increasing efforts at ‘externalising migration management’ (Zaiotti 2016, 1) by seeking to locate a reception centre in Rwanda. Since the plan’s conception in 2018, it has been met with criticism and concern over human rights from parties within the government as well as external organisations like the African Union (Ababa 2021), the UNHCR (2021, 2022), and from the EU-commission (Munksgaard 2022). Nonetheless, the government opened a project office in Rwanda in August 2022, where employees of Udenrigsministeriet (the foreign ministry) will work to strengthen ties and further the collaboration (Munksgaard 2022). The impetus of externalising is present also in locating asylum centres outside cities, making it difficult for residents to access infrastructures of community and support. For example, Avnstrup sits in a rural area. When connections link up (bus, train, bus), it takes an hour and a half to get to Copenhagen. Although they are writing about the UK’s Rwanda plans, Alison Phipps and Hyab Yohannes view externalising measures as a way of placing those seeking asylum in ‘spaces of exception and extra-legality’ (2022). This is based, then, on a ‘b/ordering principle [where] the border both borders and orders […] the racialised and illegalised people by any means’ (2022). In conversations and his lectures for Documenta 15, Jean Claude

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contextualised the b/order against colonial and personal histories of himself and the people he had met in the camps, but also against the theoretical frameworks of W.E.B. Dubois’ ‘colour line’ and Frantz Fanon’s ‘zones of being’. According to Jean Claude, the ‘notion of the border’ (Mbombo 2023) then invented a ‘distinction between the coloniser and the colonised’ (Mbombo 2023), which, in a current perspective, continues to create ‘two different Zones of people living in the same world’ (2023). As Achille Mbembe echoes, b/ordered people become ‘[d]iscounted bodies’ that are trapped in uninhabitable worlds and inhospitable places’ (2019, 10). Jean Claude continues to lay bare the material and embodied consequences of the b/order on the individual like so: When Asylum seekers and migrants reach the Western countries, they face militarised borders, armed border guards, indefinite detention in prisons and camps, precarious working conditions, minimal or no access to social services, criminalisation, racism and constant treat of deportation. This means that when Asylum seekers, refugees and migrants are trying to cross the borders in the global North, ‘the borders cross them’, instead. (Mbombo 2023)

Being located at the periphery is not only an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ distance from political centres, it equally unearths how spatial disbarment is a narrative and communal dislocation that hinders relationships developing and integration happening. In short, it works to prevent the kind of collectivity that might rework hermeneutical injustice via relational exchange. For example, Gholami’s description of the asylum centre includes reflecting on being discounted and on the failings of interpersonal exchange: ‘Many times we have complained, many times we have demonstrated against this system, but the deportation officers say to us “this is a political decision”’ (2022, 81). The contrast between the interpersonal relationship with staff, and a faceless system, show how they are both subjected to the kind of ‘political decision’ that shuts down dialogue, response, and responsibility. A few months after the artistic team began workshops for the respective workshops with a group recruited from the camps, asylum seekers started arriving from the war in Ukraine. They were met with ‘temporary protection’, which gave them a residence permit along with ‘access to education and to the labour market’ (European Commission 2022). In practice, these arrivals meant that the people living in the camps closest to

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Copenhagen were moved to other, less central ones on the mainland. These shifting circumstances underscore the continual need for ‘protection-oriented’ ways of responding to any ‘unprecedented refugee situation’, but equally highlights the ‘different level of treatment with equally deserving refugees arriving in Denmark from other countries’ (UNHCR 2022, 3). For example, what was designed by political mandate to be the inhospitable deportation centre Sjælsmark, pressuring the rejected asylum seeker to give up and leave willingly (Suárez-Krabbe et al. 2018), was rapidly turned into another reception centre due to its geographical proximity to the existing one, Sandholm. Throughout the spring, the Trampoline House community navigated how the toughest work of solidarity befalls those who have just arrived from war and those who have lived in deportation centres for years at the time. In visAvis, writer and editor Eden Germa interviews two Ukrainian sisters, Vlada and Kristina. Reflecting on Bernard’s question of who writes on behalf of whom, Germa contextualises how she was granted asylum after ten years in the system and now wishes to help other people tell their stories. Germa’s interview not only displays the possibilities for storied solidarity and hospitality, but also works as an astute critique of the differentiation between refugees based on their nationality by showing the acute need for safety, the hopes and dreams for a future, and the kindred ways of tackling processes of integration. For example, Germa writes how the sisters are building a life and ‘working hard to learn Danish’ (2022, 63). Because of the shifting situation, we changed our strategies: instead of conducting workshops only in Trampoline House, we also went to the camps. Instead of doing only our individual projects, we helped each other out as a collective. I also went with Shakira Kasigwa Mukamusoni to the camps to write with people and to assist with her work; a video and drama project adding visualisation to the b/ordering principles. Mukamusoni names her project ‘the chain’ to show how each instance and space in the asylum system is another chain around the individual navigating through it (Mukamusoni 2023). Part of our crossing these distances is then not only ensuring that the Trampoline House community is represented in Kassel, but also to redress the balance between what Agnes Woolley calls ‘literary and legal’ storytelling (2016, 378). On our trips to Asylcenter Avnstrup, Gholami’s family invites us to their house and cooks the Iranian dish ‫( قورمه سبزی‬Ghormeh Sabzi) for us so we can eat together when we finish. We go from house to house and ask questions like ‘how many camps have you stayed in?’ and ‘what is the

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situation like here?’ I write with The Banker, as she is working on her story of being a mother first in Denmark and later in the camp. She shows me pictures of their grocery webpage from which they have to get all their food. If you want to buy oil, the only choice for a long time was a 5 litre can for 17,103 kroner (23 euros), impossible for a budget like theirs. The next time we come, I help make banners that the families can hold for photographs. My work as a writer on days like this consists of thinking about how to communicate what it is like to go grocery shopping via a web page that limits not only what you can buy, but how you buy it; it consists of colouring in letters to make them more visible on banners and helping with formulations like ‘we live in a prison’ and ‘stop separating families’. It also consists of sharing meals, helping with interviews, and caring for children while Shakira interviews their parents. As James Thompson has proposed in his work on ‘aesthetics of care’, there need not be a separation in artistic practice and caring for and alongside a community. Rather these examples of ‘public justice and private care […] ultimately might be foundational to the ethics and aesthetics of a theatre and arts practice that seeks to engage with communities’ (2015, 432). I colour the letters of a banner spelling ‘we are living in a prison’, written by a woman my age, as I listen to a mother who was deported in March 2022 with her two oldest children, despite Denmark having no agreements for refoulement with her country of origin. She was subsequently sent back to Denmark, first to Ellebæk Prison, then to Avnstrup, from where the family made an appeal to the UN Human Rights Committee. I conclude this discussion on The Banker’s poignant descriptions of the effects of the threats of deportation on the individual: It is 3am in the camp. This is when the world sleeps, but you are awake. Any noise that you don’t know scares you. You will go to the window and check many times, and if you stay in your bed, you will think about their threats. You will think about how every letter you get is threatening and full of demands. ‘If you don’t sign here, you get deported’, ‘if you don’t go there, you get deported’. What they don’t say: the police come under the cloak of night. What they don’t say: 3am is the deadliest time. With Red Cross staff, they can knock at your door, they can take you. What they don’t say: you never know who they are coming for. You? Your children? Your neighbours? What they don’t say: 3am is the time where you’re running from something, but you don’t know what you are running from. (2022, 15)

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Trampoline House seeks to be a counter-space to the b/ordering principles of the asylum system by offering a space for hospitality and encounter (Grøn 2022, 2023). They emphasise creating a space for democracy and encounter, thereby challenging integration practices and rhetorics where citizens ‘accept no gifts from refugees, yet expect refugees to accept their way of life as a gift’ (Yohannes 2022). The House operated from a site in Nørrebro, running daily activities like legal counselling and language classes, but also community dinners, Women’s Classes, Children’s Club, and events bringing together the wider public and the users of the House. Due to the pandemic and lack of sustainable funding initiatives, the House closed in December 2020 and opened as a weekend-venture in the community rooms of Apostelkirken (the Apostle Church) in January 2021. Sabine Dahl Nielsen and Anne Ring Petersen write about the House in the context of CAMP—the Center for Art on Migration Politic, an exhibition space embedded in the Nørrebro House. Their examination provides a backdrop to polyphonic writing and helps locate the communal values of the House and their approach to art as a socio-political practice. Asking what a public space means for ‘a plurality of publics’ (2020, 14), they discuss how the social encounters in the House are ‘shaped under the impact of former and ongoing (im-)migration’. Although CAMP was then specifically a venue for art, its location in the House meant that it could become a sphere for ‘public debate and knowledge production’ (Nielsen and Petersen 2020, 15). The House and CAMP then challenge the b/ order’s seclusion from debate and artistic community, simultaneously unsettling hermeneutic inequality. As Nielsen and Petersen argue, this ‘transcultural engagement’ offers a space for the ‘complex and often conflictual transmutation of cultures’ (2020, 14; emphasis in original). While judicial and lived realities of asylum seekers, refugees, and migrants continue to be politically drawn, the House examines what politically engaged artistic practice looks like as a daily effort and challenge to the continual reality of b/orders.

Writing Workshops, Documenta 15, This Is a Guest Book This is politics, not art All art is politics. (Two separate entries transcribed from This is a Guest Book)

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Beyond the artistic legacy of CAMP, it was due to Trampoline House’s emphasis on collectivity and democracy as part of artistic and communal practices that they were invited to contribute to Documenta 15. ruangrupa, the Jakarta-based collective who curated the exhibition, work from ‘lumbung values’, meaning ‘an artistic and economic model [which] is rooted in principles such as collectivity, communal resource sharing, and equal allocation’ (ruangrupa 2022). Many of the installations were by collectives that document the connection between art, politics, and community.2 Documenta 15 thereby not only strove for a ‘more inclusive, equitable art world’ (Arnold 2022), but also posed a challenge to the ‘well established elite’ (Nielsen and Petersen 2020, 16) and to the idea of art-­ making as an un-political and individual endeavour. The critique of the decisions made by the collective and the controversy surrounding specific artworks have been, and undoubtedly will continue to be, ‘extensively analysed, criticised, and theorised’ (Arnold 2022). The limitations of space means that I will focus on the writing workshops and Guest Books. Nonetheless, Khalid Albaih’s reflection for an interview ties the link to this chapter’s inquiry of living well and imagining better in the face of epistemic injustice and political hostility. Albaih states: ‘Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t be part of the “art world,” let alone the documenta’ (2022). Working with lumbung values has then highlighted ‘the wealth of indigenous knowledge, humour and years of activist experience’ allowing ‘artists like me to bring our experiences and perspectives to the established art world’ (2022). Echoing Boochani’s call for the kind of language that can adequately reflect experience, Albaih continues ‘art should also be part of the reality in which we live’ (2022). The turn towards participatory practices and emphasis on debate and knowledge exchange can be viewed as a broader trend in the art world (Petersen and Nielsen 2021), but it might equally be understood as an orientation towards epistemic justice and veracious reflections of the ‘reality in which we live’. This global and collaborative backdrop encouraged Jean Claude and I to continue to think of writing as collaborative practice both in planning the workshop and in the production of texts. We decided to blend 2  See for example Project Art Works, who work with people with complex support need over artistic projects; the Wajukuu Art Project located in Nairobi creating employment through the sale of artworks; or individual artists like Richard Bell, whose work The Aboriginal Tent Embassy celebrates its 50th anniversary of First Nations resistance in Australia. During the festival, the Tent Embassy hosted debates, sharings, and videos of resistance and solidarity.

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teaching with practical writing sessions, thereby aiming to create a space where people could share their expertise and learn tools to fashion the kind of writing they were interested in. Jean Claude conducted mini lectures, for example on ‘plot, story and conflict’, after which I would run a practical session where we often started from a writing exercise and branched into individual or collective writing. For instance, we began a workshop from Alice LaPlante’s notion that good writing is ‘fuelled by an urgent desire to understand something that eludes understanding’ (2007, 67). Many of the people who came to the workshops were in situations that not only elude understanding but remain incomprehensible. This became stories of living in a democratic country but outside its benefits, of understanding the inalienability of rights, but not having them, and of parenting without institutional support. In Letiche’s reading of Gayatri Spivak’s work as an instance of polyphony, he notes how writing polyphonically faces the challenge of texts ‘collapsing into a single truth, principle or totalization’ (2010, 263). Tying the link to epistemic injustice, Letiche outlines how polyphonic writing at the intersection of ‘epistemology’ and ‘social circumstances’ risk leading to a ‘political grand narrative’ that might produce ‘literary quality’ but not ‘do justice to anyone or to any circumstance’ (2010, 263). Nonetheless, echoing LaPlante’s claim that a writer’s role is not ‘to solve the mysteries around us, but to render them precisely’ (2007, 378), The Banker and Gholami’s inclusion of political and camp ‘scripts’ reflects an existing polyphony where texts and voices are ‘interacting and in relation to one another’ (Letiche 2010, 262). We conduct one of LaPlante’s exercises of writing a list where each item starts with ‘I want to know why’ (2007, 71), suggested for gathering material of unknowability. From these responses, we invited people to write a letter to a person of their choosing. The answers ranged from ‘I want to know why we have love’ to ‘I want to know why I have waited 7 years for asylum’. While LaPlante’s exercise abets thematically rich writing, in our workshop it highlighted the structural ‘mysteries’ that people already knew about living politically marginalised lives. The letters thereby generated fictional dialogue between people in the camps and politicians, friends and heads of state, but they also foregrounded how writing ‘is not a sufficient form of action in itself’ (Bernard 2020, 77) in situations with sustained need for legal change. Even so, for some it helped find containers of expression for lived experiences. In an interview with The Banker, she spoke about it like so:

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Helene:    Why did you want to tell your story? The Banker: Because I think I was blocked up with a lot of things inside me that I could not send out. So I think writing the story was the best way to send out what I had inside. (The Banker 2022b)

Translation is part of the practices of the House, and we encouraged people to write in their own languages, both for ease of expression and as a reflection of a multilingually hospitable community. Nonetheless, most wished to write in English for an international audience.3 Unintentionally, this became a drive towards co-writing, as people would team up with those who had more fluency, but it would equally encourage engagement with each other’s interpretations and experiences. For example, a group wrote a story about a policeman working in the camp. As The Banker’s story shows, police are often contested figures for asylum seekers: ‘the phrase “the police is your friend” is not the same in the camps’ (2022, 15). This discussion reflected individual positions and experiences, but it also included imagining the human motifs that might prompt a person to take this kind of job, ranging from dislike of asylum seekers to being the breadwinner for a family (Fig. 4.1). After the workshops, we had several pieces of writing from finished texts to prompt responses. We asked: how we might bring the writing of people who cannot travel across not only geographical space and political divides, but also across the ‘spatial constructions of identity’? (Wilson 2017, 55). What might it look like to create a dialogue from people’s writing and between people who might not normally talk, like the audience of Documenta 15, and people in the Danish asylum system? And what if a book could be a site of welcome? This generated the idea for a Guest Book that could textually represent the House and the camps and think critically about the ‘giving-receiving paradox’ (Yohannes 2022) in host-guest relations. We copied people’s writing and glued them onto the pages of books alongside prompts that allowed the visitors to reflect and respond to specific stories. The paradox of the host-guest constructions hinges on the idea that it is ‘only citizens who have the right to give’ (2022). In an echo 3  I locate this chapter’s mentioning of multilingualism in the following creative and academic works: multilingualism is discussed as a subversive and necessary approach to scholarship for example in Alison Phipps (2019); as a dramaturgical tool for example by Yana Meerzon, Katharina Pewny, Laura Paetau, and Azadeh Sharifi (2020); and as a literary tool reflective of multi and bilingual realities in globalised worlds for example by Vahni Capildeo (2016), Tawona Sitholé (2017), Rachel Gilmour (2020), and Sarah Lawson Welsch (2019).

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Fig. 4.1  Example of prompt for the Guest Book and Jean Claude Mangomba Mbombo’s poem, 2023. (© Helene Grøn)

to collective hermeneutic impoverishment, Yohannes writes how this leads to ‘a reduction of their [e.g. asylum seekers and refugees’] subjectivities’, because they are ever ‘at the receiving end’ (2022). The Guest Book sought to redress this paradox by offering an opening text guiding the reader, regardless of their subjective positions, into the stories as a receiving guest: This book follows the long tradition of treading carefully, of leaving your mark so it can be remembered that you were here, and that you were hosted and fed and kept warm while you stayed. This book follows the long tradition of documenting that hospitality is always possible in the face of a harsh world, and that drawing the line between who can be a host and who can be a guest is entirely dependent on arbitrary factors, on the broad brushstrokes of history, politics and state. On these pages, you are a guest in someone else’s stories.

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The stories in the Guest Book were curated also through the Trampoline House installation. The installation was circled by a chalk line, a demarcation of a territorial space which was easy to step over and erase, unlike many other uncrossable and invisible b/orders surrounding the lives of refugees and asylum seekers.4 The circle hosted multiple ways of engaging with asylum policy in Denmark: screens displaying interviews conducted across the camps, wall-writing with information like ‘you are not entitled to public healthcare’ or ‘you have no working permit’, a help desk with information about the history and practices of the house, and a table where people could go through the book and write their responses. As a polyphonic production, the Guest Book attempted to place the stories in a circumstance that circumvented the isolation of the camps to be received in an artistic space where people could enter into dialogue. While many visitors responded to specific prompts (‘between two words/choose the quieter one/between word and silence/choose listening’), they also wrote about the installation (‘thank you all for speaking up and sharing your stories, wisdom and strength’ and ‘let’s keep massaging the Danish asylum system’) and the festival in general (‘kein Mensch ist illegal/ (no one is illegal)/ it was documenta IX (1997)/we still need this is/just insane’). The Guest Books came back from the exhibition as documents where ‘different logics not only coexist, but also inform and shape one another’ (Letiche 2010, 261). Shown in the exchange opening this section, people would enter into dialogue with each other about the politics of aesthetics. Some visitors raised concerns of representation: ‘what is documenta doing to help these people, besides telling their stories?’ and ‘why exploit these stories for aesthetics when you have what they need?’ While the Trampoline House installation might itself serve as an answer, it also highlights the ongoing importance of the question in all art made across non-citizen and citizen relations. Many from our collective who led workshops in Kassel had asylum experience and could share their expertise. Even so, the installation could equally be read as amplifying the absences of those who could not be there and framing their stories through politicised aesthetics of asylum policy, documenting important stories in need of urgent change. 4  This is loosely paraphrased from the artistic team’s January 2022 proposal for Documenta 15, penned by the collective: Carlota Mir, Dady de Maximo Mwicira-Mitali, Helene Grøn, Jean Claude Mangomba Mbombo, Joachim Hamou, Khalid Albaih, Morten Goll, Muhannad Al Ulaby, Sara Alberani, Shakira Kasigwa Mukamusoni, Tone Olaf Nielsen, and visAvis.

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In August 2022, Jean Claude and I conducted a workshop in Kassel exploring writing across space. Through the texts of The Banker, Gholami, and other people from the camps, we asked people to read the stories aloud to each other to sound out some of the absences. Afterwards, we invited people to reflect on what it meant to receive these stories through questions like ‘who are you when you hear this?’ and ‘which sentences or words stayed with you?’ From these answers, they could write replies in any format they wished. To the story of a soon-to-be mother living in Avnstrup, a participant responded: Travel long distances Wherever you want To go, without Signing anything. (Workshop, Kassel 2022)

The story shared the experience of living in Closed Camp Kærshovedgård. The writer reflects on the location of the centre (‘The place is located in the middle of nowhere, no bus that comes that route & the nearest transition is located about 5km always’), but also the food (‘like dog food, tasteless’), the mix of people who live there (‘I was afraid to go outside’), and the lack of psychological and medical support (‘almost everyone there is taking some kind of medication because of stress, depression etc.’). The enjambment of the poem perhaps demonstrates some of the b/orders that are trying to be circumvented in the story of the writer: ‘To go, without/ signing anything’. Moreover, it reflects a wish for changing circumstances and for freedom of movement in an un-free situation. When bringing back this poem to the person who wrote the story, she noted that it had meant something to her that another person knew about her situation and wished her well. Taken together with the critique of representation above the double-edged conundrum of representation and refugee aesthetics of this wider book is underlined: the writer’s reflection holds the tensions of unsettling writing as an adequate response to a complex legal situation, while showing the potential for crossing space, for polyphonic exchange, and for response and responsibility across b/ordered divides.

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‘To live well is to story well’: Writing Polyphonically Imagine us as a choir, several voices, giving the same story of injustice. (The Banker 2022, 18)

Returning to the ‘better imagined’, this section examines how polyphonic writing might pose a challenge to legal narratives through the inclusion of multiple voices and discourses in texts and through co-writing processes. As Bernard reflects, it is an established notion that ‘literature provides an alternative site for refugees’ claims for recognition and justice’ (2020, 67). Unlike legal and journalistic languages, artistic works are easier and more likely to be received with openness by a reader ‘willing to act as an ally rather than a judge’ (Bernard 2020, 67). Bernard consequently calls for discerning ‘advocacy as a driver of aesthetic innovation as well as a political project’ (2020, 67). Novelist Olga Tokarczuk poses that literature is one of the few places that might reveal ‘otherwise inaccessible experience to another person’ (2019). While sustained attention to motivations behind aesthetic choices remains necessary, taking Boochani, Tofighian, and Tokarczuk together equally shows how literature can be a way into both ‘the hard facts of the world [and] deep into the life of another being’ (Tokarczuk 2019). It is because writing is ‘unavoidably a material, technological and social practice’, that, according to Hall, it ‘“does things” between people’ (2018, 14). Scholars across the humanities have noted the narrative and performative doings of seeking asylum, which places the individual in the role of applicant and in a legally coded process where the veracity of their claim is held against the declaratory demand of ‘well-founded fear’ (UNHCR 1951, 3).5 Yet, as The Banker notes, what language does in these circumstances is expect untruths: ‘the interviewer always thinks you are lying, and they try to catch you in this. How do I know? Because they ask the same question in different ways’ (2022, 13). The inclusion of the rhetorical question shows the stakes of the interview, but also dramatises the continued demand for alertness. As above, The Banker shows the potential for 5  The scholarship on this is rich, but I here mention the work of Emma Cox (2021, 2020, 2009, 2017), James Thompson (2017), Stuart Fischer and Thompson (2020), Agnes Woolley (2014, 2016, 2019), Alison Jeffers (2020, 2012), Anika Marschall (forthcoming 2023, 2018), Alison Phipps (2019), Hyab Yohannes (2022, 2021), and Lucy Cathcart Fröden (2021).

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the text to communicate the experience of the interview by including the processual language of suspicion. While this might ultimately only work to confirm the double-edge between the narrative motivations of epistemic justice and the kind of aesthetics that enforces the legal positions of the teller, it could also reflect how stories can hold fraught political and emotional space. In the epilogue to Refugee Tales, David Herd remarks that detention is itself a silencing; ‘a shutting out of stories, a way of isolating those whose stories the state does not want heard’ (2021, 151). As The Banker’s and Gholami’s stories show, living as rejected asylum seekers is shrouded in much the same kind of silence. The Banker’s writing on the effects of deportation above is another example of narrating against these silences. Showing the threatening and b/ordering discourse through the inclusion of the letters, she also fills in the gaps that the system renders inaudible: ‘what they don’t say: the police comes under the cloak of night’ (2022, 15). According to Herd, the question of human rights is what unites the act of silencing and the need for narration: ‘where human rights are denied there is always a silencing of stories because inconvenient as it is for states to acknowledge, rights have force’ (2021, 151–152). Crystal Parikh, among others, have argued for literature as instrumental to developing human rights through its preoccupation with ‘human personhood, good life, moral responsibility, and forms of freedom that rights seek to address’ (2019, 1).6 Developing rights from abstract ideals to law-made reality needs the psychological and imaginative technologies available in literature, or, in the language of this chapter, it needs the ‘better imagined’ towards the political and mutual project of living better. When The Banker says she would like to write a story about being a parent and living in Avnstrup, but that she does not know where she might start, I show her Theodore Cheney’s ‘summary-and-dramatic mode’ (2000), a model which lets the writer glean at a structure that both shows and tells. Adding a layer to Hall’s notion of the materiality of text, our first sessions consist of writing different titles on pieces of A4 paper ‘prison’, ‘health care’, ‘Sandholm’, and shifting them around to see a structure emerging. We write the story by stealing quiet moments in Avnstrup or in the House, but often, she dictates while cooking or caring for children, or she writes while I take over those tasks. Our collaboration 6  Here too the scholarship is extensive, but I remark on the work of Joseph Slaughter (2019), Agnes Woolley (2016), and Crystal Parikh (2019).

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is about more than the creative work on the page. It is about the crossing and sharing of space and everyday tasks that makes telling possible, showing perhaps ‘that acts of writing do not have to await an event called a performance in order to perform’ (Hall 2018, 14). Through this lens, the camps, the house, and the encounters between people and legal system also pen these stories, but polyphonic writing and creative process might in turn disrupt hegemonic scripts and present opportunities for storying differently and across b/orders. The Banker’s story ends by underlining the kind of collectivity possible through polyphonic writing and the enterprise of imagining better. Drawing in the session led by Shakira described above, she asks: ‘And the future?’, and answers: In a writing workshop where we are trying to capture some of the truths about what the camp is like, we are asked to write a story from one of the following words: Prison, Children, Trauma, Police, Stress, The Future or Problem. I have already written about all of them in this essay, but one of the workshop participants says, “the future is interesting, because we are all equal when we think about the future”. But as an asylum seeker in Denmark, you are not even equal when it comes to the future. It is uncertain for us all, sure, but almost everyone in the camps suffer from PTSD. Almost everyone in the camp is stressed. […] Instead of helping them overcome this, Denmark puts more stress to them, more uncertainty. They deal us several hands of fear, from the letters they send, the night-deportation, the poor healthcare, the strain and stress. No human knows what lies ahead, sure, but then I look at my kids and think; ‘I remember some of the things that happened to me when I was 4 or 5, like them. I carry that with me as an adult.’ They are the carriers of this, the inheritors of our uncertainty and this deadly system. (2022, 18)

As Ghorashi notes, polyphonic writing can work to ‘challenge individual discursive positionings [and] create a reflection of taken-for-granted positions’ (2022). The Banker here challenges exactly the equalising positions taken for granted by questioning the inalienability of human rights and the common humanity factor of ‘the future’. Where everyone might be positioned in the same uncertain relationship with what is to come, The Banker shows that for people in the camps, the future deals ‘several hands of fear’, leading to the near certainty that the children are the ‘inheritors of our uncertainty’. Many of the people who come to Shakira’s workshop are parents living in Avnstrup. They alternate between writing, sharing their experience, and

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listening to each other. As such, a confluence of polyphony emerges, developing epistemic and hermeneutic pathways to what The Banker calls the ‘truth about what the camp is like’. As she elaborates, there is ‘a story that a lot of us tell, when we try to communicate the state of emotional services in the camp’ (2022, 18). She details how a pregnant woman lost her child due to neglect from the medical staff. Several times she went to them concerned about bleeding, and each time she was told to go and rest. ‘Imagine us’, The Banker demands in a polyphonic feat, ‘as a choir, several voices, giving the same story of injustice’ (18). The fact that The Banker is not the only person retelling this story in the workshop draws out the kind of choral polyphony that shows uniting perspectives and concerns about mothering in the system and about access to adequate healthcare. It also shows the un-silent ways in which people in the camp live their lives, underscoring Arundhati Roy’s assertion that there is ‘really no such thing as the “voiceless”. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard’ (2004). The Banker writes this collectivity into her story, a gesture underlining how ‘knowledge is negotiated throughout the process of writing by giving agency to the multiple voices that it constitutes’ (Ghorashi 2014, 60). This reflects not only on the spaces of knowledge and sharing, but also shows how her story is connected to a wider collectivity that is already present. As a ‘textual polyphonic production’ (2014, 60), this instance relays ‘alternative voices in relation to dominant discourses through dialogical agency’ (Ghorashi 2014, 60). While The Banker’s text might itself be read as a challenge to systemic silences and omissions, the narrated collectivity further marks the modes and presences of everyday resistance, underscored throughout with phrases that insist ‘[t]his is part of the story too’ (2022, 13). Tying in with the second-person wall-text above, The Banker’s second-­ person narration challenges discursive positionings too.7 By stating ‘you’, rather than ‘I’ or ‘one’, she seems to address the listener, while engaging concretely with the possibility of putting them in her position, a choice that hinges on narrowing some of the distance between near and far, asylum seeker and citizen:

7  Ali Smith uses a similar strategy in ‘Detainee’s Tale’ written for the Refugee Tales project and published in The Guardian in 2015. The use of second person here reflects efforts of keeping the dynamic of the interview between the Detainee and Smith as a part of narration, which ends up speaking to larger themes of response and responsibility (see Grøn 2023).

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The first stop is Sandholm. You can seek asylum at any police station or go straight to Sandholm if you know where it is. Sandholm is considered a welcome center for asylum seekers in Denmark. You are given a card with a personal number and your photo. You are asked to deposit your valuables and your money. The Red Cross gives you a few pieces of clothes and some shoes. (2022, 13)

LaPlante notes that some uses of second person is ‘an inverted form of first person’ (2007, 265), showing an ‘I’ in dialogue with self. Yet, The Banker’s use of second-person narration might be read as another kind of conversation. Writing across the ‘complex set of relations’ outlined above, The Banker situates the reader alongside herself and challenges who experiences b/ordering principles. Placing the reader in the shoes of the asylum seeker while functioning as a quasi-guide shows what she and everyone else undergo when seeking asylum, but also what ‘you’ might go through should this happen. She thereby questions Tokarczuk’s claim that we ‘live in a reality of polyphonic first-person narratives […] that narrowly orbits the self of a teller who more or less directly just writes about herself and through herself’ (2019). Going towards rather than ‘abstain[ing] from a broader perspective’ (2019), The Banker holds the space of ‘you’ together with reflecting that she used to have a normal life as a mother, student, and resident in Denmark before being an asylum seeker. She thereby underlines the precarity of a life subject to change with the porosity of the first- and second-person narration. Gholami’s story is written through a similar process. We discuss the best way for him to write something for visAvis and settle on starting a piece from an interview. I record and transcribe our conversation and put it into a suggested format, titling each section with what I find to be his most poignant sentences. I send him both texts, and we spend an afternoon in the House shaping paragraphs and refining their meaning together. Gholami pens a text that needs to consider the risks and merits of publishing under his own name, the wish for a cross-readership of Danes, politicians, and people in the camps, while making his point: ‘justice for everyone’ (2022, 80). As with The Banker, the writing is not only about the words on the page, but rather about allowing these different discursive positionings and constructions of meaning to be part of both the process and product of a counter narrative. What I find poetic about his phrasings in English, he would rather rewrite so it is correct and easy to read. Where I can offer my knowhow of writing, I fall short in my knowledge of some of the cultural and legal codes he is trying to pen, like

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the experience of being Kurdish Iranian growing up in refugee camps (Gholami 2022, 81), or the challenges of parenting in the asylum system and seeing one’s children suffer (Gholami 2022, 82). Like The Banker, Gholami’s story nonetheless testifies to the kind of collectivity and survival that Boochani also noted above. Gholami reflects on how he has kept active by volunteering as a driver and translator. He further discusses how he helped mobilise people for an appeal to the government about the conditions in the camp, supported by the infrastructures of community in the House (Gholami 2022, 81–83). Conversely, he remarks on the challenges of changing one’s situation in the face of a political apparatus: ‘When I do something, my heart is happy, my conscience is well, but it is like medicine for a temporary time’ (Gholami 2022, 83). The individual survival techniques of keeping active and continuing to talk about his situation ultimately ends on the reflection that he is sharing his story in the hope that someone feels for them, underscoring Bernard’s point about political aesthetics and motivations of advocacy. Gholami makes clear that his reasons for penning the story is, at least in part, that politicians and Danes might help solve the question: ‘what is the solution for us to be free from this life?’ (2022, 83). Even so, Gholami also shows that he holds the kind of epistemic position that could offer solutions to the challenges of asylum policy. He narrates his own and his children’s wish to contribute to society, to choose vocations of work and study and to have a normal life. Echoing Yohannes’ thinking on the host-guest paradox, Gholami states that he likes inviting Danish people over because he and his family want to ‘mix with Danish society and share our cultures with each other’ (2022, 82). Human rights are then a continual discursive and legal script against which both he and The Banker formulate their experiences. For example, he notes that every time there is ‘injustice, it is difficult to say that there are human rights’, because then it ‘would not be possible to discriminate’ (Gholami 2022, 83). While Gholami and his family live this contradiction, human rights are what allow him to assert that ‘[a]s I have right on this earth, you have too’ and that ‘equality is for everyone’ (Gholami 2022, 83).

Widening Space: ‘It helped me to bring out my story’ In Herd’s epilogue, he writes that what Refugee Tales might help ‘generate and underpin’ is a ‘widening space in which the stories of people who have experienced detention can be heard and shared’ (Herd 2021, 152). His

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reference to a widening space might be drawn together with this chapter’s examination of the spatial and legal perimeters of polyphonic and performance writing. Requiring the crossing of space and attention paid to the scripts of asylum and the b/ordered locations of the camps, co-writing was suggested as a way of widening spaces, of reorienting epistemology and of literature’s ability for political imagination (‘the better imagined’) in asserting human rights and living well. I end here by reiterating the necessity of spaces like the House and its way of gathering a plurality of publics and positioning them on equal footing as epistemic knowers. While literature might have the ‘capacity to generate a shared sense of responsibility among non-refugees’ (Bernard 2020, 77), the writing sessions equally documented the importance for people to have a place (a ‘widening place’) to go outside the camps. In an interview with The Banker about the House and her activities there, she stated that both the workshop and the space of the House had ‘helped me to bring out my story’ (The Banker, May 2022).8 This shows, as Herd suggests, that ‘the sharing of stories cannot stop’ (2021, 152), but is equally a call to widening spaces as a continual communal, creative, and political endeavour. Acknowledgements  While I am the author of the academic reflections and analysis in what follows, this chapter is only possible because of the co-writing processes and collaborations it describes. The artists, writers, and collaborators remain central epistemic and creative knowers in this exploration, and I dedicate this chapter to them in continual acknowledgment and esteem: The Banker, Ali Gholami, and those living in Denmark’s asylum camps who came to the workshops and are users of the house; the visAvis team: particularly Eden Germa, Hannah Lutz, Paul Farah Cox, and Tommaso Daverio; and the artistic and creative team of Trampoline House and Documenta 15: Jean Claude Mangomba Mbombo, Carlota Mir, Dady de Maximo Mwicira-Mitali, Joachim Hamou, Khalid Albaih, Morten Goll, Muhannad Al Ulaby, Sara Alberani, Shakira Kasigwa Mukamusoni, and Tone Olaf Nielsen.

8  I thank Andrew Gibbons for sharing this interview with me, which was part of the MA research project for AMIS, Advanced Migration Studies, University of Copenhagen: Language Mediation, Creating Multilingual Spaces, and Alternative Approaches to Integration in Denmark, written in 2022 by Abildgaard, Louise Rosen, Adam Eskång, Andrew Gibbons, and Yuliia Zatiseva.

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Suárez-Krabbe, Julia, Annika Lindberg, and José Arce-Bayona. 2018. Stop Killing Us Slowly: A Research Report on the Motivation Enhancement Measures and the Criminalisation of Rejected Asylum Seekers in Denmark. https://refugees. dk/media/1757/stop-­killing-­us_uk.pdf. Accessed 7 April 2023. The Banker. 2022a. The Deadly Asylum System of Denmark. In visAvis: Voices on Asylum and Migration, No. 14, ed. Eden Germa, Hannah Lutz, Paul Farah Cox, and Tommaso Daverio. Kassel, Germany: Lumbung Press. https://issuu. com/visavismagazine/docs/visavis_no14. Accessed 7 April 2023. ———. 2022b. Interview Between The Banker and Helene Grøn. 17 June. Thompson, James. 2015. Towards an Aesthetics of Care. Research in Drama Education 20 (4): 430–441. https://doi.org/10.1080/1356978 3.2015.1068109. Thompson, James. 2009. Performance Affects: Applied Theatre and the End of Effect. London, UN: Palgrave Macmillan Tokarczuk, Olga. 2019. Olga Tokarczuk’s Nobel Lecture: The Tender Narrator. Culture.Pl, December 9. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2018/tokarczuk/lecture/. Accessed 7 April 2023. UNHCR. 1951. Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees. https://www.unhcr.org/3b66c2aa10. Accessed 7 April 2023. ———. 2021. UNHCR Recommendations to Denmark on Strengthening Refugee Protection in Denmark, Europe and Globally. https://www.unhcr. o r g / n e u / w p -­c o n t e n t / u p l o a d s / s i t e s / 1 5 / 2 0 2 1 / 0 1 / U N H C R -­ Recommendations-­t o-­D enmark-­o n-­s trengthening-­r efugee-­p rotection-­i n-­ Denmark-­Europe-­and-­globally-­January-­2021.pdf. Accessed 7 April 2023. ———. 2022. UNHCR-Recommendations to Denmark on Strengthening Refugee Protection. https://www.unhcr.org/neu/wp-­content/uploads/ sites/15/2022/11/UNHCR-­R ecommendations-­t o-­D enmark-­o n-­ Strengthening-­Refugee-­Protection-­Nov-­2022.pdf. Accessed 7 April 2023. UNITED. n.d. Fortress Europe: Death by Policy. Fatal Policies of Fortress Europe. http://unitedagainstrefugeedeaths.eu/about-­the-­campaign/fortress-­europe-­ death-­by-­policy/. Accessed 28 July 2020. Welsch, 2019. Vernacular Voices: Black British Poetry. InThe Cambridge History of Black and British Asian British Writing. Susheila Nasta and Mark Stein Ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilson, Rita. 2017. Narrating the Polyphonic City: Translation and Identity in Translingual / Transcultural Writing. In Multilingual Currents in Literature, Translation and Culture, ed. Rachael Gilmour and Tamar Steinitz, 55–80. New  York: Routledge. https://doi.org/ep.fjernadgang.kb.dk/10.4324/ 9781315651675. Woolley, Agnes. 2014. Contemporary Asylum Narratives: Representing Refugees in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan

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———. 2016. Narrating the ‘Asylum Story’: Between Literary and Legal Story telling. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. https://doi. org/10.1080/1369801X.2016.1231585. ———. 2019. Asylum. In The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction, ed. Robert Eaglestone and Daniel O‘Gorman. Taylor & Francis. Yohannes, Hyab. 2022. There is Radical Denial of Humanity and Hospitality in the UK Asylum System—Hyab Yohannes. The Scotsman, November 29. https://www.scotsman.com/news/opinion/columnists/there-­i s-­r adical-­ denial-­of-­humanity-­and-­hospitality-­in-­the-­uk-­asylum-­system-­hyab-­yohannes-­3 9 3 3 7 0 2 ? f b c l i d = I w A R 0 R c x 5 Z i z B 8 7 z g 5 S u K l Y -­A d 9 U r C P V g _ _ fE4AOZk0QUNpnmk-­mPh_h_3eFY. Accessed 7 April 2023. Yohannes, Hyab. 2021. The realities of Eritrean refugees in acarceral age. University of Glasgow. Zaiotti, Ruben. 2016. In Externalising Migration Management: Europe, North America and the Spread of “Remote Control” Practices, ed. Ruben Zaiotti. London and New York: Routledge.

CHAPTER 5

Life in Detention: Journey and Border Pinar Aksu

National Borders: Unknowns Migration is an integral part of human history. Movement may occur for work, to study, to visit, while some are forced to move out of concern for themselves and their families and communities. Migration is an act undertaken to create a safe and hopeful future. Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights protects the right to migrate from one’s country, but the differentiated values placed upon people from different countries materially restrict their access to protections and rights. Indeed, various labels are applied and presented to migrating people, each one representing the differing restrictions defined by other communities, nations, and international laws. Asylum seeker, refugee, migrant: these are some of the administrative, legal, and cultural labels that are used to describe people. The different terms used to describe people reflect different forms of bordering imposed upon those who migrate. In recent years, we have seen an increase in the number of people being forced to undertake dangerous journeys to cross borders and access

P. Aksu (*) University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 F. Barclay, B. Ivey (eds.), Contemporary Representations of Forced Migration in Europe, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Human Rights, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47831-4_5

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relative safety. People face human rights violations and witness and experience conditions which cannot be forgotten for years or for a lifetime. In these conditions, people face highly traumatising situations to reach safety, including life-threatening or exploitative circumstances ranging from precarious or forced labour to slavery (Jacobsen et  al. 2020). Such experiences undermine people’s most fundamental rights set out in international law. As a result of hardening border regimes in Europe, thousands of people are disappearing and dying at land borders and at sea. In 2015, as people started reaching the borders of Europe in higher numbers, the negative focus on the border became more apparent as reporting on the ‘migrant’ or ‘refugee crisis’ became the primary topic for European media outlets. On one hand, one of the key reasons for the media attention on the border reflected the responsibility of European countries to create safe conditions for passage and to fulfil obligations outlined in international refugee protection. On the other hand, there was also a sense of growing fear concerning the creation of refugee camps at Europe’s internal and external borders. Throughout this media coverage, however, one thing was being forgotten: people have been crossing borders for years, and the so-called crisis was not a phenomenon which started in the 2000s. The failure to provide protection for people who were searching for a better life and future unfortunately started to be normalised. Conditions crossing the borders have not improved and people are continuing to suffer. Indeed, if Europe’s border regime became increasingly impermeable, it did not deter migration but simply made people more vulnerable to exploitation. Those who benefit from taking advantage of the most vulnerable took Europe’s fortification as a business opportunity and created platforms and systems to financially exploit people seeking asylum and refuge. This involved kidnapping the most vulnerable, creating unsafe travel routes, smuggling people across borders, and exploiting people. In this way, the media focus on crises at the border around 2015 and the hardening of Europe’s border regime only reinforced the vulnerability of migrating people. If the media was focused on the ‘crisis’ migration from the perspective of the fears and paranoias of European societies, it was important to offer material solidarity while bearing witness to the ways in which people themselves negotiate these hostile borders. Witnessing these sufferings and journeys at the Greek border in 2015 was a moment in my life that I will never forget. As a volunteer for Glasgow Campaign to Welcome Refugees, a group set-up in the early 2000s to campaign for and welcome people

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arriving to Scotland, I saw in person the conditions and the vulnerability of the people crossing borders in Lesbos, Greece. Alongside two other members, I met grassroots groups across Athens and Lesbos providing essential support for people who crossed borders. We also fundraised and divided the donations amongst frontline organisations. While assisting with one of the groups who provided essential support—warm clothes, water, and other essential items—to people seeking refuge, I also witnessed people crossing the sea. People with babies in arms, reaching out to the land without knowing what they would be faced with, and the look of pain combined with joy and hope. Seeing a mother checking if their baby is alive, shivering in the cold, looking for warmth and not knowing what awaits them next. I remember the shock on people’s faces as they made the journey of crossing the sea on a small black dingy boat. I remember the park in Athens with people sleeping on the ground, from young children to the elderly, without any visible support from international agencies. In contrast, I remember the strength of the local solidarity set up by grassroot groups and individuals providing welcoming group activities and support. A local group had turned an empty building into a welcoming hub providing space and advice for people and activities for children and adults. There was a world of difference between the local tourists and the newly arrived. All these experiences, pains, and sufferings could have been prevented by creating a safe and legal passage for people to cross borders. People’s dignity and safety could have been ensured in a way that avoided pain and death at the borders. It was important for us to bear witness to the experiences of the people whom we had met, to report to people in Scotland the conditions we encountered in Greece, to raise awareness, and to provide evidence. We were able to share what we witnessed at public meetings, with politicians and through written pieces. Many people hear stories of migration from the news; however, when sharing the stories directly from our own experience, we can reach out to more people to make change. Photography is one way in which we documented the situation in Greece. However, I was conscious that images needed to be taken in a dignified manner so that privacy and people’s identities were respected. Many outlets and people may show images of individuals who are clearly identifiable without any consent. Instead, I prefer to use images of objects and moments to accompany the stories and testimonies. For example, Fig. 5.1 does not seek to objectify or identify those crossing the border

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Fig. 5.1  Beach image, Lesbos, Greece, 2015. (© Pinar Aksu)

but highlights the creative traces that people left behind during their journey. Stones picked up and piled together at the shore of Lesbos demonstrated hopes for the future, dreams in the present, and joys of the imagination. Without knowing who placed and created this moment, it speaks to and captures the collective stories of many people and their hopes in making the crossing to Greece. On the one hand, it signifies the importance of family and protection. These pebbles also remind us that many people risked their lives in making this dangerous journey and did not make it. It reminds us of all their hopes and dreams for the future and how they no longer exist. Despite the violence of the border, this moment of creativity speaks to the ephemeral and creative ways in which peoples in migration bear witness to each other’s hope and dreams, as well as remember and memorialise that which they left behind. Indeed, one characteristic of the border that I witnessed in 2015 was the way in which border guards and immigration administrations suspend the everyday life of migrating people through dehumanising treatment. Thousands of people who are trapped at the border are experiencing a form of detention, as their lives are being put on hold. Not knowing what the future holds, without protection from the enduring violation of their human rights, people are deprived of shelter and safety. While visiting the

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two temporary ‘camps’ in Athens, we witnessed how the present and future collapsed, as present lives were paused and the future remained uncertain. This experience at the Greek border in 2015 made me reflect on the word and meaning of solidarity. We, as readers and citizens, all must question and try to find answers: who is responsible for the protection of people seeking safety? The host country or the countries who created these migrations? Who is responsible when the host country is complicit in the historical and present-day forces that have created these conditions? Until these questions are answered, structures and instruments of protection for the people must be in place to avoid further loss of life and suffering. I witnessed this solidarity from the local communities, organisations, and people who wanted to provide support and help. It was fascinating to see how diverse communities came together to provide shelter and support to the thousands of people arriving in Greece: from offering food, clothes, shelter, support, and information, to also allowing a space for creativity. I witnessed how art-based activities were created for the children and adults from various groups—from art classes to playing games. These creative activities initiated by local groups, NGOs, and the people experiencing migration highlight the dedication and the solidarity created for and by people who want to create a welcoming and informative space. Actions of solidarity by grassroot groups, campaigners, artists, and the local community evidenced the need for human connection and provided a platform showing humanity and human rights. Ensuring space for creativity, even in the hostile environment of the border, meant that connections could be built through dialogue and games, in defiance of detention.

Forms of Detention: Asylum and Refugee Camps For many people, crossing the border is the end of one journey and the beginning of another—the journey of unknowns, camps, and detention. As Nethery and Silverman (2015) observe, nearly every state around the world has adopted immigration detention policy and practice in some form. Ostensibly, ‘detention addresses the accelerating numbers of people crossing their borders and serves as a tool for the management of people residing in their states without authorization’ (Nethery and Silverman 2015, 1). They further mention that ‘detention could be a practice and a site of tension between extreme sovereign power and people claiming universal rights in the face of that display’ (ibid.). In some states there is no

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time limit to detention: indefinite detention erodes dreams and hope, leaving people in a space of unknowns. This raises serious questions about the human rights of the people who are being held in a detention environment without any time limit nor information about their future. Wilsher (2011) also highlighted this, noting that while most states had an upper time limit on detention some, such as the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Malta did not. Wilsher (2011, 15) indicates that the international courts, tribunals, monitors, and human rights institutions are beginning to recognise that the practice of detaining ‘migrants under the banner of protecting territorial sovereignty has led to practices which are arbitrary, inhuman, expensive, and sometimes unnecessary’. Individuals being exposed to various forms of detention in life takes years from their futures as well as being exposed to unforgettable treatments.

