'Refugee Tales'

CECILE SANDTEN Refugee Tales: Asylum Stories and Walks as New Forms of Literary and Political Intervention

1. Introduction I had come to the UK in the year 1996 because I was being persecuted and tortured for my religious beliefs. I am from a Muslim background but converted to Christianity. As a result, I experienced persecution, false imprisonment and torture. […] I had my first encounter with the State and with Immigration (the UKBA [United Kingdom Border Agency, C.S.]) in 2004. I was put in a police cell for 24 hours. I attended a court hearing the next day, handcuffed, and thereafter put in a van and driven all the way to a detention centre, again in handcuffs. I felt so depressed and disorientated being locked in a box in a special van. […] I have been detained five different times for a period of two years. I was treated just like a criminal for trying to obtain a job. […] I was in detention for further nine months. It felt like forever. These kinds of experiences left many people mentally unwell and needing long-term medication. What the UKBA strategy does is break you. I witnessed many detainees losing their mind, but in most cases the officers at the centre think detainees are acting up. […] Once you are inside a detention centre you lose almost all your rights. Even writing about my experiences isn't easy for me. […] There is so much I can say about the malpractices, treatment of immigrants and abuse of human rights in detention centres, but let me summarise it in one word: immigration detention is a demonising system. […] but thanks be to God who always gives us the victory. (J 2019, 167-172; original emphasis) These quotations from "The Parent's Tale" as told by J serve well as an introduction to this paper as they set the tone for the three collections of Refugee Tales dealt with here. They awaken expectations. They often directly address the reader, who is presumably an educated, well-to-do and politically interested member of the middle class, and lead him or her into the world of refugeeism, asylum seeking and the wilful indefinite detention system as practised in the UK. It is a world in which the state-provided support for those who, due to prosecution and torture in their home countries, find themselves in dire need, does not stand for humanity, but rather for dehumanisation. Arguing with Judith Butler, this tale and all of the stories in the Refugee Tales project1

1 Calling for an immediate end to the UK's policy of indefinite detention, Refugee Tales is an outreach project of Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group. For five years the Refugee Tales project has walked in solidarity with refugees, asylees and immigration detainees and has published three volumes of tales written by novelists, poets and people who have been through the process of flight, asylum seeking and detention. "Working directly in collaboration with those who had experienced the UK asylum system, and taking Chaucer's great poem of journeying as a model, established writers told a series of tales en route. Through that sharing of other people's tales the project gathered and communicated experiences of migration, seeking to show, in particular, what indefinite detention means" ("Refugee Tales," n.p.). Most of the texts in the three volumes of Refugee Tales edited by David Herd and Anna Pincus employ the genre of the tale, a genre which is grounded in the oral tradition and suggests something that is written in the tone of voice of someone speaking,

Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 31.3 (Winter 2020): 121-136.

solicit "images of distant suffering in ways that compel our concern and move us to act, that is, to voice our objection and register our resistance to such violence through concrete political means" (Butler 2012, 135). The aim of this article is to examine how the stories from the Refugee Tales project succeed in conveying a critique of the inhuman side of asylum seeking and refugeeism, including their aesthetic terms. The critical tone of the tales' voices, told either by well- known writers after their interviews and conversations with refugees, detainees and asylees,2 or by the refugees and detainees themselves, is even more remarkable in the context in which they have been written: the tales go against the grain of the dominant discourse of flight, refugeeism and asylum seeking, as they employ a form of telling, walking and writing back to a centre that has ruthlessly enforced its boundaries. To be more precise, the tales enact a means of political intervention against the inhuman and unjust practice of indefinite detention. It will thus be useful to begin by laying out more closely some of the political and contextual issues through the lens of a critical postcolonial cultural studies approach. This approach will be reinforced by Lawrence Grossberg's concept of "radical contextuality" and "conjunctural analysis" (2017a, 28-29; 2017b, 354). Grossberg claims that one of the "commitment[s] that is assembled into cultural studies is to think contextually" (2017a, 28). He further asserts that this approach has profound

Winter Journals implications for defining cultural studies. Its object is always a context – not culture or some subset of cultural texts and practices, but how culture is articulated in and voices historical social contexts (Grossberg 2017a, 28). Accordingly, Grossberg maintains that "'[r]adical contextuality' also means that neither theory nor politics can be the starting Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) point of one's reflections and investigations" (Grossberg, 2017a, 29), but that there is the need for a "critical response to the demands of some set [of] contemporary conjunctures or perhaps epochs" (Grossberg 2017a, 29). In keeping with Grossberg's for personal use only / no unauthorized distribution ideas, this paper will locate the discussion of the Refugee Tales project contextually and, in what follows, use Grossberg's notion of conjunctural analysis in order to be able to "understand […] the contingent organizations of relations and power that we call social contexts" (Grossberg 2017b, 354) and "to articulate multiple crises, multiple contradictions, forces and determinations" (Grossberg 2017b, 354).

whereas a few texts also use poetry, such as "The Refugee's Tale" as told to Patience Agbabi (RT), which consists of fifteen sonnets that follow the Petrarchan structure and have a rather loose rhyme scheme and metre. In "The Lawyer's Tale" (RT), Stephen Collis uses a mix of genres, such as prose, factual texts and poetry, and in "The Interpreter's Tale" (RT), Carol Watts has written a poem based on a conversation with an anonymous translator. Hubert Moore, too, has inserted poetic passages in "The Visitor's Tale" (RT). "The Walker's Tale" as told to Ian Duhlig (RT II), "The Voluntary Returner's Tale" as told to Caroline Bergvall (RT II), "The Foster Child's Tale" (RT III) told by A, "The Fisherman's Tale" as told to Ian Sansom (RT III) and "The Observer's Tale" as told by N (RT III) can be read as prose poems, whereas "The Chaplain's Tale" as told to Michael Zand (RT) is a text that, as a means of going against the conventional narrative grain, does not use any punctuation at all. 2 According to the Oxford Learner's Dictionary online, "an 'asylee' is a person who has asked for or has been given protection by a foreign government after leaving their own country, usually because they were in danger for political reasons."

