Asylum and Belonging through Collective Playwriting: "How much home does a person need?" 3031248074, 9783031248078

Table of contents :
Preface
Acknowledgements
Contents
About the Author
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction: ‘How Much Home Does a Person Need?’
1.1 ‘The Place of a Thousand Belongings’: Home as a Critical Lens
1.2 Home and Belonging in Refugee Performance
1.3 Interdisciplinary Methodology
1.4 Chapter Overview
1.5 ‘Den Smukke Fortælling’: Political Considerations
References
Chapter 2: Ontologies of Belonging: Philosophical, Historical and Narratological Considerations
2.1 Ontologies of Belonging
2.2 Belonging and Human Rights
2.3 The Nation and Belonging: ‘To Be Rooted’
2.4 Narratology and Belonging: ‘Not Just Be-ing, But Long-ing’
2.5 Compromised Belongings
References
Chapter 3: Dramaturgical Ethics: Undoing and Decreating
3.1 Dramaturgy, Ethics and Refugee Performance: Engaging ‘With a Story Beyond Our Telling’
3.2 No Pure Place to Stand: An Argument for Critical Closeness
3.3 Shifting the Ground: Participating Through Decreating
3.4 Standing on Stage: Understanding Responsibility as a Theatre Maker
References
Chapter 4: Ethnoplaywriting: Creating Belonging
4.1 Theatre and Ethnography: Mapping Terminology and Practices
4.2 Political Listening and Vulnerable Observing
4.3 Therapeutic Commitments: Can Stories Heal?
4.4 Theatre as a Home, Writing as Belonging
4.5 Letting It Break Your Heart: ‘An Aesthetics of Care’
References
Chapter 5: Rebooting the Social Contract: Trampoline House and Deportation Centre Sjælsmark
5.1 Sjælsmark—‘Souls’ Field’: Creating the Unhomely
5.2 Trampoline House: Performing Democracy and Rebooting the Social Contract
The House’s Own Parliament: Democracy as Performative Process
Institutional Creativity: My House, Your House
5.3 Person = Country: Belonging as a Human Right
References
Chapter 6: Fieldwork Reflection: ‘Not Just Theatre, Also Politics, Law’—Making Theatre in Deportation Centre Sjælsmark
6.1 Creating the Map of Non-belonging
6.2 Writing a Letter to a Danish Person
6.3 Narratable Versus Narrated Self or ‘to Learn About Beauty’
6.4 Resisting the Refugee Narrative
6.5 The Helicopter Is Waiting Outside
Appendix: This Is Us
References
Chapter 7: ‘You Are Enough, You Belong With Us’: Reimagining Sisterhood as Collective Belonging
7.1 The Youth Community Support Agency
7.2 In the Company of Women: Intersectional Sisterhood
7.3 Living Life in a Pause: Of Being Blue and New
‘Where Are You From? A Woman’s Body’: Poetry Is Not a Luxury
References
Chapter 8: Fieldwork Reflection: The Sistas and Amazing Amelia
8.1 She Travels in Worlds of…
8.2 Writing Amazing Amelia
8.3 Being Amazing Amelia at the Glad Café and the UNESCO Spring School
8.4 ‘But She’s Not the Amelia Earhart You Know’
Appendix: Amazing Amelia Or We Are All Amelias
References
Chapter 9: Conclusion: ‘Much Home’
9.1 What Is the Point of Theatre?
9.2 How Much Home? Doubly Possible and the Better Imagined
References
Index

Citation preview

Asylum and Belonging through Collective Playwriting “How much home does a person need?” Helene Grøn

Asylum and Belonging through Collective Playwriting

Helene Grøn

Asylum and Belonging through Collective Playwriting “How much home does a person need?”

Helene Grøn University of Copenhagen Copenhagen, Denmark

ISBN 978-3-031-24807-8    ISBN 978-3-031-24808-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24808-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For my father To most, Arne Grøn To me, Garne Frøn

Preface

Home and belonging have been personal, creative and political concerns for most of my life. When I try and remember a time when they were uncomplicated notions, I think of playing on the kitchen floor in my childhood home, mother-joy cooking dinner, sister-teenage in the adjacent room doing her homework, brother-bombastic playing computer games in the room we share, father-philosopher pondering life’s big questions by way of Kierkegaard on an empty stomach in his office. This mise-en-scéne has stayed with me as a feeling of home: safe within walls that knew my story, sheltered in a family unit but, all things considered, brief. When I was eight, my mother took up a post as the Danish minister and a sailor’s chaplain in the Danish Seamen’s Church in Rotterdam. She had grown up in Rotterdam with her father as the minister. In many ways, this felt like home for her, a coming full circle. The church sought to be a home for Danes in the Netherlands, operating under the banner ‘langt væk, men ikke alene’ (far away, but not alone). This produced an often eclectic gathering of people: lorry drivers, sailors, people who worked in the shipping industry, Danes and Dutch people who had married each other, those who had been sent to Denmark as children due to the bombing of Rotterdam during the Second World War, those who believed in God and came to church, those who believed in nothing and came to drink beer and shoot pool. One of the guests, Johan, would come in every day at 3 pm on the dot for cake, cigarettes and coffee. Johan’s biggest dream was to retire and buy a house in North Denmark, where the light is pretty, the fish are good and everybody is white and Danish. Despite barely being able to hide the fact vii

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that he was kind-hearted, he would often say things about ‘the foreigners’ in racially charged language. I went to a Christian school with a large demographic of Muslim kids. Our classrooms were diverse, bringing together children whose parents, grandparents or great-grandparents had made a life in Rotterdam arriving as immigrants. I was confused, even then, by how a country neither Johan nor I were born in could belong more to us than to my classmates who were born there. For one, my peers were making fluent sounds in a language I was having trouble acquiring. Today, I wish my young self could have had the vocabulary to have that conversation with him. Those years broke open my connection to belonging and scattered my family across the globe: my mother and I in Rotterdam; my brother first in Rotterdam then in Denmark; my sister in the Middle East, Paris, Germany and Denmark; my father mostly in a car going between his job at the University of Copenhagen, his visiting professor post in Germany, and my mother and I in Rotterdam. I often accompanied him between these places, witnessing him finding innovative ways of staying awake by enjoying the easy ride of his Volvo V70, by listening to elaborate pieces of classical music or by drinking bad coffee in the loneliest place in the world: the roadside McDonald’s at 2 am. On these drives, it was easy to be at home in two places, because it took a long, dark night with caffeine, uncomfortable sleeping and a lot of Mozart to get from one home to the other. As part of this project, I went to the Netherlands to interrogate my own connection to the intersections of memory and place. I was staying with a friend in Amsterdam who was there on anthropological fieldwork. After my day-trips visiting Rotterdam, we would share meals and she would help me find language that grasped at the subtleties of how place might remember in ways I could not, how a place can both home and unhome and how a place might have its own authority beyond human agency. Between the ages of 12 and 20, the question of home manifested mainly in jealousy that my friends were able to place a finger, a foot, tongue, a whole body directly in what they knew as home: their childhood houses and the Danish language. In 2010, I moved to Scotland. During my nearly ten years there, I have found belonging in the shelter of my friendships, the theatre community and universities I attended with the space they provided for writing and thinking, in the kind-hearted ethos of Scotland and the novelty and calm of living close to mountains after inhabiting horizontal land and cityscapes. By making theatre and volunteering

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at community organisations, I found ways of making sense of the tensions of belonging I experienced, while putting the feeling to work in the world. This book is an extension of that work, while simultaneously being a commitment to stand beside those whose experiences I will never fully understand, but who I, nonetheless, wish to enter into community and create worlds of belonging with. This thesis is written between the places of Denmark and Scotland. Crossing these borders frequently brings to view my privilege as a white person with a Danish passport and highlights the injustices inherent in home and belonging. Although I might have experienced being existentially out of place, the systems at work in my life have never sought to unhome me. I cross borders in safe vehicles of buses, cars, planes, and family, friends, a life, a couch, a home-cooked meal await me on either side. Others cross borders in near broken vessels via dangerous routes over land and seas and are most likely received with: ‘[w]elcome to a country in which you are not welcome’ (Smith 2019, 272), then spend years, decades, lifetimes in systems that unhome them. During the course of this project, I have had the privilege of meeting people who weave together lives of belonging from unlikely fabrics for themselves and their children: those who live in deportation centres, asylum camps and in contact with systemic and political inhumanity, those who have been deported or live with the threat of deportation, fearing for the safety of themselves and their children—but who, despite this, manage to catch at the joy, humour and light in life. I have also been lucky to stand beside those who have obtained asylum and who are weaving rich lives of belonging at the moment of writing. These experiences, and the generosity people have had in sharing their stories, remain a humbling inspiration, a call to action and a source that teaches oceans of meaning about what belonging is. Copenhagen, Denmark

Helene Grøn

Acknowledgements

What you are about to read is only made possible because of the people this study is made with and about. The sistas: Asma, Fatma, Fatma A., Nuha, Alhan, Vanessa, Christianah, Mawaddah, Shobhita, Sareh and Clare. The group in Sjælsmark: Rohan, Ghafour, Abbas (whose illustrations adorn this book), Van Damme, Salam, Ahmad Kaya, Hasan and Payman. It is a gift to know you and has been the privilege of a lifetime to work with you all. I thank also those who helped with other parts of this process: Azad, Badr, Mey, Habib, Andrew, Claudia, Fariha, Tone and Morten. I am indebted to the two organisations that brought me in contact with the groups. YCSA supports young people in need of community, and Trampoline House creates a place of belonging for many, while consistently striving to make Denmark a home for those who arrive and seek asylum. My supervisors, Dr Michael Bachmann, Dr Graham Eatough and Professor Alison Phipps, have provided insight, warmth and humour, which guided every stage of this project. The Glasgow Refugee, Asylum and Migration Network and the Gilmorehill Theatre Department have been and remain intellectual homes. The same goes for the writing community that have come through the University of Edinburgh Playwriting programme. This research was made possible by the support and funding from the Scottish Graduate School, the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Augustinus Fonden. Professor Yana Meerzon has provided generous guidance for turning this research into a book. xi

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I thank the family I am related to, particularly my mother and sister, for holding encouraging space. I also thank Nicola, Peanut, Emilie, Karin and David for being family too, and for homing me as I travelled between Glasgow and Copenhagen. I am honoured that Klara is in my boat and shares her life with me. I also thank Pernille, Anika, Lucy, Catrin, Helen, Jen and Baher for being my colleagues and dear friends. This work is marked as much by these dear presences as it is with absences; of home, legal status, of distance to and loss of loved ones. One such personal absence: I wish more than anything that my father could have shared this journey with his full capacity. Our conversations on the meaning of life, art and home are present everywhere in this writing.

Contents

1 Introduction:  ‘How Much Home Does a Person Need?’  1 1.1 ‘The Place of a Thousand Belongings’: Home as a Critical Lens  8 1.2 Home and Belonging in Refugee Performance 12 1.3 Interdisciplinary Methodology 18 1.4 Chapter Overview 20 1.5 ‘Den Smukke Fortælling’: Political Considerations 22 References 24 2 Ontologies  of Belonging: Philosophical, Historical and Narratological Considerations 29 2.1 Ontologies of Belonging 32 2.2 Belonging and Human Rights 35 2.3 The Nation and Belonging: ‘To Be Rooted’ 41 2.4 Narratology and Belonging: ‘Not Just Be-ing, But Long-ing’ 47 2.5 Compromised Belongings 51 References 56 3 Dramaturgical  Ethics: Undoing and Decreating 61 3.1 Dramaturgy, Ethics and Refugee Performance: Engaging ‘With a Story Beyond Our Telling’ 63 3.2 No Pure Place to Stand: An Argument for Critical Closeness 68 3.3 Shifting the Ground: Participating Through Decreating 71

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3.4 Standing on Stage: Understanding Responsibility as a Theatre Maker 74 References 83 4 Ethnoplaywriting: Creating Belonging 87 4.1 Theatre and Ethnography: Mapping Terminology and Practices 89 4.2 Political Listening and Vulnerable Observing 93 4.3 Therapeutic Commitments: Can Stories Heal? 99 4.4 Theatre as a Home, Writing as Belonging101 4.5 Letting It Break Your Heart: ‘An Aesthetics of Care’104 References110 5 Rebooting  the Social Contract: Trampoline House and Deportation Centre Sjælsmark113 5.1 Sjælsmark—‘Souls’ Field’: Creating the Unhomely114 5.2 Trampoline House: Performing Democracy and Rebooting the Social Contract120 The House’s Own Parliament: Democracy as Performative Process 125 Institutional Creativity: My House, Your House 128 5.3 Person = Country: Belonging as a Human Right129 References134 6 Fieldwork  Reflection: ‘Not Just Theatre, Also Politics, Law’—Making Theatre in Deportation Centre Sjælsmark137 6.1 Creating the Map of Non-belonging140 6.2 Writing a Letter to a Danish Person143 6.3 Narratable Versus Narrated Self or ‘to Learn About Beauty’145 6.4 Resisting the Refugee Narrative149 6.5 The Helicopter Is Waiting Outside157 Appendix: This Is Us160 References176 7 ‘You  Are Enough, You Belong With Us’: Reimagining Sisterhood as Collective Belonging177 7.1 The Youth Community Support Agency181 7.2 In the Company of Women: Intersectional Sisterhood182

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7.3 Living Life in a Pause: Of Being Blue and New186 ‘Where Are You From? A Woman’s Body’: Poetry Is Not a Luxury 192 References196 8 Fieldwork  Reflection: The Sistas and Amazing Amelia199 8.1 She Travels in Worlds of…201 8.2 Writing Amazing Amelia 206 8.3 Being Amazing Amelia at the Glad Café and the UNESCO Spring School217 8.4 ‘But She’s Not the Amelia Earhart You Know’221 Appendix: Amazing Amelia Or We Are All Amelias224 References242 9 Conclusion: ‘Much Home’243 9.1 What Is the Point of Theatre?246 9.2 How Much Home? Doubly Possible and the Better Imagined247 References249 Index251

About the Author

Helene  Grøn  holds a PhD in Theatre Studies from the University of Glasgow and Glasgow Refugee, Asylum and Migration Network and is currently a postdoc at the University of Copenhagen. She is also a writer and librettist, whose work has been performed by Scottish Opera and published by Dark Mountain. Her academic work has been published in Research in Drama Education and Scottish Journal of Performance. Helene often combines research and politically engaged arts-practice around themes of refugees, asylum, migration and storytelling.

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 2.1 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3 Fig. 6.4 Fig. 6.5 Fig. 6.6 Fig. 6.7 Fig. 8.2 Fig. 8.3 Fig. 8.4 Fig. 8.5 Fig. 8.6 Fig. 8.7 Fig. 9.1

Boy. Sjælsmark 2018. (By Abbas Haj) 1 Fleeing by Abbas Haj 29 Camp by Abbas Haj 61 Woman by Abbas Haj 87 Fleeing by Abbas Haj 113 Wire by Abbas Haj 116 Fight for your world, not your country by Abbas Haj 137 The map of non-belonging 141 Ahmad’s story 148 Why stories matter 149 Performing This Is Us155 Playtext in Farsi and Arabic 156 The Politicians by Abbas Haj 160 Country map game 203 Playing cards 204 Story prompts 205 She belongs to… 206 Performing Amazing Amelia at the Glad Café by Leo Plumb 218 Performing Amazing Amelia at the UNESCO Spring School 220 Untitled by Abbas Haj 243

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: ‘How Much Home Does a Person Need?’

Fig. 1.1  Boy. Sjælsmark 2018. (By Abbas Haj)

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 H. Grøn, Asylum and Belonging through Collective Playwriting, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24808-5_1

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How we are in the world can be seen as a question of whether or not we are at home in it. And yet, a person’s connection to home and way of being at home is often filled with intrinsic tensions: contingent not only on an existential task of negotiating between a sense of self and one’s place in the world, the political, social and relational spaces and practices alive in a person’s life might themselves home or unhome. In his book At the Mind’s Limits, Jean Améry details his experiences with being made a refugee by the systemic prosecution of Jews during the Second World War. Tracing his comprehensive loss of home from connection to place, language and community, he understands also something infinitely more elusive and at stake in home, namely its connection with being human and what it means to be human in the world when living experiences of exile. Asking ‘how much home does a person need?’ (1980, 42),1 Améry signals what is lost when losing home while giving the allure of the quantifiable: as a question it suggests there is an answer, just like ‘how much’ implies measurability. In 2019, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark hosted an exhibition called Homeless Souls, where artists responded to current refugee policy and experiences of forced migration. Here, the exhibition notes framed the current era as ‘the age of the refugee’, echoed by Giorgio Agamben’s naming of the refugee as the ‘figure of our time’ (2008, 93). At the time of writing the first iteration of this manuscript, the UNHCR’s statistics showed that 79.5 million people were forcibly displaced in the world. Over half of them were unaccompanied minors. Twenty-six millions of these were refugees, 4.2 million of them were asylum seekers and 80% of them were hosted in the neighbouring countries to those they fled from (2020). By the time the people in this study had told their stories in performance and text, and by the time I sat down to write the academic prose surrounding these projects, other stories had already started. Seeing these numbers change, and most often rise, is a solemn look at an ever-­ changing situation. Just as it requires imagination to see the human faces behind these statistics, it requires continual narrative revision to talk about asylum and refugee experiences, but also an eye for the kind of narrative 1  In the original publication in German, Améry’s question is ‘Wie viel Heimat braucht der Mensch?’ (1966) Both ‘Heimat’ and ‘Mensch’ are in a sense untranslatable words carrying problematic histories of erasure and sovereignty. In the context Améry writes in, ‘Person’ denotes a legal category, while ‘Mensch’ is closer to the English ‘human being’. ‘Heimat’ will be discussed further in the following chapter, but I here note its connotations of a hegemonic national space and way of being at home.

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stasis that goes into governments’ sustaining and evolving of practices that unhome. Through Albert Einstein’s voice, Shami Chakrabarti’s Prologue to the fourth volume of Refugee Tales suggests that this kind of stasis, that is, ‘doing the same thing over and over again’ (2021, viii), is also ‘the very definition of insanity’ (viii). Between finishing the work described in this book and editing the manuscript in April 2021, the Danish government made plans to locate an offshore reception centre in Rwanda (Broberg and Redder 2021), a plan later condemned by African Union (Ababa 2021). Denmark also began revoking the residence permits of specific demographics of Syrian refugees and placing them in deportation centres, despite having no diplomatic relations with Syria (Peltier and Nielsen 2022). In the UK, the Nationality Borders Bill passed through government, proposing, among other things, to make it impossible to claim asylum in the UK if arriving via illegal routes and to send asylum seekers overseas while processing their claims (Thrilling 2021). In April 2022, the UK government signed a Memoranda of Understanding (Home Office 2022) with the Government of the Republic of Rwanda for sending asylum seekers there, or, as Alison Phipps and Hyab Yohannes write, ‘for bordering and ordering—b/ordering—of the racialised and illegalised people by any means’ (2022). On the world stage, the Taliban took back control over Afghanistan after the United States retrieved their troops, and Russia invaded Ukraine. Not only do these events continue to force people on flight, thereby underscoring the continual need for safe passage and fair processing, but they also highlight the radically different responses to people arriving. For one, Denmark’s ‘much more compassionate stance’ (Peltier and Nielsen 2022) to Ukrainians has ‘evoked both sympathy and bitterness’ (2022) among communities of ‘Arab, Muslim and African asylum seekers’ (2022). As Ukrainian refugees arrive in Denmark, those living in the centres around Copenhagen are moved to other, less central camps to make room. The refugee community I worked with in Denmark are therefore currently navigating how the toughest efforts of solidarity befall those who have just arrived from war, and those who have lived in deportation centres for years at the time. In the same way that none of the people in this study are in exactly the same legal or personal situation as this book places them in, these shifting political events underscore how writing with and alongside refugees and asylum seekers can only depict a highly specific moment in an unfolding narrative of personal and political entanglement. Even so, although the story continues, the themes and motifs remain the same: people cross borders in search for safety and

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dignity, governments pass laws that hinder or help this process, words of human rights and of pro or anti-immigration discourse are spoken in political arenas and the practices of hostility and hospitality are lived in communities and everyday encounters. Within all of these processes, belonging emerges as ‘the central conversation of our times’ (Turner 2019, 15), raising simultaneous questions not only of how much home a person needs, but also how ‘to form the concept of home at all?’ (Améry 1980, 56). Theatre and performance studies reflect sustained concern with matters of migration, refugees and asylum seeking in the wake of the so-called refugee crisis, where those crossing borders and seeking safety in Western countries and ‘fortress Europe’ (UNITED n.d.) are made visible in the ‘theatres of reality’ (Cox 2015, 23). From a narratological perspective, Laura Bieger contends that stories play ‘a crucial role [in the] geopolitical consequences’ (2018, 7) of forced migration and the West’s responses to it. Coalescing narratological premises with mutual belonging, Bieger continues that ‘the world we will inhabit in the future depends on the stories that we tell ourselves today’ (2018, 8). Emma Cox writes that ‘theatre of migration coalesces around notions of home [but when] one becomes a migrant, home becomes a problem’ (2014, 77, emphasis in original). Therefore, in encounters (in theatre and otherwise) between noncitizens and citizens, it becomes imperative to ‘think through dwelling [in terms of] who may be allowed to enact “homely” [and] which dwelling is helped or hindered by hosts who are already home’ (Cox 2014, 77). Thereby, Cox and Bieger understand home as an ethical task of proximity, relationality, theatre and story, which questions not only the how to of forming the concept of home, or the how much of home is needed, but also the who of home. In an article arguing for the connections between anthropology and art, anthropologist Tim Ingold remarks how both fields act in lived domains by working from the question: ‘[h]ow ought we to live?’ (2019, 2) Ingold argues that the aims of art and anthropology are connected through being situated at once in epistemological domains, but never escaping the mutuality of sharing social and political world, and through the creativity both approaches ask for. Working from the question of how we ought to live creates opportunities to stay ‘with the trouble’ (Haraway 2016) of what is, while engaging with the creative and imaginative potential of how we could live and of what could be. Who is allowed to home is made politically prevalent when considering that ‘crisis’ applies more to the politics of inclusion and exclusion of

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European and Western countries than it does to the refugees themselves (Weiwei 2018; Jeffers 2012; Arendt 1986). Emma Cox and Caroline Wake write that ‘there is profound disagreement as to what, exactly, this is a crisis of’ (2018, 140), suggesting rather a crisis of empathy, human rights and ‘financial gain over people’s struggle for the necessities of life’ (Weiwei 2018). T.J. Demos calls it a ‘geopolitics of exclusion’ (2013, 15), and from a geographical perspective, Doreen Massey asks ‘[w]ho is it that experiences it [space] and how? Do we all benefit and suffer from it in the same way?’ (2005, 146) Geopolitical space in itself thereby raises issues of sustainability, ethics and belonging. At an event I attended in connection with the Homeless Souls exhibition, Behrouz Boochani called it a crisis of ‘asylum genocide’. How much home a person needs is thereby not only an existential question, but inexplicably linked with the statutory process that makes home and belonging possible by safeguarding human rights and dignity. Hannah Arendt here remarks that it is necessary for an individual to belong as a political subject, because in cases of statelessness and when lacking political and social rights, home and belonging also become impossible (e.g. Arendt 1996). The existential, ethical and political stipulations of how to live and how to dwell in an era of displacement can be understood also as a question of readiness to reimagine what belonging means and how it is enacted, not least, relationally between noncitizens and citizens. In a similar reversal to Deleuze and Guattari’s call for a ‘Nomadology [as] the opposite of history’ (1987, 23), Agamben argues for building up ‘philosophy anew starting from the one and only figure of the refugee’ (2008, 90), making it a question not of whether we are currently able to form a concept of home, but rather where the concept of home starts from. Sociologists like Craig Calhoun argue that in globalised societies ‘it makes little sense to talk about “belonging” to particular nations’ (2009, 209), while Nila Yuval-­ Davis (1999, 2007), Avtar Brah (1996), Halleh Ghorashi (2017), Ghorashi and Vieten (2012) and Davies et al. (2018) suggest that deterritorialised and non-place-centred notions of belonging open up for trajectories that reflect the crisscrossing, multilocal and intersecting realities of how people make a home in globalised space. This study has been written between the sites of Glasgow, Scotland and Copenhagen, Denmark. At the beginning of this study in 2017, the United Kingdom had recently voted to depart from the European Union, and Denmark was governed by a right-wing party, passing ever-tighter asylum policies. ‘Welcome to Edinburgh, this is home’ was a Royal Bank

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of Scotland billboard that, until recently, overhung the parking lot of Edinburgh airport, making it one of the first things passengers would see as they went into the city. The Brexit vote has placed belonging as a question not only for those already living with geopolitical exclusions, but also for EU citizens and foreign nationals residing in the UK. Political scientist Amanda Garrett notes how the vote was reflective not only of the UK’s xenophobia and racism, but also a vote to establish border sovereignty on account of the refugee crisis, simultaneously giving mandate for tightening asylum and immigration policy (2019). The Leave vote was not pronounced in the fieldwork in Glasgow, so while this study considers home and belonging within a European and Brexit perspective I remark on the vote to Leave mostly in its connection to border politics and asylum policy. Following Avtar Brah’s notion that personal biography can be ‘closely tied up [with] intellectual labour’ (1996, 10), I bring the places of Glasgow and Copenhagen into conversation, as they are my places of belonging. They are the worlds in which I know about departure and arrival, and where I ask the questions of how to live and how to dwell. They are also the places that make politics solid and relational, and the places where I continue making homes with those arriving as refugees and asylum seekers. The two collective writing projects described in this book breach these sites. In Copenhagen, the play, This Is Us, was written between August and December 2018 with a group living in Deportation Centre Sjælsmark and performed in Trampoline House in December 2018. Trampoline House is a community house for refugees, asylum seekers, migrants and volunteers in Copenhagen and, as later chapters will elaborate, the daily running of the house is grounded in practices of democracy and solidarity. Having a history of volunteering at the house, I was able to gain access to Sjælsmark and able to combine the writing process with an internship in the House. The people in the group were users of the House, and we would meet weekly in the camps for workshops and in the House during the week. In collaboration with a Red Cross worker in the camp, I met Rohan who had been looking for opportunities to write and act. Together, we gathered a group of people who were interested in the project. The fluctuating number of participants made clear the need for a process rather than performance-­driven approach. As in Trampoline House, people would come and participate as they could, depending on a range of factors from how they were feeling on the day to what was happening with their cases, in Danish politics and in the camps. The process of writing together thereby combined elements of teaching the craft and techniques of writing

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with writing exercise and drama games that gradually built up components of the play and allowed people to join the process as and when they could, and allowed multiple artistic visions to intersect. The collaborative and collective writing elements were thereby present both in the creative aspects of the project, but equally in finding a way of working together across the sites of the camp and the House, and across the differences in our legal situatedness. In Glasgow, I wrote a play, Amazing Amelia/We Are All Amelias, with the Youth Community Support Agency’s Women’s Group, who named themselves and each other ‘the sistas’. In collaboration with project lead Clare McBrien, we agreed that I would volunteer and get to know the group before leading a project. Starting January 2018, I participated in and assisted on other creative projects such as songwriting, cooking, music and poetry, leading bursts of workshops on playwriting in between. The play was performed at the Glad Café in August 2018 and at the UNESCO Spring School in May 2019. As in Sjælsmark, the process combined didactic elements on stories and plot with writing exercises and drama games. However, as later chapters describe, by the time we wrote the play, the group had co-written and co-sung several songs, helped each other choose lines and words for poems and they had stood together while going through the asylum process. The attunement to each other as a group and as a collective of artists developed on an ongoing basis through and beyond the projects. As this book meditates on, the projects necessarily approached writing together from an artistic as well as relational stance, meaning the process should reflect and be malleable to the political and legal situations the writers were in, the artistic abilities and knowledges they brought with them, as well as to the stories they wanted to tell as individuals and collectives. The methodologies this book examines were developed by working with these groups and the processes they called for, most notably considering the relational space between and beyond writing and making theatre as a necessary part of an ethical and reflective artistic practice when working with and alongside refugees and asylum seekers. Similarly, these groups and organisations made practical and creative work of political commitments, indicating how micropolitical action can produce moments of belonging or, at least, present continued and sustained moments and acts of welcome.

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1.1   ‘The Place of a Thousand Belongings’: Home as a Critical Lens What is home? Asking not how much home a person needs, but what home is and means is likely to elicit different answers. Western culture has readily suggested ‘house-as-home’ (Blunt and Dowling 2006, 88), often bound up in the temporality of a person’s first home or childhood home, or even in ‘imagining nation as home’ (2006, 140). Anthropologist Michael Jackson understands homes as the spatial correlatives (1995, 135) of the embodied nature of being in the world: the ‘places of orientation’ (135–36) from which both to start from and return to, even if that return is ‘in our imaginations’ (136). These spatial correlatives are steeped in ‘memory’, often those of ‘births and deaths’ (136) or the moments that have changed our lives (136, all emphasis in original). If home is understood as an individual’s emotional and lived relationship to a place, manifested temporally in significant events, then home emerges both as a location and as human connection and affect to that location. For example, a palatial container for birth, death and change, home implies both an orientational gateway to a past and the promise of a future. This link is forged by the tropes of home: the location of a heart or the site to hang a hat. The first suggests an embodied relationality, the second a movable adaptability, a willingness to hang a hat somewhere else. Where home frequently emerges in theoretical thinking around location, nationality and place, belonging is often connected to a sociological field and reflects an embodied, relational practice, in some cases even a skill (Turner 2019, 153). Cox defines home as ‘a location, an idea (which may be consigned to memory) and a material and affective practice (of being “at home” with people, things and behaviours’ (2014, 77). Yuval-­ Davis makes similar claims on belonging: people can ‘belong in many different ways and to many different objects of attachments’ (2011, 5), ranging from ‘a particular person to the whole humanity [in a] concrete or abstract […] stable, contested or transient way’ (5). As these kindred and broad formulations show, it is not always possible to make distinctions between the two. For introductory purposes, I remark how home and belonging are unified through the internal-external dialectic of living embodied complexities between self and place. While it is possible to understand a body as a home, it is necessary to negotiate this bodily belonging in lived space. Where home is then ‘a lived relationship, a

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tension’ (Jackson 1995, 122), belonging is an ‘always dynamic process’ (Yuval-Davis 2011, 5). This tension and dynamic process makes an open question of home, ‘continually created and recreated through everyday practices’ (Blunt and Dowling 2006, 23). Answering what home is might then prove both unanswerable and unavoidable, speaking, as Nuha’s poem from the sistas does, mostly in contradictions: Home Should be comforting But it is a place that pushes all my buttons down. (Home by Nuha Thalib, 2018)

Much like Nuha here highlights the discrepancies between what a home is through what it should be, Rohan from Sjælsmark will note later on that they never considered belonging to their country because of corruption and because they did not have a future there. For Rohan, belonging is rendered impossible when the location of a home cannot be the location also of an unfolding future. Jackson here suggests that home implies ‘an intimate relationship between the part of the world one calls “self” and the part of the world he or she sees as “other”’ (1995, 122), amounting to relationships between, for example, self and landscape or self and other people (122). In both Nuha and Rohan’s case, home does not perform in the way they should, thereby challenging both their senses of belonging to the places they inhabit. Reaching satisfying and inclusive definitions of home is a challenge reflected in the literature that deals with home: as a field that engenders interdisciplinary approaches, home is a question that arises in some shape or form within almost any disciplinary and creative field. Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling’s book Home (2006) supports this perspective by providing a comprehensive survey on research undertaken around home. In five chapters, they interrogate: the creative and poetic representations of home, revealing home in its emotional composition; home as a question of domesticity, gender, economy and home-owning; home in histories of nation and empire, and the imperialist world-views at play in colonial conquest and the dispossession of already-inhabited land; transnational homes, exploring the myriad of globalised experiences living in culturally and geographically diverse relationships with what constitutes as home; and lastly, leaving home, which covers experiences of exile, refugees, Indigenous

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people, migrants, asylum seekers and homeless people, as well as the emotional imperative to leave places of home when they no longer constitute as such. This study engages in some way with all of these threads and their theoretical frameworks. The gendered aspect of home is unfolded in the fieldwork with the sistas, where in many cases, gender discrimination was the cause for seeking asylum. For now, Alhan notes: …before I never go out in my country. My mum never let me go out, don’t even go out, they don’t even let me speak, they don’t listen to me. If I tried to speak, ‘oh you’re rude to me, you’re this, you’re that, you’re a bad girl’ and stuff. I feel home here [in Glasgow]. (Interview, 21st June 2019)

Similar to Nuha and Rohan, for Alhan, it becomes difficult to belong when home does not perform in the way it should. A home, Alhan implies, is where she is able to go out and where she is not silenced. The connection between home and gender is unfolded as an intersectional issue between being a woman and asylum seeker, supported by the feminist works of Audré Lorde and bell hooks, as well as the theoretical work on feminist collectives and feminist ethics of care. Transnational homes and experiencing leaving one’s home are weaved through philosophical thinking of ontologies of belonging, while remaining aware of the practical and political need for shelter and security. Leaving homes is also present through the fieldwork, as the  groups unfold their experiences of seeking asylum. The history of nations and its connection to the dispossession of land, current geopolitical accesses and border policing run as through-­lines in the chapters. So do the links postcolonial thinkers make between nation and narration, inclusion and exclusion, and belonging as an often contested site of identity in exilic experiences. Lastly, the combination of geographical scholars and narratologists uncover home as a question of the correspondence between story and landscape. From a narratological perspective, Bieger reckons that ‘belonging and narrative condition each other’ (2018, 7), but that belonging is ‘continuously produced in and through narrative’ (2018, 7), presumably in the negotiation between self and the multiple ‘other’ spaces and relations that make dynamic the tensions of home and belonging. This book connects the perspectives of home, story and geopolitical landscape through the creative practice of making theatre and writing plays with those for whom

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home is a political, existential and spatial question. This is supported by a theoretical framework that dissects story’s effect on living lives of belonging through the fields of sociology, and narrative therapy, anthropology and ethnography. These interdisciplinary overlaps display how home brings different fields in conversation with each other. In this book, this conversation extends to understanding that home provides its own critical and creative lens: the poetic and creative potential of home is a vantage point from which to understand the world and create a home in it. But in the fieldwork of this study, a poetics of home also informed an imperative to question and reimagine ‘places of orientation’ and artistic and political expressions of what it means to be at home. In that way home and belonging also provided a creative prism through which to imagine and produce other ways of being at home. For example, in the sistas’ Amazing Amelia, Nuha’s chorus line describes Amelia arriving to a safe place in the following way: Nuha:  You can call it whatever you like. Some call it Dreamland, some call it The Place of a Thousand Belongings, but you can call it Home (Scene 6) Underscoring the poetic potential, Nuha’s character gives Amelia several different options for how she will name her home. A narratological perspective suggests that it is possible to be homed by stories, but also to be storied by the world. ‘You can call it whatever you like’ implies a lived and interpretive relationship between self, story and place. ‘The Place of a Thousand Belongings’ encourages Amelia to develop not only her own relationship with dreamland, but also with her way of belonging to it. Connectively, the lived experiences of those seeking asylum and the refugee communities I worked with not only made home a proximate and relational question of who has access to rights, safety and dignity, but also stipulated the ethical imperatives to understand who is allowed to enact home. Looking at the world through the perspective of belonging reveals the crosscutting political, philosophical and poetic concerns of current times and the inequalities with which the social and political structures that provide home, security and the possibility for developing senses of belonging are distributed. As Luce Irigaray notes, ‘the most important political and ethical task of our age’ (2008, 6) is guiding oneself away from the

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‘familiarity and security of “home” to the more unfamiliar and inhospitable domain of Difference’ (6) on which ground ‘empathy can flourish’ (6). If, as Jackson suggested, home is also the negotiation between self and the multiple ‘others’ of the world, then home can also be taken as a call to ‘the other’ emergent in the wake of the so-called refugee crisis. Using home as a critical lens able to address ethical imperatives the who and how of home connects the research and practice of this study in, one, socio-political frameworks that argue, in different ways, for a global ethics of belonging and make visible the political antagonisms that create nonbelonging, as well as the possibilities for micropolitical belonging. Two, the theoretical and practical frameworks of decreation, undoing and decolonisation, which are able to address structural imbalances and adherences to set ways of knowing, being at home and making homes together. Three, the reflective, ethical and aesthetical practice of dramaturgical ethics and ethnoplaywriting, and their commitments to holding tensions and challenges of people’s different situations of belonging.

1.2  Home and Belonging in Refugee Performance From a theatre perspective, home emerges as a site of inquiry and a critical prism by which to understand the embodied conflicts of belonging. Bieger makes interdisciplinary links between narratology and theatre by remarking on narrative’s capacity to ‘emplot and emplace our lives’ (2018, 7), and in Staging Place, Una Chaudhuri reads modern plays’ treatment of the dichotomy between home and homelessness also as a matter of space. Making two terms: ‘geopathology’ and ‘geopathic dramaturgy’, Chaudhuri traces the emplotted-emplaced connection between home, story and space both on and off the stage. Geopathology refers to a world increasingly defined by dislocation and migration. Geopathic dramaturgy covers the staged conflicts between people and place, manifested materially, bodily and dramaturgically in the connection between plays and place (1997, 53). In Performing Dream Homes (2019), Klein et al. read the rendering of home and domesticity on stage in contemporary plays. But they also make the semiotics of theatre and its imagination ‘social and imaginative relations’ (2019, 4) applicable to ‘consider how places, landscapes, and cityscapes perform, and how our engagement with and movement through these spaces impacts the meanings they generate’ (2019, 4). In Performance, Space, Utopia (2013), Silvija Jestrovic continues the conversation between theatre and worldly space by examining utopia and exile

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and their historical performativities in the cities of Sarajevo and Belgrade. Yana Meerzon and Jestrovic’s Performance, Exile and ‘America’ (2009) examines exile and America through the prism of performance, geography, imagination and political practice. Theatre is in itself a liminal space able to both stage different homes at different times and occupy a space between home and homelessness. Being able to negotiate these lived and embodied relationship between home and belonging, self and the world, underscores theatre’s ability to hold explorative tensions of belonging and nonbelonging. The stage-world connection of the embodied-emplaced space of theatre has challenged and considered asylum policy as a question of the power circulated in spectatorship, the way refugees’ stories are told and the ethics of making theatre with refugees and asylum seekers. Theatre critic remarked on Michael Billington ‘a growing canon of asylum dramas’ (2001) prompting his response that ‘the asylum debate has moved into the theatre’ (2001). While this debate continues to be staged, theatre companies like Good Chance also show how theatre inserts itself into asylum politics. Good Chance was founded by playwrights Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson as they went to the Calais Jungle in 2015. While their productions also run in mainstream theatres, their work expands to cross-­ border ensemble work and smaller initiatives aimed at creating ‘stories of hope’ (Good Chance n.d.) and reflecting a belief in theatre’s ability to create acts of welcome. The Refugee Tales project adapts Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and uses storytelling as part of their project aimed at ending indefinite detention in the UK. Their prologue states: This prologue is not a poem It is an act of welcome It announces that the people present Reject the terms Of a debate that criminalises Human Movement. (Herd and Pincus 2016, v)

In his narrative poem from England’s middle ages, Chaucer places pilgrims from all layers of society in an atypical conversation with each other, as they pass the time of their journey by telling each other instructive, entertaining and moral tales. Refugee Tales is an extension of this conversation and an affirmation in the belief that stories can ‘reject terms’ (v) of

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dominating political discourse. In this way, the project re-establishes a ‘trust/In language/To hear the unsaid spoken’ (vi). These ‘[s]tories of the new geography/Stories of arrival’ (vii) then work at reshaping and countering the hostility of media portrayals and language surrounding refugees and detention. But the project is also a walk across space, following a site-specific route punctuated with stops, talks and performances. ‘As the project walks’ (Refugee Tales n.d.) it ‘creates space in which the language of welcome is the prevailing discourse’ (n.d.). In the Glasgow-based project The Trojans (Terra Incognita and Trojan Women Scotland, Platform, 2019) Euripides’ anti-war tragedy The Trojan Women became the skeleton for a play staging the experiences of Syrian refugees in Scotland. Similarly, Ariane Mnouchkine’s Le Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées) (Théâtre du Soleil, La Cartoucherie Paris, 2003) is based simultaneously on Homer’s Odysseus and on recordings of interviews Mnouchkine conducted with asylum seekers. In Performing Statelessness in Europe, Steve Wilmer remarks on this rise in using Greek tragedy as starting point for addressing current socio-political challenges. Wilmer argues that this encourages audiences to ‘question their own place and identity in the nation-state and their responsibility to those who have been excluded’ (2018, 40). But in her analysis of Le Dernier Caravansérail, Cox notes that the play ‘became a kind of mythopoetics of the dispossessed’ (2014, 18), while Helena Graham writes how the play poses the risk of turning ‘the focus to the spectators, instead of answering the call to the other’ (2009, 128). Liz Tomlin raises similar concerns in Political Dramaturgies and Theatre Spectatorship. In her analysis of Queens of Syria (The Trojan Women Project) Tomlin argues that ‘the drama of real people’ (2019, 130) and the empathic kind of spectatorship it encourages might instead eliminate the ‘potential for two-way dialogic engagement’ (130) that is otherwise ‘required to accommodate the complexities of the political situation in question’ (130). While I would always argue for the merit of the political act of listening even (and sometimes especially) when one cannot respond, and that the two-way dialogue able to addressing the complexity of a political situation far transcends staged moments, Tomlin’s scrutiny reaches productively into addressing the ambivalent complexities of refugee stories. The fieldwork reflection on the sistas’ writing of Amazing Amelia picks up the thread of adapting a classical text (in this case, the biography of a real person) to answer the challenges of a current political moment. For

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introductory purposes, I note that such double stories show how art can respond to art, how art can respond to the so-called refugee crisis, how seminal and foundational works of a Western cultural canon can be refurbished to inhabit more identities in diverse communities, create shared cultures and, most importantly, how stories can open up and present poetic and ethical acts of welcome where politics often fail. But Cox questions: ‘who is the collective “we” that “our” myths gather and speak to?’ (2014, 19) Indeed, ‘Greek myths [or English classics] aren’t necessarily (or even usually) the first point of reference for artists who have experienced forced migration or are descended from forced migrants’ (19). I use these examples to foreground this book’s involvement with a wide scope of stories around refugeedom, from those told in embodied theatre space to those told in the theatres of reality. In the fieldwork, stories (like Amelia Earhart’s, or The Lord of the Rings or Vampire Diaries) became a blueprint for plays and for understandings around how stories worked. In subsequent chapters, Helen Nicholson supports views of narrative therapy by remarking that such fictions can become as much a part of the fabrics of reality and people’s approaches to the world as living one’s everyday stories. Theatre productions, including the ones mentioned, will be drawn in as reference points throughout this thesis. But I note them here alongside their critical readings to foreground this study’s concern with the nexus of refugees, stories and reflective and ethical practices covered in the section below methodology. In a special edition ‘Envisioning Asylum’ of Research in Drama Education, Emma Cox and Caroline Wake wrote an editorial examining 10 years of performance studies responses to asylum since the 2008 RiDE issue ‘Performance and Asylum: Embodiment, Ethics, Community’. Cox and Wake note that where the articles in the 2008 issue drew on the political philosophy of Agamben, Arendt and Foucault, the 2018 issue had 10  years of research to draw from (2018, 141). Most relevant for this study, this denotes a shift in performance studies, ‘responding to institutional and governmental practices and aesthetics’ (143) and the ‘performativity of political apparatuses and discourses’ (143). Reflecting on this, Jeffers notes how storied acts of welcome can as readily perpetuate victimisation and traumatisation as they can dismantle them, as these stories are set ‘against a background of fear, suspicion and mistrust on all sides’ (2012, 12). Indeed, lives depend on claims for truth, and yet:

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[h]indrances and risks on the path to applying for asylum make it almost impossible for applicants to stick to the truth throughout their perilous ­journeys. Smugglers, for example, influence them on the way. (Bendixen and Awwad 2020, 26)

In the Danish system, an asylum interview will most often involve a translator who ‘does not necessarily speak or write both languages to a sufficiently high level’ (51), nor always works ‘professionally with the ethical rules for translation’ (51). This means there is both a ‘risk that the result may be flawed or misleading [and that the] life of the asylum seeker could be at stake’ (51). Turning the attention beyond the institutional situation of asylum stories, Jeffers understands that the connective field between media, theatre and politics on refugeedom produces the idea of a right kind of refugee story making claims, not least, on the kind of performance refugees are able to do in both theatres and theatres of reality (2012, 43). Therefore, while theatre might produce acts of welcome, it is also at the risk of continuing moments of categorisation and disbelief. As Cox notes: the identification of asylum as a category subject to artistic and political representation, regardless of the emancipatory ideals of that representation, does not merely describe but is also generative of the category. (2015, 2)

Cavarero’s differentiation between being a ‘narratable self’ (2000, 34) and a ‘narrated self’ (34) becomes a distinction of how refugees are told in institutional and artistic spaces, and how they themselves tell. The fieldwork reflection from Sjælsmark takes this up by noting how they were continually narrated through the categorisations of politics, the assumption of people and the institutions of camps and asylums. This is demonstrated in the lines opening the play: There is a lot of stories out there. A lot of stories that talk about who I am: According to them, according to you, according to the things you fear to see or the things you want to see. A lot of stories that talk about experiences that I’ve had as if they were phenomenon, as if they were graphs, as if they were yours to tell. (This Is Us, Prologue)

As Yana Meerzon (2012) notes in her study on exilic artists, and more recently in her work on dramaturgy and migration with Meerzon and Pewny (2020), a performative perspective is not only applicable to a

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socio-­political and cultural field, but it can also illuminate how exilic identities occupy migratory spaces that stage performances and negotiations of self. While this makes visible the process of translation undertaken by exilic and transcultural artists both in the intimacies of identity and in artistic output, this argument is equally applicable to the process of seeking asylum and navigating the codified process of state-apparatus that makes its applicants readable within a system that correlates act and identity of asylum seeking. Jeffers calls this ‘bureaucratic performance’ (2012, 13), which relies on the ‘imperative to tell’ (Thompson 2009, 56), as an asylum seeker attempts ‘to prove their individual persecution under the terms of the 1951 Refugee Convention’ (Jeffers 2012, 13). Silvija Jestrovic identifies a ‘hyper-­authenticity’ (2008, 160) across bureaucratic and performative spaces, where the ‘exile is required to select, condense, and pitch his/ her experience so it comes across convincing and valid’ (160). This means that it is not only a question ‘of being an asylum seeker, a refugee or an immigrant, but also of performing accordingly’ (160, all emphasis in original), across a myriad of staged and non-staged places. This book reckons with ethics and performance in a few ways: one, working from the assumption that the ‘communal nature of theatre [produces an] ethical practice’ (Jeffers 2012, 44) can be able to address ‘limits of hospitality’ (2012, 44), and at the same time resist the tendency (as Thompson (2009) notes) to overestimate the social and political effect such performances have. Two, remaining aware of the institutional scepticism and aesthetics choices that maintain rather than challenge refugee categorisations; and three, undertaking the dramaturgical ethics able to hold tensions of making theatre across differences in legal status and with those for whom theatre might not be a priority. The latter is prompted by Payman, who during my first session with the group in Sjælsmark asked what ‘the point of theatre’ was when it did not make any tangible, political difference in their lives. Here, arguing for the role theatre has in producing change, and the slowness with which that happens, was incongruous with the political reality of Payman’s situation. Instead, the task was not to argue for the effects of theatre on either politics or its potential to change their lives, but rather for its relational, communal abilities in a shared present. Nonetheless, the fieldwork of this study recount an involvement with politics not least through performance, thereby reflecting Nicholson’s argument that applied theatre can produce moments of democratic participation for those who are otherwise excluded from such practices. Nicholson’s work thus echoes Ingold’s notion that citizenship is not ‘a

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right or entitlement [but] something we have to work at’ (2019, 14). In my fieldwork, politics and democracy were enacted also through the groups making choices about story and by reinterpreting reality in fictional space. Applying Nicholson and Ingold’s perspective to the refugee communities I work with further frames the exploration on how micropolitical spaces can produce belonging through creative enactments of democracy and citizenship.

1.3  Interdisciplinary Methodology This book holds three key methodological, practical and theoretical tensions: one, practice as research poses its own set of unique challenges relating to ethics and translating the experiences from a lived domain into academic text. Two, home and belonging transcend strict disciplinary and creative boundaries, while performance and theatre studies around refugeedom are themselves ‘emphatically interdisciplinary’ (Cox and Wake 2018, 142). And three, both the practice and methodological approach of this study are interdisciplinary. Remarking on an ethnographic field, Jackson notes that the knowledge acquired through bodily participation ‘tend[s] to get suppressed in our academic discourse’ (1989, 11). Conquergood reads this conundrum as an imperative to restore the ‘connection between experience and empiricism’ (1991, 181). From a performance perspective, Melissa Trimingham notes that while artistic practice might be relevant to research, it does not contribute ‘until it is subject to analysis and commentary’ (Trimingham 2002, 54). I am here inspired by Ingold, who (echoing his question of how ought we to live) argues that research implies a way of ‘living curiously’ (Ingold 2019, 7). Ingold thereby connects the three methodological challenges: dramaturgical ethics turns how to live into a question of how to act with solidarity in and beyond a theatre frame, and in and beyond relational moments between noncitizens and citizens. Ethnoplaywriting reflects how to inhabit creative space together that might enact welcome and moments of belonging. Several parts of this thesis tackle the nexus of art, anthropology and research, not least through remarking on decreation, decolonisation and questioning the connection between experience and empiricism. This section outlines the methodological practice approaches of this thesis, while the following section maps the conversation between theory and practice by describing the different chapters.

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I use the term ‘compromised belongings’ as an analytical and performative lens reflecting the compromises and invisible work asylum seekers and refugee have to do, at every stage of exile, in order to belong. These compromises can be read also as processes of identity, translation and undertaken performances authored by an asylum system. Dramaturgical ethics is prompted by Payman’s question above (‘what’s the point of theatre?’) and thinks through the ethical demands of making theatre that seeks to address structural imbalances and inequalities by participants who occupy different statuses of these inequalities. Dramaturgical ethics extends to asking the questions of who benefits from the work when the practitioner (as is the case in this study) holds privileges of citizenship, whiteness and academic and artistic affiliations. Ethnoplaywriting argues for the already existing overlaps between playwriting and ethnography. This is particularly relevant to projects where making theatre (and performing dramaturgical ethics) required both ethnographic and theatre skills, and when what is at stake is also the making and unmaking of creative and worldly homes. While interdisciplinary method sometimes risks dissatisfying all disciplines, this study argues that undertaking an exploration of home and belonging through asylum perspectives merits a response from many disciplines. This argument is supported in the overlapping of ethnographic and theatre practice as socially engaged and forward-gazing pursuits, relying on an involvement in not only what is, but also what could be: no practice of art could carry force that was not already grounded in careful and attentive observation of the lived world. Nor, conversely, could anthropological studies of the manifold ways along which life is lived be of any avail if not brought to bear upon speculative inquiries into what the possibilities of life might be. (Ingold 2019, 2)

Ethnography’s insistence on the subtleties, and, sometimes incommunicability of research findings, while simultaneously being committed to seeking out the language or images that might catch the meaning or experiences of life, overlaps with playwriting’s attentiveness in listening for a story and engaging with what could be. Ethnography also interacts with the practice-­ as-­research challenge in translating a performative field to analytical language, and with how home can prove an unanswerable yet unavoidable question when taking into account its emotional, political and material stakes in current time. Later chapters map the methodology and application of ethnoplaywriting. Theoretically, I place ethnoplaywriting within

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the existing overlap between the practices noted in performance studies, in critical ethnography and alongside practices and methods of political listening and vulnerable observing. I argue that considering home and belonging through the so-called refugee crisis stipulates commitments of research and practice to live curiously and with care, doing in the world through and beyond the frameworks of theatre and academia and doing in text through creative and reflective positioning. As Katie Fitzpatrick and Stephen May reflect in their exploration of critical ethnography and education, part of this practice lies in ‘a politics of asking uncomfortable questions about in/equity and privilege’ (2022, 2). Similarly to critical ethnography, ethnoplaywriting is then: a located, messy, political, and versatile methodological approach; it is also embodied and relational, a methodology that assumes the researcher is also deeply implicated and cannot stand apart from their inquiry. (2022, 2)

While I reflect on my bodily inscription into the systems of privilege that oppress others in the chapters, this thesis is centred around the knowledges and experiences of those who have been generous to share them with me in playwriting and beyond. I agree with Les Back’s (2007, 21) argument that ‘theoretical work should not climb to a level where the voices of the people concerned become inaudible’. In this textual account of both research and practice, the two plays, the fieldwork reflections and the interludes punctuate the chapters and seek to parallel epistemology with the experienced knowledge of those living with compromised belonging.

1.4  Chapter Overview Dramaturgical ethics is present both in the content and the structure of this book, reflected in the order of the chapters that place the two fieldwork reflections and two plays at the end. In this way, each chapter gives context for the next. It starts with a theoretical survey of home. I then introduce the methodological approaches necessary for reading the fieldwork chapters, which are each prefaced with a context chapter serving to illuminate the nuances of the situations the two groups were in. The fieldwork reflections shift to a prose register to capture the experience of writing and performing the two plays, which, in turn, sets the stage for the experience of reading the plays themselves. It is my aim that this structure

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will encourage a reading that centres those who this work is made with and about, and reflects the ethical and aesthetic practices put forward here. Chapter 2 explores the ontological and narratological premises of belonging, as a question that arises with being human and with negotiating one’s place in the world. This chapter not only develops a historical and judicial backdrop for the so-called refugee crisis by looking also at the Human Rights Declaration and Refugee Convention, but also explores the narrative stakes of belonging. Dissecting story from a wide lense, the dynamics of how belonging and narrative coalesce around asylum are traced from geopolitical storytelling to relational moments where stories become a means of survival and a way to be visible to one another. This chapter culminates in tracing the dynamics of rights, dignity and belonging by coining the term ‘Compromised Belonging’. Chapter 3 provides the methodological approach of dramaturgical ethics. By engaging with philosophy of ethics I argue for the necessity of a kind of dramaturgy able to go beyond the moments of making theatre with refugees and asylum seekers. Being ethically called to responsibility through the proximity of another, I also question how and whether such meetings contain the makings and unmakings of home. Chapter 4 engages first with applied, documentary and verbatim theatre, and then maps the uses of ethnoplaywriting in this study and beyond. Taking its points of departure from the existing overlaps in the works, for example, of Turner and Conquergood, ethnoplaywriting applies ethnographic practice to the process of using playwriting and theatre as a tool to examine politics, stories and lived experiences of compromised belongings. Chapter 5 sets the scene for the practice and fieldwork reflections with the group in Sjælsmark by mapping the geographical landscape of asylum in Denmark. I also look at the practices of democracy in Trampoline House’s through the lens of performance. Intersecting with ethnoplaywriting, I argue that the artistic beginnings of the House imply that artistic courage helps not only to create works of art, but also to remain creative about the workings of the world and its politics. Chapter 6 gives a creative account of the process of making theatre in Sjælsmark through dramaturgical ethics, ethnoplaywriting and narratology. At the heart of this account lies Payman’s question of what theatre is able to do in the so-called refugee crisis, and of how the residents in Sjælsmark are able to form the concept of home in a place that deliberately seeks to unhome. This is followed by Chapter 7: This Is Us, the play written by the group. Chapter 8 sets the scene for the fieldwork with the sistas in Glasgow and raises asylum as an intersectional issue by looking

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specifically at how being prosecuted and at risk due to being a woman intersects with seeking asylum. This is underpinned with the theoretical reflections around the rights of refugee women, feminist ethics of care, the concept of intersectionality and its relation to the second wave of feminism. Lastly, this chapter unfolds the rich creative practices of the sistas and foregrounds the fieldwork reflection’s interrogation of writing as belonging and poetry as resistance. Chapter 9 maps the process and product of writing and performing Amazing Amelia. Intersecting with multiple other practitioners and processes, it reflects on a creative interdisciplinary approach alongside the practices of ethics and ethnoplaywriting. I also seek to unfold how collective writing and performing constituted moments of belonging. This is followed by Chap. 10, the play-text of Amazing Amelia.

