One of the most significant steps a displaced person takes when accessing aid or applying for asylum in a new country is providing a narrative of why they had to leave their home. This story is powerfully important because it is used to determine their eligibility for essential resources or protection. Like any genre of storytelling, however, audience expectations mediate the kinds of stories told by refugees and asylum seekers. As Katrina Powell argues, “readers have narrative expectations of what happens in the displacement (or refugee) story” (Powell 3). Because the audience for a displacement narrative is often in a position to help the person telling the story, whether as an individual or as part of a humanitarian organization, these expectations can have a material effect on the storyteller’s life and reveal an unbalanced power dynamic between storyteller and audience. While audience expectations mold the stories told by displaced persons as they navigate the asylum and/or aid process, however, refugees can use these expectations to speak back to larger systems and secure needed resources for their survival.
As Anh Hua argues, storytelling can be empowering or disempowering “depending on the contexts, the audience, and the purposes these stories serve” (Hua 113). It depends on who controls the telling, writing, theorizing, publishing, funding, and distribution of the stories; who benefits from them; as well as the gender, class, ethnicity, age, nationality, experience, and power differentials between storyteller and audience. Because of the context in which most displaced people are compelled to tell their stories – while being held in custody and awaiting processing by the courts, for example – their narratives are often used to determine a refugee’s ‘worthiness’ of receiving aid. In this way, displacement narratives can have a flattening and dehumanizing effect: the audience seems to care more about the story being ‘right’ than about the person who’s telling it. This does not mean, however, that displaced storytellers have no agency in the narrating their stories. As Hua argues, storytelling can be an empowering tool for refugee and immigrant women specifically, as it provides them the space to “voice themselves” and allows for the passing on of a “genealogy of stories” from grandmother, to mother, to daughter, and so on (Hua 112-13). Research on displacement narratives shows that refugees and displaced people are able to make agentive moves in telling their stories to access shelter or aid. The public storytelling that displaced people do can show a great deal of agency, ingenuity, and determination in the face of dehumanizing audience expectations.
In Identity and Power in Narratives of Displacement, Katrina Powell explores the ways that identities are constructed in displacement narratives and what audiences expect from these stories. In the chapter “Buying Refugee Narratives,” Powell specifically studies the commodification of refugee narratives by western audiences, arguing that the label ‘refugee’ can be “an embraced term that brings with it very real material gains and consequences” and “an identity that marks for its holder an advertised chance at safety from violence, an opportunity for education, and material resources for a better life” (Powell 98). In other words, Powell argues that being labeled a ‘refugee’ gives someone a certain rhetorical power: it signals to an audience that a person’s experiences make them sympathetic and deserving of assistance, and the label therefore often results in positive material improvements in a displaced person’s life. At the same time, Powell notes that the term ‘refugee’ carries with it an array of negative connotations that impacts the way society views a displaced person. Refugees are often viewed not as individuals seeking shelter and safety, but as an invading horde. Because of this, Powell argues that displaced people respond to and interact with labels like ‘refugee,’ resisting them at one turn and using them for positive effect in another (Powell 7).
One of the major components of Powell’s argument in this chapter is that displaced people are subject to the expectations of the humanitarian agencies tasked with helping them. Powell argues that an institution like the United Nations is therefore often the first audience for displacement narratives, and that because there is an “explicit recognition of constructing a particular kind of refugee narrative,” institutional expectations shape the discursive structures of the refugee narrative (Powell 99). Because of this, Powell argues that while humanitarian agencies are ostensibly there to protect refugees, “their narrative expectations place refugees in the position of ‘binding’ them to a particular kind of story” (Powell 101). The ‘pure’ refugee is a victim, one whose story shows a tremendous amount of suffering; less ‘worthy’ refugees are not visibly wounded or impoverished, and they are less likely to receive certain kinds of resources because their stories don’t align with audience expectations of vast suffering. This ‘binding’ results in refugees being represented as “so pathetic as to be dehumanized,” making it “difficult for audiences, including aid workers, to imagine them as productive citizens” (Powell 103). This ‘binding’ also produces a never-ending cycle where a refugee cannot receive asylum or funding if their story is not deemed ‘pathetic’ enough.
