The ending of ‘The Detainee’s Tale’, told to Ali Smith, stopped me right in my tracks:
But when I came to this place, when I came to your country, you say.
I sit forward. I’m listening.
You shake your head.
I thought you would help me (p. 62).¹
This ‘moment of anger’ (p. 62) rehearses much that is at stake in the rest of the Refugee Tales. There is, firstly, the relationship between interlocuter and teller: Smith is the author-narrator, but it is the detainee’s voice which is both heard in and drives the narrative. ‘[L]istening’, Smith seemingly models instead the reader the volume intends to fashion, who will listen to these marginalised and silenced voices. One might also notice that the narration is in present tense, ‘because it is all still happening’ (p. 50), Smith establishes early on. These stories do not end, not for the individual concerned, not for our world. Finally, the detainee’s harrowing conclusion, ‘I thought you would help me’, reminds us that beyond listening, beyond reading, beyond sharing stories, there is still heartbreakingly too much we need to do, and too little we have done.
The Refugee Tales project manifests in twofold ways, text and action. Every year, writers interview and collaborate with (present or former) detainees, asylum seekers, refugees, lawyers, social workers, and more to write a tale raising awareness towards the UK’s inhumane refugee policies and practices. (Gradually in later volumes, certain refugees have also written their own tales.) These tales will then be disseminated in a number of ways: published in newspapers such as the Guardian, recorded online, collected in a Refugee Tales volume, and most importantly, told during the annual Walk. The Walk, the other side of the project, consists of the very same people who work on the tales, plus politicians and other well-intentioned supporters; they journey along politically charged sites, such as detention centres, and in the words of Helen Barr, reclaim English space for refugees and ‘show in all its horror what indefinite detention means’.² Through the project, then, ‘[o]ut of the silence that barricades a detainee in time and space, a story is told and shared. It is heard on the move; it is read in a book’.³
My focus today is on the first volume of the now four-volume series. It is, of course, fitting to write my first review for Stravaig on the tales of those who have been misplaced, wandering, journeying. But my purpose is not just to respond to the thematic constraints of my blog. To me, the Refugee Tales purports to use its symbolic value to make a real, socio-political change, an ‘act of welcome’ (‘Prologue’ p. v) in the sense of a speech-act aiming to make the United Kingdom a welcoming space for refugees. To dive into its workings, then, is hopefully to contribute to this change-making process, however small the contribution might be. So join me as we ‘Listen to this story’ (‘Prologue’ p. x).
The editors and writers of the Tales are very forward about their use of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales as inspiration. Among the many engagements with Chaucer’s magnum opus (of which this review can only focus on one), it is immediately noticeable that the title of the volume and the individual tales are modelled after Chaucer’s work: the subject of each tale is identified not by their name, but by a generalised classification. Now, Jill Mann’s classic argument that Chaucer’s taletellers are social types rather than fully rounded persons is well known to Chaucerians, but this does not seem to be what the Refugee Tales is alluding to. On one level, the persons involved simply can’t be named ‘in the interests of security’ (‘The Appellant’s Tale’ p. 69). On a more symbolic level, moreover, there is perhaps the sense that these generic classifications are how the UK government icily dehumanises refugees, and the tales, with all the humanity and agency they endow to their subjects, pushes against and resists such dehumanisation.
Indeed, the tales are both a demonstration and a harnessing of the power of stories and storytelling. To the refugee, their narrative is all that they have: it will determine whether or not they can stay. But because of problems to do with translation, and because of the biases and blatant inequalities in the UK’s immigration system, the refugees’ narratives are more often than not silenced, ignored, cast aside.⁴ ‘Her story is not stacking up’, the authorities say in ‘The Interpreter’s Tale’, as they hassle over the absurdly insignificant detail of whether it was the refugees’ brother or uncle who helped her (p. 65). In ‘The Lawyer’s Tale’, meanwhile,
they
didn’t believe that he was from the tribe
he said he was from
or that his brother could be his brother (p.110).
The Refugee Tales, then, is first and foremost a correction to this marginalisation and silencing. Through the mediatory pen of various writers, the refugees tell us about their humanity. We hear about their lives back in their home countries, the disasters that have been brought upon them, their harrowing journeys of escape, and above all, the sheer dehumanisation they have faced and are facing in the UK. They emerge scarred, afraid, desperate, angry, humble, hopeful, and painfully but touchingly human. That stories have a rehumanising and legitimising power is not new: the enslaved used their abolitionist narratives for a very similar purpose back in the 18th and 19th centuries. Thus, after a narrative about the UK immigration system’s repeated attempts at eliding and denying his story and personhood, the appellant chooses to end his interview with his interlocuter without ‘anything you would like to add’, just the words ‘That’s my story’ (‘The Appellant’s Tale’ p. 84). It is as if by being able to choose when to start and end his story and name it as such, he has given the strongest rebuke against all the injustices he has faced. With his story, he is human.
But considering the multifarious, experimental, and frankly colourful forms in which these tales are couched, one might ask (as was asked of the abolitionist slave narratives) whether this aestheticisation detracts from the narratives’ veracity and sincerity. Is it an act of appropriation by these ‘high culture’ artists? It is a great question, and indeed as David Herd writes in the ‘Afterword’ to this volume, it is one that the tales themselves think about: ‘it must be the objective of a project such as Refugee Tales to question any aspect of mediation, including its own’ (p. 142). We must thus each come to our own conclusions, and my own answer is that no, there is no detraction.
