10.2357/ REAL-2021-0011 J aN r upp Telling Stories, Saving Lives: The Value of 21st-Century Refugee Writing 1 Introduction: Refugee Writing as a Literature of Survival This is a woman to whom I might tell my story If I do not share my story, then I have only this one year to my life I am a one-year-old man who walks with heavy steps I am a man burdened with hidden history 1 These are the words of Solomon, an African civil war refugee He has escaped to a village in the north of England, but his ordeal is far from over On top of being haunted by his traumatic past, Solomon is struggling with the local population’s xenophobia and an acute sense of isolation His only contact is his next-door neighbour, a middle-aged single lady, weighed down by a difficult past of her own. The prospect of being able to tell and share his story, at last, takes on an almost life-saving significance for Solomon. Without giving testimony of his experiences, he will effectively be reduced to the one year he has lived as an unwelcome outsider in his new home Only telling his story will restore an integral sense of his grown-up self Solomon’s words articulate the value of storytelling in the most fundamental way imaginable - and by extension the value of narrative fiction and literature more broadly 2 For though the reader may relate Solomon’s fate to the dire topicality of forced migration in the real world, he is a central character in Caryl Phillips’ novel A Distant Shore (2003), which in turn belongs to a growing body of new refugee writing in the 21st century What Solomon does as a narrator, the novel does as a work of literature: It tells a story of refugee 1 Caryl Phillips, A Distant Shore (2003; London: Vintage, 2004), 300 2 For current reappraisals of the ethical potential of literature and narrative see, inter alia, Sibylle Baumbach/ Herbert Grabes/ Ansgar Nünning, eds , Literature and Values: Literature as a Medium for Representing, Disseminating and Constructing Norms and Values (Trier: WVT, 2009), Vera Nünning, Reading Fictions, Changing Minds: The Cognitive Value of Fiction (Heidelberg: Winter, 2014), and Hanna Meretoja, The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) 220 J aN r upp 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0011 migration, putting a name and an individual life to those who are portrayed, all too often, as a faceless group or ‘mass,’ scandalised as ‘waves’ of immigrants causing a refugee ‘crisis ’ In short, the novel restores nothing less than a sense of humanity and human dignity to Solomon and refugees at large In the context of 21st-century refugee migration, any number of examples testifying to the central role of storytelling and narrative fiction will come to mind As countless creative and artistic projects of refugee aid suggest, telling stories as well as reading and writing literature arguably contributes to the well-being and sanity of refugees as much as decent accommodation, medical help, and food supply In the Calais ‘Jungle’, the infamous symbol of Europe’s migrant ‘crisis’ in 2015 and after, central facilities included a church, a mosque, a theatre, and a library The Good Chance theatre offered a space for refugees to express themselves, as well as to participate in workshops and performances - a varied programme that, in the words of Tom Stoppard, testified that “life without culture is nothing more than biology in survival mode ” 3 The Jungle, a play based on the reality of the camp’s inhabitants, yet featuring a fictional storyline, premiered in 2017. The collection Voices from the ‘Jungle’: Stories from the Calais Refugee Camp appeared in the same year As I shall argue in this chapter, both testimony as a storytelling practice and fictional narratives inform the value of new refugee writing. This is an extremely diverse body of literature, in which boundaries between fiction and non-fiction are frequently blurred. I will adopt a wide understanding of ‘literature’ to cover this spectrum Extending across it, the value of refugee writing may be based, even premised on giving voice to authentic stories otherwise repressed or little heard However, away from oral history or therapeutic settings, articulating and writing the refugee experience is often expanded by drawing on the fictional imagination. While not necessarily identical, testimonial and fictional narratives may overlap, with both feeding into new refugee writing as a literature and “art of survival ” 4 An important way in which the value of refugee writing manifests itself, I suggest, is through taking recourse to iconic extant narratives, which are reworked to interpret current events Over the past couple of decades, these have included anything from the bible to ancient Greek epics like The Aeneid 3 Quoted in the jacket of Joe Murphy/ Joe Robertson, The Jungle (London: Faber and Faber, 2017) Stoppard collaborated with Murphy and Robertson in Calais, two British playwrights who had set up the Good Chance theatre He is echoed by Tarek, a refugee from Syria, in another quotation in the jacket of Murphy and Robertson’s play: “The refugee who sits alone, he does not just need food, or some materials, he needs also hope Good Chance theatre gives hope ” 4 Meretoja, Ethics of Storytelling, 1 Telling Stories, Saving Lives: The Value of 21st-Century Refugee Writing 221 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0011 and The Odyssey My key and core example will concern recent adaptations of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, in particular Refugee Tales (2016, 2018, 2019), an activist project, and Patience Agbabi’s modern-day remix Telling Tales (2014) Before moving on this case study, more needs to be said about the larger trajectory of 21st-century refugee writing, as well as about different facets of its value in representing refugees Refugee writing shares common ground with, but in crucial respects departs from, earlier histories of migrant writing As opposed to a degree of relative access and agency provided for by post- WWII multicultural society, to which previous accounts date back, 21st-century refugee writing is engaged in a fundamental struggle over representation If only to counter racist and xenophobic stereotypes in public images and discourses, mediating the refugee experience, including its creative reworking in fictional accounts, becomes a matter of particular urgency. 