1.5   ‘Den Smukke Fortælling’: Political Considerations During my time in Trampoline House, I translated at an event that where artists and writers from refugee backgrounds were in conversation with each other. Khaterah Parwani, a Danish-Afghan writer, spoke about the question of stereotyping certain demographics in Danish culture. Parwani argued that in refugee representation, there was often an equation between the person and the conflict or country they came from, but very little (both public and relational) space reserved for ‘den smukke fortælling’, the beautiful story. Evidently, things  are lost when seeking asylum, but Parwani draws out that what is lost is also the space to share what might be beautiful. There are two stories going on in this section both of which provide necessary terminology for reading this book. One is the language formulated by the asylum system, which is a language of legal jargon describing the processes and spaces the individuals I worked with occupied. The second is the beautiful story: the one that ‘speaks of what I was or what I could be’ (This Is Us, Prologue). The people living in deportation centre Sjælsmark are all rejected asylum seekers, in most cases due to the Dublin Regulations or to being stateless. Being a rejected asylum means that the person faces deportation either to the country the person has been registered in previously, or back to their home country. In Denmark, the length of awaiting deportation varies. During my time in Trampoline House, a family was deported back

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to their home country where they faced significant danger. The people from the House and other organisations went to the airport to try and stop the deportation. To prevent resistance from deportees and activists, authorities often pick people up during the night or in the early hours of the morning and drive them, sometimes handcuffed, directly to the airport, a common practice for deportation across Western countries. In Glasgow, the sistas were at various stages of the asylum process at different times of the project. Almost all of them have currently obtained refugee status, which means their asylum claims have been validated as constituting ‘well-founded fear’ of prosecution and under the 1951 UNHCR Refugee Convention. Deportation and detention within the UK are remarked on in different parts of this book, specifically, within theatre and artistic projects seeking to tackle indefinite detention. The distinctions in legal status between the group in Sjælsmark and the sistas in Glasgow unfold the different possible outcomes of the asylum systems: when a person seeks asylum, a person’s claim will either ultimately be denied (after processes and possibilities of appeal), making them a rejected asylum seeker, or accepted, making them a refugee. As for the beautiful story, I ask first ‘what’s in a name?’ which is a mirror to Chap. 5’s interlude titled by the same question. This interlude explores the chosen pseudonyms of people in Trampoline House as an act of creating a self-identification and belonging when being in a system that strives against exactly that. There is a considerable amount of moral and political judgements made in how a system names people, for example, Wake and Cox note that in 2015, ‘the Independent announced that it would be using the term refugee crisis rather than “migrant problem”’ (2018, 140) because refugees are referred to as refugees, where migrants are ‘referred to as “people” wherever possible’ (140). The self-authoring of names and agentive choices made around naming is thereby a resistance to the choices made by a system. Some of the people in this study have chosen pseudonyms, some already live with names other than the ones they were born with, yet others have chosen to be named by their given first names, in some cases they have chosen their first names when named as part of a collective and their full names when mentioned as artists of illustrations and poetry (see e.g. Abbas Haj). These are not distinguished in the body of the text, which serves to work against identification wherever possible, while respecting the choices the individuals made about their names and naming. Continuing the creative and individual choices people made about their names, the beautiful story of this work continues in the illustrations

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Abbas made in Sjælsmark as a response to his situation, and to the play we were writing. They preface each chapter here as a testament to the role of artistic fortitude. Apart from Abbas, many of the  people were artists, before, during and after being asylum seekers. Rohan and Ghafour were foraying into performance. Before coming to Sjælsmark, Rohan lived in a camp near Holstebro, where they did a project also with the Odin Theatre. Ahmed Kaya was writing a book, and Hasan took photographs. As for the sistas: Nuha writes poetry, Mawaddah is a musician, Shobhita makes films and now writes scripts and the rest of the sistas have rich creative practices of making music, writing and cooking. The beautiful story is also one where the political imagery and realities of seeking asylum receive creative treatment by people using their existing and developing artistic skills to make agentive choices about how they want to tell stories. This is apparent in snippets like ‘some call it Dreamland’ or ‘the place of a thousand Belongings’ in Amazing Amelia (Scene 6); or in This Is Us, where the group spoke about being storied by a system that says ‘who I am by saying who I am to you’ (Prelude). This is not to reduce the seriousness or political efforts their situations warrant. Rather, I seek to explore a space where, like Refugee Tales, the people present can refuse the terms of a political discourse that criminalises human movement, and where it is possible instead to ask how much home a person needs and what kind of creative and worldly dwelling can be imagined.

References Ababa, Addis. 2021. Press Statement on Denmark’s Alien Act Provision to Externalize Asylum Procedures to Third Countries. African Union, August 2, 2021. https://au.int/en/pressreleases/20210802/press-­statement-­denmarks-­ alien-­act-­provision-­externalize-­asylum-­procedures. Agamben, Giorgio. 2008. Beyond Human Rights. Open 15: 90–95. Améry, Jean. 1966. Jenseits von Schuld Und Sühne: Bewältigungsversuche Eines Überwältigten. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. ———. 1980. At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1986 [1951]. The Origins of Totalitarianism. London: Andre Deutsch. ———. 1996. ‘We Refugees’, in Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile. Ed. by Marc Robinson, pp. 110–119. Boston and London: Faber and Faber. Back, Les. 2007. The Art of Listening. London, New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

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Bendixen, Michala Clante, and Nadia Awwad. 2020. Well-Founded Fear— Credibility and Risk Assessment in Danish Asylum Cases. Copenhagen. https://refugeeswelcome.dk/media/1207/well-­founded-­fear_web.pdf. Bieger, Laura. 2018. Belonging and Narrative: A Theory of the American Novel. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. Billington, Michael. 2001. One Drama after Another. The Guardian, December 22, 2001. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2001/dec/22/artsfeatures. Blunt, Alison, and Robin Dowling. 2006. Home. London, New York: Routledge. Brah, Avtar. 1996. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London: Routledge. Broberg, Mads Bonde, and Anders Redder. 2021. Nu Åbner Rwanda for at Huse Danmarks Asylsøgere. Jyllandsposten, April 1, 2021. Calhoun, Craig. 2009. Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism. In Globalization and the State: Sociological Perspectives on the State of the State, ed. Willem Schinkel, 209–242. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Cavarero, Adriana. 2000. Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood. New York: Routledge. Chakrabarti, Shami. 2021. Prologue: The Time Traveller’s Tale. In Refugee Tales IV, ed. David Herd and Anna Pincus. Manchester, United Kingdom: Comma Press. Chaudhuri, Una. 1997. Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama. Michigan: University of Michigan Press. Conquergood, Dwight. 1991. Rethinking Ethnography: Towards a Critical Cultural Politics. Communication Monographs 58 (2): 179–194. https://doi. org/10.1080/03637759109376222. Cox, Emma. 2014. Theatre & Migration. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2015. Performing Noncitizenship: Asylum Seekers in Australian Theatre, Film and Activism. New York: Anthem. Cox, Emma, and Caroline Wake. 2018. Envisioning Asylum/Engendering Crisis: Or, Performance and Forced Migration 10 Years On. Research in Drama Education 23 (2): 137–147. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569783.2018. 1442714. Davies, Kathy, Halleh Ghorashi, Peer Smets, and Melanie Eijberts. 2018. Contested Belonging: Spaces, Practices, Biographies. Bingley: Emerald Publishing. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Demos, T.J. 2013. The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis. Durham & London: Duke University Press. Fitzpatrick, Katie, and Stephen May. 2022. Critical Ethnography and Education: Theory, Methodology and Ethics. New  York: Routledge. https://doi.org/1 0.4324/9781315208510-­1.

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Garrett, Amanda. 2019. The Refugee Crisis, Brexit, and the Reframing of Immigration in Britain. Europe Now, August 1, 2019. https://www.europenowjournal.org/2019/09/09/the-­refugee-­crisis-­brexit-­and-­the-­reframing-­ of-­immigration-­in-­britain/. Ghorashi, Halleh, and Ulrike M. Vieten. 2012. “Female Narratives of ‘new’ Citizens’ Belonging(s) and Identities in Europe: Case Studies from the Netherlands and Britain.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 19 (6): 725–741. https://doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2012.745410. Good Chance. n.d. THE ART AND THEATRE OF HOPE.  Accessed July 6, 2020. https://www.goodchance.org.uk. Graham, Helena. 2009. Performance, Ethics and Spectatorship in a Global Age. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Halleh Ghorashi. 2017. Negotiating Belonging Beyond Rootedness: Unsettling the Sedentary Bias in the Dutch Culturalist Discourse. Ethnic and Racial Studies 40 (14): 2426–2443, https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2016.1248462. Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Herd, David, and Anna Pincus. 2016. Refugee Tales. Manchester, United Kingdom: Comma Press. Home Office. 2022. Memorandum of Understanding between the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Government of the Republic of Rwanda for the Provision of an Asylum Partnership Arrangement. Gov.Uk. 2022. https://www.gov.uk/government/ publications/memorandum-­o f-­u nderstanding-­m ou-­b etween-­t he-­u k-­a nd-­ rwanda/memorandum-­of-­understanding-­between-­the-­government-­of-­the-­ united-­kingdom-­of-­great-­britain-­and-­northern-­ireland-­and-­the-­government-­ of-­the-­republic-­of-­r. Ingold, Tim. 2019. Art and Anthropology for a Sustainable World. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 00: 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1111/ 1467-­9655.13125. Irigaray, Luce. 2008. Sharing the World: From Intimate to Global Relations. London: Continuum. Jackson, Michael. 1989. Paths toward a Clearing: Radical Empiricism and Ethnographic Inquiry. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1995. At Home in the World. Durham & London: Duke University Press. Jeffers, Alison. 2012. Refugees, Theatre and Crisis: Performing Global Identities. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Jestrovic, Silvija. 2008. Performing Like an Asylum Seeker: Paradoxes of Hyper-­ Authenticity. Research in Drama Education 13 (2): 159–170. ———. 2013. Performance, Space, Utopia: Cities of War, Cities of Exile. London, United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/97811 37291677.

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Jestrovic, S., and Y.  Meerzon. 2009. Performance, Exile and “America.”. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230250703. Klein, Emily, Jennifer-Scott Mobley, and Jill Stevenson. 2019. Performing Dream Homes: Theater and the Spatial Politics of the Domestic Sphere. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Massey, Doreen. 2005. For Space. London: Sage Publications. Meerzon, Yana. 2012. Performing Exile, Performing Self. https://doi. org/10.1057/9780230371910. Meerzon, Yana, and Katharina Pewny. 2020. Dramaturgy of Migration: Staging Multilingual Encounters in Contemporary Theatre. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351270267. Peltier, Elian, and Jasmina Nielsen. 2022. These Refugees Can’t Stay in Denmark, but They Can’t Be Sent Home. The New York Times, March 7, 2022. https:// www.nytimes.com/2022/03/07/world/eur ope/denmark-­s yrian-­ refugees.html. Phipps, Alison, and Hyab Yohannes. 2022. The Border Is a Colonial Wound: The Rwanda Deal and State Trafficking in People. Border Crimonologies, University of Oxford. https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-­subject-­groups/centre-­ criminology/centreborder-­criminologies/blog/2022/04/border-­colonial. Refugee Tales. n.d. A Welcome from Our Patron, Ali Smith. Accessed July 10, 2020. https://www.refugeetales.org/about. Thompson, James. 2009. Performance Affects: Applied Theatre and the End of Effect. London, UN: Palgrave Macmillan. Thrilling, Daniel. 2021. Priti Patel’s Borders Bill Is Designed to Look Tough, Not Solve Any Real Problems. The Guardian, July 14, 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jul/14/uk-­b orders-­b ill-­a sylum-­ priti-­patel. Tomlin, Liz. 2019. Political Dramaturgies and Theatre Spectatorship: Provocations for Change. London: Methuen Drama. Trimingham, Melissa. 2002. A Methodology for Practice as Research. Studies in Theatre and Performance 22 (1): 54–60. https://doi.org/10.1386/ stap.22.1.54. Turner, Toko-pa. 2019. Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home. Third. Salt Spring Island, British Columbia: Her Own Room Press. UNHCR. 2020. Figures at a Glance. UNHCR: The UN Refugee Agency. 2020. https://www.unhcr.org/figures-­at-­a-­glance.html. UNITED. n.d. Fortress Europe: Death by Policy. Fatal Policies of Fortress Europe. Accessed July 28, 2020. http://unitedagainstrefugeedeaths.eu/about-­the-­ campaign/fortress-­europe-­death-­by-­policy/. Weiwei, Ai. 2018. The Refugee Crisis Isn’t about Refugees. It’s about Us. The Guardian. February 2, 2018. www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/ feb/02/refugee-­crisis-­human-­flow-­ai-­weiwei-­china?fbclid=IwAR27OzCGkog 5F94kBnt2a7E09Qo15AKyE0exOUATXL8JXlYvjz9inIdDaVs.

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Wilmer, Steve. 2018. Performing Statelessness in Europe. London: Palgrave. Yuval-Davis, Nira. 1999. The ‘Multi-Layered Citizen’. International Feminist Journal of Politics 1 (1): 119–136. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461674 99360068. ———. 2007. ‘Intersectionality, Citizenship and Contemporary Politics of Belonging’. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 10 (4): 561–574. https://doi.org/10.1080/13698230701660220. ———. 2011. Power, Intersectionality and the Politics of Belonging. FREIA Working Paper Series, Aalborg University Denmark 75: 24.

CHAPTER 2

Ontologies of Belonging: Philosophical, Historical and Narratological Considerations

Fig. 2.1  Fleeing by Abbas Haj

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 H. Grøn, Asylum and Belonging through Collective Playwriting, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24808-5_2

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‘This thing, asylum’, Habib tells me, ‘comes first. After that come things like love and friendship’. Habib and I met in Trampoline House and are in a conversation, not about his journey or the events that brought him to Denmark, but rather ‘this thing’ and what it allows people to do. ‘For me it means freedom. Freedom to travel, for example’ he elaborates. Habib and I share friends; some living in deportation centres, some refugees, some navigating the asylum system, while others are international volunteers from countries where they are mostly free to travel as they wish. According to the declarations that will be discussed in this chapter, Habib, myself and the friends we share have the same human rights and inherent dignities, like freedom of movement. For Habib, how much home a person needs is pre-empted by the question of asylum, and asylum is a precursor for a wider engagement with life: love, friendship and being here. How much home a person needs runs as a central question through philosophical and critical discourse in the twentieth century. This chapter offers a selection of these works, documenting the effects of the rupture of civilisation and the meaning of home produced by the Holocaust, meaning that for many, ‘[d]welling, in the proper sense’ (Adorno 2006, 38), is rendered impossible. In his reading of Theodor Adorno, Matt Waggoner proposes that Adorno uses homelessness as ‘an allegory of belonging that had been polluted by the politics of exclusion’ (2018, 43), making it a question of whether or not it would be possible to ‘reconstitute the idea of home in an ethically responsible way’ (43). From accounts of those unhoused and made refugees by the systematic prosecution and incarceration of Jews, home emerges full of tensions: ‘[o]ne must have a home in order not to need it’ (1980, 46), Améry writes, making it at once a necessity and an impossibility. This chapter bases its exploration on the works of Hannah Arendt, Jean Améry and Simone Weil, as their writing raises the question of belonging alongside what it means to be human. Writing from radically different perspectives,1 they share a concern for European democracy, human rights and participation in political life, but they also begin to open up the question of the narrative and performative stakes in belonging. 1  The author biographies of the works read in this chapter note, for example, that Arendt fled to America during the war, while Améry was a part of the Resistance Movement, then captured and tortured by the SS and followingly incarcerated for two years in Auschwitz until the war ended. Weil was born in France to Jewish parents and was an activist with and among the working class, which is understood to have caused her premature death in 1943.

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Although the same concerns are politically and philosophically pertinent for people crossing borders and seeking asylum in the wake of the so-called refugee crisis, drawing parallels between contexts in a study that seeks to illuminate current conflicts in crossing borders, citizenship and the way statutory and judicial processes manage who belong can seem insensitive. As Agnes Woolley remarks, however, considering that the ‘institutional mechanisms for dealing with displacement were part of the codification of human rights into international law in the postwar period’, this ‘historical parallel [remains] instructive’ (2016, 377). The way a current moment reckons with the enactments and violations of these declarations then make their own links to the postwar moment that birthed them. In his study on remembering the Holocaust in an era of decolonisation, Michael Rothberg argues for a ‘multidirectional memory’ (2009, 3) able to understand that looking at the past does not operate an economy of scarcity and competition. He notes instead that intersecting ‘historical memories illustrates the productive, intercultural dynamics’ (3) able to arise from a multidirectional view of the past. I employ multidirectional memory by remarking on diverse histories throughout this chapter. In addition to the Holocaust, these include: Indigenous perspectives, postcolonial thought and histories of nation building. This serves exactly to remark on their intersectional and intercultural dynamics as well as their contribution both to the current moment and to account for how current events are born by historical process that can destabilise what might presently be taken for granted. For example, reading post-Holocaust accounts of the loss of home alongside the Human Rights Declaration and the Refugee Convention challenges the givens of democracy and human dignity. The centrality of belonging as a question of politics, philosophy and, notably, rights within these writings contributes terminology to the effects and affects of losing home; a perspective readily neglected in the discussions a current moment is still in the process of having. Likewise, looking at these accounts alongside literary and theatre scholars’ work, who understand the narrative and performative stakes in the asylum process, brings back Ingold’s question posed in the introduction: ‘how ought we to live?’ As Omid Tofighian remarks in his translator’s note to Behrouz Boochani’s award-winning work No Friend But the Mountains: ‘after meeting Behrouz, I’ve come to realise how integral narratives are to living life well’ (Tofighian as quoted in Boochani 2018: 375). Although Boochani’s book

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documents the human rights violations of his experiences in the Australian offshore detention facility, Manus Prison, it is equally instructive for redressing the balance between ‘literary and legal’ (Woolley 2016, 378) storytelling. Belonging becomes not only a question about the political stakes of storytelling, but also a condition mediated by the structures of narrative.

2.1   Ontologies of Belonging ‘To be rooted’ Weil writes ‘is the most important and least recognised need of the human soul’ (2010, 43), thereby capturing complexity of belonging or ‘being rooted’ as something ever in equal measures necessary and overlooked. Weil reflects that being rooted manifests in fundamental needs of ‘the soul’, made visible in the world through ‘real, active and natural participation in the life of a community’ (43). Weil argues that this ‘is automatically brought about by place, conditions of birth, profession and social surroundings’ (43). It is relatively straightforward to conceive of belonging as a question of whether or not a person has rights and is able to participate in politics and community, even if Weil’s reflection of this being brought about by an automatic process perhaps reflects more an ideal to strive for than a status quo. But if, as Habib noted, asylum is the precursor for engaging with life, understanding belonging as a question that arises with being is more complicated: it then precedes the meaning made of belonging as a political and relational activity, rendering it at the risk of being an overlooked necessity. Martin Heidegger unfolds how dwelling is a question that arises with being, thereby making belonging an ontological concern. Remarking on being as a concept that is both fundamental and hollow, Heidegger develops ‘Dasein’ (‘there-being’ or ‘being there’) (2013, 21), indicating that being is also already a way of ‘being-in-the-world’ (33). These connections are further made by tracing the German etymology for ‘being’ in the word of ‘dwelling’: ‘[w]hat then does ich bin mean? The old word bauen, to which the bin belongs, answers: ich bin, du bist mean I dwell, you dwell’. Thereby, ‘the manner in which we humans are on the earth, is Buan, dwelling’ (1971: 45 emphasis in original). For Heidegger, the connection between being and dwelling is also united by the paradox that just like Dasein can reflect on the possibilities of being through understanding

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the possibilities of not being (2013, 33), it is possible to feel homeless even when being at home. This makes the familiar (heimlich—home) unfamiliar (unheimlich—unhomely) and consequently becomes a feeling of ‘not-­ being-­at-home’ (359). Dwelling is then what builds the bridge between ontological understandings of home and its outward manifestation: as dwelling also means to ‘cherish and protect’ (1971, 145), the environmental investment of dwelling, building (Buan) and caring for the earth is what we do with senses of the heimlich and unheimlich. To illustrate, Heidegger describes an idyllic and pastoral scene of a farmhouse located in the Black Forest (where he lived himself (Waggoner 2018, 146)). The location of the house has been chosen by its inhabitants to achieve optimum dwelling in the form of shelter, nature and access to farm the land. Although there is an indication of a reciprocal and ‘fourfold’ relationship between the earth, sky, divinities and human dwellers (Heidegger 1971, 148–149), I perceive in this essay an implicit indication that nature exists as a ‘[b]eing-present-at-hand’ (2013, 81) to human belonging. I read Heidegger in this study and beyond with reservations. Although a philosopher of home, his affiliation with National Socialism and signing of the Nazi oath in 1933 (Waggoner 2018, 46) demands critical scrutiny of his philosophy of home, challenged not least by reading him alongside those who were uprooted by Nazi persecution. His pastoral reflections on being and dwelling signify a Heimat way of being at home, a word that in a postwar setting implies ‘an Aryan sovereignty’ (Blunt and Dowling 2006, 160) of both place and feeling of home. This narrow definition of belonging excludes other ways of experiencing belonging and nonbelonging, present, for example, in Nomadic and Indigenous cultures, or in those crossing borders and seeking asylum. From an Australian perspective on home and dwelling, David Crouch (2004, 49) remarks that ‘there is the anxious question of dwelling comfortability […] in homes that are set in nature, and upon land, which was stolen before it was settled’. While I do not propose a direct applicability of the already-inhabited lands of Australia to Heidegger’s Black Forest, I do argue for its critical perspective: if being is about belonging, and belonging is about dwelling in the ecologies of nature and performing care for one’s surroundings, it is necessary to consider that colonial histories of dispossession and settling have rendered these enactments of belonging impossible for many, despite the fact that Indigenous peoples often have

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care for and dwelling in landscape as an intrinsic part of their cultures and ways of belonging.2 Massey offers a geographical analogy to Heidegger’s dwelling by noting on a ‘time-space compression’ (1994, 146) of globalisation: if human beings experience geographical space in time, then this process has been accelerated by globalisation. Massey argues that this rests on an understanding that space itself is geopolitical and represents ‘a western, colonisers’ view’ (146). Therefore: The sense of dislocation which some feel at the sight of a once well-known local street now lined with a succession of cultural imports—the pizzeria, the kebab house, the branch of the middle-eastern bank—must have been felt for centuries, though from a very different point of view, by colonized peoples all over the world as they watched the importation, maybe even used, the products of, first, European colonization. (146)

By turning the perspective, Massey brings into view how political experiences of place and, by extension, belonging manifest. The familiarity (heimlich), which is lost in the Western coloniser’s gaze, rendering the familiar unheimlich by way of space, mirrors the same process on the part of the colonised, living, as Crouch noted, in land that was ‘stolen’ from them and ‘settled’. In This Is Us, the group in Sjælsmark wrote a similar 2  The climate crisis raises home as an ecological urgency. Reading Heidegger in this perspective underscores how humans have profoundly not performed care for the very places supposed to home them. There is here an interesting connection to the dispossession of Indigenous land and climate debates: In 2016 members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released an article detailing that Indigenous perspectives have been under-represented in their reports, and portrayed them as ‘victims of the impacts of climate change’ (Ford et al. 2016, 350) rather than able to make vital contributions for countering the effects of climate change (2016, 350) through their knowledge of land. During the years this study was  conducted, the 2018 IPCC report, featured four articles remarking on Indigenous knowledge and the centrality this should take in finding solutions (IPCC 2018). In 2019, the CNN published a multiple choice climate quiz in eight questions, where quizzers can rank what is deemed most and least effective for climate change. In the fourth question titled ‘how we use our land’, ‘return land to indigenous people’ scored third place (Kann et al. 2019). Reece Jones provides a framework for understanding that the ‘uneven geography of climate change’ (Jones 2017, 146) means that those forced to leave their homes due to climate change often come from countries that were colonised and where settlers have ran resource extraction schemes. Nonetheless, Indigenous rights and approaches to land might equally  offer a more dialectic take on Heidegger’s connection between care, dwelling and belonging: in recognising that humans are not at the centre of an ecological chain, optimum dwelling looks perhaps more like caring for surroundings that, in turn, care for humans.

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perspective, where the views of a right-wing politician are mirrored in his personal story of heimlich and unheimlich: The Boss:  […] Where I grew up, midlands, countryside. When I was 10, migrants started moving in and they changed everything. People were so eager to be welcoming that we forgot who we were. (Scene 6) In his closing thoughts to ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, Heidegger makes the argument that the homelessness of human beings does not boil down to a practical issue, but rather that people are in a continual process of learning to dwell (1971, 159), and that ‘as soon as man gives thought to his homelessness, it is a misery no longer’ (159). While it may be constructive to consider belonging as a work in progress, it is a question of privilege and citizenship status to be able to treat home and belonging only as an existential issue. Many ‘homelessnesses’ remain practically and existentially unsolvable even when giving thought to little else. For one, Améry makes the salient conclusion that ‘there is no “new home”’ (1980, 48) after his experiences of being incarcerated in Auschwitz, tortured and made a refugee. ‘Home is the land of one’s childhood and youth’ (48), he continues, and whoever ‘has lost it remains lost himself’ (48). The impossibility of regaining home in both temporal and spatial senses shows equal existential consequences: loss of home is loss of self, and Améry therefore questions not only how a human being is meant to exist in the world after losing a home, but also how to understand what it means to be human. Reading the experiences of Améry, Weil and Arendt, alongside ontologies of belonging, underscores that it is difficult to traverse far into the philosophical question of belonging before encountering its material and political dimensions. Even so, Heidegger’s philosophical perspectives on dwelling can be rethought in the geopolitics of space and crossing borders; suggesting dwelling as an ongoing project then becomes an invitation to personal reflection and political imagination.

2.2   Belonging and Human Rights Since 1993, UNITED for Intercultural Action has documented migrant deaths in the Mediterranean as they try to enter ‘Fortress Europe’ (UNITED 2020). These ‘death[s] by policy’ (n.d.) suggest a correlation between Europe’s ‘initiatives to reduce immigration’ (n.d.) and the unsafe

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routes of ‘irregular transit’ (Cox 2017, 477). The deaths are recorded on a downloadable list (detailing name, gender, origin, cause of death and the source the information came from), which is regularly updated as UNITED receive data from the many organisations they collaborate with. Aiming for the visibility of the deaths and attention to the policies that create them, the list is available for exhibitions, protests and public interventions. Europe’s policy to reduce intake of migrants and asylum seekers has led to militarisation and externalisation of borders, deportation and detention centres. This means that rather ‘than refugees determining whether they need to flee and where they seek asylum, these decisions are increasingly being managed for them to their detriment’ (Pupavac 2006, 2). In Reece Jones’ (2017, 5) view, borders produce ‘the violence that surround [them]’, which ‘goes hand in hand with protecting the privileges that borders created’ (88), making migrants subject to the ‘inhumane treatment that the Human Rights Convention prohibits’ (UNITED n.d.). In the two fieldworks I conducted, people experienced violations of human rights; lack of liberties, arbitrary arrests, detention, deportation and being caught in the lengthy procedures of the Dublin Convention, which ‘requires asylum seekers to register in the country where they first enter the EU’ (n.d.). The Dublin rules often become a tool for deporting refugees from ‘wealthier northern countries back to poorer countries of entry’ (n.d.), making it seem more like a ‘lottery which undermines the confidence in asylum cases being processed in a correct and just way’ (Bendixen and Awwad 2020, 107). Many of the users in Trampoline House lived in surrounding deportation centres due to the Dublin rules and due to being stateless, the ‘legal anomaly’ (European Network on Statelessness n.d.), preventing people from accessing the very structures that grant rights. In House meetings and conversation they would share how they had employed various tactics for escaping the Dublin agreement such as burning their fingerprints and going underground. These measures indicate an inability to enact rights beyond the processes of nations and systems of asylum: as the following section unfolds, people seek asylum on the basis of their ‘from’ and the story of their home countries rather than the full scope of international and interlocking histories and geopolitics. Belonging thereby became a question of human rights, being human and the way the two inform on each other. As Habib remarked in the opening of this chapter, asylum is the legal category that foregrounds relational participation. Within the context of this study, having or not having rights were decisive factors for (non)belonging, which posed acute

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questions of who has access to rights and who can affect the policies that surround them. Unhomed by incidents often beyond their control and not yet re-homed, the experiences of the people within this fieldwork sojourn polemics of the tension between the need for being rights-bearing individuals with the experiences of the de-politicisation of seeking asylum. ‘The Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ and ‘The Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees’ draw their own historic parallels to a current moment. Written in the aftermath of the Second World War, the declaration was a response to the Atrocities of the War and a preventative measure ensuring they were not repeated. Rothberg’s multidirectional memory challenges the assumption of ‘the public sphere as a pregiven, limited space’ (2009, 5) and proposes it rather as ‘a malleable discursive space […] open to continual reconstruction’ (5). The declaration offers a moral and political framework for present revision of refugee and asylum policy. Discursively, the document then functions as a commitment to the dignity and worthiness of human beings by formulating rights as inalienable. But, as Norberto Bobbio notes ‘rights are not fundamental by their nature’ (1996, 6), but rather continue to be ‘modified [by] historical circumstances’ (6). By remaining adaptable and responsive to a changing world, the declaration has been amended and expanded on as people declared their rightlessness. For example, as Chap. 5 will elaborate on, in 1991 the UN published ‘Guidelines on the Protection of Refugee Women’, and as the following interlude notes, 1989 saw the ‘Convention on the Rights of the Child’. Published as an addendum to the declaration in 1951, the Refugee Convention expands on Article 14 of the declaration, which states that: ‘[e]veryone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution’ (United Nations 1948). The Refugee Convention opens on the oft-quoted definition of what constitutes as a refugee: A refugee, according to the Convention, is someone who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion. The Convention is both a status and rights-based instrument and is under- pinned by a number of fundamental principles, most notably non-discrimination, non-penalization and non-refoulement. Convention provisions, for example, are to be applied without discrimination as to race, religion or country of origin. (UNHCR 1951)

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In the writing about the declaration and convention, the UN contextualises the documents as the cornerstone in developing human rights law: the Refugee Convention, for example, is perceived to be the ‘centrepiece of international refugee protection today’ (UNHCR 1951). However, the so-called refugee crisis has renewed European focus on adhering to these declarations, which often plays out in governments’ opposing motivations for democratic commitment to human rights, and the making of policies that limit the influx of asylum seekers. The groups I worked with radically challenged the perception of ‘fundamental rights [as] final values’ (Bobbio 1996, 5). Here, rights presented a contested issue between being intrinsically given in principle, while people experienced the dehumanisation of state, asylum systems and border crossings. In her reading of Arendt’s understanding of statelessness, Anika Marschall notes that ‘when nation states are considered to be the institutional guarantor of inalienable human rights’ (2019, 13), they instead produce their own fundamental paradoxes ‘of refugees and rightlessness, because they necessarily create groups without citizenship, political agency’ (13 emphasis in original). The structures that might necessitate the seeking of asylum (well-founded fear of prosecution from a state, a system or a community) suggest at once an acknowledgement that inalienable rights are able to transcend socio-economic, geographical and political backgrounds, while underscoring that it is also structures of state that provide this protection. In her essay ‘We Refugees’, reflecting on the Jewish refugee experience during and after the Second World War, Arendt remarks on the impossibility and necessity of state-authored belonging, manifested in the loss of home: We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in the world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of feelings. (1996, 110)

Pairing each loss within an external consequence reflects the symbiosis between rights, politics and inner life: home is familiarity of daily life; occupation is being of use in the world and language is the unaffected communication with one’s community. Trusting oneself as understood and homed after becoming a refugee proves challenging exactly because the concrete loss of home corresponds to ontological internalities, prompting Arendt’s conclusion that in a rights-discursive perspective, it is ‘much easier to be accepted as a “great man” than as a human being’ (115).

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An ‘abstract yet clearly articulated ethical code’ (Marschall 2019, 13), human rights in both the declaration and the refugee convention then do not represent finite categories ‘describ[ing] the status quo’ (13), but rather an ‘ideal, and thus calls for action’ (13). The documents thereby become a work in progress and a stage-setting for enactments and encounter, a call for sustained revision. This revision becomes relevant when considering that the universality of human rights ‘are inflexible to local cultures because they are based on European conceptions of human nature’ (Nicholson 2005, 136), making them most relevant to ‘Western philosophical tradition’ (136). Building on the previous section’s intervention of Indigenous perspectives to Heidegger’s philosophy, in 2016, UN published the ‘Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples’. Here, the question of human rights reads as closely connected to enactments and accesses to land. Article 25 states that: Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain and strengthen their distinctive spiritual relationship with their traditionally owned or otherwise occupied and used lands, territories, waters and coastal seas and other resources and to uphold their responsibilities to future generations in this regard. (UNDRIP 2016, 10)

This challenges ‘Western philosophical tradition’ and shifts the view that rights should be thought of from a statutory and individual perspective, to instead assert that rights can be enacted through a ‘spiritual relationship’ with land. Considering the perspective of those seeking ‘this thing’, I read the convention and declaration also as documents of belonging that interact with ontologies of belonging. Although necessitating continued revision, not least of the emphasis on European and Western perspectives, asylum is also what makes belonging (and love and friendship) possible through statutory process that safeguards dignities. However, the definition of what a refugee is ‘according to the Convention’ (‘someone unable or unwilling to return’) also determines a way of seeking rights (though a story of ‘well-founded fear’) and of bearing rights. The declaration then becomes a codex against which to measure one’s life and movement that does not include the nuance of lived experience, motifs and affects of transit. In his call to start philosophy from the refugee, Agamben proposes that it is necessary to abandon the ‘fundamental concepts through which

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we have so far represented the subjects of the political’ (2008, 90) such as: ‘Man, the Citizen and its rights’ (90). Starting discursively lays the groundwork for ‘the task [of becoming] equal’ (90), and dismantling categories becomes the call to further political action and a stage setting for revision of who has rights. Interlude: A Citizen’s Proposal for Children’s Rights

During my fieldwork in Trampoline House and Sjælsmark, I assisted on the writing of a citizen’s proposal and the designing of a campaign aimed at bettering the conditions for the children living in Sjælsmark. In Denmark, a citizen’s proposal works as follows: any citizen is free to write a proposal if they can get ten people to co-­ sign. If the proposal collects 50,000 or more signatures from people with the right to vote, politicians have to treat it in government and consider making amendments to the law. In writing the proposal, we combined the daily realities of the children living in Sjælsmark with research from psychologist and humanitarian aid organisations, the work of journalists and the Articles in the UN and UNHRC conventions on human, child and refugee rights, remarking on all children’s right to safety, nationality, education, medical attention and food. The proposal targeted three key areas: temporary residency for the families if the police had been unable to deport them after 18 months (to avoid the limbo of statelessness and the Dublin rules). While waiting, the children and families should have the right to cook their own food and share meals as a family rather than during set mealtimes in a cafeteria, and the children should have access to school and education. While these seem like basic rights, Chap. 5 will unfold the conditions of Danish deportation centres. In May 2019, 50,000 signatures were gathered, and in November 2019, the Danish parliament treated the proposal. I attended these deliberations with families from Sjælsmark, activists from Trampoline House and others who had worked on the campaign. While the politicians remarked on the effects of the proposal due to the children in question, most parties stood their ground on their foreign policy, posing a complex dialectic between discursively perceiving the children as right-bearing, without granting them the basic rights (continued)

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(continued)

outlined in the proposal. Integration minister Mathias Tesfaye noted that bettering the conditions for the children to the point of them thriving would be against policy, because they are rejected asylum seekers. ‘These children’, he remarked, ‘are not unwell because of the law but in spite of it’. In August of 2020, the politicians concluded that the families should be moved to Avnstrup, where living quarters are better and allow the family to cook and eat together. Avnstrup is also a deportation centre located far away from the city and with poorer public transport links than Sjælsmark. Trampoline House is currently working with the Red Cross on activities and education of the children.

2.3  The Nation and Belonging: ‘To Be Rooted’ In a Ted Talk by photographer and writer Taiye Selasi, she problematised the question ‘where are you from?’ Living with multilocal origins and affinities herself, Selasi says that asking someone where they are from is ‘playing a power game [because] countries represent power’ (2014). Chapters 4 and 5 and the fieldwork reflections uncover moments of encounter where ‘where are you from?’ proves an unhoming question, for example, prompting Asma from the sistas to remark that when ‘people just out of nowhere’ ask her where she is from, it makes her ‘feel out of place’ and ‘shakes [her] comfortability of being here’ (Interview, 28th May 2018). In this section, Selasi helps frame the question as one with a political agenda by identifying the discursive risk of nations becoming locating factors for perceptions that preserve cultural, historical and hierarchical positions. ‘Where are you from?’ in refugee and asylum contexts necessitates consideration that: one, the countries asylum seekers come from have often been portrayed in Western politics, media and debates—meaning assumptions about people’s lives, cultures and journeys are readily available and imagistically produced; two, ‘where are you from?’ is the question of an asylum system. In a report assessing and detailing the Danish asylum system made by Refugees Welcome (2020), front person Michala Clante Bendixen contextualises that nationality can be the determining factor for granting or rejecting asylum claims. Whether people obtain asylum and which nationalities are given asylum differ widely depending on

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the European country (Bendixen and Awwad 2020, 74–81). Lastly, in the context of a material sense of home, ‘from’ prompts deliberation that when seeking asylum, home can not only quite literally cease to exist, but entire neighbourhoods can be rendered unrecognisable. In Violent Borders, Reece Jones reads the militarisation of border crossings and current geopolitics of exclusion ‘are part of a long-term effort to control the movement of the poor’ (2017, 11). Viewed in the context of the formation of nations, colonial land-grabbing and the cultivation and resource extraction schemes of territories outside the borders of the colonising nations, Jones argues that ‘the idea that the state controls territory, defined as a bounded space of exclusive administration [is] relatively new’ (78). In Europe, the invention of the nation states dates back to the Peace of Westphalia, where the document that would end the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) was signed. Here ‘old systems of overlapping territory’ (103) were replaced with sovereign states claiming ‘absolute authority over all the land, resources, and people in a territory based on borders drawn on a map’ (103). According to Jones, this gave rise to the development of citizenship as ‘a new category of belonging’ (79) that was ‘place-­ based’ (80), as states ‘divided and organised people into insiders who belonged and outsiders who did not’ (79). Producing identity documents and passports then made people ‘legible to the state [through] visible characteristics like race’ (79). Although the product of a historical process, Article 15 of the Human Rights Declaration states that ‘[e]veryone has the right to a nationality’ (United Nations 1948), and nobody ‘shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality’ (1948). In Weil’s philosophy, the ‘duty which falls to the State is to ensure that the people are provided with a country to which they really feel they belong’ (2010, 166). How a nation enacts its duty to provide its people with a place they feel like they belong is a call to political imagination, but equally highlights inherent conflicts in the enactments of a state’s ‘duty’ as the guarantor for belonging through the channel of providing a nationality. In the context of this study, nationality and citizenship emerge rather as a ‘two-sided concept, with the state guaranteeing rights for some while excluding many others from the right to have rights’ (Jones 2017, 79). In asylum cases, many people enter countries with fake passports, as passports, identity documents and efficient civil registry are not a given in all parts of the world (Bendixen and Awwad 2020, 29). This means that ‘people are unable to produce any kind of personal identification when

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asking for asylum’ (30) and if such documents are produced, they are ‘difficult to verify as they are easy to forge’ (30). Problematically, asylum often depends exactly on the verifiability of identity and well-founded fear, and yet ‘it is sadly inevitable that most asylum cases contain elements of lies’ (29) when people necessarily travel with false documents and cross borders illegally. Tying the link between nation and narrative, Homi Bhabha’s seminal collection of essays Nation and Narration documents how postcolonial thinkers have long been attuned to the nation as a discursive and narrative project, relying not least on how cultural myths are exported, but also on the internal meaningmaking of belonging as people to a nation. Novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reflects more directly on the colonial implications of nations and storytelling in her Ted Talk entitled ‘The Danger of a Single Story’ (2009). Here she notes how storied power is ‘the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person’. Echoing discourses around the so-called refugee crisis, Adichie continues: ‘[s]tart the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story’ (2009). What Adichie and Bhabha centre is the fact that although a nation might also be an imagined and storied project around a political territory, narratives also have long-lasting, legal, legislative and lived implications for people who are constructed as outsiders. At the same time as being legally complex categories, cultural productions have also been compelled by the metaphorical and imagistic potential of exilic experiences and the ability of such positions to contain and ‘generalise a human condition [that equates migrant experience] with the interior nomadism of any person’ (Cox 2014, 77). For example, Rushdie understands globalisation and migration manifest in disjunctions between ‘the fantasy of Home and the fantasy of Away, the dream of roots and the mirage of the journey’ (1992, 55). Jackson notes that ‘the dispirited comments of the migrant worker, the refugee, the street kid, the vagrant, are metaphors for something we all feel’ (1995, 2). Proposing an imagistic overlap between difference in lived experience, Jackson continues to remark on the spatial enactments of such stories: ‘[t]he quarter dropped into the panhandler’s Styrofoam cup on a freezing January afternoon betokens our own mood of estrangement, even when we are well-housed and well-heeled’ (2). As narrative material, the figures Jackson presents are compelling. They tell stories and encourage the reader’s interpretations, but even in Jackson’s storied engagement with his characters, it is clear

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they hold little more than metaphoric ground for those who are well-­ housed and well-heeled. The tokenistic donation on a cold January morning becomes a frame for understanding something on the part of the person giving, something ‘we all feel’. The implications of using homelessness as epistemic and imaginative categories become particularly apparent in ‘images of rootedness’ (Waetjen 1999, 654). Weil remarks on the contradictions of using rootedness as a demarcation of home, as conquest of territory has historically meant ‘deportation on a massive scale [and a] brutal suppression of all local traditions’ (2010, 44). A perpetual process then, on both micro and macro levels, Weil contends that ‘[w]hoever is uprooted himself uproots others’ (44), making visible the destructive symbiosis of the creation of states and exiles: the apparatus that is supposed to safeguard belonging by rooting people and providing nationality as a human right is formed through the process of uprooting populations through dispossession or conquest. This process creates diasporas, exile, migration, asylum seekers; who must journey somewhere else to receive protection and rights, uprooting others in the process as they invest in a new place. In Liisa Malkki’s work, she notes that in numerous postwar studies the ‘pathologisation of uprootedness’ (1992, 32) has taken many different forms, ‘among them political, medical and moral’ (32). In these studies, loss of homeland or, more specifically, ‘loss of bodily connection to their homeland’ (32) is understood to also be a loss of moral bearings (32), doubting refugee’s ability to become ‘honest citizens’ (32). Malkki’s work shows exactly oscillating between imagining refugees as ‘political heroes [or] traumatised victims [has] troubling implications for refugee rights’ (Pupavac 2006, 12). Although it is also in the loss of homeland that refugees and asylum seekers become political figures, Pupavac remarks on the difficulties for refugees to have ‘rights as depoliticised subjects’ (2), raising questions as to how to imagine a political figure without political agency. Indeed, ‘if a traumatized individual is unable to reintegrate into political community’(Cox 2012, 122), then the traumatisation ‘offers sympathy and pity in return for the surrender of any political voice’ (Edkins 2003, 19). Cox suggests instead that it is only in the disentanglement of ‘geographical movement [and] humanist metaphor’ (2014, 77) where the ‘psycho-affective pull and the aesthetic pleasures that come from their entanglement’ (77) can be explored. She thereby provides at once the critical perspective necessary for examining how refugees are placed in aesthetic space, as well as a call to develop new views on what kinds of aesthetics can represent migratory experience.

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Malkki continues her reading of rootedness in remarking how Western perceptions often sink Indigenous ‘“peoples” and “cultures” into “national soils”’ (1992, 31). Producing paradoxical connections, Indigenous peoples are perceived to be rooted through their connection to their land, yet uprooted by colonial dispossession, bringing into view that conceptual and cultural rooting often happens at the cost of political influence or territorial agency. Cox makes the connection between Indigenous and refugee populations from an Australian perspective: in the autumn of 2009, Australia’s Prime Minister Kevin Rudd refused entry to a boat carrying 255 Sri Lankan Tamils, but the refugees refused to embark for 6 months until they had been granted passage. In a demonstration, Activist Robin Thorpe stated: ‘we want to make it clear that the Aboriginal people, the true sovereigns of this land, are offering them [the refugees] a passport to enter into our territorial waters, and our land […] we’re the colonised refugees’ (Cox 2013, 139). This situation brings questions to what Cox calls ‘contested ontologies of sovereignty’ (140). Although Cox does not define her use of ontology, I read it as reflective of being and land: sovereignty and ontology then reflect the conflict between being primary custodians of a land, its dispossession and the following questions of who is able to give welcome and wield judicial and statutory power over asylum and entry. By enacting a welcome the nexus of power and process is challenged and ‘indigenous authority and […] alternative sovereignty’ (141) are foregrounded. I draw on Cox and Indigenous reflections in this chapter and wider study not to conflate issues, but rather to argue for their connectedness and contribution to challenge the givens of national and statutory process. The European history outlined within this chapter has brought forward how state authorities both grant and take away the practical and political frameworks that govern ontological belonging. The historical and philosophical survey of rights coupled with Arendt and Améry’s accounts of statelessness and refugeedom provide a framework for the people within this study who are currently navigating asylum systems or live as refugees. Drawing in questions of sovereign ontologies and Indigenous perspectives opens up colonially aware approaches to practices of state and nationality contra a kind of dwelling and being at home that is grounded in commitments to place. As Deleuze and Guattari have noted, ‘history is always written from the sedentary point of view’ (1987, 23). Processes of granting asylum and giving rights might similarly be read as ‘written’ or enacted by locales of power from within Western institutions. I use the

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perspectives outlined in this chapter and section to ask whether there might be ways to imagine statutory rights-giving procedures that neither lean against ideas of nationalistic rootedness nor keep people in a cul-desac of case-processing and bureaucracy. Perhaps it is possible to imagine through Thorpe’s enactment of sovereignty and welcome, making contingent spaces of belonging between current and colonised refugees. Echoing the call for statutory reimagination reflects a similar call, as the introduction noted, to reimagine belonging—a key concern of this study. Contributing to this, I return to Selasi’s talk opening this section. She suggests that an alternative to ‘where are you from?’ could be ‘where are you a local?’ This question instead opens up for multilocational and relational stories and globalised affiliations. Yuval-Davis (1999, 119) argues similarly that these perceptions might come from understanding citizenship itself as a ‘multi-layered construct’, where each intersecting layer and identity is able to reflect on a historical and political context, making fewer equations between people and place. It is perhaps here it becomes possible not only to ‘glimpse a future beyond the nation-state and its destructive exclusion of noncitizens’ (Demos 2013, 9), but also to envision a kind of reciprocity where the ‘citizen is able to recognize the refugee that he or she is’ (Agamben 2008, 95). Interlude: Azad Says It’s as Painful as Being Born Again

Azad will figure frequently in the fieldwork reflection on making theatre in Sjælsmark. Here he lends illustrative and evocative language to the experience of being between home and belonging, producing his own metaphorai most suited to capture his experience with integration and belonging. The following is an excerpt from an interview. Azad: Yeah. It’s really hard, you know. When you first come to Denmark, it is everything new. Language, culture, people […] It is like, actually, it is like to be born again. If you want to change yourself. The process happen is really painful, because there is nobody who can say to you ‘do this like this, do that like that’, and it is just yourself, you seeing, you hearing, your touching. These sense help you to find a way. In the start… I can say this example: It is really like the mother, which when she wants (continued)

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(continued)

to born a child it’s really painful, and the child never know about the pain, and he just enjoy be born and be relieved and make another life. But you are in the same way you are. You are the boy you are also in the mother. You feel the pain to change, to be new-born and other way also you feel the joy. Because when you feel that’s so much pain you really enjoy to be born, if you are really want change yourself to make another life and see always with another perspective, with another glasses, you know? So if you want really change, you must be broken, broken, broken, broken until okay you come to the way you have now, and at that point you can start okay to build new ideas, build new life, build new ways to watch the world, you know? So it is really… in the start you destroy your soul and the way which you are really not sure you can build it up again. Because it is… how can I say… it is like gambling. I consider Azad’s rendering of an integration and asylum process as being broken and rebuilt, born again feeling both the pain of the child and the mother, and repurposing identity as a gamble, to be some of the most succinct and illusively beautiful language I have heard during my research journey.

2.4  Narratology and Belonging: ‘Not Just Be-ing, But Long-ing’ Although narratology is a field mostly associated with the theoretical working of texts, combining narratology and theatre can provide key analytical tools for addressing the micro and macro structures that make meaning in and around people. For example, thinking Jeffer’s bureaucratic performance together with Woolley’s work on asylum and literature foregrounds how a literary and dramatic lens can identify and dismantle the textual and embodied ‘scripts’ by which people seek asylum, as well as the underlying ontological conditions between belonging, self and story. As Laura Bieger and Nicole Maruo-Schröder note, narratology increasingly extends to the realm of social, political and relational arenas, where

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‘social scientists have engaged notions of narrative to argue that identities and lives are “storied”’ (2016, 5). But Bieger also views narratology and belonging as fundamentally invested in each other, linked, she argues, through the ‘yearning at work in and through belonging—“not just being, but longing”’ (2015, 17). This longing manifests in ‘the desire for a place in the world’ (17) and narrative as the ‘mediating structure’ (17) between self, belonging and world. Longing and belonging seek outwards in an effort to make sense of the being and its place in the world, negotiated through the sense-making structures of narrative. In Arendt’s thinking on Natality, human beings are birthed ‘into an already existing web’ (1998, 184) of stories, and capable of producing something anew because they are capable of action. Action is therefore what makes people act in the world, but it is also what makes them political selves and social beings, as ‘[a]ll human activities are conditioned by the fact that men live together’ (22). In Arendt’s thinking, Natality is then also Plurality when people are part not only of each other’s unfolding stories, but also in the making and unmaking of political worlds. In the Translator’s Introduction to Adriana Cavarero’s Relating Narratives, Paul A. Kottman reads Arendt and Cavarero together through the shared concern of the narratable self, which poses a philosophical and political shortcoming because Western politics has responded ‘to universals, rather than to unique experience and interaction’ (2000, ix). For both thinkers, narration offers an alternative way of uncovering human interaction and ‘unique existence’ (ix). Cavarero’s reason, much like Arendt, is that the beginning of politics is how ‘human beings live together and are constitutively exposed to each other through the bodily senses’ (ix), which means that ‘each of us is narratable by the other’ (ix). Echoing Arendt’s Plurality, Cavarero proposes that narration is political ‘because it is relational’ (ix), and for the ‘narratable self’ (ix) there is always ‘a necessary other’ (ix). This necessary other is ‘above all another person, an existent, a unique being’ (ix), who simultaneously contains a desire (or a longing, like belonging), for ‘having their story told [and for] hearing one’s life story recounted by another’ (1), thereby showing the political possibilities in the ‘task of interpretation’ (Bieger 2015, 22) and how ‘narrative hospitality’ (Ricoeur 1996, 15) is a starting point for ‘mutual revision’ (15). Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay ‘The Storyteller’ echoes Arendt and Cavarero’s belief in the interpersonal and political project of narration. Benjamin remarks on the rupture in public discourse following the Second World War, resulting in ‘the securest among our possessions [being lost,

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namely] the ability to exchange experiences’ (1968, 362). In Benjamin’s view, storytelling emerges as a way to be existentially and communally present to one another, formulated through a need to be told stories both of home and away: to understand the world, two kinds of storytellers are then necessary: ‘the lore of faraway places [that] a much travelled man brings home’ and ‘the lore of the past [which] reveals itself to natives of a place’ (363). Intersecting into this book’s concern with the so-called refugee crisis, Benjamin lends productive views that the architecture of storytelling and being present to each other’s experience relies on understanding both stories of travel and stories of staying. Much like Benjamin identifies a rupture in the possibilities of storytelling in a postwar moment, Cox and Woolley remark on migration and migrant spatiality as a challenge to literary and dramatic forms. For Woolley, ‘we do not yet possess the literary forms that are able to give expression to the experiences of global migrants’ (2019, 250), for example, through the fact that stories of displacement problematise the novel’s frequent emphasis on having ‘a sense of place’ (252). Nonetheless, literary technologies are not only able to untangle the ‘legal and literary plotlines’ (2016, 378) of asylum seeking, but able to identify how ‘legal perceptions of human personhood developed in human rights discourses [have] been reflected in, but also produced by, literary fiction’ (377). Woolley surveys the Bildungsroman as one such literary form exploring and producing the morals and responsibilities of modern personhood, but derives that the perspectives of ‘those seeking incorporation in a sovereign state other than their country of origin’ (378) have been both neglected and excluded. Woolley goes on to ‘read’ the asylum interview with the tools of literary analysis, noting how an asylum seeker must render themselves narratable to state agents, who interpret their story against a contradictory codex of rights and policies. Although, as we have seen, it is exactly the perceived veracity of this story which makes or breaks an asylum case, it is reshaped and re-narrated as it passes through the system, which means it can be ‘co-­ opted in ways that deprive the claimant of control over its narrative permutations and fixes their story to a particular version of the truth’ (381). Tofighian’s remark in translating Boochani’s book—that to live well is to story well—begs the question then of how literary storytelling might pose a challenge to the legal narratives. Much like Woolley does in her work, Boochani concludes that ‘the realities of this place [Manus Prison] can be better exposed through the language of art and literature’ (2018, 360). Boochani’s book not only documents human rights violations, but also

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simultaneously questions the whole complex of political, narrative and literary power. He shows how the prisoners are systematically excluded from affecting the political and conceptual stories told about them in media, and disbarred spatially from the communities that would listen to them and help them tell a different story. Within both fieldworks of this study, the groups identified this dichotomy as a problem also of belonging: not being able to recognise themselves within the stories told about them, nor having the power to change them. Boochani’s book thereby becomes not only about questioning the push and pull between narrative and political agency, but also a questioning of what different artistic languages open up. Although it is unclear what kind of ‘living well’ Tofighian refers to, I read that inserting creative language into hyper-politicised spaces can open up possibilities of making narrative and poetic choices about one’s situation, not least representationally. Similar, perhaps, to how Azad chose to tell his experience of asylum in a poetic language of birth and birthing. Thinking about narrative in a rights-based perspective, ‘living well’ arguably applies to making visible that the political and systemic injustice has human recipients. Furthermore, Boochani’s thoughts lend concrete and political realities to envisioning the ‘necessary other’ in narrative interpersonality of the mutual revision inherent in interpretive practices. In Theatre & Migration, Cox brings migrant spatiality into a theatrical frame. Reading Michel de Certeau’s ordering principles of the city to investigate ‘migrant practices in city spaces’ (Cox 2014, 55). De Certeau conceptualises ‘place as physical environment and space as human practices’ (de Certeau 1984, 3), which means that space is a practiced place (117). De Certeau traces the storied aspects of space in the concrete, for example, in the fact that the Athens vehicle for ‘mass transportation’ (115) is called a metaphor: ‘metaphorai’ (115 emphasis in original). This mode of transportation utilises the inherent movability of a metaphor, which relies on carrying meaning from one field of association to another (Cuddon 1999, 507). Following metaphorai, Cox’s reflection brings into view that the carrying of embodied meaning from one field of association to another presents disruption to space because migrants are ‘produced by movements through space’ (3). Thereby migrant trajectories (forced or otherwise) not only ground belonging as a question of narrative spatiality, but also make different demands of both space and story. Thinking literary and theatre scholarship together opens up the perspectives that the telling of asylum stories is pre-scripted both in narration and in performance and carried out in an often preconditioned discursive

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space. Where narratology then sharpens the focus on the fact that stories can both enact and challenge power, echoed stories’ ability to both constitute and to question belonging, performance studies provide a lens on what performs beyond a stage. It is in the awareness of ‘how narratives are constructed’ (Nicholson 2005, 63), and how narratives construct identities and belonging that ‘they might be deconstructed or challenged’ (64). This implies the kind of dialogical process of ‘mutual revision’ that can reconstruct the narrative, interpersonal and political dimensions of migratory experiences. But it equally foregrounds the following chapter’s exploration in how citizens and noncitizens might be mutually implicated and contributing narrators to asylum stories from the scripted space of the interview, the images circulated in media and politics, to the interpersonal space of exchanging experiences with a ‘necessary other’.