The first reason is that the authors’ sincerity is apparent. Though the form of the tales differ and can be wildly inventive, at their core are the words of the refugees. As I have discussed, the ‘Detainee’s Tale’ and ‘Appellant’s Tale’ end when their subjects end their tales. Direct speech, reported speech, and first person narration populate the volume, suggesting a humble attempt to carry across the tale as it was told. There is thus no sense of appropriation, only mediation.
Secondly, and more importantly, I think it is important to remember that the ultimate goal of the Tales is to demand that ‘indefinite detention ends’, work and education be given, and ‘a life not to be held brutally in suspense’ (‘Afterword’ p. 143). Rehumanising and giving agency to refugee voices is part of achieving this objective; so, too, is the inventive use of form. Part of what the unconscious stream of words that makes up ‘The Chaplain’s Tale’ is doing, is to make the reader experience what the Chaplain is subject to in indefinite detention: ‘a constant drone a constant repetitive a dulling […] gradually he equated this noise to madness’ (pp. 15–6). Moreover, many of these forms actively push against their own mediation. When the juxtaposition between Chaucer’s ‘Man of Law’s Tale’ and Aziz’s story in ‘The Migrant’s Tale’, told to Dragan Todorovic, ends with the former closing happily and the latter hanging in indeterminacy (‘Aziz’s story hasn’t come to an end’, p. 12), I can’t help but feel that Todorovic is showing by contrast how Aziz’s story can’t be a mere tale, punctuated neatly with a start and end. Indeed, it is a life. To raise another example: both ‘The Interpreter’s Tale’ and ‘The Lawyer’s Tale’ make use of an ambiguous first person narration which does not distinguish between the voices of the author, interpreter/lawyer, and refugee. The reader is actively encouraged to parse out the merging voices, to resist the many forms of mediation refugees face, and find the marginalised and silenced voice. Again and again, in other words, the reader is asked to look beyond the confines of art and seek out the life.
So, to return to what I set out in the beginning of the review: how does the Refugee Tales work? On one level, it foregrounds marginalised and silenced refugee voices to push against a dehumanising system which works on such marginalisation and silencing. But it also uses the aesthetic mediation of refugee narratives by established authors to further advance and amplify its political objective. In turn, the need for agency and the usefulness of mediation is balanced out by the tales’ self-reflective questioning and resistance against mediation, which raises the reader’s vigilance and reminds them that reading is only the beginning. Refugees, authors, and readers, then, are all part of this process of driving change. As the textual dynamics of the Refugee Tales gesture towards and attempt to intervene in political reality, we are finally reminded of what forms the narrative thrust of ‘The Lawyer’s Tale’: that ‘we are all in (or near) the same drunken boat’ (p. 118) tethering dangerously close to destruction on the Mediterranean. Like it or not, we are in this together.
Please consider buying a copy of the Tales in support of everyone working so hard to make the UK a better place for refugees.
[1]: David Herd and Anna Pincus (eds), Refugee Tales (Great Britain: Comma Press, 2016). Page references are in the text.
[2]: Helen Barr, ‘Stories of the New Geography: The Refugee Tales’, Journal of Medieval Worlds 1.1 (2019): 83.
[3]: Barr (2019): 80.
[4]: David Herd will later expand upon this issue in his ‘Afterword’ to Refugee Tales II, ed. David Herd and Anna Pincus (Great Britain: Comma Press, 2017), pp. 118–20.
FURTHER READING AND THOUGHTS:
As I end the review, I can’t help but feel that I have done a less-than-ideal-job. Most obviously, this looks barely anything like a review, though I hope that I have explained and shown why I have taken a vastly more analytic approach. More seriously, however, is the fact that I have left so much unsaid. There is, for instance, so much more to say about the Refugee Tales’ engagements with Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales: how Chaucer’s ethos of stories and storytelling maps onto that of the Refugee Tales, how many of the narratives in the Refugee Tales incorporate excerpts from the Canterbury Tales… Equally relevant is the issue of space, nation, and borders: the ‘Afterword’ speaks of Chaucer’s ‘political geography’ (p. 139), and one might wonder how Chaucer’s internationalism and dynamic centre-periphery politics play into the Refugee Tales. Indeed, what does the Tales make of, and how does it reconfigure space, in line with its political objectives? Perhaps Z would like to respond to this, having written so well about the politics of space in The Lonely Londoners. Indeed, Z’s piece reminds me of another lost opportunity to link the Refugee Tales with my home city, Hong Kong; as we people of Hong Kong face a new diasporic age, reading about these migrant and refugee experiences is at once deeply resonating and chilling. And still there are more thoughts I’d like to explore: the use of linguistic hybridity, the orality of the pieces (v.s. print?), the figure of the refugee as Other…
In the meantime, you might be interested in some of these other works which explore similar topics as the Refugee Tales:
- David Herd and Anna Pincus (eds), Refugee Tales II (2017), III (2019), IV (2021)
- Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Refugees (2017)
- Ali Smith, Spring (2019)
—— J.