2 The Value of Refugee Writing from Testimony to Hospitable Empathy Any discussion of the value of literature and 21st-century refugee writing is well advised to contextualise the latter within larger literary-historical and social developments Refugee writing in the new millennium is faced with conditions of migration markedly different from post-WWII multicultural society, which arguably leads to new forms of representation and places renewed emphasis on the value of literature 21st-century refugee writing constitutes a new phase indeed, as already predicted by Bruce King in his 1948-2000: The Internationalization of English Literature: “The story I tell of England’s multiracial literature needs to be superseded by later stories of the troubles of new refugees from other parts of the world at the start of the new century […] As societies change, their histories need to be revised ” 5 Writing in the early 2000s, King could not envision yet the current development of refugee migration from Africa and the Middle East But he was clearly right in suggesting that “new refugees from other parts of the world” were increasingly going to shape literary production They have done so in a way that complements 1948 as a reference point for “England’s multiracial literature” both temporally and spatially - temporally, because new refugees follow on from earlier post-WWII migration and the genesis of multicultural society; and spatially, because they often come to Europe from conflicts different to the former colo- 5 Bruce King, 1948-2000: The Internationalization of English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 325 222 J aN r upp 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0011 nial world. King’s reference of refugees is significant, too, drawing attention to forced migration as a symptomatic case of global travel and movement in the 21st century Two decades on from King’s account, the revision of literary history is well under way, prompted by expanding bodies of refugee writing which in turn respond to shifting sociological conditions In a telling phrase, Paul Lauter has delineated a new state of “immigration shock,” 6 as shorthand for the nature and effects of 21st-century globalisation According to Lauter, the era of immigration shock replaces or at least suspends an earlier paradigm of multiculturalism, which falls short of attending to a situation of increasing levels of immigration, economic disparity and terrorist violence in the 21st century: Multiculturalism focused on access and integration, but these are not the primary issues of globalization and the immigration it has generated The issues here are legitimization, whether one is, and is seen and received as, legal, legitimate, fully a citizen […] The issue is not what constitutes an identity that needs to be respected, but what constitutes a viable political community and offers the possibility of decent work 7 The fact that the new millennium has witnessed distinctively different patterns and evermore precarious forms of migration, with a corresponding need for adapting conceptual frameworks, is an insight widely echoed by scholars of migration 8 As Lauter’s quotation makes clear, the era of immigration shock introduces far more precarious conditions than the framework that multiculturalism operates in At issue here are basic questions of citizenship and legitimacy, which more often than not exclude a growing number of asylum seekers, undocumented migrants, and stateless refugees According to Agnes Woolley, a “precarious relationship to the law and the condition of statelessness” 9 constitute the single-most important characteristic of contemporary asylum narratives, too She repeatedly stresses “the ways in which asylum seeking - as both legally precarious and persistently indeterminate - is distinct from the traditional narratives of diasporic accommodation that have historically shaped discourses of migration ” 10 This situation does not render 6 Paul Lauter, “From Multiculturalism to Immigration Shock,” Journal of Transnational American Studies 1 1 (2009), 1 7 Ibid , 12 8 See, e g , Doris Bachmann-Medick/ Jens Kugele, eds , Migration: Changing Concepts, Critical Approaches (Berlin/ Boston: De Gruyter, 2018) 9 Agnes Woolley, Contemporary Asylum Narratives: Representing Refugees in the Twenty-First Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 6 10 Ibid , 3 Telling Stories, Saving Lives: The Value of 21st-Century Refugee Writing 223 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0011 multiculturalism obsolete, but it can only be engaged again, as it were, once a viable political community has been established or restored In the absence of rights and representation, refugee testimony takes on an overriding existential, political, and ethical value As has been noted with regard to Holocaust testimony and histories of suffering generally, for those affected, to tell their stories is a central precondition of survival, of overcoming their plight: “There is, in each survivor, an imperative need to tell and thus to come to know one’s story […] One has to know one’s buried truth in order to be able to live ” 11 To begin with, testimony is part and parcel of a private, individual healing process, seeking to mend the rupture of traumatic experiences Even in its private form, however, testimony is never a solipsistic affair It is an “imperative to tell and be heard” 12 at the same time In my example quoted at the beginning, the protagonist of Phillips’ novel crucially needs an interlocutor, an “empathic listener” 13 to witness his story This essentially dialogical constellation of testimony takes on an overtly political dimension, the larger the narrative audience becomes Public performances of testimony, such as Asylum Monologues (2006), a long-running stage show in the UK, are a central element of refugee aid and activism They are a key site of a “struggle to come into representation” in order then to engage in a “struggle over […] the politics of representation,” 14 in a situation where refugees are both denied basic rights and are discriminated against by racism and xenophobia While these public performances seek to communicate authentic