2.5   Compromised Belongings In Jeffer’s study, she quotes Joy, a research participant, stating that an ‘[a]sylum seeker is not a person it’s the situation which makes you become one’ (2012, 38). In an interview with the group in Sjælsmark, Rohan (who features in following chapters and fieldwork reflection) noted that ‘every person from the asylum system has a different personality, and the government they don’t see that, they think that everyone has the same thing, and they see that everyone wants the same thing’ (Interview, 17th December 2018). Both Joy and Rohan remark on the asylum system reducing the identities of its applicants for the purposes of readability. Jeffers identifies this as a ‘central paradox of refugee identity’ (2012, 37), namely that ‘refugees’ bureaucratic performances for the state force them to work hard to create an identity for which they have no desire but which they passionately desire at the same time’ (38). Reflecting on Habib’s thoughts that ‘thing thing, asylum’ is the precursor for living, this section looks at the compromises of belonging implicitly demanded and expected when seeking asylum and when being a refugee. Compromised belonging attempts to understand the effects that equating the category of seeking asylum with the identity of ‘asylum seeker’ can have on an individual’s sense of self and belonging. Building on the previous section’s reflections that nations are often ideologically, epistemologically and politically constructed, not least through the antagonistic creation of ‘other’, compromised belonging is also a way to approach what it means to be understood as an outsider. The term is enveloped within

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this chapter due to its complicity with ontologies of belonging and the statutory processes of human rights and rootedness/uprootedness, and the considerable narrative investment in this. Although it was developed prior to the practice, the experiences of those I did fieldwork with reinforced its relevance and contributed to its development. This section should therefore be read as a background for Chap. 2’s dramaturgical ethics, where these reflections gain a relational and experienced dimension. Compromised belonging links to Catrin Evan’s term ‘invisible labour’ (2020), identifying the work refugees and asylum seekers have to do everyday, behind the scenes, to fit in, to pass, to be accepted. Performing invisible labour is understood as the ‘unspoken debt that those within the asylum system endure and pay off in order to access the most basic and minimal levels of dignified living’ (250). This invisible labour made visible lends perspective to the acts of self-explanation and detailing of occurrences of inequality and oppression expected of asylum seekers and refugees as they translate their experiences in statutory, interpersonal, cultural and political contexts. Meerzon’s work goes similarly into the demands of identity when switching places, but remarks specifically on the exilic artist and the way they are able to perform and negotiate several different socio-political spheres at once. Here ‘banishment and displacement not only changes one’s social and political status, but also challenges an émigré’s perception of self’ (2012, 14). Switching codes between language, behaviours and culture is ‘the quotidian practice of the exilic experience’ (14), turning into a ‘performative site of negotiation’ (14) between senses of self and being perceived by a new culture. Building on the introduction’s argument that a performative lens can shed light on the asylum process, Meerzon’s perspective lends itself to understand the compromised belonging of asylum and refugee processes by being able to question what anchors identity in processes of translation and geographical relocation, which arenas constitute as a stage and what kind of performances these stages engender. I argue that if belonging is an ontological condition, performance is made necessary within exilic contexts exactly because one’s legal category is equated with one’s identity through an external, systemic and codified process that necessitates specific navigation. Able to explicate this inner and outer work required of a refugee or asylum seeker, exilic performance makes visible presenting oneself to statutory and judicial authorities and the corresponding inner process necessary to continually adapt to

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shifting conditions of navigating both an asylum system and life as a refugee. These labours and compromises can be read against Article 34 of the Refugee Convention, detailing that the ‘[c]ontracting States shall as far as possible facilitate the assimilation and naturalization of refugees. They shall in particular make every effort to expedite naturalization proceedings’ (UNHCR 1951). Albeit an addendum to the declaration of human rights, the call to naturalisation is still perceived within a rights-discursive perspective. Where human rights are understood as something given by virtue of being human, Article 34 instead speaks in a tone of responsibility, where facilitating the processes of naturalisation and assimilation might befall the state, but is ultimately carried out by the refugee. Naturalisation and assimilation can be understood not only as a call to blend in, but doing so to such a degree that origins (and by extension, cultural and historical past) are rendered undetectable. This process requires compromises of: learning a new language, navigating cultural differences, practicing the socio-political reading of everyday situations and an embodied presence and alertness in many situations. It also often means being held accountable for stereotypes by confirming or challenging them, perhaps on a daily basis, perhaps simply by being present in a situation or space. Then there is the consideration of racist or anti-immigration acts and discourses and their effects of feelings of belonging and the daily labour of being away from family, friends and community, many of whom might live in precarious and dangerous countries and situations. These compromises might be understood as a supplement to Weil’s perspective of the necessary violence of an uprooted person, investing in a new country through the obligatory imperative to both remember and forget a homeland. Arendt notes that the possibilities in producing new identity in exilic experiences are as ‘infinite as […] creation [but] the recovering of a new personality is as difficult—and as hopeless—as a new creation of the world’ (1996, 117–118). Elucidating what is at stake in performativities of seeking asylum and being a refugee, this reinvention is so multifaceted and all encompassing that it can become hopeless: it is a process that concurrently seeks to create anew the self and the world while re-­orientating one’s place in it. Arendt’s reflections can be read as a dialectic creation of identity where the possibilities presented (or not presented) by the world orientate the individual’s reinvention of self. In an exilic perspective, Meerzon describes this process as the ‘narrative of a newly acquired identity, a story of translation and adaptation, and an

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account of integration and adjustment’ (2012, 12). This translation grows ‘into the everyday practice of theatricality of self, a meta-theatrical experience when the actor and the spectator become one, the exilic persona’ (12). Where Meerzon hints more at an optimistic, albeit laborious, process of trial-and-error, Améry noted above that switching codes when one is at home contra being in exile is the difference between spontaneity and rehearsal. For Arendt, state-authored processes of naturalisation and experiences of being a refugee become a question of playing roles: the ‘less we are free to decide who we are or to live as we like, the more we try to put up a front, to hide the facts and to play roles [of] trying to be […] prospective citizens’ (1998, 115). These labours and compromises then become about performing self, or about performing the kind of self (the prospective citizen) that could belong to current circumstances and surroundings. During his journey of fleeing and being in hiding, Améry remarks on performing different nationalities to survive: ‘whether we [his fellow Jewish refugees] liked it or not, towards the Belgians we had to act as though we were Germans or Austrians’ (1980, 51). Presenting an exilic double bind, he continues that ‘[w]e had to mime what we were, but hadn’t the right to be. What a foolish, sham undertaking!’ (51) Améry remarks on losing his rights as a Swiss citizen on account of being Jewish, but his perspectives have a current relevance for those whose situations warrant asylum and human rights, but who end up shouldering sham undertakings instead. This is shown, for example, in Chap. 4’s exploration of ‘person = country’ where the equation between people and their nationality engenders playing of roles, putting up fronts and even doing the emotional labour of challenging citizen’s perceptions of cultural stereotypes. As Améry, Arendt, Habib, Rohan, Joy and others have noted within this chapter alone, the political power and performative choice are never with the exiled in such situations: the work of the prospective citizen is already expected, the roles prescribed, the curtains drawn and the scripts given. It is currently a necessary categorical step when seeking asylum that an individual is identified and processed in terms of the action they have taken towards needing protection, human rights and safety. In coming chapters, the people this study is made with and about will state similar frustrations to Arendt and Améry that being an asylum seeker is an identity that speaks in the world before to anything else coming to expression. For now, this interview with the sistas presents some of the compromises of belonging they experienced:

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Mawaddah:  […] imagine if you go somewhere and it feels like home, and you finally feel like you belong somewhere, but you’re not very—you don’t feel very welcome. Helene: Do you feel that in Glasgow? Mawaddah:  Umm no, that’s not what I meant. I’m talking about the whole situation of having to claim asylum. The fear of being sent back, Home Office, all of that. Fatma: Yeah for the moment you feel like – Shobhita: Glasgow and Home Office are two different things – Fatma: For one weeks or two weeks you feel like at home, but when they, they – Shobhita: Do something stupid or send a stupid letter. Fatma: When the letter starts coming that you have to go here, you have to go here, you have to go to the Home Office. Shobhita: They like to use that word ‘detention’ in every letter, I’ve seen that sometimes for no reason, just throw it around. […] Mawaddah: But Glasgow feels like home. (21st June 2019) Navigating between the places that feel like home and the places that do not indicates the daily labour and compromises of being in the process of seeking asylum. Here, Glasgow is a space of belonging, while the Home Office unhomes when they ‘send a stupid letter’, propelling more emotional and navigational work of belonging and managing one’s fear and situation. As Fatma says, the asylum system dictates both movement and action (‘you have to go here, you have to go here’) and produce fear by, for example, using the word ‘detention’ (‘for no reason’) in every letter. Thereby, compromised belonging aims to reflect both the practical, political and personal work when ‘Glasgow and the Home Office are two different things’. Using Habib’s thoughts on asylum as a refrain through this chapter foregrounds the fieldwork of this study by developing the philosophical, narratological and judicial backdrop for the situations the people were in. Habib’s comment further highlights how asylum and home are the precursors for wider engagement with the world and belonging in it, thereby contributing not only to this study’s understandings around the compromised belonging, but also a contextualisation for the way the groups reworked their situations and understandings of home when writing plays, reflecting how ‘narrative accounts are embedded within social action’

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(Bieger 2015, 21). For now, I leave this chapter’s conclusion to a conversation between two politicians in This Is Us, as they uncover the binary positions within nationalism and its effect on story and worldly space: The Boss:

[…] I certainly did not come to be personally attacked. I am a practical man. I am here to solve the problems we have in front of us – Opposition:  People, not problems. These laws are how you break the world in two, Prime Minister, Us and Not Us. (This Is Us, Scene 3)

References Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. 2009. The Danger of a Single Story. TEDGlobal. https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_ single_story/transcript?language=en. Adorno, Theodor. 2006. Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life. Ed. and Trans. E. F. N. Jephcott. New York: Verso. Agamben, Giorgio. 2008. Beyond Human Rights. Open 15: 90–95. Améry, Jean. 1980. At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1996. We Refugees. In Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile, ed. Marc Robinson, 110–119. Boston and London: Faber and Faber. ———. 1998. The Human Condition. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press. Bendixen, Michala Clante, and Nadia Awwad. 2020. Well-Founded Fear— Credibility and Risk Assessment in Danish Asylum Cases. Copenhagen. https://refugeeswelcome.dk/media/1207/well-­founded-­fear_web.pdf. Benjamin, Walter. 1968. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New  York: Schocken Books. Bieger, Laura. 2015. No Place Like Home; Or, Dwelling in Narrative. New Literary History 46 (1): 19–39. Bieger, Laura, and Nichole Maruo-Schröder. 2016. ‘Space, Place and Narrative’: A Short Introduction. Zeitschrift Für Anglistik Und Amerikanistik 64 (1). Blunt, Alison, and Robin Dowling. 2006. Home. London, New York: Routledge. Bobbio, Norberto. 1996. The Age of Rights. Cambridge: Polity Press. Boochani, Behrouz. 2018. No Friend But the Mountains. Sydney: Picador. Cavarero, Adriana. 2000. Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood. New York: Routledge.

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Cox, Emma. 2012. Victimhood, Hope and the Refugee Narrative: Affective Dialectics in Magnet Theatre’s Every Year, Every Day, I Am Walking. Theatre Research International 37 (2): 118–133. https://doi.org/10.1017/ S030788331200003X. ———. 2013. Sovereign Ontologies in Australia and Aotearoa-New Zealand: Indigenous Responses to Asylum Seekers, Refugees and Overstayers. In Knowing Differently: The Challenge of the Indigenous, ed. G.N. Devy, V. Davis Geoffrey, and K.K.  Chakravarty, 139–157. Taylor & Francis. http://www. routledge.com/books/details/9780415710565/. ———. 2014. Theatre & Migration. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2017. Processional Aesthetics and Irregular Transit: Envisioning Refugees in Europe. Theatre Journal 64 (4): 477–496. Crouch, David. 2004. Writing of Australian Dwelling: Animate Houses and Anxious Ground. Journal of Australian Studies 22: 43–52. Cuddon, J.A. 1999. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. London: Penguin Books. de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Ed. and Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Demos, T.J. 2013. The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis. Durham & London: Duke University Press. Edkins, Jenny. 2003. Trauma and The Memory of Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. European Network on Statelessness. n.d. About Us. Accessed July 29, 2020. https://www.statelessness.eu. Evans, Catrin. 2020. The Arts of Integration: Scottish Policies of Refugee Integration and the Role of the Creative and Performing Arts. University of Glasgow. Ford, James D., Laura Cameron, Jennifer Rubis, Michelle Maillet, Douglas Nakashima, Ashlee Cunsolo Willox, and Tristan Pearce. 2016. Including Indigenous Knowledge and Experience in IPCC Assessment Reports. Nature Climate Change 6 (4): 349–353. https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2954. Heidegger, Martin. 1971. Building Dwelling Thinking. In Poetry, Language, Thought, ed. Albert Hofstadter, 143–159. New York: Harper Collins. ———. 2013. Being and Time. Ed. and Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. London: Blackwell. IPCC. 2018. Summary for Policymakers. Ed. V.  Masson-Delmotte, P.  Zhai, H.-O.  Pörtner, D.  Roberts, J.  Skea, P.R.  Shukla, A.  Pirani, et  al. Global Warming of 1.5°C. An IPCC Special Report on the Impacts of Global Warming of 1.5°C Above Pre-Industrial Levels and Related Global Greenhouse Gas Emission Pathways, in the Context of Strengthening the Global Response to the Threat of Climate Change.

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Jackson, Michael. 1995. At Home in the World. Durham & London: Duke University Press. Jeffers, Alison. 2012. Refugees, Theatre and Crisis: Performing Global Identities. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Jones, Reece. 2017. Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move. New York: Verso Books. Kann, Drew, Will Houp, Judson Jones, and Sean O’Key. 2019. The Most Effective Ways to Curb Climate Change Might Surprise You. CNN. https://edition. cnn.com/interactive/2019/04/specials/climate-­change-­solutions-­quiz/?fbcl id=IwAR2_3vjt5QsZp4pZ63q0b3h7XJOSmIIzeEhUzcg_Fgz1-­W ffQFf Y7njlv18. Malkki, Liisa. 1992. National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity Among Scholars and Refugees. Cultural Anthropology 7 (1): 24–44. Marschall, Anika. 2019. Performing Human Rights Artistic Interventions into European Asylum. University of Glasgow. Massey, Doreen. 1994. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Meerzon, Yana. 2012. Performing Exile, Performing Self. Performing Exile, Performing Self. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230371910. Nicholson, Helen. 2005. Applied Drama: The Gift of Theatre. London: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1353/tt.2006.0022. Pupavac, Vanessa. 2006. Refugees in the ‘Sick Role’: Stereotyping Refugees and Eroding Refugee Rights. The UNHCR Policy Development and Evaluation Service New Issues (Research Paper No. 128): 1–24. Ricoeur, Paul. 1996. Reflections on a New Ethos for Europe. In Paul Ricoeur: The Hermeneutics of Action, ed. Richard Kearney, 3–15. London: Sage Publications. Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. California: Stanford University Press. Rushdie, Salman. 1992. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991. London: Penguin Books. Selasi, Taiye. 2014. Don’t Ask Me Where I’m from, Ask Where I’m a Local. Ted Global. https://www.ted.com/talks/taiye_selasi_don_t_ask_where_i_m_from_ ask_where_i_m_a_local?language=en. UNDRIP. 2016. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Handbook of Indigenous Peoples’ Rights. https://www.un.org/esa/ socdev/unpfii/documents/DRIPS_en.pdf. UNHCR. 1951. Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees. https://www.unhcr.org/3b66c2aa10. UNITED. 2020. List of 40 555 Documented Deaths of Refugees and Migrants Due to the Restrictive Policies of ‘Fortress Europe’. Fatal Policies of Fortress Europe. http://unitedagainstrefugeedeaths.eu/wp-­c ontent/uploads/2014/06/ ListofDeathsActual.pdf.

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———. n.d. Fortress Europe: Death by Policy. Fatal Policies of Fortress Europe. Accessed July 28, 2020. http://unitedagainstrefugeedeaths.eu/about-­the-­ campaign/fortress-­europe-­death-­by-­policy/. United Nations. 1948. Universal Declaration of Human Rights. https://www. un.org/en/universal-­declaration-­human-­rights/. Waetjen, T. 1999. The ‘Home’ in Homeland: Gender, National Space and Inkatha’s Politics of Ethnicity. Ethnic and Racial Studies 22: 653–678. Waggoner, Matt. 2018. Unhoused: Adorno and the Problem of Dwelling. Bethesda: Columbia Books. Weil, Simone. 2010. The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind. New York: Routledge Classics. Woolley, Agnes. 2016. Narrating the ‘Asylum Story’: Between Literary and Legal Storytelling. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2016.1231585. ———. 2019. Asylum. In The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction, ed. Robert Eaglestone and Daniel O’Gorman. Taylor & Francis. Yuval-Davis, Nira. 1999. The ‘Multi-Layered Citizen’. International Feminist Journal of Politics 1 (1): 119–136. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461674 99360068.

CHAPTER 3

Dramaturgical Ethics: Undoing and Decreating

Fig. 3.1  Camp by Abbas Haj

Parts of this chapter are based on the previously published article ‘“Not just theatre, also politics, law”: on dramaturgical ethics and collective playwriting in Deportation Centre Sjælsmark’ (Grøn, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 2022), used here with permission under CC BY 4.0. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 H. Grøn, Asylum and Belonging through Collective Playwriting, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24808-5_3

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This chapter is not a foraying into the many facets and processes of dramaturgy, which as Cathy Turner and Synne Behrndt rightly remark on as such complex and expansive terms that reaching ‘sufficiently inclusive definitions’ (2016, 1) can be challenging. Instead, I explore dramaturgical ethics as a methodological approach that can use the tools of dramaturgy to address ethical, aesthetical and relational questions when making theatre with refugees and asylum seekers. As Yana Meerzon and Katharina Pewny’s reading of Turner and Behrndt suggests, dramaturgical practices in the twenty-first century ‘demand new forms of storytelling’ (2020, 2). Expanding on this, Meerzon and Pewny suggest that in an age of pressing questions and calls for nuanced artistic expression of radically different experiences of migration ‘theatre makers, authors, and performers […] offer their creative search for a collective better understanding [of] our relations to the stranger, the Other’, which also brings forward new ‘dramaturgies of self’(2). Inserted into the process of making theatre that restructures relations to both ‘Other’ and ‘self’ is the question of ethics. In this chapter, cross-disciplinary theorists, like Emmanuel Levinas, Luce Irigaray and Simone Weil, interrogate being called to ethics through ‘the Other’. When some of them even argue for the ethical call to let oneself be changed in this encounter, they unfold this chapter’s concern with how ethical relations and dramaturgical process can make clear the need to decreate the ‘structural violence that holds inequality in place’ (Phipps 2019, 112). Echoing Augusto Boal’s identification of ‘all theatre [as] necessarily political’ (2000, 1), because human activity is political, ‘and theatre is one’ (1), dramaturge Marianne Van Kerkhoven concludes that the difference between major and minor dramaturgies is between ‘the structural circle [and] that which can be grasped on a human scale’ (1994). As major and minor dramaturgies cover the process of theatre making through to its social function and placement in the world, one might identify a political responsibility in the combination of Boal and Van Kerkhoven’s account of how major dramaturgies affect minor, human moments. Dramaturgical ethics applies a similar lens to examining the relations between European or Western theatre makers and/or researchers, and the refugees and asylum seekers the work is made with and about. Interrogating also the different systems of institutions of theatre and academia versus the asylum system, dramaturgy emerges as a tool for analysis of how people are placed unequally within social and political structures of their world. I suggest that in dramaturgical ethics lies the call to go beyond the moments of

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making theatre (or theatre research) to stand in solidarity and be present to the crucial differences in interlocking subject positions of privilege, legal and citizenship status, nationality, race and gender. I place both this and the following chapter on ethnoplaywriting in this chronology not to suggest that they predate the fieldwork, but rather in order that they might serve as a build up and analytical lens to guide attention towards the moments that underscored the need for both approaches. It was particularly the group in Sjælsmark that highlighted the need for dramaturgical ethics: the disparity in legal status between the groups and myself challenged the basis of how we were engaging, and whether theatre held any political, epistemological or creative validity in situations that really needed legal and structural change. The people from Sjælsmark are present in this chapter through three interludes that underscored the need for a kind of dramaturgy and ethics that could go beyond the framework of making theatre, which, later chapters will detail, informed the kind of theatre we made.

3.1   Dramaturgy, Ethics and Refugee Performance: Engaging ‘With a Story Beyond Our Telling’ Reflective of Ingold’s question in the introduction, ‘how ought we to live?’, Nicholas Ridout opens Theatre & Ethics with a question asked at the climax of Sophocles’ Philoctetes: ‘[h]ow shall I act?’ (2009, 1). Ridout uses this to underscore that theatre ‘dramatises ethical situations’ (13), and that the ‘ethical problems […] in a play […] are the sort of things that count as ethical problems in the society’ (13). Theatre and ethics are then connected through the ability to act, to reflect on right and wrong and on how to proceed in moments of crisis. Charting a right course of action on the scale of larger crisis, like the so-called refugee crisis, Sophocles’ line reaches relevantly into intimate, global and performative spectrums by placing relations between refugees, asylum seekers and citizens as an ‘ethical problem’ at the heart of current societies: how shall we act? In Ethical Exchanges in Translation, Adaptation and Dramaturgy, Emer O’Toole and Andrea Kristić understand the practices of dramaturgy as ‘intrinsically ethical’ (2017, 1), through dramaturgy’s effort to ‘understand, interpret [and] place the experiences of the Other within our own lived parameters’ (2017, 1). Remarking on a phenomenological shift from Husserl and Heidegger’s understanding of an ‘I’ that ‘reduces the

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world’ (8) to what can be understood within one’s consciousness, to Levinas who, following the atrocities of the Second World War, argued that the path to ethics lies through ‘the Other’ who ‘call[s] me to responsibility’ (2013, 213), O’Toole and Kristić argue that the ethical task in dramaturgy is contingent on a similar shift.1 O’Toole and Kristić here read Levinas’ translator Richard A. Cohen, who proposes that Levinasian ethics can be read as a storied collision between home and homelessness: Cohen understands the story of Odysseus who ‘ventures out courageously, but only in order to finally return home, where he began his voyage’ (1987, 24) as the basis of Greek thought, opposed by Jewish tradition shaped by a figure who leaves his ancestral home for good, who never returns and never arrives at his destination, who encounters and is subject to the absolute alterity of God, who overthrows the idols and is transformed, becomes his better self, Abraham. (24)

Many Western fictions, particularly fairy tales, have been structured by the home-away-home story of Odysseus (Zipes 2015). In his book on the seven basic plots of Western storytelling, Christopher Booker calls this the ‘Voyage and Return’ (2004, 87). Here, a hero, like Odysseus, ventures into the world on an often specific and almost impossible mission and has to overcome challenges by employing different tactics, and hereby discovering new personal potential. Often, this plot structure is reliant on a hero’s transformation, concluding in the ability to return home in a different way (99). From Cohen’s reflections, O’Toole and Kristić conclude that ‘Western thought returns to what is known [and fails to] account for the idea that we are answerable to the Other in much the same way Abraham is answerable to God’ (2017, 9). While, as the footnote outlines, it is complicated to apply Levinasian ethics to aesthetics, I argue that in 1  Ridout among others has remarked on the incorrectness of applying Levinasian ethics to theatre (2009, 54–55), as Levinas formulates his ethics on the basis of face-to-face encounter, and defined art as belonging to a shadowy realm (Levinas 1989, 141) (Levinas 2013, 215), where theatrical performance inhibits authenticity of ethical encounters. In Theatre and Everyday Life: An Ethics of Performance (1993), Alan Read argued for an application of Levinasian ethics on performance, stating theatre’s liveness and possibilities (Levinas 1989, 93) made ‘different demands on the shadow world’, which enforces a ‘renewed and deepened presence’ (Read 1993, 86). In later works, Read backtracks on this (2008, 36–38), but Ridout argues that in Levinas’ ‘apparent condemnation of art and the aesthetic lies the very grounds of its ethical potential’ (2009, 69).

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story-sharing and story-listening space there is a current and ethical demand not to return to the known, and specifically to understand and make room for the stories of voyage without return. This is a call to ‘perform ethical work [of understanding] other modes of being, other truths, other realities and encouraging engagement with a story beyond our telling’ (O’Toole et al. 2017, 9). Voyage without return prompts dramaturgical address to how storied structures can inform approaches to the world, as the last chapter suggested. From a playwright’s perspective, whose aim is dramaturgical presence in both text and performance, I suggest while ‘dramaturging’ might be concerned with ‘the work’s composition’ (Turner and Behrndt 2016, 4), dramaturgical ethics applies as much to the composition of the work as the composition of the world. Akin to the previous chapter’s unfolding of hermeneutical interpretation between self, world and belonging, a playwright’s semiotic awareness of theatre’s ‘sign-system’ (Aston and Savona 2005, 99) is practiced at creating characters and stories by interpreting social and political worlds and repurposing such dynamics to give ‘pre-­ determined meaning’ (99) in text and on stage. While not losing sight of the fact that there is a sociology to semiotics, often determined by an individual’s cultural and political history (153), creating theatrical meaning relies on an understanding that interpreting signs can be ‘the way in which we set about making sense of the world’ (99). Thereby, semiotic and dramaturgical craft scrutinises what makes meaning in the world and on stage, while elucidating what kind of meaning is made. This is transferrable to dramaturgical ethics, where engaging with a story of voyage beyond return and stories beyond one’s telling goes hand-in-hand with scrutiny of how refugees or asylum seekers are placed semiotically on the stage and the world. However, this is perhaps also what makes clear the limitations of both ethics and aesthetics, namely, that while storied space might create encounter and understanding, there also needs to be the acknowledgement, as the last section will detail, that some stories are, and should remain, ‘beyond our telling’. Scholarship on refugee performance has uncovered these dynamics by calling for dramaturgies that reflect and dismantle performance, spectatorship and understandings around ‘the Other’. The gravity of such a call is apparent through the fact that it is not merely a question of aesthetics or representation, but also of crucial material consequences that can equally become a question of life or death. For example, Jestrovic considers moments where refugees and asylum seekers are asked to ‘perform

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themselves’ (2008, 160) as revealing ‘the very paradoxes of authenticity’ (160), because the semiotics and dramaturgies have ‘real material consequences, often becoming the deciding factor between permission to remain and deportation’ (160). Jeffers reflects on refugees’ stories as ‘troubling, troubled and troublesome’ (2012, 1) because they are hard to hear, because they often tell of trauma, persecution and suffering and ‘because lives depend on their claims for truth’ (2012, 1). Much like Derrida uncovers fundamental ambivalences in hospitality through the dynamics of power between host and guest (2000), the ethics of being Western audiences to refugee performance displays a similar preservation of who witnesses and decides on the ‘truth’ of a story, and who is constructed as an outsider, needing to make claims on truth, asylum and welcome. Similarly, performance projects aimed at welcome through refugees sharing their stories can continue the ‘imperative to tell’ (Thompson 2009, 56), experienced at every stage of navigating an asylum system, and thereby enforce dramaturgies that ‘other’ through semiotics of victimisation and trauma, or the ‘endearing refugee’ (Jeffers 2012, 44), who is worthy of asylum. This process, Clare Bishop notes, can lead to people reinforcing ‘their own socio-economic category’ (2012, 91) rather than challenging and dismantling representation. Refugee organisations have recognised this by placing an acute demand for the ethical engagement of artists and researchers wishing to work with their communities. For example, RISE: Refugees, Survivors and Ex-Detainees, an Australian organisation run by the demographics they seek to support, operates under the slogan ‘nothing about us without us’ (2015). Therefore, with a list of ten bullet points, they urge incoming artists of non-refugee or asylum-seeking backgrounds to fundamentally question their privilege or wish to tell stories beyond their telling. For example: We are not a resource to feed into your next artistic project. You may be talented at your particular craft but do not assume that this automatically translates to an ethical, responsible and self-determining process. Understand community cultural development methodology but also understand that it is not a full-proof methodology. Who and what institutions are benefiting from the exchange? (2015)

Trampoline House place a similar call on people who wish to conduct research or art ‘to volunteer with us for a minimum of 3 months, 1–2 days per week, and give something back to the house’ (n.d.). They ask people to:

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attend our monthly Info meeting for interns, volunteers, researchers, and project initiators, where we will introduce you to the history and mission of Trampoline House, and explain how you can learn from us. (n.d.)

By institutional design, both RISE and Trampoline House display measures taken to prevent the ‘imperative to tell’ and ensure that the researchers and practitioners approaching their organisations critically examine their motivations by stipulating commitments of ethics and time to understand the community they wish to work with. Trampoline House enforces this through setting a specific time-frame for volunteering, but also by shifting dynamics and making it clear that practitioners and researchers are there to understand ‘how you can learn from us’. RISE demands for people who wish to work with them to: subject ‘your own intention to critical, reflexive analysis’, ‘realise your privilege’, understand that participation is ‘not always empowering’ and that it is not ‘a safe space just because you say it is’ (2015). Thompson similarly reflects on the imperative for practitioners to be critical of the thought that theatrical projects dealing with politics through subject matter or people involved are ‘by some default process […] one that can claim an automatic contribution to social change’ (2009, 5). Contemplating the tendency to overestimate theatre’s potential to transform the lives of those involved, stipulates fundamental limitations and necessary ethical and dramaturgical reflections of undertaking making theatre with refugees and asylum seekers as someone who ‘enjoys the privileges of the West’ (Jeffers 2012, 1). In this scenario ‘how shall I act?’ becomes a question of approach and responsibility to understand that ‘artistic practice cannot be neutral’ (RISE 2015). RISE prompts reflection on how O’Toole and Kristić’s understanding of dramaturgy’s ability to translate ‘the strange into the familiar’ (2017, 3) can become a question also of position and power. While translation might not be a problem in and of itself, ‘the concealment of that translation’ (2017, 3) can slip into the territory of appropriation or telling a story beyond one’s telling. Similarly, RISE encourages thought to be given to who translates, dramaturges, opens for another, and who stands on the other end of such processes. This chapter’s section of undoing and decreating delves further into these questions. For now, I argue that combining dramaturgy and ethics when making theatre with and about asylum seekers calls for both terms to go beyond their confines: understanding the ‘intrinsically ethical’ of dramaturgy, as an attunement towards another, is similarly reliant on uncovering that when making theatre with and about

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refugees and asylum seekers, ‘the proximity’ (Ahmed 2000, 72) is what leads both to ‘a recognition of distance’ (72) and is what reveals the ‘impossibility of being [with] them’ (72, emphasis in original). Dramaturgical ethics seeks to hold these tensions and examine motivations and commitments, when standing within the complexity of occupying different subject position and legal status. For example, seeking to create theatre and research that strives to decolonise from (in my case) a white, female, scholarly and artistic perspective; from someone who benefits from being a citizen in one European country and a resident of another is, and should be, problematic and uncomfortable. This does not mean that the work should not be undertaken. It does mean that it is exactly and only by examining the ‘how shall I act’ of who makes the work, who benefits from it and whose stories remain beyond telling, that other spaces, structures and conversations become possible. As positionality and ethics are about taking a stance, the remainder of this chapter follows through on this metaphor by reflecting on different spheres that require positioning and footing, while arguing, equally, for the need to lose footing.

3.2  No Pure Place to Stand: An Argument for Critical Closeness In Decolonizing Multilingualism, Alison Phipps speaks to the role of languages and art in university decolonising agendas and blending research with arts practice on asylum-related issues. When carrying out such work, Phipps states: There is no pure place to stand […] There are many different judgements to be made about what to do with your privilege: owning it; using it; pass it on; passing on it; making space and many other arts which need a lifetime of struggle, apology, reparation and some mutual celebration, which can hint at a post-decolonial world. (2019, 9)

‘No pure place to stand’ opens reflections on the practice-as-research approach of this project. Applying also to the situatedness of theatre practitioners and projects working with refugees and asylum seekers, I examine the role and position of the research-artist to uncover paradoxes, and argue for a critical closeness rather than critical distance. Phipps’ statement reflects these complexities through suggesting that although there may be

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no pure place to stand, and, even if standing without solid ground is risky, standing is necessary. In this way, ‘no pure place to stand’ directs attention towards what to ‘do’ with privilege while bringing into view the impossibility of doing it correctly or purely. Instead ‘what to do’ (or, ‘how shall I act?’) needs multiple efforts ranging from apology to celebration or in my case, theatre making, research and ethnography, but also continued political engagement and addressing of position, communal practices and solidarity. Academia convincingly argues that to make robust research arguments that adequately and persuasively transpose the findings of an ethno-dramatic and political process, both the foundations of those who have thought and theorised before, and critical distance to sharpen analytical understandings of embodied encounters are needed. Tying ‘no pure place to stand’ together with the decolonising agendas aiming at a post-­ decolonial world, Linda Tuhiwai Smith notes how ‘the term “research” is inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism’ (2008, 1). Speaking specifically from a context of Māori communities, Smith continues that ‘Western researchers and intellectuals [have assumed] to know all that it is possible to know of us’ (1). In the foreword to Caroline Lenette’s Arts-Based Methods in Refugee Research: Creating Sanctuary, Maggie O’Neill remarks that research ‘is still plagued by western definitions of what “knowledge” constitutes and colonialist appropriation of research methodologies’ (as quoted in Lenette 2019, xiii), thereby displaying a link between institutional decolonising agendas and refugee research and arts-practice. O’Neill and Lenette here make persuasive arguments that the inclusion of arts-based methods is what can nuance refugee research, articulate anew and decolonise definitions and methodologies. Engaging with research participants in ‘empathic ways’ (viii), O’Neill writes, can ‘produce critical, reflexive texts that may help to mobilise for social change [and] counter valorising discourses and the reduction of the “other” to a cipher of the oppressed/ marginalised/ victimised’ (viii). Tying to the introduction’s concerns with names and naming, Lenette proposes that a fundamental shift involves changing the terminology of arts-based research methods involving refugees and asylum seekers from ‘research participants’ to ‘knowledge holders’ (2019, 12). Connecting both with Trampoline House’s call for researchers and artists to learn from them and RIDE’s ten bullet points for pre-reflection before approaching their community, Lenette’s shift works at a similar dismantling of who carries epistemological authority and who produces knowledge, while working at the position of the researcher to learn from

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people with lived experiences rather than impose structures. This kind of terminology and the methodology of arts-based methods, Lenette argues, is what produces nuanced texts that make space for the complexity of lived experience and creative expression to create knowledge. Returning, then, to what is required of a research-artist (or theatre maker), Rogoff remarks that while taking position is necessary, this can be ‘the effort of arriving at positionality, rather than the clarity of having a position’ (2000, 3). While there is the danger of never arriving, I read Rogoff’s remark as an investment in a continued undertaking of a self-­ reflective ethical, and perhaps even creative, process over a pre-taken position. Akin to theatre unfolding in embodied time and space, Behar notes that anthropology is reliant on ‘the particular relationship formed between anthropologist [or theatre-maker, or researcher] with a particular set of people in a particular time and place’ (2012, 5). I argue that working with those whose lives are decided by ever shifting political dynamics necessarily widens the artistic and relational field to commitment and investment. This calls for solidarity and critical closeness rather than distance. From this perspective, ‘critical’ covers: firstly, the continued process of examining embodied inscriptions into the systems that refugees and asylum seekers live in conflict with; secondly, it extends also to undertaking the work of having ‘no pure place to stand’. In my case, ‘no pure place to stand’ is the privilege afforded to me by a lifetime of study, work and navigating systems that granted me safety and mobility. The risk involved in standing on insolid, shifting ground, though necessarily uncomfortable, it does not touch the surface of the risk, precarity and daily realities for those seeking asylum systems or experiencing forced migration. Moreover, in this study, the work could only happen through lack of distance. As the fieldwork chapters unfold, once a theatrical space was opened which sought to be story-sharing and story-listening, it remained open beyond the room or the time and space of workshops. In fact, in this project, stories were shared in complete discord with the notion of critical distance and the research or practice agendas. Instead they were told during meals, during dances or over social media. They unfolded at the pace of relation, which enforced ever-shifting dynamics of my place to stand. These dynamics bring into view why it is necessary to arrive at new formulations that can take different stances on distance and closeness when there is no pure place to stand and standing is necessary. In the following interlude, Rohan calls attention to these dynamics by addressing the fundamental differences in our legal status and the imperative for addressing this.

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Interlude: ‘We Have to Do a Lot More’

During a workshop session with the group in Sjælsmark, one of the people performing jokingly doubted that I was Danish due to the darker colour of my eyes and hair. I pointed out to him the Danish letter in my last name, and that settled the matter of my nationality. Overhearing the conversation, Rohan said: ‘you are lucky, you only have to say you have a Danish letter to gain citizenship. We have to do a lot more’. A few weeks before, we had spoken about his case in Trampoline House, and they concluded our conversation with: ‘here [in Sjælsmark and Denmark] you have to do a lot of different things. We all have to become a lawyer to know about our case’. Rohan’s remarks highlight the invisible labour and compromised belongings of navigating an asylum system and knowing about one’s case, reiterated by the other members of the group and the sistas in Glasgow. Independently and in many complex and nuanced articulations, they remarked on how they had to do more work every day, to be welcome, to be seen as a human, to know about their cases or secure their futures. The invisible labours and compromises of belonging were made visible not only by our proximity, but also by an imaginative moment that showed how the structures at play in our respective lives manifest radically differently: I do not have labour to make my life work in the way Rohan does; I do not have to become a lawyer or to ‘do a lot more’ to secure my future, human rights or to belonging when I enter the world. I read this imaginative moment, where, for a brief second, I did not hold a citizenship, and that it was then the letter in my name that gave it back to me, as a micro-aesthetic showing the capricious ways in which these things are given, received and safeguarded. Rohan, doing more, me, doing less, ‘for reasons having more to do with the countries into which [we were] born than the efforts or intelligence’ (Calhoun 2009: 212) aimed at the making of our lives.

3.3  Shifting the Ground: Participating Through Decreating Echoing on Levinasian ethics, Danish philosopher and theologian K.E.  Løgstrup argues that ‘[d]en enkelte har aldrig med et andet menneske at gøre uden at han holder noget af dets liv i sin hånd’ (one never has anything to do with another person without holding a part of their

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lives in one’s hand; author’s translation) (2012, 25). In his book Gæstfrihed (2018) refugee minister Niels Nymann Eriksen shifts the dynamics of this by stating that he meets the opposite idea in his work. For Eriksen, when meeting another (in this case, refugees and asylum seekers) they hold some of his life in their hands. While Levinas argues that meeting another is what makes apparent both responsibility and alterity (2013, 194–95), Eriksen and Løgstrup suggest that it is the alterity of another that is a call to responsibility: concurrently with holding or being held in a parabolic hand, the structure of both world and self is held. Løgstrup goes as far as to argue that what is held might be minute and brief: a passing moment, a pain enforced or lessened, an encouragement or discouragement, but it might also be significantly more; in some cases, a meeting can be deciding factor for the success of someone’s life or not (2012, 25). Irigaray suggests a similar gravity to such moments by understanding that meeting another ‘undoes the weaving of the relations that structured the world for me’ (2008, 89). The world is ‘kept in suspense to welcome the other’ (89), and after such encounters, there is no returning to the world ‘unchanged’ (89). The gravitas of these reflections brings into view what can be both possible and consequential in meeting across divides, namely, the making and unmaking of the world, the understanding of ‘all identities as ethically produced’ (Jeffers 2012, 10) and as the fieldwork chapters will detail, the making and unmaking of belonging. Holding and being held in mutual responsiveness, responsibility and suspension of each other’s worlds, identifies an ethical stipulation for undoing and decreating. For example, in coupling Eriksen’s views with dramaturgical ethics, it is possible to detect a need to question and undo categories ‘of citizen vs. non-citizen, European vs. non-European’ (Evans 2019, 166) to challenge who does the hosting of hospitality. If being mutually responsible for the making and unmaking of each other’s worlds in ethical encounters, hospitality can be understood to be an equally mutual project, rather than something citizens of a country may choose to do (or not to do) to people arriving from other places. In Gravity and Grace, Simone Weil provides an argument for decreation as a productive undoing by understanding that people ‘participate in the creation of the world by decreating ourselves’ (2002, 33). Weil conceives of decreation mainly within a religious perspective: creation is an act of love and a gravitational force. Akin to Cohen’s reading of Levinasian ethics, where in a moral framework, people become responsible to one another in the same way Abraham is responsible to God, Weil understands God’s love

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to be shown through the desire for and act of creation. Enactments of love between people are an extension of this desire. Weil here remarks on an important distinction between decreation and destruction: Decreation: to make something created pass into the uncreated. Destruction: to make something created pass into nothingness. (2002, 32)

Decreating is not passing into nothingness as destruction is, decreation is to uncreate, which presents other opportunities for creating. While I do not propose a religious approach to ethics, Weil’s perspective is convincing in arguing for entering a community on the basis both of creation and love, and in identifying a need to leave oneself behind to participate in the making of the world. In both Chaps. 4 and 5 and the fieldwork reflections, Weil’s call to decreation is mapped not only as participation in communities through commitment and care, but also as a fundamental element in creating the kinds of worlds one would like to see and be part of. Such communities here become gravitational points for the lives of the people who are refugees or navigating asylum systems. For now, Weil provides an asset to dramaturgical ethics and positionality by providing the perspective that something becomes possible in the leaving behind of oneself; something that might work at decreating adherence to, what Rancière will identify below as ‘pre-formed’ laws and political institutions, to think ahead instead to what it might mean to per-form care and participation.

Interlude: Of Fireworks and Bombs

In the fall and winter of 2018, the Danish People’s Party made significant vies for the state budget to be spent on initiatives making it increasingly difficult to be a refugee in Denmark and both to seek and gain asylum (see Chap. 4). This coincided with the 70th anniversary for the writing of the Declaration of Human Rights, and resulted in anti-hostility protests taking place all over Denmark, where people asserted their belief in human rights and dignity. Many of the people from Trampoline House and surrounding camps were either speaking at or attending the demonstration. Rohan, Abbas and Ghafour from the group I was writing a play with in Sjælsmark came and I translated the speeches that were in Danish for them. (continued)

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(continued) ­Mid-sentence, Ghafour asks me where the fireworks are. He tells me that when he was in France, there would be fireworks at demonstrations. I explain that this big crowd, the singing and nodding along emphatically to the speeches is significant for Danes and the culture of ‘hygge’, where avoiding political discussion and engagement is possible. He listens, but then tells me that when protesting back home, helicopters drop bombs on them. Although there was nothing funny about what he said, the moment was constructed as a joke, and the humour showed the inherent differences in our experiences of protesting and encounters with political systems. I understood what went on between the lines of that moment as an undoing and decreation of frames of reference; an impossibility of returning to the world unchanged. The diffractions in our experiences underscore this: for me, asserting my belief in human rights looked like taking to the streets and standing beside those who I wish to be changed by, and whose experiences remain beyond my telling. This reflects also on the question ‘how shall I act?’ as a citizen of a country that unhomes them. For him, fighting for human rights is a thing with fireworks, bombs, asylum systems and navigation. The place where we met is one where we are both called to ethics; of trying to understand, through humour or dramaturgy, the moment inhabited together, the way to proceed. Although a passing moment, where perhaps only the conditions of conversation and comprehensions of the world are at stake, I argue, nonetheless, that these micro-ethical moments contain also the call to decreation that creates the kind of participation unable to return unchanged to the world due to the proximity and experiences of another.

3.4  Standing on Stage: Understanding Responsibility as a Theatre Maker In 2017, with a team of creative partners, theatre maker, activist and scholar Catrin Evans led a participatory arts project commissioned by Tramway arts space in Glasgow and the Scottish Refugee Council called Share My Table. The project’s aim was to respond theatrically and collectively to media images surrounding refugees and asylum seekers. The

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participants were encouraged to come from all walks of life; those who had lived in Glasgow for a long time, those holding refugee status or those who had just arrived and were in the process of seeking asylum (Evans 2019, 33). In an article written for the Scottish Journal of Performance, Evans reflects on dramaturgies beyond the theatrical that ensured the inclusivity they were aiming for. These included: making the space less intimidating and more welcoming, structuring activities around everyone having something to contribute that is important for the process, ceremonially checking in with how people were feeling at the beginning and end of workshops, while ensuring that they could respond how they wish, with body, words, song or sound, and dismantling linguistic power by encouraging a multilingual space (Evans 2019). Chapter 4 on Trampoline House and the fieldwork reflections will examine the importance of multilingual practices in micropolitical and communal space. For now, I read Evan’s point that ‘[a]dvocating visibility, multilingualism and multiplicity within our space, became an act of resistance against the hostile environment outside’ (49) as an extension to the deliberate artistic undoing and decreation of the major dramaturgies and structures of an outside world. In a conversation between theatre scholar Azadeh Sharifi and sociologist and dramaturg Laura Paetau, they underscore this point: Sharifi remarks how ‘multilinguality is a prominent dramaturgical strategy [that] generates different forms of inclusion and exclusion’ (2020, 74) and produces a ‘counter-­strategy against the colonial order, challenging the colonial hierarchy that is imposed on non-European languages’ (75). In this way, Evans displays that being linguistically displaced in multilingual and artistic space can aim at counter-strategies for entrenched nexuses of power. In her PhD thesis, Evans reflects further on what I read as the ethical demands of a project that sought to counter Thompson’s ‘imperative to tell’ and ‘aesthetic of injury for an effective purpose’ (Thompson 2009, 6). Here Evans remarks how, as a theatre maker, she witnessed ‘people’s stories [being] extracted and re-contextualised or presented in ways that felt exposing to the individuals’ (2020, 106), even when the process of sharing one’s story was framed ‘as an empowering and healing process, often tied in with a social justice agenda’ (106). While not reflecting overtly on ethics, Evans provides a practice perspective to what can happen when art is ‘reshaped within a political logic’ (Bishop 2012, 13), namely, that when projects begin from artistic intent or reflect fixed social justice agendas, telling one’s story can be inhibiting rather than healing. Similar to Cox and Gilbert’s reflections on Mnouchkine’s Le Dernier Caravansérail outlined in the introduction, stories of voyage beyond return can risk

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exposing the individual rather than present creative, complex and nuanced accounts of lived experiences that challenge a political status quo. From a performance perspective, Meg Mumford and Ulrike Garde note how theatre, enforcing ‘vulnerability as a vehicle for making meaning or for effecting artistic and social change, takes the risk of reiterating or magnifying that vulnerability and reinforcing causal factors’ (2015, 12). Emma Cox and Marilena Zaroulia understand that a refugee story ‘potentially renders the migrant journey, the perilous crossing a game for our imaginaries’ (2016, 148). In such cases, ‘oscillating between invisibility and overexposure in the public sphere’ (Woolley 2014, 3) can rightfully cause an ambivalence on the part of forced migrants with ‘the aesthetic forms that seek to represent them’ (3). Connecting decolonial agendas within refugees’ stories, I note how Behar remarks on the ethical and aesthetical challenges of engaging with stories beyond one’s telling in a relational ‘field’. For Behar calling ‘a life history into a text [or a play, or a performance] is, in one sense, already a colonisation of the act of storytelling’ (2012, 12). Examining the disparities in rights and privileges between Western makers and refugee or asylums seeking participants, Evans, combined with Trampoline House and RIDE, provides a model for reflective practice that centres dramaturgical ethics by way of theatrical commitments to time spent learning and decreating in multilingual and intercultural space. Nevertheless, as the next chapter will unfold in greater detail, at the heart of this project lies a fundamental belief in theatre and storytelling’s ability to create belonging, welcome and provide opportunities to rework political and personal status quo into different stories. Speaking from within my own practice, I am persuaded by Nicholson’s idea that drama provides: a powerful opportunity to ask questions about whose stories have been customarily told, whose have been accepted as truth, and to redress the balance by telling alternative stories or stories from different perspectives. (2005, 63)

Bal provides a helpful accompaniment with ‘migratory aesthetics’, an ‘ethical imperative to provide a congenial, friendly soundscape in which mobility—the migratory—is not the despised exception but the valued norm’ (2008, 33). Migratory aesthetics can examine the ethics of cultural practices that places globalisation and displacements at the centre of conversations. Such soundscapes can be found, for example, in Ice & Fire Theatre Company’s work. Founded by playwright Sonja Linden, Fire & Ice

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‘explore human rights stories through performance’ (n.d.). They bring their plays across the UK by performing in schools, at events and for organisations. Seeking to create encounters between citizens and asylum seekers, they formed the network of actors for human rights and in 2006 they created Asylum Monologues, scripted by Sonja Linden and Christine Bacon (Ice & Fire 2006). In collaboration with Scottish Detainee Visitors, Ice & Fire produced Detention Dialogues through a process of actors creating and performing verbatim scripts made with people living in UK detention centres. There are ethical questions of representation and appropriation raised when actors with citizen privilege perform the words of those in detention. Nonetheless, the verbatim script provides opportunities to hear stories that, as Nicholson remarked, are not customarily told, thereby offering opportunities for redressing balance. I attended a performance during the Scottish Refugee Festival in 2018, and again during the 2019 UNESCO Spring School. The verbatim script kept the grammatical errors and non-fluent word choices made by someone whose first language is not English intact. Thereby, a congenial soundscape and multilingual dramaturgy created a dialogue between the story of the detainee and the actor, speaking in a Scottish accent performing it. This embodied dis-fluency created, as the next chapter will detail, opportunity for political listening through the linguistic proximity of someone in detention. In the post-show discussion, the audience circulated ethical questions around an asylum story spoken by someone with citizen privilege. Examining the complicity both of performer and Western audiences reveals the troubled listening and spectatorship of such stories. For Jacques Rancière, spectatorship produces its own paradox as it is ‘the opposite [of] knowing [and] of acting [and yet] there is no theatre without a spectator’ (2009, 2). Nevertheless, the immovability of the spectator is contrasted with the communal moment of theatre that stands in opposition to ‘a mere apparatus of laws; a set of perception, gestures and attitudes that precede and pre-form laws and political institutions’ (6). Here, Rancière hints at the prescriptive nature (‘precede’, ‘pre-form’) of governmental institutions and the way they act in people’s lives. In the discussion of the performance, space was held for the complexities of representation and responsibility of Western actors playing asylum seekers or detainees, the immovability of the spectator (who is called to both know and act when listening) and the importance of sharing stories that are not otherwise heard. One of the actors said that after a performance, a woman had approached him and told him he sounded exactly like her grandson and this had brought the story of the detainee into her everyday life. I heard in

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this story a linguistic overriding of her reality, which presented opportunities for listening with care for a story beyond one’s own, and assume ethical responsibility beyond proximity. As the introduction and previous chapter contextualised, Refugee Tales provides a similar friendly soundscape through processional aesthetics and enactments of solidarity by walking. A multi-artistic project written collaboratively between professional novelists, playwrights and poets and people experiencing detention, Refugee Tales exists in multiple media: a durational walk in solidarity where stories are told and listened to happening yearly since 2015; a series of videos on YouTube where the writers read and perform the story and as three published books. Patron of the project and novelist Ali Smith frames storytelling as ‘a profound act of hospitality [where] sympathy and empathy are only the beginning of things’ (Refugee Tales n.d.). The prologue of the Tales echoes this notion: 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. (Herd and Pincus 2016, v)

The editor David Herd remarks that when people can, they write their own texts (see for example volume four). However, when there is a threat in identification (and, in those instances where this threat is also a question of life and death, asylum or deportation), the person will be paired with an established writer to tell their story. Smith wrote The Detainee’s Tale from such a process. The choice of second-person narration serves to sustain an I-you dynamic throughout the piece, reminding the reader of the interview process behind the story: ‘[h]ere’s what you tell me. It’s all in the present tense, I realise afterwards, because it is all still happening’ (A. Smith 2015). Positioning herself as a writer within the story while centring the experience of the detainee is an insight into reflective practice and positionality. Smith’s presence offers a double perspective, displaying at once something like Rancière’s seperatedness from acting and knowing through witnessing, but her role as a co-teller also highlights the inequality of the situation in the first place. After visiting the centre the detainee was held in, the guide thanks her for making the journey. Smith questions ‘[m]e? […] Making a journey?

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Today?’ (2015), referring to those whose journeys are much longer and more difficult. The detainee calls Smith to responsibility as a storyteller at the end of the tale, stating that people do not know what it’s like to be detained, ‘[y]ou have to tell them’ (2015). Similar to the discussion after the Detainee Dialogues, Smith ends on an imperative to listen: But when I came to this place, when I came to your country, you say. I sit forward. I’m listening. You shake your head. I thought you would help me, you say. (2015)

There is a second person reversal here, which highlights a larger address: the ‘you’ shifts from being the ‘I’ in the story speaking about the detainee ‘you’. Here it is the detainee that addresses a ‘you’, which could be a direct address to the ‘I’ in the story, but it could equally question response and responsibility by meaning you, the reader, you, the Home Office, you, the UK government. Indeed, the last six words, Smith writes, ‘carry the weight of the planet, carry the weight of the earth’ (2015). Within the gravitational invocation of cosmic forces, within the ‘I’m listening’ and the sitting forward, Smith is called to a similar kind of ethical proximity and responsibility as the woman described above, or, as Abraham to God, by listening to stories of voyage beyond return. The Detainee’s Tale can similarly be read through Avtar Brah’s diaspora space (1996). While Brah argues for diaspora space as an incentive to understand all identities as produced through the notion of national boundaries, Jeffers interprets diaspora space to imply a ‘temporal and spatial quality [which is] small enough to examine moments of encounter; the space between two individuals’ (2012, 11). When the space between two individuals contains diffractions of experiences of global and political forces (and therefore also the weight of the earth and the planet) there lies in diasporic space an ethical reckoning, which places an urgency to Weil’s decreation and Irigaray’s undoing. The listening and telling of such stories underscore both the responsibility and possibility in storytelling as a micropolitical force that can open the world up and make it impossible to return to it unchanged. Returning to the call for ethical and responsible practices of theatre making from European practitioners with refugees and asylum seekers might produce friendly soundscapes where the migratory is ‘the valued norm’ (Bal 2008, 33), or as Evans noted, reflective, embodied space of being and doing together, it is important to keep in view that changing the lives of people who are refugees and displaced always requires politics

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and law. In fact, it is increasingly evident that not much changes without it, which is often brought into stark view by the differences in privilege and status. From my own research diary during my fieldwork with the sistas in Glasgow I read discomforts and reflections, where I overestimate the importance and directives of theatre in people’s lives, or direct exercises that were inattentive and, at times, insensitive. For example: What’s my effect on the space? I’m thinking about entering rooms and imposing a structure […] I want to always be thinking about why I am doing this. […] For example, just because I think something will be cathartic it doesn’t mean that it will be or that it is something they want to do. Liveness is messy. Yesterday I thought about having lived much of my life in Denmark, there are so many spaces there where it is easy to not be political. Being here, it is not an option. […] Encounter means that you extend yourself beyond yourself. I want to commit to being uncomfortable in this extension. Thankfully and messily uncomfortable. (Research Diary)

And a similar entry a few weeks later: I think I’ve attacked this all wrong. I thought working with refugees meant tackling big issues straight away, because, I thought, their lives are undoubtedly full of big issues and I wanted to make sure that people felt they could tell big stories if they wanted to… or like, that’s what we had to do. Tell really big stories. But I should have just focussed on the joy of writing plays and themes of home and belonging, I told myself i wouldn’t be prescriptive, and yet I was. Today, for example, I made a game of telling stories. That was all, and that was plenty. We told stories from near and far, made up our own ones, laughed and listened. (Research Diary)

My point in sharing these reflections is not that interrogating one’s position should take the space in a workshop setting, play-text or process that should instead be occupied by presence, community and listening. This work, I suggest, should be continually undertaken and ever be one’s own task. I do argue, however, that being uncertain of one’s footing and practice is a productive and necessary measure for ethical dramaturgy, for understanding and undertaking responsibility and for producing migratory aesthetics. After these entries, I conducted a storytelling interview with the sistas, where they could ask each other questions and tell the stories they wished to tell. Rather than placing myself as the interviewer, everybody asked a question to the person to their right. Corresponding to multilingual dramaturgical strategies, this produced a kind of ‘polylogue’

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(Meerzon and Pewny 2020, 2), creating mutual conversation as a counter-­ strategy to the typical order between interviewer and interviewee. The exercise represents a small moment in a series of events during my two fieldworks, where there was a decreation of roles, and a letting go of specific outcomes. This unhanding of artistic and academic footing intended to break open dramaturgies of process and aesthetics, and to remain attuned and responsive to the communities and people I was working with. The next chapter will examine the play and process of writing How Not to Drown (2019) by Nicola McCartney and Dritan Kastrati from an ethnoplaywriting perspective, yet for now, McCartney speaks to the ethics of practice. Written about Kastrati’s experiences of being a refugee and going through the foster system, McCartney reflects that: What’s been really important from the beginning is that Dritan has a co-­ writing credit […] because it’s his story. I feel very scared of appropriating anyone’s voice, and having just my name on it would completely go against what it is I’m trying to do with the type of work I do, which is give people back control over their own story […] The story we tell to ourselves about ourselves is really important, for mental health, but also politically in that that these stories are told by the people who own them. (Cooper and McCartney 2019)

McCartney’s perspective of at once holding ethical responsibility when making work with refugees, and positioning the possibilities of playwriting being able to ‘give [people] back control’ over their own narrative, displays an engagement with dramaturgical ethics. Here, McCartney specifies the importance of not telling a story beyond one’s telling, but, instead to enforce the aesthetic and creative practices that encourage and equip people, through a co-writing credit and process, to be the agentive tellers of their own stories. This chapter has situated the question of how much home a person needs within the call to ethics by way of another and within the practices of dramaturgically addressing this call in moments in and beyond making theatre. As Thompson’s work suggests, in theatre-fieldwork situations, it is not only the moments where theatre is created that the work happens, but also in the moments in between (2009, 3), at those times where the artist, ethnographer or academic is proximate to people ‘while they are responding to what life does to them’ (Goffman 1989, 125). It concludes with an interlude where, echoing Goffman’s reflections above, Ghafour layers spatial and dramaturgical humour over the criminalising and unhoming

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semiotics of Sjælsmark. This at once brings reality closer, while dismantling its efficacy on a shared situation, producing communal moments of affect. Interlude: ‘Welcome to Hogwarts’

After the play This is Us was performed (see fieldwork reflection), I went to Sjælsmark for a final session to interview the group about the process and to round up. We debriefed quickly and had time on our hands. Prior to this, some of them had received donations of instruments to start a band with. We decided to get the instruments and have a music session, not for anything but the sake of it. Armed with guitars, amps, a bass and other miscellaneous sound-makers, we walked down the main ‘street’ of Sjælsmark playing chords and singing. At one point Ghafour looked at me and said: ‘welcome to Hogwarts’ while gesturing to the grey sky, old, dilapidated buildings and iron fences. The irony was obvious; Sjælsmark is not a place for magic or music. Though not a moment of revolution nor research, it was at times like these—spent standing side by side in demonstrations, sharing meals, being taught about Kurdish dancing or Lebanese pop music—where the call for decreation to and participating in re-creation (from welcome to theatre) rooted. This is perhaps too porous to construct robust arguments around in a scholarly context, too close for critical distance and too far afield for taking a position on solid ground. But the poetic subtleties that destabilised frames of reference led to the understanding of dramaturgical ethics to address responsibility and practice solidarity beyond theatre and research. The solidarity produced by making theatre and by caring beyond the theatrical frame, as Thompson and Stuart Fishers also note, can re-orientate one’s work within the field, on stage and on the academic page (2020). In short, caring beyond the moments of theatre making or research shapes both knowledge and worldmaking. And so, I conclude this chapter on December day, walking through Sjælsmark, not a place for magic or music; in a moment that is neither research nor revolution, yet, is perhaps both poetry and theatre, strumming the chords of Bob Marley’s Redemption Song with people who wrote, acted and drew; whose lives are still filled with the precarities of living the limbos of citizenship, legal status, and belonging.