Detention It is clear that the reality for many people is that carceral practices and detention are being enforced against migrating people around the world, amounting to a global humanitarian crisis. Detained in a detention centre or refugee camp at the border, migrating people are isolated from wider society. It is well-documented that many detention centres and refugee camps create concerning conditions including overpopulation, insufficient medical and hygienic care, inadequate physical and mental health facilities, and limited possibilities for contact with the outside world. Nethery and Silverman (2015, 2) note that ‘some states allow detainees to move freely within the centre, or even leave it, while others confine detainees to cramped, overcrowded cells’. People are detained from life, unable to interact with surrounding communities and the outside world. Being detained is being held in a cage: not knowing your future, not being able to enjoy your freedom and human rights. Paused. This is being practised across the world, enforced by all different kinds of governments: liberal democracies as well as authoritarian regimes. If the practice of detaining people is not ended, more people will continue to suffer and face human rights violations. More needs to change to respect rights and dignity: to have a process and system which is based on human rights in line with refugee protection and international law. Who defines the human rights of some as superior to the human rights of others? Who maintains this hierarchy of human rights? Does your nationality define and create space for

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more protection and value at the expense of the human rights of others? Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations, 1948) states that ‘everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to their country’. In 2016, as part of a witness-bearing delegation from Scotland, alongside campaigners, academics, politicians, and clinicians, I visited the camps in Calais and Dunkirk. The aim of the visit was to meet grassroots groups who were providing direct support to people seeking refuge, highlight the current conditions and issues affecting camp inhabitants, and speak with the people who were staying in the camps. There was also space at the end of the day to reflect on what we had witnessed and what might be done to raise awareness about the conditions. Once we arrived in Scotland, the witness-bearing delegation led on sharing what was witnessed at the camps, reflecting on what could be changed and how we might further raise awareness about the conditions people experienced with our various capacities. At the time of the visit, there were many volunteers who travelled across the world to provide direct support to the people who were staying at the ‘temporary’ refugee camps. Solidarity was present in the actions of the volunteers and groups providing support. However, conditions at the camp in Calais were poor and reflected the lack of preparation and care in the authorities’ inhumane approaches and policies towards displaced peoples. While the camp is open air, it is clearly carceral. The presence of highly visible police with machine guns is only one example of the power on display at the camp. People in the camp were living without security, information, and the implementation of basic human rights. The camp became a place where each day the mind and soul were slowly being killed—creating a space for the soul to decay. This is a process where one’s human rights are eventually violated and people are exposed to living in less-than-humane conditions. As Freire (2017, 18) also highlights, ‘dehumanisation, which marks not only those whose humanity has been stolen, but also (though in a different way) those who have stolen it, is a distortion of the vocation of becoming more fully human’. This was evidenced on individuals’ faces, as they accepted the current reality of unknowns. The camps in Calais and Grande Synthe were not the inevitable results of migration to Europe. Rather, the camps were the result of an aggressive and panicked reaction by authorities that failed to implement the responsibilities of the state to protect the human rights of those arriving there.

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While people were searching for a better life, once again they were being held in prison-like conditions in which they were denied freedom of movement and left vulnerable through a lack of security. I witnessed the visibility of borders within the physical space of the camps in Calais. There were containers and tents with wires that served to divide people, not shelter them, creating an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty. For me, this form of bordering within the camp highlighted the role of power and oppression. The structural and administrative layers of unknowns and these physical forms of detention run parallel to each other and are interlinked. This can be seen in Fig. 5.2, which demonstrates the different layers of a border within a border. The space of the camp was another way in which one’s freedom could be taken away. On the other hand, people within the camps created various methods to share their stories such as using art to express their feelings and thoughts by drawing and painting. These forms were visible as expressive words written on stones, wood and in creations which came in various forms. With the support of volunteers, people within the camps also created a structure to cook their cultural dishes and to share with each other. Amongst all the pain and visible unknowns, it was fascinating to see the strength of solidarity and creativity coming to life through people.

Fig. 5.2  The ‘Jungle’ camp, Calais, France, 2016. (© Pinar Aksu)

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The camps on the border of Northern France are also a dangerous site of transit, as people are forced to make attempts to cross the UK-French border in the absence of safe routes of passage. As some risked their lives to cross the border, many have died under lorries. These deaths are both marginalised and highly visible, occasionally making headlines in the British and French press. In effect, the death of migrants on the French-­ British border has become part of the new normal. While death was witnessed in the camps, it is also important to recognise the acts of resistance and solidarity that were in action there. It is once again the grassroots groups that provided material support and bore witness to the pain experienced by people seeking asylum and refuge. This time transnational in nature. Volunteers across the globe travelled to help at warehouse units sorting clothes, cooking meals, and giving their time. At the camps, people organised themselves to share their cultural foods from the items donated; they shared their stories and the journeys they have made. In some parts, local communities gathered to show solidarity and to say refugees are welcome here. People who did not agree with the policies imposed on civilians wanted to help one another and show solidarity, from gatherings to sending support packs. Those who were concerned provided some form of solidarity and support. In contrast, those in power created the reasons for people’s journeys and refused to implement international obligations and human rights.

Internal Borders: Detention, Labels Detention centres and immigration holding centres are perhaps the most formalised examples of detained life. Once arrived in a new country, migrating people can then be detained at immigration detention centres, once again isolated from society. These centres are more explicitly carceral than the camps at Calais and Grande Synthe. Former prisons are transformed into detention centres for people who have not committed a crime, but rather are seeking refuge and asylum. This form of detention may have long-lasting consequences for the host country who created this and for the people experiencing this. Wilsher (2011) also highlights that immigration detention interferes with one of the most fundamental rights within a democratic state, in such a way that the liberal legal order has staked much of its legitimacy upon defending it. This is currently also evident with using ‘hotel accommodations’ as a method of housing people in hotels and in barracks rather than in communities. The Home Office

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subcontracts a private housing provider to house people in homes and also work with relevant authorities as part of the dispersal process. However, beginning from 2020, people have been placed in hotels and old military barracks as a form of dispersal and being housed there. This is being imposed for families, young children, and single people and this process has been criticised by NGOs, politicians, and human rights organisations. As a comment from Kent Refugee Action Network shows, ‘We are extraordinarily concerned for the wellbeing of these children. All of them need to be accommodated in appropriate settings with trained foster carers’ (Taylor 2022). A new form of detention is being normalised by those who continue to impose harder border control on people seeking asylum in the form of hotel accommodation. As a result of this practice, lives are being lost within hotel accommodations as witnessed at the Park Inn tragedy in 2020. People are living a life in detention where they are isolated, disconnected from communities, face wellbeing and mental health concerns. All while, they are placed in hotel accommodations or described as ‘hotel detentions’. As a response and act of solidarity, a bench at George Square in Glasgow has been dedicated to the memory of all those who have lost their lives in the UK asylum system. Figure 5.3 shows the message engraved on the bench asking, ‘we need a need based on human rights, compassion, care, justice and fairness’. I remember at the gathering of the bench launch, people across from Glasgow came together to share their frustration, their pains, and their hope for a future where people will be treated equally. Flowers with messages of hope, compassion, and care were also passed during the day to everyone to collectively bear witness to a moment of condolences. The new Nationality and Borders Act 2022 may also be a contribution to detain people to continue their lives. Colin Yeo (2021, n.p.) argues that ‘the Bill will only worsen the problems with the United Kingdom’s current asylum system…This Bill will lead to more delays and it punishes genuine refugees for having the temerity to come to seek sanctuary in our country rather than remain someone else’s responsibility’. Having a new immigration act which can create offshore detention centres criminalises people for seeking asylum and violates international law and the Refugee Convention is not the answer. Even to discuss such policies and legislations is a form of normalising and creating divisions alongside communities. In the instance of offshore detention, it creates a pathway for suspending the lives of people seeking asylum, creating a sense of community detention narrative and forming a narrative of lifelong detention.

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Fig. 5.3  A memorial bench in Glasgow to commemorate those who have lost their lives in the asylum system, 2022. (© Pinar Aksu)

Community detentions can be a place of long-term accommodation which creates structures that disconnect people seeking asylum having access to same rights as other citizens and movement being restricted within such places. These forms of everyday detention follow people from across the borders at Calais to the UK, normalising and eroding the right to claim asylum. However, physical detention is only one part of what I call ‘life in detention’, where people who are migrating are subject to long-term administrative uncertainty. Through the administrative processing of border controls, people are given different labels with different meanings and responsibilities which are then carried around for years or a lifetime: asylum seeker, refugee, migrant, stateless, destitute, and more. Each label comes with its own weight in the process of starting a new life and a new journey in life. Labels reinforce the sense of a hierarchy of migrants. For example, in the UK, people who are currently referred to as asylum seekers

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are often imagined as seeking to enter the country, not because they share liberal values such as freedom of speech, but because they are in search of work or benefits (Anderson 2013). The circulation of misinformation about those labelled asylum seekers among the public leads to an increase in cases of discrimination towards people seeking asylum and refuge. Writing about Australia, O’Doherty, Kieran, and Lecouteur (2007, 8) talk about different categorisations when describing people who are migrating and the impact of each of the labels; they consider the use of the word ‘illegal’ and the impact this may create in the media and for the population, as they highlight: ‘The headline of the article alerts the reader that there are ‘60,000 people in Australia illegally’. The adverb ‘illegally’, here, seems to imply a problem, in the sense that there are a large number of people who are purportedly breaching a law by being in Australia’. This shows the power of the media and the implications it may have for the public. However, O’Doherty, Kieran, and Lecouteur (2007, 9) also indicate that ‘our claim is that the articles contain particular uses of categorisation that are indicative of potentially oppressive social relationships, not that the authors of those articles hold oppressive views or that they seek to incite oppressive practices’. This is often reinforced by the negative portrayal and stories of people seeking asylum and refuge through the media platforms portraying and creating a space for discrimination. It is the remarkably simple division created by those in power to move the discussion towards an ‘us and them’ politics. Once dehumanising language and hatred are normalised and not challenged, this opens the door for new forms of discrimination and practices of making one feel less human than others. In other words, the different labelling applied to people who migrate in itself is an act of bordering, an act of detention that defines and delineates their lives and realities. Solidarity and resistance to detention was evident in the spontaneous action in Kenmure Street, Glasgow in May 2021, in which the local community resisted a Home Office attempt to detain two men (Brooks 2021). As a campaigner on the day of the solidarity action, I had journalists asking me questions to establish the men’s ‘immigration status’ and therefore confirm the perceived legitimacy of their detention. In contrast, the community rallied together to block the residential street and so physically prevent the removal and detention of the men, regardless of their so-called ‘status’. This was a moment of communal solidarity that demonstrated the power of the people uniting to protect their neighbours, friends, and members of the community. Actions like these show the power of people

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coming together and standing up to say people are welcome here without ‘othering’ nor labelling one another. It is delegitimising people with immigration status and labels. Whether it be the seemingly banal labels of ‘economic migrant’, ‘asylum seeker’, or ‘refugee’, or the normalisation of racist attitudes, the result is the creation of fear amongst the communities of so-called others. Weathering these attitudes is part and parcel of a ‘life in detention’. If political rhetoric, media discourse, and the everyday language we use can reinforce and normalise the disempowerment of people who migrate, we must consider the ways in which this can be resisted. Paulo Freire (2017, 21) argues that in order to challenge oppression and ‘to surmount the situation of oppression, people must first critically recognise its causes, so that through transforming action they can create a new situation, one which makes possible the pursuit of a fuller humanity’. We can resist the brutality of detention by making it visible to others through transformative acts of solidarity. ‘Life in detention’ is characterised by isolation, by being denied access to education and not being able to work. Some people arrive without speaking the language of the country, without having any family or knowledge of their rights. The process of arriving and becoming part of a community is a long journey. During this journey, the everyday fear of deportation and detention is constantly present and presented by the authorities. Not knowing if the authorities will decide to detain and deport you creates fear throughout the decision process. Having to live with everyday unknowns and not being able to plan pathways for personal development has profound material and emotional consequences for those subject to this administrative uncertainty. In short, the systematic detention of those who cross borders brings pain and leaves scars. Having to constantly explain your story of movement to the authorities and for those who want to know ‘why you have moved’ is an expectation, seen as a lifelong duty and experience. When physical imprisonment in an ‘Immigration Removal Centre’ is experienced, people are taken away from their communities, detached from their life and friends. Most of the detention centres are based in remote areas where the public is not aware of such premises and practices. Locked up in the conditions of prison life, you cannot leave, can only eat at allocated times, and cannot be part of the community. For those detained, the biggest concern is not knowing when you will be released from the detention centre, either through release back to one’s community or by deportation. This is exacerbated in the UK as without a legal

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time limit placed on detention, detention takes place in timeless space. People experiencing mental health concerns are forced into further sufferings which risk long-term scars. The physical form of detention is a form of institutionalist discrimination and a method used to dehumanise people who are crossing borders. This is a practice which needs to end immediately if authorities want to take a more humane approach to their immigration/migration policies. Detention centres are therefore key spaces around which groups of people can gather to expose and denounce the dehumanisation of those who migrate. Solidarity with people who were being detained was demonstrated in 2017, in a gathering outside Dungavel Immigration Removal Centre, a detention centre outside of Glasgow. I had organised a gathering of solidarity with the people who were detained. Although previously I have been involved in organising and attending gatherings, this time I knew the person who was detained. We spoke on the phone to inform each other about the gathering and why it was important. We discussed the value of showing support and creating a space for people to know such solidarity exists. I had invited members of the community and people from various networks to join the gathering. We had people coming along to send messages of hope and solidarity—bringing banners, chants, and poems. The detained person who was experiencing such inhumane treatment was able to join the chants behind the walls by speaking through the phone to the megaphone. There were also moments of silence and reflection as the person shared the conditions and their feelings with the people on the other side of the walls. As seen in Fig. 5.4, another member in the group outside the centre brought and released balloons with messages written on them—for me this highlighted hope and the absence of borders. As Phipps and Kay (2016, 13) mention, ‘aesthetic acts are in their own way “exorbitant” and as such provide both site and a method for such critical and transformative work in migratory settings’. Being detained. From life. From society. Being detained  ot knowing the future. Not knowing why. Not knowing how. Being N detained Talking about human rights. Which rights when detained? Which rights when caged? Being detained From life. From family. From community. Labelled as the other, as the outsider. While it is the same detained you in homeland and from new land. Being detained. From life. From future.

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Fig. 5.4  Outside Dungavel Immigration Removal Centre, Scotland, 2017. Picture taken during an organised protest outside the detention centre demanding the closure of all detention centres and for people to be based in their communities. (© Pinar Aksu)

Internal Borders: Integration, Theatrical Practice As a process of arriving in a new country, the notion of integration is presented and implemented by non-governmental agencies and communities. Integration should be understood as a two-way process without the assimilation of an individual’s culture and identity. The word itself is often considered to be problematic as it can be sometimes amalgamated with ‘assimilation’ and the demand put on migrants to ‘change’, therefore reinforcing notions of white supremacy, cultural imperialism, and other racial/ cultural hierarchies. It is for these reasons that the idea and notion of integration needs to be a two-way process and not enforce structures of assimilation.

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Integration needs to be a process in which people’s rights are respected. Any programme developed for integration should be designed and created based on feedback and decisions made by people seeking asylum and refuge themselves. The integration strategy should be co-designed, evaluated, adjusted, and adapted throughout the process. In other words, the responsibility of integration should not be a role which only needs to be fulfilled by the people who are seeking asylum and refuge; rather, this responsibility and understanding needs to be implemented by everyone. In this way, as societies we would move away from seeing people with the labels imposed upon them by the authorities; rather, we would see one another as human beings with stories to share within cultures and places of understanding. Were this to be implemented it would mean the division created by those in power and those who want to continue the understanding of ‘us and them’ would in time take a constructive turn towards the development of a welcoming community and society. For change to happen, in order to welcome people into communities and to raise awareness, we need to use community development approaches. This begins in the everyday lives of local people. As Ledwith (2011, 3) highlights, In a process of action and reflection, community development grows through a diversity of local projects that address issues faced by people in community. Through campaigns, networks, alliances, and movement for change, this action develops a local/global reach that aims to transform the structures of oppression that diminish local lives.

Through this process, people seeking asylum and refuge will have opportunities to engage in dialogue, projects, and understand one another. A key aspect is to make sure people have opportunities for creativity, are informed about their rights, and feel empowered to participate and raise their concerns. One example of employing community development approaches to forms of integration for people seeking asylum is through theatrical performances. As a practitioner, a key element when raising issues on different platforms and engaging with diverse audiences is using the power of dialogue through art such as theatre. Brazilian theatre practitioner Augusto Boal formed Theatre of the Oppressed, which is founded on the conviction that theatre is the human language par excellence (Boal 1998) and is a method of creating change and providing a platform for dialogue. Boal (1998, 7) mentions that ‘this possibility of our being simultaneously protagonist and principal spectator of our actions, affords us the further possibility of thinking virtuality, of imagining possibilities, of

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combining memory and imaginations—two indissociable psychic processes—to reinvent the past and to invent the future’. In this way, theatre is a tool which can be used by community groups to explore issues related to their groups and the community. A key method which I use in my practice is Forum Theatre, as described by Boal: ‘Forum theatre is a reflection on reality and a rehearsal for future action—the spectator comes on stage and rehearses what it might be possible to do in real life’ (Boal 1998, 9). I practise various forms of Forum Theatre as a group member and facilitator for World Spirit Theatre, which was formed in 2011. Since 2012 I have been involved as a group member, in a structure in which we all have equal roles. In this capacity, our objective is to create community theatre that explores integration and the asylum process from the perspective of those experiencing it directly. The group devised a play in 2018–2019 called ‘Where are you really from?’, which explores the identity, culture, labels, and stories of people migrating. Created by people who experienced various forms of the asylum and immigration process, it aimed to create dialogue and engage with audiences from different communities. A true moment of dialogue for me involves exploring and discussing differences through hearing one another’s views without judgement and coming to understand why one person thinks in a particular way. Throughout the years of using various forms of ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’ methods, I started to understand and explore the importance of sharing stories through the medium of art and examined how we as communities can understand each other via creativity, humour, stories, and laughter, while at the same time creating space for critical reflection. Using theatrical debates such as Forum Theatre, which involves ‘the improvisation of possible solutions, the intervention of members of the audience, the search for alternatives for an oppressive, unjust, intolerable situation’ (Boal 1998, 9) dialogue and discussion can be achieved. It is also important to hear direct voices and experiences of the people when sharing stories and raising awareness. People must feel empowered and engaged in creating change and raising awareness in their new communities, as this is the way people will truly feel part of a community: by understanding and knowing their rights. Our performances took place in various locations and to diverse audiences. These included university classes, community spaces, a theatre festival, and conferences. Because in Forum Theatre the audience members are able to intervene and replace the protagonist, the experience of each intervention with the audience was unique. We used the Forum Theatre methodology in some

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of our performances and at some we had discussions with the audience members. Through this method, audience members were able to hear direct experiences of the people, had the opportunity to try different possibilities as part of the play, and had space for questions and comments. Figure 5.5 shows the four different labels used at the performances where the actors on stage were wearing them. Throughout the play the actors carried the labels with them until the end when they were freed and questioned various aspects of being associated with the label. This approach also created opportunities for the performers to directly share their thoughts and feelings. Through theatre, exhibitions, storytelling methods, and many more techniques and media, arts-based approaches provide a platform for people to explore their feelings and experiences without having the need to explain themselves. This, for me, is a form of revolution when creating dialogue between communities to understand one another. The labelling of individuals as asylum seekers, refugees, or migrants is another way to categorise and detain people. Unless we see one another as individuals first, the ongoing division within and between communities may continue. Fig. 5.5  Prop used as part of the play, Where are you really from?, devised by World Spirit Theatre and Citizens Theatre in Glasgow, 2018–2019. (© Pinar Aksu)

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The fear created for many years by those who do not want peace, such as powers that seek domination, needs to end. We, as readers, as practitioners, as citizens of the world, need to all play a part in positive change. This could be within our communities, with our actions, with our voices, and with solidarity. If I do not act, if you do not act, if we do not act—then who will act to create change? The spontaneous pieces of art on the Greek border reflect the hope people who are on the move carry with them. Creative acts carried out to resist detention demonstrate the usage of art as a tool for solidarity and for raising voices. Creating participatory and interactive theatre opens space for voices of the people who are seeking asylum and refuge to be heard and be heard by the community. Like leaves, life is scattered in different forms and ways (Fig. 5.6). When people are on the move, the constant

Fig. 5.6  Leaves, 2021. (© Pinar Aksu)

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need for self-explanation never ends. Being asked ‘where are you really from?’ and having to explain why you are part of the community never ends. The labels given to people by authorities and by society always remain as a part of one’s identity. When these labels are invisible and are not used to define one’s identity, that is when we can be a step closer to creating the sense of a community and welcoming. When will we, as people who migrate for various reasons, stop wearing the label? When do people stop being asylum seekers? When do people stop being refugees? When do we truly see each other as humans before the presented labels? People will continue to migrate. Climate change will continue to create new forms of migration: as communities, as society, and as citizens, this could impact anyone. Is this truly when those who are labelled will be accepted? Who will define which label is then acceptable? One thing to be assured of is that migration is part of life. Migration is beautiful. Migration will create new forms of understanding towards one another, exchange of cultures, language, and viewpoints of life. Acknowledgement  I would like to thank Alison Phipps for providing the opportunity and support which enabled me to write this chapter. A huge thanks to Beatrice Ivey and Fiona Barclay and to my dear friend Sarah Stewart for their feedback and support on the chapter. It is dedicated to all people who are in search of safety, a future, and home. Every journey comes with its own story, experiences, and joy. It is time now more than ever; we need to acknowledge the stories and journeys of the people and see each other as human beings.

References Anderson, Bridget. 2013. Us and Them?: The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Control. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Boal, Augusto. 1998. Legislative Theatre. London: Routledge. Brooks, Libby. 2021. Glasgow Protesters Rejoice as Men Freed after Immigration Van Standoff. The Guardian, 13 May. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-­ news/2021/may/13/glasgow-­residents-­surround-­and-­block-­immigration-­ van-­from-­leaving-­street?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other. Accessed 5 January 2022. Freire, Paulo. 2017. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Penguin Classics. Jacobsen, Mogens Chrom, Emnet Berhanu Gebre, and Drago Župarić-Iljić. 2020. Cosmopolitanism, Migration and Universal Human Rights. New York: Springer. Ledwith, Margaret. 2011. Community Development: A Critical Approach. Bristol: The Policy Press.

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Nethery, Amy, and Stephanie J.  Silverman. 2015. Immigration Detention: The Migration of a Policy and Its Human Impact. London: Routledge. O’Doherty, Kieran, and Amanda Lecouteur. 2007. ‘Asylum Seekers’, ‘Boat People’ and ‘Illegal Immigrants’: Social Categorisation in the Media. Australian Journal of Psychology 59 (1): 1–12. Phipps, Alison, and Rebecca Kay. 2016. Languages in Migratory Settings. Abingdon: Routledge. Taylor, Diane. 2022. Lone Child Refugees Suffering Neglect in UK Hotels, Charities Say. The Guardian, 18 April. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-­ news/2022/apr/18/lone-­c hild-­r efugees-­s uffering-­n eglect-­i n-­u k-­h otels-­ charities-­say. Accessed 25 April 2022. United Nations. 1948. Universal Declaration of Human Rights. https://www. un.org/en/universal-­declaration-­human-­rights/. Accessed 20 February 2021. Wilsher, Daniel. 2011. Immigration Detention: Law, History, Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yeo, Colin. 2021. The Nationality and Borders Bill 2021: First Impressions. Free Movement, 6 July. https://freemovement.org.uk/the-­nationality-­and-­borders-­ bill-­2021-­first-­impressions/. Accessed 1 April 2022.

CHAPTER 6

Carceral Witnessing and the Spatial Imagination Helen Brewer

Introduction The spaces of immigration detention—detention centres, removal centres, camps—are key to the infrastructure of border regimes. Space is therefore a modality by which the procedures and processes of immigration detention can be analysed and conceptualised. To conceive of the space of detention for the public is to conceive of space from the outside and at a distance. This has necessitated mediated modes of witnessing of life inside detention to the outside via the construction of what I call ‘solidarity infrastructures’ that are networked forms where capacities for action are exchanged and activated. In this chapter, testimonial accounts given by This chapter is written with the support and close dialogue of my friend and colleague in Detained Voices, Tom Kemp, whose analysis of the project has greatly informed my work.

H. Brewer (*) University of London, London, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 F. Barclay, B. Ivey (eds.), Contemporary Representations of Forced Migration in Europe, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Human Rights, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47831-4_6

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detainees, who are witnesses to the punitive measures of immigration detention, act as an encoded map for articulating the otherwise hidden spatial contours of detention. Indeed, scholars have often acknowledged the difficulty in accessing detention space directly. With heavy restrictions, information from inside the detention centre is limited and must be gleaned from multiple sources such as reports by NGOs and HM Inspectorate of Prisons, interviews with ex-detainees, discussions held in visiting halls, independent reviews, Parliamentary inquiries, and telephone calls (Bosworth and Kellezi 2017; Silverman et al. 2020; HMCIP 2015; Griffiths 2013, 2014; Shaw 2016, 2018; APPG 2015). Consequently, the makeup of this chapter relies on a diverse range of sources from ethnographic and empirical scholarship on UK detention to testimonial archives produced together with detainees and solidarity organisations. This chapter is an attempt to both listen and imagine with testimonies as materials for agency and refusal, asserting through it a praxis that foregrounds the possibility of counter-hegemonic collectivities.

Immigration Detention and Carceral Witnessing Immigration detention is considered an ‘administrative procedure’, not a criminal one, and can occur at any point in the immigration process. Therefore people who are detained compose a varied population: people who are seeking asylum; people without documents; and foreign nationals who have served prison sentences. Nadine El-Enany (2020, 25) argues that the law maintains these contingent categories in order to construct a hierarchy of differentiated rights to access the legal resources and essential services for surviving the immigration regime. However, the paradox of detention space is that it simultaneously serves as a homogenising technology to capture and contain people into the other. In detention, the nebulous categories of differentiated rights effectively dissolve to assimilate all migrants together as ‘criminal’ and ‘illegal’. The mass production of ‘detainees’ in this regard cannot be severed from immigration detention’s structural origins as a racialising process of violent dispossession and displacement (El-Enany 2020, 132). As an infrastructure, it sits in relation to, and is complicit in, the carceral geographies of the border regime which transform migrants into detainable and deportable subjects, such as the policing and subjugation of diasporic communities and the enforcement of ‘hostile environment’ policies.

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Over the years, the experience of immigration detention has been shaped by subsequent legislative and policy features, most notably indefinite detention, a policy characterised by the unending suspension of time, that is often experienced and described as a ‘limbo’ by detainees (Bosworth 2019; Griffiths 2013; Turnbull 2016). When considered with the bureaucratic processes which facilitate communication between detainees and the Home Office—waiting for court hearings, for documents to be issued, for decisions to be made—this only serves to compound the length of time spent waiting (Griffiths 2013). Hence, despite the Home Office (2020) professing to advocate for the limited use of detention for the ‘shortest possible period’ the reality is, as Melanie Griffiths (2013, 271) notes further, ‘this lack of a timeframe, of a point to work towards, leaves people unable to imagine a future’, the effects of which have resulted in serious mental distress, deterioration, and in many cases led to episodes of self-­ harm and suicidality. While notable studies (Athwal and Bourne 2007; Conlon 2010; Darling 2009; Doyle 2009; Gill 2009a, 2009b) on immigration detention have often focused on the experience of asylum seekers, this chapter attends more broadly to a publicly available ‘assemblage’ (Frosh and Pinchevski 2014) of anonymised testimonies gathered during the February to March 2018 Yarl’s Wood ‘Hunger for Freedom’ strike. Further, I draw on a rich and expansive body of publicly documented material that has reported on Yarl’s Wood (like all immigration detention centres) as sites of border struggle. The testimonial accounts serve, to an extent, as a collective memory of detention, expressing both the collectivity and individuality of migrant experiences amidst wider societal discourses of immigration enforcement in Britain. In reference to Annette Wieviorka’s (2006) striking study of personal and lived accounts from the Holocaust, testimonies are seen to depict the uniqueness of every individual experience as well as the collective desire to speak, to be heard, and to be remembered. Furthermore, they reveal the cultural markers of the time, the language, the ideologies and serve as a testament to ‘collective memory—or collective memories—that vary in their form, function, and in the implicit or explicit aims they set for themselves’ (Wieviorka 2006, xii). I argue that this desire to speak and be heard does more than simply archive collective testimony; it animates through the witness, the potency to disrupt (even if momentarily) the punitive and violent formations of detention characterised by Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s (2007, 28) terms of racism, as the

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‘state-sanctioned or extra-legal production and exploitation of group-­ differentiated vulnerability to premature death’. To do this I propose to conceptualise ‘carceral witnessing’ as a way to describe the activation of the witness and the mobilisation of testimony from inside detention via formal and informal solidarity networks to the outside (public). The foundations for this specific mode of witnessing emerge from a joint responsibility between the witness who speaks and the witness who listens (Oliver 2001). It necessitates those who are engaged with the witness to respond in a way that ‘affirms response-ability’. Likened to the act of bearing witness, ‘response-ability’ requires not only a public response but action (Tait 2011; Oliver 2001). This is not to say that the carceral witness operates on a basis of quid pro quo in which there is an exchange of testimony for solidarity. There are no demands placed on the witness who gives testimony and the terms of witnessing are non-­ transactional. Instead, I question the conditions and unconscious parameters that place witnesses—in this case, those who have endured the effects of immigration detention, state manufactured violence, trauma, isolation, and loss of dignity—in constant negotiation for recognition. I advocate for the potential for witnessing practices to promote a culture of care, of difference, contradictions, the verbal and the non-verbal, the unspoken, and the many unrecognisable idiosyncrasies of detention. Immigration detention produces a particular kind of witness, shaped by the institutional infrastructures which are exercised through the built form and disciplinary and sovereign power (Foucault 1977). The witness is not an absolute figure; instead, there are moments when witnesses are borne (Tait 2011, 1221) and constantly in-the-making, shifting and expanding insight in response to socio-spatial constraints lived in detention. Throughout this chapter, I reinforce the notion that cataloguing these moments of affect reveals the ‘embodied and situated knowledges’ (Haraway 1988) needed to prompt a disruption of the migrant image so often utilised and disseminated in media discourse. This mode of witnessing is a political act which demands among other things, the right to demand (Kemp 2019). To contest the web of power-knowledge relations embedded within detention architecture, witnessing and testimony are subsequently imbued with the unique capacity to provide key insights into the impact of immigration detention on the body-politic. Yet, strategies to locate the leakages or modes of transgressing contained spaces are required from multiple perspectives and angles, and witnessing is only one such encounter of this

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transgression. For example, Nancy Hiemstra (2017, 330) deploys the metaphor of the ‘periscope’, as a research tool for scrutinising the everyday hidden or otherwise inaccessible space of detention to enable ‘unearthing and revaluing silenced voices’. The method calls for ‘pairing the reflections and refractions of those leaks with other sources of data to construct a coherent, if always incomplete, image of the cloistered space’ (Hiemstra 2017, 330). Taking this cue from Hiemstra reminds us that testimony is often delivered as fragmentary. A single testimony cannot provide a complete picture of detention and there are limits to what can be known or translated, yet it can be read with multiple others. It can resist homogenisation at the same time as it can point to a shared experience of pain or of a shared complaint, bringing insight into detention space from the inside-out and from the bottom-up. In bell hooks’ (1989, 208, in Hall 2018, 970) work on the margins as a space of radical political action, she describes how they can be ‘both sites of repression and sites of resistance’. The margins are not a physical space as much as a dynamic point from which resistance pivots. In contrast, Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s (2007) take on the ‘margins’ is conceptualised in geographical terms, for example, the prison sits on the edge or ‘margins of social spaces, economic regions, political territories, and fights for rights. This apparent marginality is a trick of perspective, because, as every geographer knows, edges are also interfaces’ (Gilmore 2007, 11). This ability to ignite the spatial imagination works to reveal the capacities to see from the ‘peripheries and the depths’ (Haraway 1988, 583) where ‘resistance turns up in domination’ (Sharp et  al. 2000, 20). In this way a spatial imagination serves as a mode for catalysing and articulating carceral witnessing and its mobilisation. It imagines beyond the spatial configurations of detention, and in different forms, how resistance and solidarities might take place, as seen through the many protests, demonstrations, hunger strikes, and migrant-led public campaigns that emerge from detention space.1 Therefore, it is when imagining these ‘solidarity infrastructures’ that work to dismantle the debilitating isolation and alienation of detention occurs, however this again is only fragmentary. Witnessing, 1  Like Donna Haraway (1988, 584), however, the author is cautious of ‘romanticising and/or appropriating the vision of the less powerful while claiming to see from their positions’. This study of immigration detention does not illustrate detention as a space for generating positive social transformation; instead it gives way to detainee testimonies as purveyors and narrators of their struggle for liberation.

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especially of the everyday encounters not formulated in hunger strikes or transformative moments of action, calls into question its own participation and reinforcement of the essentialising and homogenising nature of collective testimonials, migrant identities, and the ability for justice to figure into witnessing at all. This is most evident when testimonial evidence of protest efforts that generate media awareness and propel campaigns for release from advocacy groups are too often accompanied by narratives that legitimise the logic of asylum by highlighting those ‘most deserving’ of status as markers for witnessing and prioritising stories of victimhood that can generate public sympathy (Kemp 2019). Though witnesses may seek to formulate their own counter-narratives against a mainstream rhetoric often criticised for negative and inflammatory depictions of asylum seekers, undocumented migrants, and so-called foreign criminals. Testimonies are often presented as singular accounts of detention, depoliticising experiences in a way that regulates the narratives of detention and who is detained.

‘Detained Voices’ and Mobilising Access to Immigration Detention This chapter is by no means a comprehensive account of the many multitude forms of witnessing to come out of detention that have led to public mobilisation. For example, in 2011, ‘Barbed Wire Britain: Network to End Refugee and Migrant Detention’ published ‘Voices from Detention’, a collection of testimonial accounts by detainees in Tinsley House, Campsfield House, Rochester (HMP), Liverpool (HMP), Belmarsh (HMP), Lindholme, Harmondsworth, Yarl’s Wood, Dungavel, Dover, and Haslar Immigration Removal Centres (Barbed Wire Britain 2011). In a similar vein, the online platform of Detained Voices functions as an outlet for the stories, experiences, and demands made by people held inside immigration detention. As members of the collective, we act as facilitators for witnessing to occur from inside detention through informed consent and maintain the operation of its website and social media. When the number for Detained Voices is called, a member of the group carefully explains the aims of the project, how the call will proceed, and what will happen to their statement. The ‘informed consent’ of the witness who gives their statement to Detained Voices is tantamount to upholding trust and establishing a ‘common purpose’. This helps focus the conversation as

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well as addresses the implications of the act. Transparency in the process is a crucial measure of care, making clear the purpose of the publication and mitigating risks to witnesses. Besides the statements that are received via email or fax, the majority are taken over the phone and written down verbatim. No editorial comments or changes to the statements are made besides anonymising names and details that could lead to identifying the person giving the statement.2 This is then published on the website which operates as an archive of testimonial material. Detained Voices arose out of a long history of protest in and around detention centres in the UK.  When protests happened, mobile phones used between people detained inside and those on the outside to communicate would often become overwhelmed from the number of calls received, relaying people’s demands and experiences of detention to the public. According to Tom Kemp (2019, 202), in its initial development, Detained Voices activated a method of communicating to detainees that avoided ‘the usual gatekeepers’, those who were unwilling to divulge information about what was happening inside the centres such as guards and detention staff, and thus grew from conversations with people detained inside. For members of Detained Voices, the ‘Hunger for Freedom’ strike at Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre was a momentous series of events that catalysed the mobilisation of testimony in propelling nationwide support against one of the UK’s major detention centres. In 2018, Yarl’s Wood3 housed over 400 people, both women and family groups. Since its inception in 2001, it has fended off allegations of sexual misconduct and abuse whilst justifying the indefinite imprisonment of pregnant women, survivors of torture and rape, people with disabilities, and those with children. The hunger strike in February 2018, one of many over the years, received significant media coverage and increased public campaigning, including visits from Members of Parliament (Bulman 2018; 2  In the cases of testimonies which require grammatical or structural clarity, edits will be made for readability. All statements including any edits made by Detained Voices are always published with final consent and go-ahead by the author. 3  During the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent nationwide lockdown in 2020, the majority of women detained in Yarl’s Wood were released and the centre was ‘re-purposed’ as a ‘short-term holding facility’ to process people seeking asylum who were arriving on small boats across the Channel. At the time of writing in November 2021, Derwentside Immigration Removal Centre in County Durham opened with capacity for 80 women, while Yarl’s Wood will transform into a male centre.

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Travis 2018; Right to Remain 2018; Women Against Rape 2018). Public demonstrations outside Yarl’s Wood are a common occurrence and hint at the kind of strategies employed by activists to simultaneously mobilise the visceral access or non-access to detention. Statements made to the online platform Detained Voices came from several of the 120 women who staged the one-month hunger strike, which was followed by a peaceful sit­in by 18 women outside the Home Office department at Yarl’s Wood. Alongside the strike, women worked with campaign groups outside to release a set of demands criticising the Home Office, immigration policy, and calling for an immediate end to detention (SOAS Detainee Support and Sisters Uncut 2018) (Fig. 6.1).

Articulating ‘Refusal’ in Witness Demands Carceral witnessing is born in the dialogue between the witness inside detention who sees and speaks their lived experience, the person who records the testimony, and the audience who bears witness in turn. As John Durham Peters (2001, 709) states succinctly, ‘the witness (speech-­ act) of the witness (person) was witnessed (by an audience)’. Similar witness formations can be found in media ranging from newscasters, to interviews with ordinary folk on the street, to the viewers, and the audience. Peters (2001, 710) presents these media relations as portals for experiencing and imbuing a sense or experience of the world where we all possess the ability to become witnesses, but cautions that, ‘the journey from experience (the seen) into words (the said) is precarious’. This is also true for witnessing in detention, as actions such as protests carry heavy risks, with detainees often being served deportation notices, or so-called ring-leaders moved to solitary confinement and some even to prison (Sallis 2014). It’s important to note that not everyone detained is able to participate in protest or in giving testimony. For Audre Lorde, however, that visibility which makes speaking a vulnerable act is also the source of strength, and in her foundational lecture to the ‘Lesbian and Literature Panel’ on 28 December 1977, she stated, What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? (Lorde 1980, 41)

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Fig. 6.1  Screenshot, ‘The Hunger Strikers’ Demands’, Detained Voices (blog), 22 February 2018, accessed 15 January 2020

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Addressing her audience, Lorde empowers the silenced-silent to speak. She describes a place of seemingly impossible constraints—sites of immobility—not unlike prison or detention. How then can these spaces, where life is made disposable, be undermined? It is clear from listening to the testimonies by women on hunger strike at Yarl’s Wood that their actions were a vital response to reclaiming social and political agencies regularly denied to them on both an individual and a collective level. The resonance of the strike captures this subversion, where ‘refusal marks the point of a limit having been reached’, a way of articulating demands that say: ‘we refuse to continue on this way’ (McGranahan 2016, 2). In turn, this refusal—this pivot point—gives way to something new. By refusing to participate in detention, which in itself is a life-limiting technology, strikes call into question the logics of carceral space which deny personhood. The hunger strike, despite its deliberately destructive effects on the body, is in fact a recognition, an assertion and affirmation for a life unbounded. We were all really depressed in here, that’s why we had to do something. Even though the women are on hunger strike they have life. We needed to take back some control and our voices. If people are out there fighting for us we have to fight for ourselves. (Detained Voices, 23 February 2018)

And This whole thing started out of desperation and frustration and a deep sense of injustice felt by myself and others. We needed a voice and more importantly we needed someone to listen. We needed to be reminded that we are human beings because trust me when I say most of us are so dehumanised by this process of detention and the way we are treated in detention that you start to forget. (Detained Voices, 5 March 2018)

The ‘Hunger for Freedom’ strike, like many that have emerged across the detention estate, was a tactfully applied protest to subvert the disciplinary control and regulation over life under State care. Hunger strikes when bolstered by networked solidarity infrastructures and the types of relations that enable witnessing to occur may also generate swells of disparate protests, revive dormant communication channels, and formulate new opportunities to organise. In this practice of extreme refusal, strikes wilfully reclaim and carve out potential futures. Hunger strikes can be seen as an

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exceptional response to the exceptional nature of indefinite immigration detention. This kind of extreme action garners immediate reaction and pulls media and public to attention. The scale and intensity of these kinds of resistances are undoubtedly exhaustive, potentially harmful, and often volatile. However, as the testimonies show, whether they capture the exceptional acts of resistance inside detention or the precarity of living every day, what ‘carceral witnessing’ insists upon is the space for detainees to assert their ‘situated and embodied knowledges’ as foundations for knowing, sensing, and feeling in fugitivity. In the next section, I establish listening as a modality in the activation of the witness. I illustrate a scene from a demonstration outside Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre, characterised by the transference of testimony via solidarity infrastructures built to mobilise and connect across carceral space. This section will beckon shifts in how we might imagine and encounter thresholds to detention’s physical enclosures (Figs. 6.2, 6.3 and 6.4).

Listening as a Spatial-Political Practice in Detained Voices By its very nature noise demonstrations embody a peculiar intensity, in that they function as protests but also as collective interventions that reach across distance and break through barriers to communication.4 In the context of immigration detention and removal centres, free communication between the public is restricted and subverted. Testimony is trapped inside the centres and people are constrained to communicate grievances to the public through leaks and phone calls to journalists. During the demonstration, standing outside Yarl’s Wood, as people banged their drums and kicked and punched at metal fences, communication was live, in your face, and immediate. The noise brought people inside to the opaque windows of the centre. Holding makeshift signs, they communicated to the demonstrators by waving their arms through small openings between the glass 4  At the time of writing in April 2022, The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill 2021 clause 73 to criminalise noisy and disruptive protests that are of a ‘serious annoyance’ to the public or the activities of an organisation was amended by the House of Lords with disagreement by the Commons. The clause would have allowed conditions to be placed on where and how protests take place, including setting noise provisions for police to intervene if the protest is deemed to ‘impact’ ‘persons in the vicinity’. See Banerjee (2021) and House of Lords (2022).

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Fig. 6.2  Protestors marching to the site of the noise demonstration at Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre, 2017. (© Helen Brewer)

and concrete. In the midst of the cacophony, the chorus soon quietened down to allow those with megaphones to speak, telling them: ‘If you have a phone, call this number’. Those who could, called, and the receiving phone was placed up to the megaphone. A soft crackle indicated the line was live and connected.

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Fig. 6.3  Noise demonstration outside Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre, 2017. (© Helen Brewer)

Silence fell and we all listened as, one by one, women whom we could not see behind the centre’s walls, spoke their testimony out loud (Fig. 6.5). If these demonstrations permit live events of collective witnessing, listening to the ‘testimonies of the everyday’ on the part of Detained Voices reveals much about the unconscious survival mechanisms inherent to the space of detention. Statements are either written out as the witness speaks or they are recorded and later transcribed. When the conversation ends, and once the statement is written out in full, the listener reads it out loud back to the witness. This process clarifies any words that might have been misheard or unfamiliar to the writer and allows the witness to bring up further additions to this collaborative process. Listening allows conversations to occur freely, and not necessarily in any fixed order. Issues naturally develop through speaking out loud, as a working practice for ideas, thoughts, or experiences to be voiced. Writing and reading the testimony is a back-and-forth movement that highlights a material exchange between

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Fig. 6.4  Protestors making noise, 2017. (© Helen Brewer)

speaker and listener. The reading is done intentionally, presenting a chance for reflection, while reiterating the responsibility of the listener to be aware of deviations from the true intention of the speaker and to correct any inaccuracies that inevitably develop during the process of transcribing (Kemp 2019, 198). Detained Voices recognises these risks and resists the need to place expectations on the witness or for statements to be considered testimonies at all; instead they take on varied forms in content and speech. Subverting expectations of these conversations as direct evidence is a political act. It rejects the forced standardisation of witnessing and the ‘oppressive verification of testimony’ outlined by Michal Givoni (2016, 21) in relation to the confines of the courtroom. Navigating the dialogic of witnessing in detention insists on recognising the limits of access to detention space. This means interrogating the spatial conditions which make witnessing (im)possible. It follows then that questions on the accuracy and interpretation of testimony naturally arise when considering the lack of independent empirical research that can take

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Fig. 6.5  Protestors holding a banner, 2017. (© Helen Brewer)

place within the constraints of access (Bosworth and Kellezi 2017). The journey from passive witness to active witness is one from seeing to speaking. Witnesses are often faced with an ‘epistemological gap’, the space between the recognition of the experience and being subject to criticism of truthfulness, and the possibility of misinterpretation and inaccuracy (Peters 2001). By acknowledging that it is not always possible to communicate an accurate picture of detention when inside, Kemp (2019, 198) draws from the notion of a ‘politics of belief’ to suggest that it is not only necessary to believe what is represented in testimony but to comprehend the causes of its incompleteness. What Detained Voices demonstrates is a recognition of ‘excess’, what Kemp (2019, 198) calls ‘the demands that are leftover’ that spill into testimony. It is a material process that imbues emotional solidarity and understanding of what was said, what needs to be said, and what was not said. It is a dialogue sustained by methodically listening, writing, and speaking the subject’s words, both affirming and embodying the testimony through the activity.

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I want to put forward a note of caution on the limits of Detained Voices, particularly as I reflect on and recognise what power imbalances exist in the relationship formed between the witness inside the detention and the person listening and taking testimony. The method requires an accountable and critical examination of its process, as Detained Voices has the power to omit or control the conversation whether it wants to or not. By locating the negotiation between the speaker and listener as a place of imbalance, one recognises how listening does not always take place in a considered environment, nor does it alleviate the circumstances in which the phone call occurs. The connection is temporal and without visual cues, vulnerable to miscommunication and misinterpretation. Lastly, responsibility rests on the listener for acknowledgement and understanding, to make the speaker aware that they are in fact, listening.

Transforming Silence into Action Detained Voices advocates for a method of witnessing that imbues the capacity to act and transform the conditions faced inside. For example, statements made during the hunger strike in Yarl’s Wood used the momentum and publicity of their protest to call for ‘a serious investigation’ into how the Home Office was choosing to interpret and enforce their policies. We want to know if anything is being done regarding our plight but I also need to know if the Home Office will be held to account for their oppressive treatment of detainees, and when will its practices be regularised by a truly independent body, it cannot be allowed to continue its immoral and even illegal practices with impunity any longer. (Detained Voices, 16 March 2018)

Another statement from one of the strikers is written and addressed as a letter. It reads ‘Hello from Yarl’s Wood’ and is signed off ‘Hungry foreigner, Made In Britain’. By directly addressing her audience, she relays her experience, foregrounding events and details of life inside detention during the strike. The letter is written like a confessional and reminiscent of historically poignant diaries of political prisoners: The Home Office officials refused to talk to us as a group but we stood our ground. The directors strong-armed them into it and they did eventually talk to us, although they did not really say anything worth listening to. Just things like our detention is lawful (doesn’t feel like it) and they don’t detain

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asylum seekers and torture victims, but I can tell you this place would be more or less empty without them. We demanded to know how they can justify detaining people indefinitely and they said each case is different and judged individually, so when I said that there isn’t a pattern and it seems like a universal response from the Home Office they claimed that we would see a pattern because they have grounds to detain us. But let me tell you there is no pattern in the circumstances of detainees, only the reasons given by the Home Office. (Detained Voices, 26 February 2018)

The speaker in this extract bears witness to the detainment of others, as well as themselves. This example of first-hand witnessing is pertinent to the power of collective solidarity propagated through people’s shared conditions. Their experience of these conditions is used to petition Home Office officials, which they in turn bear witness to through the Detained Voices mechanism. This feedback loop facilitates an ongoing dispersed dialogue between the witness and the activation of testimony outside of the carceral space of detention. Occurrences which are crucial to the ways witnessing is able to shape change. By recognising the misrepresentation of their conditions and countering narratives of detainment, their activisms become part of the aggregate histories of anti-detention resistance in the UK. To witness is to describe a sensorial experience, and imbued in this testimony are the material articulations of collective solidarities that implicate the witness to ‘hear as touch’. Sara Ahmed (2002, 564) describes this gesture generated by hearing ‘others’, as the ‘ears that are alive to, or touched by, the sensations of other skins’. Ahmed posits this ‘skin-to-skin’ contact as an act of recognition which doesn’t confine or regulate the ‘other’ as ‘other’. This dialogue between skins builds on the act of witnessing as the transformation of reality through the recognition of other’s lived experience (Oliver 2001). It acknowledges that the experiences of others are real even if they may be incomprehensible to us. To witness means to recognise that not everything real is recognisable. The ‘we’ and ‘our’ of pain foregrounded in testimonies orientate the ‘collective feelings’ or the collective ‘skin’ of people in detention to others (Ahmed 2004). And even then, this recognition may not be shared or understood. Memoirs and testimonial narratives of prisons and incarceration, according to Adib and Emiljanowicz (2019, 1222), reveal the indeterminacy and incompleteness of this disciplinary mechanism, ‘as the agency of individuals to retain, create, and testify provide indications of

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non-­internalized decolonial temporal imaginaries’. In detention, there is a need to speak out, but also to not be forgotten. To contest the forces that systematically hide and silence migrants in detention, this chapter recognises in the testimonies quoted and in bell hooks’ (1989, 16) terms, that ‘the effort to speak about issues of “space and location” evoke pain and refusal’. Therefore, it is precisely in these explorations of testimony that ‘silences’ become part and parcel of the vocabularies and diverse forms of knowledge and understanding platformed here. From this study of testimony, carceral witnessing can be shown to capture the liberatory actions of people who are indefinitely detained, even if agency may not be fully realised. Witnessing presents possibilities of placing people in relation to and for each other. As a form of infrastructure, these relations are ever-present in the exchanges between speaker and listener, but to consider testimony beyond what is merely spoken is to consider, ‘what moves (between) subjects, and hence what fails to move, might precisely by that which cannot be presented in the register of speech, or voicing’ (Ahmed 2002, 564). Next, I examine how carceral witnessing gives bearing to the solidarity infrastructures constructed to negotiate and challenge detention. Drawing from the possibilities offered in viewing infrastructure, the configuration of spatial environments which shape the detention experience reveal how protest reorganises detention space.