experience, fictional narratives are frequently part of mediating testimony in ethically significant ways. Even ostensibly non-fictional performances like Asylum Monologues tend to be framed by a creative setting of sorts They frequently involve actors and are staged in theatres or similar venues Moreover, many accounts of refugee testimony draw on fictional elements as a way to counter and think beyond dehumanising public images Imaginatively extending their testimony enables refugees to work through their past and present, as well as to transcend it at the same time This process, I suggest, is closely bound up with what Hanna Meretoja, via Robert Musil, calls a “sense of the possible” - an all-around sense in which “narratives can cultivate our sense of how our narrative interpretations of the past shape our space of possibil- 11 Shoshana Felman/ Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routldegde, 1992), 78 12 Ibid 13 Ibid , 68 14 Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities,” Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed D Morley/ K Chen (1988; London: Routledge, 1996), 442 224 J aN r upp 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0011 ities in the present and our orientation to the future ” 15 The aforementioned collection Voices from the ‘Jungle’: Stories from the Calais Refugee Camp is a case in point. It is divided into five sections, the first three of which are entitled “Home,” “Journeys,” and “Living in the ‘Jungle’,” respectively In the last two sections - “Living in and leaving the ‘Jungle’” as well as “Life after the Jungle” - the Calais writers move on to imagine a life after the camp and beyond their status as refugees The value of refugee writing as a cross between testimony and imaginative storytelling is equally (if not more) present when authors do not have direct experience as refugees themselves Indeed, a good many works of 21st-century refugee writing rely on “empathetic perspective-taking” 16 and the fictional imagination instead. As Agnes Woolley has argued, fiction may serve as “a site of contestation which offers alternative, non-coercive, narrative forums in which to explore the condition of statelessness ” 17 These alternative forums differ from certain real-life scenarios, such as the credible account of their reasons to flee that refugees are required to provide as part of their asylum claim, all the while having to adhere to highly regulated story patterns As opposed to these constraints of the asylum process, fictional narratives may thus serve as “hospitable representations,” 18 going at least some way towards compensating for the de facto lack of hospitality in many real-world contexts It is in this sense that I identify and speak of a general potential of ‘hospitable empathy’ in works of refugee writing, with authors (as well as readers) drawing on the power of the imagination to engage in perspective-taking and open up a more welcoming space The value of refugee writing in facilitating testimony and hospitable empathy is further emphasised, I suggest, by a set of extant literary works which have variously underwritten recent accounts 19 References to predecessor texts from a wide-ranging literary archive are among the most conspicuous features of 21st-century refugee writing Any number of examples could be cited of the way in which stories of refugees have been modelled on older pre-texts, broaching these as hospitable representations of current refugee migration Literary life in the Calais ‘Jungle’ and the camp’s makeshift li- 15 Meretoja, Ethics of Storytelling, 90, 95 16 Ibid , 3 17 Woolley, Asylum Narratives, 20 18 Ibid , 27 19 Narrative techniques that might (or might not) induce empathy have been explored by a large body of scholarship; see, e g , Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Rather than on specific textual cues, I primarily focus on the overall constellation of storytellers, readers, and extant narrative templates to locate hospitable empathy in refugee writing Telling Stories, Saving Lives: The Value of 21st-Century Refugee Writing 225 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0011 brary, called Jungle Books, might be cited once more While possibly a playful rather than programmatic allusion to Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, the library’s name is suggestive of various interpretations of how the colonial classic might reflect on the current status quo. For one, Kipling’s children’s book and its colonial provenance fit in with a larger narrative that positions 21st-century refugee migration as a symptom of global inequality and a legacy of colonialism. More specifically, as is well known, the colonialist trope of the jungle was used, in Kipling and elsewhere, to set up a binary distinction between civilisation and native anarchy, human and animal 20 In the Calais migrant camp, it can now be seen to emerge as an empowering trope of resistance, appropriated by refugees from places once identified as the colonial jungle, who in today’s climate of xenophobia are no less likely to be portrayed as animals than their ancestors While literature of and in the Calais ‘Jungle’ can be interpreted in revisionist terms, Kipling’s Jungle Book has also been taken up in a less antagonistic way At the Edinburgh Festival 2017, Kipling’s classic was adapted for the musical The Concrete Jungle Book, with Mowgli the orphan being reimagined as a modern-day refugee Separated from his mother, Mowgli is struggling to get by in a ‘jungle’ of urban concrete in the metropolitan West, which is shown to fail refugees and asylum seekers arriving on its shores Among others, this example demonstrates that new refugee writing has taken a less adversarial approach than works of postcolonial criticism have tended to suggest 21 Instead, relational and multidirectional constellations are brought to the fore, to borrow Michael Rothberg’s concept for convergent and mutually enabling rather than competitive memories 22 Developments of current refugee writing have indeed capitalised on principles of multiplicity and relation with older established texts In the process, antagonistic conceptions of the Western or European canon and of some of its central works are being revised Reconstructing a “relational mnemohistory” of