Contemporary Asylum Narratives

Representing Refugees in the Twenty-First Century

A. Woolley

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137299055
• eBook ISBN: 9781137299062
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Contemporary Asylum Narratives marks a transition from traditional modes of diasporic belonging to the need for identifications that encompass the statelessness of refugees and asylum seekers. This book explores representations of asylum seekers and refugees in twenty-first century literature, film and theatre.

Part I

Hospitable Representations

Introduction to Part I

British suburban and provincial locations have often been understood as ‘closed communities’ which, according to David Sibley, are concerned with ‘order, conformity and social homogeneity’ and are secured by the strengthening of an ‘external boundary’ (1995, p. 38). Reassessing this view from a postcolonial standpoint in his book Dwelling Places: Postwar Black British Writing (2003), James Procter considers how the idea of racially and culturally homogeneous British provinciality is disturbed by diasporic modes of dwelling, which transform Britain’s suburbs into sites of ‘discrepant cosmopolitanism’ (p. 129). Focusing on two novels of the 1990s, Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), which is set in suburban south London, and Meera Syal’s Anita and Me (1996), which is set in a fictional village just outside Birmingham, Procter links the significance of the novels’ settings to an acknowledgement of the historicity of black experience in Britain, opposing it to the politicized urban spaces reflected in previous metropolitan cultural production. This literary shift to the relatively depoliticized suburbs signals a ‘becoming local’ (Procter, 2003, p. 126) for Karim and Meena, the young British Asian protagonists coming of age in 1970s England. Rewritten by Kureishi and Syal as ‘multicultural’ and ‘hybrid’, suburbia also provides a topographical parallel to the multiple cultural identifications often held by second-generation immigrants through its conjunction of rural and metropolitan sensibilities, allowing it to become, in Procter’s view, a ‘migrant landscape’ (2003, p. 126).

Where Kureishi and Syal read immigration as part of the ongoing construction of a multicultural Britain, the authors considered in Part I are troubled by the solitary and transient nature of asylum seeking as a mode of migration that does not easily conform to traditions of diasporic belonging. In Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore and Graham Swift’s The Light of Day, both published in 2003, refugee and asylum-seeking characters find themselves in provincial and suburban settings that are not sites of ‘discrepant cosmopolitanism’, but are instead hostile and inhospitable. Depicting an insular and fragmented Britain, these novels explore the particular challenges faced by temporary and non-diasporic migrants seeking to make a life in the UK, expressing a growing concern over the possibility of a hospitable welcome to individuals who arrive in flight from persecution and war. For these newcomers, it seems, Britain’s internal boundaries and socially segregated spaces replicate on a domestic scale their agonised experiences of national border crossing and illegitimacy.

Karim and Meena share not only a complex historical relationship to Britain but also, as Procter suggests, a localness conferred by their provincial and suburban places of residence, dwelling places which permit them legitimate status as ‘insiders’ (2003, p. 156). Where this permits Karim playfully to subvert social norms in The Buddha of Suburbia, such transgressions are unthinkable for Swift’s and Phillips’s refugees who, lacking the security of citizenship, face a series of legally-determined barriers that delimit their spatial and social legitimacy. Infinitely deferring the prospect of becoming an ‘insider’, this highly conditional mode of dwelling is brought into even sharper focus by the novels’ suburban and provincial settings, which lack the often valuable anonymity afforded by large, diverse metropolises.¹ With no cultural, familial or social ties to England where he seeks asylum, Gabriel/Solomon in A Distant Shore struggles to forge relationships or share his story of persecution and flight with those around him.² Such traumatic experiences also constitute the contested narrative ground of The Light of Day, in which the character of Kristina, an asylum seeker from Croatia, is refracted through the introspective consciousness of the novel’s narrator. In these novels, the challenges to articulating narratives of asylum are born not only of their extreme nature – often including torture, sustained persecution and death – but also of national and societal conditions inhospitable to the situated circumstances of forced migration. If postcolonial texts of the late 1980s and 1990s anticipate a progressive narrative of inclusion, then A Distant Shore and The Light of Day reflect a disavowal of British hospitality to immigration in a post-millennial context.