While these expectations around how they tell their stories may constrict the agency of asylum seekers, many have found ways to use these audience expectations to their advantage. For example, Powell points to the cases of displaced people from South Sudan and the Darfur region in Sudan, in part because of the popularity of auto/biographical memoirs, novels, and documentaries about the displaced people of the region, dubbed “The Lost Boys.” In particular, Powell focuses on Valentino Achak Deng’s What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng: A Novel, published by Deng in partnership with author Dave Eggers. Powell argues that this fictional autobiography “is carefully constructed to highlight not only Deng’s personal story but also to evoke a subtle critique of the processes he went through as he sought aid and assistance” (Powell 112). She notes that Deng and other Sudanese refugees were well-aware of the expectations the UN had for their narratives and what a successful telling would mean: “For Deng, creating a narrative asked for by the UN workers was a means for leaving the camps” (Powell 113). To be convincing, Deng knew “he had to use English, [and] it had to present a certain ‘version’ of persecution” (Powell 115). In What Is the What, Deng explicitly addresses this expectation, saying that “sponsors and newspaper reporters and the like expect the stories to have certain elements…Survivors tell the stories the sympathetic want, and that means making them as shocking as possible” (Eggers 21). For Powell, this narrative process illustrates the way humanitarian organizations like the UN “drive the discursive structures of the refugee” and shows how displaced people respond to the expectations placed upon them (Powell 113).
In the context Powell describes, UN aid workers and intake interviewers are therefore placed in an “interesting” position: they are supposed to evaluate the “facts” of a displaced person’s story based largely on “the applicant’s ability to present those facts narratively in such a truthful way as to be convincing” (Powell 104). This puts refugees and displaced people in a vulnerable position: their ability to access aid depends on whether their audience believes they are deserving, and displaced people are often painfully aware of this fact. In “Accounts of Asylum,” Monica Reyes explores the strategy of quantification used by people seeking asylum to authenticate the narratives they tell government and humanitarian institutions. Reyes argues that discussing one’s displacement narrative through quantities is a strategy intended to lend credence to the non-numerical parts of their story by invoking specific, concrete details in their stories. Through interviews with two asylum-seekers, Reyes shows that people constructing narratives of displacement are “caught in the postcolonial perplexity of cultural authentication, as the stories represent the negotiated balance between an individual’s own, unique migration story” and the demands they are expected to meet (Reyes). Reyes argues that “by relying on quantification, people seeking asylum demonstrate agency in that accounts of asylum speak back to the reductive and simplistic representations of their stories across rhetorical contexts” which tend to simplify their narratives and ignore the larger systems of oppression that are operating on them (Reyes).
Reyes highlights this strategy through the narratives of Abraham and Santos, who both use quantification to illustrate their experiences in the hopes of making sure that asylum officers can understand the seriousness of their living situations in their home countries. For example, Abraham provides several examples of quantification in his narrative: using numbers to describe the details of his coerced military service; describing the large group of 17,520 persons that he was part of; and describing the number of whistles that called him to his allotted five minutes of bathroom time. In all of these instances, Reyes argues that Abraham is using the strategy of numeration “to describe the coercion he experienced on small and large scales,” and that without this quantification, listeners such as asylum officers may not adequately understand the gravity of his condition (Reyes).
In this way, displaced people like Abraham are ‘talking back’ to the powers that be, using the rhetorical tools at their disposal, including awareness of audience expectations, to try to improve their living conditions. These discussions open up questions about just how much agency a displaced person has when recounting their story. There’s clearly a tension between a displaced person giving an honest recounting of why they were displaced, and what their audience expects or demands. In a way, these narratives exist in their own kind of micro-economy – there is both a demand for and a supply of these stories, and some are valued more highly than others. A displaced person’s worth seems to be tied to how “true” their experience was according to audience expectations, if the audience is even willing to listen in the first place, with those who experienced “acceptable” suffering being considered the most valuable. As Powell argues, this results in a “never-ending cycle” where if the refugee is not deemed “pathetic” enough, funding will be withheld. However, “because they are often represented as so pathetic as to be dehumanized,” it is challenging for audiences to view them as productive citizens (Powell 103).