Homer’s epics, Astrid Erll argues that “they are often erroneously cast as ‘European heritage’ or ‘foundations of the West ’” 23 By contrast, she 20 See Yasmin Ibrahim/ Anita Howarth, Calais and Its Border Politics: From Control to Demolition (New York/ London: Routledge, 2017) 21 See, e g , John Thieme’s Postcolonial Con-texts: Writing Back to the Canon (London/ New York: Continuum, 2001), even though Thieme’s study deals with a far broader range of responses than the metaphor of ‘writing back’ implies 22 See the title of Rothberg’s Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2009) for the Holocaust and decolonisation as a paradigm example of multidirectional memory 23 Astrid Erll, “Homer: A Relational Mnemohistory,” Memory Studies 11 3 (2018), 274 Referring to the concept’s use across a wide spectrum of disciplines, including phi- 226 J aN r upp 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0011 highlights “Near and Middle Eastern, and possibly Egyptian influences on Homer’s epics,” among others, to demonstrate that the latter in part emerged from, and continue to circulate well beyond, Europe Thus, “in twentieth-century literary history […] remediations of Homer flourished most in colonial and postcolonial situations ” 24 In Europe’s post-2015 refugee situation, the Odyssey arguably serves as an enabling and productive rather than limiting reference, too A similar relational network has been fleshed out for Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales Candace Barrington and Jonathan Hsy characterise it as “a text - or an assemblage of texts - that simultaneously reflects and constructs an entire world ” 25 They thoroughly extend or suspend Chaucer’s role as a national English poet, highlighting his extra-European settings and characters as well as his “wide world of cultural influences,” moreover emphasising “how pervasively his influences were filtered and reprocessed through layers of translation as they moved around the Mediterranean ” 26 From this perspective, the Canterbury Tales, like Homer’s Odyssey, emerges as a highly conducive and hospitable template to inscribe present-day accounts of refugee migration Proceeding to my case study, I will now analyse the role and conspicuous returns of Chaucer in 21st-century refugee writing Iconic and widely circulating works like The Canterbury Tales are an integral part of the “culturally available repertoire of narrative models in relation to which we (re) interpret our experiences and lives, the past and the future ” 27 As a relational and highly resonant narrative for modern times, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales has informed both testimonial and fictional narratives, adding to the ethical potential of current refugee writing 3 Hospitable Returns of Chaucer in 21st-Century Refugee Writing Like the Odyssey and the Aeneid, Chaucer is a frequent reference in current debates as well as in literary mediations of the refugee situation, both within and beyond the Anglophone world A great number of examples from the losophy, sociology, and postcolonial studies, Erll defines relationality as “describ[ing] an ongoing connectivity among diverse elements, which creates meaningful structures and at the same time transforms all elements involved” (ibid , 278) 24 Ibid , 278, 282 25 Candace Barrington/ Jonathan Hsy, “Editors’ Introduction: Chaucer’s Global Orbits and Global Communities,” Literature Compass 15 (2018), 2 26 Ibid 27 Meretoja, Ethics of Storytelling, 171 Telling Stories, Saving Lives: The Value of 21st-Century Refugee Writing 227 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0011 past couple of decades attest to the popularity that Chaucer’s œuvre and the Canterbury Tales in particular have gained in a wide variety of contexts 21st-century refugee writing or asylum narratives generally circumscribe a highly diverse field, including non-fictional genres and other media apart from literature The BBC adapted and updated Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in a six-part series of television dramas as early as 2003 One of the episodes is based on “The Man of Law’s Tale,” which is fast becoming a quintessential element of Chaucer’s medieval storytelling contest for present-day times The BBC version of “The Man of Law’s Tale” features a Nigerian refugee among its modern-day cast of characters, who is found hiding on a boat in Kent and becomes embroiled in a romantic relationship resisted by her lover’s family - not unlike in Chaucer’s original, in which Constance is washed ashore in the north of England en route from the Mediterranean By casting her mother-in-law and her lover’s former partner as Arab and African characters respectively, the BBC version elaborates on Constance’s racial diversity In this and other respects, it is not an example of strict textual “fidelity,” but still “faithful to tradition of the Constance legend,” 28 with a theme already present in Chaucer being enlarged and foregrounded in the latter-day television drama It and “Chaucer’s narrative may be considered companion pieces, instantiations of the Constance story, resonating with each other in essential ways ” 29 In a relational constellation, both adaptation and original undergo change, as “each version enriches an understanding of the other ” 30 Eventually, Chaucer’s tale emerges as a blueprint of cultural diversity and an early example of refugee migration, which is able to address and speak out against racism and xenophobia in today’s multi-ethnic Britain As for literary adaptations, a major book-length reworking of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales comes in Patience Agbabi’s Telling Tales (2014) 31 An “inspired 21st-century Remix of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales” (blurb), Agbabi’s collection assembles a polyglot party of modern storytelling voices as well as a wide variety of styles from performance poetry to the sonnet A “cross-cultural Can- 28 Susan Yager, “The BBC ‘Man of Law’s Tale’: Faithful to the Tradition,” Literature and Belief 27 1 (2007), 58, 57 29 Ibid , 58 30 Ibid , 57 31 For Agbabi’s collection and Refugee Tales I have elaborated on an earlier reading in Jan Rupp, “21st-Century Refugee Writing as a Refraction of World Literature: Rerouting Multicultural Canons,” Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 31 2 (2020), 35- 51 228 J aN r upp 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0011 terbury Tales,” 32 Agbabi’s rewriting highlights characters and settings that gesture beyond England or Europe in Chaucer, like the BBC’s adaptation In addition, it is significant that Abgabi reproduces the tales’ cross-cultural content also in her fictive cast of storytellers, complete with flamboyant names and far-flung “author biographies.” 