(Counter) Infrastructural Demands Infrastructures are systems of material forms, made up of architectural and spatial components that reorganise daily life. They are multifarious ‘things’, exemplified in the technological systems that enable the mobility of people, goods, services, benefitting citizen and country alike, and functioning as obtrusive and obfuscated systems that migrants must navigate, often blindly and in friction. The many dimensions of infrastructure that shape the internal border comprise multiple technological and governing apparatuses formulated to enable the political and legislative frameworks which codify the citizen and ‘other’; the logistical networks and carceral technologies used to detain, remove, or deport; the networked capacities of private entities, border agents, civil servants, and citizens that serve the disciplinary regime; the regulation of mobility and spatial segregation and exclusion and the ‘biopolitical apparatuses’ in the form of security and biometric governance. All these and more maintain and serve the regulatory forces of the border regime, in which the dialectics of power feature

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and oversee the ‘circulation, flow, and movement, in order to govern mobile populations in an increasingly expansive space’ (Vaughan-Williams 2010, 1078). Immigration detention is one part of this infrastructure, a ‘thing’ which places people and ‘things’ in relation to each other. For example, the forced removal of people from detention to deportation can be considered an infrastructural move: What I have just witnessed has shocked and angered me so deeply I don’t know where to begin. After doing a peaceful sit in against the continued detention of torture, rape, gender violence trafficking and modern-day slavery victims, we had to witness a brutal removal of an African lady. Her hands were not even cuffed but rather some sort of tape or zip tie was used to tie her hands behind her back. I and many fellow detainees were shocked and outraged by this and indeed we began to fall into descent before finally composing ourselves as we do not wish to behave like the animals that are detaining us and removing us. (Detained Voices, 28 March 2018)

These moments described by witnesses showcase the many instances of violent physical and temporal coercion evocative of the detention and deportation regime, the function of which is noted by several scholars as ‘interlocking industries’ (Mountz et al. 2013, 523). The testimony above, however, elicits more than just a response to immigration detentions titular function as a removal centre. Through carceral witnessing, we again become privy to the witness becoming witness to detention and to others. The testimony divulges both the spectacular and quotidian acts of violence present alongside debilitating threats of deportation. Yet it also proposes how ‘tactical spatial manoeuvres’ might take place within the confines of detention space (Jewkes and Moran 2015, 165). To understand resistance in relation to the infrastructural logics of detention requires a spatial analysis that considers the ‘tactics of the body’, the ‘tactics which mobilise spatial politics’ and the ‘tactics of challenging assaults on identity’ (Jewkes 2013, 128). For detainees, moving through the choreographic routine and operation of detention is intimately bound within its architecture and spatial organisation. Immobilisation in this way functions as a key component of the border’s infrastructural technology to displace and suspend citizenship; however, when met with the

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consummation of immobilising processes, there still exists the production of alternative imaginaries of politics, solidarity, and space capable of coconstituting new and authentic social relations (Hall et  al. 2015). Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007, 11) attributes this to the connections that can be made ‘at a distance’, for example, borders or prisons highlight physical and geographical distinctions between places, yet their issues are capable of stretching across time and space, revealing that in fact ‘arenas for activism are less segregated than they seem’. Therefore, I argue for the possibilities in conceptualising infrastructure as a useful tool and departure point for thinking through the terms of connection that build on collective struggle and challenge the perpetuation of hostile environments. Bettina Stoetzer (2016, n.p.) observes that ‘this then might bring into focus the wider ecologies that emerge alongside and beyond infrastructures’. Indeed, the production of testimony below does not merely emerge from the description of lived experience but in the ecology of infrastructural networks that are held in tension and ‘in-­ between’ detention and outside, revealing the movement of counter infrastructural demands (body, technology, media) capable of mediating exchanges over vast distances or barriers to proximity. Testimonies as interlocutors concretise relationships between the subject and reader to perform with them the response-ability of being witness. Portals, like the testimony below, lay bare the immeasurable losses experienced in social isolation, detailing the missed intimate and everyday encounters beyond confinement. These desires subsequently enact the terms of connection capable of undoing the spectacle of immigration violence at a distance. I feel very isolated in here (Yarl’s Wood). It’s not like just a lonely feeling. It’s a different kind of isolation. I feel like I have already been removed to a place with different laws, removed from my friends and family, removed from society, so far removed from every comfort. I find myself missing silly things like animals. I want to play with my dog. I have not seen a child in so long, do little people exist anymore? I miss watching football with a cold Peroni. I wonder what happened in Game of Thrones? Silly things really. I am busy in here though, because English is my first language people always ask me to read documents for them and I want to help as best I can of course I do but it does take its toll on me. A lady was given a ticket yesterday and she was so distressed; it could have been avoided had she been provided with the help she needed as she does not read English.

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I have to go now as I just received a text to go to reception. Every time I get a text message, I have a mini panic attack. Everyone does, and it’s doing my head right in. Bye for now From an angry foreigner who was made in Britain. (Detained Voices, 24 February 2018)

Furthermore, the testimony highlights the complex social contingencies that are produced inside detention. For example, the lack of language and translation support offered by detention staff ensures the kind of social isolation mentioned, while the breakdown of communication channels between individuals and state or legal entities is part of the carceral entrapment which withdraws support or the means of accessing support for those detained. As a result, the relationships that are formed between detainees are enmeshed within a shared struggle to navigate the detention infrastructure together. Yet, despite this solidarity between detainees, labour accumulates onto the shoulders of people who are already exhausted and pressured within the complexity of their own cases. This entanglement and tension between the need to progress one’s own case and meeting the collective’s needs in detention is a strategic constraint imposed by the carceral logics and legal boundaries that individuates and renders detainees isolated and atomised.

Building Solidarities in the Space ‘in-between’ Through carceral witnessing, insights into the formation of solidarity networks, communication channels, and their temporal mobilisation across the detention estate are made known. Migrant justice activists often attribute the closure of detention centres and the momentum of anti-­detention campaigns to the self-determined and self-organised resistances made by detainees inside (Mackeith 2020; Yates 2018). Bill Mackeith, co-organiser of the ‘Campaign to Close Campsfield’, noted that these actions spurred a growing opposition across the detention estate and campaigns had become ‘increasingly coherent, from grassroots to parliamentary levels, and exercised considerable pressure on government’ (Mackeith 2020). Imagining the scale of resistances made possible by the frequency of momentary conjunctions, connections, and solidarities which sustain mass mobilisations means locating the gaps that emerge in the indeterminacy of detention infrastructures. This is what Abdou Maliq Simone (2012, n.p.) articulates

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as the infrastructure of the ‘in-between’, moments which ‘reveal properties that explain how things are attuned to each other, complement or engender new capacities’. The framing for these nodes of infrastructural exchange, I seek to reflect on draws from Simone’s (2004) notion of ‘people as infrastructure’, elaborated in the urban scenes of Johannesburg’s intimate economies. The conjunction points of this infrastructure are in the social interactions of people who replicate the ebb and flow of the City’s internal movements. In the space in-between infrastructural movement, these capacities showcase the contacts that can be made, the knowledge that can be formed, and the ‘momentary conjunctions’ that may occur. This understanding reveals solidarity infrastructures as the thing which places bodies inside and outside detention into relation (and across multiple spatial-­ temporal dimensions). The testimony given below showcases the effect of this conjunction, where witnesses are witness to ‘response-ability’ in action: So the demonstration yesterday was welcomed as it not only invigorated me a little but also showed many detainees that there are people out there who are aware of what is happening and are making a stand with us against this corrupt, immoral practice that is indefinite detention. (Detained Voices, 26 March 2018)

Solidarity infrastructures are revealed here, as forms of mobilisations, of bridges built to challenge the enduring ‘spatial morphologies of marginalisation’ (Hall et al. 2015, 62). The depoliticisation and immobilisation of detainees are counteracted in the formulation of new possible relationships and connections across multiple histories and geographies. Despite this, their presence may be difficult to locate in instances, as they are inherently temporal, incoherent, opaque, and always responsive. Solidarity infrastructures often turn up during moments of resistance, seen in online ‘twitter storms’ to publicly mobilise against deportation flights or protests outside the Home Office guided and prompted by demands made inside detention. These testimonies showcase the ways these infrastructures underpin and liven social relations between inside and outside, while continuing to gesture towards an enduring reciprocity of bearing witness. Communication channels between inside and outside detention are critical infrastructures and are often described as ‘lifelines’ to accessing essential services like legal representation, immigration advice, and migrant support NGOs. For many, this usually occurs via personal mobile phones,

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although emails, fax, and post are also permitted. The telephone, as the preferred means of communication, rests on this accessibility and how this access is negotiated. Detainees are allowed non-smart phones (camera phones are banned) provided to them by the Home Office and their chosen network provider; however, this often means that, upon detention, loved ones, friends, advocates, and lawyers outside cannot contact them using their usual phone number. Sometimes a single phone number is shared between many and there are cases when members of Detained Voices are unable to contact witnesses, either because their phone is not working or because they were released or deported from the country. Access and means of communication are a privilege and regular, continual contact is vulnerable to the daily disruptions of life in detention. In February 2020, a High Court ruling preventing a charter flight deportation to Jamaica continued despite a legal challenge concerning mobile phone outages and lack of network connection that prevented detainees from accessing their legal advocates (BBC News 2020). Solidarity infrastructures simulate what Brian Larkin (2013, 328) describes as physical forms that shape ‘the nature of a network, the speed and direction of its movement, its temporalities, and its vulnerability to breakdown’, filling the void where access to resources and services are denied or are unable to be met. Therefore, we can also critique solidarity infrastructures for reproducing the burdens imposed on migrants by the state. Tensions inevitably arise when the function of community support and solidarity structures are subsequently contracted by the Home Office to perform a service tied to state agendas and financing. In mediating the immigration system, offering advice, legal representation, or medical help, solidarity infrastructures can be subject to legal formalities and professionalisation, requiring accountability to state institutions. The infrastructural weaknesses and vulnerabilities of this kind of solidarity presents challenges for grassroot groups who might work alongside charities and NGOs for contacts and resources; and for those charities and NGOs who work with detention centre staff and the Home Office. Both are subject to compliance and regulations by authorities and ‘gate keepers’ to the centre. According to Nick Gill (2016, 173), the conditions for this kind of proximity to the centre, albeit on ‘solidarity’ terms, risk groups ‘working to improve and soften the business of rule’ that ‘can also lead to incorporation into the very system that is being challenged’. Groups offering services to detainees in Gill’s research acknowledge that a relationship between detention centre staff is necessary for these activities to take place.

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They are welcomed by staff who observe that these activities contribute to bureaucratic ‘brownie points’ and ‘less riots’ (Gill 2016, 174). But with the risk of compromising their accessibility to the centre, adherence to comply with institutional operations for groups entering into detention as visitors or as service providers becomes unavoidable, and Gill notes further that ‘the degree of closeness to the bureaucracy is a calculated and often agonising decision’ (ibid.). Consequently the conditions for solidarity may also be the very thing which may negate solidarity in the long term. However, it’s important to note that the function of solidarity infrastructures is not the provision of ‘care’ in the sense that there is a receiver and giver. Solidarity requires self-­ reflexivity, a recognition of power imbalances, positionalities and ultimately, of what remains incommensurable in a solidarity relationship. In this way, witnessing might reflect and critique the instances of solidarity infrastructures that have been built and that will be built.

Conclusion State imaginings of border infrastructure have conjured the building of border walls and prisons, but what might be its opposite vision? From where can the dismantling and opening of these ‘walled states’ occur? Through a practice of witnessing, the space of the detention centre, a place built out of sight and mind for the greater British public, lays bare the disconnections between actuality and imagination, drawing attention to the enduring struggles, solidarity alliances, and collective knowledge countering the perceived totalising power of carceral space. This chapter has illuminated the substance of experience and shared knowledge arising from witness testimonies to discern the affective legislative and policy formations dictating the organisation of detention space. The spatial experiences of immigration detention articulated in witnessing cannot be disassociated from the everyday infrastructural demands detainees endure. When applying the concept of the ‘spatial imagination’ to detention space it’s helpful to consider Adib and Emiljanowicz’s (2019, 1227) work on ‘colonial time’ or the ‘temporal repressions’ enforced by spaces of containment and exclusion, such as prisons, to provoke the imaginative limits of such a site through witnessing: ‘The spaces of tension such as prison confronts the unseen past within a collective memory to decolonize the imagination and enact other (im)possibilities’.

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The socio-spatial texture illustrated through this chapter recalls the intimacy of relations between detainees within the detention centre and beyond its walls, with people and groups organising to build solidarity infrastructures together. At the same time, I reveal the challenges to the infrastructural demands of carceral space which seek to depoliticise and immobilise detainees. This involves refusing to limit or erase the everyday acts of resistance which constitute detention as an inherent space of contestation. Through the consideration of a critical spatial practice, we can create those links and articulate them in such a way as to negotiate the complexities of resistance and power.

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Women Against Rape. 2018. Yarl’s Wood: Women on Hunger Strike: Our Rights in Here Are Being Violated Every Day. Women Against Rape. https://womenagainstrape.net/yarls-­wood-­women-­on-­hunger-­strike-­our-­rights-­in-­here-­are-­ being-­violated-­every-­day/. Accessed 15 January 2020. Yates, Kieran. 2018. The Yarl’s Wood Hunger Strike Is a Rallying Cry Against State Racism. VICE News. March 13.

Detained Voices Detained Voices. 2018a. They Called Her, She Went to the Unit Office and Then They Locked Her Inside. Detained Voices. https://detainedvoices. com/2018/02/23/they-­called-­her-­she-­went-­to-­the-­unit-­office-­and-­then-­ they-­locked-­her-­inside/. Accessed 10 January 2020. ———. 2018b. She Managed to See Us. Diane Abbott the Shadow Home Secretary Was Here This Morning. Detained Voices. https://detainedvoices. com/2018/02/23/she-­managed-­to-­see-­us-­diane-­abbott-­the-­shadow-­home-­ secretary-­was-­here-­this-­morning/. Accessed 10 January 2020. ———. 2018c. I Feel Like I Have Already Been Removed from Society. Detained Voices. https://detainedvoices.com/2018/02/24/i-­feel-­like-­i-­have-­already-­ been-­removed-­from-­society/. Accessed 10 January 2020. ———. 2018d. Hello from Yarl’s Wood. Detained Voices. https://detainedvoices.com/2018/02/26/hello-­from-­yarls-­wood/. Accessed 10 January 2020. ———. 2018e. This Whole Thing Started Out of Desperation and Frustration and a Deep Sense of Injustice Felt by Myself and Others. Detained Voices. https:// detainedvoices.com/2018/03/05/this-­w hole-­t hing-­s tar ted-­o ut-­o f-­ desperation-­and-­frustration-­and-­a-­deep-­sense-­of-­injustice-­felt-­by-­myself-­and-­ others/. Accessed 10 January 2020. ———. 2018f. For Most of Us It Is a Fight for Life as We Know It, If Not for Life Itself. Detained Voices. https://detainedvoices.com/2018/03/16/for-­most-­ of-­us-­it-­is-­a-­fight-­for-­life-­as-­we-­know-­it-­if-­not-­for-­life-­itself/. Accessed 10 January 2020. ———. 2018g. So I Will Keep Going, and Try to Stay Strong, and I Will Not Go Gracefully, to Exile. Detained Voices. https://detainedvoices.com/2018/ 03/26/so-­i -­w ill-­k eep-­g oing-­a nd-­t r y-­t o-­s tay-­s trong-­a nd-­i -­w ill-­n ot-­g o-­ gracefully-­to-­exile/. Accessed 10 January 2020. ———. 2018h. We Have a New Chant for Our Protest and It Goes ‘I’M NOT GOING OUT LIKE THAT’. Detained Voices. https://detainedvoices. com/2018/03/28/we-­have-­a-­new-­chant-­for-­our-­protest-­and-­it-­goes-­im-­ not-­going-­out-­like-­that/. Accessed 10 January 2020.

PART II

Challenging Representations of Refugees

CHAPTER 7

‘She is the meteor and I, her space’: Co-Becoming and Biopolitical Trauma in Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail Dima Barakat Chami

Introduction On 28 April 2022, the government of the UK ratified into law the Nationality and Borders Act, a set of immigration rules and legislations which aim to fortify the British border against migrants, especially asylum seekers. Breaking with international human rights law, the Act has essentially criminalised asylum-seeking by revoking the legitimacy of all claims made upon ‘illegal’ arrival into the UK, while deporting claimants to third countries, offshoring its moral responsibilities and making it impossible for claimants to be granted leave to remain, or refuge, within the UK. In its quest to render the UK as inhospitable and hostile to migrants as possible, the government has also reclassified modern slavery and human

D. Barakat Chami (*) University of Bristol, Bristol, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 F. Barclay, B. Ivey (eds.), Contemporary Representations of Forced Migration in Europe, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Human Rights, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47831-4_7

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trafficking as illegal immigration, in a move which criminalises victims, leading to deportations and re-traumatisation. In the years since Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail (2006)—a novella centred on a protagonist who has been trafficked into the UK—was published, the state has expanded its arsenal of legal and administrative processes, turning its border regime from an ostensibly biopolitical one which aimed to manage, detain and deport migrants, into a necropolitical one which aims to subject, control and ultimately discard. The state’s cruelty also extends inwards to within its borders: it has also denied migrant women—‘illegal’ or not—access to refuge in instances of domestic or sexual violence. In light of these policies which were designed to target migrants but which in practice threaten everyone,1 there is a renewed urgency to the interventions raised by Becoming Abigail surrounding questions of rights abuses, recognising shared common vulnerabilities, and the role played by their literary representations. As a lyrical novella that deals with issues of personhood, rights, trauma and their politics within the context of human trafficking, Becoming Abigail advances a critical ethics of humanism grounded in Igbo cosmology, to expose and resist the fact of biopolitical trauma. Biopolitics is defined by Michel Foucault as technologies of governmentality which are “dedicated to the care of life: they endeavour to administer, optimize, and multiply [life], subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations” (2008, 137). This is a power of life overseen by the state, through a set of administrative processes, socio-legal institutions and discipline. The traumatic element of biopolitics can be recognised as “[t]he processes and apparatuses through which life itself has increasingly become a target of power” (2014, 142); in other words what links trauma to biopolitics is the process by which biopolitics steadily transforms from a power of life into a power over life. While biopolitics is the process by which the state exercises its sovereignty and manages the population, it does so efficiently by relying on its stratification. The state creates categories of social and legal membership to which it ascribes an order of power; the vulnerable can thus slip through the cracks of this order and occupy liminal spaces of being. The nation-state’s belonging is therefore manifest through 1  The Hostile Environment oversaw the Windrush Tragedy in which British citizens of Caribbean descent were targeted with deportations. Additionally, statistics have shown that in the UK a large number of victims of trafficking and modern slavery have been found to be British children (Dugan 2022).

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exclusionary forms of citizenship—and once the racial and legal elements are introduced into biopolitics, we are presented with a form of power which is facilitated by the total dehumanisation of people such as migrants who are deemed disposable, because they are—and can be—excluded from social and legal forms of membership, and thus personhood. The novella addresses Abigail’s encounter with the British state as an illegal migrant who has been trafficked and this encounter exposes the contradictions inherent to the British state’s claims of humanism, precisely because of its inability to recognise her humanity as a Nigerian migrant. Excluded from the categories of personhood and citizenship, Abigail is not legally legible to the state and this becomes evident when the process of rehabilitation, under the biopolitical guise of pastoral care, robs her of agency, further traumatising her. Despite being subject to the state, Abigail chooses to be beholden to those whose vulnerabilities mirror hers, such as her cousin Mary, who is a victim of domestic abuse and is an illegal migrant in the UK. It is through Abigail’s experience of the British state that she is able to perceive the depths of Mary’s vulnerability—precisely because it is shared between them. In this way, Abigail recognises that her and Mary’s survival in the UK is dependent on one another, and that they become human through one another. Her grounding in Igbo cosmology which espouses the connectiveness of all forms of life, therefore endows her with a membership that cannot be rescinded through political structures. Becoming Abigail radically reconfigures form and temporality in order to make a critical interjection into the biopolitics of trauma. Abigail’s narrative does not progress linearly, it does not resort to teleological narrative traditions which privilege narrative closure as that which can most appropriately address trauma, thereby moving beyond political rhetoric into a space of reciprocal vulnerability. What I want to suggest is that this lack of teleology puts at the fore an unknowable and inaccessible character, suspending normative approaches to our ontological understanding of the human. Because Becoming is approximating, even reclaiming, the life-­ forms of those who have been excluded from humanity, it cannot adopt those same hegemonic narratological traditions which both emerge from and produce cultural and political modernity, itself premised on the exclusion of the African person, and in this case, the African migrant. By complicating both the transmission of and response to the alterity of the lives that it represents, Becoming advances a radical ethics of trauma which opposes liberal ethics which seeks to bring under its comprehension the subject of biopolitical trauma.

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In opposition to the normative ethical position which understands the human as that which is both individually knowable and self-possessed in the eyes of the law, Becoming suggests that through grief and mourning— that is, through the processes which teach us that we are never just ourselves and always parts of an other—we are always engaging in acts of co-becoming. By understanding trauma as an act of dispossession from ourselves, a radical politics of recognition opens up a space in which we may recognise that we are all vulnerable to such dispossession, thus foregrounding an ethics of common corporeal vulnerability. Becoming posits a politics of vulnerability based on the notion of reciprocity in order to show, in opposition to the normative understanding of the human, how the human co-becomes through the other. A politics of recognition then occupies centre stage in the novella: at once concerned with ‘seeing’ Abigail, yet actively preventing unfettered access to her, the novella allows us instead to recognise the emergence of Abigail’s agency, while preserving her alterity. I argue that Abani inhabits Abigail’s voice through lyrical form, thereby necessarily inhibiting our access to her own subjectivity. As a survivor of state violence himself, Abani’s oeuvre is dedicated to recovering the beauty of becoming human—in all its painful contradictions. Abani is an Igbo novelist and poet who was a victim of forced migration as a child, when he and his family had to flee Nigeria during the Biafran war of 1967–1970 and seek asylum in the UK. After the war Abani returned to Nigeria where he wrote his first novel, Masters of the Board (1985), which the state perceived as a plot to overthrow the government and sentenced him to prison. As a university student Abani’s successive criticism of the government also landed him in prison, where he was subjected to psychological and physical torture. Ultimately, Abani fled to the UK again, and has written extensively about the violence of borders he experienced as a Black Nigerian, and the humiliation which he was subjected to as a result. Abani subsequently settled in the US, where he has since published multiple novels and poetry collections, all of which are concerned with the vulnerabilities at the core of what it means to be human. These experiences deeply shaped Abani’s sense of self and his philosophies, which complement Becoming Abigail. Becoming is a novella which attempts to vocalise the unspeakable in its exploration of love, and the consequences of its absence. Abigail Tansi, the narrative’s 14-year-old protagonist, becomes aware of herself through the grief she encounters at the loss of her mother, also named Abigail, who died during childbirth. The novella explicitly delves into Abigail’s unusual

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mourning rituals as she attempts to come to terms with a grief that she is incapable of understanding, or managing, on her own. The novella speaks to the complicated ways in which trauma and mourning are both constitutive of our quotidian existence, but also an impediment to our ability to navigate the quotidian as individuals. Abigail’s struggles become compounded when her father, unable to cope with his grief, insists that Abigail move to London where she will have better opportunities, he then takes his own life, thus leaving Abigail with no choice. Abigail is then taken to London against her will, on a forged visa. Peter, who is married to Abigail’s cousin Mary, orchestrates this move and traffics Abigail into the UK where he attempts to force her into prostitution. While Abigail does escape— with Mary’s help—and is handed over to the British state to be rehabilitated, she is silenced and further traumatised and takes her own life at the end of the novella. Despite the graphic violence which mars her short life, Abigail doesn’t lose her ability to love, she understands the need to be recognised, or ‘seen’, as she puts it throughout the novella, precisely because that is the one thing that those perpetrating violence against her are incapable of doing. In this way, Abigail’s ability to see others and recognise them for who they are is what makes her not a victim, but the agent of her own co-becoming.

Misreading Abigail: The Biopolitics of Compassion Writings on Becoming overwhelmingly read the novella within normative, political frameworks: unable to move beyond the category of the state and the state-sanctioned ‘human’, they identify Abigail solely as a victim of insufficient policy and the barbarism of men. While Abigail is indignant at the state’s erasure of her, this hasn’t prevented critics reading her story through the same limited lens as the state. Ashley Dawson reads Becoming as “a literature of displacement […] a form of cargo culture” (2010, 179–180) while Laura Reinares argues that one of the strongest merits of Becoming lies in its disclosure of the obstructive way in which the legal institutions work in destination countries, rendering trafficked women’s exploitation invisible because of their ‘illegal immigrant’ status. (2015, 121)

By analysing the West’s colonial past and its present uneven relations with postcolonial states, Dawson and Reinares each advance a criticism of

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migration policies and rightly posit that these contribute to a system of trafficking. The influx of migrants as a result of the West’s colonial past has led to the militarisation of borders and the criminalisation of poor migrants from the Global South. This illegalisation of poor people has meant that “political and legal responses to trafficking […] are by and large repressive and punitive, harming these vulnerable populations even further” (Kempadoo et al. 2005, xxv). While critics are not wrong in their analysis of those global processes, they do not read Abigail in a way which challenges the state’s categorisation of her in these terms: “Mother died during childbirth. Child probably abused by successive male relatives” (Abani 2006a, 111). Those characteristics by which Abigail becomes identifiable to the state are also the ones by which she becomes identifiable to critics. Abigail’s rehabilitation by the state presents a paradox for the ethical claims of refuge by the modern British state as it questions the legal policies which underpin the state’s response to trafficking and the very moral foundations on which these policies have been made. The danger of reading Abigail’s story simply as a critique of the state’s policies suggests a desire for state reform, and for Abigail to be enfolded into the normative categories of the state-­sponsored human, with her rights restored. Unable to move beyond a normative political reading—that is, beyond the organ of the state against which Abani and Abigail are writing—critics neglect their disavowal of modernity’s foundation, their desires to abolish those limiting definitions of the human and the socio-legal institutions which sustain it. Thus, Abigail remains unseen, never read as exceeding the limits of language and policy which govern the lives of postcolonial subjects. At their core, those misreadings rob Abigail of agency, precisely because they ultimately cast her as a victim. Throughout the novella, Abigail actively resists that posture appeal which traditionally accompanies human rights literature—and which humanitarian compassion in general demands from its benefactors. She does not ask the reader to grant her her humanity, nor does she make any rights claims. Abigail simply reveals herself, in all her vulnerability, even when this is a ‘self’ which is not fully delineated, knowable. The novella balances this dialectic through its use of lyricism, a literary tool which is capable of balancing the poetic with the narrative. This nonetheless engenders compassionate readings from critics: while those sentiments are “generous on the part of the reader, [they] obscure the deeper intent, the deeper possibility” (Abani 2009) of narrative.

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In Humanitarian Reason, Didier Fassin argues that the problem with compassion is that it is “a moral sentiment with no possible reciprocity” (2012, 3). Speaking specifically within the context of humanitarianism, Fassin claims Humanitarian reason governs precarious lives: […] threatened and forgotten lives that humanitarian government brings into existence by protecting and revealing them. When compassion is exercised in the public space, it is therefore always directed from above to below, from the more powerful to the weaker, the more vulnerable—those who can generally be constituted as victims of an overwhelming fate. (4)

Literature, and literary criticism, as public space, espouse these compassionate tendencies and are overwhelmingly subject to those interpretive frames. Reading Abigail within the institutional frameworks which continuously subjugate her ultimately prevents her from existing as anything other than the object of humanitarian reason. Hence literary forms which attempt to bridge the gap between human rights’ utopian promises and modernity’s alienating reality have as their focus the victim. Precisely because of human rights’ inadequate universalism, cosmopolitanism has had to intervene and encompass globality as an alternative framework through which to elicit identification with the cosmopolitan ‘human family’. Like human rights discourse, cosmopolitanism’s tendency relies on universalising the figure of pathos—otherwise known as Hannah Arendt’s ‘human being in general’, that is the “frail human remnant [who has lost] whatever judicial purchase it once had” (2014, 115). The cosmopolitan sentiment has thus led to a wide array of literary forms who have, at their core, a human rights claim, with the victim—or the figure of pathos—as the central focus of their humanitarianism. Lyndsey Stonebridge reminds us that the figure of ‘pathos’ is as central to law as it is to theory: the United Nations’ 1951 ‘Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees’ defines a refugee not as a person who is entitled to rights that she has been denied, but as one who can demonstrate that she lives in fear for her life. Pathos, to some extent, has become a legal requirement for today’s asylum seekers. (2014, 115)

Pathos literatures are effectively victim narratives where the agency of the victim is structurally erased. Agency, or the freedom to be seen through a

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radically different frame, is stripped away through the metrics of cosmopolitan literary rhetoric. This rhetoric is also a necessary and legal requirement for asylum claims: if personal narratives do not live up to the expectations placed on the victim—or in other words if they do not elicit enough of the right kind of sympathy—they are denied by the state. This sympathetic and thus biopolitical erasure of agency and personhood ensures that those identities are understood primarily through the cultural stereotypes and legal discourses into which they are forced, and subsequently into the cultural and legal structures they become parts of. Those identities only become visible when voiced through the international circulation of pathos literature, they become identifiable with the aid of the structures and categories of the state. Reading sympathetically thus makes legible to us the biopolitically visible subject—the subject of humanitarian government—and, by extension, the object of cosmopolitan sympathy. Read through state-sponsored normative ethics, the unknowable, opaque human who exists outside of these structures remains unrecognised. Literary forms which are not linear in form or realist in content differ from the pathos novel as they make present not the assumed subjectivity of their characters but rather, as Spivak (1988) has so clearly argued with regard to the subaltern, the no-­ place from which they can(not) speak. Literary forms which do not seek to conform to the strictures of traditional witness narratives—and thus do not construct normative subject-identities—employ both temporal and linguistic freedoms to create meaning which enable the ethical recognition of the radical alterity their subjects embody. As a lyrical novella, Becoming’s many linguistic and formal tropes make it impossible to achieve the kind of authenticity the pathos novel requires, and ultimately the novella does not concern itself with realist representations: Abigail’s opacity is maintained and the narration of her experiences never bring us fully into her psyche, but rather to the limits of our own. I want to make a distinction between recognition and identification— and I want to root this distinction in a critique of sympathy-as-biopolitics. The pathos novel embodies the contradictions within the cosmopolitan movement: it cannot conceive of a way to represent its subject without objectifying them in the process. Witness narratives engage in creating “certain kinds of victim identities[which] gain cultural saliency” (Smith

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and Watson 2012, 610–11)2 as they circulate globally as “transnational artefacts” (Hersford 2004, 105). This circulation ensures that constructed precarious identities are highly visible and thus identifiable. The biopolitical identification of the human ‘other’ is thus intrinsically linked to the sympathetic identification of this same human other. This deployment of sympathy is accompanied with a desire to bring the subject under the biopolitical regime of care and compassion. Thus, full disclosure from such narratives is also what drives its demand in the literary publishing sphere. The trope of authenticity, and thus the valorisation of realism, results in the objectification of the Other, easily identifiable but hardly recognisable. Anne Cubilié notes that “approaches to collecting, analysing, and performing testimony all rely on the ‘knowability’ if not transparency, of what is being said” (2005, 222). The flaw in cosmopolitanism and its attendant literary forms is its insistence on constructing a ‘knowable’ human, easily identified by whichever injustice has been done to them. Arguably the ethos of cosmopolitan sympathy is not so far removed from the ethos of humanitarian discourse: in their thirst for distant narratives of suffering and attendant rescue impulses, their goal of producing human equality through identification with those suffering others end up depoliticising those ‘others’. When literature vocalises the precarity of lives which have been rendered apolitical, it becomes a political endeavour to return ethics to the practice of reading, rather than limiting and short-­ lived compassion and sympathy. Fassin asks what happens ‘when we mobilise compassion rather than justice?’ (2012, 8). Compassion, while a generous sentiment, glosses over the ethics which are at stake: the critical aspect of cosmopolitan sympathy is either lost or fallible when it cannot address the complicity of that compassion in reproducing the conditions which enable the continued subjection of precarious lives. Stonebridge’s work on critical lyricism proves helpful here. This is a form she associates with refugee writing, emergent with instances of the denial of national, civil and legal rights, which both questions and traces 2  Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson explore the mechanisms of this construction; they posit that features of first-person testimony must chronicle ‘conditions of oppression, assemble histories of psychic degradation and bodily assault, register the aftereffects of survival and mourning, and commemorate victims who cannot give testimony’.⁠ Witness narratives check these five ‘metrics of authenticity’: they all share “the ‘you-are-there’ sense of immediacy, the invocation of rights discourse, the affirmation of the duty to narrate a collective story, the normative shape of victim experience and identity, and lastly the ethno-documentation of cultural specificity”⁠ (2012, 592–4).

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the relationship between literary and legal personhood. Stonebridge understands refugee writing as “a critical mourning for the human in its decoupling of humanity and language” (2014, 118). The linguistic turn of critical lyricism explores the struggle of inhabiting the ‘political-legal paradox’ of statelessness in writing. Unlike cosmopolitan discourse, the language of critical lyricism addresses the loss of language and expression which accompanies the refugee experience. The loss of language is not simply a denial of “linguistic anchorage to nation and tradition” (2014, 115) but also, crucially, the loss of “the naturalness of reactions […] the unaffected expression of feelings” (Arendt 2007, 264). In Becoming, we see this loss manifested both in its linguistic and in its formal choices; the opacity of the narrative, and of Abigail herself, gets mirrored in the inhibition of testimony and the emergence of an identifiable subject. Critical lyricism demands a level of self-critical recognition on behalf of the reader. Faced with the impossibility of accessing the other—precisely because of the other’s linguistic, politic-legal and racial alterity—the reader encounters both their own and the other’s limits. Ananya Jahanara Kabir, writing in the context of Partition, describes what she calls ‘Lyric Iterations’ as utterances or lamentations which are un-assimilated into the teleology of narrative, yet “exist alongside and seep into the Anglophone realms of the novel, juridicial and constitutional discourse, and official pedagogy” (2014, 64). Kabir argues that the transformative capacities of “non-­ narrative, even non-linguistic, reparation may be the best way out of the ‘silence versus testimony’ binary” (65). The novella thus invites us to accept Abigail’s form-of-life alongside, and despite, her official judicial erasure.

Encountering Abigail: Transubstantiation and Co-Becoming What is the position beyond cosmopolitan sympathy? And how can this position be represented, without that representation simply reproducing an ‘other’? Abani’s formal choices with Becoming, as well as the philosophies which supplemented those, enable us to read Becoming as redemption rather than political tragedy. Abani understands that “so far, the only language we have of defining self does violence to another” (Abani 2009, 169). By becoming Abigail—literally—Abani circumvents the problem of constructing and representing an individuated self. Abani’s commitment

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to redemptive, ethical transformation has led him to create an oeuvre dedicated to understanding how shared vulnerability, the ability to persist in a world dedicated to sustaining our deaths, enacts that transformation. This structure of co-constitution brings us beyond the problem of cosmopolitan sympathy as primarily, it is resistant to the idea of a self-possessed, individuated subject, performing a criticality which resists the erasure of those forms of life which are biopolitically suppressed. Abigail’s story thus marks the distinction between a humanitarian and radical humanist style of redemption. In his attempt, or inability, to express the unspeakable, Abani laboured over Becoming for years in “looking for the texture of Abigail’s life” (2006b). Abigail’s personality is testament to this labour: this texture becomes apparent in the novella through its various breaks in punctuation, temporal alternations, Igbo philosophy, Chinese poetry, interrupted internal monologues and unresolved moral ambiguities. Speaking of his encounter with Abigail, Abani explains the ways in which she haunted him until she began to materialise into a work of literature. Abani’s attempts at recalling his encounters with Abigail are grounded in unreliable memories, for which he recognises the possibility of their fabrication. Similarly, Abigail’s attempts at remembering her mother also consist of fabricated memories, suggesting Abigail is haunted by her mother just as Abani is haunted by Abigail. Despite this haunting, Abani still cannot adequately represent Abigail’s life, describing his attempts as “a deep betrayal” (2006b), followed by the confession that his approximations are still a failure: When asked, I often say that I write to find my own humanity, that I am in a desperate battle to redeem myself, to make myself beautiful in the world. And yet in finding Abigail, I feel reluctant to claim my humanity, I feel undeserving. I feel awe in the face of her. She is the meteor and I, her space. (2006b)

Contrary to the liberal ethics of cosmopolitan sympathy where identification with the Other results in a presumed extension of the self, the traumatic encounter with the Other results instead in the bisection—or rupture—of the self. Abani’s metaphor signals the two premises which substantiate my argument about co-becoming. That Abani needs to write to find his humanity is a truth that tells us he understands we are always co-constituted by the Other. This humility is key to undoing the

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dominating, patriarchal gaze which would otherwise betray and objectify Abigail. Abani co-becoming with Abigail undoes the gaze, the frame which would relegate them both to their own separate selves, and thus makes it possible to write the novel in a non-phallocentric way. The novella is thus the result of this ambiguous encounter; the vocalising of the incomprehensible, the unspeakable. This process began outside of the novella itself. For the better part of a decade, and in various ways, Abigail appeared to Abani. Abigail came to Abani first in the form of a newspaper story. The newspaper headlined the image of a trafficked Nigerian woman, beaten to a pulp by relatives who had ostensibly brought her to London as a domestic worker, but were really trying to sell her into prostitution. In shoring up what can be understood as the trauma linked to forced migration coupled with the effects of long-term pushing for assimilation (and ergo, silencing) of migrant communities, Abani talks of collective shame as his response to reading the newspaper article: [But I read that article] with a great deal of shame, because during the 80s there was a huge influx of Nigerian immigration to the UK […] And so being a Nigerian in that kind of context, every time you read something negative that might have been true you sort of felt some sort of collective shame. (Abani 2006c)

This collectivity arises from a sense of complicity, and consequently, Abani is incapable of responding to the story solely with sympathy or pity. His responses thus lay in his search for what he calls ‘some deeper human syntax’ which he attempts to vocalise through Becoming. Abani writes: This is good: that all our responses—inadequate, confused, limiting and otherwise—are driven by an insatiable melancholy and maybe even some deeper human syntax we can only guess at—that we value the lives of others precisely because we know the limits of our own. (Abani 2004, 29–30)

The novella’s history, the processes it underwent before turning into Becoming, makes apparent both Abigail and Abani’s interwoven personal histories. Abigail first appeared in a short story called ‘Jazz Petals’, where she was called Jasmine. She then became Abigail as the subject of a poem, before, two years later, Becoming Abigail. This temporal and conscious fragmentation involved in the burgeoning of a textured life is reflected in

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Abigail’s fragmentation within the text of the novella itself. Beyond character, the text shuttles unevenly between ‘Then’ and ‘Now’ chapters. The lack of temporality, and thus linearity—the whole diegesis take place in the space of a few hours—disavows the teleology of the human, thereby equally disavowing the logic of the law which writes it into being. This temporal and diegetic instability attempts to capture the overwhelming immediacy of the lived experience, without delineating who speaks and who is being spoken to. Abani recognises the limits of assuming somebody’s psyche can ever truly be accessed. His solution, however, is not to abstain from writing but rather to write ethically: that is, to lay bare the ways in which those subjects of our melancholy or imagination are never objects in and of themselves, but part and parcel of our own consciousness. Abani’s consciousness is interwoven into Abigail’s consciousness, and in this way the novella makes no pretence that it provides us with unfettered access into Abigail’s subjectivity. Abani does not attempt to mask this corporeality that he shares with Abigail, on the contrary, he openly expresses it: “And regardless of my attempts, my body is all over this book. My soul is interwoven with Abigail’s soul. My heart is her heart” (Abani 2013). Abigail has the power to humble her reader, and thus the magnitude of this confrontation in itself can make one unwilling to claim their own humanity in the awe of hers. This form of pathos differs radically from that of cosmopolitan sympathy because it arises out of an ethos of shared loss, not misplaced identification. The difference between an insatiable thirst for victim narratives and an insatiable melancholy at the conditions which enable victimisation is one of the markers of difference between Abani’s position and those of other authors. Abigail doesn’t exist simply within the text as the fractured and traumatised victim of sex abuse and forced migration; she is the product of Abani’s haunting—or what he calls ‘ectoplasmic residues’ (Abani 2006b)— the ghosts which ‘leave their vestigial traces’ on the psyche. The experiences of migrancy and sexual abuse are deeply violent ones which Abani himself shares with the Nigerian woman from the newspaper story. This link enabled Becoming: ‘The transubstantiation began […] and now, much older, draws me still toward the unspeakable, the ineffable. The unspeakable name of God is hidden in the human body. This is law’ (Abani 2006b). Abani describes transubstantiation as the process by which his metaphor for his encounter with Abigail becomes matter: Abigail materialises, but so too does Abani himself. In this way, they both co-become through the novella.

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An understanding of the trauma of political modernity prepares us for an understanding of ‘the doubly traumatic entrance of the postcolonial subject into a modernity that was never its own […]’ (Durrant 2014, 93). The multiple layers of trauma experienced by postcolonial subjects, and specifically the migrant subject to this biopolitical modernity, manifest themselves in various ways and therefore require multiple forms of representation. The question which comes to bear is: How do those forms of representation attend to the relationship between the expectations placed on migrants and the socially acceptable ethos of assimilation,3 without those forms themselves assimilating? In other words, what does the fluctuating, traumatic, unstable and ultimately opaque human experience contribute to the relationship between ethics and aesthetics? How does an understanding of this relationship resist sympathy as part of the biopolitical regime, and importantly, how would this join the critique of cosmopolitan sympathy to the biopolitical critique of the state? The range of emotions which language cannot hold are understood by Abani as being constitutive of each of us. These emotions cannot linearly, if even cognitively, be represented, and while the lyrical cannot completely detach itself from pathos, it is a critical pathos which enables the possibility of mourning and redemptive transformation rather than sympathy. Because critical lyricism is a form which traces as well as questions the relationship between literary and legal personhood, it allows for those who have been erased by the legal system to voice their mourning. In other words, it can be understood as a direct response to law’s subjection of the human and to the human’s bodily resistance to the law. What are the ways in which we are legible to the language of the humanities but not to the law? Or, to rephrase Agamben, what is the form of life that challenges the form of law?4

3  Achille Mbembe has an insightful take on this: generally speaking, the assimilation of postcolonial subjects in the West is often synonymous with the ‘civilising’ the postcolonial subject—which is in and of itself a residue of colonial attitudes (2001, 9). 4  Agamben’s original question reads: “What is the form of life which corresponds to the form of law?” (2017, 46).