When addressing the concept of representation, and in particular the representation of minority groups, cultures and voices, or the lack thereof, language becomes an important discursive instrument. By "giv[ing] meaning to things through language" (Hall 2003, 16), literature, as will be argued, is embedded in the materiality of social, cultural and political life. It negotiates cultural phenomena and contributes to the construction and dissemination of cultural meanings. Literary representation thus encompasses the ways in which race, class, ethnicity, gender, space or national and cultural identity are perceived. Applying this idea to my argument, the language of literature, including the language and narrative practices applied in Refugee Tales, offers an interventionist perspective on the current societal and political problems. But it is not only that which needs to be addressed when analysing Refugee Tales – there are also, as Laurent Berlant claims, the "public spheres," which "are always affect worlds, worlds to which people are bound […] by affective projections of a constantly negotiated common interestedness" (2011, 226). This aspect is relevant in light of the fact that the Refugee Tales project is also a public event due to its being an outreach project that supports detainees and asylees, offers regular solidarity walks, organises public readings and initiates political awareness, besides its presence in the social media. Meanwhile, story collections of the subjective experiences of flight, refugeeism and asylum seeking in Britain have become available in quite respectable numbers.3 Yet, when addressing the question of who is considered a refugee, as Matthew Gibney explains, most countries use the definition laid down in the 1951 Geneva Refugee Convention, which outlines the conditions for claiming a well-founded fear of persecution (Gibney 2011). Yet, "for asylum seekers, it is largely held that these are people that claim to be refugees but their status of being a refugee has not been determined by the supposed host state" (Gibney 2011). All Western nations, as Gibney expounds, have individual and fairly elaborate asylum determination systems that are either administrative or judicial: "They receive the claims of asylum seekers and process them to decide whether they accord with the respective state's definition of a refugee" (2011). Yet, this process of determination can often take months or even years, frequently leaving the asylum claimant in a state of limbo and precarity, criminalising and infantilising them by sending them to such institutions as detention or removal centres. To describe this state of in-betweenness (often expressed by the word "pending"), the term 'asylum seeker' is used in migration studies "because asylum seekers are people of indeterminate status" (Gibney 2011). When in this situation of being in the waiting zone, refugees and asylees are also often prone to being 'othered.' Giorgio Agamben asserts that the refugee has thrown "into crisis the original fiction of sovereignty" and has become, in that sense, part of "a border concept that radically calls into question the principles of the nation-state" (1995, 117). In this framework he or she becomes victim of xenophobia or suffers humiliation, including becoming part of an increasing negative hegemonic national discourse as well as an administrative processing system that is often racist, as is frighteningly revealed in nearly all the stories from Refugee Tales.

3 See e.g. the edited collections by Bradman (2007); Johnson (2017); Popescu (2016) and (2018); Popoola and Holmes (2016).

It is not only since the autumn of 2015 that the public and media discourse regarding refugees and asylees has been concerned almost exclusively with the notion of refugees as a burden, creating excessive financial demands or making terrorist threats. However, in the 1920s and in the period following the Second World War, far more extensive flight movements took place relative to the size of the world's population (Ther 2018, 19). This applies, in particular, to Europe, which, until 1947, was more affected by mass flight than any other continent (Ther 2018, 19). Even though, according to the Geneva Refugee Convention, conflict and war have not explicitly been considered justifications for flight, in recent years most major refugee movements have been triggered by civil wars in which religious, ethnic or tribal violence has escalated. As all of the stories in the three volumes of Refugee Tales make unmistakably clear, it can be taken for granted that no one flees voluntarily or without good reason, and that flight most often entails not only the loss of one's family or family members, friends, one's home, job and security, but also of one's material possessions or important personal documents. Yet, the rhetoric connected to flight and asylum-seeking as well as to refugeeism is often imbued with prejudices and stereotypes, as nearly all stories show, and is influenced by certain ideas and beliefs about the so-called ethnic 'other.' In this context, by being 'othered' (Spivak 1985), the refugee and asylum seeker perceives his or her identity as somehow 'other,' i.e. dependent, comparable perhaps, to the colonial subject who was both a child of the empire and a primitive degraded subject of imperial discourse. This, it can be argued, has been rampant in the political developments seen shortly before, during and especially after the so-called refugee crisis of 2015. To be more precise, in 2012, then Home Secretary Theresa May issued a policy with the aim of creating "in Britain a really hostile environment for illegal migration" (May in Kirkup and Winnet 2012). With this policy she wanted "to stop migrants from having access to public services," as she thought that they were entitled neither to "access to social benefits, […] housing […] NHS" nor to bank accounts, work or driving licenses (May in Elgot 2018). In addition, May, on the basis of a popular political debate and in a rather colloquial manner, wanted "to make it easier and quicker to remove people from this country so that they can't just stay around through a whole round of a series of spurious appeals" and to "make it harder for people to be here illegally" (May 2013). She also sought to reduce "the number of appeal rights that people have and it means that we are able to deport foreign criminals first and they'll appeal afterwards from outside the UK" (May 2013; my emphasis). These issues were implemented in the 2014 and 2016 Immigration Acts, respectively, to primarily help deter and to generally prevent asylum claims. However, these issues have led to extreme misunderstandings in e.g. the Windrush generation. Accordingly, Gibney maintains that "a lot of the tools introduced revolve around instruments of making life as uncomfortable as possible for the individual asylum seeker when he or she is in the asylum processing system" (2011). May even included sanctions of institutions such as banks, landlords or welfare organisations that are fined for helping people who do not possess the correct documents. All these issues support an inhumane policy that criminalises and eventually helps to deport those who are actually in need of protection. However, when it comes to protection, from 2000 to the present, the largest numbers of asylum claimants in the UK have come from Somalia, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Iraq,