33 Among others, these include “Dr Kiranjeet Singh,” a “plastic surgeon with a passion for poetry,” “Missy Eglantine,” who was “born St Lucia/ raised in Lewisham/ R singer-rapper-poet,” and “Tim Canon-Yeo,” from “Singapore but schooled in the UK,” who “resides in Kent and writes a poem a day ” 34 Thoroughly diversifying what remains a domestic crop of pilgrims and storytelling contestants in Chaucer, Agbabi’s speakers travel on a “Routemaster bus” from “Tabard Inn to Canterbury Cathedral,” as announced in the collection’s “Prologue ” 35 As “poet pilgrims competing for free picks,” they retell “Chaucer’s Tales, track by track, here’s the remix/ from below the belt to the topnotch ” 36 Their cross-cultural competition can self-confidently take inspiration from Chaucer’s model, as Agbabi’s tongue-in-cheek reference in her acknowledgements makes clear: “Finally, I want to thank Geoffrey Chaucer for creating a literary work that defies time and space.” 37 Drawing on Chaucer allows for ‘telling’ tales in more than one sense, to take up the collection’s productively ambiguous title Telling Tales On the one hand, Agbabi’s tales are telling in that they reveal and pay homage to a long cross-cultural (pre-)history, dating back as far as Chaucer On the other hand, they constitute an empowering act of telling tales in the present, by speakers who share in the migrant or refugee experience of a character like Constance, and who on top of this (unlike Constance) are even given narrative agency themselves Having cross-cultural characters not only appear in, but actually tell her modern-day tales, Agbabi’s collection is a veritable ‘companion piece’ in its own right. Rather than a case of strict textual fidelity, it powerfully extends and transforms Chaucer’s original, similar to the BBC’s television drama In principle, the same is true of Refugee Tales as well, though here potentials for hospitality and hospitable empathy are even more pronounced For all its multiperspectival structure and imaginary cross-cultural poet pilgrims, Agbabi’s Telling Tales remains a single-authored text, seeking to trace and 32 See Patience Agbabi, “Stories in Stanza’d English: A Cross-Cultural Canterbury Tales,” Literature Compass 15 (2018), 1-8 33 Patience Agbabi, Telling Tales (London: Cannongate Books, 2014), 155-120 34 All ibid 35 Ibid , 2 36 Ibid 37 Ibid , 124 Telling Stories, Saving Lives: The Value of 21st-Century Refugee Writing 229 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0011 carve out a legacy of cultural diversity from within Chaucer By comparison, Refugee Tales relies on a de facto collaboration between British-resident writers and refugee testimony The stories collected in Refugee Tales are effectively co-produced, further extending cross-cultural multiperspectivity from the level of characters and extradiegetic narrators (as in Agbabi) to the level of authorship Refugee Tales is based on actual empathetic encounters and conversations between refugees and a go-between writer, who then goes on to communicate their experience to a wider reading public As a relational companion piece, too, this complex mediation of testimony significantly adds to reinscribing Chaucer in Refugee Tales In the process, Chaucer is thoroughly repositioned, as echoed by Marion Turner’s recent biography Chaucer, tellingly subtitled A European Life (2019) In it, Turner rejects a number of conventional associations of Chaucer as “a figure of Englishness” or as “father” of “a national literature.” 38 Instead, she stresses his European travels and influences, a relational network newly retrieved: Chaucer, indeed, has been much resurrected in ever more inventive ways in recent years No longer entombed and monumental, he is an inspiration for diverse writers around the globe Rather than thinking about Chaucer in his tomb, I’d like to think about him as the starting point for Refugee Tales, a collection published in 2016 that brings together contemporary politics, current writers, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales 39 Refugee Tales is an activist project first carried out in 2015, slightly ahead of that year’s historical curve of refugee migration into Europe It consisted not only in recording, but also in performing refugee stories on historic ground The tales were first read out while walking along the North Downs Way in Kent, which largely coincides with the ancient Pilgrims’ Way from London to Canterbury Annual walks and readings have continued ever since, with online video recordings of various stories adding to the project’s narrative archive Apart from the publication mentioned by Turner, two more book-length collections of stories have been released since 2016 Highlighting itineraries that link Chaucer’s pilgrims to elsewhere in the world, Refugee Tales retrieves a proto-cosmopolitan vision while simultaneously reflecting back on domestic conditions of immigration Facilitated by well-known multi-ethnic as well as mainstream writers in the UK - a “who is who of contemporary progressive 38 Marion Turner, Chaucer: A European Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2019), 508 39 Ibid 230 J aN r upp 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0011 British writing in the age of transnational postcolonial globality” 40 -, the project protests indefinite immigration detention in particular, a practice unique in Europe, which allows the UK to hold migrants without a time limit The stories collected are by individuals who have direct experience of this policy In a physical space that typically excludes refugees, performing their tales opens up a cultural space contesting indefinite detention. Chaucerian connections in Refugee Tales concern its narrative set-up, its investment in language, its meditation on journeying and remapping