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Theorising Abigail: Co-constitution and Corporeal Vulnerability As a novella which has at its core a protagonist who has suffered abuse at the hands of others and eventually commits suicide, the relational nature of the social transactions within the novella leads me to Judith Butler’s seminal work on precarity and vulnerability, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2006). At the core of her work, Butler is concerned with understanding how lives become disposable and ungrievable. Butler argues that through grief, and the following inevitable acknowledgement that we are always more than ourselves—“beyond ourselves” (2006, 28)—we may understand the ways we are constituted through what she calls our “common corporeal vulnerability” (2006, 41). Butler chooses grief as a starting point to formulate her theory, precisely because grief teaches us we are always implicated in lives beyond our own; because “You and I are what I gain through disorientation and loss. This is how the human comes into being, again and again, as that which we have yet to know” (2006, 49). She suggests a model for humanism which takes as its cue the assumption that the human subject, in order to ‘become’, must be recognised by the other, that this recognition must centre the fact that we are undone by one another: “To ask for recognition, or to offer it, is precisely not to ask for recognition for what one already is” she writes, “it is to solicit a becoming, to instigate a transformation, to petition the future always in relation to the Other” (2006, 44). Because political modernity insists on moulding the subject into an image of its own progress, the answers to Butler’s questions—intricately linked with the processes of biopower—necessitate an understanding of how violence, and thus trauma, is always already constitutive of our becoming. When power shifts from the public domain into the private, and sovereignty brings under its power the human, we must attend to relationship between the politics of recognition and the power of biopolitics. The link between the two—that is, trauma—defines why the former is made necessary by the latter. Butler’s humanist model entails the surrender of the binary and individualist approach symptomatic of the Western tradition. Her theory addresses the reality that suffering is a marked condition of life in a violent world, and not simply the preserve of people from the Global South. Because trauma is at the core of the pathos novel, and the latter encourages an approach which essentialises the traumatised subject,  Pieter

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Vermeulen’s position on trauma and biopolitics is helpful as a theoretical framework through which to establish how I understand both the ways in which trauma constitutes the subject, and how this formation in turn undoes the notion of the stable human with its identifiable borders. Traditionally, trauma has been understood as a sudden and exceptional event which ruptures the constituted subject and leaves its trace, a wound whose healing may re-constitute the borders of the traumatised subject. Rather than enact itself in grand and sudden performances, the violence of biopower—in its “capillary power” (Vermeulen 2014, 143)—is as insidious as the trauma it causes. It is a creeping form of power which permeates every avenue of life: the migrant, unlike the citizen, is subject to immigration controls and ultimately lacks the privilege of privacy and the right to a private life and is therefore the target of sustained and incremental biopower. In this way the traumatic event does not end, insofar as the perpetrator is also presented as the saviour. This critical approach to trauma undoes the Western modernist conception of the human: without the narrative teleology which assumes an original self and, after the closure of the traumatic event, a return to that original self, the human is indefinitely suspended in an ambiguous state of traumatic re-inscription. Just as the field of trauma studies has traditionally territorialised the space of trauma, the field of biopolitics has also forcibly constructed the figure of the human: the residue of this construction finds itself the traumatised victim of modernity—and the object of cosmopolitan sympathy. By bringing Abani’s philosophies into conversation with Butler’s, it is easy to see how Abigail demonstrates a critical awareness lacked by most: her vulnerability endows her with the knowledge that others, namely her cousin Mary, are as vulnerable as she is. Abigail refuses to turn Peter in to the authorities because she knows the repercussions that would have on Mary—that she would become subject to immigration control. Her agency is manifested yet again when she protects Mary by foregoing her own justice from the state. Yet the ethics which prompt Abigail to act the way she does are largely misread, if acknowledged at all. Abigail’s approach complicates the sympathetic approach which would seek to bring her under a regime of care and compassion. Abigail chooses to sacrifice herself to prevent Mary from suffering further trauma; her own experiences of violence enable her to look beyond herself. The bearing of this theoretical framework on Becoming emerges foremost from the fact that even though Abigail is traumatised by others in her life, it is her erasure by the

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state—ultimately the consolidation of biopolitical violence—which culminates in her suicide. Ultimately, all of migrant life as we know it comes under this governance of biopolitical care, a paradox inherent to the claims of the British state and the history of compassion and refuge it relies upon to perpetuate this narrative. Butler’s radical humanism provides a useful way to bridge Vermeulen’s position on biopolitical trauma and Abani’s position on the ethics of representation. In instigating a recognition, or, in her words, ‘soliciting a becoming’, an understanding of shared vulnerability and co-constituted trauma indefinitely postpones the construction of the other, instead positing a space for possibility and redemptive transformation. Ethical recognition which comes about through co-constitution enables co-becoming: that is, the recognition that we become critically aware of our limits because we understand that we are limited in our abilities to ever truly understand others, yet are undone by one another. In this way, I reiterate that the model of co-constitution achieves three things: in the first instance, the agency Abigail has as a result of her co-­ constituted criticality undoes her status as the passive victim of abuse and thus resists her erasure by the biopolitical regime. Secondly, by drawing attention to his own consciousness, Abani both addresses the assumption that sympathy can ever offer us access to the psyche of the character and thus in turn addresses the ethics of representation: subalternity can never truly be represented, yet the solution is not to abstain from writing, but rather to write ethically, self-consciously. Lastly, this structure brings full circle my position on a recognition of vulnerability: because Abani has written himself into Abigail, she is never going to be fully understandable. The novella opens up the possibility of true recognition, by foreclosing the transparency that would enable assumptions being made about Abigail and thus silencing her further. For Abani, an ethics of recognition is based on conjuring a world, not of understanding, but of shared loss. This brings us over the problem of how defining the self does both epistemological and ontological violence to the self: Becoming is an ode to the redemptive power of common corporeal vulnerability, to contesting and even undoing the violence of Western individualism. Seeing Abigail: Reading Criticality and Mapping Becoming Abigail struggles to establish the borders of herself from those of her mother, also called Abigail, who died during childbirth. Abigail is haunted

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throughout her life by the absent presence of her mother: she struggles to come to terms with herself and tries to step outside the haunting shadow of her mother’s ghost. Because her father never learned to mourn, Abigail deals with this loss on her own, and grows up with the confusion of her grief. Her desire for her mother manifests a complex desire to become both her mother and also herself. From a young age Abigail engages in mourning rituals such as scarification, to trace the borders of her body to draw the limits of herself: “At first it was a curiosity, a genuine wonder at the burgeoning of a self, a self that was still Abigail, yet still her” (Abani 2006a, 28). Starved of her mother, Abigail would exchange chores for anecdotes, write them on pieces of paper and wear them under her clothes all day. Thus, from a young age, Abigail’s sense of self is incomplete without the written detritus of another—in this specific case, her mother’s. After she finds that the papers dissolve water, Abigail discovers the “permanence of fire”. Vocalising her need, and confused desire, to make those memories physical, Abigail starts inscribing them on herself with cigarette burns and hot needles in order to: create memory, make it concrete, physical […] she traced their outlines on her skin with soft fingers, burning them in with the heat of her loss, tattooing them with a need as desperate as it was confused. She tried to talk to her father about this need to see herself, but he couldn’t understand what she meant […] She couldn’t be the ghost he wanted her to be. (47)

From a young age, Abigail expresses the need to be ‘seen’; a need, as we learn later on in the novella, to be loved and recognised as a human. Her father, incapable of coping with his grief, looks at Abigail in a longing manner—he looks for Abigail the mother, there is a sexual inflection to his longing, which never get explicitly vocalised. Later in the novella, Abigail notices that Derek, her social worker, also looks at her with the look of men who want her to be something, someone, else. Without her mother to reflect her humanity back at her, Abigail struggles to come to terms with her own humanity. Her grief takes on a performative nature and she begins unusual mourning rituals which she recognises as “complex ways to be human” (38). For Abigail, writing on her body becomes a form of self-inscription against the erasure she is subjected to. Her mourning rituals become the ways in which “she was allowed to mourn. Heal […] even” (38). Abani regularly shows his hand

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in Abigail’s psyche as he describes his own process of transubstantiation and passes it for Abigail’s. Taking his cue from Derrida’s ‘Memoirs of the Blind’, Abani notes that we all have this desire to: mark loss, record memory physically […] it seems that the desire to make art, to draw the limits of the body, to create a simulacrum that has its roots in loss…The need to remember, to create (or re-create) a body out of loss, but also against loss and against forgetting […] it is through this ritual, however tangentially or deeply obscure the lens, that we can even begin to bear witness to these histories, these shades of love and loss that we carry within us. (Abani 2013)

The novella affords both Abani and Abigail the body through which they record their memories physically, ritually. Abigail explains her scars to Derek to elucidate her own process of becoming: “This one is you, this, me…Here…is my hunger, my need, mine, not my mother’s. And here, and here and here and here, here, here, here, me, me, me. Don’t you see?” (55). Derek doesn’t see. Abigail lays down what she understands as ‘seeing’, how she understands love, when she is in the park with Derek. She had felt “passion enveloping her, and she gave into the safety, the warmth, looking up into his eyes” (53). For Abigail, the deepest joy is to be seen: “This was love? To be seen? No turning away. No turning forward. Just there” (54). However, Derek’s moment of ‘recognising’ her is steeped in non-reciprocity, as he centres himself in their interactions: “And he traced her in that moment, the map of her, the skin of her world, as she emerged in pointillism. Emerging in parts of a whole. Each. Every. He wondered what form should he draw a line between each dot […] he held her. Held her and cried” (55–56). While the novella hints at the burgeoning texture of Abigail’s personhood, it is something ephemeral which only emerges and solidifies through others. Abigail’s musings on being seen echo Abani’s philosophy on love, making it unclear whose consciousness the novella gives us access to: What I mean by love is the act of seeing. Why is seeing an act of love? It is perhaps the only true act of love. Seeing slows the world down, bringing it into focus, even for a moment, the object/subject of sight, imbuing it with worth and value, while also actively resisting its erasure. But more than that, seeing requires not turning away from difficulty to the safety of comfort. (Abani 2013)

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Abani’s language is almost identical in some parts to Abigail’s language. Abigail lacks this co-becoming with Derek, making her wonder “How had he missed them when they made love?” (2006a, 55). Abigail’s betrayal by Derek in this moment foreshadows the complete erasure she will eventually suffer at the hand of the state. Despite Derek’s inability to see her, with him Abigail was still able to test the possibilities of her own becoming. Those possibilities get taken away from her when Derek gets arrested by the state: “And now that she could not feel that gaze on her, she was more lost than ever” (56). After Peter attempts to force Abigail into prostitution and she resists, he ties her to the doghouse in the backyard. Mary’s compassion as she steals food for Abigail and shields her from the snow enables Abigail to overcome her dehumanisation at the hands of Peter. Ultimately, “The slime of it, [which] threatened to obliterate the tattoos that made her” (97) galvanises Abigail to fight to preserve the borders of herself, she calls on the spirit of her mother Abigail, and tears Peter’s penis off. Abigail is set free by Mary, and is found by the police, numbly walking through the streets of London, clutching the bloody penis in her hand. The state, in its intent to safeguard what they assume is her rehabilitation—from victimised ‘third-world’ woman to newly civilised Western subject—takes away the conditions in which the realisation of that supposed healing may flourish. When Abigail is ‘rescued’ and taken to the hospital, she is informed that legally she does not exist. “She was a ghost” (110). In the hospital which she describes as feeling more like “a correctional facility” (111), Abigail is derisive of the state in her correct assumption that the entirety of her being to them only further belies her existence. She muses that her file reads something like: “Girl found with penis in hand? Claims to have bitten it off?” (105). Abigail is not so far off when the state, under the guise of biopolitical care, commits further violence to her autonomy. Derek confirms to her that his colleagues recommended “psychiatric treatment in a confined facility” (111–2). Eventually, it is Derek who gets confined in a facility for his exploitation of Abigail. From her perspective, the legal ‘being’ she is finally awarded as a ward of the state comes at the expense of her own becoming: They said they were doing this to protect her. That she didn’t know what choice was. But she did. She who had been taken and taken and taken. And now the one time she took for herself, the one time she had choice in the matter, it was taken away. Maybe, she thought, maybe some of us were just here to feed others. (119)

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Abigail’s hostility towards the state is a direct corollary of the state’s hostility towards her own autonomy. By denying her agency over her own life, the state is effectively subjecting Abigail to its violent care. The state’s justification, now as it has historically always been, is grounded in the concept of ‘reason’: it and it alone is capable of deploying reason and logic to micromanage life for the betterment and enhancement of the colonial subject. This biopolitical logic both structured the relationship between Empire and its colonies and today structures the relationship between states and its subjects. Abigail’s critique of the state therefore reaches deep into its foundations: she rightly identifies herself within the long line of generations of Africans who have ‘fed’ the British state. Abigail appeals the state’s decision, to no avail. When Abigail loses her patience with the case worker who refuses to hear her, she punches her. And yet, even as Abigail establishes her personhood, even as she asserts it, it becomes ephemeral again: So much love is memory, she thought. She had loved him so completely and he her. But what are the limits of desire? Those were questions she had heard others discuss in these last few days. Discuss as if she was a mere ghost in their presence. Called this thing between Derek and her wrong. How could it be? (81)

We betray Abigail completely by judging her choices. The novella asks us to question the ways in which the law simultaneously makes Abigail legible to us while further silencing and erasing her will and autonomy. It is this nature of the unspeakable which the critical lyric addresses; this infinitely grey space of being ethically human is what drives Abani’s art. Honouring Abigail: Conclusion An exclusively secular, biopolitical reading of Becoming betrays both Abigail herself and Abani’s attempts at ‘capturing the texture of her life’ precisely because this novella is not merely about representing social injustice, but also about the redemptive need of transformation. In limiting our reading of the novella to a secular paradigm, we negate the possibilities of life after biopolitics. Becoming joins this long tradition of African writing which defers to cosmology to transform and re-enchant the human against its dehumanisation, and secularisation, by biopolitical modernity. By integrating Igbo cosmology into the novella, the narrative complicates the

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Western understanding of power and death and the social-legal structures upholding them as well as the concept of liminality as we understand it politically. Abigail chooses suicide instead of a life as a migrant in Britain— precisely because she is aware of the legal limitations imposed on her, meaning that belonging and community—or becoming—are foreclosed to her. For the Igbo, life and death are structured in a radically different manner so as to constitute a circle rather an opposition. Death is conceptualised as a liminal stage in the transformation of life from one stage to another, therefore enabling Abigail to become otherwise. The concept of immortality, which assumes that life is infinite, undoes the necropolitical precisely because the necropolitical instrumentalises life, as a finite resource, for its own gain. In reverting to Igbo cosmology which is predicated on communal ways of being, both within the material world and in the afterlife, Abigail undoes the stratifying logic of biopolitics and is able to transform her fate. Abigail’s decision not to inform the state of Peter’s whereabouts because “the memory of Mary’s eyes” (111) haunted her could perhaps transform what the state has deemed “her terrible legacy” (111) into another’s redemption. Defiantly, Abigail’s Igbo philosophy—Ije Ewa, which translates into “One’s walk in this life” (111)—leads her to believe that the path is not always fixed; it is personality—one’s agency—and not destiny, which “sways the outcome of the game” (111). Referring back to Igbo notions of personality, personhood and the person enable Abigail to extricate herself from those Western variants which have been forced onto her. Abigail’s recourse to Igbo cosmology, at the end of her life, signals the beginning of another life. Abigail understands that her final choices can have repercussions for Mary, who is also an illegal migrant in Britain. Abigail thus chooses to remain subject to the state’s dismissal than give up Mary to the same fate. That Abigail chooses to commit suicide by throwing herself into the river needn’t constitute a morbid ending: Abigail’s referral to Igbo cosmology flirts with the idea of a second chance, after death: A person who lived poor and was buried poor can, when a relative makes enough money, receive a second burial […] So even in death, the dead can get a chance to taste the wealth that eluded him in his previous incarnation, perhaps sweetening the deal for his next one. (109)

Abigail subscribes to a belief, however loosely interpreted, that we are beholden to one another in complex ways. Abigail’s sacrifice for Mary is

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followed soon after by her sacrifice for Derek: she believes that by committing suicide, she could be making Derek’s release possible. However incomprehensible to us, Abigail chooses to see the beauty in her decisions, in her undoing by others. While the Igbo believe that suicide is a sin against the Earth, “nso ani” (Ukwu and Ikebedu quoted in Friesen 2006, 6), it is not entirely unprecedented: in 1803, the historic event known as the Igbo Landing saw 75 enslaved Igbos rebel, drown their captors and commit mass suicide off the shore of Georgia. In Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo also commits suicide. There is a case to be made for the agential nature of suicide: Foucault reminds us that “suicide–once a crime […] was a way to usurp the power of death which the sovereign alone […] had the right to exercise […] it testified to the individual and private right to die, at the borders and in the interstices of power that was exercised over life” (1984, 261). We can thus see Abigail preserve her sovereignty against the violence of the state, like those before her did against the violent sovereign impositions of the colonisers and enslavers. Abigail’s humanism, grounded in Igbo cosmology, leads her to conclude that: You just opened your heart because you knew tomorrow there would be another shaft of light, another tree, and another rain of shadows. Each particular. Not the same as yesterday’s. Not as beautiful as yesterday’s. Only as beautiful as today’s. (Abani 2006a, 109)

In light of her decisions, she wonders why, when even the dead knew, “these people [the state] know nothing of this […] of the complexities of life [?]” (109). That her ethical choice reflects her lack of options is tragic in itself, but we do owe Abigail more than the tragedy that life has dealt her. We owe Abigail recognition. Not simply for herself, but for the radical interventions she has made towards imagining alternate possibilities of being, of liberation, in an enduringly violent world.

References Abani, Chris. 2006a. Becoming Abigail. New York: Akashic Books. ———. 2006b. Abigail and My Becoming. Truthdig. https://www.truthdig.com/ articles/chris-­abani-­abigail-­and-­my-­becoming/. Accessed 7 September 2019.

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———. 2006c. In Conversation with Chris Abani. Truthdig. https://www.truthdig.com/articles/in-­conversation-­with-­author-­chris-­abani/. Accessed 7 September 2019. ———. 2009. Ethics and Narrative: The Human and the Other. Witness XXII: 167–173. ———. 2013. Painting a Body of Loss and Love in the Proximity of an Aesthetic. The Millions. http://www.themillions.com/2013/11/painting-­a-­body-­of-­ loss-­and-­lovein-­the-­proximity-­of-­an-­aesthetic.html. Accessed 7 September 2019. ———. 2004. Resisting the Anomie: Exile and the Romantic Self. In Creativity in Exile, ed. Michael Hanne, 21–30. New York: Rodopi. Agamben, Giorgio. 2017. The Omnibus Homo Sacer. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Arendt, Hannah. 2007. In The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman. New York: Stocken. Barberán Reinares, Laura. 2015. Sex Trafficking in Postcolonial Literature: Transnational Narratives from Joyce to Bolaño. New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 2006. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. Cubilié, Anne. 2005. Women Witnessing Terror: Testimony and the Cultural Politics of Human. New York: Fordham University Press. Dawson, Ashley. 2010. Cargo Culture: Literature in an Age of Mass Displacement. WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly. 38 (1-2): 178–193. Dugan, Emily. 2022. Home Office reclassifies modern slavery as illegal immigration issue. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/ oct/13/home-­o ffice-­r eclassifies-­m odern-­s laver y-­a s-­i mmigration-­i ssue. Accessed 13 October 2022. Durrant, Sam. 2014. Undoing Sovereignty: Towards a Theory of Critical Mourning. In The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism, ed. Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant, and Robert Eaglestone, 91–111. New York: Routledge. Fassin, Didier. 2012. Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of The Present. Berkeley: University of California Press. Foucault, Michel. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Friesen, Alan R. 2006. Okonkwo’s Suicide as an Affirmative Act: Do Things Really Fall Apart? Postcolonial Text 2: 1–11. Hersford, Wendy S. 2004. Documenting Violations: Rhetorical Witnessing and the Spectacle of Distant Suffering. Biography. 27 (1): 104–144. Kabir, Ananya J. 2014. Affect, Body, Place: Trauma Theory in the World. In The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism, ed. Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant, and Robert Eaglestone, 63–75. New  York: Routledge.

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Kempadoo, Kamala. 2005. Introduction: From Moral Panic to Global Justice: Changing Perspectives on Trafficking. In Trafficking And Prostitution Reconsidered: New Perspectives On Migration, Sex Work And Human Rights, ed. Kamala Kempadoo, Jyoti Senghara, and Bandana Pattanaik, vii–xxxii. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Mbembe, Achille. 2001. African Modes of Self-Writing. Identity, Culture and Politics 2 (1): 1–39. Rabinow, Paul. 1984. The Foucault Reader. New York, NY: Pantheon Books. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. 2012. Witness or False Witness: Metrics of Authenticity, Collective I-Formations, and the Ethic of Verification in First-­ Person Testimony. Biography. 35 (4): 590–626. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. Can the Subaltern Speak? In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Grossberg Lawrence, 271–313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Stonebridge, Lyndsey. 2014. ‘That Which You Are Denying Us’: Refugees, rights and writing in Arendt. In The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism, ed. Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant, and Robert Eaglestone, 113–125. New York: Routledge. Vermeulen, Pieter. 2014. The Biopolitics of Trauma. In The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism, ed. Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant, and Robert Eaglestone, 141–157. New York: Routledge.

CHAPTER 8

Unsettled: Narrative Strategies in Exhibitions About the ‘Refugee Crisis’ Hella Wiedmer-Newman

The idea that narrative has a salutary or redemptive power has been accepted in a wide range of fields, including law, medicine and various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.1 Belief in the redemptive power of narrative is especially strong when it comes to questions of human rights and the now commonplace project of giving voice to the voiceless, as well as obliging those in power to understand the plight of

I would like to thank John Paul Ricco for his close reading of my work, his thoughtful comments and encouragement and his invaluable mentorship. 1  See for instance Martha Nussbaum (2010, 6): ‘As we tell stories about the lives of others, we learn how to imagine what another creature might feel in response to various events. At the same time, we identify with the other creature and learn something about ourselves.’

H. Wiedmer-Newman (*) University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 F. Barclay, B. Ivey (eds.), Contemporary Representations of Forced Migration in Europe, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Human Rights, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47831-4_8

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those whose rights have been violated, those rendered powerless. Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith observe in their 2004 publication Human Rights and Narrated Lives that since the Cold War era ended in the 1990s we have been experiencing an era of human rights. They situate this phenomenon specifically in the history of the UDHR or Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, which engendered a culture of public testimonials and telling of life narratives to work through, legally and culturally and individually, the various crimes against humanity and international civil rights movements of the twentieth century. ‘These acts of remembering,’ they say, ‘test the value that nations profess to live by against the actual experiences and perceptions of the storyteller as witness’ (Schaffer and Smith 2004, 3). Since the end of the Second World War and the Holocaust, there has been a concerted effort to use memorials and personal narratives as a kind of apologia or public reparations for atrocities committed, and as a safeguard against further mass dehumanization; but perhaps more importantly, as a way of producing and performing the nation recovering from its murderous past. Much of the theoretical work surrounding personal narratives, as well as the artistic and creative reckoning with the past, has been produced within the context of coming to terms with the legacy of the Holocaust and of colonialism.2 Most recently, the belief in the redemptive power of narrative has been manifest in the artistic response to the global refugee situation,3 with a number of distinct events in 2015 leading to multiple documentaries, projects and exhibitions. Some of these exhibitions are produced by NGOs such as Doctors without Borders or the UNHCR, but most, if not all, feature personal narratives, identificatory strategies and a clear teleology,

2  The late art critic and curator Okwui Enwezor (2004, 14) argued that contemporary political art had ceased being interested primarily in class struggle, ‘[T]he political entity of the state, its ideology, apparatus, agents. Rather, it involves a perhaps surprising principle of the universalisation of the concept of the human evoked by human rights.’ 3  The designation of the large-scale movement of people across sovereign borders as a crisis, in this view, is merely a strategy of obfuscation. The idea of crisis itself is used to legitimise the actions of government bodies, such as the EU, to implement policies that clearly undermine the basic tenets of Human Rights. See, for instance, the 2015 deal with Turkey and the 2016 deal with Libya to keep refugees from entering Europe. As Betts and Collier (2017, 2) note, ‘[I]t was a crisis of politics rather than a crisis of numbers.’ What they mean by this is that it is not sheer numbers that make it a crisis, but rather the global political situation and, above all, the political response to it, that led to the mass migration in the first place.

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offering catharsis to, as well as aiming to elicit empathy from, the public.4 What is often left out of the discourse of narrative as empowering or healing is the way that stories can be manipulated and changed to fit any given ideology so that they can often be used reactionarily to bolster the very systems they purport to challenge or critique.5 The four (video) installation works I consider in this chapter, all of them shown at the Venice Biennale, three in 2017, the last in 2019, invite an analysis of the genre of ‘refugee crisis artwork,’ as discussed below.

Genres of Refugee Crisis Narrative In a 2019 article, Balca Arda, professor of visual communication design, investigates the dialectic of aesthetics and ethics in contemporary art on the refugee situation.6 She identifies two kinds of art about refugees, one presenting an assessment of the human condition, the other aiming to empower agency for refugees who are seen as ‘voiceless’; practitioners of both approaches stridently avoid framing their work as humanitarian, which has taken on paternalistic, even neocolonial connotations (Arda 2019). Works such as Ai Wei Wei’s wrapping of the Berlin concert hall in lifejackets and the photo of him posing like Alan Kurdi, the Syrian boy who drowned in the Mediterranean, are in the first camp, whereas projects involving auto-ethnology such as Dario Mitidieri’s 2015 Lost Family Portraits are in the second. Quoting Jacques Rancière, Arda states that aesthetic art becomes political if it produces moments of dissensus, ‘a 4  Some of these exhibitions offer viewers the opportunity to take on the identity of a refugee through so-called ID cards containing personal details of a specific person and her departure and arrival locations, so that the visitor can virtually ‘experience’ his or her own flight. This practice is similar to the one employed at the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., where cards with personal details of individual concentration camp prisoners are disseminated to visitors so that they can identify with what is otherwise a nameless victim. See, for instance, Forced From Home exhibition (2018) and Flucht (n.d.) exhibition. 5  In a similar vein, on American nationalist discourse in the wake of 9/11, Judith Butler writes in her book Precarious Life (2004, 5): ‘In the United States, we begin the story by invoking a first-person narrative, and telling what happened on September 11 … if someone tries to start the story earlier, there are only a few narrative options … what Mohammed Atta’s family life was like … (that is) easier to hear than that a network of individuals dispersed across the globe conjured and implemented this action in various ways.’ 6   For a terrific overview of artworks thematizing migration since 1989, see T.J. Demos (2013).

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means of breaking down pre-existing habits of association and categories of classification’ (Arda 2019, 314). Arda argues that there is a false ­dichotomy between ethics and aesthetics and concludes that ‘human condition assessment’ artworks thematize the ironic transfer from the profane to the cultural realm by emphasizing the tension between them, thereby highlighting what ‘ought to be;’ ‘agency empowerment’ art projects, on the other hand, seek to break the speechless position of refugees, but end up overly didactic (Arda 2019, 326). Arda does not concern herself specifically with the function and impact of narrative, but rather with the two artistic models she sees narratives producing. I would like to argue, however, that the kind of narratives employed in works about the refugee situation trouble this binary of either giving voice to the voiceless or representing the human condition, by emphasizing the links between knowledge production and reception. The works I analyse by George Drivas, Mohau Modisakeng, Candice Breitz and Christoph Büchel touch on both of these modes, as well as on the humanitarian ‘refugee as abject victim’ model. Drivas uses the instruments of myth as allegory and cells as symbols for the refugee body that appear at first to be a pathos-laden reflection on the human condition, but then turn into a meditation on the discourses of civic incorporation within the EU. With this, he reveals that it is the political machinations of the west, as well as our individual choices, that need to be scrutinized. In his grisaille video work, Modisakeng’s approach is to present seemingly fetishized Black people who, turning mimicry on its head, end up freeing themselves from our gaze. Breitz, attempting to show that we are in fact more primed to receive stories of suffering from people we can relate to, cleverly positions two famous actors playing the ‘parts’ of refugees on two screens before we are shown footage of the actual people telling their stories on six separate screens in the next room. Finally, Büchel does away with any textual, rhetorical or visual narrative whatsoever in his display of the now (in) famous Lampedusa boat. He offers instead a readymade memorial artwork in an only partly alienating setting, which works its way into people’s consciousness subliminally. By playing with elements of the documentary and the fictional, constantly staging narrative reception and reflecting the viewers’ complicity, as well as their subjection to harmful, in this case, xenophobic, narratives, they problematize the simplistic uplifting account of narrative. In so doing, they posit viewers who, when confronted with what the anthropologist Erica Lehrer calls ‘difficult knowledge’ (Lehrer

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et al. 2011) are able to discern and absorb it critically, becoming active participants in the process of representation at work in the media and in politics, and because of this, are stirred to political action. These works do not offer us catharsis, and they do not let us off the hook. Instead, they are unsettling and they leave us unsettled.

Laboratory of Dilemmas: A Fake Document of Its Time Let us begin with George Drivas’s Laboratory of Dilemmas, exhibited in the Greek pavilion in 2017. Right inside the building, yet still outside the exhibition space and serving as a narrative framing, a black reflective plaque tells us that in 2016 excerpts were discovered of a visual documentary about a biological experiment that took place from 1968 to 1969 ‘probably at a lab in central Europe’ (Drivas 2017). The clips, we are informed, were accompanied by the unidentified film-maker’s notes and an English translation of Aeschylus’s The Suppliant Women, the story of 50 women fleeing Egypt and seeking asylum in the Greek city of Argos. The plaque mentions further that the experiment itself (just like the basis for Aeschylus’s play first performed sometime after 470 BC) has reached the status of a kind of myth, as very little is known about its progress. The exhibition itself aims to reconstruct and recount the story of the experiment (Simpson 2017). And so, the scene is set. Of course, this is all a fiction: artist George Drivas and curator Orestis Andreadakis have taken Aeschylus’s tragedy The Suppliant Women as the foundation for an exploration of the refugee crisis and the discourses around accepting people who are in exile, or of turning them away. Broadly in the tradition of what Carrie Lambert-Beatty (2009, 54) terms the ‘parafictional’—fictional work that ‘does not perform its procedures in the hygienic clinics of literature, but has one foot in the field of the real’— Laboratory of Dilemmas uses the initial fake-out of the tribulations at the lab, for which the tragedy serves as a putative allegory, to obfuscate the real topic at hand. Inside the pavilion, the space is pitch black, or rather, it would be, were it not for several rows of strobe lighting illuminating the modest yet imposing installation. Split into two horizontal levels, the room seems to reverberate. A precarious-looking staircase to the right leads up to a narrow metal walkway that wraps around the entire space, from which one can gaze down onto a minimalist maze composed of black

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Fig. 8.1  Minimalist maze composed of black reflective acrylic walls, George Drivas, still from Laboratory of Dilemmas, 2017. (© George Drivas)

reflective acrylic walls on the first floor (Fig. 8.1). The walkway has screens set up every few metres, on which is recounted, in chronological order and in the form of a fake documentary with actors, the story of a team of medical researchers in the late 1960s, trying to synthesize cells that are resistant to all types of hepatitis (Fig. 8.2). At first, the experiment seems to be successful: the cell culture is strong and proves resistant to several variants of the disease. However, in the course of the research, the team discovers a new cell. It appears out of thin air, and thus is taken to be ‘an alien body’ (Drivas n.d.), as Drivas calls it. In the notes under one of the screens, there in an allusion to the dilemma King Pelasgus of Argos faces in the tragedy of The Suppliant Women. The frame narrative is thus pulled into the main drama, offering us a taste of the dilemma to come and introducing the mechanism of allegory, which is so central to the whole installation. As the classicist Geoffrey Bakewell

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Fig. 8.2  The head researcher shows off his lab, George Drivas, still from Laboratory of Dilemmas, 2017. (© George Drivas)

(2013, 3) observes, ‘Suppliant Women is above all a drama about the limits to and perils of civic incorporation.’ Aeschylus’s tragedy is based on a Bronze Age myth about the 50 daughters of Danaus who, together with their father, flee Egypt and their impending marriages to their 50 cousins. They arrive on the island of Argos and beg for refuge. The myth, unlike the tragedy based on it, includes an atavistic and essentialist element: the Danaids have a claim to the land due to their being descended from Io, an Argive princess (ibid.). Pelasgus, the king of Argos, faced with the dilemma of whether to imperil his subjects or neglect the suppliants, denies them the request for a safe haven, but, when the daughters threaten to commit suicide, he refers the matter to a citizen assembly. They agree to grant the Danaids asylum, but just in that moment, the Egyptian cousins return to steal back what is ‘rightfully’ theirs and the Argives, fighting them off, emerge victorious (ibid.). Apart from serving as a piece of anti-Egyptian propaganda, the myth is an interesting examination of what makes a liveable, and thereby savable and mournable life, a life, which to paraphrase Judith Butler (2004), is not precarious. Aeschylus’s version, however, adds a topical twist to the original myth: in the fifth and sixth centuries B.C., the playwright’s era, Athens

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experienced an increased flow of foreigners from the Mediterranean region and beyond.7 ‘Following liberation from the tyrants, the reforms of Cleisthenes, and the victories of the Persian Wars,’ Bakewell recounts, ‘the flow of immigrants became a flood’ (ibid.). A new formal legal status had to be created in order to incorporate the newcomers into the flourishing city state. The people who received this status were called metoikoi or ‘livers-­with,’ that is to say people who lived in the polis but possessed no rights of citizenship (ibid.). Aeschylus uses the ancient myth as an allegory for the political times he is living in by referring to the suppliants as metoikoi. In Suppliant Women, the newcomers represent a threat to Argive culture with their ‘foreign speech, antidemocratic inclinations, and willingness to put their own interests ahead of the city’s’ (Bakewell 2013, 34) in contrast to King Pelasgus’s ‘virtuous principles of citizen speech’ (ibid.). The play, then, serves to bolster the Athenian city state through the metaphor of civilized Argos, and, in so doing, to demonize the foreigner. Drivas echoes the playwright’s approach by retelling the fabricated myth of the research lab in the form of the equally fake documentary footage. What emerges in the modern retelling, as in Aeschylus’s play, is a comment about the legal, political and socio-cultural factors that shape the discourse about refugees, nationhood and forms of belonging. The refugees, themselves, in the meantime, are conceptualized as organic matter. The researchers in the laboratory know that if this new cell does not merge with the cell cultures in the manufactured environment, it will face extinction. However, if it does enter the environment, the experiment itself could be in peril. As the story reaches its climax, the language gets more and more suggestive: a split-screen with two images reads: ‘Possible Outcome 1: Protect the old cell cultures and leave the new cells to die. Possible Outcome 2: Complete Culture Destruction’ (Drivas n.d.). Already, a double analogy with the refugee crisis and right-wing rhetoric is being set up, both through the allusion to an ostensibly threatened ‘culture,’ and by dint of the fact that right-wing ideologues often borrow metaphors from medicine and natural science (e.g. refugees are a plague or a cancer on the nation, Jews infect the pure bloodstream of the German people). As Heidrun Friese (2017, 34, my translation) asserts, even the term ‘“refugee crisis” strengthens the constructed connection between the healthy national body and sickly mobility, between the societal status  The appeal of contemporary artists to Aeschylus (and Euripides, as in the chapter on The Trojans theatre project in this volume) makes clear the long history of Mediterranean cultural migration. 7

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quo and movement as an interruption of the established norm.’ As we reach the end of the walkway on the other side of the room, the dilemma is unresolved and continues as we descend the stairs to the maze, or what Drivas (2018) calls the second act of his re-imagined play. In the next text, it is brought to the professor’s attention that the new cell population has started growing and appears to be stronger than the hepatocytes the lab started with. In rapid order, the new cells start trying to organize with the original ones as this is their only chance at survival. However, keeping them could threaten the whole cell culture as their properties are largely unknown. One of the researchers suggests blocking the new cells. Another recommends they keep the cells, as intermingling might lead to a new, better result. In the ensuing debate about the ethics of letting the cells ‘perish,’ the researchers discover that they are, in fact, sinusoid cells, a different tribe. Finally, the doctor says he must bring the matter up for discussion with the board before he can make the final decision. This discussion represents the third act. When we emerge from the maze there is a plaque telling us that the next part of the exhibition is a re-enactment of the boardroom meeting based on the director’s notes—he had not been allowed to film the final deliberations. In a compelling scene (Fig. 8.3) starring Charlotte

Fig. 8.3  The board meets to discuss incorporation of the alien cells, George Drivas, Laboratory of Dilemmas, 2017. (© George Drivas)

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Rampling alongside a handful of international actors the cogitations on the fate of the foreign cells become much more. There are different people involved: the researchers for a start, but also the institute’s head of finance, and its CEO, each looking at the dilemma from a different point of view. The laboratory reveals itself to be what it was all along, not merely an allegory for The Suppliant Women, but for the global refugee situation as a whole. In fact, the last scene is doubly artificial, both because it is a scripted scene with actors and because, as Drivas tells me in our interview, it is the one element both the myth of the Suppliants and Aeschylus’s play leave out; we never experience the deliberations of the general assembly. The fake documentary film Drivas claims to have found has the aesthetic of archival footage. Grainy and fuzzy at times, it resembles the medical documentaries of its supposed day, with an authoritative male voice-over and close-ups of researchers in white lab coats peering into microscopes. He told me he had worked with a medical team to make sure the experiment in the exhibition was as realistic as possible. This kind of experiment, he asserted, had been carried out many times, it just never worked (Drivas 2018). The mythical, then, receives a realist coating at the hands of the artist. The medical board debate at the end resembles a play more traditionally, characters trapped in a room, debating what is essentially a question of situational ethics, with a familiar cast of characters: the idealist professor, the penurious head of finances, the stoic veteran doctor (Rampling) who takes a hard stance on a difficult matter. The fact that Drivas lets us know in advance that the final footage is a re-enactment based on the director’s notes, and we then encounter the same cinematographic aesthetic as on the previous screens is a hint, in case the viewer hadn’t already noticed, that the experiment is a fiction. As Steyerl (2011) states, ‘[T]he only thing we can say for sure about the documentary mode in our times is that we always already doubt if it is true.’ Phrased this way, it almost sounds like a myth. Drivas makes no sweeping pronouncements about the current state of affairs, but rather, asks a simple question: What would you do if someone came to your door begging for help at three in the morning? Let them in or leave them outside to freeze? In this last scene Drivas is showing us how ideas of national sovereignty and citizenship are imbricated with, and indeed engender, flows of forced movement. To complete the frame narrative of the exhibition, a last plaque tells us that no information exists

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about the fate of the experiment, but that the following lines of the director’s copy of the play were underlined: ‘On one side, if I help you, I will be in danger. On the other, I cannot ignore your supplications. My soul is clenched by fear. I am in a big dilemma: to do it, not to do it, or to leave everything to chance?’ (Drivas 2017). The focus of Drivas’s exhibition is the experiment of the sovereign state. The sterile ways that politicians deliberate about the fate of refugees detracts from the central ethical dilemma. Interestingly, there is a shift in the narrative of the suppliants, from myth—a primitive science used to explain the world, repeated orally throughout the centuries and with unclear origins—to an allegory in the form of Aeschylus’s play. The play has added elements that shape what before was a myth with several possible meanings into a story with one clear meaning. Unlike the naïve myth of the suppliants, The Suppliant Women is conscious of itself as a story, as a reflection of and commentary upon, contemporary cultural-political events. Perhaps most importantly, though, the story now has a putative author with a specific agenda that goes beyond elucidating a particular state of affairs. Drivas’s work echoes this shift from fluid meaning to concrete interpretation, with the paratext of the myth of the research laboratory greeting us at the door, which then gives way to the fabricated documentary footage created by the elusive ‘director.’ Only now, in an ultimate ironic twist, there is no consciousness of poetic manipulation of the truth. The director is perceived as telling the truth, of showing us ‘the world, not a world,’ in documentary theorist Bill Nichols’s words (2001, xi). The key to the laboratory’s ontology as an allegory lies in the final scene, which Drivas explicitly tells us is a re-­ enactment, and therefore not to be read as the ‘objective’ truth. Here, Drivas takes over the reins from his alias, the director, and infuses the story with his version of metoikia. More than suggestively, the characters refer to a ‘culture’ that must be protected from the possibly predatory others. Drivas’s uses of the documentary mode, then, conveys ‘the real not only through the image of the world they provide, but also through the way they manage to incorporate … the world’s structures and problematic issues inside their own mode of conceiving’ (Caillet, in Giannouri 2017). In Cinema 2, Gilles Deleuze (1989, 216) speaks about the modern political cinema of Alain Resnais and his contemporaries as being one in which ‘the people no longer exist, or not yet … the people are missing.’ This impulse is a reaction to the absence of proper testimony in the wake of the Holocaust. Whereas the classical political cinemas of national

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socialism and communism were very much predicated on the presence and instrumentalization of bodies, this new movement rids the cinematic surface of the corporeal. ‘Art … must take part in this task … of contributing to the invention of people’ (Deleuze 1989, 217). He locates this imperative in a colonial logic: the colonizer uses the myth of the absence of people as a justification for his actions. ‘The missing people are a becoming, they invent themselves, in shanty towns and camps, or in ghettos, in new conditions of struggle to which a necessarily political art must contribute’ (ibid.). ‘What replaces the correlation of the political and the private (of classical political cinema) is the coexistence, to the point of absurdity, of very different social stages’ (Deleuze 1989, 218). In The Laboratory of Dilemmas, various social stages or scales are indeed imbricated with one another: the personal, the institutional, the political, the legal and the mythical or allegorical and, for the most part, there is an absence of people, or, in the case of the work, cells. ‘It is not a matter of analyzing myth in order to discover its archaic meaning or structure,’ Deleuze (1989, 219) says, ‘but of connecting archaic myth to the state of the drives in an absolutely contemporary society, hunger, thirst, sexuality, power, death, worship.’ This is precisely the way Drivas is using myth in his exhibition.

Passage and Love Story: Acting the Part Candice Breitz and Mohau Modisakeng’s South African pavilion similarly plays with viewer expectations and stories, though in a different way. We enter the pavilion and first encounter a dark room with Modisakeng’s work Passage (2017) playing on three separate screens. On each of these, a different Black body—one male, one female and a person whose gender is, perhaps intentionally, hard to make out—dressed in lavish Victorian-­ looking clothing, writhes around in a boat slowly filling with water. The sumptuous high-exposure footage pulls the viewer into the depths of the image field and invites her to gaze at the figures as they perform their sometimes delicate, other times violent, ballet.8 Modisakeng’s work is poetic and captivating; it deals with constructions of the Black body in post-Apartheid South Africa. While Breitz and Modisakeng’s works are not in collaboration with one another, Modisakeng’s frames Breitz’s in one specific way: its focus on the body augurs Breitz’s engagement with 8

 For documentation on Passage, please see Modisakeng (2017b).

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her own subjects’ corporeality. Unlike Breitz’s work, however, the people in Modisakeng’s boat are reduced to mere bodies to be looked at; they never speak or make eye-contact with the viewer. By offering us an alien, otherworldly subject, Passage would seem to suggest, then, that an easy conceptualization of empathy as ontological closeness is impossible. In this vein, it is interesting to consider the ways in which Passage alludes to Homi Bhabha’s idea of colonial mimicry. ‘Colonial mimicry,’ Bhabha (1984, 126) tells us, ‘is the desire for a reformed recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite … in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference.’ In Passage, the performers don colonial garb and carry a whip, a cane or a parasol, respectively (Figs. 8.4 and 8.5). They are being fashioned after the colonizer, but with a slippage in the form of their skin colour, lack of speech and idiosyncratic choreography. The boats

Fig. 8.4  Young Black South African woman lies in a boat donning colonial garb and a whip, Mohau Modisakeng, still from Passage, 2017. (© Mohau Modisakeng Studios)

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Fig. 8.5  Young Black South African man lies in a boat donning colonial garb and a cane, Mohau Modisakeng, still from Passage, 2017. (© Mohau Modisakeng Studios)

become increasingly heavy with water, which the performers strain to displace, leaning out over the edge, their clothing alternately billowing and adhering to wet flesh. As the 19-minute footage continues, the boats slowly sink, and the camera shifts underwater, filming the performers from below as they cast off their colonial paraphernalia and swim to safety (Modisakeng 2017). By casting off those elements that make them recognizable to an imagined colonizer, the performers resist mimicry and in so doing, automatically trouble a facile conceptualization of what it means to empathize by constructing the other as a slightly flawed mirror image of the self. While Modisakeng does not explicitly focus on refugees in his work, the association with the now iconic image of people in boats along with the critique of colonial mimicry suggests a complex causal relationship between colonialism and the contemporary refugee situation.

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Fig. 8.6  Julianne Moore in character in front of a green screen telling fragmented stories, Candice Breitz, still from Love Story, 2016. (© Candice Breitz)

Fig. 8.7  Alec Baldwin in character in front of a green screen telling fragmented stories, Candice Breitz, still from Love Story, 2016. (© Candice Breitz)

As we move on to Breitz’s work in the next room, we have been set up by Passage to think about ideas of colonialism, mimicry and empathy.9 This room is dark, with benches for people to sit and look at a large cinematic screen. The image oscillates between Alec Baldwin and Julianne Moore, each sitting in front of a green screen with cameras and lighting equipment in the background, each playing three different parts (Figs. 8.6 and 8.7). They wear the same clothing for each part, save for a few specific accessories—a colourful bangle, a pair of sunglasses—and a slightly different intonation and timbre of voice to indicate the shift. Like the figures in Passage, they too have attributes indicating the other. They trail off, ask how to adjust their microphone, apologize for their broken English, but the actors never break character. Anyone who has ever seen an audition tape will recognize the disjuncture between scripted dialogue and banal surroundings. This is Candice Breitz’s video installation Love Story. Each actor tells the story of three different people who had to leave their respective country for various reasons: there is a professor from Venezuela who was persecuted for being gay, a trans woman fleeing her native India and a Somali atheist who narrowly escaped religious oppression. Each tells their 9

 For documentation on Love Story, see Museum of Fine Art Boston (n.d.).

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story of leaving and arriving, going and coming. The film is long.10 People shift uncomfortably in their seats, there are drawn-out breaths and a few sighs. Moore and Baldwin move so effortlessly in these roles and the audience has seen them embody so many different parts before, that the conceit is easily accepted, disbelief suspended without question. The actor’s lines are like vignettes, aspirations or confessions. ‘So, I’m using this window, this camera, Stephanie, to tell you that, yes, your father is gay, but that doesn’t change anything,’ Baldwin says haltingly, tears welling up in his bloodshot eyes. ‘I am not a rule breaker, I very much follow the rules and the norms … I never had a flamboyant kind of personality and I’m very simple and I’m very humble and I don’t do a lot of makeup,’ says Moore, in the slightly mechanical manner of someone whose first language is not English. The visual narrative is cut into moments of reckoning and confession, a montage as opposed to a linear narrative. Once we have consumed these stories, it is hard to imagine what will come next. The second room of Breitz’s installation has four large windows with dimmed glass, offering a panoramic view of the arsenale seaport. Set in front of the windows are six screens, each showing one of the people whose story Baldwin and Moore performed in the previous room (Fig. 8.8). In this room, visitors must sit in front of each screen and don headphones, eliciting a more intimate engagement with the stories and

Fig. 8.8  The six original storytellers, each in front of their own green screen, tell their stories in full, Candice Breitz, stills from Love Story, 2016. (© Candice Breitz) 10  This was a trend at the 2017 Biennale: the Swiss pavilion had, as its main event, an hour-­ long documentary about one of Alberto Giacometti’s lovers, herself an artist.

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lessening the cinematic effect of the previous room. The narratives are no longer fractured through the artifice of montage, rather, they flow, and, as individual details and the evidence of the particular accessories coalesce in moments of recognition, the question of which teller is more authentic to the audience—the actor or the real person—poses itself again and again. This question of authenticity can only be fully comprehended in the end, when we are confronted with the original stories. We realize only in the second room that the simulation competes with the original, the re-­ enactment chafing against the ‘original’ footage, which is itself an index for the embodied people telling the story. The six screens bring up many questions in the viewers with regard to reception and empathy: did we feel more or less affected by the actors’ renditions? Is there something fetishist about the act of consuming these stories, and does consuming them at all constitute some kind of ‘sin’? If so, which is worse, hearing the story from the source or mediated through the lens of performance and, more importantly, from people who look like us, assuming that the audience at the Venice Biennale is mainly white, well-educated and affluent enough to be able to afford to attend it? Such questions have the effect of casting our experience of exhibitions in terms of race, class, gender and morality, which many see as indicative of the way we consume art today. With the shock of recognition that Breitz plants in the final room, which consists of encountering the true bearers of the stories, contrasted with the artifice of Moore and Baldwin’s performances, she could be said to be playing with her right as a white Afrikaans woman to ‘help’ her interviewees disseminate their stories. Questioning the legitimacy of the artist to represent the other is not a new phenomenon: there have been several famous cases of artists being accused of creating morally problematic works, and, in a puritan panic, viewers worrying about being negatively affected by them. A recent example for this effect is Dana Schutz’s Open Casket (Speidel 2017), a depiction by a white artist of the lynching of Emmett Till, a young Black boy from Chicago, who was visiting his grandparents in Money, Mississippi, in the summer of 1955. The ensuing debate around Schutz’s work was a rather more subtle one, however. The artist’s detractors argued that her positionality, as a white artist, meant it was inappropriate for her to benefit materially from her (sanitized) reinterpretation of the famously brutal image of Till’s open casket (Muñoz-Alonso 2017). The problem turns, then, from one of false authorship to one of falsely inhabited intimacy, a factor even more portentous in the affect-driven medium of film.

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Along with a discussion about the subject position of artists producing work on subjects with other identities, there has been much talk about white actors taking on roles that should be filled by people of colour or other marginalized subjectivities. In Love Story, Breitz investigates the practice of casting white people in the role of the Other and interrogates the norms and conventions of identification and narrative it produces. In an interview for a South African news channel, Breitz opined: The making of Love Story, it really came from a very basic instinct. Myself and many many others in Berlin were trying to figure out what we could do to help … through my relationship to that situation I started to meet people and … have long conversations with people and one of the things that arises from a crisis of migration is that stories were migrating … they were bringing their stories with them … one of the things that became very painfully obvious to me was that we live in an attention economy in which some stories matter and others don’t. So, certain people’s stories are afforded a lot of space and a lot of visibility and are automatically interesting. (Breitz 2018)

Breitz responds to this insight by using white celebrity-actors to perform the dramatic highlights of refugee stories, suggesting that her audience will have a more patient and empathic response to the stories if they are filtered through familiar and exalted figures. Breitz’s work has long dealt with the construction of norms through Hollywood and with the production and performance of bodies through public discourse. Unlike in Drivas’s work, the body of the other is very much present in Breitz’s oeuvre. In her Ghost Series produced at the height of the truth and reconciliation commission’s actions from 1994 to 1996, the artist created stills in which the characters, native South Africans, appear white and spectral. ‘The body—both nationalized corpus and corporealized nations,’ Jennifer Law (2000, 47) writes, ‘here emerges as historically contingent ethnographic spectacle.’ In a later work, Becoming, from 2003, the artist re-creates scenes from movies, faithfully mimicking actors such as Julia Roberts, Reese Witherspoon and Drew Barrymore. This work is meant to illustrate how we fashion ourselves after celebrities and the stark discrepancies between real and performed identities. In Love Story, Breitz is doing something similar, but backwards: she starts with the refugees’ interviews and then has Moore and Baldwin re-enact them before re-cutting this footage to create a montage.

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Narrative pleasure is central to Love Story as a work. The refugees’ stories are fragmented when recounted by Moore and Baldwin, neatly edited and recut into a montage that voyeuristically captures the most harrowing moments of each person’s experience, like a long-form trailer of the footage that follows in the next room. This is certainly very easy and pleasurable material to consume. As Schaffer and Smith (2004, 23) have it Life narratives have become saleable properties in today’s markets. They gain audiences through the global forces of commodification that convert narratives into the property of publishing and media houses … in turn [they] convert stories of suffering and survival into commodified experiences for general audiences with diverse desires and also for an increasing number of niche audiences interested in particular kinds of suffering.