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References Ahmed, Sara. 2000. Strange Encounters. Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. London and New York: Routledge. Aston, Elaine, and George Savona. 2005. Theatre as Sign-System: A Semiotics of Text and Performance. London and New York: Routledge. Bal, Mieke. 2008. Migratory Aesthetics: Double Movement. EXIT 32: 150–161. Behar, Ruth. 2012. The Vulnerable Observer Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart. Boston: Beacon Press. Bishop, Claire. 2012. Delegated Performance: Outsourcing Authenticity. October 140: 91–112. https://doi.org/10.1162/OCTO_a_00091. Boal, Augusto. 2000. Theatre of the Oppressed. London: Pluto. Booker, Christopher. 2004. The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories. New York: Continuum. Brah, Avtar. 1996. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London: Routledge. Calhoun, Craig. 2009. ‘Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism’. In Globalization and the State: Sociological Perspectives on the State of the State, ed. by Willem Schinkel, 209–242. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Cohen, Richard A., and Emmanuel Levinas. 1987. Translator’s Introduction Time and the Other. In Time and the Other, 1–27. Pittsburgh, USA: Duquesne University Press. Cooper, Neil, and Nicola McCartney. 2019. Playwright Nicola McCartney on Heritage, and How Not to Drown. The Herald, July 12. https://www.heraldscotland.com/arts_ents/17764681.playwright-­nicola-­mccartney-­heritage-­ not-­drown/. Cox, Emma, and Marilena Zaroulia. 2016. Mare Nostrum, or on Water Matters. Performance Research 21 (2): 141–149. Derrida, Jacques. 2000. Hospitality. Angelaki Journal Of The Theoretical Humanities 5 (3): 3–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725002003470. Eriksen, Niels Nymann. 2018. Gæstfrihed. Akademisk Forlag. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=prmEVKLW03M&feature=emb_title. Evans, Catrin. 2019. The Practice of Solidarity Through the Arts: Inter-Relations and Shared Moments of Creation in Share My Table. Scottish Journal of Performance 6 (1): 31–53. https://doi.org/10.14439/sjop.2019.0601.03. ———. 2020. The Arts of Integration: Scottish Policies of Refugee Integration and the Role of the Creative and Performing Arts. University of Glasgow. Fischer, Amanda Stuart, and James Thompson. 2020. Performing Care. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Goffman, Erving. 1989. On Fieldwork. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 18: 123–132. Grøn, Helene. 2022. ‘Not Just Theatre, Also Politics, Law’: On Dramaturgical Ethics and Collective Playwriting in Deportation Centre Sjælsmark. Research in

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Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 0: 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569783.2022.2057793. Herd, David, and Anna Pincus. 2016. Refugee Tales. Manchester, UK: Comma Press. Ice & Fire. 2006. Asylum Monologues. https://iceandfire.co.uk/project/ asylum-­monologues/. ———. n.d. Ice & Fire—About Us. Accessed July 10, 2020. https://iceandfire. co.uk/about-­us/. Irigaray, Luce. 2008. Sharing the World: From Intimate to Global Relations. London: Continuum. Jeffers, Alison. 2012. Refugees, Theatre and Crisis: Performing Global Identities. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Jestrovic, Silvija. 2008. Performing Like an Asylum Seeker: Paradoxes of HyperAuthenticity. Research in Drama Education 13 (2): 159–170. Lenette, Caroline. 2019. Arts-Based Methods in Refugee Research: Creating Sanctuary. Singapore: Springer. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1989. Reality and Its Shadow. In The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand, 129–134. London: Basil Blackwell. ———. 2013. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Løgstrup, K.E. 2012. Den Etiske Fordring. Copenhagen: Klim. Meerzon, Yana, and Katharina Pewny. 2020. Dramaturgy of Migration: Staging Multilingual Encounters in Contemporary Theatre. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351270267. Mumford, Meg, and Ulrike Garde. 2015. Staging Real People: On the Arts and Effects of Non-Professional Theatre Performers. Performance Paradigm: A Journal of Performance and Contemporary Culture 11: 5–15. Nicholson, Helen. 2005. Applied Drama: The Gift of Theatre. London: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1353/tt.2006.0022. O’Toole, Emer, Andrea Pelegrí Kristić, and Stuart Young. 2017. Ethical Exchanges in Translation, Adaptation and Dramaturgy. Leiden: Brill Rodopi. Paetau, Laura, and Azadeh Sharifi. 2020. On Multilinguality, Decolonisation and Postmigrant Theatre: A Conversation Between Azadeh Sharifi and Laura Paetau. In Dramaturgy of Migration: Staging Multilingual Encounters in Contemporary Theatre, 71–77. London: Routledge. Phipps, Alison M. 2019. Decolonising Multilingualism: Struggles to Decreate. Bristol: Multilingualism Matters. Ranciere, Jacques. 2009. The Emancipated Spectator. London, New  York: Verso Books. Read, Alan. 1993. Theatre and Everyday Life: An Ethics of Performance. London: Routledge.

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———. 2008. Theatre, Intimacy and Engagement: The Last Human Venue. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Refugee Tales. n.d. A Welcome from Our Patron, Ali Smith. Accessed July 10, 2020. https://www.refugeetales.org/about. Ridout, Nicholas. 2009. Theatre & Ethics. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. RISE. 2015. 10 Things You Need to Consider if You Are an Artist—Not of the Refugee and Asylum Seeker Community- Looking to Work with Our Community. http://riserefugee.org/10-­things-­you-­need-­to-­consider-­if-­you-­ are-­an-­artist-­not-­of-­the-­refugee-­and-­asylum-­seeker-­community-­looking-­to-­ work-­with-­our-­community/. Rogoff, Irit. 2000. Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture. London, New York: Routledge. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 2008. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London, New  York, Dunedin: Zed Books Ltd, University of Otago Press. https://doi.org/10.1161/01.STR.32.1.139. Smith, Ali. 2015. The Detainee’s Tale by Ali Smith: ‘I Thought You Would Help Me’. The Guardian, June 28. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/ jun/27/ali-­smith-­so-­far-­the-­detainees-­tale-­extract. Thompson, James. 2009. Performance Affects: Applied Theatre and the End of Effect. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Trampoline House. n.d. Trampoline House, Learn from Us. Accessed July 6, 2020. https://www.trampolinehouse.dk/research. Turner, Cathy, and Synne Behrndt. 2016. Dramaturgy and Performance. Rev. ed. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Van Kerkhoven, Marianne. 1994. The Theatre Is in the City and the City Is in the World and Its Walls Are of Skin: State of the Union Speech, 1994 Theatre Festival. SARMA: Laboratory for Discursive Practices and Expanded Publication. http://sarma.be/docs/3229. Weil, Simone. 2002. Gravity and Grace. Gravity and Grace. London, New York: Routledge Classics. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203168455_gravity_and_ grace. Woolley, Agnes. 2014. Contemporary Asylum Narratives: Representing Refugees in the Twenty-First Century. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Zipes, Jack. 2015. The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 4

Ethnoplaywriting: Creating Belonging

Fig. 4.1  Woman by Abbas Haj

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 H. Grøn, Asylum and Belonging through Collective Playwriting, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24808-5_4

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As Nicholson notes, ‘applied drama and theatre are interdisciplinary and hybrid practices’ (2005, 2). This extends to social process and awareness, as most practitioners are likely to be ‘motivated by individual or social change’ (6). Therefore, there is a contingent interest in ‘the power of theatre to address something beyond the form itself’ (3). This covers a wide area of approaches, wherein the various forms offer their ‘own theories, debates and highly specialised practices’ (2). While I would, in the broadest sense, place ethnoplaywriting within applied theatre, this chapter is an attempt at narrowing the focus by providing the specifics of a ‘highly specialised practice’ and suggest its wider applicability. Ingold makes convincing distinctions between ethnography and anthropology (2017, 2019). He offers that ethnography is tangential and remains at a distance, thereby ethnography’s aim is doing about, while anthropology requires an immersion and dedication making it correspondent and becomes instead a doing with (2019, 4). Nonetheless, I use them interchangeably here, not to lose sight of the distinctions guarding specialised practices, but rather to reflect that both descriptions from anthropologists and ethnographers contribute to ethnoplaywriting. Like the previous chapter, ethnoplaywriting came from having spent time ‘in the field’ with the sistas, the group in Sjælsmark and in refugee communities. Throughout this project, I drew on cross-disciplinary theory. The people-­ centred, critically and ethically aware approach I read in anthropology and ethnography resonated with the way I was called to open up my craft to be present creatively, communally and politically with the people I was writing with. For example, as the following section will unfold, D. Soyini Madison defines critical ethnography through performance terminology by posing that doing ethnography is performance, which also becomes a question of belonging. ‘Ethics […] defines the distance between what is and what ought to be. This distance designates the space where we have something to do’ (1886, 199) De Certeau wrote. If dramaturgical ethics is the designated doing, then the hands-on, on-the-ground approach of ethnoplaywriting is situated in the ‘space where we have something to do’. Thinking playwriting and ethnography together thereby seeks to reflect this framework: while dramaturgical ethics called for a kind of theatre and approach that could go beyond the theatrical frame to honour ethical stipulations, ethnoplaywriting unfolds in the micro-moments and minor dramaturgies of making theatre with refugees and asylum seekers. It highlights how the skills required to do this on the part of the practitioners are both specifically ethnographic (as that which ensures e.g. adherence to critical,

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ethical frameworks) and ardently those of a playwright. This combination is reflected further in calling the practice reflection ‘fieldwork’ within this study. While Ingold would classify it as anthropology, ethnoplaywriting is distinctly a doing with, rendered in this project’s modus operandi of examining home and belonging through playwriting with rather than about. Here, through collaboration and co-writing, the sistas and the group in Sjælsmark were the ones writing and performing the play based on the stories they would like to tell about their lives of belonging or compromised belonging. This highlighted the need for a creative and ethnographic approach that could adequately listen and observe with and create storied space in a compassionate way. Ethnoplaywriting will therefore be examined in the following ways: one, through its affinity with political listening and vulnerable observing to suggest that what builds worlds and communities is what might be undertaken creatively together. Two, it seeks alliances with the therapeutic spaces of narrative therapy in the re-­ authoring of stories that might challenge previously held perceptions about the world. Three, it thinks about the act of writing as a way of belonging by exploring the tensions between the poetics and illusory language of writing and theatre and this study’s involvement with everyday and lived experiences of those seeking asylum. Lastly, in acknowledgement that ‘the field’ is a complex and intersecting space of solidarity, politics and creativity, I reckon with the vulnerabilities of these doings in the world. This chapter, like the previous, offers an analytical lens to read the context-­specific fieldwork chapters through. I nonetheless map ethnoplaywriting’s wider uses by remarking on other theatrical and artistic projects throughout. Although, for evident reasons, these projects do not conceive of themselves within the field of ethnoplaywriting, they help situate and support this chapter’s underlying questions of what kind of playwriting is necessary for contemporary challenges and whether it is possible to create belonging through storytelling.

4.1   Theatre and Ethnography: Mapping Terminology and Practices Practitioners on either side of theatre, anthropology and ethnography have remarked on the potential of one another and on the already existing connections within their respective disciplines. In the introduction, Ingold remarked on art and anthropology’s mutual potential for a future-facing

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sustainability. Correspondingly, Turner wrote about the necessity of including a performative lens on his study with the Ndembu people of Zambia: ‘anthropology’, he remarked, ‘could give me only limited insight into the dynamics of social dramas’ (1982, 12). To understand the way people performed their social functions and subtleties of experience, when what is in question is ‘Erlebnis […] “what has been lived through”’ (12), he needed the ‘gift of theatre’ (9). This widens the perspective of performance in an ethno-anthropological field and continues in later disciplinary approaches like critical ethnography. Here, a performative lens is engaged with ethno-performance theory to reveal both the ‘social dramas’ of how people perform in their worlds and experiences (Erlebnis), but the ethnographer is understood to also perform in this cohabited ‘lived domain’ (9). Indeed, as Fitzpatrick and May note, critical ethnography acknowledges that researchers are ‘inextricably entangled in the contexts we inhabit and in the processes of knowledge production’ (2022, 2). This becomes not only a question of subjectivity and positionality in an ethical perspective (Madison 2012, 9), but also of belonging as ‘we bring our belongings into the field with us’ (9). Madison notes that this amounts both to an ethico-epistemological questioning how ethnographers know what they know, but also of how they ‘belong to what [they] know’ (9). Continuing the conversation between an ethnographer’s epistemology and belonging, feminist theorist and cultural critic Aimee Carrillo Rowe suggests that a person is inseparable from the theory they create. This reflects on doing the ‘homework’ (2005, 15) of interrogating one’s belonging. Indeed, if the ‘theory we create’ (15) is to allow ‘us to live in new and more just ways’ (15), this means ‘making the familiar strange, of revisiting home to unearth what is at stake in its making’ (16). Echoing the previous chapter’s exploration of arts-based methods and their contribution to nuanced research, Conquergood notes the narrative and theatrical potential of an ethnographic field and the radical potential of ‘performance studies research’ (2002, 145), as something that can challenge ‘[d]ominant epistemologies [by being] attuned to meanings that are masked, camouflaged, indirect, embedded, or hidden in context’ (146). Donna Haraway locates this as a ‘view from a body’ (1991, 196) as opposed to the critically distanced ‘view from above’ (Conquergood 2002, 146). Thinking of Conquergood’s dialogical space as integral to understanding how critical ethnographers enter the field, Madison reads that Conquergood’s ‘dialogical performance’ (2012, 10) is ‘framed as performance to emphasize the living communion of […] embodied

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interplay’. In communal space people might ‘question, debate and challenge one another’ (10) in a way that ‘resists conclusions’ (10). Madison deduces from dialogue’s commitment to keeping the ‘conversations […] open and ongoing’ (10–11) that dialogue can be the ‘quintessential encounter with others’ (11). In Bieger’s narratology, this dialogical space translates to the need for listening and witnessing practices, in the same way an ethnographer might observe, participate and perform: Bieger identifies narratological belonging practice as reflective of one’s ‘“need to tell”: to interpret one’s surroundings and express one’s being in relation to them, hoping that someone out there is listening’ (2015, 22). Behar similarly reflects that storytellers need storylisteners, which suggests that both teller and listener enter into the space via the same premises, namely that what needs to be told needs to be listened to (2012, 2). In his anthropological field, Jackson reckons that stories are what allows for ‘recognis[ing] ourselves in otherness’ (1995, 4), which from the perspective of ethnoplaywriting presents an opportunity for doing the ‘homework’ of sharing home. Theatre practitioners have also used the methods and approaches of anthropology. The introduction remarked on Good Chance Theatre Company being founded by two playwrights who went to Calais. This in-­ situ approach prompts reflection on how a playwright’s skills might be applied beyond the practiced craft of scripting embodied and staged storytelling to work also in the lived domain and global realities of a refugee camp. The Odin Theatre in Holstebro in Denmark, housing also the International School of Theatre Anthropology. Founded by Euginio Barba, ISTA provides anatomically focused practice decoding the performer’s body in the world and on stage through empirical methods that are mindful of a performer’s daily life and cultural background (Barba and Savarese 1991). Ethnographic methods can be traced also in verbatim and documentary theatre, seen in the previous chapter’s notation of Ice & Fire scripting their plays from interviews with detainees. Similarly, playwright Inua Ellams wrote his play Barbershop Chronicles (2017) from recordings he conducted in barbershops in London and different countries in Africa. In an interview, Ellams mirrors Rowe’s argument of ethnographic theory as reflecting personal reckonings with belonging, by remarking how his play reflects his geographically criss-crossing biography of coming to the UK from Nigeria as a refugee, reckoning with belonging and non-­ belonging (Ellams and Collins-Hughes 2019). Ellams’ play connects these different places through a global conversation: the play can be read as a

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remark on the social potential of theatrical connectivity by showing that similar conversations happen in different parts of the world. Predating this book, I have used similar approaches as a practitioner and a playwright, for example, in writing the play The Giant and her Daughter (Grøn and Leylines Theatre 2016). Scripted from interviews with actor Vasso Georgiadou, who performed herself, the play unfolds the story of the women in her family, their migrations and their ways of belonging and not belonging through verbatim practices and multilingual dramaturgies. While I am convinced by verbatim and documentary theatre’s ability to produce reflective and important pieces of theatre, I believe that there is more to be gained from the combination of ethnography and playwriting. The reason for preferring and developing ethnoplaywriting as a result from this project’s practice is that, in some cases, verbatim and documentary theatre can be at the risk of excluding or neglecting people in the process or final product. I identified in the scripting from interviews or the documentation of people’s lives a potential hazard of slipping into the territory of appropriation, of making something about rather than with, thereby neglecting the imperatives of dramaturgical ethics. A process-­ oriented approach, where the play and performance was undertaken by the groups and where anything we might stage was as much a product of time spent together in dialogical space as it was of an ethno-creative process, reflected attempts at circumventing and pre-empting ethical and aesthetical pitfalls. For example, I was presented with a similar choice about people’s personal stories as the practitioners describe in Applied Theatre: Resettlement: Drama, Refugees and Resilience, where drama was used as a tool for interrogating the resettlement and resilience of refugee youth: ‘engaging with these stories directly, avoiding them entirely in favour of symbolic or fictional material, or finally, focusing only on personal stories that related to post-arrival experiences’ (Balfour et al. 2015, 5). By shifting the focus away from a final product of performance to the creative process, the groups could make their own agentive and theatrical choices about whether and how they worked with their stories. This amounted to two very different choices: in Sjælsmark the group chose to engage with their experiences of compromised belonging and the asylum system in a more direct way, while the sistas worked indirectly and more collectively with their experiences through a fictional story. This enforces Nicholson’s view that in applied theatre practice ‘fiction and reality, self and otherness, are not in opposition or isolated from each other but […] interrelated and mutually embedded’ (2005, 67). Ethnoplaywriting came from a desire to

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understand how stories might create both belonging and compromised belonging, and how theatre might be a medium in which to have these conversations in a way that resisted straightforward answers or easy conclusions. Engaging with stories in an ethno-narrative space offers insight into how stories can be worked with in order that they might do Rowe’s ‘homework’ of restructuring a home. But such dialogues could only happen on the basis of what I later identified as political listening, vulnerable observing and spending ethnographic time. This section has sought not to map the influence of one discipline on the other, but rather to make a case for the already existing and embedded mutual practices of ethnography/anthropology and theatre. While playwriting is a narratively engaged practice concerned with the telling of stories and building of worlds (however non-linear) in the fictive and embodied time-and-space of theatre, the methods of playwriting can be applied (as dramaturgical ethics made a case for) also to the reading and decoding of the semiotics of the world, and by making aesthetic and ethical choices about which stories are written and how they are told. This is reflected in the anthropological and ethnographic practices of entering lived domains through the stories people want to tell about their own worlds, of understanding how they might perform in their social worlds and in the creation of nuanced tension-holding and resolution-resisting accounts of a fieldwork. Bieger notes ‘belonging as an anthropological premise of narration’ (2018, 22), thereby reflecting that combining ethnography with playwriting also seeks to resist the dominance of ethnographic voice particularly when the premise for narration is belonging. Together, ethnography and theatre expand on understandings of storytelling, dramaturgy and performing beyond a theatrical frame to hold in view how stories are at work in people’s everyday realities.

4.2  Political Listening and Vulnerable Observing Leah Bassel frames political listening as a democratic project where listening is a micropolitical action opening up activist space. Behar poses vulnerable observing as a challenge to paradigms of witnessing and critical distance in anthropology. Instead she explores how observer and observed might be open to one another. Though neither political listening nor vulnerable observing are explicitly theatrical, outwardly radical or explicitly political, I identify them nonetheless as pertinent to ethnoplaywriting. One, because they challenge dynamics of power by identifying something

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mutual at stake in the dialogical space of writing plays with those who are unhomed; two, because in their quiet way, they can be read as calls to do the ‘homework’ of relating differently in a shared home. Treating theatre as a micropolitical ‘platform from which to enunciate broader conceptions of justice’ (Thompson 2015, 434), I trace political listening and vulnerable observing in languages of theatre and poetry, among others, in McCartney’s Rachel’s House. Bassel’s political listening is a call for a kind of politics that can listen specifically to those who have been excluded from being heard. Reading Rancière, Bassel proposes that the ‘agonistic democratic [project] reveals how people can and do demand to be recognised as speaking subjects in contexts where they are not recognised as political beings capable of “voice”’ (2017, 6). Conceived through J.L. Austin’s speech acts, where language and speaking construct worlds, Bassel argues that the political exclusion of certain demographics is then also an exclusion of constructing the world. Political listening becomes corrective as ‘a social and political process’, which can create ‘shared responsibility to change roles of speakers and listeners [and] disrupt power and privilege’ (3, all emphasis in original). Reverberant of Ingold’s reflections in the introduction, Bassel notes that ‘[l]istening with humility and ethical care can provide a resource to understand the contemporary world while pointing to the possibility of a different kind of future’ (4). Les Back maps the creative potential in listening as an orientation towards both a political now but also future possibility, by stating that listening involves the ‘process of listening for a story. Such an imaginative attention takes notice of what might be at stake in the story itself and how details and events connect to larger sets of public issues’ (2007, 7). Bassel and Back identify the discursive field of ethnoplaywriting by formulating the kind of listening and attunement necessary for understanding the radius of sound away from dominant political spaces towards the what-is of people’s lives and the what-ifs of its creative potential. This prompts reflection on whether artistic practice is a way of listening for silences and gaps in stories, while political listening contributes to ethnoplaywriting by revealing political dimensions and providing the terminology for how dialogical space can be aesthetically and ethically reverberant. In his seminal work, Poetics Aristotle offers further foundations for engaging with artistic possibility. Aristotle notes that contrary to what a historian would do, which is to say what has happened, art instead says ‘the kind of thing that would happen i.e. what is possible’ (1996, 16).

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Although departing far from both current time and space to draw Aristotle onto the page, the suggestion of art’s ability to ‘dwell in possibility’ (17) offers language for the intersection of art and politics in ethnoplaywriting, where possibility holds potential. Speaking from within my own practice, theatre and poetry have offered powerful tools to think possibility into lived experiences: I have witnessed how stories can unhome people through centring certain subject positions via silencing others and I have been part of social moments of making theatre that produced different approaches to the world and politics by working its fictive and imaginative potential. I insert ethnoplaywriting into the conversation between these two by remarking how working at once with lived experiences and with creative possibility, ethnoplaywriting opens up spaces both in the world and within imagination. This offers opportunities for re-examination and an approach of dwelling in possibility, which might infuse entrenched ideas with new narrative potential. From an anthropological perspective, Jackson echoes this and an Aristotelian identification of art as possibility by contending that ‘[e]vents get replayed in stories. [But] [s]tories [also] reshape the way we see events’ (1995, 157). Jackson’s dialectic illustrates how individual and political lives might be reimagined through engagement with dramatic possibility. Akin to Turner, Madison reflects that in the domain of an ethnographic field, people can be understood to ‘embody and enact’ (2012, 190), which becomes also a ‘performance of possibilities’ (190, emphasis in original) due to the discursive and possibility-rich field of sharing lived space. The London-based theatre company Cardboard Citizens work with and for homeless people through Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed and Forum Theatre by believing that theatre can be a ‘catalyst for change […] influence opinion and stimulate change’ ([n.d.]). Theatre, and specifically the dialogical space of forum theatre, makes ‘spect-actors’ (Boal 2000, 42) of its spectators, inviting them to take part in the action on stage. Remarking on the enacted possibility of such an approach, Cardboard Citizens (2011) reflect on their way of using ‘theatre to create a place where people could talk about change, homeless people could rehearse changes in their lives and a wider, general public could perhaps be informed about the issues homeless people face’. Behar’s approach of vulnerable observing uncovers novel possibilities in ethics, positionality and ways of relating. Introducing her term, Behar zooms in on Isabelle Allende’s short story ‘And Of Clay We Are Created’. Allende places the journalist Rolf Carlé amid the real events of the 1985 avalanche in Colombia, where 13-year-old Omaira Sánchez lies buried

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underneath the rubble. For nearly three days, rescue teams attempted in vain to save her, and in the end, the world watched as Omaira was dying. Towing the line between fiction and nonfiction, Allende explores the boundary of Carlé’s professional and journalistic stance. In the end, Behar writes, he ‘will not document tragedy as an innocent bystander. Crouching down in the mud [he] throws aside his camera and flings his arms around Omaira Sánchez as her heart and lungs collapse’ (2012, 1). Carlé here embodied what Behar considers the ‘central dilemma of all efforts of witnessing’ (2), namely: In the midst of a massacre, in the face of torture, in the eye of a hurricane, in the aftermath of an earthquake, or even, say, when horror looms apparently more gently in memories that won’t recede and so come pouring forth in the late-night quiet of a kitchen, as a storyteller opens her heart to a story listener, recounting hurts that cut deep and raw into the gullies of the self, do you, the observer, stay behind the lens of a camera, switch on the tape recorder, keep pen in hand? Are there limits—of respect, piety, pathos—that should not be crossed? (2)

Behar’s dilemma extends to both political listening and ethnoplaywriting by prompting reflections on the degree to which degree we risk ourselves in our work. Behar’s question has a certain gravitas because it reflects central and necessary considerations in working with refugees and asylum seekers. In this thesis and beyond I have been the storylistener and witness of both the big and small challenges of people’s lives. While I have recounted it as a privilege to lend a hand or an ear, the navigation between crouching down in the mud and respecting the limits of respect, piety and pathos reflect important navigations in both social and creative space. I read in the connection between Behar and ethnoplaywriting a follow-up question: do we listen to what we might not wish to hear? An answer might lie in reflecting that the way in which one is made vulnerable in observing (or listening, or writing plays) is that one’s relation to the world and self might radically change. By framing anthropology in this way as at once ‘resolutely person-specific and yet somehow not “personal”’, Behar questions the call to inter-human investment and academic rigour and distance (2012, 8). As with Carlé, Behar uncovers that in the person-­ specifics of a lived domain, the situation might entreat an investment of oneself beyond a professional framework. Carlé and Omaira illustrate this: there is evidently more at stake for Carlé than risking his professionalism in such a moment, something one might guess at as being moved by

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another’s suffering or not wanting Omaira to feel alone in her final moments of life. Moreover, there lies in the being mutually vulnerable perhaps a path to the practices of political listening that might work at restructuring the political positionalities of encounter that otherwise remain intact. McCartney’s Rachel’s House is dramatised through interviews with women leaving the prison system and living in ‘Rachel’s House, a community recovery program for women [in] Columbus, Ohio’ (Glover 2019, 107). While McCartney’s process might read as verbatim theatre, I read it through the political listening and vulnerable observing spaces of ethnoplaywriting. Exploring the play specifically through the question of home, producer and co-director of the first production of the play Jessie Glover explores how the play allowed the women to ‘to claim agency within their home life’ (2019, 108). Remarking on artistic potential of lived experience, Glover continues that this served to ‘interrupt conventional ideas about women’s role in the home and simplistic narratives of re-entry from prison to public life’ (108). In a way akin to how an anthropologist would situate themselves within their fieldwork (echoing e.g. Behar’s vulnerable observing) Glover remarks how McCartney spent weeks in community with the women both interviewing them, but ‘sharing meals and writing with the women’ (111, my italics). I read in Glover’s comments an attentiveness akin to political listening and vulnerable observing keeping in view the ‘ethical-interpersonal stakes of Community, conversation, self-narration, and listening’ (111). If so, this likely produced the trust that prompted McCartney’s (as quoted in Glover 2019, 111) remark in the foreword to the playtext that the women were able to share ‘the worst nightmares they have lived and their dreams’. In a scene where Belle is talking about whether or not she is a good mother, McCartney reproduces the moments observing by theatrically placing the audience in the listening position of the playwright. Belle states: ‘[h]ey. No. I am not going to give myself a real large pat on the back here. I just wasn’t a good mother’ (112). Glover remarks that in the interview situation, the ‘hey no’ was directed at the playwright, but in the performance, Belle directs it at the audience, which keeps the moment intact. Glover (113) argues that this ‘disrupts a spectator’s potential desire to be lulled by the “realness” or “rawness” of the narrative [which] complicates a straightforward listening-to-experience’. Glover thereby remarks also on its potential as a piece of political listening, as ‘[s]he will not be made a hero but will instead remain in charge of how her past is

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narrativized’ (113). In this subversion, McCartney demands the same non-­straightforward listening from the audience as McCartney did upon hearing Belle’s story displaying the potential of ethnoplaywriting to reach beyond process. Glover concludes that this process continues verbatim theatre’s ‘tradition of using performance to embody and bear witness to marginalized and traumatized communities’ (117). However, I contend that there is much more at stake in both product and process than bearing witness. In Political Dramaturgies and Theatre Spectatorship, Liz Tomlin continues the previous chapter’s reflection on spectatorship: reading Lindsay B. Cummings and Ahmed, Tomlin suggests when a ‘narrative of injustice is encapsulated [as a] narrative of suffering, the attention is displaced from the structures of inequality that permitted the wound to occur, leaving such structures unquestioned in place to continue the wounding’ (2019, 137). When the spectator cannot respond ‘dialogically’ (138), the social justice agenda is inhibited, and the attention is distributed to a different place, underscoring that many forms of witnessing denote passivity and an adherence to power dynamics of observed and observer. In process and product of Rachel’s House, I read a prevention of allowing an audience merely to ‘bear witness to marginalized and traumatised communities’ as Glover suggested. By producing dialogical moments of political listening, as exemplified above, the women are theatrically agentive in their ‘right to define the trajectory of [their] own reintegration and [hold] the power to articulate [their] loss and errors’ (Glover 2019, 113). This resisting of straightforward trajectories can be seen as a product of ethical and aesthetic commitments against victimisation and of time spent in conversation with the women and in investing in the major and minor dramaturgies of their lives. The practice of this thesis is inspired by the possibilities of political listening and vulnerable observing and processes and plays like Rachel’s House and How not to Drown for practicing ethico-aesthetic commitments. But political listening and vulnerable observing also draw out how ethnoplaywriting places the practitioner in micropolitical responsibility within the work and the work within the world. The social justice agenda informing the creative undertaking is understood to function not only within the process, but also within the aesthetics of the process and the aesthetics of the play. Departing from verbatim and documentary theatre, the commitment to dramaturgical ethics enforces ethnoplaywriting’s commitments to processes of time spent listening and observing as equally important as the scripting of people’s experience.

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4.3   Therapeutic Commitments: Can Stories Heal? During this project, I undertook two intensive courses led by the Institute of Narrative Therapy. Although the fieldwork was concluded at this time, narrative therapy helped ground some of the ways I had already been working with ethnoplaywriting. Picking up on Nicholson’s argument for the symbiosis between theory and practice not as ‘separate processes or modes of thought’ (2005, 14), but rather contingent on each other, where, borrowing from bell hooks, theory also becomes ‘social production’ (14), I argue that narrative therapy lends terminology to the often elusive therapeutic potential of applied theatre practice that ‘funder-facing and impact-driven’ (Evans 2020, 106) jargon fitted to social justice agendas can lose the nuances of. Contingent on a similar premise as the second chapter’s examination of stories as worldmaking, narrative therapy understands that when ‘people come to therapy, they tell stories’ (White 2007, 61). In a sentence near to how a playwright would work, founder Michael White writes that this means ‘people link the events of their lives in sequences that unfold through time according to a theme or plot’ (61) and the therapist helps the client ‘re-author’ their stories by encouraging them ‘to rectuite their lived experience, to stretch their minds, to exercise their imagination and to employ their meaning-making resources’ (61) in order to tell a different story. White positions narrative therapy as a non-structuralist, post-modern and non-pathologising therapeutic practice (White 2007; Hayward 2009). It can seem contradictory to conceive of something as post-modern, non-­ structuralist and narrative in the same breath. In fact, narrative, according to Bieger, has ‘yet to recover from the bad reputation that it gained in the wake of poststructuralism’ (2018, 8). Nonetheless, narrative therapy situates of itself in theoretical framework through its ability to not only challenge personal stories through the tools of narrative, but also to question dominant stories and pathologies that make inequality ever ‘the responsibility of individuals’ (Ahmed 2014). Narrative therapy understands instead that ‘power-based relations in Western society are endemic both interpersonally and more widely’ (Payne 2006, 12) and these ‘cultural, social and political factors are enmeshed with the problems people bring to therapy’ (12). Clients are helped to dis-embody and externalise the stories that enter lives ‘unquestioned and unexamined’ (16) by understanding them also as ‘the product of circumstances or interpersonal processes’ (12).

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Ethnoplaywriting similarly intersects into the embedded cultural and political narrative where people are encouraged to ‘ascribe the distressing and unjust results of […] social factors to themselves [and] are often implicitly encouraged to do so by those who hold positions of power’ (12). Like ethnoplaywriting and dramaturgical ethics, narrative therapy incurs criticalities towards the conclusions that are readily available in politics and society, and instead encourage processes of narratively and dramaturgically examine ‘issues of social power’ (12) and of re-authoring and plotting different stories. But it is within this wider scope that ethnoplaywriting is able to question that people are ever capable of re-authoring and living by different stories. If it is complex to unpick the social and political stories when holding citizen privilege in the ‘power-based relations in Western society’ (12), then the difficulty in doing so when living with the stories looming over those seeking asylum and experiencing forced migration can only be imagined. While both narrative therapy and ethnoplaywriting open up avenues of criticalities towards systemic and normative principles, it is crucial to question the value of telling different individual stories when societies’ stories remain the same. The main difference is, then, that ethnoplaywriting not only offers but actively encourages the engagement with fictions, and the imaginative and creative working through of the stories of both life and society. Reverberant both of Cardboard Citizens’ Forum Theatre and narrative therapy, Nicholson brings into view that theatre’s ability to deliberately blur ‘the divisions between fiction and reality’ (Nicholson 2005, 67) is what provides the opportunity for a narrative therapeutic re-authoring. Holding no claim to therapeutic consequences of the process of writing plays and performing theatre, ethnoplaywriting seeks nonetheless to stand alongside the restorative potential of sharing stories. The fact that the writing, performance and workshop process happens communally creates opportunities for political listening, vulnerable observing, witnessing and even belonging. Through this process, much like narrative therapy, ethnoplaywriting ‘encourages richer, combined narratives to emerge from disparate descriptions of experience’ (Payne 2006, 7), creating also interfaces to recognise one’s story in someone else’s or developing different language for one’s situation. Where narrative therapy tends to stop at the doorways of therapy sessions, ethnoplaywriting thinks the therapeutic potential of stories a step further to the dialogical space that can ‘challenge power vertically [and] tell stories from different spaces of narrative control and counter damaging binaries’ (Bassel 2017, 53). This can then reorient

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people to one another ‘through new forms of sociability to make sense together’ (53), giving potential to how narrative therapy might be applied also to social re-authoring.

4.4   Theatre as a Home, Writing as Belonging In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard (1994, 4) notes that ‘our house is our corner of the world […] it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word’. This, in turn, informs a narrative and interpretive relationship with the world, because it is possible to ‘read a house’ and ‘read a room’, meaning that ‘room and house are psychological diagrams that guide both writers and poets in their analysis of intimacy’ (38). Hereby, Bachelard makes connection between the spatial correlatives of home-as-­ house and its potential for reaching into the human psyche through being able to tell stories and reflect on the intermediate and intimate link between being and belonging (38). Constituting then not only a material structure for meaningmaking, Bachelard argues that house is also a dwelling for imagination and a structure for safeguarding a person’s memories and past. Continuing this line of enquiry, Emily Klein, Jennifer-Scott Mobley and Jill Stevenson open Performing Dream Homes by stating that ‘[f]or many theater practitioners and scholars, the cherished space of the stage, along with its hidden wings, narrow halls, and cluttered dressing rooms feels like a second home’ (2019, 3). This connection is underscored by ‘the terminology of the playhouse, allud[ing] to these domestic affinities between theatre and the home’ (3), traced in language like dark house, full house or front-of-house. They continue: ‘[i]n this theatrical lexicology, house paradoxically merges the private, intimate space of the home with the robust, public gathering space of the hall’ (3) and when a play starts, an audience is transported from ‘the tangible world of the playhouse and welcomed into a myriad of homes, both performatively and materially constructed’ (3–4). Here the space of theatre is understood as correspondent to unfolding narratives of home and senses of belonging. This section takes a leap to understand how seeking refuge in imaginary or quasi-fictive spaces, like theatre, might create a belonging, just like the act of writing might make a home for self and others. Indeed, when ‘we speak for ourselves, we create a home that we inhabit […] and that others may dwell in or resist as well’ (118). From an ethnoplaywriting viewpoint, Madison proposes that the ethnographer undertakes ‘performative writing’ (2012, 221) in the

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dissemination of their fieldwork. Performative writing is recognising that ‘the body writes’ (227, original emphasis). This means adhering to ‘radical empiricism [because] [m]eanings and experiences in the field are filtered and colored through the sensation of the body’ (227). Echoing Haraway’s ‘view from the body’, the dissemination of fieldwork is then contingent on this connection between self, performance and space. If the performative space of critical ethnography is also simultaneously a question of belonging, then writing through the body might constitute an embodied homecoming, akin to how poet Jericho Brown suggests that ‘[a] poem is a gesture toward Home’ (2019) and poet Paul Celan offers ‘poetry [as] a sort of homecoming’ (1972, 13). Both ‘gesture’ and ‘homecoming’ imply a movement or return from that which was not home, and poetry as a place to dwell. Emily Dickinson echoes this and rewires Aristotle’s identification of poetic possibility when she writes: ‘I dwell in Possibility—A fairer House than Prose’ (1999). As this chapter will unfold, Audre Lorde offers the radical perspective that the ‘safe-house’ (1984, 37) or ‘fairer house than prose’ of poetry is where what needs political attention is identified and worked through. Reading Lorde and Dickinson together, poetry seems to be a place for gathering strength and exploring the possibilities of approaching the world in such a way that makes belonging possible. Proposing poetry as a place of homecoming, and the act of writing a poem as a gesture towards a home, reflects on the radical potential of a fictive reworking of reality, and speaks also to Rushdie’s identification that lost homelands can only be recovered in imaginary ones (Rushdie 1992). Rushdie brings into view that imagined spaces cannot become conduits of home in a practical sense, while remarking also on the possibility of imagination. Rushdie’s words might be read, for example, through the narratological perspective identifying the ‘longing’ in ‘belonging’, and the ‘dwelling in possibility’ of creating what is not there, but what could be a temporary refuge. In an interview, violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja explains how her feeling of home is ‘mein Heiligtum, ich hüte es wie ein Kerze in einem Kristallglas. Es ist das Zerbrechlichste und Stärkste, was es gibt’ (‘My feeling of home is holy. I protect it like a candle in a crystal glass. It is the most fragile and the strongest thing there is’: My Translation) (Lemke-Matwey 2014). When she is asked how that connects to her art, she says: ‘[w]enn ich spiele, stelle ich mir vor, dass sich mein Körper öffnet, und die Kerze brennt für alle’ (‘When I play, I imagine that my body opens and that the candle burns for everybody’) (214). Kopatchinskaja offers vivid imagery

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to artistic practice might as providing a space where an audience might understand the fragility, tension and strength in her feeling of home, or in the terminology of this thesis: the complex dynamics of belonging and its compromises. I consider writing and theatre as able to hold the tensions in a similar interpretive and poetic manner, being involved in equal measures with the stories of homelessness as with its own potential to home. The interlude with Ahmed Kaya below underscores these intersections; at once situated deeply within the systemic compromises of belonging, narrative and theatrical spaces nonetheless bring him towards a sense of home. Interlude: Ahmad Kaya and the Kurdish Mountains

Ahmad Kaya was a part of the group in Sjælsmark. He chose another spelling of a famous Turkish-Kurdish singer for his pseudonym: Ahmet Kaya, who died in exile after he had been forced into hiding for writing lyrics and singing in Kurdish. One of his most renowned songs were: ‘Ya beni sararsa memleket hasreti’ (what if I am homesick?), which Ahmad Kaya showed me when reflecting on his own longing for home. He pondered that for his famous namesake, as for many people all over the world, Ahmet Kaya’s life had changed with a single sentence: writing and singing a line in Kurdish, which reflected the deeper intention to remain true to where he was from. For Sjælsmark Ahmad Kaya, as for the rest of the group, belonging was intrinsically bound up with questions surrounding citizenship and human rights, but his feeling of home was rooted in longing for a country he could no longer return to. For him, showing pictures of the mountains or the food, listening to songs or looking at videos of the dancing was a way of remaining in conversation with the place, encouraged by someone else looking and listening with him. In a workshop session he wrote the following monologue: There is a story that asks the question: if a flower is born in the mountain, how can it live in the city? How can it bloom and grow and reach for the sun away from its home? If you have lived in one place, and you’re dug up by your roots and planted somewhere else, how can you grow? How can you love again and have new relationships? People only have one heart, one home, one place they come from. They do not have many hearts to love many different people with. (Transcribed from Fig. 6.2 in the Fieldwork Reflection on Sjælsmark) (continued)

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(continued)

Ahmad Kaya prompted the idea that there might be a difference in home and belonging, which could also be considered temporal particularly in refugee situations. If so, then home the location left behind and a source of continued longing. Belonging is the profound wish for a place in the world, manifested by gaining refugee status through formal state-authored processes that thereby welcome a person to a current context. ‘My problem’, Ahmad Kaya would tell me, ‘is not asylum. It is this word “system”’, while home remained a longing for mountainous roads and landscapes that he was able to access only through photos, poetry and his own writing.

4.5  Letting It Break Your Heart: ‘An Aesthetics of Care’ In Thompson’s ‘aesthetics of care’ he develops an interpersonal parallel to Bal’s ‘migratory aesthetics’. Thompson describes his concept by remarking on the care of his colleague Antoine Muvuyni, ‘a drama worker from eastern Democratic of the Congo’ (2015, 430) who was shot in the arm during an attack where six of his co-workers were killed. Thompson and his wife observe the physiotherapist and plastic surgeon do their work requiring skill, attention and mutual trust. Independent of each other, they remark on this work as ‘beautiful’ (432 emphasis in original), thereby using ‘aesthetic criteria to judge the exceptional in this example of care’ (432). In a statement reflecting dramaturgical ethics, Thompson notes that when Antoine came to stay with his family, he was aware that if he ‘failed in this call to take care of [his] colleague, then the ethics [and] aesthetics […] of [his] professional work was worth very little’ (430). This section takes this ‘aesthetics of care’ at face value to examine the correlatives between care, ethics and aesthetics within and beyond artistic works of mutual storytelling. In the Traverse Theatre bar during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August 2019, I sit with McCartney before a showing of How Not to Drown. The play details Kastrati’s refugee journey fleeing from the Kosovan War to the UK and his journey going through the asylum and foster care system. As an actor and co-writer, Kastrati has shaped his story

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both in writing and by performing in the play. In a conversation with other people, McCartney is asked about the process and the play. She tells us ‘he broke my heart, and so I had to work with him’. What arrested me was not the notion that heart and work can correlate; I can think of few theatre makers who do not bring a segment of ‘heart’ to their work, and whose work is not made better by doing so. What I continue to note was the level of care shown throughout and beyond the process between Kastrati and McCartney, understood, perhaps most accurately, as vulnerable observing and aesthetics of care. Bringing an ethnographic echo to this and following on from the previous chapter’s exploration of ‘no pure place to stand’, Behar ends her book on vulnerable observing detailing her friend and colleague Renato Rosaldo’s anthropology and seminal essay ‘Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage’ (1993). On a shared fieldwork among the Ilongot tribes, looking into their tradition of headhunting as an outlet for anger and grief, Rosaldo lost his wife in an accident. Never experiencing the desire to headhunt himself, it is Rosaldo’s bereavement that gives him a depth of perception and understanding as to how grief, anger and despair could lead people to do so. While he is criticised for including subjective understandings in his text, Behar notes that these critiques were made of someone who ‘has made himself extremely vulnerable’ (2012, 169), while the people criticising him refuse ‘to make themselves vulnerable in how they read him’ (169). Behar suggests instead that ‘[s]cience should make it possible for the unspeakable to be spoken and open borders previously closed’ (12). This further probes Behar to call for a more nuanced and radical approach of ‘anthropology that breaks your heart’ (177). There are necessary diffractions to this, such as examining one’s participation through the methods of dramaturgical ethics and understanding who is made vulnerable by what discourses and categories. Evans’ linguistic shift from ‘vulnerable’ to ‘vulnerabled’ (2020, 21) in refugee contexts is here helpful in bringing into view that while people seeking asylum may indeed be vulnerable in many different areas of their lives, describing people as vulnerable also enacts ‘vulnerability upon them […] as a constant linguistic reminder that decisions, actions and structures are what are causing these vulnerabilities, not the people themselves’ (21). Connecting to the previous chapter’s examination of ethics as that which can open people up to one another in mutual negotiations of shared space, I here reiterate that when compassion, care and heart are in question in aesthetic space and production, it is necessary to direct continued questioning at

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positionalities. Arendt notes how pity keeps power-relations intact, as pity does not look at the ‘strong and the weak with an equal eye’ (1965, 89). ‘[W]ithout the presence of misfortune, pity could not exist’ (85), Arendt continues, and therefore it has ‘just as much vested interest in the existence of the unhappy as the thirst for power’ (85). For Arendt, solidarity poses a very different ground for relation, as it, opposite to pity, does not need to produce a weak and a strong side. In ‘Selfcare as Warfare’ Ahmed writes that although vulnerability is not a privilege, privilege can ‘reduce the costs of vulnerability, so if things break down, if you break down, you are more likely to be looked after’ (2014). So far, vulnerability has been treated as an academic, aesthetic and ethical call to be changed and affected by another in a moment of mutual vulnerability. But through Ahmed, vulnerability emerges as a political question as there are those vulnerabilities about which no choice can be made: war, illness or loss of loved ones. In Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou’s Dispossession: The Performative in the Political Athanasiou remarks that ‘vulnerability is about the abiding and vital potential of being affected by others and of owing ourselves to others’ (2013, 158). However, in equal measures it is ‘always about the potential for injuring, the potential for unevenly distributed and experienced injuries of injustice’ (158). Yuval-Davis echoes this as she problematises personal investments of solidarity in neoliberal democracies: here in both influence and making of ‘public institutions, emotions such as care and compassion are not sufficient, unless there is power to make them affective’ (2011, 8). She dismantles particularly, much like Thompson does in his essay, the care-sector work performed, most often, by women, which ‘facilitates and oils, rather than obstructs and resists, the smooth working of globalized neo liberalism’ (8). In ‘Affective Economies’ (2004) Ahmed complicates emotion as that which also creates politics by exemplifying how hatred, fear and othering of certain demographics create racist politics. Ahmed here probes a working beyond a heart-on-our-sleeves approach of ‘letting it break your heart’ or ‘anthropology that breaks your heart’, to instead suggest methods of softer engagements and a tending to the things that break our hearts as something that directs our attention, activism and aesthetics. Athanasiou supports this by reckoning that ‘there must be another way to enact vulnerability’ (2013, 158). Echoing Yuval-Davis’ introductory calls for re-imagining belonging from a multi-trajectoried perspective, Athanasiou suggests that this might be a part of the ‘critical project to […] repoliticize “belonging”’ (159) beyond normative categories of identity

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and state. Reflecting Bieger, Athanasiou notes how there is a longing in belonging, in this case a ‘longing for a different way to cohabit the political’ (159). Connecting to the modes of undoing and decreating at work in dramaturgical ethics and the call for different forms of belonging at work in this study, Athanasiou continues to remark that ‘[s]uch a cohabitation would involve the performative-affective dimensions that (in)form political desires to belong’ (159) by ‘productively deploy performative (un)belonging’ (159). I argue that it is nonetheless worth asking the question of what an affinity with that which breaks our hearts allows us to know that might otherwise be impossible to know, while continuing to address the ethical dimensions of positionality and vulnerability. Ahmed and Yuval-Davis keep in sight that the way people are vulnerable (or ‘vulnerabled’) is contingent on social, institutional and political factors, while Behar offers perspectives that vulnerable observing and openheartedness provide critical frameworks for questioning women performing care and for knowledge-­ decolonising agendas. Athanasiou’s perspective uncovers that vulnerability, and by extension openheartedness and aesthetics of care, might reformulate a politics of belonging in language of performative (un) belonging, decreation and undoing to normative and systemic identity categories. These viewpoints, I think, are not mutually exclusive through the critical frameworks and methodologies of ethnoplaywriting and dramaturgical ethics; it is possible both to be open to another in aesthetic compassion space while examining one’s investment. Offering language for how theatre and poetry reach into this debate, poet David Whyte follows the Greek etymology of ‘vulneras’ meaning ‘wound’ to suggest ‘vulnerability as the place where you’re open to the world [and poetry as a] language against which you have no defences’ (2018). In her ethnographic study about care and disease among the Canadian Inuit, anthropologist Lisa Stevenson reads Walter Benjamin to frame her study of artistic images as that which ‘expresses without formulating’ (Benjamin 1968, 36) and ‘capture[s] uncertainty and contradiction without having to resolve it’ (Stevenson 2014, 13). She argues that it is these images, this frame, that allow for a standing within the myriad of uncertainties that life, and especially the life for those who are politically and historically marginalised, presents. There seems to me to be something in taking this in tandem: in a time of polemic debates, a mode of defence against certain languages is understandable, especially against those spoken by the people one might not agree with. However, following

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a line from Whyte to Stevenson and Benjamin suggests that poetic and theatrical space is able to hold tensions and complexities that our political and social spheres cannot. Crucial to this is that creative spaces hold these tensions in a way where it is possible to remain open, even vulnerable, to them. Theatre, then, can present issues through affects that make clear challenges and contradictions without the promise of immediate or easy solutions. Offering instead a space for decreation and defamiliarisation to let something new emerge, we might think about how a story of someone we might not (on political, legal paper) have anything in common with can nonetheless be understood as the story also of ourselves. Not in order to own or appropriate it, but to acknowledge that the distance political language creates between us (using wordings of borders and insurmountable cultural differences and national identities) can prove to be narrower than first imagined. In an interview about How Not to Drown, McCartney remarks on using her numerous skills in the process: ‘[t]here’s the playwright bit, the applied theatre bit, and all that training with foster care working with people who are damaged or traumatised in some way’ (Cooper and McCartney 2019). In the author’s note to the playtext, McCartney writes that the play is ‘adapted and dramatised […] from transcribed interviews […] with Dritan Kastrati between 2014–2018’ (2019, vi). I remark on these together to show that while McCartney and Kastrati’s play can certainly be considered verbatim and applied theatre, there is something observant of the process of ethnoplaywriting and vulnerable observing in McCartney’s understanding of the foster care system and in Kastrati holding co-author credit over his own story. Performing himself in the play gives incentive to consider the connection with narrative therapy and dramatic possibility, but also to understand the play and process as an aesthetics of care. In a statement reverberant of Nicholson’s remarks on applied theatre’s social justice agenda and Madison’s notations of critical ethnography, McCartney forges these connections herself: I think it was the fostering that re-engaged me with why I was making theatre in the first place, and why I wanted to write plays. I think I got my anger back. I rediscovered my rage. I’d always written plays about social justice, and I’d forgotten that was why I’d started. (Cooper and McCartney 2019)

As Thompson notes, care is often also ‘a comment on contemporary care institutions’ (2015, 435). Within a play detailing a child navigating both

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the asylum and the foster care system, Dritan notes that ‘you can’t fake “home” if you’re a foster carer. You have to be “home”’ (McCartney and Kastrati 2019, 81), giving both political and personal directives for systemic change and interpersonal authenticity. The play ends on an exilic note by showing Dritan in an airport after he has visited his family in Kosovo after years in the UK. Dritan asks: DRITAN/CHORUS:  Do I want to go home? I mean England … I don’t know … Where is my home? It’s not here. And it’s not there … It is here but … My language isn’t my language […] I just have to learn everything all over again. (87) Leaving home as an open question reflects the difficulty in belonging when navigating systems that unhome and when living a relationship between two different places. Connecting to Améry’s ‘there is no new home’ and remarking on the difficulty in finding footing in compromised belonging, Dritan reflects that to him the open question of home amounts to learning everything anew. The play here becomes the dialogical space that holds these tensions for him. McCartney remarks that this play has been ‘a labour of love’ (Cooper and McCartney 2019), not least through its global relevance, but also because of theatre’s ability to create moments of empathy and encounter. I propose that, read through the lens of ethnoplaywriting and ‘letting it break your heart’, How Not to Drown and its process reveal not only the numerous skills required of a playwright, but also display how theatre can be an act of care. An act of care that might at once be a comment on care systems, but might also through aesthetics, ethics and process, give back a segment of care lost to those systems. In this way, McCartney used both stagecraft to create dialogical space of encounter that forges political listening and vulnerable observing bringing into view how Kastrati was vulnerabled by the systems and institutions in his life. But she also produced ethnographic and interpersonal moments of care and aesthetics in processes of interviews and affects that re-authored his story in a way that allowed him to belong to it. On the day at the Traverse, McCartney’s and my conversation continued these themes: the degrees to which we remain open and commit to ethical listening and investment in people’s stories, the boundaries of respect, piety, pathos, the deepened understanding of people’s challenges

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and sorrows through being shared stories with; understandings crucial for writing a play, but infinitely difficult to remain at a critical and invulnerable position from. I venture that ‘letting it break your heart’ can sharpen our focus and direct our political attention. Speaking from within my own practice when I have been called to care deeply, this has been met with an equally strong imperative of being called to action. As Thompson notes, ‘public justice and private care’ (Thompson 2015, 435) are often a foundational connection to aesthetic pursuits that engage with the world.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2004. Affective Economies. Social Text 79 (2): 117–139. ———. 2014. Selfcare as Warfare. Feministkilljoys Blog. http://feministkilljoys. com/2014/08/25/selfcare-­as-­warfare/. Arendt, Hannah. 1965. On Revolution. London: Penguin Books. Aristotle. 1996. Poetics. London: Penguin. Bachelard, Gaston. 1994. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press. Back, Les. 2007. The Art of Listening. London, New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Balfour, Michael, Penny Bundy, Bruce Burton, Julie Dunn, and Nina Woodrow. 2015. Applied Theatre: Resettlement: Drama, Refugees and Resilience. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Barba, Euginio, and Nicola Savarese. 1991. A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The Secret Art of the Performer. London: Routledge. Bassel, Leah. 2017. The Politics of Listening: Possibilities and Challenges for Democratic Life. London: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/ 9781137014597_4. Behar, Ruth. 2012. The Vulnerable Observer Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart. Boston: Beacon Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1968. Illuminations. Edited by Hannah Arendt. New  York: Schocken Books. Bieger, Laura. 2015. No Place Like Home; Or, Dwelling in Narrative. New Literary History 46 (1): 19–39. ———. 2018. Belonging and Narrative: A Theory of the American Novel. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. Boal, Augusto. 2000. Theatre of the Oppressed. London: Pluto. Brown, Jericho. 2019. Duplex. Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/152729/duplex. Butler, Judith, and Athena Athanasiou. 2013. Dispossession: The Performative in the Political. Cambridge: Polity. Celan, Paul. 1972. Paul Celan: Selected Poems. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books.

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Certeau, Michel de. 1886. Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cardboard Citizens. 2011. Untold Stories: Cardboard Citizens’ Forum Theatre at Homeless Hostels. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srvnPJcLmlM. ———. n.d. What We Do. Accessed July 18, 2020. https://cardboardcitizens. org.uk/who-­we-­are/what-­we-­do/. Conquergood, Dwight. 2002. Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research. TDR: The Drama Review 46 (2): 145–156. https://doi.org/10.121 5/9780822375128-­009. Cooper, Neil, and Nicola McCartney. 2019. Playwright Nicola McCartney on Heritage, and How Not to Drown. The Herald, July 12, 2019. https://www. heraldscotland.com/arts_ents/17764681.playwright-­n icola-­m ccartney-­ heritage-­not-­drown/. Dickinson, Emily. 1999. I Dwell in Possibility. Poetry Foundation. https://www. poetryfoundation.org/poems/52197/i-­dwell-­in-­possibility-­466. Ellams, Inua. 2017. Barbershop Chronicles. London: Oberon Books. Ellams, Inua, and Laura Collins-Hughes. 2019. ‘Barber Shop Chronicles’ Gives Black Men Control of Their Story. The New York Times, December 2, 2019. h t t p s : / / w w w. n y t i m e s . c o m / 2 0 1 9 / 1 2 / 0 2 / t h e a t e r / b a r b e r-­s h o p -­ chronicles.html. Evans, Catrin. 2020. The Arts of Integration: Scottish Policies of Refugee Integration and the Role of the Creative and Performing Arts. University of Glasgow. Fitzpatrick, Katie, and Stephen May. 2022. Critical Ethnography and Education: Theory, Methodology and Ethics. New  York: Routledge. https://doi.org/1 0.4324/9781315208510-­1. Glover, Jessie. 2019. Staging Recovery as Home Work in Rachel’s House. In Performing Dream Homes: Theater and the Spatial Politics of the Domestic Sphere. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Grøn, Helene. 2019. ‘Where Are You from? A Woman’s Body’: Navigating Notions of Belonging through Poetry and Playwriting with Refugees and Asylum Seekers. Scottish Journal of Performance 6 (1): 55–80. https://doi. org/10.14439/sjop.2019.0601.04. Grøn, Helene, and Leylines Theatre. 2016. The Giant and Her Daughter. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1gpjBCmTPY&t=1100s. Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. Hayward, Mark. 2009. Is Narrative Therapy Systemic. The Institute of Narrative Therapy. http://www.theinstituteofnarrativetherapy.com//wp-­content/ uploads/2019/02/is-­n arrative-­s ystemic-­p aper-­c ontext105.pdf?LMCL= jAvywk. Ingold, Tim. 2017. Debate: Anthropology Contra Ethnography. Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (1): 21–26. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/ pdfplus/10.14318/hau7.1.005.