of geography, and its construction of a new social community The project’s complex constellation of telling is signalled by its title, which is worth reproducing in full: Refugee Tales, as Told to Ali Smith, Patience Agbabi, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Inua Ellams and Many Others Both title and subtitle have the same structure in all three volumes of Refugee Tales (except for differing sets of contributors in the subtitle), thus foregrounding the collection’s status as a multi-authored volume, consisting of co-authored tales In a complex mediation of refugee testimony, the tales have been told to a go-between writer, such as Ali Smith and Patience Agbabi, in order to be retold and expanded by them in turn The original storytellers remain unnamed for various reasons, because they were too traumatised or did not want to be identified for fear of reprisal, and so were protected by activists and writers serving as community gatekeepers Refugee Tales III for the first time includes a number of first-person narratives, written by former detainees themselves Again, however, their identity is protected, with only their initials, such as “A,” “J,” or “F,” being provided as author names For the most part, Refugee Tales relies on what might be characterised as a heterobiographical rather than autobiographical mode, which is particularly conducive to empathetic perspective-taking 41 As in Chaucer, the writers contributing to Refugee Tales thus mediate life-stories of others and give expression to what otherwise might not get heard They perform an important function as interlocutors, witnessing and corroborating the refugees’ experience While chosen for reasons of gatekeeping, among others, this collaborative set-up might be criticised for not directly representing subaltern voices To be sure, this is a problem of long standing in literatures involving testimony or marginalised subject positions in terms 40 Dirk Wiemann, “Make English Sweet Again! Refugee Tales, or How Politics Comes Back to Literature,” Hard Times 101 1 (2018), 72 41 Drawing on Philippe Lejeune’s work, Lucia Boldrini, Autobiographies of Others: Historical Subjects and Literary Fiction (London/ New York: Routledge, 2012), 9 defines heterobiography as a “collaborative autobiograph[y] in which the writer […] speaks of another in the first person,” effectively constituting a “collaboration between the two ‘I’s’ involved” (ibid , 10) Telling Stories, Saving Lives: The Value of 21st-Century Refugee Writing 231 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0011 of gender and race 42 Addressing such concerns, Helen Barr emphasises that “Refugee Tales is also a physical, bodily realization of The Canterbury Tales,” 43 in which refugees do have a direct, visible presence as part of the project’s walks and readings along the way Paradoxically, the fact that the refugees’ names are textually absent might not be seen to detract from, but in fact help to authenticate their accounts: “by signposting their names, the contributing writers make themselves accountable […] for the accuracy of the telling of the story,” with the “visible author” moreover serving as an “identifying device for the average reader,” 44 enabling the latter to share in the concrete encounters that many stories stage Indeed, Refugee Tales holds a significant potential for hospitable empathy, which derives from a close interaction of refugees with the project’s local activists and authors, as well as with previous experiences of migration as a multidirectional memory All this feeds into a relational act of Chaucerian storytelling mapped onto a global scale - “re-humanising some of the most vulnerable and demonised people on the planet,” as pointed out by an endorsement printed on the collection’s cover In challenging existing frameworks of immigration policy, Refugee Tales draws heavily from Chaucer’s role in establishing the vernacular as a literary idiom Where Chaucer not only painted a multi-faceted portrait of society, but popularised English at a time when sophisticated writing tended to appear in French or Latin, the project also seeks to develop a new language, away from the dehumanising discourse and practice of indefinite detention. Right away David Herd’s “Prologue” is a case in point In it, the tales to follow are characterised and signposted as: Stories of the new geography Stories of arrival Of unaccompanied minors Of people picked up and detained Networks of visitors and friends This new language we ask for Forming Strung out Along the North Downs Way 45 42 See John Beverly, “The Margin at the Center: On testimonio (testimonial narrative),” Modern Fiction Studies 35 1 (1989), 11-28 on problems of representation informing testimonial literature 43 Helen Barr, “Stories of the New Geography: The Refugee Tales,” Journal of Medieval Worlds 1 1 (2019), 105 44 Wiemann, “Make English Sweet Again,” 73, 74 45 David Herd/ Anna Pincus, eds , Refugee Tales (Manchester: Comma Press, 2016), vii-viii 232 J aN r upp 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0011 The collection’s collaborative set-up is crucial to this new language forming It uses the writers’ craft and the dialogical model of Chaucerian storytelling to construct these “networks of visitors and friends” in the first place, replacing the dehumanising discourse of indefinite detention with an alternative vision of convivial culture As much as on language, Refugee Tales capitalises on Chaucer’s intersection with international geographies and tales of journeying Several of the project’s stories draw on “The Man of Law’s Tale” in Chaucer, which is worth recapitulating in some more detail Constance or Custance, the story’s central character, is the emperor’s daughter in Rome She is married off to a Sultan in Syria, but the Sultan’s mother has him killed for turning his back on Islam Brutally widowed, Custance is made to leave Syria, flees across the Mediterranean and is eventually washed up on English shores She gets married for a second time, but again to the dismay of her (new) husband’s mother So Custance is displaced yet again and embarks on another perilous journey at sea Only at the very end, back in Rome, is she reunited with her English husband, the Northumbrian king Alla Unmistakably, this is a