Zimbabwe, Iran or Syria (Sturge 2019), all of which are characterised by a fairly wide- spread abuse of human rights. Therefore, deportation, which, according to the 2014 and 2016 Immigration Acts, has become common practice, "is politically very controversial, as it is very expensive and resource-intensive" (Gibney 2011), and uses detention as a control measure, putting people who are actually in need of security and help into so-called removal centres, where they are cut off from the opportunity to make any rights claims. Since 2015, the writing, telling and walking project that is Refugee Tales has set out to counter this policy. It is a walk in solidarity with refugees, asylees and (ex)detainees to call for an end to indefinite detention and other inhumane asylum control practices. After having outlined theoretical as well as contextual issues, this article will contend that refugees and asylees are intricately interpellated by their so-called state of limbo – the impossibility, since no one will listen, of narrating another, 'true' story, in contradistinction to the official asylum narrative, a goal underscored by nearly all of the tales. Taking up current cultural and political debates from a selection of writers and scholars in postcolonial studies, cultural studies, affect theory and philosophy, I will, in what follows, provide an analysis of a selection of the Refugee Tales by arguing that the project presents and executes new forms of literary and practical political intervention.

2. Refugee Tales – the Project and the Stories as Modes of Political Intervention In 2019, Refugee Tales walked for the fifth time,4 this time under the motto "Walking towards the better imagined," a phrase put forward by writer and patron of the project Ali Smith. The Refugee Tales project was "an idea born in Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group, driven by the need to communicate the stories and realities of people held in indefinite detention," as David Herd explains (2019). According to Herd, it "has so caught the imagination as to sustain hundreds of miles of collective, cultural, political action" (2019). Herd adds: "Those stories have been told in many ways and in many settings, and not least in the past year, when our friends who have experienced detention have spoken in parliament, at meetings across the country, and on the BBC" (2019). In order to protect the narrators' anonymity, most of the stories are told and written down in collaboration between a person who is or was detained and an established writer,5 thus creating a double perspective on the particular situation and story depicted.

4 There have been five walks: "In 2015, from Dover to Crawley via Canterbury; in 2016, from Canterbury to Westminster via Dartford, […] in 2017, from Runnymede to Westminster" (Barr 2019, 80); in 2018, from St Albans to Westminster, and in 2019 from Brighton to Hastings. 5 Usually, David Herd and Anna Pincus ask British but also international writers if they want to meet a detainee or an asylee and write a tale. Sometimes the author, when visiting e.g. the detention centre, needs a translator to accompany her or him. During the interview process at the detention centre, the author is "not allowed to carry a pen and paper into the building" (Herd 2016, 140). Often the participants know little about each other. They usually meet for the first time in their lives. The writer does not know anything about the story, background and situation of the detainee or asylee concerned. Therefore, both sides have to first establish a relationship of trust. The tales are written in English, frequently, supplemented by markers

The Refugee Tales project not only involves writing, but also very prominently telling and walking, having taken up the medieval concept of the pilgrimage as laid down in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.6 Apart from raising awareness and intervening politically, the project's aims also include transforming the historical English landscape into a hospitable space – in stark contrast to May's hostile environment policy. What is special about the third volume of Refugee Tales, which came out in 2019, is that […] as the project has developed and as people have come to trust the space it has created more and more, so people have come to tell their own stories – people, principally, whose status in the UK has been regularized, [sic] These first person narratives […] feature in Refugee Tales Volume III […]. (Herd 2019) The UK, as David Herd keeps repeating, "is the only country in Europe that detains people indefinitely under immigration rules, […] it [nonetheless] remains possible that an amendment to the current Immigration Bill will bring an end to indefinite detention in the UK […]" (2019). Yet, it must be added, none of the hostile environment legislation introduced by May in 2012 has been repealed, although, as many politicians have confirmed, the project is very close to having intervened politically, since politicians of various political parties have noticed that there is an urgent need for action regarding a change in the law.7

of local linguistic or cultural elements or idiomatic expressions of the respondent which render the story more 'authentic.' 6 In her very informative article, "Stories of the New Geography: The Refugee Tales," medievalist Helen Barr argues that "there is no sustained re-telling of any of Chaucer's tales by updating their plots and characters. Storylines do not travel across. Refugee Tales denies the pleasure of spotting coded resemblances between Chaucer's taletellers and updated narrators. In Refugee Tales, the stories are too telling for the game of allusion. These stories are too true, and while the titles of the tales follow a Chaucerian format – "The Interpreter's Tale," for instance – neither the tellers nor the persons in the tales are modelled on specific Chaucerian characters […]. Refugee Tales is also set apart from closely contemporary responses to Chaucer because of its ongoing radical account of what it means to take a journey. In closely contemporary responses [to Chaucer], the journeys are completed. With Refugee Tales, the journey has not ended […], [since] the project appropriates Chaucer's structural model of the storytelling journey" (2019, 80-82). In her article, Barr further elaborates on the importance of the route, the landscape and the geography for Chaucer's tales as well as the Refugee Tales, as the latter, according to Barr, "re-enact the social practice of highways in the Middle Ages" (2019, 83, fn. 21). 7 From my first-hand experience as a participant of the 2019 Refugee Tales Walk, on the first day before the walkers sat out to walk from Brighton to Hastings, Green MP Caroline Lukas pointed out that "we are all human and that compassion is at the heart of this movement, and that the opportunity to tell stories will change minds in the end" so that "we might get a different immigration regime" as we "keep pressure on the government to end the hostile environment" (C.S.). As I have recorded, on the third day of the walk, Conservative MP Maria Caulfield who welcomed the walkers, confirmed that she is one of the many MPs who have signed the amendment on indefinite detention to have the legislation of indefinite detention changed when the Immigration Bill came back to the House of Commons in autumn 2019 (C.S.).