It is a relief, a shock and a challenge when, in the final room, the stories are put back together again, with a beginning, middle and end. Breitz is playing with the way the body of the other and with it, her story, is fractured and its constituent parts magnified for the audience’s pleasure, both in feature films and in traditional ethnographic documentaries (think Leni Riefenstahl’s 1995 The Last of the Nuba).11 In her work Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Laura Mulvey (1975, 838) argues that pleasure in looking has been split into ego identification with the male figure in film, and a scopophilic fascination with the female figure. We, the viewers, act through the male figure and act upon, the female figure, who breaks up the ‘Renaissance space, the illusion of depth demanded by the narrative’ through her body, which is fragmented by close-ups on various body parts. The female character, as Mulvey puts it, ‘connotes to-be-looked-at-ness’ (ibid.). In Love Story, this happens not necessarily visually, but rather

11  This, of course, begs the question of who Breitz’s imagined subjects are and, with it, her imagined audience and if, in fact, audiences with different subject positions would react differently to her work. Later in the interview, Breitz also points out that it was important to her to show that people fleeing are not a monolith, that ‘anyone could be a refugee,’ which is why she chose people from different countries and with different religious backgrounds, genders and sexual orientations. Markedly though, there is not one white person included in the group she assembled. In an effort to bridge the gap between viewer and viewed and elicit empathy then—the very phenomenon that Breitz is trying to discuss in her artwork—she ignores the historical, materialist and systemic conditions that are more likely to render non-­ white subjects refugees.

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through the fragmenting of the stories themselves.12 In the Baldwin/ Moore re-enactment, we focus on the anatomy of the stories, gazing at the emotional, synchronic elements up close, not consuming them in their diachronic entirety. This is not only a comment on the way Hollywood’s camera fragments bodies, especially marginalized ones, but also the way stories are often fed to us in a palatable, marketable form. Through this fracturing of the refugee body, Breitz’s work also interestingly subverts Bhabha’s idea of mimicry. By showing us the fragmented re-enacted stories first, and then the full stories told by the interviewees, Breitz flips the idea of mimicry on its head: Moore and Baldwin mimic the refugees, ostensibly in the subject position of the colonized, rather than constructing the other as a mirror image of the colonizer. This inverted mimicry turns out to be pleasing to the audience. In Love Story, the powerful actors, Baldwin and Moore, are the ones not quite faithfully delivering the stories of the disenfranchised; they are the ones who perform mimicry. However, this uneasy position for the ‘colonizer’ to be in does not last long; equilibrium is restored and so any subversion, however destabilizing, is only temporary.

Barca Nostra: Unreliable Narrators and Uncanny Dockings If these three works from 2017 work to trouble stock ‘refugee crisis’ stories and the idea of the salutary narrative through fakery and fanciful artifice, the final example I focus on, from two years later, does away with any tangible stories, or any text or speech, altogether. Christoph Büchel’s 2019 Barca Nostra (Fig. 8.9) installed at the Biennale’s arsenale takes the idea of a poetics of representation to another level. Perched on the port, the looming fishing boat, which boasts a gash that exposes its innards, almost fades into the background. This is the wreck of the very boat that, in 2015, sank off the coast of Lampedusa, dragging 1100 trafficked refugees down with it. In June 2016 the Italian government retrieved the wreck and brought it to the Augusta Naval base in Melilli, Sicily, where the remaining bodies still trapped in the hold and machine room were recovered. A number of different political uses were proposed for the boat, 12  I am using Mulvey’s ideas about women in Hollywood to talk about the figure of the refugee in general, though of course, this figure and her appendant fracturing is compounded by various intersectional factors, including, race, gender, class and sexuality.

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Fig. 8.9  The ship-wrecked fishing boat being transported to the arsenale to be installed there, Christoph Büchel, Barca Nostra, 2019. (© Christoph Büchel)

including parading it around Europe and across national borders as a symbol of hope and mobility. The forensic pathologist on the case planned to place the boat in the garden of her Alma Mater, the University of Milan, and turn it into a kind of accessible ‘site’ for groups of school children. The prime minister at the time, Matteo Renzi, intended to install the wreck in front of the dome in Milan, as the pope was scheduled to visit, but when the conservatives came to power, under Matteo Salvini in 2018, this plan was quickly forgotten. Finally, the Swiss-Icelandic artist Christoph Büchel asked to exhibit the wreck at the Biennale (Stauffacher 2019), dragging the repressed evidence of our broken humanitarian system up from our collective id’s watery depths. Before I saw the installation with my own eyes, I encountered a lot of people who had not heard of it, and even more who had been to the arsenale, had drunk coffee at the small make-shift café right in front of the boat and had not even seen it. When I finally looked at it myself, it was not the catharsis I had been hoping for. Büchel’s work was roundly criticized by people who found it tasteless to display a site of mass death at one of

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the biggest nexuses of global cultural power (Meier 2019). Many of the criticisms levelled at Büchel’s work had to do with its lack of visual signage, its refusal to announce itself as what it was. Unlike Ai Wei Wei’s 2016 wrapping of the Berlin concert house in orange life vests, a very recognizable index for the refugee body meant to stop people in their tracks with the juxtaposition of Western cultural pleasure with the dangerous reality of refugees’ journeys, Barca Nostra almost disappears against the background of the port, possibly just a damaged boat in need of refurbishment, temporarily displaced. At the same time, the fact that the boat is on land leads to a slippage in the normalcy of its presence. Something none of the work’s critics seem to have noticed is the boat’s placement next to a newly refurbished crane that was built in 1885. The story of the crane’s refurbishment is lovingly recounted on a banner near the café. In his chapter on governmental re-unification strategies in Mostar,  Bosnia and Herzegovina, Andrew Herscher (2011) notes that appeals to shared heritage are often used to obfuscate existing tensions. The crane represents a salutary narrative of industry, global expansion and national wealth; by drawing attention to these tensions between the utopian narrative of transnational exchange and the boat as a symptom of its price, Barca Nostra shows us which narratives of history we privilege and which we simply leave unframed. Like Laboratory of Dilemmas, Barca Nostra makes itself known through its uncanny presence and it has endured in the minds of those who saw it, at the latest when they read or heard about the work’s story later, or suddenly realized what they had just seen. In his work The Texture of Memory, James Young (1993, 28) introduced a generation of artists working in the 1980s, who sought to create new forms of commemoration. ‘Instead of searing memory into public consciousness, they feared, conventional memorials seal memory off from awareness altogether.’ The artists’ antidote to this lacuna, Young has it, is to challenge the memorial’s claim to permanence and centrality, by forcing ‘the memorial to disperse—not gather—memory, even as it gathers the literal effects of time in one place. In dissipating itself over time, the countermonument would mimic time’s own dispersion, become more like time than like memory’ (1993, 48). In this process, countermemorials often destroy or negate themselves, with or without viewer engagement. In the sense that Büchel’s work does not offer to ‘do our memory-work for us’ (Young 2011, 374), thereby

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providing a catharsis, it resembles a countermonument,13 but in its prominent location, inertia and open narrative, it bespeaks a new form of engagement with an ongoing crisis, and a more honest and effective way of memorializing the lives already claimed by such crises. This installation is indifferent to us; it does not absolve or lecture the public with pathos-­ laden stories, but rather allows us to realize how we are being primed to receive these stories and perhaps how to pay attention to new ones.

Conclusion: Unsettling Catharses The four installation works I analyse are unusual in that they do not confront the refugee situation head-on. They are subtle and poetic, and they play with visitor expectations, narrativity, allegory and performance. Instead of condescending to viewers, they challenge us to participate in the act of interpretation and become meaningful political participants. Far from the kind of exhibition that tries to elicit empathy from visitors—a simple, mono-planar narrative, beginning with refugees who leave one place, undertake a harrowing journey with a climax of some sort and arrive in a new place, often without exploration of the challenges that face refugees upon arrival in their host country, or of the decisions that are made in the host countries themselves—George Drivas’s Laboratory of Dilemmas, Mohau Modisakeng’s Passage, Candice Breitz’s Love Story and, finally, Christoph Büchel’s Barca Nostra problematize this simplistic narrative and raise more complex questions about ethics, geopolitics, the political discourses around questions of hospitality and integration, and empathy, all the while playing with ideas of authenticity, re-enactment, performativity and memory. They represent a more critical engagement with the complex role of narrativity in questions of crisis, culture and flight. The word ‘catharsis’ comes from the Greek katharos meaning ‘pure,’ and kathairein meaning ‘to cleanse’; the notion of release through drama derives from Aristotle’s Poetics. By not allowing us this moment of release, the exhibitions I analyse insist that we can never be released from the problematic of forced migration. The exhibitions unsettle preconceived ideas about refugees by pointing out the ideas that the viewers have simply accepted, ideas that have settled and need to be shaken up.

13  See Veronica Tello (2016) for an application of James Young’s ideas, amongst others, to a reading of contemporary art on forced migration.

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References Arda, Balca. 2019. Contemporary Art on the Current Refugee Crisis: The Problematic of Aesthetics Versus Ethics. British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 46 (2): 310–327. Bakewell, Geoffrey W. 2013. Aeschylus’s Suppliant Women: The Tragedy of Immigration. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Betts, Alexander, and Paul Collier. 2017. Refuge: Rethinking Refugee Policy in a Changing World. New York: Oxford University Press. Bhabha, Homi. 1984. Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse. October 28: 125–133. Breitz, Candice. 2018. Interview. SABC Digital News, February 2. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=1wTfv2HXV6I. Accessed 5 August 2018. Büchel, Christoph. 2019. Barca Nostra. Installation. Venice Biennale. Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Demos, T.J. 2013. The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Drivas, George. 2017. Laboratory of Dilemmas. Video Installation. Venice Biennale. ———. 2018. Unpublished Skype Interview with Hella Wiedmer-Newman. ———. n.d. Interview. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARnMVmSGTe8. Accessed 5 August 2018. Enwezor, Okwui. 2004. Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights and the Figure of ‘Truth’ in Contemporary Art. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 5 (1): 11–42. Flucht Exhibition. n.d. http://www.flucht-­fuir.ch/home/. Accessed 1 August 2018. Forced From Home Exhibition. 2018. Forced from Home Brings Stories of the Global Refugee Crisis to Cities Across the US.  Médicins Sans Frontières. https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/what-­we-­do/news-­stories/news/ forced-­home-­brings-­stories-­global-­refugee-­crisis-­cities-­across-­us. Accessed 1 August 2018. Friese, Heidrun. 2017. Flüchtlinge: Opfer – Bedrohung – Helden. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. Giannouri, Evgenia. 2017. Exhibition Catalogue. Laboratory of Critical Analogism: The Real Under the Microscope of Contemporary Art. Laboratory of Dilemmas George Drivas. Hellenic Republic of Ministry and Culture. Herscher, Andrew. 2011. Points of No Return: Cultural Heritage and Counter-­ Memory in Post-Yugoslavia. In Curating Difficult Knowledge: Violent Pasts in

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Public Places, ed. Erica Lehrer, Cynthia E. Milton and Monica Eileen Patterson, 147-160. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Lambert-Beatty, Carrie. 2009. Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility. October 129: 51–84. Law, Jennifer. 2000. Ghost Stories: Democracy, Duplicity and Virtuality in the Work of Candice Breitz. Frauen Kunst Wissenschaft 29: 45–56. Lehrer, Erica, Cynthia E.  Milton, and Monica Eileen Patterson, eds. 2011. Curating Difficult Knowledge: Violent Pasts in Public Places. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Meier, Philippe. 2019. Ein Flüchtlingsboot zum Spektakel zu machen ist keine Kunst – es ist geschmacklos. Neue Zürcher Zeitung, May 10. https://www.nzz. ch/feuilleton/fluechtlingsboot-­das-­ist-­keine-­kunst-­sondern-­ein-­mahnmal-­ ld.1480926?reduced=true. Accessed 10 January 2021. Modisakeng, Mohau. 2017. Passage. Video Installation Available at https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=6HsIIfoHxw4. Accessed 4 August 2018. ———. 2017b. Documentation on Passage. http://www.mohaumodisakengstudio.com/passage-­2017. Accessed 4 August 2018. Mulvey, Laura. 1975. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen 16 (3): 6–18. Muñoz-Alonso, Lorena. 2017. Dana Schutz’s Painting of Emmett Till at Whitney Biennial Sparks Protest. Artnet News, March 21. https://news.artnet.com/ art-­w orld/dana-­s chutz-­p ainting-­e mmett-­t ill-­w hitney-­b iennial-­p rotest-­ 897929. Accessed 19 March 2022. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. n.d. Exhibition: Candice Breitz. Love Story. https://www.mfa.org/exhibitions/candice-­breitz-­love-­story. Accessed 18 April 2019. Nichols, Bill. 2001. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Nussbaum, Martha. 2010. Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Schaffer, Kay, and Sidonie Smith. 2004. Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Simpson, Veronica. 2017. Exhibition Materials, George Drivas’ Laboratory of Dilemmas. Venice Biennale. https://www.studiointernational.com/index. php/george-­drivas-­laboratory-­of-­dilemmas-­video-­interview-­greece-­venice-­ biennale-­2017-­charlotte-­rampling. Accessed 2 April 2022. Speidel, Klaus. 2017. Dana Schutz’s ‘Open Casket’: A Controversy Around a Painting as a Symptom of an Art World Malady. Spike, March 24. https:// www.spikear tmagazine.com/en/ar ticles/dana-­s chutzs-­o pen-­c asket-­ controversy-­around-­painting-­symptom-­art-­world-­malady. Accessed 5 August 2018. Stauffacher, Daniela. 2019. Dieses Flüchtlingsschiff wurde für 900 Migranten zum Grab – nun wollen es plötzlich alle an des Biennale von Venedig sehen.

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Neue Zürcher Zeitung, July 20. https://nzzas.nzz.ch/hintergrund/biennale-­ von-­v enedig-­p loetzlich-­w ollen-­a lle-­d as-­f luechtlingsschiff-­l d.1497243? reduced=true. Accessed 20 July 2019. Steyerl, Hito. 2011. Documentary Uncertainty. Re-visiones 1. http://re-­visiones. net/anteriores/spip.php%3Farticle37.html Accessed 1 March 2022. Tello, Veronica. 2016. Counter-Memorial Aesthetics: Refugee Histories and the Politics of Contemporary Art. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Young, James E. 1993. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. Yale University Press. Young, James E. 2011. At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust. In Contemporary Art and Architecture in The Collective Memory Reader, ed. Jeffrey K.  Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 9

Archaeologies of Nonentity in Aki Kaurismäki’s The Other Side of Hope Asha Varadharajan

Introduction: Contexts of Enquiry The definite article in the title of Flannery O’Connor’s 1977 short story, along with its unidentified referent, marked ‘The Displaced Person’ as the figure for and story of our times. The latest data from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), ‘Figures at a Glance’ (June 2023), indicates 108.4 million forcibly displaced persons worldwide—62,5 million internally displaced persons and 35.3 million refugees. In short, 1 in 95 people on earth has fled their home because of conflict or persecution. These figures reinforce the suspicion that displacement is neither This chapter is indebted to Corey Boechler’s etymological savvy, Hailey Scott’s indefatigable research, Sylvia Söderlind’s keen insights, and Tim Wyman-­ McCarthy’s intellectual inspiration.

A. Varadharajan (*) Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 F. Barclay, B. Ivey (eds.), Contemporary Representations of Forced Migration in Europe, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Human Rights, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47831-4_9

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anomalous nor aberrant in the global landscape but, rather, ubiquitous, perhaps even, as Peter Gatrell remarks, ‘depressingly commonplace’ (Gatrell 2001, 41). Despite its commonplace character, the terrain of displacement continues to shift, morph, and evolve such that it encompasses ‘ever-expanding numbers of stateless people, irregular, stranded and survival migrants, so-­ called urban refugees, and populations affected by state fragility, and climate and environmental change’ (Betts et  al. 2012, 77). Yet, the 1951 Convention’s definition of refugees as persons ‘outside the country of their nationality’ (UNHCR 2010) who could establish a ‘well-founded fear of being persecuted on grounds of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion’ (UNHCR 2010, 3) seems hardly adequate to account for the mix of defiance and despair that drives those ‘impoverished by fate or political economy’ (Harding 2014, 96). The ‘perennial impasses and systematic failures’ (Malkki 1996, 223) that compromise the UNHCR’s heroic efforts and erode its efficacy and authority in the system of global governance as well as the conundrums that refugee succour and behaviour pose simultaneously sustain and baffle the ever-growing body of scholarship on global displacement. This chapter emerges from a recognition that the ‘legal and normative’ definition of ‘the refugee’ by which many scholars continue to abide, their laudable focus on refugee rights, no longer captures completely the emerging dynamics of displacement (Zetter 2018, 20). Indeed, the focus of UNHCR policy on the persecution and haplessness of refugees not only exhorts states to ensure their protection, but also traps refugees in permissible affects designed to provoke compassion for and amelioration of their plight, as Dina Nayeri has convincingly noted (Nayeri 2019). In 2016, the then-Deputy UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Kate Gilmore, addressed these very troubling consequences of UN policy. While urging the international community to build on the momentum created by the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants (2016), Gilmore (2016) asserted, ‘Rights are not a system of endorsement or appreciation. … [They] are for the best and for the worst of us. For each of us—to the exclusion of none of us, in the interests of all of us.’ Gilmore’s (2016) acute diagnosis of the tendency in UNHCR discourse and policy to make succour for refugees equivalent to ‘an award’ for perceived vulnerability and virtue and her exposure of a prior flawed assumption that rights for ‘people on the move’ are of a different order than rights for those ‘who have no movement whatsoever’ are remarkably unapologetic and

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uncompromising for a representative of the status quo, recognising, as she does, the overlaps between safe and perilous migration. By situating refugees within an ongoing deterritorialisation—born of desire or violence, as Liisa Malkki suggests—Gilmore generates a different set of questions. ‘What does it mean to be, or to remain?’ (Malkki 1995, 515) rather than move or abandon? Are all citizens nestled safely in the arms of the State? Is resilience always a matter of producing conditions of belonging against all odds? Is it only the home refugees leave behind that becomes estranged, even terrifying? Why should only exile and displacement result in disorientation or the loss of moral bearings and cultural sustenance? Nayeri asks whether ‘the life of the happy mediocrity’ (Nayeri 2017) is ‘a privilege reserved [only] for those who never stray from home’ (Nayeri 2017). I want to suggest, on the contrary, that alterity and alienation could exist within an ethos of belonging and without the glamour and romance that attach themselves to figures such as the flâneur or the mock-ressentiment with which Nayeri saddles the citizen. Thinking ‘the refugee’ with rather than against ‘the citizen’ or thinking ‘the citizen’ in and through the uncanny menace of ‘the refugee’ might attune us to both recognisable and invisible forms of displacement while reminding us of what distinguishes the refugee in any given context (Bakewell 2008). My aim is less to valorise displacement or celebrate transplanted identities than to remap the contours of exile and belonging. I now turn to a work of cinema that exhibits a powerful capacity to unmoor the viewer in precisely this way. A chance encounter with Aki Kaurismäki’s The Other Side of Hope (2017) on sabbatical in Edinburgh in 2019 precipitated a crisis in my assumptions about the refugee condition. Kaurismäki’s film may focus on Khaled, a ‘classic’ refugee from Syria, and from Aleppo no less, but the world he depicts is populated by figures in transit, abandoning unpalatable pasts and facing uncertain futures, gambling on their own wits and the compassion of strangers, minions rather than masters in the domain of social hierarchy and mobility, a community, if it is one, forged among outcasts and in their mutual alienation from and incomprehension of the machinery of the State. Even the skinheads have a touch of the maladroit about them, which, of course, makes their actions crueller and the consequences of those actions catastrophic for Khaled. This archaeology of nonentity, trapped between inertia and renewal, forced me to ponder the meaning of displacement in relation to the misfits within rather than only at the borders of city spaces. Kaurismäki made me recalibrate identity by rendering the parallel rather than oppositional

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trajectories of refugee and citizen. By honouring the economically superfluous and socially rootless (Arendt 1976), his film evokes a familiar but seldom appreciated form of habitation, that of denizen, encompassing the alienation of both refugee and citizen. The scholars, architects of UNHCR policy, and auteurs to whom I allude comprise an unexpected synchronicity of sensibilities across times and between places. The fugitive convergences between their perspectives struck me as harbingers of an opportune moment in which to write this chapter.

‘In the Shadow of Bright Policy Lights’ My encounter with Kaurismäki’s film whetted my curiosity about the residual and emergent ‘scum of the earth’ (Arendt 1976, 256) it evokes as well as shaped my desire to respond to Roger Zetter’s ‘analytical challenge’ (Zetter 2018, 22) to alter the dominant rhetoric of displacement and rescue. Zetter imagines a radical re-visioning of forced migration through the lens of the empirical realities and existential actualities of displacement. As Oliver Bakewell remarks in his marvellous essay (2008), however, more is at stake than rendering policy categories more capacious or analytical because the analysis of data we bring to bear on policy remains beholden to concerns and categories defined by policy. Rather, the explanatory power of data and categories should render visible groups, relationships, and questions ‘that are methodologically difficult to capture’ (Bakewell 2008, 433). Bakewell’s advocacy of ‘an oblique approach to research’ (Bakewell 2008, 449. Italics in original), and his appeal for ‘a sideways look at policy and practice from a new angle’ (Bakewell 2008, 449), is rare among social scientists. His emphasis on the denaturalisation of frames of reference and the cultivation of perspective informs my deployment in this essay of fictional cinema to think the ‘extremity’ of which Hannah Arendt speaks, ‘the deprivation of a place in the world’ (Arendt 1976, 296) in and through the mediation of word, sound, and image. Cinema is, after all, about what lingers in the frame and remains beyond it, and about the unsaid, the unheard, and the overheard as much as the said. I hope my exploration of the incompleteness, even opacity and silence, of ‘fictions’ rather than the evidence of archive, witness, and experience, will tell a different story ‘of, and in, displacement’ (Gatrell 2015, 2). Rather than treat cultural representations as metonymic of the political dynamics of displacement (Gatrell 2015, 15), or deploy the semiotics of

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cinema to illuminate or illustrate the ‘shifting matrix of relations and practices’ (Gatrell 2015, 15) that constitute ‘refugeedom’ (Gatrell 2015, 15), I consider my chosen film a disarticulation of the category and person of the refugee, simultaneously making and unmaking dwellings in displacement. In other words, I mobilise and catalyse rather than only explain and interpret just as Kaurismäki’s film dismantles and unravels rather than inhabits and constitutes refugeedom. Both the film director and I ‘embrace’ (Gatrell 2015) displacement with all the fraught fervour such an experiment entails.

Nordic Hospitality The Other Side of Hope (2017) is the second film in Kaurismäki’s purported trilogy, the first of which was Le Havre (2011). There has been no sign of a third film to complete this sequence and Kaurismäki’s gift for defeating audience expectations, habit of indulging in a hiatus between films, and his puckish humour, make it entirely possible there will not be a satisfying finale to this cinematic exploration. Kaurismäki has always played fast and loose with his relationship with the centre of Europe and of European cinema—as Robert Koehler remarks, Helsinki ‘is about as far as you can get from the European center without falling into Russia’—and his reputation rests on his penchant for fringe-dwellers of various shades and stripes in his native Helsinki and ‘those whom events have made marginal, those yanked out of their roots by war and global forces far greater than they can resist and barely survive’ (Koehler 2018, 51). Both films depict the plight of the refugee—an adolescent boy in Le Havre and a young man in The Other Side of Hope—in the aftermath of their clandestine arrival in Le Havre and Helsinki, respectively. Claudia Breger (2015) argues that the spirit of affirmation Le Havre exudes is a consequence of its ‘forceful simplicity’ (513). An ageing shoe-­ shiner, Marcel, comes to the rescue of a boy, Idrissa, who escapes the police when they open the container in which he travels from Gabon to Le Havre. Marcel hides Idrissa, manages to rope in the community to raise enough money to send him to London where his mother resides, and even secures a happy ending for himself with the miraculous recovery of his wife, Arletty, from cancer. The fairy-tale implausibility of the film, its vivid palette, and its reliance on ‘simple acts of generous defiance’ (525), as Breger perceptively remarks, enable Kaurismäki to make ‘political empathy’ dependent upon ‘private love’ (512). The irrepressible optimism of

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the film, then, is a critical ‘[imagination] of a better world’ (Breger 2015, 526). Breger’s essay is a tour de force tracing how Kaurismäki defies ‘the claims of realism, or the regime of death operating at the borders of contemporary Europe’ (518). Nonetheless, I am drawn to Le Havre’s successor, The Other Side of Hope, for its elliptical rather than ‘proclamatory’ (Breger 2015, 514) character and style. I find Le Havre’s simplicity charming, even affecting, and was aware, even before encountering Breger’s intricate defence of its sentimentality, that the latter was artful and knowing rather than cheesy. Still, I do not find the film intriguing. The title of The Other Side of Hope already bristles with questions: why isn’t the film called Hope and Despair? If the other side is not the opposite of hope, what might that be? Isn’t ‘the other side’ already representative of a spatial and affective division? How might borders be both territorial and psychic? I wanted to discover whether these questions were, could, and should be answered. Breger indicates Kaurismäki’s powerful assertion of the calm and dignity of the refugees who emerge from the container rather than the more customary harrowing portrait of suffering and endurance in fiction and media as emblematic of his humane and egalitarian approach. The scene of Khaled emerging from the shadows, his face blackened by the coal the ship’s containers transport, which might be construed as the parallel to this one in Le Havre, immediately distinguishes The Other Side of Hope from its predecessor. Khaled appears not as an enigma to be decoded or a mystery to be solved or even a victim to be rescued as the choice to cast a boy in Le Havre indicates; instead, his ‘hope’ is his own, one he will choose to and may never disclose. Sherwan Haji’s (the Syrian actor who migrated to Finland in 2010) dark, melancholic eyes and his composure suggest a personality sufficient unto himself—self-contained in direct contradiction to his containment aboard the ship and by the fate he flees. Kaurismäki adroitly avoids turning Khaled, despite his Syrian credentials, into a representative figure and makes him sympathetic precisely because his humanity is singular rather than one he might be presumed to share with his hosts. The Other Side of Hope follows the parallel trajectories of Wikström, a shirt salesman, who abandons his wife and job, and Khaled, whose family, except for his sister, Miriam, has been buried under the rubble of Aleppo. The interplay between abandonment and loss structures the cinematic diegesis. Khaled is befriended by an Iraqi asylum-seeker at the detention centre and advised by him to conceal his grief and rage when he appears before the border official assigned to determine the merits of his case.

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Wikström wins a poker game, the proceeds of which he uses to buy The Golden Pint, a restaurant with few customers, diminishing prospects, and a tactically woebegone staff, each of whom spins a yarn to secure a pay raise from their gullible and generous new employer. Khaled is no less subject to chance in the ‘game of poker’ he plays with the border officer to secure his asylum and acquire the wherewithal to allow Miriam to join him. Despite following the advice of his Iraqi friend, and the border officer’s apparent sympathy for his stark declaration that he chose Finland because it is a country without war, Khaled is denied the right to remain in Finland and becomes a fugitive from the law just as Wikström is a fugitive from his past life. Wikström befriends Khaled, offers him a job in his restaurant, and introduces him to his motley crew of staff, all of whom readily assume the responsibility of keeping Khaled out of the reach of the long arm of the law and bureaucracy. They do not, however, protect him from the violence of neo-Nazi skinheads who succeed in wounding him, perhaps fatally, by the end of the film. Khaled’s uncertain fate is juxtaposed, at the film’s conclusion, with the arrival of his sister Miriam in Finland. While Wikström has been responsible for smuggling her in, there is no guarantee that she will be granted asylum either and the film leaves its audience with both Khaled and Miriam on the other side of hope and despair. The release of The Other Side of Hope in 2017 coincides with the shifting climate of ‘Scandinavian’ response to the influx of refugees, predominantly from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and parts of Africa in 2015. ‘Scandinavia’ is a common misnomer for the five Nordic countries of Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, and Norway, which is why I have preferred to refer to these nations as ‘Nordic.’ One million migrants arrived in Europe in 2015, ‘in chaotic, unauthorised flows that taxed rescue and care operations, left policymakers with policy proposals inadequate to the enormity of the challenge, and hit some countries much harder than others’ (Tanner 2016). Finland ‘received more than 32,000 asylum applications’ (Tanner 2016) and Iraqi arrivals were the highest in Finland, which may explain Kaurismäki’s decision to make Khaled’s companion in the detention centre Iraqi. These migrant flows are usually attributed to Nordic countries’ hospitable and generous asylum policies. Finland, for example, provided large stipends to asylum-seekers awaiting the outcome of their applications to remain in Finland. Nonetheless, scholars and media outlets concur that 2015 was also the turning point for both public opinion and governmental policy which became increasingly

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hostile and restrictive, respectively. Finland’s emphasis has shifted from the shelter of asylum to the efficiency of deportation: one recalls the irony that corrodes the moment Khaled is denied asylum and Syria is deemed a location to which it is safe for him to return against the backdrop of a TV screen replaying the devastation Khaled has fled. Kaurismäki is careful to suggest that while Khaled might be unwanted, he is not needy; rather his decision to leave is both bold and rational and should not require justification or special pleading on his behalf. Khaled is the victim of the altered climate of reception. What were once policies that ensured ‘free accommodation and health and social services … monthly cash grants [for food, and] the right to work three months after submitting applications’ (Tanner 2016), turned into locals ‘ill at ease’ with reception centres and the presence of hundreds of Middle Eastern men, ‘reduced service provision due to capacity shortages, and long wait times for asylum decisions’ (Tanner 2016). The presence of neo-Nazi skinheads in the film alludes to the rise of populist and right-wing parties winning votes on the basis of ‘anti-­ immigrant rhetoric and sentiment’ (Tanner 2016). These include the Sweden Democrats, Finns Party, Danish People’s Party, and Norway’s Progress Party. As Tanner points out, Denmark’s Lars Lokke Rasmussen and Finland’s Sauli Niinistö have even suggested the 1951 Refugee Convention might need to be revised. The overdetermined character of these shifts in policy and public sentiment, the rise of xenophobia coinciding with an economic downturn and the costs of integrating ever-increasing waves of refugees into small countries with low populations, is generally acknowledged. Nayeri’s comment about refugees’ desire for the mediocrity citizens inhabit without fuss dovetails nicely with Kaurismäki’s world of ‘deadbeats’ and ‘failures,’ of the remarkably unremarkable, as the haven for the unwanted refugee, precisely in the midst of an economic crisis likely to be as prolonged as the burgeoning refugee crisis. The surrender to chance rather than fate that both Khaled and Wikström and his droll and doleful band evince thus becomes their means of survival. This distinction between chance and fate is crucial because chance affords the possibility of improvisation, adaptation, and reinvention unlike the prospects for a life buffeted by the winds of fate. When the neo-Nazi skinheads mistakenly dub Khaled a Jew, Kaurismäki delicately makes temporality both repetitive and deliberately anachronistic. The attack on Khaled immediately evokes the Holocaust and the spectre of the right to have rights that continues to haunt Europe’s present; it also cleverly alludes to the scandalous and widely condemned

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law allowing Denmark to seize valuables from refugees to defray their expenses or the cost of reaping the benefits of the welfare state (Damon and Hulme 2016). Paula Merikoski’s fascinating article ‘“At least they are welcome in my home!” Contentious hospitality in home accommodation of asylum seekers in Finland’ (2021) offers a different angle on hospitality that transforms it from a moral obligation (although it does not lose this feature) into ‘a form of political agency and resistance’ (91). Her empirical investigation of hosts offering their homes in a spirit of solidarity with asylum-­ seekers and against both the ‘protectionist discourse’ of home in anti-immigration rhetoric and the opposition between ‘private and public spheres of societal agency and citizenship’ (91) accords with the spirit of The Other Side of Hope. The film exploits this ambiguity in that Wikström’s ‘home’ is his business because he has abandoned his domestic home and it is in the restaurant that Khaled finds his ‘home,’ while Khaled’s sleeping quarters are located in an abandoned warehouse, the relic of a failed business. The significance of Khaled’s rejection of a fake ID also becomes clear in this regard—he refuses to participate in the imposition of the officious and official hospitality of the State. The film seems to be drawing on the culture of ‘civic mobilisation’ and domestic hospitality Merikoski describes (92), the principle that people are more hospitable than their governments. Kaurismäki sidesteps both State and civil society in his attention to the fringes where resistance to migration policy and discourse occurs and a stealthy compassion emerges without pomp or ceremony. Le Havre ends with Idrissa on his way to his mother in London rather than with his reunion with her because the film resists both the cultural homogeneity and nationalist sentiment that underwrite conservative imaginations of home as well as the poetic justice implied in Idrissa’s return to his rightful home signified as a maternal embrace. For Kaurismäki home, like hope, is a horizon of possibility, not refuge, succour, or stability. Idrissa faces forward, leaving the rubble of the past behind. That futurity may prove elusive for Khaled and uncertain for Miriam, but the point is that both are ‘here’ to stay. Thus, Kaurismäki resolutely attends not to the refugee crisis but to the crisis in asylum (see also Merikoski’s investment in this shift in emphasis and terminology).

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Etymologies of Dwelling The delinking of both hostility and hospitality in Kaurismäki’s film from either the professionalised compassion of organised civil society or the indifferent efficiency of state provision points us away from citizenship as the final word on belonging and towards something else, what I identify as denizenship. An etymological inventory of the traces of the word ‘denizen’ reveals as many torsions and contradictions as ‘belonging’ poses for the displaced. Etymologically speaking, ‘denizen’ is the opposite of ‘foreign.’ While it is true that the former has become a noun and the latter is more commonly an adjective, they have the same composite parts New Oxford American Dictionary 2015). Originally, denizen was denzein while foreign was forein, the -ein ending having been adapted from the Latin -aneus denoting a relationship of origin from the source word. Intriguingly, however, their respective source words are also opposites. ‘Denz’ comes from ‘de+intus’ or from + within, while ‘for’ comes from ‘foris’ meaning out of doors. Thus, one is from within while the other is from without. The transformation of denzein into denizen exposes the flirtation between denizen and citizen throughout the centuries. Middle English’s ‘Citisein’ borrowed a ‘z’ from ‘denzein’ but by the Early Modern period the pull of the arguably more common citizen became too strong and denzein’s ‘i’ played hopscotch to become denizen. Changing the suffix -aneus (as represented by the ‘-ein’ ending) to ‘-izen’ along the lines of citizen in a strange sense parallels the forced assimilation of migrants, while marking their distinction through that first syllable: den. To make matters more curious, even ironic, den is another word for home, but a home of/for animals. The Other Side of Hope provides fertile ground for interpretation in light of these etymological facts. The very title of the film depends on a relationship between ‘within’ and ‘without’—the other side immediately conjures up a fence, a wall, a border, as well as an apparent relationship between opposites. But is ‘other’ synonymous with ‘opposite?’ If it is, the other side of hope would be ‘despair,’ but the title leaves that possibility open to question and challenge without indicating what the alternative might be. The remarkable opening sequence that features a coal-­blackened Khaled Ali emerging from the ship’s hold that has transported him to Helsinki establishes him as foreign, arriving from without, and yet the shower that dribbles away the stain establishes his likeness rather than difference. When he finds himself detained among other asylum-seekers, he locates a comrade who loans him a cigarette and cell phone, reminisces about the past with him, and offers tips on how to negotiate the

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interrogation by the authorities. Crucially, however, his new-found comrade is from Iraq, not Syria—here, too, affinity exists in and perhaps in spite of difference. Nevertheless, Khaled’s foreignness is the source of his commonality with those who share his space. Because Khaled reports to the authorities immediately on his arrival and lawfully seeks asylum, Kaurismäki mischievously foregrounds his right to have rights rather than his likely nefarious route to refuge. Khaled becomes illegal and foreign when he is denied protection and asylum rather than is, by definition. The mutual inscrutability that evolves over the course of Khaled’s interrogation by the official, and the arbitrary and absurd decision that denies him asylum and deems Syria safe for repatriation, only reinforce this point. Who, in other words, is foreign to whom? Kaurismäki continues to exploit the relation between foreign and denizen, their mutual undecidability, in the course of the film. Many scenes place Khaled out of doors: the skinheads catch him unawares on unfamiliar city streets, Wikström, his ‘saviour,’ discovers him amidst the garbage, the accommodation Wikström provides is an abandoned storage space in his defunct business, his fellow employees in the restaurant shove him hastily into the toilet (customarily perceived as out of doors) when the inspectors arrive and, most poignantly, perhaps, a wounded Khaled finds himself alone at the conclusion of the film with only a stray mongrel for company. Den, after all, is where ‘animals’ abide. One possible meaning for the other side of hope suggests itself: Khaled’s ambiguous expression evokes not the loss of hope, but the loss of anticipation. Khaled’s attack coincides with his sister’s arrival (we know she is awaiting him at the police station where she intends to claim asylum). His sister, with any luck, might still be able to emplot her existence, but Khaled cannot do the same for his anymore. Her hope is his joy, entwined as it has always been, with the uncertain melancholy of his existence in Helsinki. If one shifts the focus to Helsinki’s citizens, it is fascinating how domestic spaces are virtually absent in this film, making the characters denizens rather than citizens, estranged from their home and native land. Only the restaurant, ironically a place of business, that serves comically lousy local cuisine, reopens its doors to custom in the guise of global fusion cuisine, provides Khaled and its erstwhile staff jobs, and shelters both Khaled and the dog from the authorities, may be said to qualify for the label ‘home.’ The unforgettable scene of Wikström surrendering his wedding ring to his wife, only to have her crush both it and her cigarette into the ashtray, sets the tone for the rest of the film. Even the skinheads who fancy themselves

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as the living embodiments of Fortress Europe roam the streets hunting for ‘foreign’ prey rather than function as men whose home is their castle. In a marvellously incisive moment, they abuse Khaled with the word ‘Jewboy’ after attacking him, simultaneously multiplying the signified of the word ‘foreign,’ recalling the history of persecution and exclusion that transforms friends within into enemies without, and taking a broad swipe at discourse and policy that identifies refugees according to their place, culture, and religion of origin. The friend to whom Wikström hopes to sell his clothing stock is on the verge of departing for greener pastures and the wandering minstrel who gives Khaled directions to the police station is another of the film’s parade of outcasts making a precarious living dependent on the kindness of strangers. And Wikström’s friends in shipping who agree to smuggle Khaled’s sister into Helsinki make their living in transportation, once again defying the notion of a fixed abode and unmooring the apparent stability of the citizen at home in their world. The pointed playfulness with which Kaurismäki treats the inhabitants of Helsinki mirrors the etymological origins of the word ‘denizen.’ The first syllable of denizen is actually a combination of Latin de (from) and intus (within), suggesting a denizen comes from within a country—i.e. is a natural inhabitant. De- as a prefix is a fascinating one for it is subtler and more nuanced than its two other Latin counterparts: ab- and ex-. In addition to the obvious meaning of from, or of, de-, through its association with downwards motion and movement away, can mean not or un-. So, while de+intus means from within, in a sense it can also mean not within. The Other Side of Hope thus naturalises the denizen and denaturalises the citizen. Such contradictions contained within ‘denizen’ are also reflected in its two primary (contradictory) definitions: (1) an inhabitant of a country, in opposition to foreigners who live without a country, and (2) an alien-born person living within a country (primarily Great Britain). The distinction between foreign and alien is one I find compelling, for, as already discussed, foreigner means an outsider, literally, but alien means belonging to another. Alien contains within it a sense of belonging, but to whom? To which country can displaced peoples claim belonging? Contrary to many representations of the displaced that deploy memory to ‘encapsulate a sense of loss’ (Gatrell 2015, 290) and ‘(re)store a sense of self’ (Gatrell 2015, 290), or to invest ‘places they left behind … with notions of beauty, pleasure, fecundity and stability’ (Gatrell 2015, 289; Nayeri 2019), the only audible link to Khaled’s past is the music that reminds him of home but remains as elusive and intangible as home has become. The

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disinterring of the bodies of his family members hidden in the rubble paradoxically signifies the burial of Khaled’s past just as his projected repatriation only serves to remind him that nothing remains of this past for him to resume. Refoulement acquires a simultaneously sinister and painful connotation in this moment. Khaled’s focus is on reunion with his sister, his remaining family member, rather than on restoration of his belonging to a place. In an unusual move, Khaled refuses the fake identity that Wikström offers to arrange for him, preferring to keep his name. This scene implies that Khaled carries his identity with and in him; his self and baggage are one. His identity manifests itself as self-containment derived from his movement away from home, with the film introducing the finality of Khaled’s departure as one without desire to or hope of return. Simultaneously, however, the trajectory of the plot, or the exegetical movement of the film, is a downward one as the opening syllable of denizen and Khaled’s wounded, possibly dying, state suggest. Denizen thus encapsulates the contingency of displacement. A third definition of ‘denizen’ provides me with perhaps some clarity on its ‘within/not within’ status, namely the linguistic definition of denizen. In the realm of language, a denizen is a word birthed in a foreign country but adopted into another language and clothed with the pronunciation rules of that country. A word is considered alien if it is adopted into a language but retains its original pronunciation, if not necessarily its comprehensive meaning in that language—rather like Khaled’s absorption into this community of outsiders while retaining his own name. Thus, ‘de rigueur’ and ‘hors d’oeuvre’ are aliens, but ‘valet’ (pronounced the exquisitely British way with the final ‘t’ sound) is a denizen. However, the linguistically colonial overtones of language absorption coupled with the cultural capital inherent within speaking English add further nuance to the already complex discourse on denizen. One recalls that the only way Wikström and company can communicate with Khaled is in English, a language that is neither Khaled’s nor his kindly hosts.’ As if to confirm my argument here, the version of the film I saw refrained from subtitles for the parts of the script spoken in English! At each layer it seems that ‘denizen’ operates with an intermediary status, both within and without a language, within and without a country. As the coup de grâce that defines Khaled’s predicament, the film’s opening features Khaled’s emergence out from the interior of the ship’s hold but it concludes with him out in the exterior and yet hidden from sight, except of those who have hurt or can destroy him.

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The Other Side of Hope illuminates ‘the agency of the individuals … who have no easily observable institutional form’ (Bakewell 2008, 441) because it refuses to assume that policymakers and institutions ‘are the actors who will improve the situation of forced migrants’ (Bakewell 2008, 440). Indeed, the film exposes the failure of such actors and the harm they can do. Kaurismäki might be said to coax into being what Vinh Nguyen has defined brilliantly as ‘refugeetude’ (Nguyen 2019), a ‘catalyst for thinking, feeling, and doing with others—for imagining justice’ (Nguyen 2019, 111). The film throws into ‘sharp relief the chasm between a definition and how it is experienced’ (Nguyen 2019, 114). Nguyen describes prevalent discourses ‘whereby the refugee’s struggle and suffering are cast as provisional, and deliverance into freedom is always just on the horizon’ (Nguyen 2019, 110). The ambiguous and unnerving ending of The Other Side of Hope as well as the film’s unrevealing title indicate what lies just over the horizon—more of the same at best and death at worst. Despite this sobering conclusion, however, the film nevertheless imagines ‘refugeeness’ as ‘a way of being in the world or, in Jean-Paul Sartre’s words, “a certain affective attitude towards the world”’ (Nguyen 2019, 117). Khaled’s encounters with the amiable denizens in Helsinki provide the film with its moments of ‘clarity and communion’ (Nguyen 2019, 119): the many casual gestures of kindness Khaled receives, the level playing field in which Khaled and Wikström emerge with equally bloodied noses before they shake hands in mutual recognition and acceptance, the clandestine acts that allow Khaled to remain undetected in exile and his sister to arrive safely in the city he has made his abode. Thus, Kaurismäki imagines refugeetude as ‘a condition of possibility’ (Nguyen 2019) because it thrives, as Nguyen suggests, not so much on what is ‘oppositional, radical, or controversial’ but on what is ‘surprising, unexpected, and revealing’ (Nguyen 2019, 123). As is characteristic of Kaurismäki’s sensibility, the tone of his film teeters between humour and melancholy. His humour is always droll and deadpan rather than sharp or even hilarious because it is born of compassion rather than rage. The depth of his vision stems from his detection of the difference between what Nguyen describes as ‘shared intimacies’ (Nguyen 2019) and ‘cultivated affinities’ (Nguyen 2019, 124). Kaurismäki never assumes or presumes just as his characters are rarely surprised or appalled. What they offer the unsuspecting stranger in their midst is their own strangeness and idiosyncrasy as consolation rather than smother him with understanding and empathy. Kaurismäki weans us of the ‘versus habit’ (Paul Fussell, as quoted in Gatrell 2001, 37) provoked by

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the ambiguity refugees represent, ‘in so far as refugees were neither purely friend nor purely foe, neither wholly familiar nor wholly foreign’ (Gatrell 2001, 37). The undeniable pathos of the film ensures that Khaled’s refugeeness is not constrained by the letter of the law but is ‘psychic, affective, and embodied’ (Nguyen 2019, 114). If there is one nuance that Kaurismäki brings to Nguyen’s fashioning of both refugeeness and refugeetude, it is the perceived absence of affect to which all his actors’ performances adhere. The apparent blankness of their countenances, the sparseness of gesture, and the laconic dialogue shift the emphasis from identification, a feeling with, to understanding what remains incommensurable with our experience and knowledge. It is this approach that allows Kaurismäki not only to contextualise displacement but to comprehend the displaced as ‘an experiential resource for developing significant and durable ways of being in and moving through the world’ (Nguyen 2019, 111). While Kaurismäki would baulk at the notion that his film gestures towards a ‘political possibility’ (Nguyen’s 2019, 111), I would like to intimate that films like his are part of what Stuart Hall described in 1987 as ‘the “decline of the west”—that immense process of historical relativization’ which ‘define[s] a new space for identity. But it is not necessarily armour-plated against other identities. It is not tied to fixed, permanent, unalterable oppositions. It is not wholly defined by exclusion’ (Hall 1987, 46). As the episodes with the skinheads show, Europe is nowhere near free of ‘those extremities of power and aggression, violence and mobilisation’ (Hall 1987) integral to ‘older forms of nationalism’ (Hall 1987, 46) and, as the ongoing culture wars demonstrate, the British are in the throes of resisting with all their might the processes that make them ‘feel just marginally “marginal”’ (Hall 1987, 46). Hall’s unholy glee in finally becoming centred, when all about him felt dispersed and fragmented, may well have been premature or even travestied in light of the Windrush scandal, but its spirit lives on in films like The Other Side of Hope. Films that persist in centring marginality in order to comprehend migration as ‘a one way trip’ (Hall 1987, 44).

Voice, Authority, and Authenticity A complementary challenge to the constitution of ‘the figure of the refugee as an object of concern and knowledge’ (Malkki 1996, 378) occurs in several influential essays by Liisa Malkki. The precise elucidation of the interconnectedness and overdetermination of the ‘powerful discursive fields’

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(Sigona 2014, 11) in which the ‘refugee’ is situated has long been the hallmark of her writing (1992, 1995, 1996) as well as of powerful subsequent anthropological and historical interventions, among others, by Gatrell, Gaim Kibreab, and Barbara Harrell-Bond on refugee values, behaviour, opinion, and action. Malkki argues that the emphasis on refugees as ‘object[s] of knowledge, assistance, and management’ (Malkki 1996, 377) in practices of humanitarian intervention abstracts ‘their predicaments from specific political, historical, cultural contexts’ (Malkki 1996, 378) and denies the validity of their own assessments of their condition. Malkki makes the provocative claim that the very principle of universal humanity and dignity that underwrites the policy of human rights and the practice of humanitarian intervention is responsible for creating ‘exemplary victims’ (Malkki 1996, 384; italics in original) ‘whose judgement and reason [have] been compromised’ and who need to be ‘cared for and understood despite themselves’ (Malkki 1996, 384; italics in original). Malkki argues that the transnational social imagination relies on this reduction of refugees to a ‘merely demographic presence’ (Malkki 1996, 390), whose need and helplessness make it inevitable that they are spoken for rather than speak. Therefore, for Malkki, the crucial question becomes that of ‘narrative authority, historical agency, and political memory’ (Malkki 1996, 398). Taking voice seriously in this sense—note that Malkki insists on authority not authenticity—will move humanitarian intervention beyond equally unpalatable philanthropic and clinical modes and make it possible to perceive refugeeness ‘as a matter of becoming’ (Malkki 1996, 381; italics in original) rather than an incurable and archetypal condition. Malkki also identifies a corollary to the dehistoricisation of the predicament of refugees: ‘sedentarist assumptions about attachment to place lead us to define displacement not as a fact about sociopolitical context, but rather as an inner, pathological condition of the displaced’ (Malkki 1992, 33). Thus refugees who have become ‘torn loose from their culture’ (Malkki 1992, 34) are perceived as moral aberrations or political anomalies in social orders that thrive on identity and nationality. Instead, Malkki calls for a simultaneous attention to how refugees construct, remember, and lay claim to their homelands and to how their appearance in boundaries and borderlands might challenge scholarly and public common-sense about territoriality as a moral and spiritual, even metaphysical, need. Malkki describes this new form of critical attention as new maps of attachment (Malkki 1992, 38) and, I would add, new forms of detachment.

