Border-Crossing Experience in Refugee Tales IV

Abstract

The year 2021 witnessed the publication of the latest volume of Refugee Tales, which chronologically coincided with the seventieth anniversary of the adoption of the 1951 Refugee Convention by the UK and other countries. This collection is the fourth volume of the Refugee Tales Project, which began in 2015 with a yearly meeting to walk and share stories by victims of detention, with the main goal of abolishing indefinite detention in the UK. The Refugee Tales Project, which exposes the humanitarian crisis involved in displacement, refugeehood, and detention, is primarily a spatial project that is concerned with borders and boundary crossings. The centrality of space can be seen reflected in the stories collected in Refugee Tales IV, which also reveal a sustained interest in the dimension of time. In this context, the present study addresses borders and border-crossing in the literary voicing of migrants’ experience as these migrants interact with spatial and temporal planes, with the aim of exploring such an interaction in a selection of narratives from Refugee Tales IV. This analysis examines the selected tales from the perspectives of the treatment of space, time, and the disoriented perception of both, considering how the articulation of these parameters contributes to the exposure of the injustices in detention and refugeehood.