The notion of British ‘hospitality’ to migrants draws on a set of ideas and a social practice with a long and complex history.³ In recent years, however, the concept has become a dominant theoretical framework for examining the intersections between ethics and politics in relation to immigration and, in particular, the experience of the refugee. Having been ‘revitalized’ as ‘an ethico-political framework for analyzing the worldly realities of living amongst diverse others’, the concept now resides at the centre of debates about ‘immigration, multiculturalism, and post-national citizenship’ (Dikeç et al., 2009, p. 2). Despite this ongoing process of conceptual reorientation, the usefulness of hospitality as an idea that allows for the kinds of non-national, non-cultural affiliations often required by stateless individuals remains open to debate. Moreover, the question of hospitality in the context of forced migration is often negotiated within a predetermined relationship of power that pits a dominant host nation against a vulnerable and dependent asylum-seeking guest.

In a reading of Immanuel Kant’s essay ‘Toward Perpetual Peace’, in which the eighteenth-century philosopher sets out his ideas on hospitality, Jacques Derrida (2000) notes the provisional nature of the Kantian model. Though based on the idea of the ‘possession in common of the earth’s surface’ (1996 [1795], p. 329), Kant’s vision of hospitality is only as a right of ‘resort’ or temporary residence; thus, ‘there is no hospitality for people who are not citizens’ (Derrida, 2000, p. 16). Presupposing that the request for hospitality is made to one sovereign nation by a citizen of another, Kant defines hospitality as transactional; a ‘pact’, in Derrida’s terms, between host and guest (Derrida and Dufourmantelle, 2000, p. 25). It cannot account for those – like refugees and asylum seekers – who have already been denied the legitimating privileges that national belonging is able to confer. Reframing Kant’s cosmopolitical ‘right’ to hospitality, recent formulations of the term examine its broader implications for national sovereignty and the extent of collective and individual responsibility for those who make a request for either permanent or temporary hospitality. Understood variously as a metaphor, a legal obligation and an ethical responsibility, the concept of hospitality entails alliances and exchange on the one hand, and fear and mistrust on the other. As Heidrun Friese observes, negotiations over hospitality ‘question social, cultural or national boundaries, and undermine the general congruence of citizenship, territory and nation’, yet also ‘re-affirm the rights of political communities to deliberate about the contents and the extent of the universal duty of hospitality’ (2009, p. 53). Though it may initiate a reassessment of the bonds linking territory and identity, for refugees, the question of hospitality more often results in a ‘narrowing of the ethnocentric, nationalist and xenophobic circle’ (Derrida and Dufourmantelle, 2000, p. 53).

Derrida’s thinking on hospitality focuses on the extent to which national and textual imaginaries are able to host or accommodate an ‘unknown, anonymous other’ (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000, p. 25). This question, for Derrida, belongs to the order of culture itself:

Insofar as it has to do with the ethos, that is, the residence, one’s home, the familiar place of dwelling [...] the manner in which we relate to ourselves and others, to others as our own or as foreigners, ethics is hospitality [...].

(2001, pp. 16–17, original emphases)

Precisely because hospitality and ethics are ‘thoroughly coextensive’ (2001, p. 17), there are laws, in both the legal and the social sense, which delimit the operation of hospitality. Derrida makes a distinction between conditional and unconditional forms of hospitality: where the former constitutes the multiple laws that surround the concept of hospitality such that any home – or nation – may remain sovereign, the latter, by contrast, considers the possibility of welcoming an ‘anonymous other’ without asking them either to account for themselves or to enter into a Kantian pact with the host. The multiple laws (conditional) and the law (unconditional) of hospitality are not in opposition, according to Derrida, but are heterogeneous to one another and must remain so if they are to respond adequately to historically and politically situated circumstances. Giving rise to an ethically responsible hospitality, the delicate interdependence between conditional and unconditional ensures that the ideals of hospitality become neither abstract nor illusory.

Drawing on the irreducibility of Derrida’s dual vision of hospitality, the chapters below consider the varying ways in which The Light of Day and A Distant Shore address the conditionality of hospitality to unknown others, arguing that these novels provide a hospitable space for narratives of asylum where British legal and social institutions do not. As refugees, Gabriel/Solomon and Kristina bear witness to the unavailability of hospitality to those whose singular experiences of persecution, trauma and migration drive them to the margins of an already fragmented and antagonistic Britain. However, this pessimism about the effectiveness of hospitality as a political practice – a recognition of its inevitable conditionalities – is counterbalanced in The Light of Day and A Distant Shore by a poetics of hospitality in which the imagination is not subject to such rigid circumscription as national or juridical space. The imaginative act in these novels – or, as the narrator of The Light of Day describes it, putting oneself ‘in the picture’ (p. 153) – creates a space that ‘allow[s] for encounter’ (Friese, 2009, p. 64, original emphasis); a space that accommodates asylum narratives without diminishing their particularity and sets the conditions imposed on refugees against the possibilities opened up by the imagination.