Having outlined the current political context shaping Refugee Tales, I will examine the aesthetic means through which the authors criticise the current political and social conditions. In this framework, I will analyse a selection of the tales with regard to their form, pattern and the degree of political intervention. I will thus propose a reading of Refugee Tales that aims at decentring a right-wing border rhetoric by offering a postcolonial perspective on Herd and Pincus's critical testimony on forced and indefinite detention. Thus, the analysis is an attempt to explore the postcolonial textuality in the tales by taking up two questions: What is the impact of writing an account of torture and detention in relation to the literary? What is the postcolonial perspective in these texts, or how can the texts be read through a postcolonial cultural studies lens, especially in the context of human rights violations? In his "The Arriver's Tale" as told to Abdulrazak Gurnah, the arriver asks: "Do you know what limbo is?" The immediate answer that he himself gives is, "It is the edge of hell" (Gurnah 2016, 39). Refugee Tales (volumes I-III), in which many stories are written in the present tense, focuses primarily on refugees', asylees' and detainees' or ex-detainees' experiences of violence, loss, modern-day slavery, hunger, rape, prosecution, imprisonment, torture, flight, survival, detention and deportation as well as, and most prominently, the state's wilfulness and arbitrariness. They are either written by renowned writers,8 or – as in the third volume – by refugees themselves, who, to protect their identities, remain anonymous. In addition, the stories are at times not written from the perspective of the refugee, but from the perspective of a person involved with flight and refugeeism.9 Six tales in the third volume were written by refugees and detainees themselves. 10 All three volumes begin with a "Prologue" and end with an "Afterword" by David Herd, in which, in poetic form and factual texts, the project's history as well as its underlying aims and political implications are explained. Even though it must be taken into consideration that these tales cannot be understood as mimetic representations of social reality, Helen Barr claims that "[t]he tales record real experiences" (2019, 80). Related to the function of the stories, Barr further explains that "[t]he Refugee Tales creates a new geography to appropriate a space for the telling of stories that badly need to be heard" (2019, 84). In her view, "[t]he Project is an act of radical enunciation" (2019, 84). Barr defines the project as "a reading back to Chaucer that is sensitive to the social resonances of his narrative dynamics" (2019, 103; my emphasis). In this sense, the stories and the project practise a symbolic resistance, a 'writing back,' to the dominant state power and the established political and media discourses that tend to dehumanise

8 Renowned writers are, e.g., Ali Smith, Patience Agbabi, Abdulrazak Gurnah (who has stories in RT and RT II, which, in both cases, are about the same person) and Inua Ellams (RT), Jackie Kay, Helen Macdonald, Neel Mukherjee and Kamila Shamsie (RT II), Monica Ali, Bernardine Evaristo and Patrick Gale (RT III). 9 "The Lorry Driver's Tale" as told to Chris Cleave, "The Visitor's Tale" as told to Hubert Moore, "The Interpreter's Tale" as told to Carol Watts, "The Friend's Tale" as told to Jade Amoli-Jackson, "The Lawyer's Tale" as told to Steve Collis (all RT), "The Barrister's Tale" as told to Rachel Holmes, "The Support Worker's Tale" as told to Josh Cohen (all RT II) or "The Listener's Tale" as told to Gillian Slovo (RT III). 10 "The Foster Child's Tale" as told by A, "The Volunteer's Tale" as told by R, "The Care Worker's Tale" as told by B, "The Observer's Tale" as told by N, "The Applicant's Tale" as told by F and "The Parent's Tale" as told by J (RT III).

migrants. In this framework, it is important to point out that "narrative" by asylees is a "discourse" and "storytelling" (de Fina 2003, 369) that also always refers to biographical material that, through the necessary selection, processing and structuring in the process of narrativisation, is ordered and modelled in a way that can be regarded as highly semantically charged (Conermann and Gymnich 2015, 10). Accordingly, in the face of the fundamental insecurity and traumatic experiences with which the tales are semantically charged, tale and, as I would call this genre, short life writing become the main literary vehicles for the narration of fragmented lives, of trauma and unbelonging. Since torture, suffering or crisis cannot be easily recounted, the tale or short life writing "is more easily adapted to the refusal of narrative that these texts enact" (Padamsee 2008, 2). Looking specifically at the depictions of the refugee, asylee or detainee in Refugee Tales, it is possible to trace a pattern of narrative similarity that is revealed in the teller/interviewee, the writer/interviewer and the writer's or teller's voice as narrator. Most of the tales work with fragments of memory as well as details of certain experiences from the beginning to the present day, and are sometimes written in the second-person singular, or with the interviewer as "I" and the narratee or teller as "you," sometimes using a homodiegetic voice, then again a heterodiegetic voice with a focalisation on the teller/person, in which the experiences of the teller as a survivor of war, torture, flight and detention are articulated from her/his particular social, political and cultural background. In the face of such extreme uncertainty, the different narrative situations, themselves forms of dislocation, refusal or inability of narrative, help the individual to make sense of his/her life in the moment of utmost crisis, and to find a voice and gain agency.