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Narrative authority in The Other Side of Hope stems from the manner in which its narrative arc is dependent on Khaled’s desire to be reunited with his sister, Miriam; thus, what begins as the parallel trajectories of citizen and refugee converge in the effort to help Khaled fulfil his dream. While Kaurismäki toys with authenticity in that Sherwan Haji is himself a Syrian migrant to Finland, this ploy would not have sufficed without making him the protagonist of the tale and the architect of his escape from the blow life has dealt him. As I have argued, the film’s celebration of denizens is a strike against both territoriality and nationality. In other words, Kaurismäki makes the moral aberration and the political anomaly his moral centre and political utopia. Simultaneously, Khaled’s fierce loyalty to family and the strains of the music in which his memory of his past resides resist the romantic or sentimental affirmation of his exile to evoke what it means to be ‘torn loose’ from one’s culture. By situating the film within the context of Finland’s response to the asylum crisis, I have refused to consign Khaled to either the pathological or the archetypal predicament of the refugee. Simultaneously, Wikström is not a philanthropist and Khaled a grateful recipient of charity—the former offers Khaled a job, not a handout, and they betray the law with a common goal. I also wanted to avoid the ‘liberal trap of expecting the articulation of conscious anger … against the object of one’s discontent’ (Sen 2018). The characters in The Other Side of Hope do not aspire in the conventional sense because their lives are predicated upon accident, circumstance, and luck. They are thus relieved of conventional expectations precisely because of their perceived failure and haplessness, because they approach life with a shrug and faint smile. While these characters are often canny, they do not exercise agency in the manner of those negotiating and imagining options, armed with savvy and mobility and access (Sen 2018). Even the savvy that Khaled shows is always in danger of being eroded by institutions whose language he does not speak and the threat of skinheads around the corner who perennially misunderstand and destroy. Kaurismäki’s wry compassion challenges the opposition between representation and authenticity in the name, not only of justice, but of the stranger at the door whom we must bid welcome.

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Conclusion I have begun to envisage a constellation of denizen alienation to set against the unending proliferation of social scientific and legal definitions (refugee, IDP, migrant, etc.) and debates about them. It seems to me that the ever-more sophisticated and precise range of these definitions is a way to articulate all forms of displacement in (negative) relation to belonging, whereas my archaeology of nonentity does not presume belonging or its loss as either the destiny or tragedy of the subjects of the film. This methodology is what allows me to read the façades or fictions in this account as an authoritative account of what is surprising, unexpected, or revealing about the process of becoming rather than as an authentic expression of interiority. If authenticity is a requirement for voice—or silence—to register, then the displaced already have the deck stacked against them because of our assumptions about the desirability/necessity of belonging (à la Malkki). Even the 1951 Convention’s definition includes requirements to express a ‘well-founded fear.’ This need to express authentic emotion is baked into the discourse from the start. I hope, therefore, to provoke a new set of questions: how can this place be home for me and so routinely crisis-laden, depriving, and alienating for another? How might my sense of home and belonging rest on or require that others bear a relation of non-­ belonging to this same place? How might the displaced fail to belong with both cheek and impunity? How might the play of memory and forgetting serve to survive rather than be lured by trauma? How might the displaced move beyond gratitude and hope (this too, might be the subtle meaning of ‘the other side’ in the film’s title) to experience and exploit the full range of affect, emotion, and speech as well as the resources of restraint, reserve, and silence (Khaled has seen and known unimaginable suffering for which he refuses to seek the talking cure)? How might they continually inhabit the register of becoming rather than that of being? While I remain cautious about speaking on behalf of the displaced or appropriating their voice in my affirmation of exile, I imagine this chapter as a compliment to their resolve and resourcefulness and, in this way, aspire to find a way of writing that makes ‘us’ and ‘them’ companionable rather than divisive. Finally, and crucially, this is not a pessimistic tale! I find hope in the making and unmaking of dwellings in displacement because it may be a way out of the trap of belonging and help us to understand more about the possibilities for becoming in the grim modern world of nations and states.

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References Arendt, Hannah. 1976. The Origins of Totalitarianism. 1st ed. New  York: Schocken Books. Bakewell, Oliver. 2008. Research Beyond the Categories: The Importance of Policy Irrelevant Research into Forced Migration. Journal of Refugee Studies 21 (4): 432–453. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fen042. Betts, Alexander, Gilbert D.  Loescher, and James Milner. 2012. UNHCR: The Politics and Practice of Refugee Protection. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Bloch, Alice, and Giorgia Donà, eds. 2018. Forced Migration: Current Issues and Debates. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315623757. Breger, Claudia. 2015. Simple Truths, Complex Framings, and Crucial Specifications: Aki Kaurismäki’s Le Havre. MLN 130 (3): 506–527. Damon, Arwa, and Time Hulme. 2016. Denmark Adopts Controversial Law to Seize Asylum Seekers’ Valuables. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2016/01/26/ europe/denmark-­vote-­jewelry-­bill-­migrants/index.html. Accessed 1 April 2022. Gatrell, Peter. 2001. The (Extra) Ordinary First World War, 1914–1917: Perspectives on the Concept of Refugeedom. Ab Imperio 2001 (4): 29–41. https://doi.org/10.1353/imp.2001.0036. ———. 2015. The Making of the Modern Refugee. Oxford University Press. Gilmore, Kate. 2016. Opening Statement by Kate Gilmore, Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights, at the High-Level Panel Discussion on the Implementation of the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights Education and Training: Good Practices and Challenges. OHCHR. https:// www.ohchr.org/en/2016/09/opening-­statement-­kate-­gilmore-­deputy-­high-­ commissioner-­human-­rights-­high-­level-­panel. Accessed 22 April 2022. Hall, Stuart. 1987. Minimal Selves. Institute of Contemporary Arts. Harding, Jeremy. 2014. The Uninvited: Refugees at the Rich Man’s Gate. Profile Books. Kaurismäki, Aki (dir.). 2017. The Other Side of Hope. Sputnik/Oy Bufo Ab. Koehler, Robert. 2018. The Other Side of Hope. Cineaste 43 (2): 50–52. Malkki, Liisa. 1992. National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees. Cultural Anthropology 7 (1): 24–44. https://doi.org/10.1525/can.1992.7.1.02a00030. ———. 1995. Refugees and Exile: From ‘Refugee Studies’ to the National Order of Things. Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1): 495–523. https://doi. org/10.1146/annurev.an.24.100195.002431. ———. 1996. Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistoricization. In Siting Culture: The Shifting Anthropological Object, ed. Kirsten Hastrup and Karen Fog Olwig, 223–254. London: Routledge. Merikoski, Paula. 2021. At Least They are Welcome in my Home! Contentious Hospitality in Home Accommodation of Asylum Seekers in Finland. Citizenship Studies 25 (1): 90–105.

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Nayeri, Dina. 2017. The Ungrateful Refugee: ‘We Have No Debt To Repay’. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/04/dina-­nayeriungrateful-­refugee. ———. 2019. The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You. Catapult. New Oxford American Dictionary. 2015. Denizen. In New Oxford American Dictionary, 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nguyen, Vinh. 2019. Refugeetude: When Does a Refugee Stop Being a Refugee? Social Text 139 37 (2): 109–131. O’Connor, Flannery. 1977. A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Oxford English Dictionary. 2021. Denizen, n. and Adj. OED Online. http:// www.oed.com/view/Entry/49985. Sen, Shaunak. 2018. Dialogue with Filmmakers. Iihschannel: YouTube. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqi_REuxtQU. Sigona, Nando. 2014. The Politics of Refugee Voices: Representations, Narrative and Memories. In The Oxford Handbook of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, ed. Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, Katy Long, and Gil Loescher, 369–382. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfor dhb/9780199652433.013.001. Tanner, Arno. 2016. Overwhelmed by Refugee Flows, Scandinavia Tempers Its Warm Welcome. Migration Policy Institute. https://www.migrationpolicy. org/article/overwhelmed-­r efugee-­f lows-­s candinavia-­t empers-­i ts-­w arm­welcome. UNHCR. 2010. Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees. UNHCR Communications and Information Service. http://www.unhcr. org/3b66c2aa10 ———. 2023. Figures at a Glance. UNHCR The UN Refugee Agency. https:// www.unhcr.org/uk/figures-­at-­a-­glance.html United Nations General Assembly. 2016. The New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants. The United Nations General Assembly. https://www.un.org/ en/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A%2FRES%2F71%2F1. Zetter, Roger. 2018. Conceptualizing Forced Migration: Praxis, Scholarship, and Empirics. In Forced Migration: Current Issues and Debates, ed. Alice Bloch and Giorgia Donà, 19–43. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315623757-­2.

CHAPTER 10

Beyond Objectifying the Humane: Memory in Media and Political Genres Siobhan Brownlie

Introduction This chapter will be concerned with the representation of migrants and refugees in specific media and political contexts in the United Kingdom during the so-called migrant crisis around the year 2015.1 In the Global North, social attitudes towards migrants and refugees are characterised by ambivalence. Migrants and refugees are seen as both helpless victims to be pitied and helped, and as threatening people to be controlled and refused access to the country (Wilmott 2017). On the one hand, they are  At the time there was a debate over the terms ‘refugee’ and ‘migrant’, since the latter label, evoking ‘economic migrant’, could be used with the implication that deprives people fleeing war of their lawful right to claim asylum. On the ground, the situation was and is not clear, since people move for a variety of motivations (Schuster 2016, 301), and it could be considered that those fleeing extreme poverty should be included in the category of asylum seekers (Whitham 2017). 1

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welcomed in a spirit of human generosity, foregrounding the hospitality of human rights conventions. On the other hand, they are feared or disliked as ‘the other’ or even criminal, and are subject to restrictive sovereign authority. Faced with the overwhelming number of migrants, about 1.3 million, coming to Europe in 2015, there was a noticeable hardening of borders in concrete actions such as building barriers on borders. Governments’ ‘biopolitical’ drive to manage the population transformed at times into the ‘necropolitical’ that involves control or neglect imposing suffering (Davies et al. 2017). Yet, there was also a groundswell of citizens’ solidarity with refugees, evidenced in the UK by the expansion of movements such as ‘City of Sanctuary’. Papastergiadis (2012, 7) refers to the ambient ambivalence towards migrants in terms of dilemmas and social tensions that involve competing claims on identity. He finds that cultural products articulate these tensions, holding together conflicting viewpoints. One would expect that negative portrayals of migrants and refugees as threats to identity and well-being would involve stereotypes and othering through demonising the other and positing ‘us’ as opposed to ‘them’ (Holliday 2011, 69). Less expected is that similar processes of objectification and abstraction would be at work in positive portrayals of migrants and refugees. In this chapter, I examine what I am calling objectification and de-objectification of the humane approach towards migrants and refugees in cultural production. What is ‘humane’ in terms of actions and depictions cannot be determined in an absolute sense; here, my reference is to positive humanised depictions, humanitarian discourse and a compassionate welcoming approach to refugees as well as support of international aid. Two extended cultural products are examined. The first is the BBC/KEO television documentary Exodus—Our Journey to Europe (2016) which recounts the journeys of a group of refugees and migrants to Europe in 2015, and the second is a series of parliamentary debates about the issue of Syrian refugees that took place in the British parliament between 2013 and 2017. Items from a medial genre and a political genre were chosen for study because these genres have a significant impact on social thinking and policy. The contrasting items allow reflection on similarities and differences in generic functioning. My particular focus is on Exodus as a memory artefact that captures the historic events of 2015 for posterity, and on the extensive and skilful use of references to the past by MPs in parliamentary debates at this time of crisis for foreign affairs and immigration policy. I argue that it is the parameters of the specific genres involved, the television documentary and

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the parliamentary debate, that help explain the objectifying of representation, but that, because genres are never fixed and closed (Frow 2015), they also allow ‘lines of flight’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1980), that is, moments of escape from generic characteristics and thus, in these cases, potential for de-objectifying the humane. In other words, although the Global North’s gaze upon refugees remains voyeuristic and objectifying in general, in the cultural products studied there are moments of non-­conformity to the norm. In what follows, I outline the theoretical framework for this study before proceeding to a description of the data sets and their analysis.

Genre, Objectification and Memory In the next section which features the data analysis, I will demonstrate how documentary and parliamentary discourse related to migrants includes accounts or mentions of the memory of recent and long past events that illustrate objectification as well as moments of de-­objectification. It is genre that presents constraints that provide conditions for objectification. For Frow (2015), genre refers to kinds of speech, writing, images and organised sound, encompassing a broad range of forms of talk and text. A genre is linked to a situation type. It has a set of material and formal features, a thematic structure drawing on particular topics, a situation of address (speaking positions), a structure of implication invoking background knowledge, and a rhetorical function with pragmatic effects. It is interesting to note that for both the genres that concern us, the television documentary and the parliamentary debate, persuasion is a prominent rhetorical function, even though there may be an attempt to hide this by the appearance of neutrality. The term ‘rhetoric’ harks back to the ancient classical tradition of public speaking that has greatly shaped practices of British politics, notably the expectation that those who hold office should be required to justify their views in oral communication and the belief in the need for debate that involves dissenting opinions (Finlayson 2014, 431). In his analysis of the genre of documentary, Nichols (2010, 67) writes about the documentary having a voice: it is not only a representation of the historical world, but a version of how the filmmaker wants to speak about that world. He writes: ‘Just like the orator or public speaker who uses his entire body to give voice to a particular perspective, documentaries speak with all the [filmic] means at their disposal’ (ibid.). The goal of both the parliamentary debater and the documentary maker is to persuade their audience of a point of view.

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In the Aristotelian tradition, as well as matters of style (elocutio) and of delivery (actio) alluded to above, in order to be credible and convincing speakers avail themselves of the rhetorical appeals to logos, ethos and pathos. Logos is an appeal to reason and involves the demonstration of logic through using rational argument, general principles, empirical evidence, statistics or examples. Ethos is an appeal to the authority or character of the speaker and involves an explicit or implicit reference to qualities of the speaker. Pathos is an appeal to the emotions of the audience; it is about expressing feeling and identifying shared emotions, and can include appeals to compassion (Martin 2014, 55–64). Perelman (1979, 14, 18) considers that in aiming to persuade, argumentation must be adapted to the audience, and hence must be based on beliefs and values accepted by the audience. Another common feature that the two genres that are considered here share is the recounting of or evoking of narratives. Narrative form with its particular relational and temporal structure holds a strong attraction in human communication. Somers and Gibson (1993) distinguish personal narratives (stories individuals tell themselves) that influence and are influenced by public narratives (shared socially circulating narratives). Beyond these common features, there are of course specific parameters of the genres of parliamentary debates and television documentaries. The purpose of parliamentary debates in democracies is for MPs to discuss and air differing opinions on government policy, proposed new laws and topical issues. Debates are adversarial and deliberative where arguments for and against a normative proposition for action are presented. Practical argumentation is undertaken which consists of presenting premises followed by a claim for action (Fairclough and Fairclough 2012). There are formal set procedures: speakers, for example, have a limited time to speak, a maximum of five minutes or less in the British House of Commons; and noticeable traditions include specific usages of language (House of Commons 2010). As for television documentaries, they often focus on ongoing issues of the day that involve underlying social values, and aim to increase understanding of complex matters and orient public opinion. Various filming techniques are employed in different modes of documentary, notably expository (emphasising the impression of objectivity through voiceover commentary) and participatory (the filmmaker interacts with social actors, typically through interviews) (Nichols 2010, 169, 172–179). Gray (2013, 85) affirms, further, that television producers

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insist that the basis of ‘good television’ is a combination of striking visuals, strong narrative and compelling characters. Frow (2015, 10) argues that genre conventions are not simply stylistic devices, but rather they are a powerful set of conventional and organised forces. Genres are fundamental, since no symbolically organised action takes place other than through generic codes that create effects of reality and truth. However, the relationship between genre and textual (in a broad sense) event is far from deterministic, since texts may involve more than one genre, and most importantly they are performances that may subvert and even transform the genre. Thus, for example, a textual performance may both enact and resist the generic constraint towards objectification. Objectifying a human means lowering a person, a being with humanity, to the status of an object.2 Objectification is closely linked to inequality and hierarchies of power, since it consists of a relation between the powerful objectifier and the powerless objectified (Halwani 2010). As objects, a group of people is dehumanised, anonymised and abstracted through being deprived discursively of their agency and specific context of political, material and historical conditions. The notions of inequality and denial of a complex identity are inherent in othering of the foreigner. Othering involves defining a simplistic and often inferior image of ‘them’ that supports an idealised image of ‘us’ or the Self. Even the liberal intention to help the other inadvertently positions the Other as deficient, and naïve multiculturalism reproduces the same schema of superficial stereotypes, albeit celebratory: the reduced Other is commodified, packaged as an object that can be collected, bought and sold (Holliday 2011). Through narrative and visual forms, particularly noticeable in filmic genres, the foreign Other can become a commodified object of voyeurism, appealing to the audience’s desire to discover remote realities that are normally hidden from view (Gonzaga 2017, 118). With respect to refugees, the objectifying of reality partakes of the dichotomous menace/pity imaginaries that infuse refugeedom from the perspective of the Global North (Cox et al. 2020) and that are expressed in the contrasting standard discourses of restrictive bordering and humanitarian generosity. Holliday (2011) links othering to a long-standing Western discourse of Orientalism. The 2  Our typical conception of the inferiority of objects as compared with humans is currently being challenged by post-humanist thought where objects are rehabilitated as having agency (Bennett 2009).

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orientalist and colonial mind-set is thus an active memorial force that is expressed in attitudes and reactions towards migrants today (Mayblin and Turner 2021). This mind-set that objectifies the other from the Global South is part of collective memory (Halbwachs (1925) 1975), the shared and perpetuated knowledge of past events and figures of a particular group as well as traditions and discourses. Different genres, in our case television documentary and parliamentary debate, provide both possibilities and constraints for memorial expression. Personal memory accounts play an important role in documentaries, since first-person testimonies are particularly appealing to viewers (Gray 2013, 85), and they are also surprisingly frequent in parliamentary debates. An important feature of both personal memory and memory accounts is their malleability: selectivity may involve moulding accounts for specific circumstances and audiences (Olick and Robbins 1998). What is generally happening here is that personal memory is made public; it traverses scales and is transformed in this process of interscalarity in accordance with the new generic context (Keightley and Pickering 2013). Whether reviewing long-distant events or capturing recent events and issues, a television documentary is a memory artefact. It is a mass-­ media item that engages the senses and emotions and thus has a particular experiential force. A vicarious experience, obtained from viewing an experientially rich mass-media production may give a person, indeed potentially a large number of people, a memory that is almost as if they had lived through the events themselves. Landsberg (2004) calls this ‘prosthetic memory’. In the parliamentary context, as well as personal memory accounts, collective memory plays an important role. References to past historical events and people are prevalent in debates, notably past parliamentary figures and events in the nation’s history. The feature of malleability mentioned above also operates on the collective level. In a national political context, collective memory may be deployed to bolster positive group identity through a somewhat selective view of the past, a ‘myth’ that tends to glorify the nation (Bell 2003). As we will see in the parliamentary debates about the Syrian refugees, memory of past events is also frequently used analogically by policy-makers through reflecting on past similar cases, particularly in the area of international relations, for the purpose of making decisions in the present case (Khong 1992). Let us now proceed to the data analysis while keeping in mind the above theoretical concerns.

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Objectifying and De-objectifying the Humane The documentary Exodus—Our Journey to Europe (BBC/KEO 2016) and parliamentary debates on the matter of Syrian refugees (2013–2017) comprise two kinds of reaction in Britain to the so-called migrant/refugee crisis in Europe that peaked in 2015. In the following analysis, I focus on displays and uses of memory in Exodus and the parliamentary debates that represent a humane attitude towards the refugee crisis and I discuss them in the light of (de-)objectification. Exodus—Our Journey to Europe Exodus—Our Journey to Europe was produced by the company KEO Films and broadcast by BBC2 in 2016. The documentary is currently available via Vimeo (BBC/KEO 2016). Comprising three hour-long parts, the documentary constitutes a record of the turbulent time in 2015 when a huge number of refugees crossed into Europe. The exceptional increase of refugees coming to Europe at this time was due to an influx of Syrians fleeing the civil war in their country who joined the existing groups of refugees and migrants coming from other parts of the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa. The title Exodus evokes the biblical reference to the Israelites’ delivery from slavery in Egypt through the hand of God, and alerts to the historic scale of the migration to Europe, as well as to the idea of the journey to a promised land. A noticeable feature of Exodus—Our Journey to Europe is that it interweaves the stories of particular participants. Across the three episodes of the documentary, audiences follow the desperate travels to Europe of Hassan, a teacher and opponent of the Syrian regime from Damascus; Ahmad who has left his wife and two children behind in a Syrian village; Isra’a, an 11-year-old girl, her father Tarek and their family who have fled from the destruction in Aleppo, Syria; Ali and his four sisters escaping from a dangerous life in Kabul, Afghanistan; Sadiq also from Afghanistan who dreams of living in Finland; and Alaigie, the sole hope of his impoverished family in the Gambia, West Africa. In the UK, there is a long history of negative discourse about immigrants and refugees in the press that dates back to the late nineteenth century when newspapers became mass market organs, and that relates to discourses of empire. It was at that time that an influx of Jewish refugees arrived in Britain, fleeing violent persecution in Poland and Russia. The Pall Mall Gazette described these arrivals as a ‘pest and menace’, and the

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Evening News campaigned against this ‘foreign flood’ (Winder 2005, 253). Despite modern race relations, legislation and awareness, there is still an underlying bias against certain types of migrant in the press with targets shifting in recent years to Eastern European immigrants and Muslims. As well as text, images play an important role. In a study of British broadsheet newspaper images of Syrian refugees in 2015, Wilmott (2017) finds an emphasis on securitisation (police, border controls), men presented as potential threats, and lack of personalisation with large anonymous groups of refugees. Although public television is required to provide fair and balanced reports, often the common currency of newspaper rhetoric is adopted, and the voices of refugees themselves are neglected (Wright 2014, 464). In the light of this situation, the aim of Exodus—Our Journey to Europe was expressed as follows by the documentary’s producer at KEO Films, Will Anderson, in an interview with Marie Gillespie (2016): ‘what we wanted to do was to humanize the phenomenon, and to try and go behind those headlines a bit, and find a way to tell the real human stories of the people who were making these journeys’. Clearly, Anderson wanted to demarcate his documentary from the depiction of asylum seekers and refugees in the media described above. Various filmic modes and techniques were used in making the documentary to construct the memory accounts of the migrant travellers in such a way that these participants were given a voice and with the aim of providing a humanising portrayal. An omniscient voiceover was used very sparingly, only as a quick introduction at the start of each episode, announcing that the story of the migrant crisis would be told by the migrants themselves. KEO used a strikingly innovative participatory technique (Nichols 2010, 179) whereby the migrant participants were given camera phones to record their journey whenever they could and particularly in circumstances where a KEO cameraman could not be present, thus creating their own personal memory records. The filming is hand-held; the image swerves wildly at times and is sometimes blurred and low-angle (showing legs and torsos) in circumstances where the camera had to be hidden. Thus, Hassan provided footage of meetings with smugglers as well as footage of an attempted crossing by dinghy from Izmir in Turkey to the Greek Islands; Hassan and Ahmad filmed being inside lorries where they were stowed away in their attempt to get to the UK; and Alaigie filmed the treacherous crossing of the desert from Agadez, Niger, to Tripoli, Libya. This self-filming technique appeals to the rhetorical element of ethos, credibility of the source, and implies a

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similarity and equality between video maker and spectator (Bennett 2018, 23). Another important technique for gathering the story was filming by a KEO cameraman of (walking) conversations with participants on site. At the beginning of episode 1, bright 11-year-old Isra’a from Aleppo, Syria, shows the cameraman around the streets in Izmir where her father has set up a stall selling cigarettes: she points out the coffee shops and restaurants, the illegal vendors of rubber rings and life jackets, and a seller of chargers and waterproof bags for mobile phones. Thus, the film constructs an intimate memory record of what it was like to be a displaced person in Izmir preparing to cross the sea to Greece. Tracking the participant almost gives a feeling to the viewer of talking to the participant themselves. A further type of filming involving participants was interrotron interviews that were undertaken after the journey to the final destination was complete. This filming technique allows the interviewee, who is alone on-screen, to look directly at the camera, which thus enhances a sense of intimacy (Bennett 2018, 29). The participants provide memories of their journey to and in Europe and also of life before the journey. Quite often, they speak in the present tense, or mix past and present, indicating the vividness of the memory for them. Participants express their feelings and opinions about events, and are thus presented as reflective individuals. The filmmaker frequently used extracts from these interviews as voiceover for the self-­filming by camera phone: in the clandestine circumstances of self-filming, commentary was often limited to a few whispers, and thus narrative was provided by the subsequent studio interview recordings. Again, the participatory documentary ideology is reinforced. The filmmaker chose camera techniques that bring peoples’ faces powerfully onto the screen. There are many close-ups of participants, which show large brown eyes looking into the camera, and some extreme close-­ ups of profiles. Ahmad is shown, for example, with an extreme close-up looking from Calais port towards the UK.  Faces show emotion, often thoughtfulness and patience, sometimes a smile. On the Greek island of Samos, a very large crowd is shown in a long shot from a great distance, and then successive shots zoom in to the point of being able to show faces of people in the crowd. In this way, the dehumanised anonymity of the typical refugee crowd depicted in media photos (Wilmott 2017) is undermined. The content of the documentary traces the individual stories of the small number of participants and their families in detail across time and geography, showing complex and rounded characters who struggle with

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difficult circumstances as they make the decision to leave their country and then experience many trials on the journey. The intimate stories provide an understanding of the participants’ motivations and experiences for the documentary viewers. In sum, the documentary maker has made choices in terms of content and visual and participatory filming techniques among the possibilities provided by the documentary genre that have meaning-­ making implications (Frow 2015): together they combat media dehumanisation. Certainly, the reception of the documentary by the general public (as evidenced by an Open University discussion board) and by reviewers from different sides of the political spectrum in the main bears out achievement of the documentary producer’s ambition to provide greater understanding. Daily Telegraph reviewer O’Donovan (2016) writes: ‘Exodus—Our Journey to Europe revealed the terrifying reality of being a refugee’, and Cooke (2016, 51) in the New Statesman says that the documentary was ‘a powerful bit of storytelling that made mere statistics [become] flesh and blood’. Some comments indicate that it was not just a matter of gaining increased cognitive understanding, but the audience member had the sense of sharing experiences and emotions. Cooke writes: ‘Braced at first for disaster, I came to share their willed optimism’ (Cooke 2016). Such comments indicate that the vicarious experience may have provided some viewers with a shared prosthetic memory (Landsberg 2004) of the participants’ journeys. This memory can lead to greater compassion. Given the above discussion, it may seem counterintuitive that this personalised documentary with its humane perspective could be considered to be objectifying. The minority reaction of one of the Open University discussants will serve to open this topic. He seems to accuse the programme of manipulation: ‘A typical BBC over the top PC view of refugees. Cameras were only given to the more civil educated English-speaking ones. Designed to be heart-wrenching, full of sob stories and making use of families to emphasise things’ (Roy). The mention of the words ‘typical BBC’ alerts us to the shaping of institutional forces and generic norms. The documentary was produced by KEO, an independent film company, operating in the commercial world of contracts and evaluations. In this context, the documentary genre is particularly geared towards producing a result that appeals to the commissioner and to the audience, and that will

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win kudos and awards.3 The public service programming of the BBC generally has a ‘do-good’ agenda, and the question of the refugees was not only very topical at the time, but also is an area of ‘exotic’ human drama that appeals to the audience’s curiosity and voyeurism. In Exodus, the audience is provided with the view of normally private hidden realities. The self-filming of the participants, in particular, gives a rare insight into experiences such as meetings with smugglers and stowing away in lorries that are normally never witnessed. This raises an ethical issue, since by filming certain scenes clandestinely, the participants were putting themselves at risk. Anishchenkova (2018) points out that documentaries have an inherent exploitative potential, and that the careers of some documentary makers have been built on others’ misfortunes. This potential for harm and manipulation becomes more acute with refugees who are a very vulnerable group. One wonders whether the filmmakers of Exodus were willing to put the refugee participants in danger for the sake of getting footage that enhanced the sensationalism of the documentary and that satisfied the voyeuristic pleasure of the audience. In his study of ‘slum voyeurism’ in cities of the Global South, Gonzaga (2017, 118) affirms that the filmic appeal to voyeurism presents an overload of shocking visual depictions of the environment alongside stereotypical representations. In Exodus, it is the up-closeness to people depicted that may have shock value in the scenes of squalor and misery such as the make-shift camp at the Serbo-Croatian border and the ‘jungle’ at Calais, and in the scenes of inhumanly crowded spaces such as the dinghy that almost capsizes and the four-wheel drive crossing the African desert. Visual stereotypes in the documentary reproduce common media depictions of crowds of refugees and of women. In establishing shots, the cameraman lingers on ‘anonymous’ people sitting, standing, looking and waiting. The camera focuses particularly on mothers with hijabs holding children, showing faces of great beauty; the shots are accompanied by plaintive music. Pulling on the heart-strings, this accords with the gender-based motif of representation of female and child refugees as helpless victims (Wilmott 2017), which is underlined perhaps by the fact that all the principal refugee video makers for the documentary are men. The above depictions are reinforced by the insertion of archival news broadcast footage of similar scenes. Even with regard to the footage originally filmed 3  Exodus—Our Journey to Europe won four awards including the British Academy Television Award for Best Factual Series (2017).

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by the refugees, the voyeuristic audience tends to apprehend film scenes and participants as the Other, as cognitive objects and commodified facts (Holliday 2011), since it is encouraged to do so by the edited documentary packaging. Various aspects of generic norms indeed lead to objectification. In Exodus, the criteria of ‘good television’ have certainly been prioritised: striking visuals, compelling characters, first-hand testimonies and strong narrative (Gray 2013, 85). The ‘strong narratives’ recounted comprise stock storylines that appeal to sentimental publics through the rhetorical element of pathos: dramatic ‘sob stories’ (Roy, Open University) of hardship and struggle, dreams of a better future, and in most cases the perspective of positive outcomes. By the time the documentary ends, the most successful of the participants are Hassan and Ahmad. They have entered the UK by stowing away on a truck (Ahmad) and flying with a fake passport (Hassan). Since the viewer has followed Ahmad and Hassan’s hardships throughout three episodes, the two young men have become familiar ‘heroes’, and the audience has been prepared to support an outcome of achieving hard fought for goals, the familiar and powerful narrative (Somers and Gibson 1993) of the happy end. Hassan and Ahmad are granted asylum. It does not seem to be a coincidence that the only fully successful outcome by the end of the documentary has been attained by the two participants who came to the UK.  The positive and happy end stories of the intelligent and charming Hassan and Ahmad (the ‘more civil educated English-speaking ones’, Roy, Open University) will remain in the memories of viewers. This display of successful heroic refugees and of Britain in a positive light intimates an ideological bias of the documentary maker and/or institutional commissioner. By turning the refugees’ stories into an object for their own use, the documentary presents the filmmaker’s perspectives on the historical world (Nichols 2010, 67). In accordance with its genre, this documentary gives the impression that the realities being discovered are authentic when they are actually manufactured into a coherent assemblage for easy consumption. The filmmaker has imposed meaning on realities that he is observing, as does the complicit audience with their domineering gaze. The ‘authentic’ footage filmed by the migrants themselves is noticeably edited and framed by the documentary maker’s interventions. Hassan’s footage of crossing in a dinghy from Turkey to the Greek islands, for example, is book-ended with explanatory studio interviews/voiceover, trimmed, and inserted with subtitles, a black screen for suspense and music. A private memory captured

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by self-filmed footage traverses scalarity (Keightley and Pickering 2013) to be shaped into a public memory product appropriate for consumption by a British audience through filmic, musical, narrative and linguistic codes that are familiar to them. Nevertheless, there are definitely many instances of de-objectifying scattered fleetingly throughout the documentary that take place in the cracks of the organised ensemble. They consist of looks, movements, words, voices and inter-relations of the migrants that display a raw reality and affect. There are also insights into complex ambivalent subjectivities as from one moment to the next the migrant participants are seen to be both passive victims at the mercy of situations and events, and agentic actors who struggle to achieve their objectives. The memory record is not abstracted, since it is anchored in precise material, political and historical conditions, and othering is combated through empathic links created between viewer and viewed. Furthermore, the swerving and blurring of hand-held footage destabilise the mastery of the filmmaker (Bennett 2018, 24). It is as if the moments described here refuse to be hemmed in by generic norms, and escape reductive domination by both documentary maker and viewer. In sum, there is a play between objectification and de-­ objectification in the telling of these refugee stories. Parliamentary Debates on Syrian Refugees Let us see whether this same play of (de-)objectification applies to a very different genre, parliamentary debates, that also engaged in depth with the ‘refugee crisis’. The data collected for this second study consists of passages containing memory references (references to the past) from British parliamentary debates4 on the topic of refugees that took place between April 2013 and March 2017, a period that covers the beginnings up till the aftermath of the crisis. Transcripts of parliamentary debates are available in the Hansard Online archive since 2010, and the broadcast versions are also available online (parliamentlive.tv). During the time period studied, there were 53 debates brought up by the search term ‘refugee’ that contained memory references. The debates concern primarily the huge number of refugees in Syria’s neighbouring countries (Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq and Turkey) who had fled the war in Syria, as well as the 4  This chapter contains parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0.

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issue of the unprecedented number of refugees and migrants crossing the Mediterranean into Europe. The debates reveal a series of developments and about-turns in government policy which moved from only providing financial humanitarian assistance to in-region refugee camps to finally agreeing to resettle 20,000 Syrian refugees in Britain from the camps over a five-year period as well as 350 unaccompanied children already in the EU. The Houses of Parliament (House of Commons and House of Lords) are known for their robust debating style: the debates are adversarial, since they are linked to ideologies and positions of opposing political parties that stem from strong traditions. In the UK political context, the two main parties are the Conservative and Labour parties. At the time of the 2015 ‘refugee crisis’, the Conservatives were in power with David Cameron as prime minister. In the parliamentary tradition, the opposition often takes a different stance on issues from the government, and in the debates under study here, this was exacerbated by the fact that conservative right-wing politics tends to take a harder line on immigration than the left. Thus, the debates were heated, and the overall tenor was a situation of the opposition (Labour and also noticeably the Scottish National Party) criticising the government for a lack of humanity and generosity in terms of accepting Syrian refugees into the country (generosity with regard to overseas aid was not disputed). Their goading as well as other factors such as international pressure and public opinion led to the change of policy on the government’s part noted above. Political debates are primarily a matter of practical argumentation, that is, persuasive argumentation about what to do in response to practical problems. The structure of practical reasoning comprises a set of premises and a conclusion (supported by the premises) which is a claim for action (Fairclough and Fairclough 2012). Memory references are used as a normative rhetorical practice in the genre of parliamentary debates.5 They act as premises indicating values, discursively constituted situations of the past or historical analogies. The most frequent reference to the past in the parliamentary debates concerns Britain’s ‘proud tradition’ (62 instances). Linguistic variants of the phrase include ‘proud record’, ‘proud history’, ‘distinguished record’, ‘long history’, ‘honourable tradition’ and ‘very good record’. In terms of what is being referred to, there are also variants. The tradition can be stated quite vaguely as a matter of values and 5

 Not all the types of memory references in the debates are discussed in this chapter.

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attitudes. More concretely, the tradition is that of international humanitarian aid, and most frequently a tradition of accepting refugees into Britain from various parts of the world afflicted by conflict and persecution. There appears to be cross-party consensus on the existence of this positive tradition (Kushner 2006, 19), although there are significant nuances with Conservative politicians displaying their reluctance by referring to refugees who have ‘genuine needs’. The premise of ‘proud tradition’ is used to support a call for action. The following extract shows, like many others, the appeal to pathos, of claims based on tradition. Lord Bach is referring to the early Syrian Vulnerable Persons Relocation Scheme and calling for more generous action: We believe that the Government are to some extent selling our country’s humanitarian tradition and spirit of generosity short by not taking in more Syrian refugees. The figure of 187 is disgracefully small. (Lord Bach, Lords Grand Committee, 18 June 2015)6

Values underlying the reference to a ‘proud tradition’ are sometimes made explicit. ‘Generosity’ is mentioned by Lord Bach above. As an explicit premise, Britain’s ‘history’ of mercy, tolerance and showing humanity to persecuted minorities as ethical behaviour is cited as a reason for showing those qualities in the Syrian refugee crisis. The striking issue with respect to the ‘proud tradition’ is that it can equally be used as a premise to support opposite claims. As well as being used to support the claim that the government is not doing enough with regard to the refugee crisis, it can be used to support the claim that the government’s actions are fully in line with the ‘proud tradition’. Overall, it is almost as if there is a competition among politicians of opposing parties and views to monopolise the ‘tradition’ reference, which supports Perelman’s (1979, 18) stipulation that effective argumentation must be based on strong widely accepted beliefs of the audience. MPs cite Britain’s welcoming of various groups of refugees in the past as evidence of the ‘proud tradition’. These memory references operate by historical analogy where the memory reference is compared with the present case, and supports a call for action. Analogical reasoning is common in the pragmatic world of politics where practical examples are used to address specific issues (Martin 2014, 78), and such references may also 6

 See transcription key at the end of this chapter.

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have an aesthetic appeal (elocutio). With 28 references, the most commonly mentioned group of past refugees is the 1938–1940 Kindertransport whereby 10,000 Jewish children were brought to safety in Britain. Reinisch (2015) and Kushner (2018) note that Kindertransport has become a much-cited, triumphalist and self-congratulatory beacon in British national memory that elides the more complex historical details.7 In the following extract that is part of the debates on the issue of Britain taking in unaccompanied refugee minors from Europe, the analogy is highlighted by the performative feature (actio) of word stress: The winter is coming, and conditions are dire in northern France. Could we not have a special humanitarian effort this year? Kindertransport does not belong to yesterday alone. It could belong to today (.) and we could bring over some 380 children who are eligible to come to the UK in a matter of weeks. Will the Minister please take that to heart? (Lord Roberts of Llandudno, Lords, 6 September 2016)

The earliest group of refugees in Britain that is alluded to in debates is the Protestant Huguenots who came from France in the seventeenth century fleeing religious persecution. Other groups of past refugees that have come to Britain and that are regularly mentioned are Bosnians and Kosovars in the 1990s, Vietnamese refugees in the 1980s and East African Indians coming from Uganda and Kenya in the 1970s. Also mentioned are Russians fleeing the Tsar, Belgians at the time of WWI, German Jewish refugees during the 1930s, Poles and East Europeans after WWII, Hungarians following the 1956 revolution, Cypriots after the Turkish invasion, Sierra Leoneans fleeing civil war, and Rwandans after the genocide. Among these, it is only the Balkans case (Bosnians and Kosovars) that provides a comparative site for present disagreement about Syrian refugees in that it displays the tug between in-region aid and resettlement in the UK. Otherwise, the quantity of people welcomed from these refugee groups in the past is seen by the parliamentarians who refer to it as positive, and serves as a premise to support the call to increase the number 7  The Kindertransport was not an entirely positive scheme, since children suffered from being separated from their parents, foster parents did not always treat them well, some siblings were separated, some children were robbed of their Jewish heritage by being fostered with Christian families, and not all were angels and made a ‘contribution’ to Britain (CraigNorton 2018).

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of Syrian refugees being accepted. In the following extract, David Lammy (Labour) is reacting to the Prime Minister’s announcement that 20,000 refugees will be taken over the term of the parliament: I welcome what the Prime Minister has said today, but he will (.) know that when Turkey invaded Cyprus, we took 50,000 Cypriots. During Idi Amin’s reign in Uganda, we took 30,000 Asian Ugandans. And we took more than 20,000 Vietnamese boat people in a short ((upward arm movement)) space of time. Why has he limited his help for Syrians to 4,000 a year? (David Lammy, Commons, 7 September 2015)

The positive analogy with previous refugee groups works by depicting a past morally sound action (‘the right thing to do’, Harriet Harman, 7 September 2015) with a positive and useful outcome that is proposed as a source of emulation for the present. Thus, the case for taking in refugees is argued on moral and utilitarian grounds. There are indeed a large number of mentions (23) of the positive contribution that refugee individuals and communities have made to Britain, drawing on a common socially circulating narrative (Kushner 2006). Most of the references to the British past in relation to refugees have a positive aura. However, there are a few cases where it is pointed out that the UK ‘tradition’ is not entirely worthy of pride. In particular, reference is made to failings in the way that Jewish refugees were treated around the time of World War II. The criticisms, which are mentioned so that more praise-worthy actions might be undertaken in the present refugee crisis, signal that the ‘proud tradition’ is a construction that has side-lined less laudable events, and is part of a simplified and selective ‘national governing myth’ (Bell 2003).8 The references to the past discussed above are mainly used by Opposition parliamentarians with the aim of supporting the humane action of resettling (more) Syrian refugees in the country. However, shaped by constraints and norms of the genre of the parliamentary debate, the references objectify in various ways. The vague allusions to the ‘proud tradition’ are bereft of historical and contextual details, and often seem empty and superficial, a rhetorical ploy. The fact that ‘the proud tradition’ can be 8  As part of this myth, the extent of Britain’s generosity in relation to refugees can be questioned. Certainly, with regard to Syrian refugees, Britain was much less welcoming than Germany which took in 1.1 million asylum seekers in 2015 of which a large proportion were Syrians.

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used by either side of the debate underlines this. The references to past refugee groups as analogies are also cited with no detail, eliding complex historical situations. Lists of past refugee groups are cited for increased impact, and the generic constraint of short interventions by parliamentarians prevents elaboration. For the rhetorical purpose of logos, mention is made of statistics, the number of each group that was taken in, rather than relating accounts of real people. The self-promoting focus on British values and Britishness strengthens the sense of othering, ‘us’ and ‘them’. In the jousting of parliamentary rhetoric, memory references are used instrumentally, and past and present refugees seem to serve as objects in scoring political points. There are, however, moments of de-objectifying within the debates and these generally occur when a more personalised approach is adopted. Surprisingly frequent in the debates is the number of parliamentarians’ self-references (22 instances) whereby a personal or family memory is brought into the public arena, traversing scales (Keightley and Pickering 2013). The purpose of these mentions and stories is still persuasive force, since ethos (the speaker’s qualities), identity and personal experience can be taken as criteria for authority to speak about an issue, but they also have a de-objectifying effect through personalisation and emotivity. With regard to identity and family heritage, there are a few cases where the parliamentarian himself was a refugee, for example Lord Dubs was a child from the Kindertransport, and Paul Uppal is an East African Sikh. More often, stories are told of the parliamentarian’s parents, grandparents or more distant forebears who were refugees or immigrants. As well as supporting credibility, these references are used to establish the parliamentarian’s stance (which is generally empathic towards refugees). As for personal experience, parliamentarians recount experiences of being in the Balkans as military or in other roles during the wars of the 1990s, of visiting refugee or IDP camps during past conflicts, and of working on refugee issues in the past in the UK. Memory of past personal experience may act as an analogical premise. Perhaps the most well-known example is that of Lord Dubs who has used the premise of his positive personal experience as a Kindertransport child to support calls for action regarding refugees. Some accounts of personal memory and mediated family memory may conflate different histories, and may also reproduce certain standard discourses such as that of the grateful refugee who has contributed to society. But there are also instances of more unusual anecdotes and points of view. Here, for example, are words from Lord Griffiths:

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I remember how many years I spent on the north coast of Haiti, for example, working with communities that I am afraid […] had no alternative resources with which to make another life. They had absolutely nothing, and the despair that I faced in hearing them argue their need to take a boat that would cross the sea to Florida was something that I shall never forget. How many families have I supported after the breadwinner left? How many families have I seen emaciated by hunger when there was nothing they could turn to in order to alleviate that hunger? I have come to understand ­economic migration in terms other than the denigratory way in which it is referred to as an alternative to the seeking of asylum and therefore a less important objective. (Lords, 9 July 2015)

Personalised evocations involve individual experiences and cases with concrete contextual detail, rather than impersonal or anonymous masses. But regardless of the precise semantic content of the interventions, what stands out as having a de-objectifying function is their affective force. The hard-­ headed politician fleetingly becomes vulnerable through personal revelation, and pathos brings an unfathomable personal dimension that is only evident in the actual performance of the words and not in words on paper. The memory references go beyond mere instrumental rhetorical use, as they appear to be sincere and heart-felt, creating links of empathy with the current refugees, and influencing the politician’s thought processes (Khong 1992). Apart from personal memory, there are instances where appraisals of national and transnational memory have a de-objectifying result. Complex historical circumstances are recognised that involve national self-blame in the form of miscalculation of foreign policy initiatives. In particular, MPs blame Britain and more generally the West as having contributed to the situation in the Middle East which gave rise to the current problems in the region, notably through past military action in Iraq and Libya. This self-­ blame is used as a moral premise relating to the past that supports the argument to welcome Syrian refugees. It breaks down the sense of ahistorical victims and othering, since it displays historical causal acts and a moral entwinement of ‘us’ and ‘them’.