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———. 2019. Art and Anthropology for a Sustainable World. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 00: 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-­9655. 13125. Jackson, Michael. 1995. At Home in the World. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Klein, Emily, Jennifer-Scott Mobley, and Jill Stevenson. 2019. Performing Dream Homes: Theater and the Spatial Politics of the Domestic Sphere. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Lemke-Matwey, Christine. 2014. Geigerin P.  Kopatchinskaja: Mein Rollendes R. Die Zeit, January 2, 2014. http://www.zeit.de/2014/02/moldawien-­ geigerin-­patricia-­kopatchinskaja. Lorde, Audre. 1984. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley: Crossing Press. Madison, D. Soyini. 2012. Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics, and Performance. Los Angeles: Sage. McCartney, Nicola, and Dritan Kastrati. 2019. How Not to Drown. London: Samuel French. Nicholson, Helen. 2005. Applied Drama: The Gift of Theatre. London: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1353/tt.2006.0022. Payne, Martin. 2006. Narrative Therapy: An Introduction for Councellors. 2nd Kindle Edition. London: Sage Publications. Rosaldo, Renato. 1993. Introduction: Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage. In Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. London: Taylor & Francis. Rowe, Aimee Carrillo. 2005. Be Longing: Toward a Feminist Politics of Relation. NWSA Journal 17 (2): 15–46. Rushdie, Salman. 1992. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991. London: Penguin Books. Stevenson, Lisa. 2014. Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic. California: University of California Press. Thompson, James. 2015. Towards an Aesthetics of Care. Research in Drama Education 20 (4): 430–441. Tomlin, Liz. 2019. Political Dramaturgies and Theatre Spectatorship: Provocations for Change. London: Methuen Drama. Turner, Victor. 1982. From Ritual to Theater: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ Publications. White, Michael. 2007. Maps of Narrative Practice. New  York: W.  W. Norton & Company. Whyte, David, and Krista Tippet. 2018. Poetry from the on Being Gathering (Closing Words). On Being, October 15, 2018. Yuval-Davis, Nira. 2011. Power, Intersectionality and the Politics of Belonging. FREIA Working Paper Series, Aalborg University Denmark 75: 24.

CHAPTER 5

Rebooting the Social Contract: Trampoline House and Deportation Centre Sjælsmark

Fig. 5.1  Fleeing by Abbas Haj

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 H. Grøn, Asylum and Belonging through Collective Playwriting, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24808-5_5

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5.1   Sjælsmark—‘Souls’ Field’: Creating the Unhomely Between November 2018 and October 2019, several organisations stood beside the residents in Sjælsmark and assisted them in organising a string of demonstrations and targeted action for bettering the conditions in the deportation centre.1 These demonstrations happened in conjunction with the citizens’ proposal for addressing the needs of the children of rejected asylum seekers presented in the interlude in Chap. 2. At the fifth demonstration in January 2019, Shakira, then a resident in Sjælsmark and mother to a then ten-year-old son, asked the crowd: ‘for how long am I going to stay in that situation with my child, who has grown up knowing that prison is his house?’ (KaosTV Danmark 2019) Shakira explained that she had claimed asylum when her son was still very young, and so he has known little else than asylum camps during his childhood. As this section will go on to detail, Sjælsmark and other deportation centres take several measures to ensure the residents do not feel at home, instead forcing them to stay in asylum liminality, where waiting is not a transitory experience, but an elongated norm.2 As Boochani writes of his own experiences, ‘[w]aiting is a mechanism of torture used in the dungeon of time’ (2018, 62). Living within this state of waiting where her house is a prison, Shakira draws out the difficulty many parents face in making homes for their children when they are in the asylum system. Her question shows the distress in understanding that her son’s experience of home is a place that unhomes him. Sjælsmark translates as ‘Soul’s Field’ and is a converted army barrack located behind an iron fence about an hour and a half via public transport northwest of Copenhagen. It houses roughly 250 asylum seekers (about 100 of them children under 18) whose cases have been rejected by the Danish government. It was approved as a deportation centre by a political majority in 2015, and is considered a last stop for rejected asylum seekers in Denmark (Hergel 2017). Since 2015, several investigations have been launched enquiring into the conditions in the camp and their ramifications 1  Parts of this chapter and the next are based on the previously published article “‘Not just theatre, also politics, law’: on dramaturgical ethics and collective playwriting in Deportation Centre Sjælsmark” (Grøn 2022), used here with permission under CC BY 4.0. 2  I am indebted to my friend, collaborator and PhD colleague Lucy Cathcart Fröden (2018, 2019) for identifying the applicability of Victor Turner’s work on liminality (1982) to the asylum system.

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on the physical and mental health of the people living there. Following complaints from numerous refugee organisations, the ombudsman made two unannounced visits to Sjælsmark in October 2017, but concluded that the conditions were not in breach of the Human Rights Convention (Sørensen 2018). Politicians have similarly stated that the circumstances are adequate for awaiting deportation, and some claim that the lack of liberty is a necessary measure to encourage people to leave Denmark (Kjersgaard and Debatten 2019). Nonetheless, in 2018 the Danish Refugee Council launched a report stating how Sjælsmark and Denmark’s other deportation centre, Kærshovedgård, has lasting physical and mental effects on individuals, especially children (Dansk Flygtningehjælp 2018). Similarly journalist Olav Hergel continues to write articles addressing the damaging and lasting effects of living in Danish deportation centres on children and adults alike (2017, 2019). This is not least due to the fact that although Sjælsmark and Kærshovedgård are designed solely for temporary stays, many asylum seekers spend years in the system and its deportation centres. This elongation of process is on account of being in a ‘fastlåst udsendelsesposition’ (‘locked leaving position’), which means the asylum seeker is in a limbo between staying and leaving. In many cases, people collaborate on their own deportation, but are caught in lengthy and bureaucratic procedures awaiting the processing of their return by their home country or the country they have fingerprinted in under The Dublin Regulations. Even when having a well-founded fear of return, and despite rules of non-refoulement (UNHCR 1951), rejected asylum seekers risk being sent to Ellebæk detention centre (see following chapter) if they are perceived as non-collaborative. The reasons for refusing deportation vary. In some cases, authorities and governments have deemed countries safe to go back to through often brief diplomatic procedures that cannot grasp the complexities of situations of the country in question, and fail to take into account the individual case or motif for leaving in the first place. Some refuse simply because the alternative and potential for a future is worse for themselves and their children, the list goes on.

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Fig. 5.2  Wire by Abbas Haj

In a study commissioned by the Freedom of Movement Research Group and Roskilde University, researchers looked into the conditions for the people living in Sjælsmark. In their report entitled Stop Killing Us Slowly (Suárez-Krabbe, Lindberg, and Arce-Bayona 2018), they contextualise how the deportation centres were established as part of the Danish government’s tightening of the asylum laws, and were designed to pressure the rejected asylum seeker to give up and leave Denmark willingly. The conditions in the centre reflect this motivation accordingly, as direct measures were taken to make the impermanence of their situation clear to the residents. The report includes procedures such as geographical isolation of the centres with poor public transport connections; no subsidies from the state; no right to work or education (or other so-called meaning-­ giving activities); having to report to authorities several times a week; a constant threat of being jailed; limited access to medical care; no legal aid before the person’s asylum claim has been rejected. In conversations, at demonstrations and in House meetings at Trampoline House the residents remarked on the following daily challenges to living a dignified and humane life: if they want to stay with

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friends and family, they must apply for this weeks in advance; their keys log when they exit and enter; they have to give their asylum number rather than their name when receiving post (this also goes for other contact with the staff); there is close to no privacy: larger families share a very small flat while single people share bunk bedrooms with other residents; the children only have access to very little schooling by the Red Cross; indeed many of the residents consider the Red Cross a symbolic presence in the camp; there is poor access to healthcare. Some residents reported not getting adequate or quick enough treatment from serious illnesses, and psychological problems manifesting in sleeplessness and depression were often treated with paracetamol and a glass of water. Many of them have missing teeth, as the dental staff deems it less costly to remove teeth than to treat cavities. There are a significant number of suicide attempts; the police come by rooms randomly and also barge in on people when they are in the toilet or shower; the residents have to sign a paper every second week saying they will collaborate on their deportation; and they are not allowed to cook their own food, but have to eat in the cafeteria at three set times a day. There are always uniformed staff present while the residents eat to make sure they do not steal food, as only certain things and amounts are allowed for certain age-groups. Residents often compare Sjælsmark to a prison, which is unsurprising when considering that Kriminalforsorgen (the Prison and Probation Service also operating the Danish prison system) manages the daily running of the centre. As a ‘non-place’ (Augé 1995), the asylum camp operates on a ‘coded logic of exclusion [and] restricted access’ (Sharma 2009, 136), but also shows how geopolitical (non) space and story connect in the semiotics of how Sjælsmark criminalises its residents both in design and execution. In the fieldwork reflection, Hasan will note how his surroundings forced a kind of symbiotic performativity of him by writing how Sjælsmark was ‘creating a monster’ (see Figure 6.2 in the following fieldwork reflection) in him. While he did not consider himself as such, the semiotics of the place forced him to be what he was not. Hasan shows how life in Sjælsmark can be viewed through the prism of Agamben’s ‘bare life’ (1998, 127), the biopolitical state of life preceding political agency. This ‘bare life’ is inscribed into the Declaration of Human Rights as the kind of life that has rights by ‘the pure fact of birth’ (127). What Agamben calls ‘nativity’ (128), having rights by being human, links to Arendt’s ‘Natality’, belonging by being born. A place like Sjælsmark thereby produces a ‘state of exception’ (126) because ‘the very figure who should have embodied

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the rights of man par excellence—the refugee—signals instead the concept’s radical crisis’ (126). This links the ‘fates of the rights of man and the nation state’ (126), because while producing a crisis of rights, a state simultaneously asserts its sovereignty by either granting or stripping an individual’s rights. Refugees and asylum seekers thereby challenge ‘the idea of the nation state and of the rights of man, and of the citizen’ (126) by, in the case of Sjælsmark, being rightless, unhomed and criminalised within democratic borders. Drawing out the paradoxes of ‘bare life’ further, at the moment of writing, Sjælsmark is being used as a reception centre for Ukrainian refugees due to its proximity to Reception Centre Sandholm (Hvilsom and Ulvig 2022). Although the Danish government is responding to crisis, it simultaneously raises questions of how political intent of unwelcome and unhoming semiotics of Sjælsmark can turn into reception and welcome. During a succession of two right-wing governments seated between 2015-2019, anti-immigration initiatives won steady ground in Denmark. The conservative party, Danish People’s Party (DPP),3 became the driving force behind anti-immigration discourses, and the former minister for immigration, integration and housing Inger Støjberg (from the right-wing Party Venstre) publicly stated that they were aware that their initiatives may push the limits of The Human Rights and Refugee Conventions, but that this was necessary for the welfare of the state (Kjersgaard and Debatten 2019). Between 2015–2019, the Danish government have passed anti-­ immigration laws for ethnic minority populations already living in Denmark, such as banning the wearing of the niqab in public and a ‘ghetto-plan’ due to which the residents of specific culturally diverse areas face eviction as their buildings are set to be demolished to hinder the formation of ethnic minority ‘ghettoes’ (Abend 2019; John and Gargiulo 2020). These measures form a part of an overarching ‘shift in paradigm’ of Danish foreign politics manifesting, overall, in targeted amendments in 3  The 2015 and 2019 election both saw formations of a new right-wing party. In 2015, Pernille Vermund formed Nye Borgerlige (‘The New Citizens’). Nye Borgerlige campaigned for an asylum stop, arguing that Muslim populations in Denmark threatened democracy and freedom. Nye Borgerlige won four seats in 2019. In the same election, Rasmus Paludan formed the party Stram Kurs (‘Hard Line’). Although Stram Kurs did not win any seats, Paludan usurped the election debate with polemic rhetoric about refugees and with acts such as burning Korans in culturally diverse areas of Copenhagen. However, I focus on DPP and Venstre in the body of the text, as they have been the frontrunners in shaping the discourse and realities on asylum policy as it was during my fieldwork in 2018.

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integration and refugee policy. For example, in 2018, the DPP ruled on granting refugee status only on temporary basis and significantly dropping the subsidies given to people in the system (Korsgaard 2018). The DPP furthered these measures in 2018, forming a coalition with other parties and proposing an extremely costly conversion of Lindholm Island, located off the coast of south Sjælland, into an asylum centre. Prior to this proposal, the island housed facilities for testing diseases in agricultural animals (resulting in nickname like ‘svineøen’, ‘pig island’). The coalition suggested that the island should instead be made into accommodation for specific demographics of asylum seekers, drawing parallels to the Australian offshore detention facility Manus Prison. These demographics included asylum seekers on tolerated stay, people with criminal records (despite often having done their time in prison already), as well as other segments of the asylum-seeking population (Abend 2019). Although it was never executed and notwithstanding Lindholm is still within the borders of Denmark, the plans correlate with increasing practices of the ‘externalisation of migration management’ (Zaiotti 2016, 1) by locating asylum-processing facilities in ‘remote control’ (6) places. As the introduction noted, both Denmark and the UK have continued their efforts to externalise their asylum processes to territories outside their borders, a development also seen in Italy’s delegation of its migration management to Libya, in the fortified border crossings of the US and Mexico or Spanish Melilla (Jones 2017). In connection with the citizen’s proposal for bettering the conditions for the children living in Sjælsmark, the host of a nationally broadcast debate programme, Clement Kjersgaard invited politicians and heads of refugee organisations into his studio. Here, Morten Messerschmidt (party member of DPP and the European Parliament) stated Denmark opening its borders would be equal to treating the country as an experiment for integration that would inevitably go wrong. Messerschmidt continued to argue that the parents living in Sjælsmark mismanage their parental role in taking their children ‘hostage’ to await asylum, and that Danish couples should adopt the children in question (Kjersgaard and Debatten 2019). DPP’s language surrounding these initiatives positions the people seeking asylum as a direct threat to Danish national values, reflecting Chantal Mouffe’s notation that political relations ‘can always become political [when] what is in question is the creation of a “we” by the delimitation of a “them”’ (2005, 2). Echoing previous chapters’ notations of nationalistic antagonism, Mouffe elaborates that when a ‘them’ ‘begins to be perceived

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as negating the identity of an “us” [it places] in question our very existence’ (2), and thereby ‘becomes the site of political antagonism’ (3). Reading the DPP’s 2018 election posters through Mouffe’s political antagonism makes clear the semiotics of how asylum seekers, migrants and refugees are positioned in a political discourse. DPP called this their ‘Tegneserie-kampagnen’ (‘cartoon-campaign’), which displayed the party members drawn as photo-like cartoon characters with speech bubbles above their heads, and the DPP logo below. Their speech bubbles read: ‘you still know what we stand for’, ‘There is so much we need to protect’, ‘Stand strong. Vote Danish’, ‘Take off your scarf and join Denmark’ and ‘We stand together for Denmark’. In their notes to the campaign, they write that they try to communicate in a ‘lettere univers’ (‘lighter universe’) (Dansk Folkeparti 2018) than what is usual for political parties. To them, they continue, ‘det islamiske tørklæde signalerer værdier, der er i lodret strid med de danske’ (‘the Islamic headscarf signals values that are in direct opposition to the Danish’) (2018). In this space of collective identification, these posters reflect Mouffe’s us/them relation by suggesting, for one, that the way to be a part of the nation is to ‘Vote Danish’, to not be Muslim (‘Take off your scarf’), and to protect national values (‘There is so much we need to protect’). Bendixen dismantles this political antagonism by noting that understanding asylum seekers as capable of taking their own children hostage reflects a fundamental lack of empathy and attunement towards the motifs of another (2018). This assumes that parents from other countries do not love their children in the same way that Danish parents do, and neglects the perspective that it is due to a deep concern for their children’s future and welfare that refugees flee and, indeed, stay.

5.2  Trampoline House: Performing Democracy and Rebooting the Social Contract Until it closed due to the corona crisis in December 2021, Trampoline House was located in Nørrebro, Copenhagen, and offered a counter-space and site of resistance to Sjælsmark and anti-immigration initiatives. As this section goes on to detail, the structures of the house are porous and ever responding to the needs of their community and the realities of precarious funding. In January 2022, the house opened again as a smaller weekend operation in Apostelkirken (Apostle Church) in Vesterbro, but I describe the running of the House as it was during my time there in 2018.

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On a daily basis, the House is vibrant with people from different walks of life, providing a packed programme seeking to meet the needs of its users: legal advice, psychological and medical counselling, language and democracy classes and lessons in journalism that publish the newsletter Trampoline Times. There is also a women’s club with social arrangements aimed at creating a space for women, and women’s classes on topics ranging from feminism and human rights to period products and recognising trauma in refugee children. There are also social events like community dinners, cinema evenings and monthly parties. The House has started several in-house enterprises such as Sisters’ Cuisine, a catering service with food made by the women in the House, and Next Practice, helping refugees find work through building their resumes and improving their skills and employability. Trampoline House is also home to Centre for Art on Migration Politics (CAMP), a gallery that programmes decolonising art on migration politics. Lastly, the House hosts Refugees Welcome and Folkebevægelsen for Asylbørns Fremtid (People’s Movement for Asylum Seeking Children), showing how initiatives aimed at building bridges between the refugee and asylum-seeking population and wider Danish society often either begin in the House or use its facilities. The House was founded in 2010 through a workshop process called ‘the asylum dialogue tank’ in which a group of politically engaged visual artists went to the asylum camps and entered into dialogue with residents there, exploring where the aims of asylum and art could intersect. In an interview with one of the founders, artist and current director of the House Morten Goll, I explored this process and the institutional and democratic structures of the House: Helene: It’s really interesting to hear that you went to the camps first, and asked them what they needed. I wasn’t sure of the order of that, whether you had set the House up first and then gone to the camps and said ‘please come.’ But then in terms of space it is different, because then you are already thinking people into it from the beginning. Morten:  Yes, I think it was definitely necessary to go out and ask, because we have no idea that they needed a house. They taught us this. We were just open. If they had said ’please paint some flowers on our walls’, we would probably have painted flowers. But, you know, they were laughing, because lots of artists had gone

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to the camps, and said ‘let’s make this more beautiful. It’s all grey and white walls. Let’s make colourful paintings’. And when you asked people, ‘did you notice the painting on the wall here?’ They look at me like ‘what are you talking about, do we have pictures?’ They don’t even notice it because they are occupied with other things. (7th December 2018) Echoing performance scholars’ criticalities of presuming effects of personal and political change in applying one’s artistic craft directly to a socially engaged situation, Goll equally dismantles artistic approaches in asylum camps. What was required of the artists was not to paint flowers on a wall, but echoing dramaturgical ethics and ethnoplaywriting, a process that was rooted in the needs of the asylum seekers before artistic intent. This necessitated an opening up and reshaping of craft to meet these needs, underscored by the way in which the making of the House can be read as the result of a collaborative, dialogical process; after the asylum dialogue tank, the House ran first as a test site at a gallery, and later became more permanent. Viewing Trampoline House as a spatial manifestation of a creative process grounds an exploration of artistic response to so-called crisis. This extends to examining how the House builds creativity into its institutional structures in an effort to remain responsive to the shifting needs of people living in the asylum system. As Goll explains, having territorial space meant having a framework for experimentation and for the trial-and-error of artistic and communal process: We could redefine what it means to be together in a space […] we needed to reboot the social sphere in a sense. And we did that by opening up a culture house where we could claim the territory and define the rules. (interview, 7th December 2018)

The House thereby operates not only a site of resistance, as stated, but also a blueprint for what is possible in wider society, as rebooting the social contract also means redefining the rules of engagement between refugees, asylum seekers and citizens. In Sharing the World, Luce Irigaray notes how such imperatives require an opening from within: To open a place for the other, for a world different from ours, from inside of our own tradition, is the first and most difficult multicultural gesture. Meeting a stranger outside of our own boundaries is rather easy, and even

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satisfies our aspirations, as long as we can return home and appropriate between ourselves what we have in this way discovered. To be forced to limit and change our home, or our way of being at home, is much more difficult (2008, 133)

Irigaray’s thoughts reflect dramaturgical ethics’ approach of undoing and decreation; to make another truly welcome requires an undoing of one’s way both of being and of being at home, and this is what makes it possible for global relations to become intimate. ‘The other’, Irigaray continues, ‘interrupts the system of cross-references of my world, re-opens my horizon and questions its finality. As such the other undoes the familiarity that was mine’ (97). Echoing Cavarero’s ‘necessary other’, I understand Irigaray not as a call to open up and decreate thoughtlessly, but rather that ‘opening a space from within’ can be a mutually dependent and necessary process in a changing world. As Goll opened a House Meeting with: ‘every time someone new comes to the House, the structure has to change, the House has to open to them’ (18th September 2018). Like Weil’s thoughts that people participate in worldmaking by decreating themselves, the House encourages disruption of frames of reference from a structural down to an interpersonal level. It is this which opens the house and offers opportunity to reboot a social contract and undoing structures that keep intimate and global relations in place. The political reach of assemblies like Trampoline House and their efficacy in creating the social change that binds the community together remains a point of critique. For example, while Irigaray’s ethics of engagement might cultivate understandings across divides, the people coming to the House often already enter relations on the basis of openness and mutual respect. Foregrounding Chap. 8’s exploration of asylum as an intersectional question in terms of gender dynamics, I remark that although the House seeks to foster a brother-sister culture, many of the House Meetings have addressed the gender dynamics between the male asylum seekers and refugees, and the female, often Western, volunteers and interns. Placing Irigaray’s call to openness within those relations necessitates an accompaniment of an understanding of the complexities with which restructurings of social dynamics occur. For example, while these dynamics might be an issue of different cultural views on women, it concurrently displays a discrepancy between advocating for refugee and racial justice and addressing gender inequality. In such cases, manoeuvring between openness and privacy also becomes an intersectional question of

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what kind of inequality is experienced individually, and necessitates wider discussions on how openness might be misconstrued in asylum-volunteer relations. While I navigated such occurrences in the House and fundamentally believe in the importance of addressing these interlocking issues, I leave it as a side-track in this thesis. Although the group in Sjælsmark were mostly male identifying, this is not the case for all of them. The dynamics described here were much less pronounced, and it would be a disservice to the reader to describe the Sjælsmark group as all male and the sistas as all female. Furthermore, the gender identities of the group in Sjælsmark, unlike the sistas, did not become central to the process of writing a play nor their process of belonging. Ultimately, it is important to remark on the correlative between the House being a site of resistance to discriminatory discourses and its attempt at creating space for complicated and acutely necessary conversations on gender, gender identity and sexual equality as a contributing factor to support the restructuring of these.4 In the space held for challenging conversations and reimagining social relations also lies the critique of enacting equality in fundamentally unequal situations without producing wider social change. This poses the challenge of microspheres enacting solutions where there are none and raises questions of sustainability. It has become increasingly evident that in the wake of the so-called refugee crisis, the everyday care of creating welcome, network and sometimes even of providing legal, medical and psychological aid befalls often precariously funded community initiatives that run on the investment and free-time of volunteers rather than on the support of statutory, judicial and political structures. This can be seen as an effect of ‘the state of emergency’ (Zaiotti 2016, 1) being understood as ‘temporary’, thereby introducing ‘long-term solutions [once] the problem is under control’ (1). In 2020, Trampoline House ran a campaign asking people to support ‘sustainable integration’ (n.d.-a). Linking to Chap. 2 (see footnote 1) noting that sustainable approaches to land can arise from demographics who have been colonially dispossessed, and echoing also Chap. 2’s exploration of Indigenous land and geopolitical story, Trampoline House’s invocation of stability works also at destabilising the political nexus of power. The House thereby suggests that sustainability 4  As mentioned, the House Meetings address this on a regular basis. The House also has posters with house rules, where no discrimination on the basis of gender is one. The women’s classes and democracy classes also periodically revisit gender and sexual equality across cultures to foster dialogues about women, sexuality and gender identity.

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arises not from policy, but from the ground up, in time spent making a multinational community work on a day-by-day basis. CAMP has also been a setting for addressing the connections between decolonisation and refugee communities. In the 2018 exhibition Decolonizing Appearance, artists showed their works making links between histories and practices of colonisation and current asylum policies. In the exhibition catalogue Gurminder K.  Bhambra contextualises that ‘[t]oday’s migrants are frequently seeking to escape the disadvantages that earlier colonial movement had produced’ (2018, 20). Around the opening of the exhibition, the house held Decolonising Assemblies led by the MTL-collective, where everyone could discuss the effects of Denmark’s imperial history, and make concrete plans for decolonising their arenas. The House’s Own Parliament: Democracy as Performative Process Fundamental to rebooting the social contract is the creation of what the House calls a ‘culture of democracy’ (Trampoline House n.d.-b), working with the individual and their understanding that ‘active citizenship entails understanding the social contract, your rights and duties’ (n.d.-b). This is framed as a didactic and holistic process, seeking to educate the people who come to the House about Western democracy while taking into account their individual situation. I read this as a process that is at once creative and performative, predicated on the fact that, for a majority of users of the House, ‘active citizenship’ in a judicial sense is not possible, and democratic participation is therefore enacted through the localised political microcosm of the House. Nicholson’s questions on drama’s ability in creating participation in citizenship guide this analysis. Remarking that citizenship is a contested and porous category in both a historical and contemporary perspective, Nicholson reflects that it might be productive to think about the link between drama and citizenship as ‘more creative, unpredictable and subversive than [the] official discourse implies’ (2005, 20). It is therefore ‘subject to a continual process of re-negotiation, it has relevance to the more ordinary and everyday activities of life as well as the bigger political issues of the day’ (23). Mouffe elaborates that it might be possible to understand citizenship as ‘embodied’ (as cited in Nicholson 2005: 23), aiming citizenship more towards identity than legal status. According to Mouffe a citizen can then be understood also as someone who ‘act[s] as citizens within a wider framework of personal, political and ethical associations’ (as cited in Nichlson 2005: 23). While it is imperative

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not to neglect the everyday precarities of living outside legal categories and equally important to keep in view that democracy and citizenship are two different statutory questions (one as a status, the other as participation) connecting Nicholson and Mouffe creates a pathway to understand the performance of democracy in the House as that which can make porous the unobtainability of citizenship and the seclusion of political life when being a refugee or asylum seeker. A central component in creating a culture of democracy are the weekly meetings, described by staff and users as ‘the House’s own parliament’. Viewing these meetings through a performative lens brings into view how parliament and democratic process is enacted: every Tuesday at 4 pm everyone in the House gathers and elects someone to run the meeting. After a name-round aimed at acknowledging everyone’s presence and participation, people can make small announcements. There is a talking stick, and only when holding it can a person speak. These announcements are followed by a big discussion with a topic chosen by the people present. This discussion ranges from practical and administrative concerns in the House (e.g. whether a new initiative is working or if community dinners should be vegetarian) to asylum-related issues and current affairs of Danish politics. Challenging the criticism that micropolitical assemblies hold little political sway, these meetings have fostered several of the initiatives for campaigns, movements and demonstrations targeting asylum, refugee and integration politics in Denmark. These initiatives thus come from a democratic process that seeks to centre the concerns of the people in the asylum system and those standing in solidarity with them, thereby challenging the seclusion of refugees and asylum seekers in the political decisions that concern them. For example, People’s Movement, the writing of the citizen’s proposal and its surrounding campaign were a direct result of the parents in Sjælsmark raising concerns about the welfare of their children. Similarly, Next Practice was formed because people with refugee status wanted advice and help in entering the Danish job market. These meetings and their democratic practice reflect the impetus of creating what Goll called ‘a better version of Denmark’ (House Meeting 18th September 2018) through dialogical practices and, circumventing Agamben’s state of exception, inclusion of those who are within the borders but outside a political agency. The decision to have the House meeting in English with translation into Arabic, Farsi, Tigrigna, Spanish and Danish (depending on who is present) marries the aims of democratic practice with opening a space for one another from within: according to Goll, English makes the Danes

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‘guests in the language’ (House meeting 18th September 2018), thereby destabilising also the linguistic nexus of power. As will be elaborated on in the fieldwork reflection, the multivocality of such situations requires political listening reflected in the pauses for translation which guards the possibility for everyone participating. Creating a culture of democracy is also carried out by eradicating principles of charity through, for example, exchanging tickets to and from the camps for 3 hours of work or an internship in the House, based on the individual’s needs and wishes for how to spend their time. This can take the form of cooking or cleaning, but also of attending classes and House Meetings. As Goll argues, disposing of the principles of charity carves out the space for relating on a more equal footing: We try to see these people as what they are and try to invite them. […] that’s why the idea of charity becomes no good in this House because charity destroys this relation of equality […] When we gave up charity and we said now you have to work in this House if you want something… that is… it’s actually generous to need someone. It’s not generous to dish out your surplus value. It’s much more generous to tell a person “thank you for coming, I really need you.” And that’s where you start to have real relations. (Interview, 7th December 2018)

Goll’s reflections on charity might be read alongside Arendt’s argument in Chap. 3 that pity keeps power relations intact. Encouraging instead an investment in a place that seeks to centre the interests of its community draws out the ‘rights and duties’ aspect of democracy and underscores democracy’s predication on active participation. This further shifts the perception of an asylum seeker being located perpetually outside power and without agency to perform control over their lives by placing them instead as fundamental for a community to function. In an interview conducted when rounding up the process of writing This Is Us, Rohan stated: they put you in a society in Trampoline House […] You have things to do […] And then you have the responsibility of, you have to clean the place, or you have to make food, to make you feel like a normal human being who has his responsibility as you live in your house, normal human life. And you have a decision of what you want to do. Here [in Sjælsmark] you cannot decide when you eat, how you eat food, what food to eat … In Trampoline they give you a lot of things and you can choose what you want to do. So you

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have your own free will. You have people who see you in Trampoline. (Interview, 17th December 2018)

Besides stripping the refugee of control and decision-making, the space of Sjælsmark frames its residents as criminals and, to use Hasan’s words, ‘monsters’ through signifiers such as prison guards, a fence, having to sign papers of collaboration on deportation with police, among other measures taken to eradicate, as Rohan states, ‘free will’. The wider political landscape of Denmark secludes asylum seekers from democratic processes, and some political parties and media sites frame them in semiotics of hostility and unwelcome, expressing that they have nothing to contribute to the society they live in, nor a chance to affect political change. But by destabilising the centrality of power and dismantling notions of charity, Trampoline House makes those who join necessary to the community, thereby engaging in ‘continuous re-enactment’ (Mouffe 2005, 67) of a democratic culture, which can create ‘a common political identity’ (67). Institutional Creativity: My House, Your House Remembering the ‘asylum dialogue tank’ that created the House and combined the process of arts practice with investment in the realities of forced migration and asylum policy, Trampoline House displays how creative processes can be built into institutional structures (Marschall 2018). This continues Bachelard’s notations of house as psychic diagram for creatively relaying intimacies of home, and the previous chapter’s unfolding of writing and creativity as ways of belonging. Having a space where it is possible to approach community and engagement creatively, and letting that community change depending on the dialogical approaches of encounter, participation and democratic house meetings, reflects the imperatives of decreation and political listening while bringing into view the place where art and politics intersect. By posing, for example, fundamental questions of democracy, citizenship and whose voices are heard within political decisions, the micropolitical sphere offers opportunities that a structured government does not, reflecting on dramaturgical ethics, ethnoplaywriting and Back’s argument that ‘highly localised micro public spheres’ (2007, 57) can present new forms of social governing and intervene in entrenched statutory processes. The House centres the notion of belonging by seeking to ensure democratic participation and by governing the individual’s dignity akin to how a state would. The House also creates

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belonging through the understanding that the people who come to the House are vital in shaping its community, represented in the House’s slogan ‘my house your house’ (Trampoline House n.d.-b). I argue that at the heart of creative process, which can be traced both in the House’s beginning and in its everyday practices, lies the need for courage. Artistic courage becomes key both in imagining other worlds and in the openness and vulnerability of the trial-and-error approach in creating such worlds. Trampoline House highlights how employing creativity on an institutional level can provide a micropolitical growing-bed for wider intervention into asylum policy, which can take both the form of targeted action, such as the citizen’s proposal, and the shape of continued imagination of what is possible in a wider world. Reading Trampoline House through its performed democracy and institutional creativity thereby gives a tentative answer to what the importance of art might be within the so-called refugee crisis.

5.3  Person = Country: Belonging as a Human Right Giving personal experience to living between two sites that offer each other’s opposites in terms of democracy, citizenship and welcome, this section functions at once as a continuation of the first and second chapter’s reflection on nationality, belonging and ‘from’, and as a preamble to the fieldwork reflection by drawing out how the group in Sjælsmark positioned belonging as a question of human rights. This subchapter can also be read as a converse mirror to Chap. 2’s reflection on nationality as state-authored belonging governing human rights by looking at those for whom nationality hinders both belonging and rights. In a session that will be detailed in the following chapter, the group wrote their associations with non-belonging on a sheet of paper. One of them penned ‘person = country’, explaining that whenever he was defined or equated with his country, and thereby defined by being an asylum seeker before being a person, he felt like he did not belong. Being equated first and foremost with a country also applied for those who had been rejected on the basis of The Dublin Regulations. In such situations, fingerprints determined both their chance at a future and the circumstances of their current life. Person = country also encompasses the labour involved in navigating the mazes of such systems and living in a country without access to its rights, citizenship or political say.

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Ahmed’s argument that in a ‘narrative of crisis’ (2004, 132) where those who are ‘without home’ (136) are simultaneously constructed as the ‘source of our fear’ (2004, 136) underscores how belonging can be contested through media categorisations that equate lack of home with a basis for fear. This has emotional ramifications, as Arendt notes, because ‘few people have the strength to conserve their own integrity if their social, political and legal status is completely confused’(1996, 116). Arendt continues: ‘we lose confidence in ourselves if society does not approve of us’ (116). Agamben elaborates on the link between the destiny of rights and the state as a problem of also proximity when rights-bearing and non-­ rights-­bearing individuals are encircled by the same border. He remarks: ‘refugees no longer represent individual cases but rather a mass phenomenon’ (Agamben 2008, 92). In Agamben’s view, both organisations, such as the UN, UNHCR, and individual nations have proved not only ‘incapable of solving the problem’ (92) but also of ‘facing it in an adequate manner’ (92). He traces this in the ‘blindness of bureaucratic apparatuses, but also in the very ambiguity of the fundamental notions regulating the inscription of the native (that is, of life) in the juridical order of the nation-­ state’ (92 emphasis in original). Occupying the position between democratic performativity in the House and the fundamental lack of rights and political say in Sjælsmark and in the asylum system, the group underscores the discord between being human and having human rights. Being at once categorised in a certain way on the basis of nationality while living outside judicial categories of a nation-state that governs dignity produces what Mouffe calls a ‘democratic paradox’ (2000, 40). Mouffe argues that in a liberal democracy, rights and belonging are ‘expressed through citizenship’ (40). But even in ‘modern democratic states where universal human equality has been established’ (41) there are still those without rights or access to the democratic state they inhabit. Therefore a liberal democracy produces no guarantee, but does present a paradox, as universal human rights prove to be rights only for those who can partake in a democratic process through citizenship. Person = country also manifested in living in limbos of citizenship, being made a stranger and living in continued contact with systems that unhomed the group. On a daily basis, this would happen through being criminalised in the framework of the camp or wider society or the people they met taking nationality as a demarcation of behaviour by making assumptions about the group’s religion, culture and worldviews. Apart from the systemic discrimination on macro-levels, these instances can be

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read through Dr Chester Pierce’s concept of ‘microaggressions’. Originally coined to examine Black people’s experiences of racism in the USA, microaggressions bring visibility to the fact that racism is experienced also on the micro-levels of everyday instances and relations (Spencer 2017; Pérez Huber and Solorzano 2015), and ‘describe both conscious and unconscious acts that reflect superiority, hostility, discrimination, and racially inflicted insults and demeanours to various marginalized groups’ (Spencer 2017, 1). For example, the group remarked how, when being asked ‘where are you from?’, they would answer with what they called ‘good European countries’ like France, Italy or Spain, rather than say Syria, Lebanon and Iran. They made this choice because they had experienced people making assumptions about them or excuses to leave if they answered truthfully, and had therefore learned to lie both to dismantle expectations, but also to avoid categorisation or discrimination. As the fieldwork reflection details, these experiences formed the background for the writing of Scene 2 and Scene 6 in This Is Us. The monologue in Scene 2 directly dismantled person = country by stating: ‘Each person is an individual mind, he is not his country, and he do not represent it nor responsible of what it did of bad things’ (This Is Us, Scene 2). For now, Ghafour expressed his experiences of microaggressions in the following way: Ghafour: I speak to person and he understand me, understand all, but after that I can see—eyes—he don’t like me in his country, you know? I understand that. Helene: When you speak to Danish people? Ghafour:  In French it’s not so much person like that. But here it’s maybe 70% like that. (Interview, 17th December 2018) Ghafour draws out that it is not solely overtly hostile circumstances that unhome. Regardless of intent of the person in question, belonging is at stake also in the micro moments of encounters where ‘eyes’ is what says ‘he don’t like me in his country’. On a car-journey to Sjælsmark, Azad, an Iranian refugee and filmmaker, echoed Ghafour’s thoughts by remarking how the DPP’s campaign and press coverage of the plans for Lindholm Island affected him. Despite having asylum and living in Denmark for 13 years where he had made a life of belonging with work, study, friends, community and fluency in Danish, these things affected him and dislodged his hard-won sense of home and belief in being welcome.

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Elaborating on the considerations of person = country, Hasan (see Figure 10) wrote: we are losing our dignity by facing such inhumane rules. Sorry! If we cannot maintain the reputation that Denmark is a country of happiest people on earth when we are outside and a smile doesn’t exist on our face.

Hasan’s incapability of maintaining illusions of happiness while being secluded from the national community of Denmark captures the lived experience of Mouffe’s democratic paradox and Agamben’s state of exception: living within a country, but standing ‘outside’ where a smile cannot ‘exist on our face’, links the ‘fate of the modern nation-state’ (Agamben 2008, 91) with the rightlessness of an asylum seeker and makes nationalistic antagonism apparent: Hasan understands that his presence threatens Denmark as a liberal democracy, identified by the happiness and human rights of its people. Denmark’s borders here home people who have been ranked among the happiest people in the world and people who are losing their dignity ‘by facing such inhumane rules’. Correlating identity with nationality met resistance also when group members remarked on not identifying with their countries due to war, religious bias, corruption or lack of jobs and education. Rohan (Interview, 17th December 2018) expressed this by saying: ‘I never really thought about belonging to my country’, as it had felt insular and failed them in their basic needs for safety and a future. Abbas resonated with this: I don’t feel, basically that I, that anyone, should belong to such closed place. We are born in this planet and we have the right to go wherever we want, as the people, citizen living in Europe or America or other places in the world, they have the right to do that, so I am too, I have the right, I am not a prisoner in my country. The country that makes you feel like a prisoner and don’t let you go out without permission, it is not even a country. (Interview, 17th December 2018)

Abbas challenges perceptions of person = country by speaking to the universality of human rights and freedom of movement. Like he says, if a home feels like a prison ‘it is not even a country’, and likely not even a home. Like any other citizen in the world, he exercised his right to move, thereby dislocating being equated with his nationality (‘I am not a prisoner in my country’). Abbas draws out fundamental paradoxes in who has

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the right and opportunity to move freely by remarking that he preferred to ‘do this in a decent way’ (Interview, 17th December 2018), but was left with no choice but asylum. Similar to how Chap. 8 unfolds home as a contested category and territory for the sistas, both Rohan and Abbas call out the need to understand belonging beyond the national in refugee situations. I read in Rohan and Abbas’ reflections a call to continue addressing art by way of dramaturgical ethics producing continued opportunities of political listening and ethical process. But it also positions lived experience within Agamben’s notion of starting philosophy anew from the point of view of the refugee and of considering a de-territorial politics of belonging as that which can perhaps re-establish the ‘connection between ethics and politics’ (Mouffe 2005, 65). From the two sites of Sjælsmark and Trampoline House, how much home becomes a conversation between hostility and hospitality, one offering the opportunity of belonging and participation in a micropolitical democracy that the other does not, thereby also asking the question of who is allowed to home. The artistic and creative process of creating such a space makes how much home a person needs an underlying conversation of the practices of the House. This chapter concludes on an interlude elaborating on the introduction’s concern with names and naming. This is a segway into the fieldwork where how much home is needed becomes also about naming and storying one’s situation.

Interlude: What’s in a name?

Pseudonyms and name changes were a common practice both in Trampoline House and in Sjælsmark. As seen in the interlude in Chap. 3, where Ahmad Kaya took the name of a Turkish-Kurdish singer, Van Damme similarly chose his name from the martial arts legend Jean-Claude Van Damme. He explained how his previous name reminded him of the hardships he had lived through, but naming himself Van Damme captured both his interests in martial arts and his capabilities of training and overcoming. Rohan Yarburg chose their name by combining Rohan, a beautiful and mountainous kingdom in Lord of the Rings homing riders and noble men, with Yarburg, meaning ‘ascending earth-castle’. Rohan made this choice because people in their home country would make assumptions (continued)

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(continued)

about their belonging to a neighbourhood, family and religious group based on their name. Dislocating notions of place and origin by taking a name that alludes to faraway and imagined places had been a key factor for stepping into their own identity. Name changes also often occurred in Trampoline House, particularly if people’s legal situation changed: ‘X now goes by Che, as in Che Guevara’. Some took Danish names in an effort to belong or to be more anonymous as foreigners in their everyday lives, and some had several names and profiles on social media to avoid identification by the system or the situations they had fled. So, what’s in a name? I read in Rohan, Ahmad Kaya and Van Damme’s chosen names a self-imagination that is also a repossession of identity happening on their own terms and for their own reasons. Like Trampoline House makes efforts of placing people in a position of having a democratic say, naming oneself provides, perhaps, a similar chance at choice and agency in claiming belonging not to categories of asylum seeker, stranger or other, but simply, to oneself.

References Abend, Lisa. 2019. “An Island for ‘Unwanted’ Migrants Is Denmark’s Latest Aggressive Anti-Immigrant Policy.” Time Magazine, January 16, 2019. http:// time.com/5504331/denmark-­migrants-­lindholm-­island/?fbclid=IwAR28dQ F8KRjR9gl6ObvoxHzJuA_ud72k81_MrxIR_rRmyPRFk34vLiZQQuU. Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. California, USA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2008. Beyond Human Rights. Open 15: 90–95. Ahmed, Sara. 2004. Affective Economies. Social Text 79 (2): 117–139. http:// muse.jhu.edu/journals/soc/summary/v022/22.2ahmed.html. Arendt, Hannah. 1996. We Refugees. In Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile, ed. Marc Robinson, 110–119. Boston and London: Faber and Faber. Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Ed. and Trans. John Howe. New York: Verso Books. Back, Les. 2007. The Art of Listening. London, New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Bendixen, Michala Clante. 2018. “Flygtningeorganisation: Unødvendigt, at Politikere Tager Asylbørn Som Gidsler.” Altinget, June 2018. https://www. altinget.dk/udvikling/artikel/flygtningeorganisation-­u noedvendigt-­ at-­politikere-­tager-­asylboern-­som-­gidsler.

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Bhambra, Gurminder K. 2018. Decolonizing Appearance: Migration to Europe in the Context of Migration From Europe. In Decolonizing Appearance, ed. Tone Olaf Nielsen and Yannick Harrison. Copenhagen: CAMP: Center for Art on Migration Politics. Boochani, Behrouz. 2018. No Friend but the Mountains. Sydney: Picador. Dansk Flygtningehjælp. 2018. “Trivsel Og Udvikling Hos Børn På Asylcentre: Om Krydsfeltet Mellem Udlændingeloven Og Serviceloven.” Copenhagen, Denmark. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a266f53e9bfdf7a6ed272 af/t/5acdf4dd2b6a28a5770e5478/1523447012942/trivsel-­og-­udvikling-­ hos-­boern-­paa-­asylcentre.pdf. Dansk Folkeparti. 2018. “Tegneserie-Kampagnen.” Dansk Folkeparti. 2018. https://danskfolkeparti.dk/politik/kampagner/page/2/. Fröden, Lucy Cathcart. 2018. “Episode 4.” Our Chance of Becoming Human. 2018. https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/our-­chance-­of-­becoming-­human. ———. 2019. “A Moment in and out of Time.” Vox Liminis. 2019. https:// www.voxliminis.co.uk/a-­moment-­in-­and-­out-­of-­time/. Grøn, Helene. 2022. ‘Not Just Theatre, Also Politics, Law’: On Dramaturgical Ethics and Collective Playwriting in Deportation Centre Sjælsmark. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 1: 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569783.2022.2057793. Hergel, Olav. 2017. “Børns Vilkår: Forholdene På Sjælsmark Er Kummerlige Politkken.” Politkken, October 29, 2017. www.politiken.dk/indland/ art6180917/Forholdene-­på-­Sjælsmark-­er-­kummerlige. ———. 2019. “Video Med Dreng På Fem År, Der Nægtes Mad På Sjælsmark Forarger: Kun Små Børn Må Få Broccoli Og Kogte Kartofler.” Politikken, January 3, 2019. https://politiken.dk/indland/art6947113/Kun-­små-­børn-­ må-­få-­broccoli-­og-­kogte-­kartofler. Hvilsom, Frank, and Karoline Ulvig. 2022. “»De Behandles Nærmest Som Kvæg:« Afviste Asylansøgere Må Vige for Ukrainske Krigsflygtninge.” Politiken, March 14, 2022. https://politiken.dk/indland/art8668092/Afviste-­asylansøgere­må-­vige-­for-­ukrainske-­krigsflygtninge. Irigaray, Luce. 2008. Sharing the World: From Intimate to Global Relations. London: Continuum. John, Tara, and Susanne Gargiulo. 2020. “Denmark Is a Liberal Paradise for Many People, but the Reality Is Very Different for Immigrants.” CNN World, July 20, 2020. https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/20/europe/denmark-­ghetto-­ relocation-­intl/index.html?fbclid=IwAR19a8rJ0y4B1SKOcaNBrCKjeXcej6u mrnL6poHGk8sHqbK5Oil0bzYZi9M. Jones, Reece. 2017. Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move. New York, USA: Verso Books. KaosTV Danmark. 2019. “Shakira Incarcerated at Sjælsmark Deportation Center Denmark.” 2019. https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=348605805978868.

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Kjersgaard, Clement, and Debatten. 2019. “Skal Børnene Ud Af Sjælsmark?” Denmark: Dansk Radio. https://www.dr.dk/tv/se/debatten/debatten-­9/ debatten-­2019-­01-­10-­20-­00?fbclid=IwAR2fgxLU2eHSe8DoGZZjGIiocvjq4 HVB-­WsULrBfxQEo53QHv06Svc0mLvI#!/. Korsgaard, Kirstine. 2018. “Sådan Endte DF’s Paradigmeskifte: ‘Jeg Kan Ikke Give Garanti for et Tal, Men Jeg Kan Give Garanti for, at Det Virker.’” Altinget,November30,2018.https://www.altinget.dk/artikel/saadan-­endte-­dfs-­ paradigmeskifte-­jeg-­kan-­ikke-­give-­garanti-­for-­et-­tal-­men-­jeg-­kan-­give-­garanti-­ for-­at-­det-­virker. Marschall, Anika. 2018. What Can Theatre Do about the Refugee Crisis? Enacting Commitment and Navigating Complicity in Performative Interventions. Research in Drama Education 23 (2): 148–166. https://doi.org/10.108 0/13569783.2018.1438180. Mouffe, Chantal. 2000. The Democratic Paradox. New York, USA: Verso Books. ———. 2005. The Return of the Political. New York: Verso Books. Nicholson, Helen. 2005. Applied Drama: The Gift of Theatre. London: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1353/tt.2006.0022. Pérez Huber, Lindsay, and Daniel G. Solorzano. 2015. Racial Microaggressions as a Tool for Critical Race Research. Race Ethnicity and Education 18 (3): 297–320. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2014.994173. Sharma, Sarah. 2009. Baring Life and Lifestyle in the Non-Place. Cultural Studies 23 (1): 129–148. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380802016246. Sørensen, Jørgen Steen. 2018. “Uanmeldte Tilsynsbesøg i Udrejsecenter Sjælsmark—Forholdene for Børn.” Copenhagen, Denmark. https://www. ombudsmanden.dk/find/udtalelser/beretningssager/alle_bsager/2018-­39/. Spencer, Michael S. 2017. Microaggressions and Social Work Practice, Education, and Research. Journal of Ethnic and Cultural Diversity in Social Work 26 (1–2): 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1080/15313204.2016.1268989. Suárez-Krabbe, Julia, Annika Lindberg, and José Arce-Bayona. 2018. “Stop Killing Us Slowly: A Research Report on the Motivation Enhancement Measures and the Criminalisation of Rejected Asylum Seekers in Denmark.” http://refugees.dk/media/1757/stop-­killing-­us_uk.pdf. Trampoline House. n.d.-a. “Trampoline House: Sustainable Integration.” Accessed July 29, 2020a. https://www.trampolinehouse.dk. ———. n.d.-b. “Trampoline House—About Us.” Accessed January 29, 2020b. https://www.trampolinehouse.dk/about. Turner, Victor. 1982. From Ritual to Theater: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ Publications. UNHCR. 1951. “Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees.” 1951. https://www.unhcr.org/3b66c2aa10. Zaiotti, Ruben. 2016. In Externalising Migration Management: Europe, North America and the Spread of “Remote Control” Practices, ed. Ruben Zaiotti. London and New York: Routledge.

CHAPTER 6

Fieldwork Reflection: ‘Not Just Theatre, Also Politics, Law’—Making Theatre in Deportation Centre Sjælsmark

Fig. 6.1  Fight for your world, not your country by Abbas Haj

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 H. Grøn, Asylum and Belonging through Collective Playwriting, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24808-5_6

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‘Home and belonging’, Svend says to me, ‘are really interesting things to look into here’. He is the Red Cross volunteer coordinator I am meeting with in Sjælsmark to start my fieldwork. Like in many other asylum camps, Red Cross is a symbolic presence that the government ‘buys in’, as he puts it, to do the humanitarian work, such as schools and social activities. As I tell him about my background, he says he studied art, but needed a job to finish his degree. He became a substitute teacher in another camp, and fell in love with the work by way of the people. ‘I only learned later how absurd the political situations surrounding their lives are’, he continues, ‘but theatre, home and belonging…’ he takes a sip of his coffee, mulling it over, ‘it’s like the camp becomes a political symbol: the prison, and when people talk about it, they do it in that way, but essentially, they also forget that many of them make it their homes, that they do what they can to make it homely, do what they can to make it homely for their children, even if it’s temporary’. He shows me around the different rooms for activities they have, asks me where I would like to be. As we walk around the camp, guards crossing our way, Svend and I greeting the people we know (him from working here, me from Trampoline House) I try to place the concept and feeling of home amid the derelict buildings. Some months later, I will hear Shakira ask how she is supposed to live with the fact that her son thinks of home as a prison in her speech at a demonstration, and I will meet mothers in the Women’s Club I help coordinate in Trampoline House speaking about trying to furnish a shared room so it feels a little like home for themselves and their children. I will see the labour and compromises mothers and fathers make in reaching for a sense of normality for their children, and watch the childcare staff and volunteers structure activities, outings and events for the children to give them a sense of belonging and the chance at a childhood. The train and bus on the way up here do not link up. What is half an hour’s drive takes an hour and a half via public transport, sometimes longer. I wait at a bus stop for 30 minutes next to a family who are trying to find their way somewhere. The father asks me: ‘Sandholm?’ and shows me the map on his phone. Sandholm is an asylum reception centre for people who have just arrived and whose cases are still being processed. Directly next to this lies Ellebæk prison, and ten minutes further up the road is Sjælsmark. Ellebæk is divided from Sandholm by a high fence resembling something like a border wall and incarcerates people who are deemed to have broken the law. They are detained indefinitely without due processing or transparency about which sentence they receive. Their offences can

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range between the manner of their border crossing to having been caught living underground or refusing deportation. In June 2020, the contact network for people in Ellebæk (Ellebæk Kontaktnetværk 2020) published an article contextualising how the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture had deemed Ellebæk unfit for humans, concluding that in Ellebæk the ‘state punishes people without a sentence for being unwanted in the national community’ (my translation). At the bus stop, the father and I try and find a common language as I communicate the geography of North-Denmark’s asylum camps: three stops, then Sandholm. Their children run around and play, knock on the window of the bus-shelter where I sit, stick their tongue out at me then hide behind a bus stop poster whereon the drawing of a politician from Danish People’s Party says ‘Vote Danish’. The bus comes, and as we pass Sandholm I signal to the family to get off. In Sjælsmark, I am twenty minutes early and walk around the area. The September sun is warm, beneath me is a valley with big houses, and in the distance shots can be heard from another army barrack, the proximity of which the residents will remark on when we campaign for bettering the conditions for the children in Sjælsmark. Their children are scared when hearing these shots everyday, as many of the families have fled from war and conflict. The theories around geopathic dramaturgy, asylum liminality, bare life and reading the dramaturgies of deportation centres as unhoming are yet in the process of forming. Some of the texts that make these connections are unread, some of the thoughts unthought until I meet people who are generous in sharing their experiences. On that day, the name of Sjælsmark, Soul’s Field, seems simultaneously ironic and peaceful when placed between sunny fields, the big houses and the centre. It beckons questions of whose lives are valued, the ones in the big houses, the ones firing the shots or some 250 souls living in limbo just a step up the road. As I leave, Svend and I have agreed that I will come back in a few days to meet Rohan, who is keen to do theatre. ‘It is exciting’, he says, ‘to see if it works making theatre in this place’. The guard gives me a wave as I leave. Whoever is on duty at the entry sits behind a shielded window and keeps a record of who comes and goes, but they also have to open the iron gate for people to leave and enter. A few days later, Rohan comes and gets me at that same gate. Rohan speaks to the guard in Danish to say I am his visitor, but the guard has to call Svend to make sure it is okay that I am there, since for some reason my volunteer registration has not gone through yet. ‘Theatre?’ the woman asks Svend on the phone, ‘okay’. She

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looks at me and asks for my personal information so she can put it in the system, and finally I am let through. ‘Where did you learn Danish?’ I ask Rohan as we enter Sjælsmark. ‘I’ve lived here for 5 months. First in Jylland in a camp there, now here because they rejected my case’. They tell me about their dream to act, that theatre has always been a part of their life. Rohan and I agree to start the project the week after and that we will both try and find more people who might be interested in joining us. They take me back to the entrance, I wave at them and nod at the guard, the iron gate shuts behind me and the autumn sun is setting. I wait for half an hour for the bus, watching the cars whisk past.