3. "The Orphan's Tale" as told to David Constantine David Constantine's story "The Orphan's Tale" (RT III, 11-24) is written from a primarily heterodiegetic voice, focalising on "M" from "Freetown" in Sierra Leone, where his grandfather had "served in the British army," "fighting for the nation that had abolished slavery and now must defeat an evil that would enslave the world" (11; my emphasis). The second part of that sentence already conveys a critique of the contemporary situation epitomised in the UK's hostile environment policy. Generally, the story is characterised by the aesthetic effect of repetition and extensive use of anadiplosis as a rhetorical device, which can already be observed in the words "slavery" and "enslave," followed by the next sentence, spoken by the grandfather to M: "You're descended from slaves the British set free and gave them a beautiful country to call their own" (11; my emphasis). Polyptoton as a rhetorical device is further revealed in the sentences that follow and the clustering of words: "Every storyteller wants to be believed. Belief persuades. Every storyteller wants to be persuasive. How willing to be persuaded the children are […]" (11). In a repetitive and connecting mode, "M wants to be believed, to persuade, to get them to feel the living truth of it and be moved to pity" (11) which is intended to evoke some type of effect on both the listener and the authorities in order to be deemed credible in the context of asylum. As the tale conveys, however, M is not very good at storytelling, at least not in the presence of official administrators, as he becomes more and more entangled in what is expected of him,

what is the truth and what is not true. Generally, narrative representations of one's own life or that of a stranger always have a retrospective character at their core and are therefore decisively shaped by the dynamics of individual and autobiographical as well as cultural memory (Conermann and Gymnich 2015, 7). Accordingly, M's tale is interspersed with words that reveal his past experiences – "terror," "rage," "horrors," "machetes," "choking" – as well as feelings and emotions, expressed by such words as "tremble" and "weep" (12). This is followed by a description of "the streets of countless children, old as pain, sick with witness, speechless, many lacking hands to pray and beg" (13), hinting at the untold atrocities of civil war in Sierra Leone between 1991 and 2001. These, however, as an act of eschewing narration, are not detailed further, thus demonstrating that the impossibility of narrating certain experiences is also a narrative – which, however, leaves a gap that must be filled in by the reader. As M lost his parents early in his life, his grandfather sent him to England, where he "was chosen by a reputable charity as one who might recover and even prosper in a rich and Christian country famous for its love of justice" (13). This last sentence, again, shows in ironic fashion a high appraisal of the former colonial power, whom the grandfather served during the war – one which, however, no longer holds true. Having been flown to England and placed in an "English Borough! Used to processing people like M," (13) i.e., without ID or papers, M is put up with foster parents, Mr and Mrs Robinson,11 who are kind and helpful. Although he is anxious "not to offend," his social worker nonetheless repeatedly tells him to "[s]tay clear of the Law" (14) and to keep his head down, as M is actually "happy" (14). As a way of foreshadowing that this 'happiness' will not last, Constantine uses the device of contrast and a horrifying personification of 'the Law,' that rather resembles the "adversary, the devil, who walketh about seeking whom he may devour" (14). Thereby, the story makes quite unmistakeably clear that happiness is not a concept that is part of a refugee's life, as "some jealous deity," epitomising an abstract power, will not allow it, pointing thus to what Sara Ahmed, in the framework of migration, terms an "unhappiness cause" (2010, 122). Nonetheless, M finishes his GCSEs, meets a girl named Céline, who is three years his senior, and her five-year-old daughter Lara. He goes to college, gets a National Insurance Number, works in a supermarket six days a week stacking shelves, he has cash and a debit card and pays his taxes, beginning to believe that he is "useful" and that he "contributes" (15; original emphases). Having turned eighteen, however, though without a birth certificate, and having finished college, with plans to go to university to study engineering, he also takes on more responsibility for Lara, picking her up from school. In addition, he receives his council flat. When he applies for a new job, which would be "better paid and be more interesting than the supermarket, with a long- established firm who," ironically, "dispatched belongings to people moving abroad" (18), May's hostile environment policy kicks in, as the firm discovers that he does "not have the right to work" (19): […] next day came a letter from the Home Office informing him that since he was now eighteen his discretionary leave to remain in the United Kingdom had been revoked. He

11 The Robinsons' telling name foreshadows M's initial success, similar to Robinson Crusoe's who, after the shipwreck, has to start all over again in a rather hostile environment. However, in contrast to Robinson Crusoe, M's success does not last long due to Theresa May's hostile environment policy.