tale that resonates presciently with itineraries of current refugee migration The fact that “The Man of Law’s Tale” circulated across the Mediterranean long before Chaucer drew on it in translation creates an added significance, extending the relational network at play well beyond Chaucer 46 In Refugee Tales, Constance is invoked several times, such as in “The Migrant’s Tale, as told to Dragan Todorovic ” The tale is based on Todorovic’s conversation with Aziz, a young political refugee from Syria, who attempted to flee to Europe twice, only to be detained on his arrival in England. In alternating sections, Todorovic retells Aziz’ ordeal and constantly interweaves Custance’s original story, as a prism through which to interpret current events: “For days, for years floated this creature across the eastern Mediterranean, and into the Strait of Gibraltar - such was her fate Often she expected to die ” 47 Today, a similar kind of suffering has violently inscribed itself on Aziz: “He holds his upper arms and rocks back and forth Slow and steady, waves in the bay I’ve seen this same movement, this same posture, in other times and other cultures ” 48 History repeats itself, with the only redeeming factor that Aziz, similar to Custance, might ultimately hope to be rejoined with his family, who he has left behind in Syria 46 See Yager, “Faithful to the Tradition,” 56 on Chaucer’s sources for “The Man of Law’s Tale ” 47 Herd/ Pincus, Refugee Tales, 7 48 Ibid , 4 Telling Stories, Saving Lives: The Value of 21st-Century Refugee Writing 233 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0011 In whichever scenario, refugees like Aziz have little to expect from the law, as other stories in the collection make clear “The Lawyer’s Tale, as told to Stephen Collis” shifts attention from Constance’s story to its narrator, the eponymous Man of Law In a combination of critical commentary and lyrical passages, this time not based on a particular refugee’s story, Collis reflects on the Man of Law as a curious blank space in the pre-text: “Chaucer’s Man of Law tells us precious little about the law, or himself […] It is not clear what Constance’s story means to him, either personally or professionally ” 49 The Man of Law is an enigmatic figure and difficult to place indeed, just as legal representation or even basic human rights will be impossible to attain for many present-day refugees in a framework like indefinite detention. Chaucer’s Man of Law thus becomes symptomatic of a fundamental split between the law and any sense of compassion or moral justice, failing to attend to structures of global precarity that prompt people to flee their home in the first place. As Collis’ tale asserts: “the law sits/ a hooded falcon/ on whose arm/ privilege preys ” 50 Both Constance and the Man of Law in Chaucer’s tale ominously foreshadow the fate of refugees today “The Man of Law’s Tale” also features in Patience Agbabi’s Telling Tales, in which Constance is reimagined as a refugee from Zimbabwe Her time in England is retold deliberately from her mother-in-law’s point of view, who is pictured as an older woman from Newcastle: “I didn’t want all the tales to be delivered by sympathetic characters In fact, writing from a negative viewpoint was ultimately more rewarding because you had to work harder to engage the reader ” 51 In Agbabi’s version of the “The Man of Law’s Tale,” subtitled “Joined-Up Writing,” it soon becomes clear that the mother expresses some staunchly racist views in describing Constance: She wasn’t bonny, always overdressed, I’d never understand her when she spoke Not that I’m prejudiced, some of my best friends are foreign These days folk are folk but then was different: Constance was coloured, brown, a name so long you’d sweat to break it down 52 From Constance’s poor English to the spurious racist disclaimer “Not that I’m prejudiced,” this passage - the sestet of a sonnet - contains a number 49 Ibid , 108 50 Ibid , 117 51 Agbabi, “A Cross-Cultural Canterbury Tales,” 5 52 Agbabi, Telling Tales, 22 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0011 234 J aN r upp of familiar stereotypes The mother-in-law’s xenophobia is further thrown into relief by the quite regular, formal style of Agbabi’s use of the corona, a sequence of sonnets where every new first line picks up on the previous sonnet’s concluding line Agbabi exploits this formal principle to particular effect, demonstrating psychological repercussions for Constance as a result of her xenophobic experiences: Didn’t belong, nigh verging on a breakdown and Ollie, such a softy African She’d not talk much, her face a constant frown, must have been pity made him take her hand - raped, or so she said We were dead close, Ollie and me, until she came, from nowhere: whole house smelt of sadza; all his clothes designer labels; cut his bonny hair 53 In the (new) first line of this subsequent, third sonnet of the corona, Constance is “nigh verging on a breakdown ” This is linked back to her name being “so long you’d sweat to break it down,” as stated in the second sonnet’s concluding line In other words, her nervous breakdown is linked to the fact that people cannot break down, get their head around even Constance’s name The third sonnet then elaborates on the mother’s account, who generically refers to Constance as “African,” objects to her cooking smells, and suspects her of using “Black Magic ” Significantly, the voices featured in Telling Tales include not only migrants and refugees, but representatives of the host society, too The same is true of Refugee Tales, where readers get to hear, among others, “The Migrant’s Tale,” “The Chaplain’s Tale,” or “The Lorry Driver’s Tale,” all of whom figures who play important roles in the refugee process as well As in Chaucer, diverse social groups are bound together, working towards a viable community that is not established yet in the political arena: “In creating a space of appearance, and a polity out of the structural model of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, The Refugee Tales project reads back into Chaucer’s work a community of fellowship and common purpose ” 54 Even Constance’s racist mother in “Joined-Up Writing” is part of a multiperspectival community that Agbabi chooses to stage and contain, including its