6.1   Creating the Map of Non-belonging ‘What is the point of theatre if it doesn’t change anything?’ Payman asks me. He has stopped me in the middle of a name-game and asks why I am here. He tells me they already know each other’s names, they see each other every day. We sit down and I explain, once more, what I would like to do: write a play together with the stories they want to tell about how home and belonging arise and manifest in their lives, and if they want to, when the time comes, to perform it. I tell them it is part of a research project I am doing. Before I can explain further, Payman asks, ‘so basically we are just helping you with your research?’ Payman and Hasan continue to tell me that they have spoken to journalists, writers and creatives before, but nothing changes in their situation. ‘If you want to help, you should help’, he says ‘but not just theatre, also politics, law’. I explain to Hasan and Payman that my investment in their situations goes beyond writing plays; that I stand with them in community, demonstrations and politics, but their question remains, were they just helping me with my research, and, in that case, who is the work benefitting? As contextualised in previous chapters, applied theatre makers and scholars of refugee performance highlight the need to continually question the political efficacy of socially engaged drama. This first session made clear the difficulty and degree to which the hostility of politics and media played out in their lives, and therefore raised the question outlined in Chap. 2: how shall I act? Calling for a different methodological approach, dramaturgical ethics emerged as a way to structurally and theatrically address the differences in privilege, national and legal situations, while being ethnographically present to their legal, political and lived experiences. As Rohan translates for Ghafour, Arabic, English and bits of Danish intermingle, each language expressing

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opinions and giving explanations on theatre and making politically engaged art. What for Rohan and others is a future dream and a nice way to spend some time is a question of politics, access and change for Payman and Hasan. These different opinions highlighted the need for a process that was ethical, engaged and able to extend beyond the moment of making theatre together. On that day, we settle the conversation in the only place it can: uncertainty and unresolvedness; me, unable to change the immediate political circumstances of their lives, them, needing, urgently, for the political circumstances of their lives to be changed. Instead of doing the warm-up and get-to-know-you games I now feel silly for bringing, this discussion makes clear for me the need to listen and try to understand. We get a big sheet of paper, and I ask them to write, in whatever language they want, everything they associate with not-belonging, Sjælsmark and asylum. We will create a map, a way for me to understand, and a way for us to think about what we would write in a play, if we want to write a play. Figure 6.2 shows how the worksheet looked like. The headlines transcribed were:

Fig. 6.2  The map of non-belonging

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DIGNITY: Being treated like an animal. Not having control over your situation. We’re losing our dignity by facing such inhumane rules. Sorry if we can’t maintain the reputation “Demark is a country of the happiest people on earth” when we are outsiders and a smile doesn’t exist on our face. STEREOTYPES: Being treated like a stranger, an outsider. If we can talk to people and people will listen to us they will change their minds. I don’t want you to feed me, I just want you to listen to me. INVISIBLE LABOUR: Having to prove yourself all the time. UNFAIR SYSTEM/DOUBLE EDGED SYSTEM: You are creating the monster when you look at me that way. I can’t do anything. Why? The system in Denmark. Being caught in a system that’s against you. LACK OF CONTROL IN SITUATION: We can’t vote, we can’t change the system. TIME: We can only care for today, tomorrow is a mystery. PERSON = COUNTRY: Person is judged by where they are from, not who they are. Countries are scary words. When Danish people ask us where we are from, we say “France, Italy”— hiding identity so as not to discomfort people. Not make them run away. You are not better than me because you are Danish. You don’t choose where you are born. DANISH PEOPLE ARE THE PROBLEM: Every person is an individual Tom and Jerry HUMANITY: X:) Everyone not bad, everyone not good, everyone human. You have to believe in humanity. Refugees are not angels, just humans like you. En fremmed er en ven jeg ikke har mødt endnu (translates as: a stranger is a friend you have not met yet). COLONISATION:

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USA are also made of immigrants People have a short memory HOPE: Future Freedom

This provided a simple activity to gather around, which opened up the conversation from another point and created opportunity for me to listen. We spent the remainder of the session unpicking the dynamics of the political landscape in Denmark, life in Sjælsmark and the groups’ personal encounters with racism, systems and conflicts of belonging. These reflections on the worksheet and this first session laid the foundation for the themes and plot of the play, but as contextualised above, this session also led to key methodological approaches and theory of this study described in Chaps. 3–4. Payman and Hasan’s questions and directness called out my accountability and positionality, prompting me to reflect: How shall I act? Who is allowed to home? As the group questioned the relevance of theatre in their lives, they prompted me to do the same. This led to developing a process that was able to accommodate and work with these perspectives and to aim playwriting beyond a theatrical frame by incorporating non-theatrical elements, like sharing worksheets or engaging in conversation when performative elements or getting on one’s feet was not an option. Payman, Hasan and I wait at the bus stop together after the session and continue our conversation. They are also going into the nearest town to get away from Sjælsmark for an hour or two. They tell me transport is a problem, as they do not get any subsidies from the state and have no way of paying for it. Many of the residents in Sjælsmark have multiple fines from the transportation companies. Sometimes the bus driver will refuse to take them. They say they have their travel cards from friends. On leaving, I think of Améry’s how much home does a person need? More home than Sjælsmark.

6.2   Writing a Letter to a Danish Person To address the issues of the previous session and to start thinking creatively, the following session revolved around an exercise in which everyone wrote about their situation and the things they wished to draw out from the worksheet as if they were writing a letter to a Danish person. This

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functioned by using the medium of writing to imagine a dialogue where there is none (i.e. between the group and the typical Danish person) while shifting the dynamics of how such a dialogue works: through their letters, the group were the ones to decide what to tell and how to go into dialogue with an imaginary Danish person rather than the one who is typically on the receiving end of such an address. In Arabic, Ghafour asks whether it is okay if he writes down his whole story, and if Rohan will translate it for him when he is done. ‘My story’ Rohan translates ‘has all of this’ Ghafour gestures to the worksheet. When everyone is done, we read the letters out. Rohan wrote what became, almost word-for-word, the monologue in scene 4 of This Is Us. Rohan’s writing uses the framing and duration device of ‘give me a second’ to recount how national and international systems home and unhome people unequally. Imagining this addressee as a Danish person whose life has been supported by the systems that unhome Rohan, they notice the support such subject positions are given in developing identity and self: ‘the whole world helped you and supported you until you became who you are’ (This Is Us, Scene 4). But, durational again, ‘meanwhile I was somewhere else’ (This Is Us, Scene 4), living where systems support their own interests. Underscoring the invisible labour and compromises of such a situation, Rohan writes how they ‘had to fight to stay a good person’. This echoes Hasan’s remark that Sjælsmark and the hostility of Danish politics creates ‘the monster you fear to see’ (see Fig. 6.2). Ghafour reads his story bit by bit in Arabic as Rohan and Abbas translate into English. It takes him from his home to France to Denmark, unfolding the details of his life amid violence, turmoil and chaos with poetic and mellifluous phrases. In later sessions, the group will try and teach me how to shape my mouth around Arabic words. We will laugh as I get it wrong. They will tell me I have mispronounced their names since I met them, I will make a point of sounding it how they tell me and get it wrong again. We will all stay in this multilingual process together, as we learn snippets of each other’s languages. For now, I listen to the words in Arabic and wait for the translation. Following Irigaray, this process undoes my familiarity: the moments between language and comprehension highlight the gaps in understanding and experience between us and make clear the ethical and relational divides. Our attempts at ‘meeting across difference’ require, as Lorde notes, ‘mutual stretching’ (2009, 57). This punctuation between Arabic and English is reminiscent of the House Meetings in Trampoline House. Whenever someone speaks, they pause their

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sentences for translation, which is followed by a wave of murmurs in different languages. The duration of these processes: listening first to one language, then hearing the meaning in another, or the other way around, is what insures the inclusivity and democracy of Trampoline House. Following Bassel and Back’s notions on political listening, these pauses, gaps and silences that require listening in a different way are micropolitical acts that restructure the politics of a room, or, in Goll’s words, help reboot the social contract. In Sjælsmark, on that day, Rohan, Abbas and Ghafour open up the language and story by all contributing in the telling of it; sometimes stopping to discuss the meaning of a word and its correct translation into English, sometimes asking if I know a word for a certain feeling or situation, sometimes we are all side-tracked by an untranslatable word and spend moments meditating on its substitute. I miss several buses; the duration necessary in unfolding his (and the rest of the group’s) letters to a Dane offers a different space for storytelling outside of bureaucratic performance and the systemic dissecting of personal experiences for asylum claims. Ghafour’s choice to tell his story and the decisions he makes about the way it is told, demands a certain kind of listening and presence of us all. Perhaps this listening is akin to Benjamin’s reflections on storytelling as a community coming together in an effort to understand experiences that are not one’s own, but might, nonetheless, further our abilities to understand and share the world. Although on the surface nothing specifically theatrical happened, there we were in a community of our own making, listening, translating and seeking to understand an individual’s experience with the events of his life.

6.3  Narratable Versus Narrated Self or ‘to Learn About Beauty’ The next sessions unpicked devices of playwriting in an effort to open up the practice from within and give the group the tools they needed in telling the stories they would like to tell. This meant coupling reflective and creative writing exercises with conversations detailing the building blocks of dramatic writing and reflections on why and whether stories mattered. Opening creative and political space and approaching the elements of drama in terms of action, character, plot, structure and conflict meant that the group would develop a practical and reflective skillset to draw from. Situating playwriting within its narrative elements and as a narratively engaged practice required spending time inside of storytelling and

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unpicking narratology’s wide lens on story able to reflect how media, politics and the space of the camp structured identities around them. Taking apart the structure of whose voices dominate in such stories, the sessions sought to situate playwriting as a possibility for writing from a different vantage point and for creating a situation where the group were narrators rather than the narrated. Over two weeks, we worked through the mechanisms of dramatic plot and action, which work from the premise that action and conflict are the basis of developing dramatic narration. As a structural device, I introduced them to the four layers of conflict: . Internal: the character’s conflict with themselves. 1 2. Interpersonal: the character’s conflict with another person. 3. Horizontal: the character’s conflict with their community, job, politics, church, society, town and so on. 4. Vertical: the character’s conflict with bigger forces, such as God, disease, the cosmos.1 As a playwright, the task is to develop one’s character, the story and the dramatic universe through both conflict and the tactics the character uses to get around the obstacles. We traced these structures in the films, books and plays they liked to develop a sense of how this worked in the stories they knew. We also went through basic narrative structures and arches from an inciting incident building to a narrative climax and dwindling to a resolution. Echoing Rushdie’s perspective that human beings are ever positioned in the dialectic between the fantasy of home and the fantasy of away, we reflected on the story structure often used in fairy tales of home-away-­ home. For reiterative purposes: here a character starts from a known place of status quo, but via an inciting incident needs to go into the world to overcome a central conflict or complete a task and is then able to return home in a different way, accompanied by newly acquired skills and worldviews. As Chap. 3 remarks, there lies in ethics a pathway also towards understanding stories of voyage without return. Reflecting on the conflict 1  I was taught these layers of conflict by playwright Nicola McCartney when I trained as a playwright. As detailed in Chap. 5, when making verbatim and socially engaged plays, McCartney uses this method as a tool for the individual to also reflect on the conflicts of their own lives and the tactics they have employed in getting around them.

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between communicating ideas about dramaturgy from my own position of learning narrative structures in a Western tradition versus the need to give a structure to work from, I also conducted a workshop combining Booker’s (2004) idea of the seven basic plots within (dramatic and, importantly, Western) storytelling with Adichie’s danger of a single story elaborated on in Chap. 2. This opened up stories from a different trajectory, and led to us thinking and talking about the stories from their countries. During the remainder of the session, I was told stories of Kurdish mountains and flowers on hilltops as detailed in the interlude in Chap. 2, Syrian pop music and Lebanese bedtime stories. I was told about cow-poop-soup from Pakistan and made further attempts at Arabic sounds. During one of these sessions, Ahmad sat down in front of me and said, ‘okay, write this’, while he told me the story of his family, which revolved around the question: ‘if your mother is from one place and your father is from another, how does that work? How are you meant to have more places in you?’ (paraphrased from the conversation around the worksheet below) He continued to explore how one was able to be a family if they had all fled from war and ended up in different countries, and finished with the Kurdish proverb: ‘the person who leaves his house loses his value’. Pointing towards different narrative, for Ahmad, voyage without return or ‘away’ was not the potential space of conflict and opportunity allowing one’s character to develop and return home with renewed wisdom, but rather a place of non-transparent systems dividing families and unhoming them in different corners of the world. Had time and situation permitted, I would have attempted to spend more time developing these alternative structures with Ahmad (Fig. 6.3). Before deciding on the plot of their own play, we wrapped these sessions up with another worksheet whereon we brainstormed which fictional stories the group resonated with and all the reasons why these stories mattered to them. These stories, mainly Western films and books following traditional structures, circulate themes of battling against big, unseen evil forces as a seemingly powerless individual. My own lack of knowledge of other structures that could challenge the dominance of Western stories, coupled with the fact that the stories the group resonated with were mainly from Western traditions, limited the possibility of including and developing such facets in the play. The key attempts at doing so were Ahmad’s poetic and allegorical contributions, which begin to hint at alternative places from which to narrate.

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Fig. 6.3  Ahmad’s story

Reflecting perspectives of narratology and narrative therapy, and enforcing Nicholson’s (2005, 67) view that ‘fictionalised narratives found in myth and legend are integral to narratives of selfhood and community’, Rohan remarked how these stories matter because they became part of how he lived. For Ghafour they mattered because it allowed him to live multiple lives and taught him about beauty. For Abbas stories could transform suffering. Dismantling the dominating stories combined with reflecting on the possibility that stories can engender belonging and other perspectives on life created the double approach the group used in writing their play (Fig. 6.4). Azad gives me a lift home from one of these sessions. He is making a film about an Iranian family in Sjælsmark. We speak about theatre in a place like Sjælsmark. We speak about when he lived in an asylum camp and the monologues the group has written as part of the writing exercises. He says it was important for him to not be hardened by his experiences even though they were difficult, to not let them change him. He says art was part of preventing this. After a pause where we both trace the way the

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Fig. 6.4  Why stories matter

other cars move on the highway, he says that it is important to remember the effect you have on people when you try to see them in a different light than just through their situation.

6.4  Resisting the Refugee Narrative The process which combined the narrative arches of the stories most often told with criticalities around who does the telling, which stories are deemed important to hear and how political and media portrayal often create certain identities led to two, in my view, remarkable decisions being made about the play: firstly, the group wanted to write a character (the politician) who did not approve of refugees in order to understand why a person could have that view. Secondly, they did not want to tell the stories that encouraged the audience only to pity them. The telling of such stories, they said, did not account for everything they were before and beyond being asylum seekers or the hopes they had for their futures. Therefore, from the beginning, the group came at playwriting through the

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perspective of decreating and undoing to allow for something else to emerge. This, in turn, segmented the thoughts around undoing from the perspective of dramaturgical ethics. For example, by engaging with a character who has built his career around strict asylum policy, the group enacted a reaching across divides through theatre to understand and imagine how a person comes to be that way even when, in the reality of their lives, the politicians rarely reach back with the same aim of understanding and imagining what life as a refugee and asylum seeker is like. Ghafour insisted that a way to achieve complexity and avoid telling stories about themselves in a typical way was by including humour and black comedy. This would destabilise the audience’s perception of the refugee and the sadness and trauma that so often surround them. ‘I don’t want to tell a story where they pity us’, Ghafour insists as Rohan translates. ‘I want it to use black comedy’, Rohan translates again, ‘to make people see the darkness through the light’. We spend the next sessions writing together, unfolding the theatrical possibility of the stories and deciding on the plot and structure. Trampoline House has offered that we can perform the play at the Christmas Party, and the group has agreed that they would like to do this. Working towards a deadline gathers everyone. I bring my computer, Rohan brings theirs, and there are pens and papers on the table. Rohan and Abbas transcribe their monologues, Van Damme occasionally joins us, gives his opinion, leaves again, Ahmad and Hasan do the same and Azad pops his head in, asking to hear a scene or to see how it is going. Linking to the exploration of Trampoline House’s performative democracy, I am reminded of Balfour’s thoughts that ‘performance often facilitates participation through story-based process, and in this way could be seen as enacting a form of inclusive democracy’ (2013, xxv). Decisions are made unanimously, even if that takes time. Time we don’t have, Hasan likes to remind everyone. We decide together also on the title and which language we should write in. Ghafour wants to write a sketch about being in a nightclub, and answering where he is from with ‘good European countries’ (This Is Us, Scene 6). I suggest that he can write it in Arabic, and that we will find a theatrical way of working with that, but the group insists we write in English. Hasan and the others remind me that when we started these workshops, they wanted as many people as possible to hear and understand their stories. Reverberant on the multilingual dramaturgies outlined in Chap. 3, Rohan and Ghafour therefore end up writing Ghafour’s scene together: Ghafour dictating in Arabic, Rohan translating

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it into English as they explore dramatic possibilities together. Every time they finish a scene, Ghafour reads it in Arabic via Google translate and gives his thoughts and comments. This Is Us is two-fold: there is a story following two politicians in an ideological battle over the tightening of asylum laws. One of them does not like refugees and has built his career on the defence of national, traditional values. These scenes are interspersed with monologues and stories written by individual members of the group, addressing life in the camp, who they were before and who they wanted to be. The opening monologue reflects the process of coming at playwriting from undoing and decreation. Aimed at a Western audience (at once the politicians and the imagined Danish recipient of their letters) this monologue begins not a story, but rather a dismantling of a story. It tells by un-telling and destabilises frames of reference. Resisting the formulaic telling of refugee narratives, often reducing unique experiences and lived realities to graphs and ‘yours to tell’, the prologue drew on the sessions that worked with politics and media and their way of constructing identities around people: there are the things that frame me: The camp, the media, the wars, the conflicts, the seas, the journeys, the borders, the worn shoes, the ones who look at me with kindness, the ones who look at me with fear. (Prologue)

Combining the notion that ‘crisis’ reflects more on European countries than refugees (‘A lot of it tells you more about yourself than it does of me’) with Adichie and RISE’s critical thoughts around power and story, the monologue highlights the ethical demands of hospitality: It places you in the center of all the stories. The one who fears or loves the other. Me being the other, you being the one. The main character, the one who gives or withdraws, opens or closes. The one who controls the story by pulling the strings, the one who says who I am by saying who I am to you. (Prologue)

The next line ‘None of it speaks of what I was or what I could be. None of it means that I speak first’ (This Is Us, Prologue) underscores, as remarked on in several parts of this thesis, that for refugees, the story ‘is structured around the repeated requirement to tell within a culture of institutional disbelief; a story is presented as a currency to earn the next

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stage of entry’ (Dennis 2013, 287). Instead, the group begins the play by centring their own experiences and drawing out the conflicts and complexities in doing so: in this play, I want to speak first. I want to tell you about signatures on documents and few men in grand rooms that make decisions in the name of great words. Country, tradition, culture, safety, future. I want to tell you that rooms like that have changed the course of politics and lives of ordinary people for as long as written history has its memory. But I also want to remind you of the people who live between the pages, underneath the lines of signatures on documents made by few in sturdy government buildings. So in between the men pulling the strings, is me, and you, and everything in between. Everything I was and could be. (Prologue)

The prologue foregrounds the structure of the play where the story of the politicians is punctuated with monologues from the group, reflecting realities of how the macro-levels of politics, media and institutions have micro-­ level consequences on the lived experiences and belonging of those who ‘live between the pages’. The group further decided that they wanted to make a slideshow with photos and drawings of them doing other things than being refugees as a backdrop for the play. Abbas made his illustrations and the rest of the group found pictures showing them as friends, tourists, actors, beach-goers, boat-rowers, cooks, horse-riders, family-members, artists. This process highlights the dramaturgical ethics at play in the creative output: by making agentive creative choices that resist the currency or formulaic tellings of refugee narratives, the play offers an opportunity to ‘speak first’ and insist on an aesthetic that can hold the complexity and tensions of their situations. The dialogical scenes between the politicians follow an almost simplistic story that reduces the conflicts of left versus right to an interpersonal vie for power on a political stage. While this reflects another limitation to the process, namely that unfolding complex narratives takes time and time spent developing craft, two key challenges in Sjælsmark and in the time available for the process, this can also be read as an agentive choice in reserving the nuances in This Is Us for the monologues punctuating the politicians’ story. In a refugee-politician dialectic, this also reverses who does the formulaic narration of who. The inspiration for the story of the politicians came from conversations on the political landscape in Denmark depicted in Chap. 5; the debate on Lindholm Island, the DPP’s campaign

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and posters and life in the asylum camps, while taking into account events on the world-stage, such as Donald Trump’s presidency, Brexit and the political landscapes of their own countries. Peter is introduced to provide the comic relief Ghafour sought after, while also highlighting the absurdity of political process. In an almost Donald Trump-like parody, we see how Peter is simultaneously the right-hand man of the mafia-named politician, ‘the boss’, while also being the writer of his autobiography. Their humorous and ironic search for titles, such as A Life of Service or The Voice of the People, underscores the ironies of how political acts are often discussed as being in service of a common good, despite often neglecting the people at the fringes of a national togetherness. In an effort to understand how a person might make the central issue of his government the issues surrounding refugees, the group gave the boss the back-story of watching his neighbourhood change because of an influx of refugees and migrants. Rohan performed the character of the boss while also giving several of the monologues, such as their own monologue in scene 4 and the tour guide in scene 10. This provided a subversion of Jeffer’s bureaucratic performance and Jestrovic’s hyper-authenticity by being instead a compelling double-embodiment: rather than being the one asked to undertake processes of translation, compromises and the telling of stories within scenarios of institutional disbelief, for the duration of the performance, Rohan embodied a central conflict of their own life, being simultaneously the enforcer of such systems and displaying the effects such systems have on lives like theirs. Throughout the play, the audience thereby watched not a politician telling the story of asylum seekers, but asylum seekers telling the story of a politician who, notably, disapproves of asylum seekers within a play that centres those experiences over his. Challenging the refugee narrative and in a further effort to decreate, Hasan wrote the monologue in scene 10, transforming his experiences of the inhumanity in Sjælsmark into a biting counter-narrative. Written from the perspective of a tour-guide-esque character, he shows Sjælsmark as a cross between a retreat and a rehab centre. This guide has been on ‘quite an adventure’ travelling through ‘Dublin, Geneva and Palermo and that’s just the conventions!’ (This Is Us, scene 10). At the moment of speaking, however, he has finally ended up, with quite some relief, in the wonderful facility of Sjælsmark where people lose weight and take walks—anywhere— because there is not much else to do. Humour carves out the space for the gravity of the situation to unfold. The difficulty of living a life of dignity and humanity in Sjælsmark becomes apparent exactly because the tone

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strives against the topic. The dramaturgy of the monologue is shaped around questioning the ethics of how it is possible to allow a human to live in such conditions; the migratory aesthetics constructs a soundscape around the manifestations of mobility where the sharp notes of the precarious situation become jarringly clear. In order to get from the page to the stage, I asked actors Andrew Whalley and Claudia Domenici from Copenhagen Theatre Circle2 and Badr Amine from Trampoline House to come to Sjælsmark for a weekend to work with us on staging and rehearsing. As we get out of Azad’s car in Sjælsmark, Badr states ‘so this is Sjælsmark. I’ve heard great things’, eying the iron fence. The weekend begins with warm up exercises and drama-games led by Andrew and Claudia. As I play several rounds of zip-zap-boing and Samurai with the group, I reflect on how things had changed from the first session where games, movement and immersion were not options. Somehow, here, with a story that is theirs through a process that has sought to be engaged and ethical, performance and embodied playfulness has become possible. We run the play several times in different ways, exploring the possibilities of how to play the characters. I watch Andrew and Rohan work on the Sjælsmark tour-guide together and try him out in registers varying from apathetic to too-eagerly engaged, almost rallying the audience to enthusiasm for Sjælsmark. From the sofas, Van Damme, Ahmad, Azad and Abbas watch. While Abbas is making his illustrations, the others sometimes get on their feet and interfere to tell the actors ‘more’ or ‘less’. For his own scene, Ghafour has asked a friend, Salam, to act with him while Claudia played the ‘beautiful girl’. Ghafour tries out several different jokes in the beginning, making his decision on the measure of our laughter. When he tries the scene again, he tells me he has decided to start with: ‘I have a funny story, and if you don’t laugh I will kill you’. He runs his finger across his throat and looks threateningly at us, then says ‘no I am joking, I am not a terrorist’. His playful approach infuses in the whole scene. By thinking humour into an encounter rather than deciding on depicting a character who gives into the frustration of not being seen or understood, Ghafour resists formulaic and straightforward tellings. His scene, although light, does not resolve a situation that has no solution, but rather makes it possible for him to hold the space of tension. Neither Nicholas nor Anne’s 2  Copenhagen Theatre Circle is a Copenhagen-based theatre company producing Englishspeaking plays.

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positions change, speaking to the structural challenges they both operate within; he, as a refugee, she as a ‘Danish, born and raised’ citizen who, for unspecified reasons, chooses to leave once she learns Nicholas is from Syria. In this situation, much like in the groups’ own lives, being part of the story does not change anything; rather it shows the conflicts of the encounter. She is unable to make him welcome, of sustaining her interest in him once she learns where he is really from, and he is ultimately unable to hide his origins, even if he plays a role of a person who is accepted in the situation they share. These two positions exist alongside each other, even if there is not an easy or immediate solution of the problems of belonging between them (Figs. 6.5 and 6.6).

Fig. 6.5  Performing This Is Us

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Fig. 6.6  Playtext in Farsi and Arabic

As only a few of them want to perform their own monologues, the group asks Claudia, Andrew and Badr to perform also on the night. In Trampoline House, on the day of the Christmas Party and performance, Ahmad comes up to me, ‘hi my friend’, and asks me why I have never asked him to perform. When I say I have asked him a million times, he says he is joking, but has decided he would like to perform his own epilogue and end the play. When the others arrive, we practice with him. In the evening, I introduce the play to the audience gathered in the house from all walks of life. As ever in the House, the House is buzzing with activities and celebrations from the day, and it is so full that people sit on the floor and in the window stills. As ever it is a task to get people to listen. During the play, most of them fall silent, pay attention and applaud each scene, while others stay within the ethos of the House: listening to one scene, going outside for a cigarette, then coming back and watching again, asking a friend what they had missed. Although not a typical performance atmosphere, these disruptions, movements and different attention spans are accommodated in the House as people navigate their cases and lives. I am reminded again of political listening and the durational practices that

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ensure participation, which is also what allows for disruption; the mutual stretching where each can meet another where they are. Behind the actors is the slide show with pictures from their lives: Hasan and Payman on a boat trip, Ghafour riding a horse, Abbas’ drawings, Rohan acting, Van Damme doing martial arts, all of them deciding on telling a story that goes beyond their current situation. Forming a mirror to the opening monologue, Ahmad delivers the epilogue, ending the play by, once again, centring their own experiences and reminding the audience that the main fighters in the world are ‘those who fight silently’ (This Is Us, Epilogue). As I interview the group in the session detailed below, Ghafour will say that he did not like the experience much of performing, because he was not sure if people were paying attention, and whether they were only watching and clapping because they were refugees performing. My impression from both the event and from conversations with audience members after is directly the opposite. In fact, Ghafour delivered his scene with captivating comedic timing. I leave his comments here nonetheless both to reflect on the limitations of the process in terms of time, space and performance, but also to underscore the need to ever interrogate spectatorship and how a person is semiotically viewed placed within a performative setting.

6.5  The Helicopter Is Waiting Outside ‘Can I ask you some questions?’ I ask the group for our final session to round up before we go and get instruments as detailed in the interlude in Chap. 3. Ghafour says something in Arabic and the others laugh. ‘He says’ Rohan translates ‘to ask quickly, because the helicopter is waiting for him outside’. The group had previously joked about becoming famous actors and suggested ‘what ifs’ of a reality show coming to Sjælsmark. ‘I am very famous now’, Ghafour says, ‘like Johnny Depp’ and gestures to his t-shirt with Johnny Depp’s face on it. Ghafour’s joke titles this finishing reflection to underscore how creativity and dramatic possibility were an ongoing approach to reality in this process. The group were often simultaneously invested in the concrete and precarious terms of their lives, but also the narrative possibilities of what could be. As we saw in both Ghafour and Hassan’s scenes, humour carves out other spaces within a known world and shows how story as possibility and micropolitical action can work through the fabric of reality and tear at its solidity. After Ghafour speaks about the helicopter, we continue along this line for a while, transforming

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the story of Sjælsmark into a place where anything can happen: residents could make it in Hollywood (‘like Van Damme’, Rohan says), Sjælsmark could be a holiday destination, a helicopter could pick up a famous person trying to avoid his many screaming fans, or as we saw in the chapter on dramaturgical ethics, a deportation centre could be a school for witchcraft and wizardry. I interview them about the process and about making theatre in their situations and in Sjælsmark (Sjælsmark, 17th December 2018). Rohan, Abbas and Ghafour all reflect that the main difficulty is not being able to commit to a process even when perhaps wishing to. As Rohan remarks: ‘you never know how long you will stay. So you cannot plan. Maybe you are writing one day, and the next day you are leaving, so…’ Abbas agrees: ‘you don’t have a comfortable and stable situation, so you don’t feel comfortable doing anything’. Reflecting on the notions of narrative therapy, and whether writing had helped in that way, Rohan remarked that ‘when Hasan wrote the sarcastic part about Sjælsmark, that made me feel personally a little bit better about the place … to not be angry all the time’. Rohan further reflected that the sessions had provided a space for them to come, regardless of how they were feeling: maybe something would have happened that morning in their cases or in Sjælsmark, but ‘then you would be writing and then you would be giving all that you have of upsetness and put it in the play’. Abbas elaborated on his thoughts above with relaying that what had helped for him was also enjoying the process. He continues: People here they need to have someone from outside the circle to listen to them. Where do they came from, what is their problem and what is the things they are facing here and in their minds and from their past, and they just want people from outside to listen and to know what is happening here. Just this it helps so much. (Sjælsmark, 17th December 2018)

Abbas prompts me to reiterate the process-specific approach of ethnoplaywriting and dramaturgical ethics, focussed on creating spaces both for making theatre, for communicating experiences and for holding tensions. As the interview underscores, these factors are necessary for people whose situations are precarious, and where anything might end or begin at any hour, such as police coming in the middle of the night to drop them off at an airport for deportation. While this makes it impossible to create performance through sustained and say weekly participation over a length of time, Abbas underscores how the process itself is a way of listening: while

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writing This Is Us, people would come to sessions having received news about their cases or their family and friends in other countries and be unable to concentrate. Sometimes members of the group had been up all night from anxiety, other times they brought their friends not to participate in making theatre, but simply to be in a room with other people doing something. During one of the sessions, the news of Lindholm Island and the debate around Sjælsmark had reached a peak in the media. Van Damme joined us late and interrupted the activity to ask what it meant and what I, as a Danish person, knew. He was afraid for himself and his family and needed the space to talk through what this news meant. Ahmad only came to sessions sporadically, but would often find me in Trampoline House to tell me a story he had thought of or to show me pictures of his home and Kurdish mountains. He wrote his monologues in the play also like this: with him dictating and me typing on my computer in the house. At some point he found a friend who had a computer, and he would start editing them during the evenings and nights and send them over emails. Ahmad is not in Denmark anymore, but for a long time I still received his emails, ‘hi my friend’ he wrote in the subject line, and sent a song, a piece of writing or a picture. Just as Trampoline House work holistically for democracy by understanding that its users are often navigating an asylum system while participating in the making of a community, writing This Is Us warranted a process where theatre became a space for belonging and being listened to while people participated and wrote in the way they could. While the group wished to perform the play again to a wider audience, the precarity and political realities of their situations played out: a month after the performance, almost all were facing deportation and handled this in the unpredictable and risky ways available in such situations; going underground, going somewhere else, appealing their case. At the moment of writing, I could not gather that same group in a room, let alone on a stage. While it is perhaps neither the politics nor law that Payman and Hasan called for in the first session, I intend to conclude this reflection with a lack of conclusion and abundance of questions because this, I believe, is also how we do the work of performance and drama; in these irregularities of holding space for complex and precarious lives as stories that resist easy telling or straightforward dramaturgical processes, stories that require answering the call to ethics and responsibility, stories that unfold in relational moments of care that reorient and rethink scholarship, dramaturgy and artistic practice, and, most importantly, the way in which we enter into the world together.

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Appendix: This Is Us Play written by  Rohan, Abbas, Ghafour, Ahmad Kaya, Hasan, Payman, Van Damme, Salam Characters: ‘The Boss’: The Prime Minister Peter: His clerk and autobiographer Opposition ‘Mr Green-spring-leaf’: The voice of the opposing party Setting: A government building. An asylum camp. The places between. Prologue: There is a lot of stories out there. A lot of stories that talk about who I am: According to them, according to you, according to the things you fear to see or the things you want to see. A lot of stories that talk about experiences that I’ve had as if they were phenomenon, as if they were graphs, as if they were yours to tell.

Fig. 6.7  The Politicians by Abbas Haj

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And then there are the things that frame me: The camp, the media, the wars, the conflicts, the seas, the journeys, the borders, the worn shoes, the ones who look at me with kindness, the ones who look at me with fear. A lot of it tells you more about yourself than it does of me. It places you in the centre of all the stories. The one who fears or loves the other. Me being the other, you being the one. The main character, the one who gives or withdraws, opens or closes. The one who controls the story by pulling the strings, the one who says who I am by saying who I am to you. None of it speaks of what I was or what I could be. None of it means that I speak first. But in this play, I want to speak first. I want to tell you about signatures on documents and few men in grand rooms that make decisions in the name of great words. Country, tradition, culture, safety, future. I want to tell you that rooms like that have changed the course of politics and lives of ordinary people for as long as written history has its memory. But I also want to remind you of the people who live between the pages, underneath the lines of signatures on documents made by few in sturdy government buildings. So in between the men pulling the strings, is me, and you, and everything in between. Everything I was and could be. Scene 1: A room in a government building. The discussion is already happening. Outside, a protest can be heard. The boss: Look we don’t have much time. 4 hours to be exact. Peter: I brought coffee and cake. The boss: Shut up, Peter. 4 hours… Peter: There’s milk and sugar… The boss: 4 hours to tell the people what kind of country we will be Peter: And one of those cakes with the chocolate inside that… The boss: Peter, will you shut up? 4 hours to say what we will do for them. Peter: Sorry. The Boss: If we will listen to our people’s concerns. Opposition: Some of the people, prime minister, some of them. Don’t forget, half of them are demonstrating the passing of this law outside as we speak. The boss: Not half of them, a few hundred, and those? They are like children, they are so stuffed to the brim of idealism that they don’t know what’s best for them. Peter, would you write this down?

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Peter: Yes sir. The boss: We have to be the parents, the parents that keep an overview of their entire lives and decide what’s best for them, not only now but in years to come. We are at their service, do you understand? Peter are you getting this? Peter: At their service. Yes. The boss: Good, excellent. Opposition: Excuse me, but I’m confused, what is he doing? The boss: Peter is my clerk, and he’s documenting my political life for my autobiography. Peter: And doing so with pleasure I might add. The boss: ‘A Life of Service’ Peter: Or ‘The Voice of the People’ Opposition: Right, well. Peter: Or ‘For the Love of my Country’ The boss: We’re still working on titles. Opposition: Okay—well. I know my party said they were ready to sign, but I have to say that I cannot back what you’re proposing. Peter: But your party said they would. The boss: And why on earth did they send you? You’re as green as a spring leaf. I thought I’d be dealing with Mr Thomsen. Opposition: Mr Thomsen is old and he has passed many laws that are against our party’s values, they thought it was time for opposition. A fresh pair of eyes, and I’m glad they did, because I’m here to tell you that you cannot call it a democracy if you deny people having their opinion, prime minister. The boss: That’s absurd, we have to sign this today. This was a done deal. The people need it. Opposition: The people are outside protesting asylum laws that this government passed and continue to pass—inhumane laws. Do not undermine their intelligence, they read and think and… The Boss: They read and think what we tell them to read and think. Opposition: They read newspapers, prime minister, newspapers that tell them stories about people drowning on journeys across seas, walking across borders. The boss: Left-wing propaganda. And what about those newspapers that speak our cause? The ones that write about crime statistics of Muslim communities, bad integration, people coming here for welfare? Opposition: Fears, not facts.

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The Boss: What a wonderful place you live in. Wouldn’t that be a privilege for a day to not have a bird’s perspective of the world, Peter? Peter: Yes boss. The boss: Don’t you think I would love it for the world to be that simple, but we can’t afford that privilege. Opposition: This is a farce. The boss: We have to leave the world to our children better than we found it… Opposition: Better for who? The Boss: For our people. Opposition: And what about the other people? The Boss:  They are not our people, it’s not our responsibility to help them. Opposition: If every country denies responsibility, then what’s left? With all the respect, prime minister, we’ve signed conventions, conventions that insist on the dignity of every human being’s right to… The Boss:  Conventions signed many moons ago that did not and could not foresee the mess we’re in now, conventions drowned in diplomacy that has left every country in Europe at odds with itself… Opposition: If we don’t uphold conventions when the going gets tough then what do they mean? The Boss: And if we don’t take responsibility in the present then what does the future look like? I did not ask you to come to discuss philosophy. We’re politicians and everyone knows that game is messy. It’s blood and guts and real change. Opposition: A game, prime minister? This is real people’s lives we’re talking about. The Boss: Look, we have delayed for long enough. We have a press conference in 4 hours. Peter: 3 and a half. The Boss: Where we have to present our new asylum laws. The press are waiting, the people are waiting, if we don’t reach an agreement today we will all lose face, your party included. So let me start by saying, I love my country, write that down, Peter, and I believe this will make a great difference. But let’s start with the facts, Peter.

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Peter: I think we should start with cake and coffee, soften the tension a bit. The Boss: Oh for goodness sake. Scene 2: ‘Fish have colours but the sea is one colour’—proverb. Each human on earth has born in a different place, you can call it a country, kingdom, land, it doesn’t matter. It happens randomly, without any kind of welling or choosing. As all of you truly know, ladies and gentlemen. Then, for some reasons out of our control mostly, it happened that some of us became under big dangerous situations on their land, it could be war, persecution, starvation and so on. Therefore, as human beings, with the ability of surviving and to stay alive, we choose to leave, to another secured place, in our big land, because we are not trees! If I knew of something that could serve my nation but would ruin another, I would not propose it to my prince, for I am first a man and only then a Frenchman … because I am necessarily a man, and only accidentally am I French. (Montesquieu)

I think, by the whole history, no community had a continuous peaceful life forever, continuous wealthy successful time or a quick civilised countries on demand. So what is happening now of disasters in our countries, it could be the same or worse in your countries, which is something I really don’t like to happen at all, anywhere. The fact that I’m trying to tell is that we are all humans at the first place, some of us are good and some are bad, and that could be also affected by the treatment of the society and environment. Another thing I would like to say, about stereotyping, I mean even if we are in the twenty first century and all of this globalisation and opened media, we still hear people acting and judging on us according to our nations, our colours and appearance! Socrates once said ‘speak, so that I may see you’. Each person is an individual mind, he is not his country, and he does not represent it nor responsible of what it did of bad things. Look around you in your own country, your city and even your family to find all the diversity.

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Scene 3: Same as before. The boss: Peter, the facts. Peter: Yes boss. Let’s start from the beginning. The boss: Just read the document. Peter: We can all agree we’ve experienced a crisis. Refugees have been a huge problem in this country. It has had a negative impact on the welfare system we have worked hard to create. Crime rates are higher in these specific populations. And then there is the question of culture and people coming with cultures that are in conflict with our ways of living. Several countries around us have closed their borders, which means the flux will go our way in the next years. Already we have seen an increase of people asking for asylum here—and so, we need to send a stronger message. ‘Go somewhere else’, ‘Shoo’, or maybe ‘this country is ours’, or—I’m just throwing stuff out there, but… The boss: Please Peter, don’t get creative, stick to the facts… Peter: Right. So what we propose is to close the borders and not take more asylum seekers—and then there is another clause saying increase efforts to deport those who have not been granted asylum already. The boss: And we need to sign this document and pass it on today. Those are the facts. Opposition: This is absurd. The Boss:  It’s reality. I understand that’s not your expertise, but there it is. Opposition: And the tightening of the laws wouldn’t have anything to do with the upcoming re-election and hoping for more right-wing voters, would it, prime minister? The Boss: Why, do you want my job? Do you think it’s easy to be this polemic? Opposition: It’s easier to be polemic than it is to be humane, clearly. The Boss: I am humane, I love my people. Opposition: Their own countries have failed them, prime minister. There is no one else. The Boss: We cannot encourage more to come, we do simply not have the space or the money.

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Opposition: Denying them access to safety is not only against several human rights conventions, it is placing a price on their heads, it’s saying we are more worth than them, it’s devaluing human life. And what way is that—asserting your own humanity by denying that of others? The people who come here are fleeing from terrible situations in search of what we have, safety, freedom… The Boss: Money, a government who will pay for them so they can sit at home and do nothing—freely giving them access to our country destroys our culture, our traditional values. They do not fit. They come here to have what we have without understanding the responsibility involved in democratic life. It is a recipe for disaster. Opposition: People learn, goddamit. The Boss: You cannot replace upbringing with learning, don’t be ridiculous. Culture sits in bones. Opposition: It’s called integration. The Boss: It is called a goddamn mess. It is called downright ignorance. Opposition: You cannot say that you’re better than them just because of where you’re born. The Boss: Damn right I can. And they can too, but if they want to continue their way of life, I have nothing against it, I just don’t want it to be on my territory. Opposition: You sound like a colonial ruler. The Boss: And you sound like a blind optimist. Opposition: A better world is possible. The Boss: Damn right it is, and it starts in this room by signing this document. I will ensure the safety of my country before today is over. I was under the impression you loved your country too, Mr. spring-leaf. Opposition: Of course I love my country, but I also want to share it. It has no value otherwise. The Boss: It will not be the country you know and love in twenty years if we do not do anything now. Opposition: I agree, it will be worse. It will be inhumane—a place filled with coldness and suspicion with border walls the height of Mount Everest, scared of anyone who comes and goes— sounds wonderful. Does it also sound familiar? Oh yes, that’s a dictatorship.

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I will not have you talk like this. You cannot compare me to a dictator simply because I love my country and want to protect and cherish what I grew up with… Opposition: White people living next to white people in white house being challenged by nothing—closing in on themselves like… The Boss: And I certainly did not come to be personally attacked. I am a practical man. I am here to solve the problems we have in front of us… Opposition: People, not problems. These laws are how you break the world in two, Prime Minister, Us and Not Us. The Boss: I am not a dictator. Don’t write that down, Peter. Opposition: It’s despotic. It’s colonial. If politics is blood and guts, then… The Boss: You’re young, you don’t understand yet. Opposition: And you’re old, move over so you can let us create a better world… Pause The boss: Oh I see. I see you now. Look at us, Peter. Peter: Yes? The boss: Mr Green-spring-leaf here wants power. Opposition: What? The boss: He wants to be prime minister. Opposition: This is absurd. The boss: He wants to create a better world, and he wants to do it from the big desk—that’s why he took this meeting. Trying to steal Mr. Thomsen’s job, are we? Opposition: You’re out of order. All I want is to take my country back from xenophobic, retiring fearmongers like you. You feel threatened, I get it, and you should. We will create a better world, and all we have to do is keep fighting, eventually people like you will die out and your ideas will too… Pause The Boss: Enough. We’re taking 5. Peter: But you said we don’t have much time. The Boss: Shut up, Peter. The boss exits.

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Peter: Opposition: Peter: Opposition: Peter exits.

Please, have more coffee and cake. How you got your job is beyond me, Peter. But I… Please shut up, I need a second.

Scene 4: Give me a second I asked you for help, and you judged me by my name. I said I want peace, you said I am a rebel terrorist. I told you I am open to new ideas and all types of human beings. You told me there is no place for me, that I come from a dark background. But then I asked what now? You told me to hold on a second so you can think. Pause But let me tell you something. You were born here. Your country helped you, the European Nations helped you, the whole world helped you and supported you until you became who you are. Meanwhile, I was somewhere else. My country did not help me, it helped its owners. I became who I am because I fought for it everyday, I fought to stay a good person. My society kicked me away. My society neglected me. My family wanted me to be like society and I told them no because I wanted to be more like you. So don’t tell me everyone have the same opportunities. And when I told you about all this, you turned away, telling me this is not your fault. Not your responsibility. Don’t worry, I am not going to say that you are selfish or committing a crime, because if I do you will stop listening. So I am going to let you conclude it. Pause But it has been a lot more than just a second.

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Scene 5: Another room. The Boss is looking out the window. Protestors can still be heard. Peter: I brought you coffee, sir. The Boss: Enough with the coffee and cake, Peter. I need signatures on documents. Peter: We will, before the day is over. Is the protest still going on? The boss: Yes. Peter: They’ll tire. (pause) look, I know I may not seem that bright, I know that I maybe wasn’t the most qualified for the job … but I joined this party because I believed in you, in what you were saying. I remember being 18 watching you on TV, and I thought… this man, he can make our country better, he can make real change. Everything you stand for. Stability, integrity… The boss: A despot. A dictator. Peter: The burden lands harder on the people with the responsibility. The boss: That was almost clever, Peter. Peter: My granddad said it to me once. He told me to pity politicians, the burden of power. The boss: Every politician wants both the burden and the power, Peter. You can write that down. Pause The boss: I do think about it, you know. The people in boats on sea or walking cross the countries or homes being bombed. I’m human. I never saw myself as someone without a heart. I saw myself as someone whose sacred duty it was to protect my country, to protect what I love. Peter: He is only saying what he does because he’s afraid. The boss: We’re all afraid. Where I grew up, midlands, countryside. When I was 10, migrants started moving in and they changed everything. People were so eager to be welcoming that we forgot who we were. You can write that down too. Peter: The refugees pay the price for globalisation.

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The boss: We all pay the price for globalisation, Peter. The world will be divided into people on different sides. I can see it. They want what we have, but that’s not fair, that’s communism. The only way they can get what we have is by taking it from us, and then nobody has it … Imagine that, Peter. Peter: You lost me, sir The boss: These are the things that keep me awake at night. My responsibility to my country, my children growing up having what I had. Green fields, clear traditions, one language, citizenship. Birthrights and culture aren’t choices, that’s a modern illusion. Peter: Perhaps it won’t matter where you’re from in the future. Maybe nobody will care about that anymore. The boss: You sound like you joined the wrong party, Peter. Peter: No, sorry, boss, I just sometimes wonder about globalisation … If history will understand what we—sorry boss—I mean you, your party were trying to do, to protect. The boss: History won’t write about you, don’t worry. They’ll write about me. And maybe they’ll write about how I resembled a dictator, how I sent people back to deserts and death. But I’m an old man, Peter, I can’t afford to care about personal opinions anymore. I need another 4 years in office to create a better, more stable future before our Mr. Green-spring-­leaf can ruin it. Peter: Perhaps if we offer them a seat at the table in the debates? The boss: What do you mean? Peter: You said he wanted power? What if his party get to co-author the laws? He can sign but have a say. We say we back him as party-leader and prime minister after your term? Pause The boss: You know Peter. You’re not as stupid as you look despite your obsession with coffee and cake. Peter: Thanks boss. The boss: Call every single member of his party and get them to back him. Tell them Mr. Thomsen is old, that we will work with Mr. Green-­spring-­leaf, back him as prime minister in 4 years if they sign today. Peter, you’re brilliant. Peter: Really?

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The boss: By then the laws will be so hard to change that it won’t matter. He’ll be pushing and running himself into the ground before real change happens. Why didn’t I think of that? Peter: I don’t know, sometimes I just have these ideas and The boss: Why are you still standing there? Dial those numbers. Scene 6: A refugee, a Mormon and a politician walk into a bar Just joking. No seriously, so one day I walked past a bar, out in front smoking was this beautiful girl, and I wanted to talk to her. Now I have a survival tactic for situations like these. In my pocket at all times, I have this paper. It’s a plan, it is very important to me, what it is, a paper of Denmark cities in one column, and on the other column, it is matched with European and good countries to tell girls that I’m from so they don’t freak out. Imagine—‘hey, where are you from?’ ‘Syria’ —She’d be out of there. So I checked what city I’m in, and what’s the matched country on the other side. So for example: Allerød = Italy. And it works every time, except for this one time. He goes and ask someone from the audience that they agreed before. Refugee: Hi Girl: Hey Refugee: My name is Nicolas Girl: Hi Nicolas, my name is Anne. Where are you from? Nicolas checks the paper Nicolas: I’m from France, and you? Anne: I’m Danish, born and raised. Nicolas: I saw you from away, and you got my attention. Can we get to know each other? Anne: Sure. I saw you too. Nicolas: Cool! Can I have your phone number? Anne: Yes absolutely. Can I have your phone to put the number in? Nicolas: (To the audience) See? Nicolas hands her the phone, and then his friend comes to him and speaks in Arabic. Friend: (in Arabic) Hey you, will you introduce me? Nicolas gets nervous and tries to push him away and speaks in French. Nicolas: Degage! Go away! pas maintenant. Anne: Who’s that? What did he say?

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Nicolas: (In English to Anne) No idea, clearly he’s crazy. (In French to his friend) Go away. Friend: (In Arabic) What are you doing? Anne: Seems like he knows you. (To the friend) Do you know him? Friend (In English) I’m his friend, we know each other back in Syria. Nicholas: (In Arabic) Please stop. Friend: We were just speaking Arabic. Anne: Arabic? From Syria? Nicolas tries to stop him from speaking, arguing and pushing his friend in Arabic. Anne hands him his phone back, without giving the number. Anne: Hey sorry, my mom called me an hour ago, I have to see my friends back home. Pleasure to meet you. So I walk on. And 20 minutes later I see her sitting with an Italian guy, and not a like ‘Allerød = Italy guy’, a real wine, spaghetti, pizza Italian one. Pause So, instead of having an evening with her and had an evening in the first class Sjælsmark. Scene 7: ‘The person who goes out of his house loses his value’—Arabic proverb There is a story that asks the question: If a flower is born in the mountain, how can it live in the city? How can it bloom and grow and reach for the sun away from its home? If you have lived in one place, and you’re dug up by your roots and planted somewhere else, how can you grow? How can you love again and have new relationships? People only have one heart, one home, one place they come from. They do not have many hearts to love many different people with. Scene 8: Government building. Back in the first room. The Boss: Opposition: The boss: Opposition: The boss: Peter:

We have one hour. We also have a global responsibility. Look before we get back into this. Gentlemen, if I have to be the last voice of reason and humanity I will… Peter, will you? We have called every single member of your party. We have told them Mr Thomsen is old, that they need new blood, your blood…

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The boss: Peter:

Peter. I don’t mean your blood as in an assassination, I mean your blood as, you know new leader… The boss: Peter. Let me handle this. Opposition: You’re out of your minds. The boss: Look Mr Green, it’s gonna go like this. You sign, you become party leader. You back our laws for the next 4 years when I get re-elected. Opposition: 4 years of this? You must be crazy if you think I’ll agree to that. The boss: And then we put you forward as prime minister when my term is over. We will put you in my seat, what you do with the country then is your business. I’ll retire to my vineyard in France. Opposition: You must be fucking joking. The boss: Your party agrees. Peter: I have them on the phone now. Opposition takes the phone Opposition: (To the phone) What the fuck, John? You backed me into a corner. Opposition exits. The boss: Good work Peter. Peter: Thanks boss. The Boss: I’ll have that coffee and cake now. Scene 9 2+1=0 Once, a wise man walked along a field with several of his companions when they saw three people looking for a treasure. The wise man said to his friends: ‘Look at what happens to these three people’, and they stood and watched. One of the three men said: ‘I will bring food from the village to you, and you can watch the treasure’. The two men decided that when their comrade came back from the village, they would kill him and share the treasure between them. A cook from the village had heard of the three men and the treasure and poisoned their food, so he could get the treasure himself.

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When the first man returned, his comrades killed him. To celebrate getting the treasure, they ate the poisoned food and, alas, died. From then on, there was no treasure and no men. 2+1=0 Scene 10: I’ve been on quite an adventure since I left Pakistan, I’ve been through Dublin, Geneva and Palermo and that’s just the conventions! Finally though, you’ll be pleased to hear, I’m safe and sound here in Denmark and am living it up in a place called Sjælsmark. Haven’t heard of it? Well, please let me explain… I’ve always loved the outdoors and lucky for me Centre Sjælsmark is in the middle of the beautiful Danish countryside. Just a short 45 minute walk to the picturesque town of Allerod with its lovely 7–11 and train station. Set in z acres of former military base, it offers luxury accommodation to over 200 people. Security is a big deal. With all the shootings and gang violence in Nørrebro, the government really wants to make sure we refugees are protected in our very own compound. You can never be too careful! 3 metre high fences. Two brand new gates. Even private guards. I can never remember which security firm they’re from, it says, ‘KriminalForsogen’ or something on their uniforms. They’ve got the army to protect us too, we can hear them practicing. It’s reassuring that constant sound of gunfire and those tanks, it lulls me to sleep at night. They have a great integration programme to teach us the secret to the Danes’ happiness. Society is so materialistic these days so at Sjælsmark we have the opportunity to live simply and escape modern technology. No fridges, no TVs and just 120kr every 15 days. It’s the perfect programme for smokers, alcoholics, anyone looking to break a bad habit or get back to nature. There’s plenty to do here too, walk in the woods, walk in the fields, walk beside the lakes, around the fence, anywhere really. Oh and the food is fantastic. There are no seconds though, no extra portions. Don’t even think about trying to steal an extra sugar, they’re watching. Obesity is a big deal here in Europe and the government doesn’t want us to get fat. We can’t take the food to our rooms either, I guess they do have to be sure that we’ve eaten all our greens. Sometimes I do get that gnawing hunger at night, but hey I know it’s for my own good in the end. Forget Atkins and Flexitarian, the Sjælsmark diet is way more effective, I’ve lost 20 kilos in 6 months. Despite their best efforts, we do get sick now and again but don’t worry we have an onsite medical team to help us. They don’t believe in newfangled antibiotics and medication in Scandinavia, it’s too risky with all those

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awful side effects, they prescribe more traditional treatments. Bed rest, plenty of water and a nice cup of tea cure everything (apparently). So if you’d like to relax in the Danish countryside for a few months or possibly a few years (no one really knows how long they’re staying), Sjælsmark is your dream destination. I’d be happy to show you around! Scene 11: Opposition sits with the paper. Outside, press gather. Demonstration can still be heard. Opposition: One sentence that changes so much for so many people. One name. I don’t know how you can live with yourself. The Boss: I couldn’t live with myself in any other way. Please sign, we don’t have long. Opposition: In four years … I will destroy you. He signs. The Boss: In four years the country is yours. Sign here. Opposition: People will die, you know. And the camps we made, the ones both our parties signed off on, like prisons, telling them they’re criminals. The hopelessness. That’s on you. The Boss: If it helps you sleep at night. He signs. Peter takes the papers. He exists The boss: Pleasure working with you. Opposition: Fuck off. You backed me into a corner. The Boss: Politics, my young friend, blood and guts and real change. (He’s about to leave) Let me give you a piece of advice. Take your youthful optimism and your belief in real change and humanity. Lock it in the safest place you can, and don’t let anyone touch it. Take it out only when you need it, and then lock it back up. In this world, it’s the only way to keep a shred of dignity in your beliefs. Opposition: You are only saying that because you should have retired a long time ago. The Boss: Maybe. But you remind me of myself at your age. Peter enters. Peter: Here’s your press release. The Boss and Peter exit. Opposition sits back. He buries his head in his hands. Outside demonstrators can be heard.

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Epilogue: Songs travel from one night to the next. they say: There are those who stay with darkness Those who wait for the nostalgia of the homeland at night. Those who are waiting for their families and their children. Those who remember their previous love in their hearts. Those who swear to freedom. There are those who recall their young memories and those who remember their childhood. And some people fall asleep with nostalgia. Some people count the bad days. Some people fight with their lives. Some die in the corner of the world alone. But the main fighters are those who fight silently.

References Balfour, Michael. 2013. Refugee Performance: Practical Encounters. Edited by Michael Balfour. Bristol. Intellect. Booker, Christopher. 2004. The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories. New York: Continuum. Dennis, Rea. 2013. Inclusive Democracy: A Consideration of Payback Theatre with Refugee and Asylum Seekers in Australia. In Refugee Performance: Practical Encounters, ed. Michael Balfour. Bristol: Intellect. Ellebæk Kontaktnetværk. 2020. I Ellebæk Straffer Staten Mennesker Uden Dom for at Være Uønskede i Det Nationale Fællesskab. Information, June 9, 2020. https://www.information.dk/debat/2020/06/ellebaek-­s traffer-­s taten-­ mennesker-­uden-­dom-­vaere-­uoenskede-­nationale-­faellesskab?fbclid=IwAR3A KCRuyrJe3bv8YMSjfB_KCrJxHgxmGM-­VHofkP7T-­v0VtZkeTrPOwSCo. Lorde, Audre. 2009. I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde. Edited by Rudolph P. Byrd, Johanetta Betsch Cale, and Beverley Guy-Sheftall. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Nicholson, Helen. 2005. Applied Drama: The Gift of Theatre. London: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1353/tt.2006.0022.

CHAPTER 7

‘You Are Enough, You Belong With Us’: Reimagining Sisterhood as Collective Belonging

Fig. 7.1  Girl by Abbas Haj © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 H. Grøn, Asylum and Belonging through Collective Playwriting, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24808-5_7

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On International Women’s Day in March 2019, a group of young women from asylum-seeking and refugee backgrounds took the stage at the Glasgow Women’s Library.1 As part of a music project developed at the Youth Community Support Agency (YCSA), the group had undergone songwriting workshops with industry professionals2 to learn about the mechanisms of music-making and to develop their own creative capabilities. To an all-female audience, the women’s performance was a contribution to a day that celebrated the historical and continuing struggles and overcomings of women the world over. They finished the evening with a song written collectively called ‘You Belong with Us’ in which one of the verses went: Lost in the list of life’s essentials locked in the frozen sea an ancient goddess grieving her reflection wondering who to be. You are enough, you belong with us. (YCSA Music and The Sistas 2019)

With that, the group lyrically expressed the dynamics that this chapter and fieldwork reflection seeks to get to the heart of. The last line became a chorus sung repeatedly, as if it were the end to a story which has no easy conclusion: the story of belonging again after escaping precarious situations, the story of being a refugee or asylum seeker in a new country and context, the story of undermined feelings of belonging due to societal structures and bureaucratic processes. And then, on the other side of this, the gentle suggestion of belonging as being enough (‘you are enough’), belonging as something that can be done collectively (‘you belong with us’), belonging as taking the space and the stage in the world, in the shape you have, whether you know who you are or not, whether lost, whether an ancient goddess still puzzled by the question of how to find footing in the world. 1  Parts of this and the following chapter are based on the previously published article ‘Navigating Notions of Belonging Through Poetry and Playwriting with Refugees and Asylum Seekers’ (Grøn 2019), used here with permission. 2  The project was led by community musician and project manager Clare McBrien and the songwriting workshops conducted by: Donna Maciocia, Lucy Cathcart Fröden and Diljeet Bhachu.