One way of activating the imagination in ethical relation to Derrida’s ‘unknown’ others is through the idea that imagining difference, both as an everyday form of social engagement and within cultural representations, creates a necessary self-estrangement. Perceiving the self differently, according to Paul Gilroy, allows the ‘strangeness of strangers’ to go out of focus, making way for ‘the peaceful accommodation of otherness in relation to fundamental commonality’ (2004, p. 3). As we shall see, this activity is undertaken both by the characters in the novels explored here, who have varying degrees of success in their attempts to cultivate an empathetic understanding of asylum experiences, and, inevitably, by readers engaged in the imaginative act of reading. Making an even stronger case for the significance of the imagination in contemporary fiction, John Su argues in his 2011 book Imagination and the Contemporary Novel that the process of imagining is ‘crucial to recovering and communicating alternative systems of knowledge’ (Su, 2011, p. 3). Far from signalling a retreat from the world, for Su, the imagination is ‘an epistemological faculty for interpreting reality – a task that is inseparable from the creation of a horizon of expectations that emerges from an individual’s social location, cultural identity, and idiosyncratic aspirations’ (Su, 2011, p. 6). As a postcolonial approach to the act of imagining, the important element here is the imagination’s capacity to comprehend difference. For the postcolonial writers Su explores, the imagination ‘is no longer charged with the task given it by Romantic thinkers of dissolving differences between self and society’ but instead offers a ‘mode of relating to others whose differences cannot be dissolved’ (Su, 2011, p. 54). The ‘difference’ of the refugee becomes the object of imaginative speculation – and, often, imaginative struggle – in The Light of Day and A Distant Shore, both of which emphasize the value of imaginative engagement with asylum experiences. Yet while the imagination as depicted in these novels is hospitable to this difference, it is also a space of contestation. The restrictions of subjective perception impose conditions on the imaginative accommodation of the other, meaning that the knowledge the imagination can provide is not always readily available. As the narrator of The Light of Day repeatedly avers, ‘it’s hard to imagine’ (p. 44).

My readings of The Light of Day and A Distant Shore in this part of the book are shaped by this understanding of the imagination as simultaneously integrative in scope and beset by conditions. The act of imagining in Swift’s and Phillips’s novels of asylum provides an alternative way of knowing traditionally marginalized or traumatic experiences and is also presented as a demanding ethical obligation; a hospitable response to the other’s request for refuge. Imagining for the characters in The Light of Day and A Distant Shore is, in Derrida’s aporetic vision, a potentially impossible yet fundamentally necessary task. As a constitutive theme of both novels, the attempt to imagine another’s experience becomes an ethically and socially significant act. For Swift’s private detective narrator, George, the imagination is another form of knowledge which uses insight and intuition to solve cases and, concomitantly, to understand Kristina. Similarly, the protagonists of A Distant Shore attempt to undermine the barriers erected by their social isolation through imaginative speculation about each other’s experiences of displacement. This thematic preoccupation with the process of imagining draws these novels together as literatures of hospitality in which the attempt to imagine ‘otherwise’ is a transformative act in the face of hostile political and social conditions. The texts thus become hospitable spaces of encounter in which the demand to imagine the other and their circumstances might be met.

