"..These writers
have put the clothes of language on the experience of being an asylum
seeker".....
That's how Lisa Appignanesi introduced Sunday's
literary panel at the Tricycle Theatre - Caroline
Moorehead, Edie Friedman and Gillian Slovo - who
met to discuss their new books about the refugee experience for Jewish Book
Week.
Refugee voices, real and imagined, are prominent in all
three books. Caroline Moorehead wrote Human
Cargo: a journey among refugees, after following young Liberian refugees
stranded in
Cairo
- she wanted to give them back their stories.
Edie Friedman, co-author of Reluctant
Refuge: a layperson's guide to asylum in the
UK
, includes refugees' own stories to
humanise the issues; and Gillian Slovo explores the complexity of migration
through her new novel, Black Orchid.
She also wondered, "When did the word 'refugee'
become 'asylum-seeker'?" When she and her family arrived from
South Africa
in 1964 as political refugees they were taken, not to a detention centre, but
to a BBC studio. Was it because they
were white? She returned to
South Africa
many years later, but her memory was of a different place. She asked, "What
effect does moving country have on you? What
do you have to do to have a sense of belonging?"
Some people never get that far, like Suleiman, the Guinean
teenager in Caroline Moorehead's tragic story.
Isolated both physically and by language, he was refused asylum in the
UK
. He said, despairingly "You have to kill yourself in this country to prove you would be killed
in your country". After
several appeals were also refused, he jumped from a bridge to his death.
Edie Friedman blamed government and the press for colluding
in manipulative language and negative attitudes. Why couldn't they prepare
host communities positively for asylum seekers, like the crowd that met Kosovan
refugees at
Leeds
airport with placards saying, "Welcome to
Leeds
"? Caroline Moorehead cited citizens' action in
Australia
which had helped change policy. Gillian Slovo had met some local residents who
had been inside Belmarsh detention centre were profoundly shocked by the inhuman
treatment happening in
Britain
, while others simply refused to believe the reports.
So meeting asylum seekers was a process of understanding
the reality, while fiction could allow the reader to enter their world. As
Gillian Slovo put it, "Asylum seekers are us - with incredibly bad luck."
