Refugee Tales , livre ebook

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95 pages

English

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These are not fictions. Nor are they testimonies from some distant, brutal past, but the frighteningly common experiences of Europe s new underclass its refugees. While those with citizenship enjoy basic human rights (like the right not to be detained without charge for more than 14 days), people seeking asylum can be suspended for years in Kafka-esque uncertainty. Here, poets and novelists retell the stories of individuals who have direct experience of Britain s policy of indefinite immigration detention. Presenting their experiences anonymously, as modern day counterparts to the pilgrims stories in Chaucers Canterbury Tales, this book offers rare, intimate glimpses into otherwise untold suffering.

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Short story

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Publié par	Comma Press
Date de parution	16 juin 2016
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781910974636
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	3 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0274€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Comma Press.

www.commapress.co.uk

Copyright © remains with the authors 2016.
All rights reserved.
‘The Detainee’s Tale’ was first published in The Guardian (28 June, 2015). ‘The Refugee’s Tale’ was first published in Beached Here at Random by Mysterious Forces: 50 Years of Poetry at the University of Kent (University of Kent, 2015), edited by Ben Hickman and Janet E Montefiore. A version of pages 135-138 of the ‘Afterword’ first appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books (3 March, 2015).

The moral rights of the contributors to be identified as the authors of this work have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The opinions of the authors and editors are not necessarily those of the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.

Proceeds from this book go to the following two charities:

The publisher gratefully acknowledges assistance from Arts Council England.
Contents
Prologue

The Migrant’s Tale
Dragan Todorovic

The Chaplain’s Tale
Michael Zand

The Unaccompanied Minor’s Tale
Inua Ellams

The Lorry Driver’s Tale
Chris Cleave

The Arriver’s Tale
Abdulrazak Gurnah

The Visitor’s Tale
Hubert Moore

The Detainee’s Tale
Ali Smith

The Interpreter’s Tale
Carol Watts

The Appellant’s Tale
David Herd

The Dependant’s Tale
Marina Lewycka

The Friend’s Tale
Jade Amoli-Jackson

The Deportee’s Tale
Avaes Mohammad

The Lawyer’s Tale
Stephen Collis

The Refugee’s Tale
Patience Agababi

Afterword : Walking with Refugee Tales

About the Contributors
Special Thanks
Prologue
This prologue is not a poem
It is an act of welcome
It announces
That people present
Reject the terms
Of a debate that criminalises
Human movement
It is a declaration
This night in Shepherdswell
Of solidarity.

It says that we have started –
That we are starting out –
That by the oldest action
Which is listening to tales
That other people tell
Of others
Told by others
We set out to make a language
That opens politics
Establishes belonging
Where a person dwells.
Where they are now
Which is to say
Where we are now
Walking
In solidarity
Along an ancient track
That we come back to the geography of it
North of Dover
That where
The language starts
Now longen folk to goon
On this pilgrimage.

In June not April
And with the sweet showers far behind us
Though with the birds singing
And people sleeping
With open eye
And what we long for
Is to hear each others’ tales
And to tell them again
As told by some hath holpen
Walking
So priketh hem nature
Not believing the stories
Our officials tell.
Because we know too much
About what goes unsaid
And what we choose to walk for
Is the possibility of trust
In language
To hear the unsaid spoken
And then repeated
Made
Unambiguous and loud
Set out over a landscape gathered
Step by step
As by virtue of walking which
We call our commons
Every sap vessel bathed in moisture
And what that commons calls for
Is what these stories sound.
Of crossing
For to seken straunge strondes
In moments of emergency
Whan that they were seeke
Of tribunals
Where the unsaid goes unspoken
Lines of questioning
No official has written down
People present by video
Answers mistranslated
As outside by the station
At the dead of morning
As the young sun rises
Woken in their homes
People are picked up and detained.
Routinely and
Arbitrarily
In every holt and heeth
Under the sun while
Smale fowles maken melodye
And why we walk is
To make a spectacle of welcome
This political carnival
Across the Weald of Kent
People circulating
Making music
Listening to stories
People urgently need said.

And said
And said again
Stories of the new geography
Stories of arrival
Of unaccompanied minors
Of people picked up and detained
Of process
And mistranslation
Networks of visitors and friends
This new language we ask for
Forming
Strung out
Along the North Downs Way.

Which makes it a question of scale.
Consider just
The scale
Of the undertaking
Chaucer’s pilgrims crossing
Palatye and Turkye and Ruce
Across the Grete See
Which is the Mediterranean
Dark these days
Not like wine
Crossing through Flaundres
Through Artoys
Crossing the water at Pycardie.
And all the while finding stories
And then all of them
Gathering one night in London
And so the Host says
Since we’re walking
Why don’t we tell each other tales
And so they do
Out of Southwark
And what comes out of Southwark
Is a whole new language
Of travel and assembly and curiosity
And welcome.