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Early on, the group named themselves and each other ‘the sistas’ to encompass the bonds they forged and the affinity they felt with each other. In an asylum process that is systemically in contrast to belonging, I read the sistas’ act of naming themselves as belonging, like their song suggests, to each other, as a feminist act of solidarity. Both the creative output and the ethos within the group, shared with the practitioners and volunteers who joined them on projects, reflected this intersection of belonging, sisterhood and solidarity. Although the fieldwork with the sistas took the same approach of writing and performing a play together as with the Sjælsmark group, the context and situations fundamentally differ. Like the previous chapter states, the group in Sjælsmark were mostly male-identifying and rejected asylum seekers awaiting either deportation or repeal. The sistas were all women, arriving in Glasgow mostly without their families and predominantly from countries with patriarchal structures, suppression of women and gender violence. Many have claimed and obtained asylum on the basis of this, and a number of them received their refugee status during my time with them. But even as the sistas went to college and lived in and around the city while awaiting the outcomes of their asylum cases, they, like the group in Sjælsmark, experienced the asylum system as dehumanising, isolating and as forcing compromises of belonging. Naming each other kin and supporting each other through these situations offered a restructuring of several identities: woman, asylum seeker and sister. Women seeking asylum remains an issue entangled in feminist history and politics. In 1990, the Women’s Refugee Commission assisted the UNHCR in writing its first policy on the protection of women refugees (n.d.). Just as the Refugee Convention was an elaboration on an article of the Declaration of Human Rights, the ‘Guidelines on the Protection of Refugee Women’ is an addendum to the Refugee Convention. Published in 1991, the first few paragraphs of the document state that refugees need protection because they are more likely to be victims of human rights violations and, living outside their own countries, are unable to receive the protection of their government. Refugee women share these needs for protection, but: refugee women and girls have special protection needs that reflect their gender: they need, for example, protection against manipulation, sexual and physical abuse and exploitation, and protection against sexual discrimination in the delivery of goods and services. (UNHCR 1991)

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Although it is always necessary to take into account individual stories and lived experiences, it is equally necessary to take into account gender-­ specific concerns in seeking asylum and on journeys of forced migration. As will be detailed below, scholars of refugee studies continue to suggest that asylum should be considered an intersectional issue, and that intersectionality can provide an adequate lens by which to understand the nuances of precarity in refugee situations. Intersectionality can bring into view how women are positioned in the political and judicial circumstances of the countries they come from, the process of seeking asylum and how they are likely to be more vulnerable on their journeys. Intersectionality is a term coined by critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw, as ‘a prism, for seeing the way in which various forms of inequality often operate together and exacerbate each other’ (Crenshaw and Steinmetz 2020). Intersectionality is often used in debates around the Second Wave of feminism, thinkers and poets such as bell hooks (2003, 2000, 1990) and Audré Lorde (2009, 1984) reflected how Black and lesbian women were politically positioned between the Women’s Liberation Movement and the Civil Rights Movement. When considering the struggle for gender equality, intersectionality is able to take into account how a person is situated in their social and political worlds and how they are able to conduct their activism or political engagement. By understanding this also as questions of race, gender, sexuality and class, intersectionality deepens perspectives on the complex ways women have and obtain rights. Following the ethos of ethnoplaywriting and dramaturgical ethics and as a textual manifestation of the feminism and solidarity at the heart of this exploration, this chapter develops the theoretical backdrop for the fieldwork in two ways: firstly, following Lenette’s concept of ‘knowledge holders’, the sistas are at the centre of this chapter. Their perspectives are drawn from a patchwork of sources ranging from their creative output to the group interviews I conducted with them. The sistas are then not only knowledge holders but also artists and creative communicators of their own experiences. Secondly, this chapter chooses sources that are written only by women, and wherever possible, women from non-white backgrounds. This does not seek to be corrective or symbolic. Instead, it is a way to stand beside a wider discussion on feminism, sisterhood and belonging through the lens of solidarity between women. Reading thinkers like bell hooks and Audre Lorde, these sources also make the connections between intersectionality, asylum and poetry as activist spaces. At its core, this serves as an acknowledgement that those who have had the

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experiences should be the ones telling the stories and framing the exploration.

7.1   The Youth Community Support Agency The sistas started as an initiative from the Youth Community Support Agency targeting women in the asylum process and women from Black and minority backgrounds who might need more support and a safe space for conversation and creation. Through projects that foster and develop creativity, the group tried their hands at different artistic practices in an effort to build language skills, confidence and encourage creative expression. Led by project manager and community musician Clare McBrien, the group involved several practitioners in and around Glasgow, who developed projects such as podcast-making, cooking, songwriting and poetry. Along with these projects, the women also performed their work in public settings in and around Glasgow and Edinburgh. In an email correspondence about the writing of this chapter, Clare explained: Originally we noticed that women weren't attending our creative projects and that when they did, they were often quiet, shy and did not seem very comfortable. We asked women who were in the YCSA Youth Panel to reflect on this, and they said it would be due to a number of reasons: women not being encouraged to be creative, women themselves feeling uncomfortable/unable to speak in front of men, dads and/or husbands not wanting them to be in situations with men etc. We therefore wanted a place were women could come and be creative but that could also be sold as a women group. (30th September 2019)

Organisationally, YCSA supports young people from ethnic and minority backgrounds and young people who are otherwise on the fringes of society. Through approaches that take into account their cultural and religious backgrounds, the YCSA conducts several different projects supporting the development of a large range of skills, both to enhance employability and to create community. As a charity, the YCSA receives funding on an often year-to-year, project-to-project basis that uses set application and evaluation procedures to measure the process and progress of the various projects. The evaluation and success of the projects as well as their measured impacts determine whether funding will be obtained to sustain projects and start new ones. The projects of the women’s group were evaluated

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on the same basis; however, the longevity of the group far outlasted many of the other initiatives of the YCSA for reasons more to do with the individuals in the group and their connection to one another. The sistas thereby necessitate a going-beyond the jargon of funding applications into the more elusive realms of immeasurable results that the chapter on ethnoplaywriting encircled. Like the chapter on Trampoline House remarked on, sustainability and longevity become urgent questions within organisations that support refugees and asylum seekers, and need further examination. For example, as this chapter will expand on, trust and comfortability take a length of time to establish that often extends beyond the funded period of a project.

7.2  In the Company of Women: Intersectional Sisterhood By combining theoretical frameworks of sisterhood, feminism and a feminist ethics of care with ethnoplaywriting and dramaturgical ethics, the sistas open up new facets of belonging. Yuval-Davis offers that feminist ‘ethics of care’ (2011, 7) is ‘more specifically a feminist political project of belonging’ (7) and that this transcends ‘familial relationships into a universal principle of interpersonal relationships’ (11). In Caroline Sweetman’s work on women’s collectives she suggests that the ‘company of women’ (2013, 218) represents: an alternative form of social network which enables individual women to move away from dependency on the traditional social relations available to them via engagement with the family, marriage and the household. Collective association and sharing of experience challenges women’s isolation, ‘outs’ women’s sense of injustice, and raises hopes that gender relations can, and should, change. (218)

By establishing trust and connections, the women’s group at the YCSA offered a space away from the structures dominating their lives in which they could be both social and creative. Through their collective, the sistas were able to challenge the notion that active citizenship and targeted activism are the only ways to achieve political change or address structural, gendered and social injustices. Aligning with approaches of ethnoplaywriting as a micropolitical act and poetry as activist space, the group did not seek directly to challenge the systems at play in their situation, but by

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undergoing creative processes and inhabiting a collective based on kinship, the sistas resisted the status quo of asylum policy and gender politics. Firstly, by permitting these dynamics to be undercurrents to their creative work. Secondly, through manifesting their collectivity also in their creative approach and thirdly, by using the creative output to reflect on themes of sisterhood, womanhood and belonging (in and to all), which, echoing Sweetman, offered both a restructuring of what it means to be a woman in the world and an identification of politics and systems interfering with this. This, in turn, allowed for an audience or listener to understand the profundity of working through these identities and the process of translation between being a woman in their home countries and being a woman in Glasgow. From the onset, ‘the sistas’ invokes notions of sisterhood. As introduced, the idea of sisterhood has been problematised, especially during the Second Wave of feminism, where thinkers like hooks and Lorde ‘challenged white women who spoke of sisterhood to unlearn their racism, to take the time to revise the theories that they were creating from a perspective of racial biases’ (hooks 2003, 58). Understanding the ‘intersections of racism and sexism’ (58), it is necessary to keep in view that ‘oppressions are interlocking [and] intersectional’ (Lorde 2009, 28). Similarly, Lenette argues that consolidating women and men seeking asylum neglects complexities of experience and the interlocking ways oppression plays out in people’s lives: When the intersectional nature of the issues that women face are constantly overlooked or conflated with men’s, this leads to a partial exploration and understanding of forced migration concerns. Importantly, the lack of attention to women’s perspectives means that their strengths and capabilities, as well as their participation in decision-making processes can also be ignored, perpetuating depictions of refugee women as vulnerable and passive victims. (2019, 9)

Intersectionality opens up the complexities of women’s asylum experiences and allows them to be viewed through the lens and history of feminism, while addressing inequalities and discrepancies in ideologies that seek to secure rights for those who are marginalised. Intersectionality also allows for nuances to emerge of the complex social, political and racial perspectives that women experience under forced migration, while challenging also the perceptions of victimhood and trauma often attached to

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them. For example, O’Neill writes about her work with refugee women that they represented themselves ‘not as victims’ (2010, 49), but rather as survivors able to express resistance in a myriad of ways from being attuned to ‘the needs and wellbeing of their families’ (49) to ‘cultural resistance in the form of songs and poems’ (49). O’Neill connects to this chapter’s exploration of creative expression, but she also draws out the resistance to victimhood and the manifestation of strength in all areas of women’s lives. Both with the sistas and in the Trampoline House Women’s Club and Women’s Class, these resistances were apparent in creativity and beyond. Many of the female users of the House lived with their children in Sjælsmark. Nonetheless, they came to the House, participated in classes, for example, on feminism or human rights, while knitting, taking care of their children, cooking for events and community dinners, speaking at demonstrations and partaking in campaigns. Similarly, the sistas cooked, sang, wrote and performed. These everyday acts of creating familiarity and change are nuances necessary to envisioning the activism and everyday resistance of women seeking asylum. Prompted by hooks and Lorde, the reflections on sisterhood and intersectionality link to dramaturgical ethics in necessitating an examination of the relationship between researchers and workshop participants. In the context of the fieldwork and time spent with the sistas, an intersectional and ethical lens applies to reflecting on the differences in life circumstances, legal status and privileges of the predominantly white, Western and female practitioners who led workshops and the group of Black and minority women seeking asylum from very different countries and backgrounds. Linking these reflections with Yuval-Davis’ feminist ethics of care, Ahmed offers that: Living a feminist life does not mean adopting a set of ideals or norms of conduct, although it might mean asking ethical questions about how to live better in an unjust and unequal world (in a not- feminist and antifeminist world); how to create relationships with others that are more equal; how to find ways to support those who are not supported or are less supported by social systems; how to keep coming up against histories that have become concrete, histories that have become as solid as walls. (2017, 1)

Ahmed’s thoughts connect with hooks and Lorde in recognising that feminism, solidarity and ethics are a matter of addressing structural imbalances and oppressive systems (no matter how one is positioned intersectionally within those issues) in relations that centre ethics and equality

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with other women and letting this inform living in the world as a mutual project. The Great Lakes Feminist Geography Collective’s work places these questions within academia, as they frame their exploration on slowing down scholarship as a question of feminism. When working in the increasingly neoliberal structures of universities, the collective suggests that slowing down scholarship is a form of resistance. Echoing a feminist ethics of care, the Collective call this ‘care-full scholarship’, where ‘[t]aking care may also involve working with, and on behalf of, our research communities as feminists committed to participatory, activist work’ (Mountz et al. 2015, 14), thereby expanding ‘our community of care beyond those in the academy’ (14). Drawing parallels to Sweetman’s reflections above on the possibility ‘the company of women’ offers in addressing dominating structures by forming counter spaces through collectivity, The Collective identifies a feminist dialectic between academia and living in the world: Living in the world reveals the institutions and policies we need to change and how. Living with and responding to the needs of others keeps us relevant (and human) in ways that no metric can measure. (11)

Although not reflecting directly on asylum, slow scholarship explores the importance of entering into community with the world and expanding those circles or care. ‘Living in the world’ can thereby be understood as a way to keep scholarship invested in the world, which cultivates possibilities to rethink the structures both of scholarship and society. This combination of slow scholarship, intersectionality and feminism reflects on the above considerations of funding structures and sustainability of refugee organisations and universities. As the fieldwork reflection will show, establishing relations and creative work required a slowness not encompassed in the structures that led me to the groups and supported my research. This slowness meant taking time to do the things that cannot be measured, but that ethnoplaywriting seeks to create a space for. Just like in Sjælsmark, these were the situations like learning how to cook jollof rice or chapati, eating together and singing together. This also means that I cannot take myself out of the fieldwork: while I have no direct understanding of gendered violence or forced migration, I do have a personal and political investment in women’s rights through my own experiences of being a woman in the world. Forging bonds of friendship with women

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who have experienced much worse than me and remain resilient, joyful and hopeful in their lives have taught me new meanings about courage, belonging and womanhood. I remain inspired and grateful for their light and presence. For this reason my investment goes beyond the remit of my research and takes the shape also of friendships, standing in solidarity with and helping give expression to the inequalities faced in their situations.

7.3  Living Life in a Pause: Of Being Blue and New Where are you from? here Where are you from? the sky Where are you from? the moon Where are you from? the sun Where are you from? you, you, you Where are you from? Afghanistan Where are you from? Afghanistan Where are you from? Afghanistan (Where are you from? By Sareh) I’m blue and I’m new placed in this beautiful place innocent mind running through this maze (Blue by Nuha Thalib)

Although not written explicitly about being in the asylum system, Nuha’s lines above capture the sentiment of being in a new place. Being blue denotes several things: young, naive, even an array of hurt, bruised or depressed. It proposes hope and youthful imaginings of what a space might hold and what her place may be in it; it suggests also a tending to all of the above—one’s newness as well as one’s bruises. With these lines, Nuha leads the way into the examination of being blue and new in a place, in an asylum system and in a situation that offers new opportunities, complicated and bureaucratic processes as well as dilemmas of belonging.

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As introduced, the sistas are mainly from places with high instances of gender violence, but as these were stories and backgrounds that were told gradually, in confidence, and sometimes not at all, this section will not go into specifics but rather focus on which feelings the asylum system induces and what kind of life is lived when being in such processes. Ontologies of belonging have unfolded the political concerns of being, being in the world, and being at home in the world. Améry remarked that home constitutes as familiarity manifesting in feelings of security and understanding the semiotics of the world one inhabits. However, the sistas’ situations reflect that a place of home can become unhomely and prevent belonging when perpetuating restrictive and patriarchal patterns on an individual. But, as the sistas will explain below, both the longing for home and the dynamics of that place seem to prevail even after understanding situations to be harmful. The shift between experiencing forced migration on the basis of gender violence or discrimination to being in a situation that offers expression and freedom to repossess those parts of one’s identities proves to be complex and entangled processes that reckon also with home and belonging. In their own words below, these processes encompass both experiencing a loss of familiarity and home and the freedom to develop new and existing parts of one’s identity (as a woman and beyond) while cultivating belonging to it: Mawaddah: There were like many things I had to quit doing, things that I loved doing, because I was told ‘you’re a girl, you can’t do it.’ Considered well, not acceptable there. One of these things was cycling, I stopped ages ago now… How old was I when I stopped? I don’t recall, but yeah, because I was a girl, but I’m back at it again! Shobhita: And now you’re a real girl again. Nuha: There’s a lot. And I guess you don’t really live. For me, you didn’t really live, you were told what to do, you were told what to wear, you were told what to say. And that’s how you live. Fatma: And how to behave. Nuha: That is it. You cannot say anything, you’re a girl. Alhan: It still happens to me. Mawaddah: Guys, I have a funny thing. See I was also always like told what to do by my dad and stuff like that. Not anymore, like you know, thank goodness. But sometimes I’m like,

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goodness, someone tell me what to do, please. Because, I don’t know. I mean of course it’s like nobody likes to be controlled, you know, I hate it. I don’t like being controlled and all of that, but I’m just talking about some decisions it’s nice to have someone to tell you what to do… Fatma: I think it happens because you’re already used to being told what to do and how to behave, so whenever you have to do a decision you just wait for someone to tell you what to decide. It’s you now. Shobhita: Yeah, it doesn’t really mean anything like you being controlled, it doesn’t mean you wanna go back to it it’s just like… Mawaddah: It’s okay to miss things and not want them back. (Interview, 21st June 2019) The sistas encapsulate how there is a security and familiarity to ‘home’ and to being told what to do, which, despite restrictive, produces predictability; predictability that, as Fatma notes, can be difficult to dismantle. The engrained morals of how a ‘girl’ should be in the world (silent, submissive, not on a bike) call attention to what happens when a place of home does not denote security, but is instead entangled with familial bonds and societal restrictions that are oppressive: in Nuha’s words, this means that ‘you don’t really live’. In such situations, as Mawaddah remarks, it is okay to miss things and not want them back. Thinking of the different places the sistas inhabit as settings that each demands their own approach, translations and behaviours unfold the second chapter’s reflection on how geopolitical space and story intersect. It also helps to draw out the complexities that being within the asylum system adds to negotiations of belonging: their places of home, in most instances, are settings of restrictive behaviour, discrimination and violence. Conversely, Glasgow is a Western and progressive city, hosting a number of refugee initiatives predicated on welcome, hospitality and belonging. Lastly, setting of the asylum system involves navigating bureaucratic mazes, being suspected, disbelieved and reduced, as Shobhita notes, to a case: It [the asylum system] gives you another identity, because if you’re in the asylum system all you have is your identity, like that becomes… you’re not a student anymore, you’re not a, you know, citizen, you’re not a national,

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you’re just you, you have that one identity which is an asylum seeker and that’s it. All your other identities and personalities are erased. (interview, 21st June 2019)

While Glasgow might encourage reimaginings around the identity and expression of being a woman, modifying one’s behaviour or feelings against the restrictions of a home, or undergoing a process that, as Shobhita says, is reductive in terms of all other identities than asylum seeker, stifles several processes of developing self and belonging even when navigated in the same locale. In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler comprehends the categorisations of gender and political engagement by understanding both as performed and performative through set signifiers and pre-formulations in a discursive field. Reflecting on feminism and identity politics, Butler writes that ‘identity politics tends to assume that an identity must first be in place in order for political interest to be elaborated and, subsequently, political action to be taken’ (1999, 181). In other words, identity politics presupposes the formation of identity prior to action in the world. Applied to Shobhita’s remark, Butler’s perspective shows that although the group can be said to have definite political interests, political action becomes impossible when one’s political identity is reduced to ‘asylum seeker’. Echoing the fieldwork reflections in Sjælsmark, being locked into one identity without the right to political action is dehumanising and frustrating. Being stripped of all other identities hinders both belonging and the necessary processes that, as Butler shows, preamble acting in one’s own political interests. Echoing asylum liminality, Nuha remarks how it is not only a question of processes of identity being interrupted, but also a question of not being able to progress through life’s stages: it feels like your life is in a pause but you’re still going, you’re aging. Some people stay here for five years and they keep getting rejected, but they can’t do anything. You know, they are limited in studying, they can’t study full-­ time, they can’t do like big courses, they can’t get a job, you know they can’t get married, they can’t really do anything. And basically you’re just waiting all the time, you’re just going to the Home Office and it’s very depressing. So, yeah, and it just feels… it’s like your heart just skips every time the postman comes, because you don’t know if you’re going to get sent home, so yeah, it’s very difficult. It’s hard to feel at home when you’re terrified if you’re gonna get sent home the next day or the next week. It’s just, you don’t know what’s gonna happen. (Interview, 21st June 2019)

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Nuha portrays the effect that the external dynamics (Home Office, postman, college) have on internal processes (limitations, uncertainty, fear). These internal processes also play into how Nuha is able or unable to understand a current home as home when living in fear of being sent back or not knowing what will happen next. Echoing Nuha and reflecting a kind of geopathic dramaturgy of self and space, the sistas elaborate on the reluctance to undergo processes of belonging, changing and being able to feel free: Nuha:

… what you want to be in here is against what you want to be in your country. So if you change completely here and then you get sent back, you’re gonna… Helene: Really struggle? Nuha: It’s very hard. You just, you don’t know what to do, you’re just in between and – Fatma: Yeah you don’t know if you’re staying, you don’t know if you’re going, you have moved from the other part of the world and you’ve come somewhere where there’s hope. And you don’t see it, you just see like I’m still the same person, I’m still living the same life even though I have changed place but it’s kinda still the same, it’s very hard. Helene: That’s really interesting what you say, changing and then if you get sent back then it’s even harder. Mawaddah: So you just kinda try to… Nuha: Wait…Stay still… Mawaddah: You’re too scared to change. Yeah, about that, I was like ‘alright, okay, do not get excited, stay like that, you don’t know what’s gonna happen.’ So like as she said previously, you feel stuck, you can’t move forward – Fatma: But days are passing by – Mawaddah: But you never know if it’s gonna last. Not having that sense of control. (Interview, 21st June 2019) The sistas’ situation underscores the everyday manifestations of asylum liminality: being in a process that replaces complex and intersectional identities with that of asylum seeker can also be viewed as a liminal process of being between homelessness and home. Thinking about this from a feminist perspective, the sistas further express a liminality between ‘what you want to be here’ and ‘what you want to be in your country’ which

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results in waiting, ‘staying still’, being scared of changing or ‘getting too excited’. The asylum system thereby hinders desired processes of exploring ‘what you want to be’. This extends also, as Fatma remarks, to being spatially challenged: Glasgow is a place ‘where there’s hope’, but not being able to access it fully means, in Fatma’s words, living in much the same way in this ‘other part of the world’ as she did at home. Like in Sjælsmark, the sistas continued to remark on these isolating factors and frustrations at not being able to live a life of choice and security. This extended to not having access to everyday materialities and activities such as Netflix or a gym membership because they could not open a bank account. They further expressed fear of the Home Office and, as above, of the postman coming with unwelcome news. They also remarked on not feeling at home in their home because they would receive regular visits from the Home Office (often men) checking up on something in their flat, and if they did not answer the door quickly enough the Home Office representatives would just come in. This could happen at all hours of the day including when they were sleeping, showering or cooking, overlooking the backgrounds of their asylum claims and fact that an unannounced visit from an official, often a man, in a private sphere could be triggering. Apart from being exposed to these processes through bureaucratic channels, the sistas also had to navigate dynamics in everyday encounters and situations that can be considered destabilising to senses of belonging. Sareh’s poem above captures these threads and was written during a workshop day and shared at the Scottish Poetry Library in March 2018 with poet and facilitator Hannah Lavery. As a way to create poems, Hannah asked the sistas which questions they found it annoying to be asked. These were: ‘where are you from?’, ‘how did you arrive?’ and ‘why are you here?’ Based on this the group wrote poems responding in the ways they wished they could in the everyday conversations and encounters where such questions arose. At the 2018 UNESCO Spring School in Glasgow, I presented a paper on the poems exploring whether, in encounters between citizens and asylum seekers or refugees, these questions could be considered uprooting and destabilising to senses of belonging. In the question and answer session, the audience expressed conflicting opinions on the issue: some felt that ‘where are you from?’ should not be discarded as a harmless conversation starter, coming from compassionate desire to know a person deeper; others reflected that such questions made them doubt their belonging; yet others expressed the inability in such conversations to account fully for a life lived with complicated geographical origins or

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precarious belongings. Regardless of intention, as Ahmed notes, these questions make an assumption of ‘not from here’: ‘to be identified as a stranger is to be identified as not being from here, or not being entitled to be here; you are identified as someone who endangers who is here’ (2017, 117) These questions, Ahmed continues, ‘only appear to be questions; they often work as assertions’ (117), and in Ahmed’s case they are often asked as a way for her to give an account ‘of how I ended up brown’ (117). In an article written for Scottish Journal of Performance, I situated these poems within a larger debate on national and interpersonal hospitality, of understanding what is at stake within such conversations and how the women’s poems and play open up these questions in a different way (Grøn 2019). As previous chapters have argued, I remarked on the need to allow oneself to be changed in the meeting with another to belong, both as nations and individuals, to a shared moment and location. I reiterate these reflections within the space of this thesis by situating them also within an understanding of embodied belonging in Sareh’s poem above. The poem brings visibility to the compromises and invisible labours of belonging by poetically capturing the numerous occurrences she has had to answer the question by ending on the repetition: ‘[w]here are you from? Afghanistan’. But it also reveals what is at stake in these situations, namely that it is possible to be exiled in a context she is seeking to find footing in. As contextualised in the chapter on Sjælsmark, these questions can be understood as micro-aggressions which uproot people in a shared conversational moment. Akin to Ghafour’s dismantling of these dynamics through the humorous scene in which he is trying to pick up a woman by lying about where he is from, Sareh hints at an embodied homecoming: she places herself, the listener and the person asking in the same shoes by drawing attention to the cosmic realities that are the same for everyone: sky, sun, moon, you. ‘Where Are You From? A Woman’s Body’: Poetry Is Not a Luxury Where are you from? home Where are you from? because I’m black? Where are you from? relax

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Where are you from? a woman’s body (Where are you from? by Asma)

In her study on arts-based methods in refugee studies, Lenette problematises views on art as a ‘voice-giving’ medium. Based on empirical findings from several arts-based projects undertaken with people from refugee and asylum seeker backgrounds, she proposes that in such contexts, power dynamic must ever be examined, as the term ‘voice-giving’ suggests that there are givers and receivers, and that those who receive (in this case the refugee and asylum seeker) do not have a voice to begin with. Novelist Arundhati Roy remarks that there are ‘really no such thing as the “voiceless”. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard’ (2004). Linking to the ethical and creative stipulations when making theatre with refugees and asylum seekers outlined in the approaches of dramaturgical ethics and ethnoplaywriting, political listening is here revisited to unfold how it extends to listening for what has been silenced or preferably unheard. This interrogation of poetic space and voice forms the preamble to the fieldwork reflection, which expands on how poetry was transformed into dialogue and how the sistas’ poetic register unfurled into a unique theatricality and dramatic voice. Tying the threads of feminism, activism and belonging together, Lorde’s essay ‘Poetry is not a Luxury’ positions poetry as activist and feminist space. As the following chapter will detail, in naming each other kin and working collectively and creatively together, the sistas’ artistic output reflected how poetry and creativity can create belonging. But the sistas’ poems also elaborate how poetic space can become political, as they were the ones to give voice to their thoughts, thereby requiring a different kind of listening. Many of the women were already writing poetry and using this to examine their lives prior to me meeting them. Asma’s poem above links to Sareh’s by using poetic space to encompass an uprooting situation next to an embodied homecoming. Like Sareh, Asma’s poem gives creative answers to a question that unhomes her. It demands political listening, and in this demand lies both a voice given to what is silenced or unheard within a situation that raises that question, as well as a poetic and political restructuring of such an encounter. Like Sareh, Asma’s poem ends on appealing to the listener’s understanding of where everybody is alike. But Asma also ends her poem with giving poetic authority to being not from a country, but ‘from a woman’s body’.

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The title of Lorde’s essay counteracts the perception that poetry is a luxury for those whose external lives are in order and who are therefore free to turn their gaze inwards to focus on existential and intellectual musings. Rather than understand poetry as something that remains at a distance as a poet makes observations and writes from their own solitude to that of a reader, Lorde thinks of poetry as ‘the skeleton architecture of our lives’ (1984, 38), and thereby also in a political symbiosis with life. Making connections between the courage to write poetry and developing a sense of self and voice, Lorde positions poetry especially as a tool for women: For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives. (37)

Akin to ethnoplaywriting’s interrogation of dramatic possibility as able to work through real-life situations, Lorde suggests poetic process to be similar in its progression from language to idea to tangible action. Poetry offers a space where the ‘honest exploration’ (37) of ‘feelings’ (37) creates ‘sanctuaries and [becomes] spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of idea’ (37). Poetry is therefore able to work with the givens of reality when it ‘lays the foundation for a future of change’ (38). Giving a ‘quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives’ (36) it can provide the ‘strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to dare’ (38). Poetry is then the place to examine, interpret and shed light on life lived outside poetic spaces, the place to give thought and attention to what needs change and to develop radical and daring ideas. Rather than remain at a distance from the world, poetry dictates rather a going forward, and encourages entering into the world with the ideas and resistance cultivated in poetic sanctuary. The poetry quoted in this chapter speaks to Lorde’s reflections. Sareh and Asma’s poem offers political and personal restructurings of being asked where they are from. Nuha gives voice to being blue and new in a place, while the opening song sheds light on experiencing uncertainty of identity but being a goddess nonetheless. In their song called ‘The Spark’, the sistas sing a line that further draws out the poetic potential Lorde

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identifies. The singer speaks about not recognising herself in the mirror, asking: ‘is this who I’ve become?’ In a poetic turn, she answers her question with: ‘but the light says: come on child, there’s a place where you can find the spark in you’ (YCSA Music & The Sistas). Rather than posing immediate solutions, the poetry of the song shifts the focus—the quality of light—to a place of hope and embodied strength and poetic sanctuary. It suggests that it is not a matter of simply waking up one day and feeling like oneself again, but rather, that somewhere out there, there is a light, and this light suggests the search inside for a place where hope can be found. Following on from Chap. 4’s examination of the therapeutic potential of stories, theatre’s ability to create counter narratives on refugeedom and ethnoplaywriting’s preoccupation with creative belonging, Lorde extends these arguments also to poetry: The white fathers told us, I think therefore I am; and the black mothers in each of us—the poet—whispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be free. Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary awareness and demand, the implementation of that freedom. (38)

As Massey, Ahmed and the Great Lake Feminist Geographical Collective have remarked on in different parts of this thesis, creating knowledge through Enlightenment ideals has been linked to, as Lorde puts it, ‘white fathers’ occupying dominant positions, which Smith connected to colonial agendas in Chap. 3. Here, poetry is offered instead as a space to feel and be free, but also as its own radical and activist producer of knowledge. Asking what ‘would I advice women to do to create a discourse that is neither seductive nor reductive?’ (1994, 29), Irigaray examines subjective experiences as feminist epistemologies by ‘[n]ever abandon[ing] subjective experience as an element of knowledge’ (29). She continues: ‘[t]he most transcendental theory is also rooted in subjective experience. The truth is always produced by someone’ (30). By addressing the intersection between poetry, subjective experiences and knowledge production, Lorde and Irigaray’s thoughts stress how giving agency to subjective experience and poetic voice to internal dynamics can produce both knowledge and action that challenge hierarchies and dominance. By exploring how feminism is also about one’s being in the world, Ahmed echoes a feminist ethics of care by proposing that care is also a matter of collective survival, and that ‘survival can be what we do for

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others, with others’ (2017, 235), indeed, ‘we need to be part of each other’s survival’ (235). For the sistas, coming together to care for each other and create with each other challenges the isolation and dehumanisation of the asylum system, and instead offers a way of being part of each other’s survival. Lorde echoes this by reflecting not on asylum but on patriarchal systems: For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power is rediscovered. It is this real connection which is so feared in the patriarchal world. Only within a patriarchal structure is maternity the only social power open to women. Interdependency between women is the way to a freedom which allows the I to be, not in order to be used, but in order to be creative. (1984, 111)

Lorde shifts caring for one another from a passive and gendered doing to a radical action that works against structures that isolate and dominate, carving out a space for being creative. How much home a person needs is answered in the following ways in this chapter: in caring for each other, the sistas challenged the dominating systems in their lives, and as the next chapter will elaborate on, caring and creativity became vital components in creating shared spaces of resistance, poetry and sisterhood. These shared spaces were activist in restructuring identities of womanhood, asylum seeker and home, not least by being able to answer the question of ‘where are you from?’ with ‘a woman’s body’ and ‘where do you belong?’ with ‘you are enough, you belong with us’.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham and London: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107415324.004. Butler, Judith. 1999. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London and New York: Routledge. Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams, and Katy Steinmetz. 2020. “On Intersectionality: Essential Writings.” Time Magazine, February 20, 2020. https://time. com/5786710/kimberle-­crenshaw-­intersectionality/. Grøn, Helene. 2019. ‘Where Are You from? A Woman’s Body’: Navigating Notions of Belonging through Poetry and Playwriting with Refugees and Asylum Seekers. Scottish Journal of Performance 6 (1): 55–80. https://doi. org/10.14439/sjop.2019.0601.04.

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Hooks, Bell. 1990. Postmodern Blackness. Postmodern Culture 1 (1): 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-­1-­137-­04505-­8_13. ———. 2000. All about Love: New Visions. New York: Harper Perennial. https:// doi.org/10.2307/40142342. ———. 2003. Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope. New York and London: Routledge. Irigaray, Luce. 1994. Thinking the Difference: For a Peaceful Revolution. London: The Athlone Press. Lorde, Audre. 1984. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley: Crossing Press. ———. 2009. In I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde, ed. Rudolph P. Byrd, Johanetta Betsch Cale, and Beverley Guy-Sheftall. New York, USA: Oxford University Press. Mountz, Alison, Anne Bonds, Becky Mansfield, Jenna Loyd, Jennifer Hyndman, and Margaret Walton-Roberts. 2015. For Slow Scholarship: A Feminist Politics of Resistance through Collective Action in the Neoliberal University Published under Creative Commons Licence: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works. An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 14 (4): 1235–1259. O’Neill, Maggie. 2010. Asylum, Migration and Community. Bristol, UK: Polity Press. Roy, Arundhati. 2004. “Arundhati Roy - The 2004 Sydney Peace Prize Lecture.” The University of Sydney. 2004. http://sydney.edu.au/news/84. html?newsstoryid=279. Sweetman, Caroline. 2013. Introduction, Feminist Solidarity and Collective Action. Gender and Development 21 (2): 217–229. https://doi.org/10.108 0/13552074.2013.819176. UNHCR. 1991. “Guidelines on the Protection of Refugee Women.” 1991. https://www.unhcr.org/publications/legal/3d4f915e4/guidelines-­ protection-­refugee-­women.html. Women’s Refugee Commission. n.d. “Our History.” https://www.womensrefugeecommission.org/about/our-history/ YCSA Music, and The Sistas. 2019. “Hidden Rhythms.” Soundcloud. 2019. https://soundcloud.com/ycsa-­music/sets/hidden-­rhythms. Yuval-Davis, Nira. 2011. “Power , Intersectionality and the Politics of Belonging.” FREIA Working Paper Series, Aalborg University Denmark 75: 24.

CHAPTER 8

Fieldwork Reflection: The Sistas and Amazing Amelia

Fig. 8.1  Balloon by Abbas Haj

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 H. Grøn, Asylum and Belonging through Collective Playwriting, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24808-5_8

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‘A story has to start before it can be told’ Can you hear the drums? Here they come, the glittery bums In the neon sun, in the neon sun […] Shorty shorts with dramatic eyes Sun is up full of pretty lies Hair flicks in the dancing heat No cares in the world, living proud and free, free, free, free. Living proud and free, free, free, free […] Put your shades on, it’s a city invasion A peacock procession of proud imperfection. (Glittery Bums, the sistas)

Sara Ahmed’s thoughts title this section by reflecting that the telling of a story needs its beginning to precede it (2017, 4). Ahmed reflects on this in the context of her feminism: before she could tell this story, she had to become aware of how global, political and social dynamics had manifested in her life. Ahmed paves the way for tracing the larger frameworks of politics and feminism in the intimacies of life and its stories and for understanding that such stories have many beginnings before they can be told. This introduction is the telling of the many beginnings that start the story of Amazing Amelia. Amazing Amelia begins with women coming to Glasgow via several different journeys and for many different reasons. It begins as an initiative from the YCSA to gather newly arrived women in Glasgow and make a safe, welcoming and creative space for them. It begins with Clare McBrien being project lead for the group and meeting with them every Friday. It begins with some of these women meeting at college, becoming friends and bringing each other to the group. It begins with several research projects and creatives’ journeys intersecting with this group by coming to do workshops and by staying for the warmth and company. It begins with Clare and I having a meeting where we agree that I spend time with the group before starting a drama project. Then it begins with the story of the real Amelia Earhart deciding to be the first woman to do something impossible. It begins again, many decades later, as a group of women use her story as a blueprint to write a play about their own experiences of being women and doing something impossible. It begins and continues to begin in gathering together to share time, food and thoughts.

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I met with the group from January 2018 and onwards. At first I was a participant and volunteer, and from April–June 2018 I led workshops on storytelling and themes of home and belonging. In August 2018, I wrote a play with the group called Amazing Amelia/We are all Amelias, which became a reimagining of the story of Amelia Earhart, drawing in the experiences of the women in the group and on the creative work done in workshops and with other practitioners. The group performed the play at The Glad Cafe in August 2018 and once again at the UNESCO Spring School in May 2019. In the meantime, they had written and recorded songs with Clare McBrien, Lucy Cathcart Fröden and Donna Maciocia. The artists and practitioners coming together to work with the group, and the sistas themselves having rich creative practices, opened up dynamic creative conversations across artistic and academic disciplines and on questions surrounding sisterhood, collectivity and solidarity. These bonds transcended the time spent together and included the practitioners supporting each other’s projects and letting them feed into each other. That is why this story also begins with a song called Glittery Bums written by the sistas after observing the glittery, neon-short-shorts wearing women going to Glastonbury, as the sistas were on their way to a songwriting workshop at the YCSA one summer. Glittery Bums begins this journey into the playful territory of exploring creative language as a medium to reckon with conflicts of belonging experienced on account of being a woman and an asylum seeker. Glittery Bums is also the beginning of a story where these intersecting identities might be a cause for pride, celebration and freedom.

8.1   She Travels in Worlds of… From March to May 2018, I led an initial set of sessions that explored writing together and addressed themes of home and belonging. Elongating a creative process and building up to playwriting and performing reflected the aims of ethnoplaywriting both in taking the time to find a language that the group connected with in speaking about home and belonging, but also in the duration of letting the relationships grow both by spending time together and by being creative together. The need for this approach became apparent after the first session where I conducted an activity around spheres of influence, drawing the places they frequented and how it made them feel. When the group was silent, I explained that this was also to start a conversation about belonging and asked them whether this resonated. One of them answered: ‘we think about this all the time, but

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we just try to get on with it’. What was made clear was the call to dramaturgical ethics: planning activities relying too heavily on sharing personal experiences did not harmonise with why they came to the group, nor was it getting at a language that resonated with them in terms of speaking about their experiences. Unlike the workshop at the Scottish Poetry Library described in the previous chapter, where the ‘where are you from’ poems were written through a process of questions and creativity, my initial approach had been too direct and reflective of my own aims and research rather than keeping in view the group and their wishes for how to spend their time. Attempting a more playful approach, I designed a game that might get at similar themes in a different way. On a big sheet of paper, I asked the group to pick their own corner and draw their dream country. I then placed three cups at the centre and divided out pieces of paper. I asked the group to fill one cup with all the material things they needed to belong in a country, the second with the things they needed emotionally to belong and the last one with everything that could go wrong in a country. We then rolled a dice, and if the player got a 1–2, they picked a piece of paper from the first cup; 2–3 from the second; 3–4 from the third. A 5 meant the player could give one of their papers away and a 6 meant taking a piece of paper from another player. We then played what came to be known as ‘the country map game’. When all the pieces had been divided, we spoke about which country was most desirable to live in and gave out first, second and third places. For example, one country might have house, food, poets and family but also war. Another could have nature and love but be ruled by a dictator. Others presented contradictions such as having corruption and an institutional patriarchy but also good social health services. This game opened up conversations on countries and governments from a different angle, and led to a debate which mixed personal experiences with philosophical and political thoughts on how home and belonging are created by countries, governments and in intimate spheres (Figs. 8.2 and 8.3). In the next session, we told stories together. To give this structure, I planned another game with another three cups. In the first cup, the group put in pieces of paper with different settings written on them, in the second cup they put in paper with objects written on them, and in the last they wrote sheets with people and characters on them. Every round, each person would pick a piece of paper from each cup and have to make up a story using all elements; setting, object, person. This led to fanciful and humorous stories about ‘the guy who married his TV’ or about ‘Rihanna’

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Fig. 8.2  Country map game

living in ‘a tiny house on a mushroom’ with ‘a coffin’ for a bed. Asma told us a story where a top scientist invited her to ‘a party’ on ‘a space ship’. In an almost Doctor Who-like sequence, she described the other people at the party drinking fluorescent coloured drinks. There was one person in particular at the party that the scientist wanted to introduce Asma to; he was important for having invented something or other. Finally they find

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Fig. 8.3  Playing cards

him sitting in the kitchen. She ended her story with them talking, and in a masterful twist she says ‘and can you believe it, it was the most boring person in the world?’ showing us her last strip of paper with ‘the most boring person in the world’ written on it. This led to sharing different stories the sistas were told as children or from their own countries. Fatma A. told us that as a child she ate a baobab fruit and accidentally swallowed the seed. Her grandfather saw it and told her, shame, now a tree would sprout from the crown of her head. For weeks she would wake up and feel the top of her skull for branches poking through. Asma and Fatma shared stories of sea monsters told by mothers in villages to prevent children from going near the ocean, and Vanessa shared the rich traditions around the Day of the Dead in Mexico, where relatives cook colourful plates of food and bring it to the graves of those they have lost to be with them (Fig. 8.4). Mirroring the collectivity already present in the group and building on telling stories together, the next session experimented with writing together. With the prompts, ‘she travels in worlds of’, ‘she has overcome’ and ‘she belongs to’, I gave everyone pens and papers to write first their

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Fig. 8.4  Story prompts

responses to ‘she travels in worlds of’. Folding over and switching papers, everyone writes their responses to ‘she has overcome’ underneath the first answer. Folding and switching again, we write our responses to ‘she belongs to’. Initiating with pronoun of ‘she’ rather than ‘I’ makes it possible to decentre the personal experience and makes it possible to view one’s experiences from outside as a story that can be told. But it also engages with poetic and dramatic possibility where the story of someone else can be the story also of oneself. When the sistas read these out, it created a polyphony of voice, and a need for political listening: layering one person’s response over another wove a patchwork of shared and individual experiences through collective expression. Polyphonic writing, according to Ghorashi, brings out dynamics where the production of knowledge is negotiated throughout the process of writing by giving agency to the multiple voices that it constitutes. This means sharing the authority of authorship […] the textual polyphonic production provides alternative voices in relation to dominant discourses through dialogical agency. (2014, 60)

This workshop became a precursor for writing together and exploring individual experience through a collective expression. Writing like this

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Fig. 8.5  She belongs to…

requires political listening because such stories, as Ghorashi notes, can destabilise nexus of power and challenge dominating discourses. Within polyphonic writing there lies a path to ethnoplaywriting where multiple and intersecting experiences can be expressed and where, in this workshop, personal responses weaved themselves onto larger narratives of travelling, of overcoming and of belonging (Fig. 8.5).

8.2   Writing Amazing Amelia (Asma) Passenger: Why are you here? (Shobhita) Amelia: To see the unseen and share the stories (Nuha) Passenger: Where are you going? (Sho) Amelia: On a journey that’s worthy. (Amazing Amelia, Scene 3) The first rendition of the play was written over a weekend at the end of August 2018. We started the Friday afternoon with going through the four layers of conflict and basic plot structures as described in the Sjælsmark

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fieldwork reflection. We then spent time in conversation about the ways one might develop characters using these layers of conflict, but also by engaging with their back-story, motivations and obstacles placed between the character and their goal. Tracing these conflicts and structures in the Netflix series they were watching gave a deeper understanding of how they were at work in the stories the group were engaging with. Zooming in, for example, on Elena from the Vampire Diaries, it became clear how she operated within multiple conflicts and tumultuous character motivations: Elena is in love with two vampire brothers at once, she does not want to be a vampire, but ends up becoming one as the story progresses. She is doing all this while her best friend becomes a witch, her other best friend a vampire, her parents die and she has to finish high school. In all its melodramatic aspects, a story like Vampire Diaries made clear how conflict, character and plot shape a story. As with the group in Sjælsmark, there was the challenge of giving structure and setting for developing narratives, while not imposing Adichie’s single-story framework on a multinational and multilingual setting. However, as indicated, the stories the group shared spoke about and resonated with the ones told in mainstream media. In later conversations, Clare told me she had these same reflections when making music that mainly came out sounding like Western pop songs. She had come to the conclusion that it would limit the process equally to impose a specific cultural framework on people who, in a process that had aimed at being open and free, had chosen to write and sing differently to whichever tradition they might come from. Navigating these intricacies of cultural and mutual practice is a continued commitment of dramaturgical ethics that calls for continually addressing and managing the frameworks and structures given as a facilitator and theatre maker. On the Saturday, we began brainstorming on what kind of story they would like to tell. The only parameters I gave were: it had to be able to include some of the poetry and writing they had done so far and the story had to come from themselves. Inspired by the country-map-game, Shobhita suggested a storyline following an explorer who goes to three different countries in order to find a place of belonging, but each country would have something wrong with it, pushing the character to keep moving forward to find a home. The group chose the character of Amelia Earhart, in Shobhita’s words, because: the options were Marco Polo because he was a famous Venetian traveller and the other was Amelia Earhart because she a famous female pilot who went missing and was never discovered, you know, adventure/traveller, there was

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a theme. Nobody wanted it to be a really old man, I understand, so … It had to be Amelia. (Interview, 21st June 2019)

Having a simple structure of three countries and a character goal of belonging gave a straightforward framework to write from. Shobhita led the group in finding out the names and atmosphere of the three countries, Nuha suggested that there could be scenes of travel that weaved in the poetry they had written, and the group decided on an open ending. Once the structure was planned, I divided them into smaller groups to work on a section each in a shared document. To hand over the initial process to them, I went and cooked them lunch, making myself available for questions and checking in occasionally. As I was chopping vegetables or frying onions, one of them would come out and ask ‘what if this happened?’ and we would discuss what that would do, or I would check in with a group on their scene and how it fit into the next one. At the end of the Saturday, the group had written a draft, and on the Sunday we polished and rehearsed it. The writing process mirrored the workshop and the ethos within the group of being committed to being part of each other’s lives and each other’s belonging. But Amazing Amelia also reflects the methodologies of ethnoplaywriting and dramaturgical ethics in both product and process: creating a workshop process inspired by the way the group had already worked and spent time together was possible only by spending this time along with them. Rather than centring any one group-member’s experience and drawing inconsiderate parallels to telling one’s story within an asylum system, the story of Amelia came from a process that sought to remain open for that story to emerge through the channels of reflective, creative and storytelling practices. The playful and sometimes wry tone at the heart of Amazing Amelia reveals the tensions and complexities of belonging in all their entangled dynamics of seeking freedom and being a woman navigating political and patriarchal systems. In this first rendition of the play, we follow Amelia Earhart, ‘a strong determined woman. But she’s not the Amelia Earhart that you know’ (Amazing Amelia, Scene 1). This Amelia lives in ‘Man’s World’ and has a dream to be a pilot. However, Man’s World is: Nuha: […] a toxic country. But not just any country. A country where women were expected to be a stereotype. Shobhita: Doing the same thing every day, like cleaning, cooking, looking great. Never allowed to change. (Scene 1)

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Wanting to achieve her dream of being a pilot and living free, Amelia goes on a journey to find a place where she can truly belong. She lands first on Lemon Island, and from her eager tour-guide Peter she learns that this is a place where women can do many lemon-related things, but never anything without a man: (Asma) Tour Guide:

You’re a free spirit, aren’t you?

(Nuha) Amelia: Yes sir, certainly am. (Asma) Tour Guide: Well, here we have lemons a-plenty, but women don’t usually ask for things. (Nuha) Amelia: Like what? (Asma) Tour Guide: Like names. (Nuha) Amelia: I do. (Asma) Tour Guide: Okay, well, don’t tell anyone I said, but I’m Peter. (Nuha) Amelia: Well, Peter, take me around and get used to me asking for stuff. (Asma) Tour Guide: Where would you like to go first? The lemon orchard? Or the lemon castle? Or, I know, the lemon lady lunch… (Nuha) Amelia: No no no … Look, maybe I should explore this place alone. (Asma) Tour Guide: (Laughs) What??!! are you serious?? On Lemon Island women can’t do anything except being a housewife, let alone an explorer. And they must have a man with them at all times. (Nuha) Amelia: Look, I’m used to doing things that aren’t normal, so… Alhan: But Peter insisted on guiding her around the island and doing everything for her. (Nuha) Amelia: I swear, if he opens one more door for me… Shobhita: Because a woman can’t be left alone in Lemon Island (Asma) Tour Guide: And this is the lemon orchard (Nuha) Amelia: Boring. (Asma) Tour Guide: And the lemon castle, shaped like… (Nuha) Amelia: Surprise, surprise, a lemon. (Asma) Tour Guide: And next up is lemon lady lunch with… (Nuha) Amelia: What, lemon cake? (Asma) Tour Guide: But not just any lemon cake. Also lemon custard and lemon tea and lemon… (Scene 2)

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Too reminiscent of where she has just come from, she goes on a bus to somewhere else. On the bus people keep questioning her about where she is from, and it is in this scene where the group incorporated some of their poetry, for example: (Alhan) Passenger:

Why are you here?

(Sho) Amelia: To show the world what I have. (Asma) Passenger: Who are you? (Sho) Amelia: Someone who doesn’t want to feel suffocated but appreciates every breath I take in (Scene 3) These two lines transpose first Fatma’s ‘why are you here’ poem and Asma’s poem ‘me’ into lines of dialogue, underscoring the way the group worked in a multi-creative register. Finally, Amelia arrives ‘Nowhere’, a non-place with a name that mirrors its atmosphere. When writing this scene, the group had the idea of Amelia arriving in a country that has always been at war. As she is trying to find out why, everyone gives her different answers. When writing this scene, I sat with my computer while the group threw all the reasons people could give, echoing both the country-map game where we explored what could go wrong in a country, but also drew on knowledge within the group of the futility of conflict and living in places of unrest: (Alhan) Amelia:

Why are you fighting?

Nuha: (Asma) Person: (Alhan) Amelia: (Sho) Person: (Alhan) Amelia: (Asma) Person: (Alhan) Amelia: (Nuha) Person: (Asma) Person: (Sho) Person: (Asma) Person: (Alhan) Amelia: (Sho) Person: (Alhan) Amelia: (Nuha) Person:

But everytime she gets different answers. Because I lost my family Why is there a war? Because they took my mum prisoner Why are you fighting? Because they bombed my house Why? I fell in love with a girl I’m fighting for my rights They drove me out of my home I ran away Why are you fighting? Because I’m a foreigner who’s not welcome here. Why are you fighting? Because I feel suffocated

(Scene 4)

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Amelia is caught by an immigration officer and sent to a detention centre. In the car with other people in a similar situation, the group structured the dialogue around incorporating their writing from the ‘she belongs to…’ session: (Asma) Amelia: Where are we going? (Alhan) Person: We’re being sent to Detention. (Asma) Amelia: Why? (Fatma) Person: Don’t know. I guess nobody wants to deal with us. Why are you here? (Asma) Amelia: I’m trying to find a country I can belong to. (Chris) Person: Aren’t we all. (Asma) Amelia: Where do you belong? (Sho) Person: We don’t belong anywhere (Asma) Amelia: That’s not true. (Sho) People: Yes it is. (Asma) Amelia: No, we belong to every drop of joy, we belong to Hope, we belong to Love. (Chris) Person: Life isn’t like that. (Asma) Amelia: No but it should be. We all deserve to start over our lives. Especially lives we didn’t ruin but that were ruined for us. (Fatma) Person: Lovely story, girl. (Nuha) Person: But keep dreaming. (Scene 5) This scene forms its own contrast: here, the people know that ‘nobody wants to deal’ with them, and that the solution is to send them away into a system that they are unlikely to surface from again. At the same time, Amelia speaks alternative belonging into the scene, and highlights how even in such a situation, it is possible to conceive of oneself as belonging to joy, hope and love. In the detention centre, Amelia makes a narrow escape by showing her papers to an immigration officer. She finds a taxi and, exhausted, asks the taxi driver to take her somewhere nice. He says he has heard of a place called Dreamland, but nobody knows exactly where it is. He drops her off at a field where she follows the ‘sunset. And the sunrise. And the sunset. And the sunrise’ (Scene 6) until she faints. ‘When she wakes up she is greeted with smiles and warmth and welcoming people’ (Scene 6):

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(Chris) Amelia: What is this place?

Nuha: You can call it whatever you like. Some call it Dreamland, some call it The Place of a Thousand Belongings, but you can call it Home. (Chris) Amelia: And can I do whatever I like here? Alhan: Of course. Whatever your heart desires. But first, you must eat and drink. You’ve journeyed so far. Mawaddah: When Amelia recovered her strength, she went for a walk around Dreamland.

Fatma: Everywhere she saw people following their dreams. Artists painting canvases the size of ballrooms. Nuha: Dancers and swimmers. Alhan: Everyone helping and caring about each other. Mawaddah: She stops in a garage where a woman is fixing a plane. (Chris) Amelia: Hey! (Sho) Woman: Hey! (Chris) Amelia: Is that your plane? (Sho) Woman: Sure is. You know how to fly? (Chris) Amelia: I do … Although it feels like a lifetime ago. (Sho) Woman: Do you want to help me fix the wing? (Chris) Amelia: I’ve never wanted to do anything more. Fatma:  Amelia and her friend talk about everything. But mostly about flying with the wind and the fresh air blowing in their face and hair. (Sho) Woman: Best feeling in the world. (Scene 6) In this scene, the inspiration came from the country-map game, where everything is good and people are free. However, Amelia quickly learns from the female Prime Minister that they are unwilling to share their resources, and that they are protecting their country by a giant border wall: (Asma) PM: Look, there are many answers to these questions. But above all, this place is a secret. You are welcome here, but you can’t tell anyone else about this. (Chris) Amelia: But why? I have met many people who could use a home. We could share this place with them. (Asma) PM: We welcome anyone who has the passion and the need to find us but we can’t share our country freely with the outside.

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(Chris) Amelia: But you have so much. (Asma) PM: Sharing it too freely and recklessly would ruin it. It would ruin our community, our resources, our unity and culture. (Chris) Amelia: But that’s ridiculous! (Asma) PM: Amelia, you are welcome here. (Scene 6) Dreamland reflects at once an engagement with the ‘what if’ of a character getting all that they want and learning it is not all that, but also on conversations had within the group on wealthy countries not sharing their powers and resources with those who might need it most. In such conversations there would be a fatigue over diplomatic processes and colonial histories of resource extraction on many of the countries they were from. Eventually, this would turn into thinking about the moral questions and hopes of living in a more humane world. This is reflected in Amelia’s reaction; having had a brief encounter with detention and being affected by the people she has met on her journey, she cannot belong in such a place and so she continues her journey. Inspired by the storytelling exercise detailed above, the sistas decided on incorporating a narrative and choric element. This places them as the tellers of the story, it reflects their collectivity and it offers a dramatic and creative device for them to be both inside and outside the play at the same time. Echoing the Prologue of This Is Us, the sistas hereby become the ones who are ‘pulling the strings’ (This Is Us, Prologue) and the agents in unfolding how their story will be told, reflected in the play’s beginning: Shobhita: Let us tell you a story. Not just any story. This is a story about a woman. But not just any woman. (Scene 1) From the beginning the teller, in this case Shobhita, dismantles the audience’s expectations by stating something along the lines of: we will tell you a story, but it will not be what you expect. It will be about a woman, but not the kind of woman you imagine. She is called Amelia Earhart, but it is not the Amelia Earhart you know. This beginning uses similar dramatic devices of decreation and subverting audience’s expectations as This Is Us and thereby resists the telling of a refugee story through its characteristic elements of trauma and war. Working loosely and freely

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from the biography of Amelia Earhart provides a blueprint for developing these themes by tapping into ongoing conversations about what women are expected and able to do, and, like the real Amelia Earhart, how women throughout history have dismantled and reacted against expectations and limitations in order to follow their own paths. As the introduction noted, it can be problematic to begin from Western myths and narratives or, in this case, biography. Cox remarked that it prompts the question of who the ‘we’ are that ‘share’ such stories, and what is achieved by setting them as a framework for migratory experiences. With the sistas, the story of the biographical Amelia Earhart had two very clear purposes: one, it was chosen by the sistas. Two, instead of starting from the sistas’ own (albeit beautiful and powerful) overcomings, Amelia Earhart provided a biographical hypotext and dramatic starting point where these themes were already present. This avoided the process of having to invent them through the group sharing experiences they were unwilling to share or that risked exposing them in ways they did not wish to be exposed. Moreover, as the introduction remarked on particularly with Refugee Tales, Amazing Amelia reflects also how art can respond to existing stories, how adaptations provide frameworks to work with and against and how the story of a woman following her own path can be refurbished to incorporate the experiences of refugee women and their dynamic and complex reckonings with freedom, womanhood and belonging. Building the story around a strong female character and against the blueprint of Amelia Earhart also starts the dramatic conversation of belonging from another place. While the second draft of the play has Amelia leaving her country because her life is in danger due to acting out of order as a woman, she starts her journey in the first draft also from the motivation of exploring and being on a quest for belonging. This brings a different sensibility to the character and the story. Placing a strong character in the turmoil of having to find a different home and giving her agency and, above all, choice in how that unfolds, resist the typical portrayal of refugee women. We see this, for example, at the beginning of the second draft of the play where she comes of age and decides she wants to sit the pilot exam, although she knows it will be impossible in Man’s World: (Fatma) Amelia:  Hey dad, I’ll be back later, I have something I need to do. (Alhan) Dad: Please, Amelia, don’t get into trouble. Nuha: She walks straight into the pilot school (Fatma) Amelia: Hey you, can I speak to the person in charge?

