A Difficult Passage to Navigate: From Asylum Story to Refugee Tale

Helga Ramsey-Kurz
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Abstract

This article draws on the results of a life writing initiative, ARENA (Archive of Refugee Encounter Narratives), developed at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. It involves students of English collaborating with refugees over periods of three months to write down the latter’s stories. Like other storytelling ventures spawned by the perceived European refugee crisis of 2015, ARENA aims to enable a better understanding of the situation of refugees in Europe than the dominant asylum discourse allows. To this end, students arrange regular encounters with participating refugees and encourage them to tell whatever they consider to be their stories. The texts the students craft from these exchanges capture not only the refugees’ stories but also their own experience of hearing them. I will examine the embodied act of narration thus recorded in the ARENA corpus and contest critical claims that, too indebted to the rigid veracity standards defining official refugee testimonials, refugee life writing is unable to augment new ways of thinking about refugee experience and forced migration at large. My argument is that such criticism does not apply where the dialogic nature of live telling is consciously experienced and given due expression in the life writing it eventually becomes.
艰难的道路:从庇护故事到难民故事
本文取材于奥地利因斯布鲁克大学发起的一项名为ARENA(难民遭遇叙事档案)的生活写作倡议的成果。它要求英语专业的学生在三个月的时间里与难民合作,写下后者的故事。与2015年欧洲难民危机引发的其他叙事活动一样,ARENA的目的是让人们更好地了解欧洲难民的处境,而不是主流的庇护话语所允许的。为此,学生们定期安排与参与的难民见面,并鼓励他们讲述他们认为是自己的故事。学生们从这些交流中编写的文本不仅记录了难民的故事,也记录了他们自己听到这些故事的经历。我将研究ARENA语料库中记录的具体叙述行为,并反驳批评的说法,即过于依赖于定义官方难民证词的严格真实性标准,难民生活写作无法增加对难民经历和被迫移民的新思考方式。我的观点是,这种批评并不适用于生活讲述的对话性质是有意识地经历并在生活写作中给予应有的表达。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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