To make his English sweete.
That’s why Chaucer told his tales.
How badly we need English
To be made sweet again
Rendered hostile by act of law
So that even friendship is barely possible –
Ther as this lord was kepere of the celle –
So we might actually talk
And in talking
Come to understand the journey –
Tender
Says the poet
To Canterbury they wende.

Tender
To hold
From the French
Tendre
From the English
For listening
To a story as it is said
To attend
Tendre
And then writing it down
Because it isn’t written
Because the hearings
In the British immigration system
Are not courts
Of record.
So there are no stories
And people leave
As if there never had been
Stories
And so nobody
Who reaches a verdict
Has a real story
With which to contend
So now we are telling them
En masse
And people will listen
In sondry londes
And specially
From every shires ende.

But this prologue is not a poem
It is an act of introduction
Bathed every veyne in swich licour
And all the introduction can do
Is set the tone
Albeit the tone
Is everything
And the tone is welcoming
And the tone is celebratory
And the tone is courteous
And the tone is real
And every step sets out a demand
And every demand is urgent
And what we call for
Is an end
To this inhuman discourse.

And so we stop this night
And the Host steps up
And he says
Listen to this story
Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
And the room goes quiet
And a voice starts up
And then the language
Alters
Sweet
Tender
Perced to the roote.

David Herd
The Migrant’s Tale
as told to
Dragan Todorovic

Heere begynneth the Migrant his tale.

#

In Syria once upon a time dwelt a company of rich merchants, trustworthy and true. 1

#

We are sitting on the second floor of a corner office in Birmingham. This is an area of white shirts and Pink Floyd streets. Metal blinds are all down. I put the chocolate cake I’ve brought for Aziz on the coffee table connecting the three of us, and it feels inappropriate. Cream over pain.
Our interpreter wears a dark suit and his stern beard makes him look worried. Aziz is dressed in loosely fitting clothes, at least a size bigger. He speaks English, I was told, but feels safer if the interpreter is with us.
I would like to start as far as possible from the recent events in his life, so I ask about his childhood in Syria. What were his favourite toys? The interpreter must have used the word ‘game’ when speaking of toys and Aziz says, ‘I was a basketball player, a team captain. My family was big and important. We were wealthy, and never had any problems that I can remember.’

#

O sudden woe, you are ever successor to worldly bliss, sprinkled with bitterness, the end of the joy in the fruit of our labour! Woe waits at the end of our gladness. Hear this counsel for your own safety: on happy days do remember the misery that waits behind.

#

He grew up in Daraa, in the south of Syria, the city first mentioned in the Egyptian documents some 35 centuries ago. Moses fought his battles here, but that was yesterday. Today, Daraa is the place where the Syrian uprising started when 15 schoolchildren were arrested for doing graffiti, in March 2011.
That is an area frequented by despots, droughts, and deities. A hundred kilometres to the north and south lie two capitals: Damascus and Amman. Jerusalem is close; Judaism and Christianity and Islam walk on the same streets, shop in the same souks. Fall silent in the afternoon heat, scream at one another when they wake up.

#

Now it happened that these rich merchants decided to visit Rome – whether for business or for pleasure they would not say. They stayed in that town a certain time, fulfilling their desires. And it so happened that they heard of the excellent renown of the emperor’s daughter, Lady Custance. 2 […] The common report was that she was beautiful without pride, young without folly, humble and courteous – the most beautiful woman that ever was or ever will be in the world.
With their ships already loaded, the merchants declared that they would not return home until they had seen Custance for themselves. Once they had seen her, they happily travelled back to Syria.

#

Aziz studied to become a civil engineer. He got married and his wife gave birth to five children. They travelled often. Aziz visited Great Britain four times before the war. He liked it a lot: a land of dignity, wealth, respect, democracy. Green. Some of his friends moved to the UK. Now that the civil war in Syria was entering its third year, Aziz was thinking about the island more often.

#

These merchants were much favoured by the Sultan of Syria. […] Whenever they came back from any foreign place he invited them to be his guests and hungrily questioned them about the news from distant countries and wonders they had heard of or seen. Among other things the merchants told him about Lady Custance. They spoke of her beauty, of her nobility. They praised her so much, in such detail, that the Sultan felt a great desire to hold her in his arms. He wanted to love her for as long as he lived. […]
‘Without Custance,’ he told his Council, ‘I am as good as dead.’
The Council spoke at length about magic, about