must apply for indefinite leave to remain and pending the outcome of the application he was not permitted to work but must report weekly and sign in at the Office in the Borough. (19; original punctuation) With the short sentence "So it began" (19), the downward process of applying for indefinite leave to remain starts, described in terms of an earthquake that disrupts M's private life, since "[t]he unravelling has begun" (19). In addition, representative of all the tales in the Refugee Tales project, an 'us-them' binarism is introduced, with "They halt his progress, re-christian him Illegal, order him to show himself at their counter every Monday morning" (19). Those to whom he has to show himself are, ironically, "Nasrin, Olly, Piotre" (19), names originating in the Persian, French and Polish languages, thereby hinting at an earlier migration process to the UK. Direct speech, without the use of inverted commas, is used several times in the story to indicate the immediacy of the narrative, as when M tells Céline, after they have somehow managed their daily routine: "Kev told me to keep my head down, and I think he meant I shouldn't let them see how happy I am" (20). With the personification of 'the Law,' which is repeated throughout the story, Constantine addresses the arbitrariness and wilfulness of the state power that stays anonymously, dangerously and unassailably in the background. Eventually, what has been feared comes true, M is arrested and is no longer allowed to pick up Lara from school. The narrator's comment reads: "He is a young black man in handcuffs like any common criminal in a public place. Later he remembers an absolute silence and dozens of faces turned his way in fear and pity" (22). This incident is a public 'othering' in the form of a colonial gaze that addresses both the fear of the 'other' (e.g. the potential terrorist) and of compassion regarding those who do support refugees but do not take any action against the system of oppression. Ironically, once again, "All the enforcers sound East-European" (23), implying that the earlier wave of refugees and migrants, e.g. those who arrived in the UK during the Balkan wars, have successfully integrated into the British workspace and society. What is more, in detention, M "will often hear again in the years to come" the howling of captive fellow human beings who have been told that early next morning they will be on a plane back where they came from, however bad that place and whatever their loves and friendships, their loyalties, brave beginnings, notable achievements and aspirations here in this worsening land. (24) The story ends on this foreshadowing note, leaving open the concrete outcome of M's fate, except for the fact that, as the word "worsening" indicates, there are years, perhaps, of suffering to come. In "The Orphan's Tale," the protagonist and teller of his own story, M, is shown to be a person who has taken over his grandfather's loyalties in which he initially believes, is brave at the beginning, successful in work and relationships, but becomes the victim of an arbitrary system (the Law) that often operates wilfully, thus abandoning subjectivity, voice and agency. By using the aesthetic devices of repetition, personification and non-narrative, and by eschewing closure at the end of the story, the tale demonstrates the failure of location and belonging in a situation of utmost crisis. Eventually, the tale does not offer any hope, which the expression "in this worsening land" indicates. In conjunction with the knowledge presented about Britain as a former colonial power that is held in high esteem, the tale hints at the clashes of past and present and allows for its reading as a critical postcolonial text.

4. "The Volunteer's Tale" as told by R "The Volunteer's Tales" as told by R (RT III, 53-69) which, with regard to its structure and content, represents the overall genre of the Refugee Tales, is written as a life narrative, using the first-person confessional account. The tale is subdivided into four parts: "Home," "Libya," "Crossing" and "Here" – a pattern employed by many of the stories. In the first part, "Home," the narrator reports on events that occurred "in a small village in Sudan, in a small family" (53). His family were farmers, and, as the oldest son, he wanted to support his father on the farm. His life changed when he turned seventeen and various militias arrived, raiding the village and killing people. Sudan, a country that has been in conflict ever since British colonialism, had experienced several civil wars prior to independence – but also especially in its aftermath. During one of the more recent outbreaks of civil war, the narrator is captured, held prisoner, and severely tortured but is eventually able to escape, under life-threatening circumstances. He crosses the Sahara within fourteen days. After arriving in "Libya," he is tortured, kidnapped and enslaved. The aesthetic device of the universalising "you" is used in this instance to make the reader even more aware of the harrowing circumstances that R has had to face: You didn't have to talk back, you didn't have to say anything. Then they rounded us all up and put us in a container – a long container – locked the door. For some time, you couldn't sleep, and you couldn't sit down because they hosed in water. You just had to stand there. If you wanted to sit down you had to sit in the water. Like that. And every morning they came and said, 'If you have money, you can be released. If you don't, you'll remain here – until you get money. Alternatively, if you have someone here in Libya, give us his phone number, and he can pay for you. Or, if you have your family's phone number, you can call your family back in Sudan.' (58) This passage makes unmistakably clear that Libya is a country in which severe human rights violations take place. The narrator does receive help from a man, only to be enslaved again as a worker on the man's farm. Subsequently, a Sudanese man helps him out of this predicament, until R decides to make the crossing to Italy, since, when reflecting upon his life, he sees no sense in staying on. On an overcrowded boat that eventually sinks – and in a fake life-jacket –, the narrator is rescued. After falling unconscious, he finds himself in a hospital, which he then leaves to go first to Paris, then Calais, and finally, across the channel to England. The section "Here" is about his arrest, being fingerprinted, handcuffed and deported back to Italy (as the Italians had taken his fingerprints first, when he was in hospital, unconscious), going back to England, claiming to stay, a refusal, detention, and finally the so-called, 'leave to remain.' Refugee Tales, in general, and "The Volunteer's Tale" in particular, represent a "genre of crisis" that, according to Lauren Berlant, "can distort something structural and on-going within ordinariness into something that seems shocking and exceptional" (2011, 7). In keeping with the observation that all the tales tell of how crisis situations, caused by murder, abduction, rape or violence, in countries where human rights are grossly violated, have made ordinary life – food, work, family, home – an impossibility, it is in these kinds of situations, as Berlant puts it, that "people find themselves adjusting to newly proliferating pressures to scramble for modes of living on" (2011, 8). Drawing on Hannah Arendt's seminal essay "We Refugees" (2007 [1943], 264-274), Giorgio Agamben argues that "[t]he paradox […] is that precisely the figure that should have