Discussion and Concluding Remarks Comparing these two case studies that feature memorial accounts in relation to refugees allows insights into the workings of genre and objectification. The conventional and organised forces of genre have an important role in each case, allowing and restricting meaning (Frow 2015, 10). The

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genre of the documentary calls for an overall unified point of view, that of the filmmaker and/or institutional commissioner. In the case of Exodus— Our Journey to Europe, this is a humanising and welcoming perspective with regard to refugees. In contrast, the genre of the parliamentary debate is adversarial: speakers present a range of opinions and notably opinions that support or oppose government policy. In the case of the debates studied, opinions oscillate heatedly between non-welcoming and welcoming approaches with regard to the Syrian refugees. Hence, the different genres shape thematic structure (Frow 2015). Standard objectifying discourses work differently in accordance with this structure: whereas the documentary clearly partakes of humanitarian discourse with regard to refugees, the parliamentary debates reflect conflicting imaginaries of menace/pity (our focus being on the latter in this chapter). The genre of the parliamentary debate is also very prone to explicit nationalistic discourse that can relate to othering, whereas this remains implicit in the documentary. The studies reveal that both refugees and refugees’ stories are (de-) objectified in the data, and that this operates in different ways in the two genres. The sub-genre of the documentary is participative (Nichols 2010) in an innovative way, since refugees were given camera phones and produced footage themselves, creating memorial artefacts. This unusual formal feature of self-filming challenges the omniscient speaking position of the documentary. Thus, refugees have a powerful voice in the documentary that certainly has a de-objectifying force. Moments of authenticity as well as complexity of subjectivity shine through via the participants’ fleeting looks, movements, voices, words and inter-relationships. However, the footage is not ‘raw’, as it is shaped by the filmmaker in accordance with generic norms. The genre of the television documentary encourages well-­ made, somewhat simplistic stories for ready consumption that both attract and orient the audience. Refugees and their memories become objects of voyeurism through the display of shocking visual details and stereotypes; sentimental stock storylines are used; and the documentary maker has manipulated this cultural product for the purposes of ideologised commodification, drawing on the standard humanitarian discourse of the Global North. The parliamentary debates are more clearly objectifying than the documentary, since this genre calls for short interventions where references to the past and present are used superficially and instrumentally to make a political point. Mentions are made of history with no contextual details, including lists and statistics regarding refugee groups, and the emphasis

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on the construction of Britishness and British collective memory and ‘values’ has an othering effect. Standard stereotypical discourses drawn on in the debates on Syrian refugees evoke Britain’s ‘proud tradition’ of humanitarianism, and the narrative of refugee contribution to society. Importantly, in this genre there is no possibility of expression by current refugees themselves. Nevertheless, there are moments of de-objectifying in the course of the debates. The stories of parliamentarians’ own immigrant pasts and their experiences of contact with refugees are embedded in precise historical contexts and display authentic feelings, creating empathic links with the Syrian refugees. The two cultural products involve the appropriation of others’ lives and stories for the rhetorical purpose of persuasion of a point of view. Persuasion is enacted through different means as appropriate for each genre: in the case of the documentary, fairly lengthy and emotional stock storylines; and in the case of the debates, brief mentions of figures, lists and anecdotes. Such mechanisms tend towards objectification. However, although genre is a force for objectification, it is also not rigid, allowing ‘lines of flight’ in textual productions (Deleuze and Guattari 1980; Frow 2015, 10). The comparison of the two case studies allows us to conclude that certain genres are more prone to providing the conditions of objectification than others (the genre of the parliamentary debate tends more towards objectification than the genre of the innovative participatory documentary), but that both cultural products display the play of objectification and de-objectification. As a final point of discussion, it is important to consider the attitudes of migrants and refugees themselves with respect to humanitarian objectification. Even if many memory references in parliamentary debates are superficial and prone to myth and simplification, they can be efficient in conveying a worldview in few words and useful as ‘projectiles’ (Martin 2014, 92) in the course of argumentation. If such rhetoric is effective in serving the cause of a humane approach to the refugee crisis, it is probably welcomed by refugees. Similarly, Hassan, one of the main participants in Exodus, was happy to collaborate with the documentary maker, because, as he says: ‘I wanted to get the word out [about the plight of the refugees] and there was no better platform than the BBC’ (Akkad 2017). Again, the documentary served the interests of the refugee participants through generic features, in this case the mechanisms of filmmaking that were skilful and powerful despite and because of objectification. Following Chow (2010), we might affirm that both objectifications and de-objectifications

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are inevitable, since they link to the way the human brain necessarily operates with generalisations and with particularities, with established schemas and with newness, with de-territorialisation and with re-territorialisation. Chow (2010) argues that with regard to objectification, rather than the fact of objectifications, what is really important is the use made of them, what and whose interests they serve. In accordance with this line of thought, if humanitarian objectification serves the interests of refugees, from their point of view it is not to be condemned.

Transcription Key Long underlining indicates that a word is stressed through being pronounced more loudly and slowly, and generally with rising intonation (.) a pause of less than a second ((…)) the transcriber’s descriptions

References Akkad, Hassan. 2017. Exodus from Syria. Talk Given at the Power and Film and Moving Image Annual Cultural Event. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/ exodus-­from-­Syria. Accessed 16 June 2019. Anishchenkova, Valerie. 2018. The Battle of Truth and Fiction: Documentary Storytelling and Middle Eastern Refugee Discourse. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 54 (6): 809–820. BBC/KEO. 2016. Exodus—Our Journey to Europe, Episodes 1–3. https://vimeo. com/185455685;188556030;188556031. Accessed 12 March 2022. Bell, Duncan. 2003. Mythscapes: Memory, Mythology and National Identity. British Journal of Sociology 54 (1): 63–81. Bennett, Jane. 2009. Vibrant Minds: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press. Bennett, Bruce. 2018. Becoming Refugees: Exodus and Contemporary Mediations of the Refugee Crisis. Transnational Cinemas 9 (1): 13–30. Chow, Rey. 2010. Brushes with the-other-as-face: Stereotypes and Cross-ethnic Representation. In The Rey Chow Reader, ed. Paul Bowman, 48–54. New York: Columbia University Press. Cooke, Rachel. 2016. No Direction Home: Exodus—Our Journey to Europe. New Statesman 15–21 July: 51. Cox, Emma, Sam Durrant, David Farrier, Lyndsey Stonebridge, and Agnes Woolley. 2020. Introduction. In Refugee Imaginaries: Research Across the Humanities, ed. Emma Cox, Sam Durrant, David Farrier, Lyndsey Stonebridge, and Agnes Woolley, 1–11. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Craig-Norton, Jennifer. 2018. The Kindertransport: Contesting Memory. Talk Given at the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford. https://www.rsc. ox.ac.uk/news/the-­kindertransport-­contesting-­memory-­dr-­jennifer-­craig-­ norton. Accessed 11 March 2022. Davies, Thom, Arshad Isakjee, and Surindar Dhesi. 2017. Violent Inaction: The Necropolitical Experience of Refugees in Europe. Antipode 49 (5): 1263–1284. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1980. Capitalisme et schizophrénie: mille plateaux. Paris: Editions de Minuit. Fairclough, Isabela, and Norman Fairclough. 2012. Political Discourse Analysis. Milton Park, Oxon and New York: Routledge. Finlayson, Alan. 2014. Proving, Pleasing and Persuading? Rhetoric in Contemporary British Politics. The Political Quarterly 85 (4): 428–436. Frow, John. 2015. Genre. Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge. Gillespie, Marie. 2016. The Making of Exodus—Our Journey to Europe. Interview with Will Anderson, Producer. https://www.open.edu/openlearn/tv-­radio-­ events/tv/exodus-­our-­journey-­europe. Accessed 9 July 2019. Gonzaga, Elmo. 2017. The Cinematographic Unconscious of Slum Voyeurism. Cinema Journal 56 (4): 102–125. Gray, Ann. 2013. Televised Remembering. In Research Methods for Memory Studies, ed. Emily Keightley and Michael Pickering, 79–96. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Halbwachs, Maurice. (1925) 1975. Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire. Paris and La Haye: Mouton. Halwani, Raja. 2010. Sexual Objectification. In Philosophy of Love, Sex and Marriage: An Introduction, 165–226. New York: Routledge. Hansard Online. n.d.. https://hansard.parliament.uk. Accessed 27 March 2019. Holliday, Adrian. 2011. The Indelible Politics of Self and Other. In Intercultural Communication and Ideology, 69–96. Los Angeles: Sage. House of Commons. 2010. Some Traditions and Customs of the House. Factsheet G7. London: House of Commons Information Office. Keightley, Emily, and Michael Pickering, eds. 2013. Research Methods for Memory Studies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Khong, Yuen Foong. 1992. Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kushner, Tony. 2006. Remembering Refugees: Then and Now. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kushner, Tony. 2018. Truly, Madly, Deeply...Nostalgically? Britain's On-Off Love Affair with Refugees, Past and Present. Patterns of Prejudice 52 (2-3): 172-194. Landsberg, Alison. 2004. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Martin, James. 2014. Politics and Rhetoric: A Critical Introduction. London and New York: Routledge.

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Mayblin, Lucy, and Joe Turner. 2021. Migration Studies and Colonialism. Cambridge UK and Medford MA: Polity Press. Nichols, Bill. 2010. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. O’Donovan, Gerard. 2016. Exodus: Our Journey to Europe Revealed the Terrifying Reality of Being a Refugee. Daily Telegraph, 11 July 2016. Olick, Jeffrey, and Joyce Robbins. 1998. Social Memory Studies: From ‘collective memory’ to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices. Annual Review of Sociology 24: 105–140. Open University Discussion Hub: Exodus—Our Journey to Europe. n.d.. https:// www.open.edu/openlearn/people-­p olitics-­l aw/politics-­p olicy-­p eople/ discussion-­hub-­exodus-­our-­journey-­europe. Accessed 5 June 2019. Papastergiadis, Nikos. 2012. Cosmopolitanism and Culture. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press. Perelman, Chaïm. 1979. The New Rhetoric: A Theory of Practical Reasoning. In The New Rhetoric and the Humanities: Essays on Rhetoric and Its Application, 1–42. Dordrecht, Boston and London: D. Reidel Publishing. Reinisch, Jessica. 2015. History Matters...But Which One? Every Refugee Crisis Has a Context. www.historyandpolicy.org. Accessed 11 January 2024. Schuster, Liza. 2016. Unmixing Migrants and Refugees. In Routledge Handbook of Immigration and Refugee Studies, ed. Anna Triandafyllidou, 297–303. London and New York: Routledge. Somers, Margaret R., and Gloria D. Gibson. 1993. ‘Reclaiming the Epistemological Other’: Narrative and the Social Constitution of Identity. CSST Working Papers. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Whitham, Ben. 2017. On Seeking Asylum from Poverty: Why the Refugee/ Migrant Paradigm Cannot Hold. Mixed Migration Platform Guest-Authored Series No. 1. https://www.dora.dmu.ac.uk/handle/2086/14605. Accessed 9 July 2019. Wilmott, Anabelle. 2017. The Politics of Photography: Visual Depictions of Syrian Refugees in UK online media. Visual Communication Quarterly 24 (2): 67–82. Winder, Robert. 2005. Bloody Foreigners: The Story of Immigration in Britain. London: Abacus. Wright, Terence. 2014. The Media and Representations of Refugees and Other Forced Migrants. In The Oxford Handbook of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, ed. Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, Gil Loescher, Katy Long, and Nando Sigona, 460–472. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 11

Wolves in the Sanctuary: Ecopolitics and Forced Migration in the Literature of the Anthropocene Peter Arnds

Chapter Right-wing politics casts migration as a criminal act, equating migrants with parasitic and predatory species, warning domestic communities against being overrun by ‘hordes’ or ‘floods.’ In recent years, populists have also regularly referred to undocumented migrants as ‘animals,’ labelling them as ‘invaders infesting’ our nations (Schanzer 2019), criminalising migrants allegedly eager to engage in ‘slicing and dicing young beautiful girls’ (Gupta 2017), or invoking images of biblical locust infestations by comparing them with ‘swarms of people’ coming across the Mediterranean. Such a phenomenon conjures up the Third Reich’s

P. Arnds (*) Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 F. Barclay, B. Ivey (eds.), Contemporary Representations of Forced Migration in Europe, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Human Rights, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47831-4_11

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ideology of an infestation of the Volkskörper, the people of a nation as body, but this widespread rhetoric also harkens back to even older fears of being infected by vermin, as ‘during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, biblical accounts of infestation by lice, flies, locusts, frogs, and other unidentified swarming things were deeply embedded in scientific and political, as well as religious, culture’ (Cole 2016). While in those days it was a rhetoric that was closely tied to the pandemics such as the London plague, it has now become an integral part of what Fintan O’Toole (2018) has described as the ‘new pre- rather than old post-fascist’ political climate, with the COVID-19 pandemic adding its own scenario of fears and xenophobia. According to the Irish journalist, we live in a new era of preparation for widespread fascism and political violence towards minorities. He defines fascism as building ‘a sense of threat from a despised out-­group’ in the context of claims such as the one that immigrants ‘infest’ our well-protected nation-states, a strategy he views as a ‘test-marking’ of whether the voters of populist politicians are ready for the next step-up in language, which is to call undocumented aliens ‘vermin.’ Once that has happened, O’Toole reminds us, anything is possible. A prominent example of this rhetorical ‘vermination’ of humans are the comments on migrants as cockroaches famously made by racist UK media pundit Katie Hopkins. In her column published in The Sun on 17 April 2015 and titled ‘Rescue boats? I’d use gunships to stop migrants,’ she claimed that she did not care about the plight of migrants getting lost and dying in the Mediterranean Sea and other places: ‘No, I don’t care. Show me pictures of coffins, show me bodies floating in water, play violins and show me skinny people looking sad. I still don’t care.’ Hopkins added that migrants are like ‘feral humans,’ ‘spreading like the norovirus,’ and: ‘Make no mistake, these migrants are like cockroaches. They might look a bit “Bob Geldof’s Ethiopia circa 1984,” but they are built to survive a nuclear bomb. They are survivors’ (Jones 2015). By calling migrants ‘cockroaches’ and ‘feral humans’ ‘spreading like the norovirus’ Katie Hopkins echoes the genocidal rhetoric of Rwanda where in 1994 the Hutus labelled the Tutsis and their Hutu collaborators as cockroaches, killing approximately 800,000 people.1 The cockroach is, of course, an extreme example of dehumanisation, and one that tends to be rare in the context of immigration. This chapter examines a lesser studied image in the context of forced 1  On the history of the cockroach as a metaphor of dehumanisation, see Livingstone Smith 2011, 303, note 53), and Frances Hemsley (2021).

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migration, both in political discourse and in cultural production: the wolf. The wolf-as-wanderer and, consequently, the wolf-as-migrant have a long history within the rhetoric of dehumanisation wielded against people who have been expelled from their communities and therefore abandoned to nature. The wolf evokes biopolitical paradigms such as the mediaeval wolf man in Agamben’s discussion of the vargr y veum, the wolf in the sanctuary (Agamben 1995, 104). Written in the early 1990s Agamben’s book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life predates the so-called migrant and refugee ‘crisis’ at Europe’s borders. However, his concept of the Friedlos, humans without peace, is the Germanic equivalent of the Roman homo sacer. In this respect, the Friedlos undoubtedly has some validity for today’s migrant situation. The concept of the vargr y veum in particular, this early mediaeval legal formula for humans on the run, whom Hopkins now calls ‘feral humans,’ can still be applied to millions of people forced to migrate in search of a sanctuary. The vargr y veum is an ambivalent term. The human ‘on the run’ is in need of a sanctuary but is also not tolerated inside it by those in a position to offer the homo sacer such a sanctuary. Finding themselves in various precarious scenarios today’s migrants are sacer in the sense of being ‘set aside’ by the community, and often left to their own devices, sacer in the sense of ‘pertaining to the Gods’ (Douglas 2002, 10). They are set apart from the communities they leave and the ones they are trying to enter. For example, if we look at conditions in the Mediterranean, the Sonoran Desert, or off-shore Australia to name but a few precarious locations, we can observe that a continuing plight of the homo sacer is the exposure and abandonment of people to the state of nature. In other words, this is ultimately a state of war, where human rights are suspended and the Hobbesian homo hominis lupus all too easily becomes the only law of existence. In such conditions, the homo sacer is reduced to bare life, which implies dehumanisation, a reduction from political (human) to biological (animal) life. A prevalent theme in the wolf-as-migrant image is the containment within ‘sanctuaries.’ In general, sanctuaries are politically sensitive spaces. As typically enclosed space, they can often be shut to those in greatest need of them. The vargr y veum—as the human wolf—wants to be inside the sanctuary to become fully re-humanised. However, sites purporting to be ‘sanctuaries’ for migrating people, such as the various detention spaces within and bordering the Global North, only further inflict acts of dehumanisation in themselves. These pseudo-sanctuaries are places in which

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migrants are caught in limbo between their humanity and lupisation, as is reflected, for example, in the detention of migrants in the zoo of Tripoli in the wake of the Libyan Revolution of 2011 (Vaughan-Williams 2015, 4). As Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (2022, 321) has argued, it is migrants themselves who, in the discussions of their journeys, also often employ animalising tropes to highlight the inhuman treatment to which they have been subjected. It is then also in contemporary literature about migration that dehumanising animal metaphors are used by refugee writers, such as Hassan Blasim’s engagement with the werewolf figure (Minca 2021). This chapter will focus on contemporary authors, including Blasim, and one artist who engage with narratives of the wolf in the wildlife conservation sanctuaries that also engage with narratives of human migration. By employing an approach informed by ecopolitics, we can establish how these creators have tried to wrest the animal-human metaphor away from its historical demonisation and use for dehumanisation in order to underscore the crisis in biocultural diversity. How does contemporary literature in particular employ the metaphor of the wolf and the werewolf in the context of forced migration, the notion of abandonment, the liminal status of refugees, and their search for sanctuaries? How does this literature, in talking about biodiversity, also address cultural diversity? The need for wolf sanctuaries and hospitality for migrants and refugees connotes a shared space in which multiculturalism and ecological diversity can thrive. I argue that this is an urgent issue. I suggest that there are lessons to be learned about the rights of Others from animal sanctuaries such as the Wolf Science Centre in Ernstbrunn near Vienna, or, indeed, from contemporary artists like Rainer Opolka and literary texts such as Sarah Hall’s Wolf Border (2015), László Krasnahorkai’s one-sentence novella The Last Wolf (2015), Roland Schimmelpfennig’s novel One Clear, Ice-Cold January Morning at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century (2018).

Migrants and Wolves in Germany As Rebecca Pates and Julia Leser have recently shown in their book The Wolves Are Coming Back (2021), the process of rewilding wolves in Germany has become a cipher for post-fascist politics. Wolves were wiped out in Germany in the nineteenth century, but since the 1990s have started to re-enter Eastern German territory from Eastern Europe. Wolf migration has provoked heated debates between defenders of biocultural diversity, on the one hand, and opponents of immigration such as the Alternative

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für Deutschland (AfD) party, on the other hand, who see the ‘foreign’ (Polish) wolf as an invasive species. Furthermore, the AfD has likened the migration of the Polish wolf to the invasion of mostly Muslim immigrants, creating a discourse that compares Muslim immigrants with the ‘rapist’ wolf of the Red Riding Hood tale.2 In light of these neo-fascist tendencies, wolves have triggered debates about biodiversity and cultural diversity that revolve around comparisons of wolves with immigrants, the present moment and the fascist past, while also representing a cipher for East Germany’s persistent perception as having been colonised by West Germany (Pates and Leser 2021, 41–49). One of Germany’s most sensitive areas where wolf politics, environmental concerns and immigration across national borders come together is the so-called Lausitz (Lusatia) in Eastern Saxony. This region along the German-Polish border has been witness to migrations of animals and humans for centuries. It has also seen its share of right-wing extremism. Just as wolves were reappearing in the region in the 1990s, there were numerous attacks on asylum seekers in the wake of unification and fierce disputes over resources. The area has remained fertile ground for far-right political movements such as the AfD or the Pegida (Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the Occident), who have been able to recruit massively in these parts. It is in these regions in particular that the wolf has become a cipher for the local politics of fear and hate in the context of biopolitics both for immigrants and for wolves, but also reflecting local sentiments of powerlessness in the face of what is perceived as a colonising West German governance. Immigration is seen as de-culturalisation by these right-wing parties and their followers. Within this imaginary, the wolf is pivotal in reflecting a threshold between order and chaos, civilisation and barbarism. As Pates and Leser (2021, 167) argue, ‘in refusing to side with civilised man, Hobbes’s wolf man has free range to endanger us all. To resist the wolf […] is to resist returning to the state of nature. So even though the wolf is no threat to anyone, […] as an anthropomorphous object it becomes accessible to political discourse.’ The AfD talks about wolves in the same way as they talk about immigrants, demanding 2  Rebecca Pates and Julia Leser (2021, 5–7); Kaisa Lappalainen (2019, 752) and Barry Lopez (2004, 266) have shown this complexity for wolf politics in the U.S., especially how the wolf can become sexualised in the context of rural perceptions of gender, race, and immigration: ‘the sort of outrage and the promise of violence stockmen manifested when they found a wolf-killed sheep is uncommonly like that manifested by men on hearing that a neighbor’s child has been raped by an itinerant laborer’ (Lopez 2004, 266).

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Obergrenzen, ‘ceilings’ or literally ‘upper limits’ on the numbers of both. It insists that wolves and immigrants (especially of Islamic faith) are foreign to the German cultural landscape, that they share a rapacious, criminal nature, and that while one allegedly has a negative impact on the natural environment the other equally negatively impacts on the cultural, that is, Christian environment (Pates and Leser 2021, 5–6). This type of racist invective draws on ancient prejudices towards both wolves and outsiders in addition to feeding into a national psyche under the spell of what can be summarised by the term ‘Little Red Riding Hood Syndrome,’ a cultural baggage that has left its mark on the national subconscious, especially in Germany, France, and Russia due to the legacy of evil wolves in folklore (Grimm Brothers, Charles Perrault, Prokofiev’s ‘Peter and the Wolf’). The wolf metaphor has since antiquity been appropriated for ideological purposes in legal and political discourse, folklore, and in artistic representations in myth, literature, the visual arts and film (cf. Arnds 2015 and 2021).3 It is a fluid metaphor in the context of forced migration. While the AfD equates wolves with trespassing undocumented immigrants, in Nazi Germany the wolf was a key metaphor for warfare and imperialist expansion. As a reminder of Nazi racism the metaphor has recently had a comeback in Rainer Opolka’s highly successful art installation entitled ‘The Wolves are Back,’ featuring a series of metal wolf statues, some giving a Nazi salute, others blindfolded to represent blind hate. Opolka’s Nazi-­ saluting wolves have been misunderstood to promote nationalism, although they are clearly directed against hate, xenophobia, and racism and promote multiculturalism, inclusion, and plurality. Opolka uses eight different wolf poses, each of which is designed to represent a different group of people contributing to racism in Germany. The wolves on all fours, for example, represent passive followers of racist agendas, while by way of statues entitled ‘muscle-wolf’ and ‘leader-wolf’ the exhibit also features the leaders of Neo-Nazi groups such as the National Socialist Underground (NSU) (Fig. 11.1). Opolka’s Sieg-Heil saluting wolf sculptures deliberately evoke the iconography of the Third Reich with its own brand of wolf metaphorics. Adolf Hitler in particular, sovereign ruler above and beyond the rule of 3  Peter Arnds, Lycanthropy in German Literature (London/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Peter Arnds, Wolves at the Door: Migration, Dehumanization, Rewilding the World (New York: Bloomsbury, 2021).

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Fig. 11.1  ‘The Wolves are Back,’ Rainer Opolka, 2016. (© Rainer Opolka)

law, saw himself as a wolf leading the German pack. He took a certain pride in his first name Adolf as it is derived from Aethalulfr, the noble wolf in Old Norse, and he was familiar with the Disney movie Three Little Pigs from 1933, frequently whistling its theme song ‘Who is afraid of the big bad wolf’ (Arnds 2015, 122). In his early writing Hitler used the pseudonym ‘Herr Wolf’ and called his first shepherd dog Wolf. However, the Nazis’ lycanthropic energy went well beyond the Führer himself. In the final months of the war a berserk troop was created, a top-secret movement named Operation Wehrwolf or Operation Karneval. It is this political baggage to which Opolka’s so-called Wanderausstellung (migratory

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exhibit) travelling from Berlin to Potsdam, Dresden and Chemnitz referred, its chief purpose being a message against hatred and xenophobia towards immigrants worked into the very marrow of this flexible installation of 66 lycanthropic sculptures. In contrast with the simplistic equations of wolves and migrants by the AfD, Opolka links the wolves to fascism and neo-racism, a gesture that is also not unproblematic in view of ecological concerns about canis lupus. However, the criticism levelled against Opolka goes well beyond ecological concerns. He has also been spuriously criticised by members of the right-wing AfD for being a left-wing fascist, and by others for breaking the German taboo of displaying the Nazi salute, and also for his lack of subtlety, as—in Chemnitz at least—large posters behind the wolves tried to explain what they stand for, almost as if the audience were too ignorant to figure this out by themselves. The one criticism one could indeed level at the artist is that he falls into the usual trap of mythologizing wolves, as once did those he rallies against. In Opolka’s defence, however, it needs to be pointed out that although he aggressively draws on wolf lore his installations re-appropriate the Nazis’ wolf iconography for the purpose of revealing and destabilising it, and ultimately also to guarantee a politics of hospitality that provides a sanctuary in Germany for immigrants. While in Opolka’s art installation the metaphorical wolves in the sanctuary signify Germany’s right-wing factions, that is, the principle of sovereign power, this is quite different in some of the contemporary literature about migration in which the wolf is closely linked to migrants and refugees as homo sacer. The Iraq-born author Hassan Blasim, for example, himself a refugee who found a new home in Finland, shows us a refugee as werewolf in his short story The Truck to Berlin, published in his collection The Madman of Freedom Square (2009). It is the story of a group of men escaping various regimes of terror, and who, hidden in a truck, travel clandestinely from Istanbul towards Berlin. The journey ends abruptly in the Serbian-Hungarian border region with a gory discovery. When the police open the back of the truck, they discover that one of the hidden refugees has massacred everyone else, leaving 34 mangled bodies in the truck ‘full of shit, piss and blood, livers ripped apart, eyes gouged out, intestines just as though hungry wolves had been there’ (Blasim 2009, 75). They then see a young man jump off the truck and run like a madman towards the nearby forest, where ‘he started to run on all fours, then turned into a grey wolf, before he vanished’ (Blasim 2009, 75).

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Blasim draws substantially on the werewolf myth in the context of forced migration and exile, his story being a modern version of the myth of Lycaon, the King of Arcadia, whom Jupiter turns into a werewolf condemned to run through the silentia ruris, as Ovid puts it in his Metamorphoses (Ovid 2004, 13), the silent fields of an eternal exile. It is the myth’s motifs of the criminalised wolf man, his loss of sanctuary and protection, and his troubled sojourn reduced to nuda vita, bare animal life in the state of nature that Blasim revives in this story. However, it can be argued that the only sanctuary left for the refugee as migrant as homo sacer is ‘the vast forest,’ the heart of darkness, as Rita Sakr (2018, 771) has argued, of a continent, Europe, that does not extend its hospitality to undocumented migrants. Drawing on Agamben’s homo sacer I argue that Blasim’s story reflects many of the paradigms attached to this figure which the Middle Ages saw as a vargr y veum. The setting of his story in the Serbian-Hungarian border region displays all the signs of abandonment (‘in an abandoned poultry field,’ 75) but also of a migrant asserting agency for himself. By escaping the pressures of the striated space of nation-states for the smooth space of the forest and shapeshifting into a grey wolf this illegal migrant acquires the traditional freedom of the homo sacer, a freedom that implies being able to cross borders like an animal but also that he can be hunted down like one. It is this act of self-determination that makes the migrant as werewolf literally ‘more than human,’ as Claudio Minca (2021, 2) has recently also pointed out for Blasim’s story. By labelling the migrant experience as more rather than less than human Minca is pointing to the potential of refugees showing agency rather than interpreting such narratives along the lines of traditional strategies of dehumanisation through demonising metaphors. More than human, Blasim’s werewolf does indeed develop an agency in his final act of ‘vanishing’ within a policed system that tries to constrain and expel him. It is this act of the vanishing wolf that also links Blasim’s story to two other contemporary European texts.

Roland Schimmelpfennig and László Krasnahorkai In his novel One Clear, Ice-Cold January Morning at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century (2018) Roland Schimmelpfennig features a wolf as protagonist who is sighted one day approaching the German capital, moving between Poland and Germany, inside and outside of the city. As the wolf weaves its way between what used to be East and West Berlin, its

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trajectory also traces the different lives and communities within Berlin. On the one hand, the wolf becomes a reflection of each character’s own individual life, their crises, their personal losses and decisions. On the other hand, a multicultural wolf, he reflects broader trends expressive of the characters’ fears, xenophobia, and neuroses. In this text, the wolf is a border crosser who awakens old folkloric fears among the Berliners and, in this respect, he symbolises a catalyst for the act of migration, border crossing, and the crisis of multiculturalism in Europe. He is an animal that unites Germans, Turks, Poles, Chileans, and many more in their existential angst. He is a wolf on the threshold, a position he has held over time in myth and folklore, trotting along aimlessly but generally in a north-­ westerly direction, facing and gazing at various characters, some of whom are hell-bent on killing him. Finally, a young man named Charly, who is a vaguely sketched character, shoots at the wolf. Despite losing a paw, he keeps on migrating on three legs. He is sighted one more time, in a bad shape and hiding in the labyrinth of Berlin’s train track and tunnel system. Finally, the novel ends with wolf’s ghostly exit: ‘the wolf had vanished’ (Schimmelpfennig 2018, 233). Schimmelpfennig positions his wolf between myth and reality. While the novel contains faint echoes of Hansel and Gretel, the Wolf and the Seven Kids, and Little Red Riding Hood, the wolf also faces the harsh reality of having to navigate through a hostile cultural landscape consisting of an endless web of motorways and a city landscape which although known for tolerating all sorts of wildlife from foxes to wild boars feels extremely uncomfortable about having a wolf on its doorstep. The Berliners’ reactions reflect very real contemporary anxieties about the presence of wolves in Germany, fed by myth and the folktales. Similarly to the work of Rainer Opolka and his wolf sculptures, one can interpret Schimmelpfennig’s wolf as a cipher for the current crisis in Germany involving the presence of wolves and immigrants. Schimmelpfennig’s wolf is an animal in need of a sanctuary, and in its perambulations keeps crossing the boundary between the countryside and the city. Although the capital is the place least suited for the wolf’s survival, Schimmelpfennig ironically appropriates for his wolf Kennedy’s famous words ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ by which the American President praised Berlin’s cosmopolitanism: ‘This wolf is a Berliner’ (Schimmelpfennig 2018, 203). It is the wolf’s presence in the city, however, that is problematic. The consensus is that wolves belong in the wilderness, and yet such a wilderness does not exist in Germany. Schimmelpfennig’s wolf is forever

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Friedlos, without peace, in the ecological sense but also as a reflection of the troubled fates of the migrants of the novel. As a wolf who has arrived from Poland, he is as much associated with the so-called wilds of Eastern Europe as the people migrating from there. Moreover, this wolf is also associated with Turkey and Anatolia, which is reflected in the childhood memories of some of the second-generation Turks in the novel. In spite of its ironic stance, the novel contains a great deal of sadness about the plight of the wolf that is then linked to the lack of hospitality offered to migrants in Germany. Throughout his precarious journey, the wolf stirs the murderous fantasies of various characters, even among human migrants in Germany. The animal follows in the footsteps of former refugees, travelling through places like the ‘no-man’s land […] where the wall and the death strip once were’ and where now in reminiscence of GDR border forces shooting their own country’s refugees, ‘armed police with dogs combed the area, thereby unwittingly driving the wolf eastwards’ (Schimmelpfennig 2018, 91). As an animal that unites various cultures through their shared fear of the beast, the wolf symbolises various aspects pertaining to migration within Europe: the wolf’s entry into Germany of course signifies its own kind of immigration, and his reception speaks to the limits of German hospitality towards human migrants, and the perception of multiculturalism as being in a state of crisis. The novel announces the limits of Kennedy’s great invocation of Berlin’s freedom, as the wolf’s presence prompts vilification in the media and speculation as to whether he has rabies to the public’s increasing obsessiveness over his threatening presence. The fear of being bitten and contracting rabies from an animal seen as traditionally not belonging into the cultural landscape of Germany parallels contemporary fears relating immigration to cultural contamination and the transmission of diseases (nosophobia). The aggression and xenophobia the wolf inspires are possibly most evident in the quest motif that fills a large part of the loose plot. Charly, who hunts the wolf, dreams about killing him after being humiliated by the wolf’s stare (Schimmelpfennig 2018, 94; 95). This moment of trans-species encounter strips him of his humanity and obsesses him, evocative of the famous gaze between Derrida and his cat (Derrida 2008). In Peter and the Wolf fashion Charly sets out to kill the wolf, and it is this hunt that I would argue becomes indicative of the crisis of multiculturalism inscribed into this text, based on the xenophobic aggression and violence triggered by the gaze of the Other, the wolf.

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Much like Schimmelpfennig’s novel, László Krasznahorkai’s sinister story, The Last Wolf, is about the last wolves to inhabit the border region of Extremadura in Spain. Through this story, the text alerts us to both planetary decline and crises of migration and multiculturalism. It links the extinction of an endangered species to a vision of monoculture and a place, Extremadura, that threatens to become hermetically sealed off from the world. The wolves here are on the brink of extermination in an impoverished part of Spain. As such, the landscape itself, the dehesa of Western Spain that shows similarities with the Hungarian puszta, reflects the abysses of the human soul, and serves as a fragile sanctuary for wolves and humans alike: ‘[…] Extremadura was outside the world, because extre means outside, out of, you get it? […] and nobody was really aware of the danger presented by the proximity of the world’ (Krasnahorkai 2015, 34). In a half drunken stupor, the narrator tells a barman in Berlin of his assignment to travel to this distant part of Spain to report on the plight of last wolves, who were being tracked down and killed one after another by the lobero, the wolf hunter. He manages to kill only seven out of nine animals, leaving alive a young male and pregnant female, representing the hope of a future for wolves in Extremadura. However, the pregnant female is run over by a truck when crossing the road, leaving the last wolf in Extremadura to vanish completely. As in Schimmelpfennig’s novel, however, the wolves are a catalyst in this narrative of the Anthropocene for opening this region to the world outside. On the one hand, Berlin’s cultural diversity is contrasted with the monoculture of a forgotten region where tensions are ripe among locals and ‘Arab’ immigrants. On the other hand, the ecology is threatened by the rapid disappearance of wolves. The wolves are a border phenomenon and I would argue that they metaphorically bridge Berlin with Extremadura and Extremadura with the overall planetary concerns. The story contains little in the way of optimism or hope, but it is significant for the ways it associates wolves with the concept of porous, unstable borders. While forming a vanishing presence in Extremadura, whose very own name implies extraterritoriality, the wolves instil fear and prejudice in the local population, and are closely associated with the ‘Arab’ immigrants that are mentioned several times in the text. In turn, this racism is closely tied to the historical legacies and fears associated with Al-Andulus transforming the wolf into an orientalising allegory, a species breaking into Extremadura from the world outside. According to the drunken narrator, tension with the Arab Gastarbeiter (guest workers) has developed in Andalusia to the southeast of Extremadura, and there is the danger of it

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spreading into Extremadura in the same way as the wolves are. Being from Kreuzberg, the Berlin barman is well aware of the phenomenon of Gastarbeiter, the issues of ethnic divides and immigration thus waxing borderless in this novel. In addition, these issues are strangely tied to ecological concerns, as the Arabs on Spanish turf are mentioned in a journal on ecology that contextualises them with the last wolf killed south of the River Duero in 1983 (Krasnahorkai 2015, 22). The collapse of the fragile ecosystem through the wolves’ gradual disappearance coincides with the arrival of an altogether different culture into Extremadura, a post-species world full of highways and ugly shopping malls. Globalisation has thus reached Extremadura as the world of the wolf has disappeared, and it turns out, the narrator assures us, that while obsessed with the possible danger of wolves and superstitions about their unbelonging, nobody in Extremadura had actually been aware of the real dangers ‘presented by the proximity of the world’ (Krasnahorkai 2015, 34). Krasznahorkai’s story is a sad tale about the end of a species in a forgotten part of Europe, a metaphor for the hatred and superstitions of local people towards what is perceived as the trespassing outsider, whether human or non-human animal. In his typically absurd style, somewhat reminiscent of Kafka, the Hungarian author demonstrates what happens to an area that loses its biodiversity alongside its own cultural identity and all hope for cultural diversity. As the text appeared in 2009, it contains a sinister premonition of the territorialism and stifling of cosmopolitan spirit in Hungarian politics since the rise of Orban in 2010. Wolves and Migration in the UK: From Dracula to Sarah Hall While Spain and Germany abound in wolves, it may come as a surprise that the wolf metaphor appears in contemporary literature from the UK, considering that wolves were exterminated on the island in the Middle Ages. The wolf is not a key metaphor in the UK in view of political rhetoric surrounding migration, whereas insect metaphors tend to be more prevalent, often tied to fears of an invasion by a multitude of foreigners, of disease transmission, so-called nosophobia, and the fear of being drained of precious resources. As a more extreme metaphor for this image of draining the body of the nation Andreas Musolff has identified the ‘scrounger,’ who sucks and bleeds the country dry, and who ‘aims for freebies and lives off or sponges from Britain, thus exploiting it as a treasure island. Its references to immigrants range from relatively moderate depictions as welfare

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tourists to their dehumanising stigmatisation as leeches, bloodsuckers and other parasites’ (Musolff 2015, 46–47). With such images Gothic horror has entered the immigration discourse, especially when it sees the immigrant as a vampire. Of course, this is not a new image. When we look at European history there are perhaps primarily two key moments in which the migrant as racialised Other was seen as a vampire. The first of these two moments is a literary one expressive of Victorian fears of Jewish and Romany invaders of the British Empire coming in from the ‘uncivilised’ East, while the second refers to the Nazis’ equation of Jews with bloodsucking, disease-spreading, and nation-draining vampires and parasites (Hitler 1969, 277). This fear of the migrant as bloodsucker has a key literary antecedent in the UK, where late nineteenth-century racism towards migrants and foreigners perceived as invading and infecting the nation is perhaps nowhere as prominent as in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). With their dehumanising metaphors of vermin, parasites, and infectious animals, contemporary literary migrant narratives and the current rhetoric of racial Othering in the Global North evoke an aura of Gothic horror that can be traced back to the literature of modernism and the wolf/werewolf metaphor in particular. By pointing to the proximity of the werewolf and vampire in his discussion of the Slovak word vrolok and the Serbian vlkoslak Stoker (1993, 7) brings together two demonising animal metaphors in the context of illegal immigration, the bat/vampire and the wolf reflecting the Count’s origins perceived by the West as wild, undomesticated, and uncivil. Stoker’s vampire has a particular significance for invading the island, polluting national blood, and draining it of its life blood. As we have seen in the work of Musolff, the vampire is a metaphor that has survived in the context of immigration to this day. Stoker’s bloodsucking foreigner who enters Britain in Whitby, traditional territory for Viking raids, is feared ‘perhaps for centuries to come […] amongst its teeming millions, [to] satiate his lust for blood, and create a new and ever-widening circle of semi-demons to batten on the helpless’ (Stoker 1993, 45). The novel is a literary testimony to the discourse on race and eugenics emerging at the time in Germany, France, and England. Famously, the Count is a projection of late nineteenth-century British phobias of invasion, contagion, and racial pollution, of the nation being drained by immigrants, primarily Jews and the Roma (Zanger 1991, 36). Although the Count embodies English fears of mass immigration, his act of bleeding late Victorian England is partly also the product of the anti-Semitic climate in the wake of the series

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of unresolved murders in 1888 accredited to Jack the Ripper, who at one point was suspected to be a Jewish kosher butcher (Sharkey 1987, 114–15). In Dracula, as Tabish Khair (2009, 59) argues, the demonised racial Other from a threshold place between Europe and Asia joins a fierce anti-Semitism and fears of a crumbling British Empire due to migration and outsiders like the aristocratic Count from Transylvania trying to establish an empire within the British Empire. Khair (2009, 106–109) has discussed Stoker’s text as a colonial Gothic novel. In his liminal status between the human and the devil, between being an eloquent human and shapeshifting into all kinds of animals without a language, between the uncivilised East and the Christian West, as well as between life and death, Dracula also represents the coloniser’s fears of cannibalism as it was experienced in the colonies. An apt literary example of Agamben’s parasitic outlaw, the Count is indeed both homo sacer and sovereign in one person. He has a criminal mind (Stoker 1993, 285), arrives ‘from a wolf country’ (Stoker 1993, 270)—Transylvania/Romania—and wolves are at his constant beck and call as are even their more domestic relatives, Bersicker, the London Zoo wolf and all dogs, it seems. The Count controls wolves just by holding up his hand in silence, and he can turn into a wolf, an aggressive dog, or a bat. While the wolves symbolise his foreign, uncivilised nature, his turning into the domestic relative of the wolf, a dog, is a form of camouflage or cultural mimicry as Britain is the nation that domesticates. The wolves in this novel also form a close symbiosis with the Roma population of Transylvania, especially when in the final showdown between Van Helsing and Dracula, the close connection between the Roma, wolves, and the vampire culminates. The Roma and wolves are connected through forming circles around the hunters of Dracula, but as soon as Dracula is finished they also disappear. This triad of wolf, Roma, and vampire is closely associated with the Count’s family and race. From the beginning, British fears of racial pollution by Eastern invaders of Oriental provenance form a stark contrast with the Count’s own perception of his noble and ancient lineage steeped in Northern Europe. As a boyar (noble), he identifies with the allegedly superior Nordic race in his insistence on his family’s origins in the berserks, aligning him with marauding Vikings, with predators, and thus a much older threat of invasion than that experienced by the British from nineteenth-century migration waves of Jews and Roma. Long accepted as a Gothic classic Stoker’s novel now also shapes contemporary British literature in the context of rewilding nature,

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immigration, and xenophobia. One contemporary British novel that peripherally draws on Stoker is Sarah Hall’s Wolf Border (2015). With its central idea of rewilding Britain with wolves, viewed by many as an act of trespassing and anachronism, the book explores topics such as non-human and human sanctuaries. Specifically, it examines the interface of biodiversity and cultural diversity, and the links between species politics and human politics, through the lens of immigration, Englishness, and Scottish independence. Underpinning all of this are issues of class and race. Wolf Border tells the story of Rachel Caine who returns to her native Cumbria from Idaho where she has studied the local wolves. Back in the UK, she has been put in charge of reintroducing the wolf to the vast estate of the ecologically minded Earl of Annerdale. Hundreds of years after the extermination of all wolves in England, this is the first attempt at rewilding the cultural landscape of England with a set of wolves imported from Romania. The reference to Romania recalls Stoker’s novel with its own wolf imagery within the context of Victorian fears of immigration. In the contemporary moment, the challenges involved in Rachel’s rewilding project in the Lake District reflect another identity in crisis. The project parallels recent attempts at rewilding the Scottish wilderness with wolves but also the reintroduction of wolves in Idaho, where it had a significant impact on the cultural self-understanding of the indigenous Nez Percé. Rachel is well aware of the indigeneity of wolves in Idaho, their belonging facing opposition from those who once displaced both native wolves and people. Like in Idaho, where ‘it’s not a good time to be a wolf’ (Hall 2015, 32), the presence of wolves in England causes a great deal of tension in this novel. In addition to its lakes and fells, Cumbria is a cultural landscape, and the idea of a full reintroduction is deemed as rather utopian. The image of the wolf considered out of place in this cultural landscape of Europe becomes an allegory for matters of class, race, belonging, immigration, and Euroscepticism, with traditional metaphors of the wolf competing with the attempt to strip them of all metaphorical abuse. Like other European nations that consider their landscapes as so-called Kulturlandschaften, Britain has a troubled history with wolves, although its early extermination of the animal has recently also been described as a unique success story. Books about nations thriving after they have lost all their wolves are rare, but in the English context such a theory does exist. In The Last Wolf: The Hidden Springs of Englishness (2017) Robert Winder analysed the effects of the complete annihilation of all wolves, specifically of Peter Corbett’s killing of the last wolf in 1290, on English identity, the

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economy, and migration. Winder’s central argument is that the early extermination of wolves led to Britain becoming a gigantic sheep farm, a country where sheep were happy and able to multiply, causing the nation’s great prosperity. On the other hand, for centuries this also divided Britain into what Benjamin Disraeli in his novel Sybil (1845) once called the two nations, rich and poor: ‘the terrific wealth that flowed from wool […] would eventually give England the flood of capital that allowed it to dominate first the British Isles and then an immense overseas empire’ (Winder 2017, 22). The advantage of course of keeping England wolf-free is that as part of an island it is a natural fortress with a persistent fear of invasion and trespassing that shows itself as much in a novel like Dracula as in fears of rabies and current anti-immigration phobias. Wool, Winder argues, is the founding father of British prosperity; it changed the British countryside and set Britain apart from its continental neighbours who were economically lagging far behind due to the persistent presence of wolves on the continent threatening livestock. To Winder natural history is a part of political science, British identity a product of its natural history, while ‘vast sheep ranges were inconceivable in Central Europe, thanks to the wolf’ (Winder 2017, 66). In Central Europe, the continuing presence of wolves led not only to fewer sheep but also to a different cultural identity with its ominous biopolitical scenarios, such as the persecution of women as witches thought to be riding wolves. In England, on the other hand, the absence of wolves went hand in hand with major changes to the landscape, and it had a massive impact on migration. The year 1290 marked the year in which not only the last wolf was killed but also when, following two-hundred years of Crusading and anti-Semitic riots in London, York, and Norwich, England’s entire Jewish population was deported after being ‘herded into ghettos, obliged to wear a cloth patch as a badge of their heritage, and taxed almost to the bone’ (Winder 2017, 38). The killing of the last wolf was a metaphor for matters of identity, for a new force that dominated England, that of Englishness. Two centuries of Norman and Angevin rule, thus Winder’s argument, had merged into a single national consciousness that considered Jews, Scots, and all other foreigners as different. Moreover, as land was turned into giant sheep pastures owned by only a few, such changes to the British landscape meant the end of feudalism, turning vast numbers of dispossessed people who had been working the land upon which they lived into destitute vagrants. Winder thus adds to rewilding activist George Monbiot’s central argument in his book Feral (2015) about the natural

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devastation of the land through sheep, and the social devastation through monoculture. These changes, however, also led to expulsion and immigration. The year 1290 not only marks the year of Jewish deportation but the new booming economy then over the centuries also triggered immigration, to wit that of foreign guest workers. Immigration was, according to Winder, thus also a direct consequence of the killing of the last wolf, as it created a prosperity with an urgent need for itinerant workers such as stone masons and weavers from the continent. England, he maintains, was built by immigrants, and this is linked to the disappearance of its wolves (Winder 2017, 125–26). In this context, a novel such as Sarah Hall’s Wolf Border, which suggests re-wolfing the island, is a rather provocative gesture that challenges current politics of isolationism and anti-immigration. While George Monbiot (2015, 90–120) has discussed the actual project of re-wolfing the UK, especially in Scotland, Hall’s Wolf Border explores this idea and its potential socio-political consequences on a fictional level. This idea of rewilding Britain is closely tied to the notion of the sanctuary as well as the delineation between civilisation and wilderness. The boundary between the UK’s well-controlled city and garden landscape and a wilderness both coveted and feared is expressed in Hall’s title. Derived from the Finnish concept of susiraja, ‘Wolf Border’ denotes the boundary between the capital region of Helsinki and the wilderness outside. The title, however, refers to the boundaries between several paradigms: between myth and fact, between medieval wilderness and the British Empire with its vast colonial extensions, between nature and culture, between wilderness and the city, the border between the less tamed landscape of Scotland and the garden landscape of its southern neighbour, the rift between the defenders and the opponents of the rewilding project. It corresponds to the ancient Greek perception of human ‘being’ to be found only within the polis (derived from pelein/to be), while all life outside the city was considered nuda vita, animal life. Hall’s title, however, also connects with Agamben’s mediaeval legal formula of the vargr y veum, the human wolf outside the community in need of a sanctuary. Agamben’s paradigm has become an ecological concept for the preservation of an endangered species in this novel as well as a cipher for the human search for sanctuaries away from political violence experienced at home and the racism of the host country in which anti-Europe stances merge with anti-immigration sentiments: ‘In the window of the farmhouse is an anti-Europe poster, left over from the by-­ election’ (Hall 2015, 396). The text is not directly referring to migration,

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but it voices the conditions and imaginaries that make it easier to welcome Romanian wolves than Romanian immigrants. Although Hall manages to wrest the wolf metaphor away from the demonising, orientalising aspects that it shows in Dracula’s invasion of Britain as wolf/rabid dog with a Jewish/Gypsy background, she exploits the traditional binary of wilderness and domestication/civilisation tied to Stoker’s wolf imagery. Specifically it is also her representation of Scottish independence in the context of the wildness of wolves and England as a colonising, domesticating force—rewilding as de-colonisation—that can be linked to Stoker’s wolves: the Count as untamed wolf from abroad and Bersicker, the London zoo wolf, whose crushed spirit briefly revives and is being rewilded as Dracula enters the country. Yet, in the contemporary British political climate the ecological discourse of rewilding in Hall’s book—that is, an increase of biodiversity through the introduction of new megafauna migrating into and within the country—needs to be understood also as a parallel to the discourse of human migration with its potential to increase cultural diversity. Bringing in wolves as a boost to the ecological diversity of Britain as a green desert implies maintaining a tradition of multiculturalism threatened now by rising nationalism, illustrated by Brexit. Rewilding, however, fails in this novel as it does in Schimmelpfennig’s book. Rachel ‘would like to believe there will be a place again where the street lights end and wilderness begins’ (Hall 2015, 234), yet like in many other parts of the world where wolves reappear the Cumbrian farmers are worried about their livestock, the parents about their children, and by many their reintroduction is perceived as invasion, as foreign intrusion, paralleling isolationist views of the immigration of people from the former colonies as the empire is striking back. As the wolves emerge from the depths of myth to reality they become a catalyst for the crisis of identity of a crumbling island nation whose last vestiges of empire threaten to break away. ‘They will divide the country,’ Rachel argues (Hall 2015, 146), and while they could mark a new beginning for the nation as it is being rewilded, much in the way in which Monbiot has seen it, re-wolfing Britain would also signify the end of empire, a vision of returning to pre-imperial mediaeval times before their extermination by King Edward I—Britain’s return to an unfettered wilderness, the wolves’ centuries-old ‘unbelonging reversed. Nothing of history will matter to them: land is land’ (Hall 2015, 248). As a metaphor for migration the wolves in Hall’s novel are thus closely linked to the

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discussion of indigeneity, colonialism, and who belongs within the nationstate. As Rachel and the Earl are trying to reverse the wolves’ ‘unbelonging’ they concede to the historical truth of the wolves being indigenous to Britain, a fact paralleled by the links between Native Americans and wolves and their shared belonging voiced at the beginning of the text. At the same time, as Isabel Armstrong (2022, 7) astutely points out, the Earl’s ‘comments, likening the wolves to “refugees seeking asylum in the newest European nation” (Hall 2015, 401) raises the spectre of the treatment of refugees throughout Europe and throws into doubt the purported welcome offered by Scotland.’ That being said, Sarah Hall’s wolves have a particular relationship with Scotland. As the more suited environment for them (cf. also Monbiot 2015, 116–19) their migration across the border into Scotland reflects a series of human qualities these animals are once again anthropocentrically associated with, such as wildness, ferocity, rebelliousness, and independence. Their metaphoric character, however, transcends the notion of wilderness, political freedom, and rebelliousness against empire, and also extends to social class. While they signify Scottish independence from a class that had once colonised Scotland, it is that class that also associates itself with the purported ‘nobility’ of the wolf, an apex predator as the private toy and joy of the ‘apex class, the financial raiders in charge’ (Hall 2015, 152). Derrida’s sovereign as wolf comes to mind (Derrida 2009) in the association of the Earl of Annerdale with the wolves, the territory they are being given is identical with the territory owned by the Earl.4 The wolves’ freedom is ambivalent. They are free to roam in a landscape that conveys the semblance of non-national wilderness, while at the same time their habitat is closely linked to the land ownership of one of the wealthiest members of society. The wolves are thus part of the hierarchy that constitutes the imperial polity of Britain, while paradoxically also representing a possibility for those colonised by that class to break away from Britain. At the same time, the anti-wolf league consisting of the lower and middle classes is as opposed to rewilding Britain with this ‘noble’ animal, as it is to the idea of porous borders open to immigration from abroad. In that sense, Sarah Hall’s novel Wolf Border voices concerns that are similar to those in Schimmelpfennig’s book. 4  Hall models the Earl of Annerdale on the Alladale Wilderness Reserve of Paul Lister, an Englishman who in 2003 bought up 23,000 acres northwest of Inverness specifically to bring wolves back to Scotland.