The suggestion that these novels are ‘hospitable’ to asylum narratives risks instrumentalizing narrative fiction as a space of imaginary consolation for the inadequacies of an unjust reality. From this perspective, a text becomes one more placeless imagining of identity, which struggles to transform the world because of its inability to overcome the material borders with which forced migrants are regularly confronted. As Su observes, there is a tendency in concepts such as Paul Gilroy’s ‘planetary humanism’ to depend on the imagination to ‘translate an aesthetic ideal into a viable political reality’ (2011, p. 18). Nevertheless, the poetics of hospitality figured in the imaginative acts depicted in The Light of Day and A Distant Shore, and in the hospitable gesture extended by the novels themselves, is valuable not only for presenting asylum stories which would not otherwise be told or for brokering an encounter with the other that engenders an ethical self-alienation. The imagination in these novels is a self-reflexive one, which is at pains to examine its own conditionalities and limits. Taking as their theme the imaginative challenges posed by dark experiences, Swift and Phillips self-consciously explore the conditions of possibility for imagining the experience of the other. As a starting point for an ethical engagement with asylum, these imaginative acts pursue the elusive connection between imagination, empathy and solidarity.

1

Narrator as Host in Graham Swift’s The Light of Day

During the early 1990s, Western European countries were forced to consider their ethical duties towards those fleeing the break-up of Yugoslavia. As large numbers of people sought refuge in neighbouring states, the issue of how to deal with refugees became as pressing as it had been after the end of World War Two and was considered a crisis (Cohen, 1994). In contrast to 1945, however, most new arrivals to Western Europe at this time were offered only temporary protection, a measure that denied them the usual rights afforded refugees such as travel documents, identity papers and the chance of family reunion. The 1990s thus represented a seismic change in attitudes towards, and the management of, international asylum and protection, resulting in ‘a substantial paradigm shift for Europe from uncoordinated liberalism to harmonised restrictionism’ (Joly, 1999, p. 355).

In Britain, this increase in asylum claims coincided with considerable economic growth and, towards the end of the decade, a proliferation of migrant workers, heralding a new era of provisional and contingent immigration to the country (Gibney, 2004). While this transient migrant population – comprising both asylum seekers and migrant workers – is distinct from the UK’s postcolonial diasporic communities, the cultural and social impact of such quasi-legal residents often remains invisible within dominant narratives of contemporary Britain. The significance of this occlusion concerns Swift in The Light of Day, whose asylum-seeking character, Kristina, is a refugee from the war in Croatia which took place between 1991 and 1995. In a novel notable for its localized domestic setting and highly insular narrative voice, the politics of the period play a crucial and, I would argue, largely overlooked role. Indeed, the fraught geopolitical climate of the 1990s makes troublesome incursions into the novel’s ostensibly narrow field of vision through its refugee character in ways that have an important bearing on the notion of imaginative hospitality examined in this chapter.

Kristina is an oblique and impalpable presence in The Light of Day because information about her is provided exclusively through the novel’s narrator, George, a private detective. Having been granted temporary refugee status, Kristina is, in George’s words, a ‘stateless person, only half within the law’ (p. 78). She is also only half within the novel itself, as the first-person narrative relies on George’s memory and imagination in telling her story; a task he struggles to carry out. Based only on photographs and second-hand information, George constructs a conjectural narrative around Kristina, her life in Croatia and her time in London as a refugee. Having entered Britain on a student visa, Kristina is forced to claim asylum when war breaks out in Croatia and her family are killed. At this point, her English teacher, Sarah Nash, invites Kristina to live with her and her husband Bob in their house on Beecham Close in the well-off London suburb of Wimbledon Village. However, this ‘fine piece of charity’, which gives Sarah ‘unpaid help around the home and the bonus of feeling good’ (pp. 45–6), starts to unravel when Kristina and Bob begin an affair. Unable to return home yet no longer welcome in Wimbledon Village, Kristina moves into a flat paid for by the Nashes until it is safe for her to return to Croatia. George enters this love triangle when Sarah hires him to follow Bob and Kristina to the airport to say their goodbyes after the war is over. Having already fallen for Sarah, George carries out her request and returns to Beecham Close to find that she has stabbed Bob to death with a kitchen knife.

George recounts these events over the course of a day two years later in 1997: the second anniversary of Sarah’s murder of Bob. In the intervening years, he has been visiting Sarah in prison and with her tuition has begun to use his analytical skills as a detective to investigate words and their meanings; to ‘hold them up to the light’ (p. 177). Despite this forensic approach to his own linguistic expression, George’s narrative is replete with cliché and proverbial wisdom, resembling, in the words of one critic, ‘a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Exposure
• Part I Hospitable Representations
• Part II Refugees on Film
• Part III Staging Asylum
• Part IV Asylum in a Global Era
• Conclusion: An Uncertain Belonging
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index