Ever-expanding access to smartphones, Wi-Fi, and social media, however, has allowed refugees to circumvent these institutional channels and tell their stories to the public without an intermediary. In “Self-represented witnessing,” Rae et al. examine how displaced people in Australian immigration detention centers have used social media to conduct an “unmediated form of self-represented witnessing” of their experiences with human rights abuses and other legal claims. The authors define “self-represented witnessing” as when agents use digital media to “bear witness to their own suffering and communicate this directly to an online audience (Rae et al. 482). In the two cases Rae et al. analyze, refugees like Behrouz Boochani and ‘Free the Children NAURU’ utilize social media to describe their experiences to a wide audience: family and friends, journalists, advocates, legal representatives, and activists. More than simply telling the world what they are experiencing, their reports are a call to action for those witnessing. For example, Boochani’s Facebook post about the documentary he completed about his experience garnered comments offering to distribute the film or organize screenings (Rae et al. 487), which shows how these social media witnesses almost act as accomplices to Boochani. This is also true of the ‘Free the Children NAURU’ account described by the authors, which has been taken over and managed by Australian citizens on behalf of the detained children who began it.
A crucial part of successful ‘witnessing’ seems to be related to whether or not the audience agrees that the suffering is unacceptable and whether or not they are inspired to take action. The authors suggest that witnessing on social media networks bridges this gap by being comprised of “clusters of ‘digital witnesses’ who willingly observe the suffering” documented by refugees in Australia’s detention centers (Rae et al. 482). It’s the interactivity between agent and audience that closes the ‘veracity gap’ representing a disconnect between an audience and distant suffering – the audience feels that they are indeed present and experiencing some of the same suffering as the refugees in real time. This power of social media perhaps shows why refugees’ access to digital technology and communications is so restricted – as the authors note, “asylum seekers’ access to the digital world is tenuous and can be removed arbitrarily and without warning” (Rae et al. 491). In such a secretive and off-limits space as an immigration detention center, social media and other communication tools are crucial for refugees to be able to tell their stories in their own words to the outside world.
In most rhetorical situations, the relationship between storyteller and audience is symbiotic. Symbiosis, however, does not necessarily mean that both parties benefit from the relationship. In the case of displacement narratives, the audience has power over the displaced person as they are often in a position to materially help their condition. Because of this, their expectations can significantly shape the kinds of stories displaced people tell, making their stories and their lives all blend together into one expected, cohesive narrative. Rather than completely giving in to these expectations, however, displaced people show great agency in shaping their stories to address audience expectations and speak back to the often flattening and dehumanizing asylum process. This strategy extends into digital spaces as well, where refugees utilize the unique possibilities of social media to directly communicate with a community of witnesses willing to help. Viewing refugees and displaced people in this way – as courageous people with agency over their lives and their stories – counters the hegemonic image of migrants not as capable individuals, but as part of a large group of helpless victims. While displaced people may not be able to singlehandedly control the material conditions of their lives, they show a great deal of agency in advocating for themselves and their families in their storytelling.
WORKS CITED
Eggers, Dave. What Is the What. Penguin, 2011.
Hua, Anh. “Travel and Displacement: An (Ex)Refugee and (Ex)Immigrant Woman’s Tale-Tell.” Canadian Woman Studies, vol. 19, no. 4, Centennial College, 2000, p. 110–.
Powell, Katrina M. Identity and Power in Narratives of Displacement. London & New York: Routledge, 2015.
Rae, Holman & Nethery. “Self-represented witnessing: The use of social media by asylum-seekers in Australia’s offshore immigration detention centres.” Media, Culture & Society, vol. 40, no. 4, SAGE Publications, 2018, pp. 479–95, doi:10.1177/0163443717746229.
Reyes, Monica. “Accounts of Asylum: A Call Toward Transnational Literacies of Displacement.” Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing & Culture, 2020, Web.