incarnated the rights of man par excellence, the refugee, constitutes instead the radical crisis of this concept" (1995, 116; original emphasis). Generally, in "The Volunteer's Tale", R is trying to make sense, through the structure of his narrative, of what has happened to him, as indicated by words such as "then," "after that," "and after that," "following that," "eventually" or other markers of time and space. Resonating in the background is a constant criticism of human rights violations but also, especially in the "Here" section, mention is made of people like C from the "visitors group" (65), who show their unreserved humanity and help. Another aesthetic effect is achieved when the narrator repeats certain words in specific sections, such as the word "nobody:" "Nobody" had seen such torture marks before, but "nobody" sat with him and listened to him (66). Here, the black, tortured body is scrutinised by the curious, white western gaze without, however, being helped. Another word is "happy," in conjunction with the second-person direct address, to express credibility as well as a reflective mode, indicated by "I realised:" You know, the first time I came to the UK, I had been so happy. I don't know why, but I felt so good, like a newborn baby. But after all these things that had happened to me, looking back at that time, I realised it was a fake happy. I was happy but it wasn't right. I was happy with nothing, for no reason. (66; emphases added) Moreover, R introduces time and place markers in order to create orientation for himself and the reader (de Fina 2003) as well as, having been provided with a new lawyer, a meta-narrative instance as the lawyer interviews him: "And she started from the beginning, like really from the beginning – like this account I'm giving you now. Since I arrived here, no one had asked me questions like hers" (67; original emphasis). R also always addresses the 'us' and 'them' binary as a marker of being in the suppressed position: a passive object that has to endure maltreatment. As the most important and distinctive structural aesthetic feature of the story, the first-person narrator shows himself to be on the same intellectual level as the text's intended middle-class readers, since he is able to report, reflect and thus assume a voice with which he is able to address a "you" to report on his monstrous experiences and living conditions. The intellectually credible voice of the narrator, who does not want to evoke compassion, but who wants to tell his story, is needed to mediate between the different worlds, also addressing the ignorance of the individual fates of refugees and asylees as well as their feeling of the void and limbo, as reflected in the subsequent use of the word "nobody." At the end of the story, only a combination of charity in action and the belief that he is doing good by helping others and telling his story (R has become a volunteer himself) appears to be a feasible model, as his happiness has vanished: "Finally, I have to say, I got my leave to remain. Finally. But, you know, when I got it, I didn't feel happy the way I did the first time I arrived, because something had died" (68-69). Sara Ahmed's ideas about multiculturalism can be made productive when transferred into this framework, as refugeeism has entered the (narrative) media and political discourse as an "unhappiness cause" (Ahmed 2010, 122), as something that "forces people who are 'unalike' to live together" (Ahmed 2010, 122). However, in the current discourse, refugees and asylees have been presented as a "threat to national survival" (Ahmed 2010, 122). Yet, the narratives of suffering, survival and perseverance that the tales tell do not only arouse pity but will help to eventually

"transcend ethnicity" (Ahmed 2010, 122), as they depict people's humanity in the condition that Agamben has called "bare life" (1998, passim). His concept of homo sacer (1998) most fittingly describes humans reduced to bare life, no longer protected by any legal and civil rights. In Refugee Tales, refugees, asylees and (ex)detainees are primarily presented as precarious bodies and subjectivities whose stories need to be told and heard in order to make a change, as also highlighted by Barr: Names may be withheld but the experience of the migrants themselves are [sic] transmitted, told to someone who wants to listen. In contrast to how the migrants are muted, or written out of legal and bureaucratic discourse, the tales open up space for their voices, and their language, to be heard. (2019, 92). Pleading for "moral universalism" and "cosmopolitan federalism" (Benhabib 2004, passim), the voices of those who have been excluded by state powers need to be re- introduced into the public sphere of the walking and listening project which, at heart, is a democratic, egalitarian and public mode of intervention. Refugee Tales has continually done this by using the public space of the landscape along with the press, social media and the reading venues, as well as by continually informing politicians (e.g. sending them the books) about the most harrowing situations with which refugees and asylees are constantly confronted and which mould them wilfully and seemingly arbitrarily into a socially undesireable and mentally most deprived postcolonial underclass. Thus, building upon Berlant's notion of "the cinema of precarity" (2011, 7), in which attention is directed to a "pervasive contemporary social precariousness" (2011, 7), Refugee Tales can be defined as narratives of precarity since they give an account of the "structural pressures of crisis and loss" (Berlant 2011, 7) without eschewing "the need for a good life" (Berlant 2011, 7). In addition, as Butler proposes, the tales help to mediate the "ethical relations" that are needed in order to develop a willingness for cohabitation with even those who are distant, or "'human' in the abstract" (2012, 138).

5. Conclusion The Refugee Tales transform both an abstract and extensive worldly experience into a poetic and aesthetic textual experience. At work is a combination of varying social, cultural and political questions that demonstrate that race, class and gender are interlocked within the power structures of oppression, which I read as being similar to the binary construction within Orientalist discourse of coloniser and colonised "[b]ecause [what is currently done] is a systematic negation of the other person and a furious determination to deny the other person all attributes of humanity" (Fanon 1990, 200). Therefore, the Refugee Tales present a strategy of using manifold approaches to write back to the hegemonic (state) power and refugee regime. Among them is that they directly address the reader, use a diachronic mode12 of narrative that often points to the colonial legacy, employ the method of telling tales, use the aesthetic devices of the untold narrative as well as meta-fiction, occasionally put forward religious and humanitarian ideas of hope and present the refugee or asylee as a precarious suppressed

12 Apart from a diachronic style of writing, Stephen Collis uses a collage technique of verse and prose as well as historical textual references in "The Lawyer's Tale" as told to Stephen Collis (RT 2016, 107-124).

and often 'othered' body who, through his or her individual voice or his or her voice as reported to and through another writer, is able to speak out and eventually gain agency, something that has been denied this person by a wilful, anonymous state power. The project, read through a critical postcolonial lens, consistent with the concepts of "radical contextuality" and "conjunctural analysis" (Grossberg 2017a, 28-29; 2017b, 354), demonstrates that it is this "re-enacting" (Barr 2019, 83, fn. 21), appropriating and inquisitive form of writing and telling tales as well as walking in solidarity that will perhaps be successful when British politicians begin to amend the 2014 and 2016 Immigration Acts.