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As we have seen, it is helpful to keep the historicity of the wolf metaphor in mind in terms of European migration imaginaries. The metaphor appears in the context of forced migration, exile, and the search for a sanctuary as early as in the Greek myth of Lycaon. It is a biopolitical formula for the expulsion of criminals in the Middle Ages. It is then employed in the context of race and migration in the literature of the long nineteenth century the werewolf being constructed as a racial and bestial Other from a foreign country (Dracula), before Nazi Germany appropriates it for its imperialist propaganda. Contemporary visual art by Rainer Opolka and the literary narratives this chapter has discussed may indeed re-appropriate this historically blighted metaphor, but they do so for the purpose of resisting and destabilising the demonising and dehumanising agency it contains. The works I have discussed show us how fluid this biopolitically charged metaphor is. Opolka uses it with ironic distance by deliberately marking its political appropriation during the Third Reich and embedding the metaphor in a contemporary context of racism and xenophobia. In some contemporary literary works the wolf metaphor is then primarily being used to stand in for the migrants’ threshold experience in a liminal space regarding their perceived humanity and between a civic sanctuary and their abandonment in non-places (Blasim’s forest). Blasim’s The Truck to Berlin redefines the homo sacer as werewolf paradigm in the context of contemporary forced migration along the Balkan route, although the nineteenth-century trope of the werewolf as foreign Other with uncertain origins persists. By making a refugee shapeshift into a wolf who can only find a sanctuary in Europe’s wilderness Blasim, however, in similarity to Opolka, develops an ironic distance to traditional appropriations and demonisation of the wolf metaphor. While in Blasim’s short story the only possible sanctuary is the forest as the heart of darkness of Europe, Roland Schimmelpfennig, László Krasnahorkai, and Sarah Hall in their attention to ecological concerns strip the metaphor from its traditional mythification, but in the end they show us fragile sanctuaries for both humans and wolves. Their narratives display an ecocritical perspective that laments the extinction of wolves in certain regions of Europe and allegorically associates the subsequent loss of biodiversity with a paucity of cultural diversity. However, although these stories may end badly for the wolves involved reflecting major obstacles in attempts to rewild Europe, their flagging the possibility of rewilding/re-­ wolfing Europe in itself contains a dimension of hope, linking the idea of increased biodiversity metaphorically to a flourishing cultural diversity.

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References Agamben, Giorgio. 1995. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Armstrong, Isabel. 2022. Wolves as a Metaphor for the Colonial Other in Sarah Hall’s Wolf Border. Undergraduate paper under author’s supervision at Trinity College Dublin. Arnds, Peter. 2015. Lycanthropy in German Literature. London & New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2021. Wolves at the Door: Migration, Dehumanization, Rewilding the World. New York: Bloomsbury. Blasim, Hassan. 2009. The Madman of Freedom Square. Trans. Jonathan Wright. London: Comma Press. Cole, Lucinda. 2016. Imperfect Creatures. Vermin, Literature, and the Sciences of Life 1600–1740. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2008. The Animal that Therefore I Am. New York City: Fordham University Press. ———. 2009. The Beast and the Sovereign. Volumes 1 and 2. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Douglas, Mary. 2002 [1966]. Purity and Danger. An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. New York: Routledge. Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, Elena. 2022. Exploring the Psychosocial Impact of Cultural Interventions with Displaced People. In Refuge in a Moving World: Tracing Refugee and Migrant Journey across Disciplines, ed. Helen Chatterjee et  al., 323–346. London: UCL Press. Gupta, Prachi. 2017. Trump Calls Undocumented Immigrants ‘Animals’ Who ‘Slice’ and ‘Dice’ Beautiful Teen Girls. Jezebel: A Supposedly Feminist Website. July 26. Accessed 10 August 2020. https://theslot.jezebel.com/trump-­calls-­ undocumented-­immigrants-­animals-­who-­slice-­a-­1797260978. Hall, Sarah. 2015. The Wolf Border. London: Faber & Faber. Hemsley, Frances. 2021. Spectres of ‘Development’: Francophonie, Agricultural Coloniality and Genocide Memory in Scholastique Mukasonga’s La femme aux pieds nus and Inyenzi ou les cafards. Modern & Contemporary France 29 (2): 193–208. Hitler, Adolf. 1969. Mein Kampf. London: Hutchinson. Jones, Sam. 2015. UN Human Rights Chief Denounces Sun over Katie Hopkins ‘Cockroach’ Column. The Guardian, April 24. Accessed 12 April 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/global-­d evelopment/2015/apr/24/ katie-­hopkins-­cockroach-­migrants-­denounced-­united-­nations-­human-­rights-­ commissioner. Khair, Tabish. 2009. The Gothic, Postcolonialism, and Otherness. London: Palgrave. Krasnahorkai, László. 2015. The Last Wolf. London: Profile Books Ltd.

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Lappalainen, Kaisa. 2019. Recall of the Fairy-Tale Wolf: ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ in the Dialogic Tension of Contemporary Wolf Politics in the US West. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 26 (3): 744–767. Livingstone Smith, David. 2011. Less than Human, Why we Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Lopez, Barry. 2004. Of Wolves and Men. Scribner. Minca, Claudio. 2021. Of Werewolves, Jungles, and Refugees: More-than-Human Figures Along the Balkan Route. Geopolitics. Accessed 8 December 2021. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2021.1931840. Monbiot, George. 2015. Feral. Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Musolff, Andreas. 2015. Dehumanizing Metaphors in UK Immigrant Debates in Press and Online Media. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 3 (1): 41–56. O’Toole, Fintan. 2018. Trial Runs for Fascism are in Full Flow. The Irish Times, July 12. Accessed 10 March 2020. https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/ fintan-­o-­toole-­trial-­runs-­for-­fascism-­are-­in-­full-­flow-­1.3543375. Ovid. 2004. Metamorphoses. Translated and with Notes by Charles Martin. New York City: Norton. Pates, Rebecca, and Julia Leser. 2021. The Wolves are Coming Back. The Politics of Fear in Eastern Germany. Manchester University Press. Sakr, Rita. 2018. The More-Than-Human Refugee Journey: Hasan Blasim’s Short Stories. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 54 (6): 766–780. Schanzer, David. 2019. We Must Call the El Paso Shooting What It Is: Trump-­ Inspired Terrorism. The Guardian, August 5. Accessed 12 April 2022. https:// www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/05/trump-­i nspired­terrorism-­el-­paso. Schimmelpfennig, Roland. 2018. One Clear, Ice-Cold January Morning at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century. Trans. by Jamie Bulloch. London: Quercus. Sharkey, Terence. 1987. Jack the Ripper: One Hundred Years of Investigation. London: Ward Lock Limited. Stoker, Bram. 1993. Dracula. Oxford: Wordsworth. Vaughan-Williams, Nick. 2015. We Are Not Animals: Humanitarian Border Security and Zoopolitical Spaces in Europe. Political Geography 45: 1–10. Winder, Robert. 2017. The Last Wolf. The Hidden Springs of Englishness. London: Abacus. Zanger, Jules. 1991. A Sympathetic Vibration: Dracula and the Jews. English Literature in Translation 34 (1): 33–44.

CHAPTER 12

Remapping the Borderlands of Britain: The Calais ‘Jungle’ and the Enduring Legacy of Imperial Frontier Policing Béatrice Blanchet

Chapter This chapter investigates media representations of Europe’s shifting borderlands, against the backdrop of the so-called migrant crisis, a period of increased migrant arrival in the European Union from across the Mediterranean or overland in the 2010s. Our research analyses the renewed visibility of liminal spaces—associated with spatial practices of containment—that revive colonial representations of otherness in the contemporary period. Indeed, in the post-9/11 era, entrenched anxieties about foreign invasion and subversion have led to defensive responses through rebordering policies that conjure up colonial practices of othering.

B. Blanchet (*) Sciences and Humanities Confluence Research Center - UCLy, Lyon, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 F. Barclay, B. Ivey (eds.), Contemporary Representations of Forced Migration in Europe, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Human Rights, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47831-4_12

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Simultaneously defined as lines of separation and places of connection between territories, “borders” are territorially and metaphorically linked to liminal spaces of indeterminacy, the borderlands. Described as an “interstitial zone of displacement and deterritorialization that shapes the identity of the hybridized subject” (Gupta and Ferguson 1992, 18), borderlands have often been celebrated for their cultural creativity and syncretism. However, they are also frequently associated with abject spaces “in and through which increasingly distressed, displaced, and dispossessed peoples are condemned to the status of strangers, outsiders and aliens […] in various emerging frontiers, zones and camps around the world” (Isin and Rygiel 2007, 181). Indeed, borderlands stand at the edge of cities and countries “as a gathering of the powerless, the marginalised and politically contested” (van Houtum and van Naerssen 2002, 131) and they are often associated with ambiguity and illegality (van Schendel and Abraham 2005, 25). This contribution explores the imperial genealogies of the “Calais Jungle”, which can be traced back to the British mapping of a multilayered frontier between Afghanistan and the Indian Empire during the colonial period. The enduring potency of (post-) imperial bordering practices that entail both ordering and othering (van Houtum and van Naerssen 2002) is illustrated by the legacy of the contested Durand Line, carved out in 1893 to materialise the respective spheres of influence of British India (Britain’s imperial alter ego) and Afghanistan. Drawn on the basis of naturalised ethnic identities, the North-West Frontier contributed to the creation of a liminal space of exception expressed through the inscription of violence within law (Gregory 2017). In the early twenty-first century, such mnemonic as well as geographical connections between colonial borderlands and Britain’s contemporary borders are exemplified by the itinerary of Afghan migrants displaced by successive layers of imperial warfare from the so-called AfPak area to the Calais “Jungle”. The second part of our contribution analyses the apprehension of post-­ colonial borderlands as spaces of irreducible otherness epitomised by the Calais “Jungle”, in relation to contemporary debates about spaces of belonging and citizenship. During the recent British intervention in Afghanistan (2001–2014), the ambivalent media representations of Afghan native interpreters working for the military contributed to expose the inclusion of the British informal empire in the colonial present, namely through the lasting memory of past Anglo-Afghan wars (1839–1919). Debates on asylum rights denied to Afghan interpreters in the aftermath

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of contemporary British military involvement in Afghanistan underscore the currency of ideologically motivated criteria of inclusion intensified by the revival of insular exceptionalism.

Borderlands and Spaces of Exception: The “Calais Jungle” and the Reverberation of Imperial Spaces of Belonging The “Jungle”—a term used to describe various encampments in the Calais area since the turn of the millennium—emerged in the 1990s in the Northern French landscape. Its haunting presence at the edge of Britain collapsed the distance between the present and the past as well as between “home” and “away”, at a time when military interventions in the former British colonial sphere of influence revealed the “multiple temporalities and spatialities” of the “colonial present” (Gregory 2004, XV). The Calais Jungle originated from “three intersecting processes of infrastructure, law and military conflict” (Hicks and Mallet 2019, 4), namely the opening of the Channel Tunnel, the implementation of the Schengen Area and the arrival of refugees from the Kosovo and the Afghan wars. The setting of a refugee landscape in a hostile in-between environment challenged narratives of globalised freedom of movement in the post-Cold War era. Indeed, “debordering and rebordering is an ongoing dualism in contemporary European politics” (Yndigegn 2011, 47) and it sheds light upon paradoxical trends linked with globalisation and with the “return of borders” (Foucher 2016). While offshore bordering has extended the territoriality of the UK border zone to the European continent following Le Touquet Treaty (2003), states have created “extraterritorial locations that are neither entirely inside nor outside of sovereign territory, but that subject migrants to graduated degrees of statelessness by introducing ambiguity into their legal status” (Mountz 2010, 121). In the prophetic words of Étienne Balibar, “borders […] are no longer at the border, an institutionalised site that could be materialised on the ground and inscribed on the map, where one sovereignty ends and another begins” (Balibar 1998, 217–18). Expressed through juxtaposed border control, this disjunction between territoriality and national sovereignty entails the multiplication of ambiguous zones of indeterminacy characterised by exceptional legality. Around Calais, juxtaposed controls have consequently contributed to overlapping legal regimes in a territory patrolled by UK

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Border Agency Officers who were authorised to carry firearms, “in contrast to the national practice of the overwhelming majority of British law enforcement” (Bosworth 2016). Simultaneously, France was “enforcing a hostile environment very literally” (Hagan 2019, quoted by Timberlake 2019, 12) through destruction operations carried out by French police and gendarmes. The “Jungle” gained media currency in 2009 at a time when the French riot police dismantled a makeshift camp known as the “Pashto Jungle” and mostly occupied by Afghan migrants before dispersing its occupants (Howarth and Ibrahim 2015, 131). The Calais migrant camp juxtaposes British and French colonial histories, practices and imaginations associated with the encamping of undesirable populations. Indeed, it conflates French and British “colonial spatial regimes” (Martin et al. 2020) experienced in the British camps of the Boer War (Forth 2017) but also illustrated by the long-term French “national history of internment” (Bernardot 2008, 110) of “undesirable foreigners”. The liminality of the Jungle itself reverberates the obliterated memory of protected states, mandates or territories under British indirect rule, such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Sudan. From the nineteenth century, Afghanistan was within the sphere of influence of Britain, as part of its informal empire, but it was not indicated with colours in the official maps of the British Empire, unlike India coloured in pink and the protected states in yellow (Onley 2009, 51). In 2016, Afghans and Sudanese made up more than two-third of the total number of migrants in the Calais Jungle (Agier et al. 2018, 7). This has contributed to the troubling status of the people living in the Jungle, as insider-outsiders dwelling at the fringe of the former colonial metropolis. As regards borders and boundaries, “colonial spatialisations have an enduring legacy that continues to structure the ways in which we experience and think […] today” (Manchanda 2017, 386). In this respect, Afghanistan had its border drawn by colonial surveyors in the second-half of the nineteenth century, in order to secure the periphery of the British Raj. The border was associated to the crucial elaboration of imperial “ontological security” (Giddens 1991, 36), consequently defining identities and alterity (Bayly 2016, 122). Conjuring up images of threatening otherness and potential subversion, the borders of the British Raj were imbued with a “military and psychological significance”. In the words of Corinne Fowler, they were apprehended “as potential points of entry to (and exit from) the relative security of British India” (Fowler 2007, 26). During the colonial era, Afghanistan was metonymically associated with

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the frontier of the British Raj which defined the respective realms of irreducible barbarity and British civilisation (Fowler 2007, 28). Known as Yaghistan—alternatively translated as “land of the unruly” or “land of the free”—the frontier region between British India and Afghanistan was literally described as a no-Englishman land by Colonel Brazier Creagh who served in the Indian army and visited the area in 1893–1894: “it was a forbidden land, and no Englishman had ever been there before. […] It was impossible to go [inside]; and if you did your bones would be left there” (quoted by Haroon 2007, 30). In practice, the British established a multilayered “threefold frontier” “as a cordon sanitaire […] around India [,] to protect its northern and eastern borders from invasion” (Onley 2009, 44). The first frontier was a string of buffer states (such as the protectorates of Afghanistan and Nepal) which belonged to the British informal empire. Another frontier, at the edge of directly administered territory, enabled the colonial regime to impose its legal and political order. In between those frontiers was a zone of indirect rule in the so-called tribal areas. Based on a “state of exception” (Agamben 2005), its borderland was ruled by the Frontier Crime Regulations (FCR), a special legal structure introduced by colonial Britain and denying due process of trial. Abolished in 2018 only, the FCR aimed to deal with the allegedly unruly tribal populations living at the border regions between India (now Pakistan) and Afghanistan. Combining distance and interference, the Frontier Crime Regulations illustrate the ambivalence and ambiguity that characterised imperial interaction with Afghanistan. As a matter of fact, these insidious legal regimes originated from the Raj’s decisions “to exclude the frontier and its residents from the empire proper while simultaneously staking out its claim on the territory and citizens” (Manchanda 2020, 84). Integral to the colonial mapping of Afghanistan, they have reinformed the “violent geographies” (Gregory and Pred 2007) still prevailing today in the AfPak area, the Afghanistan-­ Pakistan borderland. From 1919—when the British air force started bombing the tribal areas in Waziristan and the North-West Frontier—to the present-day use of armed drones by the American army in order to quell rebellion in “lawless” territories, (post-) imperial frontier policing has “exposed the targeted population to particular forms of confinement, bombardment and physical force as it aimed, alternately, to deter and to persuade subjects in order to maintain control” (Tahir 2017, 220). The British media across the political spectrum alternatively depict the migrants as “villains” or “victims”, consequently depriving “the audience

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of a complex or nuanced understanding of migration issues” (Crawley et al. 2016, 5). In the words of Ewa Połońska-Kimunguyi, migrants voices are largely missing and “[…] most news coverage paints ‘migrants’ or ‘refugees’ as silent […], not regarded as fully human with voice, capacity, or agency” (Połońska-Kimunguyi 2022, 5). This media framing also entails the decontextualisation of the migrant plight, whose prevailing root causes—such as successive wars with Western collusion—are obliterated. Perceived as frozen in an atemporal frame or in a remote time, contextual and relational identities are therefore naturalised (Blanchet 2019, 111), reflecting “the complete disavowal of complicity that has characterised imperial policy and strategy. […]” (Manchanda 2020, 3). As noted by Charles Tripp on the brink of the Iraq War, “History, as ever, has been here before” (Tripp 2003). The discursive construction of the “migrant crisis” by the British media strongly relies upon the performative use of connoted images such as emotionally charged metaphors of water, tides, waves and floods (Gabrielatos and Baker 2008, 22). Evoking an unstoppable natural phenomenon, these pervasive aquatic metaphors tend to reinforce “a recurring stereotype of refugees as potentially threatening, uncontrollable agents” (Azevedo et al. 2021, 2). Indeed, “natural events are not directly caused by us; they are a threat that is difficult to control. […] We must somehow defend ourselves against it; and of course they happen naturally. […] In order to prepare for this inevitable threat, ‘we’ must incorporate measures that will keep this danger as far away as possible” (Silveira 2016, 6). The use of depersonalising metaphors at the gates of “Fortress Europe” similarly serves to legitimate policies of restriction and confinement while denying agency and dignity to migrants, in the face of potentially deadly sea crossings and perilous dwelling in encampments. Against the backdrop of (post)-imperial containment practices and associated racialised prejudice, the Calais narrative is frequently framed through war-related terms such as “invasion” (Suffee 2015) as well as dehumanising animal metaphors. In July 2015, PM David Cameron was criticised for describing migrants seeking to reach Britain as “a swarm of people coming across the Mediterranean, seeking a better life, wanting to come to Britain. […]” (Anon. 2015). Cameron’s description of the Calais migrants echoed the use of the highly connoted verb “swamped” by Home Secretary David Blunkett to describe child migrants in  local schools (Anon. 2002). According to Gerald V. O’Brien, “writings that depict marginalised groups as less than human or a threat to society constitute an important and

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possibly essential precursor to inhumane or adverse social policies” (O’Brien 2003, 44). The exoticisation and animalisation of migrants tend to obliterate debates on human rights and no-rights zones on the territory and under the jurisdiction of nations that promote the rule of law at home and abroad. Conjuring up a wild untamed environment inherent to the state of nature, the spatial metaphor of the “Jungle” reinforces the divide between mere biological life (bare life) and qualified life associated with citizenship (Agamben 1998). The metaphorisation of the migrants’ subjective experience through a connoted term associated with chaos and violence shows the performative power of naming—also illustrated by the term “migration crisis” in the contemporary period. The wide currency of the “Jungle” spatial metaphor in French and in English is testament to the colonial imaginings and genealogies at work across cultures. In fact, the term designates in French a “marshy plain of India covered by thick and exuberant vegetation, where the wild beasts live”1 (TLFi n.d.). As reminded by Haydée Sabéran, “Jungle” is based on an initial misunderstanding by the French volunteers working among migrants of the word djanghal, meaning “forest” in Pashto and in Dari, the languages spoken by Afghan migrants sleeping in the woods: “This word doesn’t originate from migrants, but from volunteers who adopted it because it made them shiver. […] Without quotation marks, the word transforms the migrants who live there into wild animals”2 (Sabéran 2012, 18). Contributing to the fear and anxiety experienced in the presence of an animalised other, djanghal possesses multiple layers of meanings as a term in perpetual transit. Indeed, the word has been previously used by Afghans exiles to describe their experience of loss and destitution in Pakistan in the 1970s, “before being picked up and spread by Afghans themselves to name the places of refuge along the roadsides of their exile”3 (Agier 2016, 53). During the Soviet-Afghan war (1979–1989), millions of Afghan refugees fleeing the communist regime had settled in Pakistani camps, mostly in the North-­West Frontier Province and in the Federally Administered Tribal 1  “Plaine marécageuse de l’Inde couverte d’une végétation épaisse et exubérante, où vivent les grands fauves.” Translations are my own unless otherwise stated. 2  “Ce mot ne vient pas des migrants, mais des bénévoles qui l’ont adopté parce qu’il les faisait frémir. […] Sans guillemets le mot transforme les migrants qui y vivent en bêtes fauves.” 3  “avant d’être repris et diffusé par les Afghans eux-mêmes pour nommer les lieux de refuge sur les bords de route de leur exil.”

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Areas (FATA), two provinces created by the British administration in the early twentieth century. The term “Jungle” also evokes the memory of the British colonial rule in India through intertextual references to Kipling’s Jungle Book (1894). Among Iranian migrants, the trans-generational memory of the “Jangal Movement” (1915–1921), a revolt against landowners and elites accused of corruption and collusion with the British, adds other layers of meanings as it refers to marginalisation and revolt in the former British sphere of influence. Although the subsequent resemantisation of djanghal has distorted and resignified this word so as to translate “the unnamable” (Agier et  al. 2018, 9), the “Jungle” appears as a territorial space combining refuge, loss and resistance at the junction of multicultural characterisations. The actual invisibility of the disenfranchised migrants living in legal limbo contrasts with their perceived cross-boundary ubiquity as well as their strong bodily presence through media coverage. In the British popular press, the visuality of the Jungle—that is the production of culturally oriented meanings through image—involved pictures of crowds climbing on the back of lorries. Images of anonymous migrants entering the backdoor of lorries echo “the common metaphor employed within ‘migrant’ discourse, which depicts illegal migrants as entering Britain through the back door” (Silveira 2016, 9). Mediated images of migrants attempting to cross the Channel fuse “the otherness of the stranger with the otherness of the deviant” (Banks 2012, 293). Combining a denotative meaning with a connotative message that conceals the presence of ideology (Barthes 1977) newspaper photographs are endowed with power. The criminalisation of migrants by media discourses as well as through political speeches is reinforced by photographs of groups of anonymous strangers, mostly males, often dressed in black or wearing hoodies (Banks 2012, 304). Indeed, in recent years, photos of young males wearing hooded tops have become visual shorthands for urban menace and the breakdown of society (Garner 2009). In the popular press, migrants entering British territory are frequently portrayed as “faceless figures, anonymous, an undifferentiated mass” (Silveira 2016, 9), which strengthens the metaphor of deceptive intrusion into Britain. Associated with unruliness, criminality and imputed violence, these images ultimately accentuate representations of “the refugee camp as a violent and dissonant space in civilised Europe” (Ibrahim and Howarth 2016, 1). All this contributes to the production of the migrant camp as “a

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piece of land placed outside the normal juridical order, but it is nevertheless not simply an external space” (Agamben 1998, 170). Similar to the Möbius strip, the camp entails the exclusion of those captured inside, as a form of inclusive exclusion, through a topological zone of indistinction. In the camp, according to Derek Gregory, “the ‘external’ and the ‘internal’ are articulated not to erase the ‘outside’ but to produce it as the serial spacing of the exception, forever inscribing exclusion through inclusion” (Gregory 2004, 258). Apprehended as “a cartographic practice and as a form of narrative” (Tazzioli 2015, 1), the rebordering of Europe consequently reveals a “cartographic anxiety” (Gregory 1994, 70) generated by the disjunction between the representation of geographical territories and “the elusiveness of migrants’ geography” (Tazzioli 2015, 14). As we will see, the connection between imperial bordering in Afghanistan and the “Jungle” continues to reverberate today through ongoing military interventions in Britain’s former informal empire (Iraq, Afghanistan) which result in the displacement of refugees, some of whom are blocked by the British border in Calais. At the confines of sovereign states, borderlands have often been described as a third space, “the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the in-between space” (Bhabha 1994, 38) that subverts binary divisions between exclusive identities and irreducible alterity. However, as shown by debates surrounding the asylum demands made by Afghan interpreters who are caught between conflicting loyalties, there is no such thing as intermediary spaces of belonging and dwelling. Liminal in-betweenness is indeed frequently associated with a (transient) phase of uncertainty and it conjures up the danger and contagion imputed to “threshold people” whose attributes, in the words of Victor Turner “are necessarily ambiguous, since […] liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention and ceremonial” (Turner 1969, 95). In this respect, the native interpreter who subverts linguistic as well as geographical borders is frequently regarded as a defector. In the context of the recent British intervention in Afghanistan (2001–2014) dominated by the post-9/11 security agenda, the classical paronomasia “traduttore, traditore” (“translator, traitor”) has acquired further resonance. Ambivalent representations of Afghan native interpreters reveal the enduring legacy of colonial characterisations of otherness that were and remain associated with the borderlands.

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At the Borderland, Figures of the Intimate Stranger and Celebrations of Britishness The “migrant crisis” has become the focus of media discourses as well as the subject of debates outlining the (precarious) borders of Britain during the Afghanistan war (2001–2014), a conflict dominated by the “clash of civilizations” rhetoric. While the “safe zones” and the “wild zones” seemed to collide in the sky above New  York on September 11, 2001 (Urry 2002, 64), the “war on terror” revived connections with colonial temporalities and spaces situated within the former British sphere of influence, in Mesopotamia (Iraq) and in Afghanistan (Gregory 2004). In December 2001, the United Nations authorised the creation of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), a NATO-led coalition of nations including the United Kingdom, whose purpose was to assist Afghanistan in rebuilding government institutions while fighting the Taliban insurgency. In April 2006, British forces deployed to the Helmand Province, in South-West Afghanistan, as part of NATO’s widening mission in the country. Describing the spectacularisation of the ongoing military campaign— illustrated by the ritualisation of casualty announcement as the opening sequence of British TV news broadcasts—Anthony King noted that “Helmand has become an intense subject of public fascination and concern” (King 2010, 2). The discursive leitmotivs accompanying the contemporary British intervention in Afghanistan reveal the pervasive presence of past colonial conflicts, filtered through the selective amnesia of the British Empire whose “unsettling history was diminished, denied, and then, if possible, actively forgotten” in its aftermath (Gilroy 2004, 98). Indeed, following 9/11, “the West [was] fighting a phantom” (Mair 2010, 4) in the form of elusive Afghan guerrilla warriors but also under the shadow of past colonial wars marked by British defeats. From 1839 to 1919, Afghanistan was the site of three Anglo-Afghan wars, in the context of imperial rivalries initiated by Russian expansionism towards warm water ports. Aiming to place a conciliatory ruler on the Afghan throne, the first Anglo-Afghan conflict (1839–1842) involved a guerrilla war and had a disastrous epilogue, the Gandamak Massacre (January 1842) when frostbitten British and Indian forces were killed along with their civilian followers. According to Corinne Fowler (2007, 26), the First Anglo-Afghan War highlighted “the military and psychological significance of Afghan borders, especially the North–West Frontier, as potential points of entry to

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(and exit from) the relative security of British India. […] The North–West Frontier and, by extension, Afghanistan, were envisaged as uncolonisable spaces and ever–present reminders of the limit to British authority and influence.” As a result of the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878–1880) fought between the British Raj and the Emirate of Afghanistan, the British gained control of Afghanistan’s foreign policy. But this diplomatic achievement is overshadowed by the British defeat at the Battle of Maiwand (July 1880) when the young Malala of Maiwand—known today as “the Afghan Joan of Arc”—is said to have rallied local fighters in the Kandahar Province bordering Helmand. The Third Anglo-Afghan War (1919) began after Afghan troops had crossed the North–West frontier to invade India, and it reactivated entrenched anxieties related to the crossing of boundaries between Afghanistan and India, Britain’s alter ego. In the contemporary period, the resilience of the archetypal figure of warlike Afghans living in a state of “mediaeval” barbarism has been instrumental in legitimising the intervention of Western powers (Blanchet 2016, 149). These references to a seemingly timeless Afghanistan operate semantic translations which obliterate past British interferences, from the recruitment of Pashtuns by the British Indian Army—on the basis of their affiliation to “martial races”—to the Western military support to the anti-­ Soviet Afghan mujahideen during the Cold War. More recently, media accounts of battles fought in October–November 2001 against “Afghan warlords” in the context of Operation Enduring Freedom conjured up romanticised visions of warriors on horseback as well as orientalist archetypes essentialising Afghan violence (Stanski 2009, 73). This contradictory characterisation is a leitmotiv in these media accounts that reverberate past colonial collusion with Afghan warlords in ways that are shot through with fascination but also terror in the face of Afghan otherness. The imperial imagination associated with the Pashtuns, alternatively described as duplicitous allies and fierce enemies, permeates the narratives accompanying the recent British intervention in Afghanistan (2001–2014). In the Victorian era, scientific typologies opposed the Nepalese Gurkhas praised for their loyalty to the Pashtuns considered as being prone to duplicity: “In official reports [the Pashtuns] are alternately seen as courageous and honest or as bandits and traitors” (Lindholm 1980, 350). In the contemporary period, the imperial imagination associated with the Pashtuns, regarded as allies or enemies, still affects the ambivalent perception of Afghan interpreters (Blanchet 2016), insider-outsiders living at the intersection of civilian and military life, whose presence and duties reveal

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the weaponisation of language in wartime (Rafael 2012). In the British military manuals, local interpreters are described as a remedy against a potential lack of communication but also as an insidious poison comparable to the Platonician Pharmakon (Derrida 1972, 150): “Inevitably, the prime means to communicate will be through interpreters. […] There are many issues concerning the use of contracted interpreters—language skills and their ability to convey the right message, impartiality, motivation, and trustworthiness” (MoD 2009, 3–13). As reminded by Vicente Rafael, “[t]hough regarded as essential, the presence of interpreters is also a source of great unease among the troops. They are seen by soldiers to be Janus-faced: indispensable aides as much as they are potential spies” (Rafael 2012, 64). Frequently invisibilised from the ISAF narrative, Afghan interpreters have frequently been replaced in the theatre of military operations by members of a third nation such as Iran, who combine the knowledge of Farsi—a language close to Dari—and non-Afghanity. In fact, the native interpreter is frequently perceived as a defector who subverts ideological and linguistic borders, as well as a “polyglot foreigner whose uncertain allegiance and rootless existence make it into a dangerous enemy” (Rafael 2009, 11). The use of native interpreters in wartime reveals their status as insider-outsiders, feared as potential traitors or transtraitors (Beebee 2010) but also temporarily regarded as subordinate alter egos of the Western soldier, due to the widely held “belief in the mimetic capacity of translation” (Rafael 2012, 66). Professional and scholarly discourses are frequently pervaded by a romanticised perception of translators and interpreters, described as cross-cultural intermediaries and ideally characterised by invisibility (Venuti 1995). But, in practice, the process of interpretation predominantly takes place in “danger zones” (Tesseur 2019), and more generally in “contact zones” where subjectivities disrupted by warfare as much as “cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in context of highly asymmetrical relations of power” (Pratt 1991, 34). In the words of Eduardo Kahane, “The violence of neutrality […] is not the violence of denying interpreters the vacant and neutral spaces between discourses—as they do not exist—but the violence of denying them any space at all” (Kahane 2007). Local interpreters are defined through the “state of exception” perpetuated by “the legal complexity of the status of conflict zone interpreters” (Moser-Mercer 2015, 306). The contingent nature of their position is subsequently “exposed […] in their lack of right to protection and asylum once they relinquish the interpreter

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role” (Inghilleri 2010, 179). Following the British military interventions in Iraq and in Afghanistan (2001–2014), debates about political asylum granted to interpreters reveal the importance attached to the figure of war heroes shedding blood for Queen and Country, predominantly associated with whiteness (Ware 2010). Such heroes may include, under exceptional circumstances, “deserving migrants” entitled to citizenship due to long-­ time military involvement. The existence of multiple delineations between British citizenry and former British (semi-) colonised subjects (Manchanda 2020, 14) outlines the ideologically motivated criteria that designate outsiderdom and belonging. This provides further evidence of the long shadows of colonial history and warfare, as epitomised by the contrasted yet equally tumultuous fates of Gurkha soldiers demanding residency and of Pashtun interpreters seeking asylum in Britain. In recent years, debates on the admission of Gurkha soldiers and Afghan interpreters to Britain have been permeated with pervasive representations associated with past “military constructs of indigenous culture” (Barkawi 2017, 19). In the imperial age, Gurkhas―who originally hail from Nepal and have been recruited into the British army since the colonial era―and Afghan Pashtuns had an “ambiguous status […] inescapably hybrid”: classified as representatives of so-­ called martial races by the British rulers of India, they were “imagined as quintessentially other and yet, equally, as loyal, brave and dependable” (Rand 2006, 14–15). The legal limbo experienced by Gurkhas soldiers and Pashtun interpreters in the aftermath of recent military conflicts still echoes their unsettled position across cultures and allegiances, as allies and collaborators of the (former) imperial powers. Following a long campaign that emerged in the 1990s, the House of Commons voted to allow the Gurkha soldiers to equal pensions, settlement and citizenship rights in 2009. The long history of “elision and neglect” (Mairs 2021) experienced by Afghan interpreters for the British forces was perpetuated following the Taliban takeover of Kabul in August 2021, when many interpreters were blocked and ignored by the Home Office “on security grounds”. The denial of asylum rights to Afghan interpreters who occupy an in-between position as native civilians embedded with foreign troops has deep historical roots. There has been a continuous obliteration of their role by British accounts since the time of the First Anglo-Afghan War (1839–1842) and therefore “it is not just foreign invasion and defeat in Afghanistan which is a historical constant: it is the ill-treatment of interpreters” (Mairs 2021).

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Following 9/11, in a context dominated by NATO bombings in the Afghan borderlands, Pakistan implemented a so-called voluntary repatriation of 4 million Afghans living along the border. “Oblivious to the paradox in the ‘host who kills’” (Khan 2021, 3), 700 Afghans applied for asylum monthly in Britain in 2002, many Afghan refugees in Calais seeking to join the Afghan diaspora in Britain during the so-called Fourth Anglo-Afghan war (2001–2014). During Britain’s involvement in Afghanistan, about 3500 locally employed civilians fulfilled the role of interpreter and served the British military. While many Iraqi interpreters who had worked for the British army were granted political asylum in 2007, their Afghan counterparts did not benefit from this protection and some were sent back to Afghanistan after court decisions (Farmer 2016). Following the withdrawal of the majority of British troops in October 2014, the Home Office policy deemed that it was “generally safe to send these interpreters back to certain areas of Afghanistan such as Kabul” (Taylor 2016). While there had been a broad consensus that Britain owed a “debt of gratitude” to the Afghan interpreters, their resettlement in the United Kingdom has frequently been treated “as a matter of last resort” (House of Commons 2018, 3). The Afghan government has actually been instrumental in shaping the boundaries of the relocation schemes, invoking a potential “brain drain” of some of Afghanistan’s brightest (House of Commons 2018, 20). Despite the widespread public outcry at the treatment of Afghans associated with the UK during the fall of Kabul, in December 2021, the eligibility to the Afghan Relocations and Assistance policy (ARAP), launched a few months earlier to relocate current or former employees of the UK facing intimidation or threat, was narrowed, at a time when the Home Office announced plans to tag and curfew migrants who come to Britain via so-called irregular routes (Sparrow 2021). Conjuring up immemorial images of potentially invasive Afghan others in spite of their seemingly humanitarian concerns, relocation schemes define the desirable characteristics of “deserving migrants”, in contrast with their criminalised counterparts reaching the British shores outside of legal ports of entry. Narratives of cross-boundary subversion have proliferated in the early twenty-first century and are associated with the globalised so-called war against terror. Regarded as a potential bridge for invasion, the frontier has remained “a site of anxiety, of potential harm, of barbarians who could be marching towards the gates” (Ahmed 2011, 60). However, such

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narratives also occurred at a time when debates on the ongoing UK debordering process were closely linked with a defence of “Britishness”, perceived to be under threat due to Europeanisation, devolution and multiculturalism (Cruse 2008, 4–5). In the contemporary period, the discursive celebration of British insular exceptionalism constitutes a response to the attested existence of liminal spaces of belonging (Blanchet 2019, 116). These spaces are epitomised by the figures of insider-outsiders such as exiles and native interpreters from Afghanistan seeking asylum in the UK.  Combining proximity and distance, the migrants of the Calais “Jungle” embody the complex and paradoxical figure of the stranger described by Georg Simmel: “In the case of the stranger, the union of closeness and remoteness involved in every human relationship is patterned in a way that may be succinctly formulated as follows: the distance within this relation indicates that one who is close by is remote, but his strangeness indicates that one who is remote is near” (Simmel 1971 [1908], 143–144).

Conclusion This chapter has investigated the imperial genealogies incorporated in the spatial practices of encampment containing migrants in the borderlands of “Fortress Europe” and deposited in the contemporary characterisations of the Afghan other. The mapping of borders is an act of empire that reinforces the imaginative geographies separating home and away, “this universal practice of designating in one’s mind a familiar space which is ‘ours’, and an unfamiliar space beyond ‘ours’ which is ‘theirs’” (Said 1978, 54). While borders institutionalise and naturalise identities, they are also dialectically related to borderlands and confines, apprehended as territories of a perilous liminality. The apprehension of borderlands as spaces of disjunction rather than as transition zones has been influenced by the enduring representations of rebellious territories at the edge of the British Empire. Indeed, representations of the Afghan migrants elaborated by the mainstream British media conjure up memories of colonial bordering exemplified by the multilayered Durand Line between Afghanistan and the Raj (today’s Pakistan) since the late nineteenth century. Imbued with orientalist anxieties, the discursive framing of the Afghans combines fear and fascination, echoing the colonial depiction of (semi-)colonised territories perceived as irreducibly other and, yet, strangely familiar.

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The perception of a “migrant crisis” gained momentum as well as public attention in the wake of the geopolitical upheavals brought about by Western interventions in former territories of the British informal empire (Iraq, Afghanistan). As evidenced by the “violent geographies” (Gregory and Pred 2007) of new imperial warfare that have intensified migrant confinement in the borderlands of Europe, Western military undertakings have revealed the time-space compression situated at the core of our “colonial present” (Gregory 2004). The tumultuous journey of Afghan migrants to Europe consequently conjures up a mnemonic as well as a geopolitical connection between their native lands and the confines of Britain, as exemplified by the itinerary of Afghan migrants experiencing displacement and confinement from the so-called AfPak area to the Calais “Jungle”. The memorial legacy of imperial borderlands epitomised by the Afghan North-West Frontier contributes to the perception of migrants as a threat to Western security and integrity, through fictionalised and mediatised narratives of national sovereignty and identity. Migrants are situated geographically and metaphorically in-between spaces of belonging, whether in a flux of movement or through the containment of a refugee camp. In the words of Henk van Houtum and Ton van Naerssen, the making of a place through spatialisation rests upon a paradox: “Bordering rejects as well as erects othering. This paradoxical character of bordering processes whereby borders are erected to erase territorial ambiguity and ambivalent identities in order to shape a unique and cohesive order, but thereby create new or reproduce latently existing differences in space and identity—is of much importance in understanding our daily contemporary practices” (van Houtum and van Naerssen 2002, 126). (Re) bordering “brings distance in proximity” (Arbaret-Schulz 2002), a process that involves, in the case of Afghan migrants, a “grammar of difference” (Cooper and Stoler 1997, 3) entailing segregation. Contemporary depictions of the “Calais Jungle” in the British media and political discourses consequently bring to light the imagined geographies of overseas territories that conjure up orientalised otherness as well as long-obliterated memories of past encounters in “contact zones” (Pratt 1991). In the context of the post-9/11 security agenda, the wartime interaction of the occupying troops with native interpreters in Afghanistan reverberates the liminal identities at the core of the British informal empire epitomised by figures of insider-outsiders such as native interpreters.

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Indeed, across linguistic, cultural and ideological borders, interpreters are frequently perceived as embodying a perilous hybridity, torn in between allegiance to the military and potential insurgency. Contemporary debates on asylum rights denied to Afghan native interpreters ultimately reveal the ubiquitous presence of multilayered spaces that classify individuals as undesirable or qualified to move across boundaries on the grounds of naturalised—yet ideologically motivated—criteria following a war. As illustrated by the fates of native interpreters seeking shelter following the recent Afghanistan war (2001–2014), debates on asylum rights are shaped by representations of imputed lawlessness and alleged duplicity, denying the responsibility and interference of the former colonial powers in the so-called migrant crisis. Post-colonial geographies of belonging “do not easily fit with well-­ worn binary models of here and there, home and abroad” (Polezzi 2006, 158). They are visibilised through ubiquitous liminal territories—such as the Calais refugee camp—that illustrate the enduring connection between the borderlands of the British Empire and the gates of contemporary Europe, providing reflective opportunities to “track the tangibilities of empire as effective histories of the present” (Stoler 2013, 29).

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Index

A Acting, 38 Aesthetic of injury, 59–61, 71, 77 Afghan interpreters, 297–300 Agamben, Georgio, 265, 291 Ai Weiwei, 16–17, 195, 214 Anglo-Afghan wars, 296, 297 B Biopolitics, 168, 169, 181, 182, 187 Blasim, Hassan, 266, 270, 271 B/ordering, 88, 92 Borderlands, 287–291, 295 Breitz, Candice, 204–212 Büchel, Christoph, 212–215 Bureaucratic performance, 60, 66, 67 C Calais Jungle, 288–290, 293, 294 Camps, 33, 47, 81, 85, 89–91, 94, 95, 97, 101–105, 117–121, 294

Carceral witnessing, 138, 142, 152–153, 155 Catharsis, 195, 197, 213, 215 City of Sanctuary, 240 The Claim, 17–19 Colonial mimicry, 205–212 Colonial spatial regimes, 290 Compassion, 171–174 D Deleuze, Gilles, 203, 204 Denizenship, 228–231 Depersonalising metaphors, 292–294 Detained Voices, 140–142, 145–151, 153, 155–157 Detention, 16, 83, 89, 100, 113–132 Detention centres, 125–127 Documentary, 241–243 Dracula, 276, 277 Drivas, George, 197–204

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 F. Barclay, B. Ivey (eds.), Contemporary Representations of Forced Migration in Europe, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Human Rights, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47831-4

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312 

INDEX

E Ecopolitics, 266 Empire, 11 Ethnography, 55, 211 autoethnography, 83 Eurocentrism, 7 Exodus–Our Journey to Europe, 245–251 F Fascism, 264, 270 Forum theatre, 129–130 France, 120, 121 G Genre, 195, 241–243 Greece, 114–117 Grief, 181, 184 H Hall, Sarah, 277–278, 280–282 Hostipitality, 5 Hotel detention, 122 Humanisation, 15 Human rights, 8, 104, 193, 194 Hunger strikes, 144 I Imperative to tell, 58–59, 61, 66, 68, 71, 77 Imperialism, 6 Indefinite detention, 118, 137 Infrastructures, 152–153 Integration, 127, 128 J Juxtaposed border control, 289

K Kindertransport, 253–257 Krasnahorkai, László, 271–273 L Labelling, 124, 125, 130 Liberal democracy, 8, 9, 19 Liberal humanism, 5, 15 Listening, 145–150 M Margins, 139 Media coverage, 114 Modern slavery and human trafficking, 167–168, 178 Modisakeng, Mohau, 204–212 Myth, 196–200 N Narrative authority, 234–235 New Scots, 69 No Friend But the Mountains, 83–84 North–West Frontier, 288, 291, 293, 296, 297 O Objectification, 242–244, 248–251, 258–260 Opolka, Rainer, 268–270 The Other Side of Hope, 221, 223–233, 235 P Parliamentary debate, 242, 251 Participatory arts, 57 Participatory arts-co-writing, 82 Polyphonic writing, 82–87, 94, 99, 101

 INDEX 

Popular press, 294 Power imbalances, 150 Prosthetic memory, 244, 248 Psychology, 45, 50 R Refugee body, 196, 212–214 Refugee collaboration, 41 Refugee narratives, 13–14 Refugees as endearing, 56, 57, 60–61 Refugee Tales, 84, 100, 104–105 Refugee writing, 87 Regime and refuge, 6, 9–10 Rwandan asylum centres, 88 S Sanctuary, 265 Schimmelpfennig, Roland, 271–274 Scotland, 40 Solidarity, 114, 117, 119–121, 124, 126 Solidarity infrastructures, 135, 139, 155–158 Syria, 12, 31–51 T Testimonies, 136–138, 140, 142, 145–149, 151, 154, 156

313

Theatre, 33, 34, 37, 38, 43, 45, 48, 50, 54, 56, 58, 67 audiences, 36, 43 as therapeutic, 58 Translation, 95 Trauma, 45, 50 U UK Houses of Parliament, 252 UK Nationality and Borders Act, 167 Ukraine, 2, 3, 5 UNHCR, 87–88, 90, 194, 219–221 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), 113, 119, 194 V Vermination, 264–265 W Welcome-unwelcome dialectic, 66 Whiteness, 209–210 Wolves, 265–270, 275–282 Y Yarl’s Wood, 137, 140–142, 144–147, 150, 154 Years and Years, 1–4