divisions and tensions Both Telling Tales and Refugee Tales thus provide a collective and reciprocal account of refugee migration, gesturing towards common effort while pointing up lingering chal- 53 Ibid , 23 54 Barr, “Stories of the New Geography,” 103 235 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0011 Telling Stories, Saving Lives: The Value of 21st-Century Refugee Writing lenges In both cases, Chaucer’s hospitable returns yield important modes of relation, afforded by his work as well as reflecting back on it. As a matter of their geographical scope and polyglot cast, the Canterbury Tales becomes a powerful model and metaphor for these new refugee writings 4 Conclusion: Literature as Refuge and Shelter in a Hardening World Works like Telling Tales and Refugee Tales provide ample evidence of the role and nature of refugee writing as a literature of survival, which I noted at the outset Like many other creative and activist projects, they give voice to life-saving stories of refugee testimony and facilitate empathy, going a long way towards rehumanising refugees in the light of exacerbating xenophobic sentiment and resurgent nationalisms around the globe It bears repeating that resonant and relational narratives like Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are part and parcel of this literature of survival As I hope to have shown, they demonstrate the value of culturally available repertoires in launching hospitable representations at a time when hospitality in real-life contexts proves elusive As well as survival, refugee writing thus throws into relief the multiple ways in which “literature provides shelter,” 55 as Arundhati Roy has recently observed Revaluing literature in a “world that is rapidly hardening,” Roy includes in her commentary the extent to which “[c]apitalism’s gratuitous wars and sanctioned greed have jeopardised the planet and filled it with refugees.” 56 Responding to such developments, refugee writing is a literature of survival while offering a place of refuge and shelter at the same time Projecting and accommodating stories of refugee experience and existential struggle, refugee writing rearticulates the ethical potential of literature in a rather emphatic way If “[i]n the contemporary world, literature and art have lost much of their community-building force,” refugee writing offers a timely reminder of the “shared affectivity and the weaving of narrative fabrics […] central to art ” 57 Stories and characters from literature’s far-reaching archive, such as Chaucer’s international tableau of travellers, hold an important legitimising function and affective appeal They offer an instructive historical precedent and reaffirm the way in which “[l]iterature and the other arts have 55 Arundhati Roy, “Literature provides shelter That’s why we need it,” The Guardian, 13 May 2019, https: / / www theguardian com/ commentisfree/ 2019/ may/ 13/ arundhati-roy-literature-shelter-pen-america, n p 56 Ibid 57 Meretoja, Ethics of Storytelling, 118 power not only to strengthen existing social bonds but also to envision new social formations and relationships ” 58 At a time when social and cultural diversity are newly attacked, retrieving Chaucerian connections and a proto-cosmopolitan vista from works like the Canterbury Tales is a highly symbolic move Novels like Phillips’ A Distant Shore highlight the promise and power of literature and storytelling, too At the same time, many works of 21st-century refugee writing are informed by the pervasive number of bleak stories existing yet Solomon, Phillips’ protagonist, while having been able to tell and share parts of his story, is ultimately left dead in a ditch, murdered by racist thugs It will take political solutions as well as laws, rights, and a more equal distribution of wealth to address such deplorably familiar turns of events This being said, literature arguably has an indispensable role to play in envisioning more humane and hospitable responses to today’s hardening world Works Cited Agbabi, Patience Telling Tales Edinburgh: Cannongate Books, 2014 --- “Stories in Stanza’d English: A Cross-Cultural Canterbury Tales ” Literature Compass 15 (2018), 1-8 Bachmann-Medick, Doris/ Jens Kugele, eds Migration: Changing Concepts, Critical Approaches Berlin/ Boston: De Gruyter, 2018 Barrington, Candace/ Jonathan Hsy “Chaucer’s Global Orbits and Global Communities ” Literature Compass 15 (2018), 1-12 Baumbach, Sibylle/ Herbert Grabes/ Ansgar Nünning, eds Literature and Values: Literature as a Medium for Representing, Disseminating and Constructing Norms and Values Trier: WVT, 2009 Beverly, John “The Margin at the Center: On testimonio (testimonial narrative) ” Modern Fiction Studies 35 1 (1989), 11-28 Boldrini, Lucia Autobiographies of Others: Historical Subjects and Literary Fiction London/ New York: Routledge, 2012 Erll, Astrid “Homer: A Relational Mnemohistory ” Memory Studies 11 3 (2018), 274-286 Herd, David/ Anna Pincus, eds Refugee Tales, as Told to Ali Smith, Patience Agbabi, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Inua Ellams and Many Others Manchester: Comma Press, 2016 --- Refugee Tales II, as Told to Jackie Kay, Helen Macdonald, Neel Mukherjee, Kamila Shamsie, Ali Smith, Patience Agbabi, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Inua Ellams and Many Others Manchester: Comma Press, 2018 --- Refugee Tales III, as Told to Monica Ali, Bernardine Evaristo, Patrick Gale, Gillian Slovo and Many Others Manchester: Comma Press, 2019 58 Ibid 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0011 236 J aN r upp 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0011 Felman, 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London/ New York: Continuum, 2001 Turner, Marion Chaucer: A European Life Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2019 Wiemann, Dirk. “Make English Sweet Again! Refugee Tales, or How Politics Comes Back to Literature ” Hard Times 101 1 (2018), 68-76 Woolley, Agnes Contemporary Asylum Narratives: Representing Refugees in the Twenty-First Century Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014 Yager, Susan “The BBC ‘Man of Law’s Tale’: Faithful to the Tradition ” Literature and Belief 27 1 (2007), 55-68 237 Telling Stories, Saving Lives: The Value of 21st-Century Refugee Writing