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. "We Refugees." Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures 49.2 (1995): 114-119. DOI: 10.1080/00397709.1995.10733798. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. 1995. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Berkeley, CA: California University Press, 1998. Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2010. Arendt, Hannah. The Jewish Writings. 1943. Eds. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman. New York: Schocken Books, 2007. Barr, Helen. "Stories of the New Geography: The Refugee Tales." Journal of Medieval Worlds 1.1 (2019): 79-106. DOI: 10.1525/jmw.2019.100005. Benhabib, Seyla. The Rights of Others. Aliens, Residents, and Citizens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2011. Bradman, Tony, ed. Give Me Shelter: Stories about Children Who Seek Asylum. London: Frances Lincoln Children's Books, 2007. Butler, Judith. "Precarious Life, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Cohabitation." The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26.2 (2012): 134-151. DOI: 10.5325/jspecphil.26.2.0134. Conermann, Stephan, and Marion Gymnich. "Narratio Aliena? Kulturspezifische Erzählstrategien in 'nicht-abendländischen' Lebensdarstellungen." Kulturspezifische Erzählstrategien in "nicht-abendländischen" Lebensdarstellungen. Ed. Stephan Conermann. Berlin: EBVerlag, 2015. 7-24. Constantine, David. "The Orphan's Tale as told to David Constantine." Refugee Tales III. Eds. David Herd and Anna Pincus. Manchester: Comma Press, 2019. 11-24. De Fina, Anna. "Crossing Borders: Time, Space, and Disorientation in Narrative." Narrative Inquiry 13.2 (2003): 367-371. DOI: 10.1075/ni.13.2.08def. Elgot, Jessica. "Theresa May's 'hostile environment' at heart of Windrush scandal." The Guardian 17 April 2018. [accessed 23 January 2020]. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. 1963. Prefaced by Jean-Paul Sartre. Trans. Constance Farrington. London: Penguin, 1990.

Gibney, Matthew. "Asylum Policy." The Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford 26 March 2011. [accessed 10 September 2019]. Grossberg, Lawrence. "Making Culture Matter, Making Culture Political." Crisis, Risks and New Regionalisms in Europe: Emergency Diasporas and Borderlands. Eds. Cecile Sandten, Claudia Gualtieri, Robero Pedretti, and Eike Kronshage. Trier: WVT, 2017a. 27-45. Grossberg, Lawrence. "The Time for/of Cultural Studies." Crisis, Risks and New Regionalisms in Europe: Emergency Diasporas and Borderlands. Eds. Cecile Sandten, Claudia Gualtieri, Robero Pedretti, and Eike Kronshage. Trier: WVT, 2017b. 353-355. Gurnah, Abdulrazak, "The Arriver's Tale." Refugee Tales. Eds. David Herd and Anna Pincus. Manchester: Comma Press, 2016. 35-39. Hall, Stuart, ed. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage, 2003. Herd, David. "Walking the Border." Refugee Tales 5 June 2019. [accessed 23 January 2020]. Herd, David, and Anna Pincus, eds. Refugee Tales. Manchester: Comma Press, 2016. Herd, David. "Afterword." Refugee Tales. David Herd and Anna Pincus. Manchester: Comma Press, 2016. 133-149. Herd, David, and Anna Pincus, eds. Refugee Tales II. Manchester: Comma Press, 2017. Herd, David, and Anna Pincus, eds. Refugee Tales III. Manchester: Comma Press, 2019. J. "The Parent's Tales." Refugee Tales III. Eds. David Herd and Anna Pincus. Manchester: Comma Press, 2019. 167-172. Johnson, Anna, ed. Refugees and Peacekeepers: A Patrician Press Anthology. Manningtree: Patrician Press, 2017. Kadar, Marlene. "Coming to Terms: Life Writing – from Genre to Critical Practice." Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice. Ed. Marlene Kadar. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. 3-16. DOI: 10.3138/9781442674615. Kirkup, James, and Robert Winnett. "Theresa May interview: 'We're going to give illegal migrants a really hostile reception'." The Telegraph 25 May 2012. [accessed 23 January 2020]. "May discusses 'hostile environment' policy in 2013." The Guardian. Online video clip. YouTube 7 April 2018. [accessed 9 September 2019]. Oxford Learner's Dictionaries online. 2020. Oxford University Press [accessed 30 January 2020]. Padamsee, Alex. "Uncertain Partitions: 'Undecidability' and the Urdu Short Story." Wasafiri 23.1 (March 2008): 1-5. Popescu, Lucy, ed. A Country Called Refuge. London: Unbound, 2016. Popescu, Lucy, ed. A Country to Call Home. London: Unbound, 2018. Popoola, Olumide, and Annie Holmes, eds. Breach. London: Pereine Press, 2016.

R. "The Volunteer's Tale." Refugee Tales III. Eds. David Herd and Anna Pincus. Manchester: Comma Press, 2019. 53-69. "Refugee Tales." 2020. "About Refugee Tales." [accessed 23 January 2020]. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives." History and Theory 24.3 (1985): 247-272. Sturge, Georgina. "Migration statistics: How many asylum seekers and refugees are there in the UK?" House of Commons Library: Research and analysis from impartial experts 20 March 2019. [accessed 4 September 2019]. Ther, Philipp. Die Außenseiter: Flucht, Flüchtlinge und Integration im modernen Europa. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2018.