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Nuha: Because even in a Man’s world, a woman has to try. (Sho) Male Pilot: Are you here to see your husband? (Fatma) Amelia: No, I’m here to sign up. (Sho) Male Pilot: I’m sorry Ms. I think you might be slightly confused. Let me explain it for you. (Fatma) Amelia: Let me guess, ‘women can’t fly’ (Sho) Male Pilot: You’re smarter than you look. (Fatma) Amelia: You’re not. (Sho) Male Pilot: Look lady, if you don’t treat me with the respect I deserve I will call the police. (Fatma) Amelia: Can you just listen for a moment? (Sho) Male Pilot: I am only allowed to listen to you if you talk about cooking, cleaning or looking great. (Fatma) Amelia: I want to take the exam. Please, I know everything… (Sho) Male Pilot: Funny story girl. (Fatma) Amelia: I really do. I know about wings and aviation, about seeing the world from above. (Sho) Male Pilot: That’s not allowed, now shoo. (Fatma) Amelia: Please. (Sho) Male Pilot: Go home this instant girl, or I’ll report you. (Fatma) Amelia: Well damn you! (Sho) Male Pilot: That kind of language from a lady. (Fatma) Amelia: I am not a lady, I am a pilot. (Sho) Male Pilot: You’re a trespasser. Didn’t you see the sign?  ‘NO WOMEN ALLOWED.  UNLESS IT’S TO FIND THEIR HUSBANDS’ (Fatma) Amelia: All I want to do is fly. (Sho) Male Pilot: And I want to rule the world. Now shoo. (Fatma) Amelia: I am not leaving until you let me speak to the person in charge. (Sho) Male Pilot: Security. (Fatma) Amelia: Don’t you dare. (Sho) Male Pilot: This woman is a woman. And she has seen the sign. (Fatma) Amelia: I will kick, I’ll scream. (Asma) Security: You will come with us. Nuha: Amelia in a police station waiting patiently for a man to get her out of trouble. (Fatma) Amelia: Please don’t call my dad. (Asma) Officer: He is on his way. (Scene 1)

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While Amelia may be thrown around in the turmoil of her experiences, she never neglects her own voice or doubts her agency. This is evident in how she leaves Peter, her tour-guide, on Lemon Island after she has been told women cannot do anything on their own: (Nuha) Amelia: Look, Peter. You’re sweet and all, but lemon is a little sour for my taste, and it doesn’t go down well when women can’t do anything on their own, so… (Asma) Tour Guide: Well, I’m sorry, lady Pilot, but that’s how we do things here, and if that isn’t good enough for you, you can just bloody leave. (Nuha) Amelia: Well, maybe I will. (Asma) Tour Guide: Good, because you have way too many opinions for this place. (Nuha) Amelia: Excuse me? (Asma) Tour Guide: I’ll take you to the bus stop. (Nuha) Amelia: Fine. (Asma) Tour Guide: Fine. (Nuha) Amelia: Fine. Shobhita:  As Amelia boards the bus, Peter stands back and thinks. (Asma) Tour Guide: Damn she’s something (with a smirk on his face). (Scene 2) The story also travels to main sites within the asylum system: the car of detainees, the war zone, the waiting room in the detention centre, described as: Alhan: A waiting room full of shallow breaths and uncertain lives. Nuha: A waiting room full of discontent and carelessness. Christianah: A waiting room full of inhumane atmosphere. (Scene 5) However, it does not dwell on these episodes or draw them out. By not going to the expected place (e.g. through detention and the asylum system), Amazing Amelia reflects an undoing and decreation in the telling of its story, not by neglecting these elements or dismissing the lived experiences of people forced to navigate these systems, but by working the scenes into a larger ethical and moral discourse on belonging (‘I’m trying

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to find a country I can belong to’), on who belongs (‘We don’t belong anywhere’) and on what it is possible to belong to (‘You belong with us’).

8.3   Being Amazing Amelia at the Glad Café and the UNESCO Spring School We had a brief rehearsal process before the performance at the Glad Café in August 2018. The group decided on a simple staging: we would use chairs as a way to create the different scenes; scattered around the stage in the war scene to represent a derelict landscape, arranged like the seats of a bus, a van or a taxi in the transportation scenes or set up like a formal tea party when Amelia meets the prime minister of Dreamland. We also used paper planes as a playful aesthetic and semiotic of piloting and airplanes. For example, in scene 6, Amelia meets a woman in Dreamland fixing the wing of her airplane, but instead of mimicking doing so, Shobhita sat on the floor and folded planes out of bits of paper from the script. In the last scene, as each actor spoke their final lines, they also aimed a paper plane out at the audience both to signify Amelia’s journey and bring a theatricality to their telling, but also to acknowledge their own journey in Amelia’s. The process started out with six women and six scenes, and the group therefore decided that a different person should play Amelia in each scene. This gave embodiment to the ethos of sisterhood and performative expression to everyone having contributed both personally and collectively in the creation of Amelia (Fig. 8.6). Nearly a year passed between the staging at the Glad Café and the one at the 2019 UNESCO Spring School. In the meantime, the sistas had written and performed many of the songs mentioned in Chap. 6. Because both songs and play reflected on similar themes of belonging, being a woman and insisting on hope and joy amid challenges, the group decided they wanted to incorporate the songs into the play for the Spring School performance. Meeting, once again, several Friday evenings in a row, Clare and I would both be present to help with the process. These Fridays spent in an interdisciplinary creative process segmented the polyphony and collectivity the sistas worked from: one group at one end of the room with Clare, placing songs within the text, another group at another end of the room with me, responding to the music, tweaking the scenes and adding new branches to existing storylines. For example, Alhan had written a song called Marionette with the lyrics: ‘is this my life? Cos I can’t feel it.

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Fig. 8.6 Performing Amazing Amelia at the Glad Café by Leo Plumb

Too many hands pulling my strings, I’m just a marionette. Will someone cut my strings?’ This applied to Amelia’s situation and added depth as we see her navigating a patriarchal world with too many hands pulling at her strings. Incorporating the music also meant that more scenes needed to be added. For example, Fatma’s song Best Part of Me is about her mother. Through the lyrics ‘you were a lioness, always struggling, you went hungry, always hunting. You never fed till the family fed. Raising your cubs, I’ll never forget’, Fatma displays an intergenerational dialogue between women passing on strength to women that we wanted to include in the play. We therefore extended Scene 1 to incorporate the story of Amelia’s mother giving her aeronaut books, telling her to dream as big as she can and, suddenly, going missing. It also led to developing the character of her

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father and how his concern for his daughter’s desire for freedom and equality makes him simultaneously proud and ultimately without a choice to send her away on her journey. In the warm atmosphere of the Spring School, the sistas take the stage accompanied by Clare on piano and Lucy Cathcart Fröden on guitar and perform their play to an audience who are all there to engage with themes of integration through commitments to hospitality. As they switch being Amelia and unfurl the story of her quest for belonging, I reflect on the process and the joy, openheartedness and courage at the heart of this group in turning their experiences into a collective story. As Nuha will explain when I interview them some weeks later on the process, all performing Amelia and Amelia coming from all of them offer interesting dynamics of collectivity and courage: Nuha:

Yeah so like in the play when Amelia stood up for herself, I think why I like Amelia so much, like I’m obsessed with her, I just love it so much, I think it’s because I want to be as brave as her. She just got up, she talked back, she fought for herself. She didn’t know where she was going but she just went, you know it’s something I would wish, or I would try to do for myself. Shobhita: But you know she also is you, in a way? Like she’s all of us because we all put a little bit of ourselves in her. She wouldn’t be Amelia without us, so if she is strong it’s because you made her strong. Nuha: Because we made her strong […] but how brave she is, is just amazing. Fatma: You made her brave. Nuha: We made her brave. (Interview, 21st June 2019) As the sistas draw out, the process of co-writing and performing Amelia offered a way to restructure individual identities through the collective. Nuha’s bravery in the context of Amelia has several different layers: it is part of her, but the play allowed her to perform Amelia’s bravery and engage with its dramatic possibility by being part of creating the world of the play in the scenes where she is not Amelia. By both creating and embodying Amelia in a play where the actor simultaneously stand both within themselves and within a collective of women creates a performative

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mirror on the personal and political conflicts the sistas experienced: as Nuha states, Amelia talks back, goes on her journey and fights for herself. These are ways Nuha says she wishes she could be brave; but as Shobhita and Fatma remind her, she already is what she desires to be. This interview draws out how undergoing creative processes can be (like Shobhita noted in Chap. 6) humanising when being within a system that sees one only as an asylum seeker. But, as Nuha shows, it also allows for engaging with both self and the world differently by exploring the dramatic potential of the conflicts the sistas have experienced and the compromises in belonging and identity they have had to make on account of being women (Fig. 8.7). After the performance at the Spring School, Lucy hosted a session where participants could respond in song to the play. Many of the sistas joined the workshop and received due compliments and accolades for their play and performance. During this session, people played together, strung new lines to the play, paid homage and created music from what they saw and how it made them feel. This workshop demonstrated the

Fig. 8.7 Performing Amazing Amelia at the UNESCO Spring School

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creative conversation between song, poetry and theatre. But it also underscored that art can respond to art, that art can respond to refugee experiences and that art can create a reflective and ethical space where the story is told and responded to on the terms of the people who have the experience. Echoing the micropolitics of political listening and vulnerable observing, the space Lucy created that day conveys how reaching a hand, a song, a sound across in hospitality and kindness can reshape the structures of belonging in a shared world.

8.4   ‘But She’s Not the Amelia Earhart You Know’ Like in Sjælsmark, we rounded the process off with an interview. Taking into account how theatre was contested as a viable way to address the difficulty of living in Sjælsmark, I revisited the question of the role of art and Amazing Amelia against the so-called refugee crisis with the sistas, who answered in the following ways: Shobhita: I think it raised a lot of important questions, but I don’t know about answers to those important questions because … I mean even the play is not really conclusive because there is no ending to it but it does raise a lot of important questions and I think that’s the most important thing sometimes because at least you’re starting a conversation, at least you’re going into a topic that people are sometimes scared to for some reason or the other and I think that’s always a sign of hope that even if you don’t have the answers, at least you’re willing to try to find out. […] Nuha: Yeah I think it helped writing the play a lot, because the character finding their home and where they belong as a person, and like Shobhita said, it raised a lot of questions, so you ask yourself questions that even you don’t want to ask yourself, but you’re just gonna do it because you have a reason because you’re writing so you need to, you know, find good answers, but there is really no answer to it, it’s just more questions. Shobhita: But the emotion is raw, and even if you don’t find the answers the emotion that you feel when you go through it is raw and it’s real and I think people may not understand

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the question or the answer, but they can understand the emotion, I think the audience definitely can, and at least that’s something that applies to all of us. Nuha: Like Amelia is asked, was it in the bus? ‘where do you belong, where do you belong, where do you belong?’ and then she strongly answered ‘I don’t belong anywhere’, and that emotion transfers to the audience and everyone. Mawaddah: Sad, yeah. Helene: Yeah I think when you talk about the feeling you’re referring to, is that like the feeling of not belonging in a place properly? Shobhita: Just a lot of mixed feelings, because you know we’ve gone through a lot of talking about this. There is the feminism and that from the beginning the not being heard, the not belonging, there is the danger, the war, the conflict. And we do touch on all that and the emotion in that is quite raw but the things you say, you know, they’re not subtle, it’s not the most subtle piece of writing. It is quite to the point and quite direct. Nuha: It is quite direct and relatable. In the war where is ‘why are you here, why are you here?’ and then the answer is different for everyone like: ‘because I kissed a girl, I was kicked out of my own home’ and everything relates to not belonging anywhere and it’s not just the word, it’s how you say it, you transfer the feeling. Mawaddah: Also you know, so one thing I think is a result of the play it got me thinking about the whole concept of home and belonging and all that, but I mean I’ve been always thinking about it, but then … So I’ve come to this conclusion, that I think, or I feel like home is not necessarily a place where you were born, it can be anywhere. It’s just where you feel like you belong— Helene: And when do you feel like you belong, is that when you feel seen and respected? Mawaddah: Seen, respected, appreciated Nuha: Where you have a voice Fatma: Where you choose what you want to do Mawaddah: Yeah, so that … and this place feels like home. Helene: Like the group? Everyone: Yeah.

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Fatma: I can say that this room feels like home, because I’m here with everyone, I’m free. Shobhita: You can be free to be yourself Helene: I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but does that also have to do with what we talked about before, like being a woman and being a woman here and that maybe being different from how it was where you were from? Everyone: Yeah Fatma: It’s very different (Interview, 21st June 2019) As Shobhita remarks, the play asks more questions than it answers; questions that the sistas, in Mawaddah’s words, live with all the time, and questions that, in Nuha’s words, ask more questions. But having the courage to go into the question of home, ‘transferring the feeling’ to an audience and leaving what has no answer unanswered is, in Shobhita’s words, ‘a sign of hope’. As is making the audience aware of the microaggressions experienced, as Nuha says, in the scene where Amelia is asked where she is from, or the scene displaying the futility of living with war and conflict. I read in Shobhita and Nuha’s comments, that even if it is perhaps impossible to find the answer to what belonging means in situations of being a refugee, asylum seeker and woman on a journey of finding a home, starting the conversation and being willing to try to find the answers is in itself an act of courage, a leaving behind of fear and a directing of hope outward, to an audience, that they might see and understand. In Mawaddah, Fatma and Shobhita’s comments, I read that by examining belonging through processes of creativity, it is possible that belonging is something that can be created. By standing together on a stage and beyond, by naming each other kin, by coming to a place where they feel free, the sistas reshape what kind of belonging is possible, underscoring Ghorashi and Vieten’s view that: many women connect their source of belonging to the space where they can improve themselves and be free of various forms of restrictions they may face because they are female […] they emphasize that they are not passive victims of their cultures but active agents of change in their own lives and also contributors to the many spaces of which they are part. (2012, 14)

Much like This Is Us, Amazing Amelia offers no solution but holds instead a space of tension through humour, through poetry and through dramaturgical ethics providing an aesthetic that can show encounters with unjust

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and patriarchal systems without the allure of easy solutions. Amelia is left unresolved within the conflicts of her life crossing the Atlantic, finally in her own airplane: Nuha: Alhan: Asma: Fatma: Christianah: Shobhita: (Scene 7)

Amelia, Amelia, flying high in the blind sky With the wind and the fresh air blowing in her face and hair. Amelia, Amelia crosses the Atlantic The first woman to make that journey alone Looking for a country she can call home The sun sets and she flies into amazing colours Orange, blue, yellow, pink Relieved that in spite it all she can go where she wants to Maybe there’s something at least to the freedom As she stares at the stars coming out She takes a deep breath and thinks That every journey will end and start again....

Mirroring the sistas’ journeys of belonging as story that begins before it can be told and continues before it is clear where it will end, this final choral sequence hints at the bittersweet aspects of Amelia’s finale. Like How Not to Drown (see Chap. 4) Amelia’s story resists a straightforward resolution and therefore cannot conclude by her finding her home. Instead it leaves her, as the real Amelia Earhart, within the mystery of her journey. But then there is also freedom (‘With the wind and the fresh air blowing in her face and hair’), the support of women who have gone before in the biographical reference (‘The first woman to make that journey alone’), there are the colours of the dusk sky (‘Orange, blue, yellow, pink’) and belonging as an ongoing journey and continuing story.

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Appendix: Amazing Amelia Or We Are All Amelias Written by the amazing gals at YCSA, aka. the sistas Scene 1: Shobhita: Let us tell you a story. Not just any story.  This is a story about a woman. But not just any woman. Nuha: Amelia Earhart was a strong determined woman. But she’s not the Amelia Earhart that you know. Shobhita:  See this Amelia dreamt the same dream every night. But not just any dream. (Fatma) Amelia: I want to fly with the wind and the fresh air blowing in my face and hair. Nuha: Shame. Because she lived in a toxic country. But not just any country. A country where women were expected to be a stereotype. Shobhita:  Doing the same thing every day, like cleaning, cooking, looking great. Never allowed to change. Nuha: A country where women are not considered. A country known as Shobhita & Nuha: ‘Man’s World’ Everyone: Ugh, boring! Shobhita: Amelia is tired. Nuha: Tired of people saying. Alhan: But women can’t fly. Shobhita: Or. Alhan: Women don’t know how to work a plane. Shobhita: Or. Alhan: Women can’t be pilots. (Fatma) Amelia: You’re lying! Song: ‘Marionette’ My carved head is hanging. My wooden limbs are flimsy. I can only move if the strings are pulled And they pull them till I’m dizzy. My voices is someone else’s.

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Their script, my mouth. I can only speak if the strings are pulled Though my mind just wants to shout. Is this my life? Cos I can’t feel it. Too many hands pulling my wires. I’m just a marionette. Will someone cut my strings?

Shobhita: If that’s all you want to be, you’re in trouble. And Amelia is in trouble because everyone laughs at her and puts her down as she makes paper planes and wears flying glasses. But it’s not her fault, really. What can you do when you grow up with a mom who helps you make paper planes and tells you: (Nuha) Mum: Amelia you can do it and live the best life you can, don’t listen to anyone who puts you down. Shobhita: And a dad who says: (Alhan) Dad: My dear, don’t put dreams in her head. (Nuha) Mum: Come on, one dream won’t hurt. (Alhan) Dad: In this world it will. Shobhita: And it’s true, it could. In “Man’s World” it is illegal for women to educate themselves on anything else than (Asma) Amelia: cooking cleaning looking great. (Nuha) Mum: Amelia, that’s nonsense. The world is open to you, don’t you forget. Shobhita: Amelia misses her mum. She can’t exactly remember, but one day she was there, and the next day she wasn’t. And whenever she asks her dad (Fatma) Amelia: Hey dad, what happened to mum? Shobhita: He says: (Alhan) Dad: Car accident. Shobhita: Or. (Alhan) Dad: Incurable disease. Shobhita: Or (Fatma) Amelia: No really dad, I deserve to know. (Alhan) Dad: She left for the hills and never came back. And that’s the end of it.

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Song: ‘Best Part of Me’ You were a lioness always struggling You went hungry, always hunting You never Fed till the family fed Raising your cubs I’ll never forget Mama you’re my role model And I’m so proud of me today Because I’m the best version of you And I love you everyday You are the best part of me You are the best part of me

Shobhita: All she has left is a paper plane and her secret, Aeronautics books … and a big dream. (Alhan) Dad: Amelia, what did I tell you about reading out in the open, it’s illegal. (Fatma) Amelia: But dad, I just learned how to fix a wing. (Alhan) Dad: Well forget it again, and quickly too, don’t tell anyone you know. (Fatma) Amelia: But it’s my last missing piece, now I know about the motor, the wings, the steering wheel… (Alhan) Dad: Amelia please, shush. Go inside. (Fatma) Amelia: I know everything I need to to fly, just like she wanted me to, dad, don’t you see? (Alhan) Dad: Amelia shut up and go to your room right now. And don’t come out till you have forgotten all you know. Shobhita: This is a typical conversation. And Amelia is tired Nuha: of cooking cleaning and looking great. Shobhita: So when she comes off age she says: (Fatma) Amelia: Hey dad, I’ll be back later, I have something I need to do. (Alhan) Dad: Please, Amelia, don’t get into trouble.

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Nuha: She walks straight into the pilot school (Fatma) Amelia: Hey you, can I speak to the person in charge? Nuha: Because even in a Man’s world, a woman has to try. (Sho) Male Pilot: Are you here to see your husband? (Fatma) Amelia: No, I’m here to sign up. (Sho) Male Pilot: I’m sorry Ms. I think you might be slightly confused. Let me explain it for you. (Fatma) Amelia: Let me guess, ‘women can’t fly’ (Sho) Male Pilot: You’re smarter than you look. (Fatma) Amelia: You’re not. (Sho) Male Pilot: Look lady, if you don’t treat me with the respect I deserve I will call the police. (Fatma) Amelia: Can you just listen for a moment? (Sho) Male Pilot: I am only allowed to listen to you if you talk about cooking, cleaning or looking great. (Fatma) Amelia: I want to take the exam. Please, I know everything— (Sho) Male Pilot: Funny story girl. (Fatma) Amelia: I really do. I know about wings and aviation, about seeing the worldfrom above. (Sho) Male Pilot: That’s not allowed, now shoo. (Fatma) Amelia: Please. (Sho) Male Pilot: Go home this instant girl, or I’ll report you. (Fatma) Amelia: Well damn you! (Sho) Male Pilot: That kind of language from a lady. (Fatma) Amelia: I am not a lady, I am a pilot. (Sho) Male Pilot: You’re a trespasser. Didn’t you see the sign? (he points to the sign and reads) ‘NO WOMEN ALLOWED.  UNLESS IT’S TO FIND THEIR HUSBANDS’ (Fatma) Amelia: All I want to do is fly. (Sho) Male Pilot: And I want to rule the world. Now shoo. (Fatma) Amelia: I am not leaving until you let me speak to the person in charge. (Sho) Male Pilot: Security. (Fatma) Amelia: Don’t you dare. (Sho) Male Pilot: This woman is a woman. And she has seen the sign. (Fatma) Amelia: I will kick, I’ll scream. (Asma) Security: You will come with us. Nuha: Amelia in a police station waiting patiently for a man to get her out of trouble.

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(Fatma) Amelia: Please don’t call my dad. (Asma) Officer: He is on his way. (Alhan) Dad: Amelia, what did you do? (Asma) Officer: You need to get a handle on your daughter. If we ever hear about her again we’ll give her a life-sentence and we will be keeping an eye on you. Now shoo. (Alhan) Dad: Amelia. (Fatma) Amelia: I know dad, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I’m a woman. I’m introuble because the world says what I can and can’t do. (Alhan) Dad: You sound like your mother. (Fatma) Amelia: I’m in trouble because I have a dream to be a pilot. If I was a man that would be a great dream. But because I am a women it is dangerous. And I hate it. (Alhan) Dad: I tried so hard to keep you safe but you’ve always been so strong willed. (Fatma) Amelia: All I ever wanted was to be treated the same as everyone else. (Alhan) Dad: Which is why you need to go. (Fatma) Amelia: What? (Alhan) Dad: You have too much of her spirit, Amelia, and they took her too. (Fatma) Amelia: They took her? (Alhan) Dad: For being too outspoken. For knowing how to read, for teaching her daughter about dreams. (Fatma) Amelia: I’m sorry dad. (Alhan) Dad: Never apologise for being like her. But I can’t lose you too. (Fatma) Amelia: But (Alhan) Dad: Down the end of the street is a car, it’ll take you to the airport. You get in and never look back. (Fatma) Amelia: Dad. (Alhan) Dad: Here’s a letter your mother wrote for you before they came and some money for your journey. (Fatma) Amelia: I’m going to miss you. (Alhan) Dad: She always said you’d fly away. (Pause) Now, no more words. You go, far away from here. Shobhita: In the car Amelia reads her mum’s letter.

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Song: ‘Keep Moving’ The moment you came into my life. I knew that you would always be there I can’t see myself anymore, now that you are far away I miss you every moment. You’re my breath, my laugh, my strength My sweet achievement. You make me feel complete.

Scene 2: Alhan: Up in the air. Flying with the wind and the fresh air blowing in her face and hair. After 5 hours she arrives. And is greeted by a tour guide. (Asma) Tour Guide: Welcome, welcome to Lemon Island. Where the lemons grow on trees and from the ground and from everywhere. Madame, lady, I’ll take you to your hotel. Shobhita: See, Amelia is smart. She knows that in strange worlds and whendoing research on which country she could belong to, she needs a little help. (Nuha) Amelia. Why thank you kind sir. (Asma) Tour Guide: Just in here. Rest. Eat. We have a long day ahead. I will pick you uptomorrow. (Nuha) Amelia: Man, what a day. Alhan: The next day the tour guide picks her up. (Asma) Tour Guide: Come with me, much to see. (Nuha) Amelia: Hey, what’s your name? (Asma) Tour Guide: My name? (Nuha) Amelia: Yes. (Asma) Tour Guide: Why do you want to know? (Nuha) Amelia: Because I want to be able to call you if I need you. (Asma) Tour Guide: You’re a free spirit, aren’t you? (Nuha) Amelia: Yes sir, certainly am. (Asma) Tour Guide: Well, here we have lemons a-plenty, but women don’t usually ask for things. (Nuha) Amelia: Like what? (Asma) Tour Guide: Like names. (Nuha) Amelia: I do. (Asma) Tour Guide: Okay, well, don’t tell anyone I said, but I’m Peter.

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(Nuha) Amelia: Well, Peter, take me around and get used to me asking for stuff. (Asma) Tour Guide:  Where would you like to go first? The lemon orchard? Or the lemon castle? Or, I know, the lemon lady lunch (Nuha) Amelia: No no no … Look, maybe I should explore this place alone. (Asma) Tour Guide: (Laughs) What??!! are you serious?? On Lemon Island women cantdo anything except being a housewife, let alone an explorer. And they must have a man with them at all times. (Nuha) Amelia: Look, I’m used to doing things that aren’t normal, so— Alhan: But Peter insisted on guiding her around the island and doingeverything for her. (Nuha) Amelia: I swear, if he opens one more door for me… Shobhita: Because a woman can’t be left alone in Lemon Island (Asma) Tour Guide: And this is the lemon orchard (Nuha) Amelia: Boring. (Asma) Tour Guide: And the lemon castle, shaped like… (Nuha) Amelia: Surprise, surprise, a lemon. (Asma) Tour Guide: And next up is lemon lady lunch with… (Nuha) Amelia: What, lemon cake? (Asma) Tour Guide: But not just any lemon cake. Also lemon custard and lemon tea and lemon… (Nuha) Amelia: Look, Peter. You’re sweet and all, but lemon is a little sour for mytaste, and it doesn’t go down well when women can’t do anything on their own, so… (Asma) Tour Guide: Well, I’m sorry, lady Pilot, but that’s how we do things here, and if that isn’t good enough for you, you can just bloody leave. (Nuha) Amelia: Well, maybe I will. (Asma) Tour Guide: Good, because you have way too many opinions for this place. (Nuha) Amelia: Excuse me? (Asma) Tour Guide: I’ll take you to the bus stop. (Nuha) Amelia: Fine. (Asma) Tour Guide: Fine. (Nuha) Amelia: Fine.

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Shobhita:  As Amelia boards the bus, Peter stands back and thinks. (Asma) Tour Guide: Damn she’s something (with a smirk on his face) ‘Marionette’ Chorus repeats: Is this my life? Cos I can’t feel it. Too many hands pulling my wires. I’m just a marionette. Will someone cut my strings?

Scene 3: Nuha:  Amelia hopped on a bus and went on a long journey. For two or three weeks she passed the sunset and the sunrise and the sunset again, staring out the window hoping for a new beginning. Alhan:  She crossed many different lands with different people in it, andeverytime the bus stopped, a new passenger sat beside her and asked her the same questions. (Nuha) Passenger: Where are you from? (Shobhita) Amelia: A place that buried my hopes and dreams. (Alhan) Passenger: Why are you here? (Sho) Amelia: To show the world what I have. (Asma) Passenger: Who are you? (Sho) Amelia: Someone who doesn’t want to feel suffocated but appreciates every breath I take in. Nuha: Amelia travels in all kinds of weather. Cloudy, heavy rain, rainbows and bright sun. Song: ‘We are the Sun’ I am a unicorn, I am a flower I am a robin, a high tower I am a wave, I am a tree I am a lighthouse I am green I am the town on a Friday night I am a magpie, a lucky sight I’m a sweet potato, surprise inside I am a well worn scarf, nothing to hide.

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I am the sun Nos somos o sol (Portuguese) Ana alshams (Arabic) Awa ni Orun (Yoruba – Nigeria)

(Sho) Amelia: All I’ve seen in a blink of an eye, the same questions I hear Alhan: Where are you from? (Sho) Amelia: Oh for goodness sake. (Asma) Passenger: But where are you from? (Sho) Amelia: Here. (Nuha) Passenger: But where are you really from? (Sho) Amelia: A woman’s body. (Asma) Passenger: Why are you here? (Shobhita) Amelia: To see the unseen and share the stories (Nuha) Passenger: Where are you going? (Sho) Amelia: On a journey that’s worthy. Alhan: On and on she goes, answering questions nobody should be asked, reminding her only that she’s not home anymore and she doesn’t yet belong where she’s going. Nuha: Meeting not one friendly face. Rain and rainbows. Sun and blinks of eyes. Days and days on end (Sho) Amelia: Please, just nobody ask me anything anymore. I’m nobody from nowhere, okay. Alhan: She falls asleep Song: ‘Haze of it All’ It’s not the first time, the second or the third. I’ve been here before. Unannounced goose bumps, memories blurred Awake on the floor But I know nothing, it’s all a haze Life has played it’s tricks The hard drive of my brain erased. I’ll sleep again, build up the bricks. Soft soft pillow, my heavy, heavy eyes. I’ll close off the world

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Scene 4: (Sho) Bus Driver: This is Nowhere. Nowhere, everyone. Anyone getting off in Nowhere, this is your stop. Nuha: Amelia, Amelia, wake up! This is your stop. (Sho) Bus Driver: Final call for nowhere! Going... Asma: Amelia, Amelia, wake up! (Sho) Bus Driver: Going… (Alhan) Amelia: Oh, this is my stop! Nuha: Off the bus. In a country where war has broken out. Sounds of bombs and people fighting. Asma: She has to duck more than once to not get in people’s ways. Everyone running for shelter. Asma: Quick, duck! Nuha: She hides behind an old car. And she has to know. (Alhan) Amelia: Why are you fighting? Nuha: But everytime she gets different answers. (Asma) Person: Because I lost my family (Alhan) Amelia: Why is there a war? (Sho) Person: Because they took my mum prisoner (Alhan) Amelia: Why are you fighting? (Asma) Person: Because they bombed my house (Alhan) Amelia: Why? (Nuha) Person: I fell in love with a girl (Asma) Person: I’m fighting for my rights (Sho) Person: They drove me out of my home (Asma) Person: I ran away (Alhan) Amelia: Why are you fighting? (Sho) Person: Because I’m a foreigner who’s not welcome here. (Alhan) Amelia: Why are you fighting? (Nuha) Person: Because I feel suffocated Shobhita: As she’s hiding from the shots and the bombs, an immigration officer approaches her. (Fatma) Officer: Hey! What’s someone like you doing here? (Alhan) Amelia: Well, I’m looking for a place I can (Fatma) Officer: You don’t belong here. (Alhan) Amelia: But…

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(Fatma) Officer: You need to leave. (Alhan) Amelia: Look (Fatma) Officer: Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard it all before… Nuha:  With surprise and disappointment without even being allowed toexplain she is put into a car with other people who are the same as her and taken over the border. (Fatma) Officer: Don’t say another word. ‘Perfectly Imperfect’ comes on the bus radio. The travellers start singing absent mindedly which builds up to a bizarre moment of connection and joy. Amelia and the immigration officer lock eyes, who remembers his position and turns the radio off while telling everyone to be quiet.

Scene 5: Christianah: In the car, Amelia looks at everyone who’s travelling with her. Nuha: She wonders about their faces and their lives. (Asma) Amelia: Where are we going? (Alhan) Person: We’re being sent to Detention. (Asma) Amelia: Why? (Fatma) Person: Don’t know. I guess nobody wants to deal with us. Why are you here? (Asma) Amelia:  I’m trying to find a country I can belong to. (Chris) People: Aren’t we all. (Asma) Amelia: Where do you belong? (Sho) People: We don’t belong anywhere (Asma) Amelia: That’s not true. (Sho) People: Yes it is. (Asma) Amelia: No, we belong to every drop of joy, we belong to Hope, we belong to Love. (Chris) Person: Life isn’t like that. (Asma) Amelia: No but it should be. We all deserve to start over our lives. Especially lives we didn’t ruin but that were ruined for us. (Fatma) Person: Lovely story, girl. (Nuha) Person: But keep dreaming. (Alhan) Person: The world isn’t like that.

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Alhan: Just as Amelia is about to argue, the car comes to a stop. (Sho) Driver: Detention Center. (Fatma) Officer: Come with me. Song: ‘You Belong with Us’ Just like the white crayon in the box She is desperate for attention Wondering how to fit in To the spectrum of perfection Lost in a list of life’s essentials Locked in the frozen sea An ancient goddess grieving her reflection Wondering who to be You are enough, you belong with us.

Alhan:  A waiting room full of shallow breaths and uncertain lives. Nuha:  A waiting room full of discontent and carelessness. Christianah: A waiting room full of inhumane atmosphere. (Asma) Amelia: Look! (Fatma) Officer: Shh, no talking. (Asma) Amelia: But I came here legally. (Fatma) Officer: Good one. (Asma) Amelia: Please, look at my passport. (Fatma) Officer: It’s fake. (Asma) Amelia: Look at the picture. (Fatma) Officer: So why are you here? (Asma) Amelia: A misunderstanding. (Fatma) Officer: Fine. Go. But don’t let it happen again. Alhan:  Amelia looks back at the people she journeyed with, wondering why she gets to leave when they can’t. Nuha: She finds a ride. (Sho) Taxi Driver: Where to? (Asma) Amelia: Away.

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(Sho) Taxi Driver: Away where? (Asma) Amelia: I don’t know … I’m tired. (Sho) Taxi Driver: You have to give me more than that… (Amelia) Amelia: Anywhere safe. Anywhere that feels like home. (Sho) Taxi Driver: Well I don’t know about home, but there is this country calledDreamland where everyone is nice and have everything they could ever need. (Asma) Amelia: Equal rights? (Sho) Taxi Driver: I believe so. (Asma) Amelia: No war? (Sho) Taxi Driver: Yes indeed. (Asma) Amelia: No discrimination? (Sho) Taxi Driver: Not a shadow of it? (Asma) Amelia: Racism, dictators, unhappiness? (Sho) Taxi Driver: No, no and no. (Asma) Amelia: Take me there. (Sho) Taxi Driver: Yes Madame … Only trouble is … Nobody knows exactly where it is. (Asma) Amelia: Oh for goodness sake. (Sho) Taxi Driver: I have heard stories, though. People stop at the crossroad, go into thegrass, go to the left and follow the sunset. I can drop you off there? (Asma) Amelia: Please. Scene 6: Shobhita:  The driver drops her off in a beautiful field. To the left and follow the sunsets. Alhan: And the sunrise And the sunset. And the sunrise. Mawaddah: For days and nights she keeps walking. Sunsets and sunrise Fatma: Sunsets and sunrise and sunsets Until finally. (Chris) Amelia: I feel dizzy. Alhan: She faints. When she wakes up she is greeted with smiles and warmth and welcoming people. Fatma: Bright white light shines from everywhere.

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Song: ‘Glittery Bums’ Can you hear the drums? Here they come, the glittery bums In the neon sun, in the neon sun Shorty shorts with dramatic eyes Sun is up full of pretty lies Hair flicks in the dancing heat No cares in the world, living proud and free, free, free, free. Living proud and free, free, free, free Put your shades on, it’s a city invasion A peacock procession of proud imperfection.

(Chris) Amelia: What is this place? Nuha:  You can call it whatever you like. Some call it Dreamland, some call it The Place of a Thousand Belongings, but you can call it Home. (Chris) Amelia: And can I do whatever I like here? Alhan: Of course. Whatever your heart desires. But first, you must eat and drink. You’ve journeyed so far. Mawaddah: When Amelia recovered her strength, she went for a walk around Dreamland. Fatma: Everywhere she saw people following their dreams. Artists painting canvases the size of ballrooms. Nuha: Dancers and swimmers. Alhan: Everyone helping and caring about each other. Mawaddah: She stops in a garage where a woman is fixing a plane. (Chris) Amelia: Hey! (Sho) Woman: Hey! (Chris) Amelia: Is that your plain? (Sho) Woman: Sure is. You know how to fly? (Chris) Amelia: I do … Although it feels like a lifetime ago. (Sho) Woman: Do you want to help me fix the wing? (Chris) Amelia: I’ve never wanted to do anything more. Fatma: Amelia and her friend talk about everything. But mostly about flying with the wind and the fresh air blowing in their face and hair. (Sho) Woman: Best feeling in the world.

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Song: ‘Old Chest’ It’s ok, stop right there You’ve done all that you can. Don’t try so hard by yourself Don’t force it. Life is more than science We are more than science

Alhan: As she walks on, she begins to think… (Chris) Amelia: This could be home. Not just to me, but to many. Alhan: She begins to think. (Chris) Amelia: If I could share this with the people in the car … or the people from back home … If they could know… Nuha: But she stops dead on her feet… Asma: There, in front of her. To all sides of her. Nuha: A giant wall. Shobhita: Surrounding all of Dreamland. Alhan: As tall as the tallest building. Fatma: Or the biggest mountain you’ve ever seen. (Chris) Amelia: I don’t understand. (Sho) Woman: Hey, Amelia, I think our Prime Minister would like to meet you. Shobhita:  In a huge ballroom, the size of Timbuktu, the Prime Minister sits in an armchair. (Asma) PM: Welcome, Amelia. The pilot, right? (Chris) Amelia: Yes, ma’am. (Asma) PM: Please, none of that. Just sit and drink some tea. Fatma: They sit together for the afternoon. Alhan: Amelia has so many questions … Like how have they made this land? Their laws? Where does their freedom come from? (Asma) PM: Look, there are many answers to these questions. But above all, thisplace is a secret. You are welcome here, but you can’t tell anyone else about this. (Chris) Amelia: But why? I have met many people who could use a home. We couldshare this place with them. (Asma) PM: We welcome anyone who has the passion and the need to find us butwe can’t share our country freely with the outside.

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(Chris) Amelia: But you have so much. (Asma) PM: Sharing it too freely and recklessly would ruin it. It would ruin ourcommunity, our resources, our unity and culture. (Chris) Amelia: But that’s ridiculous! (Asma) PM: Amelia, you are welcome here. (Chris) Amelia: But I am not sure I want to be if nobody else is. Look … Even thoughthis country has everything I wanted and everything I dreamed, it’s not the same if it’s not shared with the rest of the world. There are people who need to be shown the way because they are wandering around with nowhere to go, and nowhere to belong. (Asma) PM: Yes, the world is full of evils, but we are safe from them here. (Chris) Amelia: But then I can’t stay. (Asma) PM: I’m sorry to hear. (Chris) Amelia: You’re too far removed from reality. What is the point of a place beingbeautiful if you can’t share it? (Asma) PM: I understand but I can’t do anything about it. It is written in our law. Youcan stay if you want to or you can leave. It’s your choice. (Chris) Amelia: I wanted to find the perfect country but this isn’t it. (Asma) PM: I’m sorry to hear … Look, I heard you helped one of our pilots fix herplain. It’s a good thing to do, so it’s yours if you want it. Nuha: On the landing court, Amelia’s new fried hands her the keys to the plain. (Sho) Woman: Keep her safe. Song: One line of ‘The Spark’ Don’t dismay, tomorrow’s another day, You will be ok, you will be ok

Alhan: She puts on her helmet and her glasses and gets ready to fly. Everyone in Dreamland wave her off.

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Song: One line of ‘The Spark’ Don’t dismay, tomorrow’s another day, You will be ok, you will be ok

Shobhita: As she soars above the sky, she sees that round land, surrounded by a huge wall become smaller and smaller. Song: ‘You Belong with Us’ outro: See the water dance around your feet Drip drop of rainbow tears Your metamorphosis

Scene 7: Nuha: Amelia, Amelia, flying high in the blind sky With the wind and the fresh air blowing in her face and hair. Alhan: Amelia, Amelia crosses the Atlantic The first woman to make that journey alone Looking for a country she can call home Asma: The sun sets and she flies into amazing colours Orange, blue, yellow, pink Fatma: Relieved that in spite it all she can go where she wants to Maybe there’s something at least to the freedom Christianah: As she stares at the stars coming out She takes a deep breath and thinks Shobhita: that every journey will end and start again.… Song: ‘Haze of it All’ outro: I will be free I will conquer mountains Lie in the warm grass Get lost in the sky

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References Ahmed, Sara. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham and London: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107415324.004. Ghorashi, Halleh. 2014. Bringing Polyphony One Step Further: Relational Narratives of Women from the Position of Difference. Women’s Studies International Forum 43: 59–66. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2013.07.019. Ghorashi, Halleh, and Ulrike M.  Vieten. 2012. Female Narratives of ‘New’ Citizens’ Belonging(s) and Identities in Europe: Case Studies from the Netherlands and Britain. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 19 (6): 725–741. https://doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2012.745410.

CHAPTER 9

Conclusion: ‘Much Home’

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I have asked the question how much home does a person need in theoretical, creative and lived domains, while exploring how creative practices with refugees and asylum seekers might rethink home and belonging. As an enquiry placed amid the so-called refugee crisis, this exploration and practice has brought with it other questions: who is allowed to home? How shall I act in sharing the world across legal and social divides of belonging? And, bearing the first two in mind, how ought we to live? On a chapterby-chapter basis, the question of home was asked and answered in the following ways: through existential philosophy and the historical perspective of a postwar moment, I traced belonging as arising with the metaphysical condition of being, while evidencing that being is already contingent on dwelling in the world. Considering how to dwell and who is allowed to dwell, Habib’s comment of asylum preceding ‘there-being’ in the world foregrounded the fieldwork where being home and being human were intrinsically linked with having human rights. This served to unfold the bureaucratic performances and compromises of belonging people make in the asylum system, but also to develop a backdrop for the legal situations of the fieldwork and the kinds of themes and understandings of home the groups developed in their plays and creative expressions. Identifying belonging as being and longing, the strand of narratological thinking I read situates story and narrative as a mediating factor between being, longing and being in the world. Narrative therapy and narratology promote a wider lens on story able to encapsulate: one, how dominating and repeated stories create realities, pertaining, not least, to refugees; two, how humans story space and vice versa; and three, how, theatre and literature can resist and rework asylum narratives. Here stories emerged also as what can make people visible and relational to each other, and what makes entering the world a mutual project. This foregrounded the relational ethics of dramaturgical ethics, where the question how shall I act is contingent on asking who is allowed to home and who is considered to be at home in the socio-political frameworks safeguarding judicial categories of belonging. In the introduction, Jackson defined home as a negotiation between ‘self’ and the multiple ‘others’ of the world. Through hermeneutical narratology and the practices of dramaturgical ethics and ethnoplaywriting, this study has made the case that there is an intrinsic and mutual ethical task in homing. I developed new dramaturgical frameworks of dramaturgical ethics and ethnoplaywriting. These provided a context-specific methodological approach for creative and embodied doing in the world. Both were

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situated in their interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks of political listening, vulnerable observing and ethnographic practice and, importantly, traced in the fieldworks that birthed them. But they also reflected a conversation between research, activism and theatrical practice through Ingold’s thought that research is living curiously and with care. The interludes punctuating this thesis reflect this conversation between academia, arts-­practice and activism, and foregrounded the fieldwork where striving to write and perform stories through an ethical engagement that stretched also beyond moments of making theatre was, in a micropolitical way, an approach to exploring what could be. In terms of addressing how creative practice with refugees and asylum seekers might rethink home and belonging, I have argued firstly that homes are made in refugee communities through artistic courage, holding the tensions of political and relational space, and exactly through deep involvement not only with what is, but also what could be. Secondly, I have mapped how collaborative democratic and creative practice can become its own place of belonging, thereby extending the discussion on home beyond the political and literal discourses of asylum, to explore the wider issues of compromised belonging. For example, the sistas made a home by naming each other kin, which offered a way of mutually redefining the subject positions and identities they had experienced discrimination on the basis of, while countering the unhoming effects of the asylum system. The performative democracy of Trampoline House used artistic process and courage in creating daily practices aimed at other ways of being at home in multinational and multilingual space. The two playtexts of This Is Us and Amazing Amelia are then in themselves documents that capture the unhoming effects of seeking asylum and give new language to what belonging might mean, and what collective writing might make possible. Dramaturgical ethics was integrated into both the structure and the content of this book by placing the chapters in an order where they might engender a reflective way of reading, by weaving the words of the groups into the text throughout, and by letting the polyvocal, collectively written plays conclude the writing around the two fieldworks. Putting these many registers in conversation is an encouragement for further exchange between academia, activism and artistic practice, but it was also a way to let the text in the plays and beyond hold the tensions of lived experiences of home and asylum. As such, these playtext form an integral part of the analytical framework within and beyond this book, as well as the creative and analytical contributions of the people who produced them.

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I suggest the methodological tools and theoretical combinations made in this book can be more widely drawn to contribute to the political conversation on home, in creative projects with refugees and asylum seekers, and in the wider context of applied theatre. In an effort at such an extension, I note that an undercurrent of this study has been exploring space, story and asylum in histories of landscape and dispossession of land due to conquest and colonialism. This has reflected on the embodied and political conversation between self and space, where space might be understood to enact its own authority or be in a symbiotic relationship with human belonging. How spaces story has been relayed as a question of geopolitical sustainability, remote-control border practices, ‘fortress Europe’ and the sustained acts of welcome from precariously funded community initiatives. These reflections reach into the pressing ecological effects of the climate crisis, making how much home a person needs a material and geographical concern, as refugees continue to be produced not only by war and conflict, but also as homes become uninhabitable. While there might be a unifying call to action in understanding the earth as a home to all humans, I have noted how people are placed unequally and intersectionally within the unfolding effects of climate crisis. In pointing forwards, I remark on the narratological and geographical perspective that living well with one’s surroundings is contingent also on storying well, and envision that belonging will be a question that continues to arise when people cross borders and can no longer stay at home.

9.1   What Is the Point of Theatre? Payman’s question of what the point of theatre is in a situation that really needed politics and law has been a central current throughout this book. I here remark on Jackson’s understanding that ‘[w]e often say we feel at home in the world when what we do has some effect and what we say carries some weight’ (1995, 123). This view was unfolded in the two fieldworks where writing plays together was not only about scripting embodied storytelling, but also about being in a space that could listen, imagine and explore the tensions of home. Belonging understood as actions having effect and words carrying weight was reflected in the sistas’ remarking on creativity as humanising, or Rohan and Abbas’ comments that writing together was also about having a place to go, regardless of how their cases were unfolding. Jackson’s comment is further reflected in reworking an experience of losing home into Amelia’s story of making agentive choices

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in her own quest for belonging, or in reframing the space of Sjælsmark as being either Hogwarts or a desirable holiday destination. Thereby, the artistic and democratic practices of the communities I worked with, coupled with the theatrical and relational potential of the workshop, give tentative answers to both Payman’s question and the questions of home: the point of theatre can be understood not only as providing a setting for working through the meaning and mooring of home, but also be a home in itself; belonging might be something undertaken together through collective creativity; and resisting the dominating narratives and tellings around refugeedom might outline other ways to live and dwell. I have gone as far as to suggest then that performance practice in collaboration with refugees and asylum seekers is not only a component in rethinking notions of home, but also in resisting the unhoming effects of asylum policy. And yet, I formulate these answers tentatively not to underestimate their effect, but rather to continue to hold in view that while situations akin to Payman’s might need the kind of home potentially created through theatrical process, it also needs the sustained efforts at structural and social change, in short: ‘not just theatre, also politics, law’.

9.2  How Much Home? Doubly Possible and the Better Imagined Améry’s question has framed this exploration of what home means in the wake of the so-called refugee crisis, and given the allure of the quantifiable. He answers his own question with: ‘[h]ow much home a person needs cannot be quantified’ (1980, 60). However, ‘precisely at this time, when home is losing some of its repute, one is greatly tempted to answer the purely rhetorical question and say: he needs much home’ (60). Améry shows home again in its unavoidable and unanswerable dimensions. And yet, it is perhaps in the attempts at producing a solution to the complexity of home as an embodied, political and existential entity that reveals the paradox and necessity of the simple retort: ‘much home’. This study has uncovered these paradoxes as lived tensions: home can manifest in the longing for Kurdish mountains that cannot be returned to, as was the case for Ahmad Kaya. It can be the site of familiarity that informs an approach to the world, while simultaneously being a place that suppresses, discriminates or holds conflict, as Mawaddah, Shobhita, Nuha and Fatma remarked. Rohan and Abbas uncovered how a country is only a home if there is the promise of an unfolding future, while Ghafour’s

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interview comments and the sistas’ poems underscored that belonging is at stake also in everyday encounters when seeking to be at home in a current situation. These tensions become spatial through the unhoming practices of Sjælsmark, the Home Office and deportation centres. In Sjælsmark, for example, people make a home from homelessness for themselves and their children through daily efforts. I conclude on these tensions as follows: firstly, on an equally evident note to Améry, a person needs much more home than afforded within the exilic experiences of being excluded from statutory, judicial and communal categories of belonging. Secondly, ‘much home’ reiterates the imperative for reconfiguring what home means in a globalised world of ‘crisis’. Apart from the communal and theatrical practices outlined above that provide a setting for rethinking, what is needed is also political and social imagination. Smith’s Spring provides further language for such a call. Here the main character Florence, the child of a woman in detention, asks: [w]hat if […] Instead of saying this border divides these places. We said, this border unites these places. This border holds together these two really interesting different places. What if we declared border crossings places where, listen, when you crossed them, you yourself became doubly possible. (2019, 196)

Both This Is Us and Amazing Amelia reflect similar situations as the Opposition and Amelia contemplate a different world:  pposition:  You sound like a colonial ruler. O The Boss:   And you sound like a blind optimist. Opposition:  A better world is possible. (This Is Us, Scene 3) Alhan:      As she walks on, she begins to think… Amelia (Chris):  This could be home. Not just to me, but to many. Alhan:     She begins to think. Amelia (Chris): If I could share this with the people in the car … or the people from back home … If they could know (Amazing Amelia, Scene 6) All three situations stay with the realities of what is, while engaging with what could be. For the opposition a better world is ‘possible’, and Amelia’s comments are also future gazing; ‘[i]f they could know’. Florence’s call

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for borders as uniting rather than divisive identifies the work both of politics and imagination, thereby connecting several strands of this study: compromised belongings and the dramatic potential in exile and crossing borders that goes from telling it ‘like it is […] towards the better imagined’ (Smith 2021). Considering how ought we to live and who is allowed to home, Florence envisions a world where, in crossing, a person became not less but more: possible in multiple places. I began this book remarking on the necessity to keep in view both narrative revision and narrative stasis when working with and alongside refugees, asylum seekers and their political and legal entanglements. I end on offering this work as a vantage point for the ‘doubly possible’ and from which to continue the conversations the people in this study have started. Let this be a call to carry on the political, creative and mutual work necessary for deepening the understanding of what home means at a time where much home is needed. As the editors of Refugee Imaginaries echo in their survey of the last decade’s worth of refugee research in the humanities: artistic representations and political storytelling of forced displacement are never only about refugees, but rather the ‘whole complex set of historical, cultural, legal and ethical relations that currently tie all of us—citizens of nation-states and citizens of humanity only—together’ (Cox et al. 2020, 4). Then, the ‘if only they could know’ and the ‘better world’ that is ‘possible’ reflect sustained investment ‘towards the better imagined’, towards what it might mean to home across divides of legal status, nationality and categories of belonging.

References Améry, Jean. 1980. At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Cox, Emma, Sam Durrant, David Farrier, Lyndsey Stonebridge, and Agnes Woolley. 2020. Refugee Imaginaries: Research Across the Humanities. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Jackson, Michael. 1995. At Home in the World. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Smith, Ali. 2019. Spring. United Kingdom: Penguin Ramdom House. ———. 2021. The Better Imagined. Refugee Tales. https://www.refugeetales. org/the-­better-­imagined.

Index1

A Activism, 106, 180, 182, 184, 193, 245 Adorno, Theodor, 30 Agamben, Giorgio, 2, 5, 15, 39, 46, 117, 126, 130, 132, 133 Ahmed, Sarah, 98, 99, 106, 107, 130, 184, 192, 195, 200 Améry, Jean, 2, 2n1, 4, 30, 30n1, 35, 45, 54, 187, 247, 248 Anthropology, 4, 11, 18, 88–91, 93, 96, 105, 106 Anti-immigration discourse, 4, 53, 118 Applied theatre, 88, 92, 99, 108, 140 Arabic, 126, 140, 144, 147, 150, 151, 156, 157 Arendt, Hannah, 5, 15, 30, 30n1, 35, 38, 45, 48, 53, 54, 117, 127, 130 Asylum, 2–7, 10, 11, 13–17, 19, 21–24, 30–33, 36–39, 41–45, 47, 49–55, 62, 66, 68, 70, 71,

73–78, 89, 92, 100, 104, 105, 109, 114, 114n2, 116, 117, 118n3, 119, 121–123, 125, 126, 128–131, 133, 138, 139, 141, 145, 148, 150, 151, 153, 159, 179–181, 183–188, 191, 196, 244–247 Asylum liminality, 114, 189, 190 Asylum seekers/asylum seeking, 62, 63, 65–70, 72, 74, 77, 79, 88, 96, 114–116, 118–123, 126–129, 132, 134, 149, 150, 153, 178, 179, 182, 189–191, 193, 196, 201, 220, 223, 245–247, 249 Athanasiou, Athena, 106, 107 Audience, 149–151, 153, 154, 156, 157, 159, 213, 217, 219, 222, 223 Augé, Marc, 117 Azad, 46, 47, 50

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

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B Bachelard, Gaston, 101, 128 Back, Les, 94, 128, 145 Bal, Mieke, 104 Barba, Euginio, 91 Bassel, Leah, 93, 94, 100, 145 Behar, Ruth, 70, 76, 91, 93, 95–97, 105, 107 Belonging, 4–23, 30–55, 34n2, 64n1, 65, 71, 72, 76, 78, 80, 88–110, 117, 124, 128–134, 138, 140, 143, 148, 152, 155, 159, 178–196, 201, 202, 206–208, 211, 214, 216, 217, 219–224 Bendixen, Michala Clante, 16, 120 Benjamin, Walter, 48, 49, 107, 108, 145 Better imagined, 247–249 Bhabha, Homi, 43 Bhambra, Gurminder K., 125 Bieger, Laura, 4, 10, 12, 47, 48, 55, 91, 93, 99, 107 Bishop, Clare, 66, 75 Boal, Augusto, 62 Bobbio, Norberto, 37, 38 Boochani, Behrouz, 31, 49, 50, 114 Brah, Avtar, 79 Brown, Jericho, 102 Bureaucratic performance, 47, 51, 145, 153, 244 Butler, Judith, 106, 189 C Cavarero, Adriana, 48 Centre for Art on Migration Politics (CAMP), 121, 125 Chaudhuri, Una, 12 Citizen/citizenship, 4–6, 17–19, 31, 35, 38, 40, 42, 44, 46, 51, 54, 63, 68, 71, 72, 74, 77, 100, 103, 114, 118, 119, 122, 125, 126, 128–130, 132, 155

Collective writing, 6, 7, 22, 205–206, 245 Colonisation, 34 Colonised, 34, 34n2, 45, 46 Compromised belonging, 19–21, 51–56, 71, 89, 92, 93, 109, 138, 179, 192, 220, 245 Conquergood, Dwight, 90 Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, 37 Copenhagen, 3, 5, 6, 114, 118n3, 120, 154 Cox, Emma, 4, 5, 8, 14–16, 18, 23, 36, 43–45, 49, 50, 75, 76, 249 Critical ethnography, 88, 90, 102, 108 D Dasein, 32 De Certeau, Michel, 50 Decolonisation, 12, 18, 31, 68–69, 76, 125 Decolonising, 107 Decolonising Assembly, 125 Decolonizing Appearance (exhibition), 125 Decolonizing Multilingualism, 68 Decreating, 62–82 Democracy, 6, 18, 21, 30, 31, 145, 150, 159, 245 Democracy (performative), 125–128 Demos, T.J., 5, 46 Deportation, 3, 22, 23, 36, 44, 115, 117, 128, 139, 158, 159, 179 Deportation centre, ix, 3, 6, 22, 30, 36, 40, 113–116, 137, 139, 158, 248 Detention, 13, 14, 23 Detention Dialogues, 77 Dialogical, 122, 126, 128, 152 Dialogical (performance), 90 Dialogue, 91, 93, 193, 210, 211, 218

 INDEX 

Dialogue (the asylum dialogue tank), 121, 122, 128 Diaspora space, 79 Documentary theatre, 91, 92, 98 Doubly possible, 247–249 Dramaturgical ethics, 12, 17–21, 52, 62–82, 88, 92, 93, 98, 100, 104, 105, 107, 114n1, 122, 123, 128, 133, 140, 150, 152, 158, 180, 182, 184, 193, 202, 207, 208, 223, 244, 245 Dramaturgy, 139, 147, 154, 159 Dramaturgy and Performance (Cathy Turner and Synne Behrndt), 62, 65 Dramaturgy of Migration: Staging Multilingual Encounters in Contemporary Theatre (Yana Meerzon and Katharina Pewny), 62, 80 Dublin Regulations, the, 22, 36, 115, 129 E Earhart, Amelia, 15, 200, 201, 207, 208, 213, 214, 221–224 Ellams, Inua (Barbershop Chronicles), 91 Ellebæk detention centre (Ellebæk prison), 115, 138, 139 Ethical Exchanges in Translation, Adaptation and Dramaturgy (Emer O’Toole, Andrea Kristić, Stuart Young), 63 Ethics, 62–68, 71–76, 81 Ethnoplaywriting, 12, 18–22, 63, 81, 88–110, 122, 128, 158, 180, 182, 185, 193–195, 201, 206, 208, 244 Evans, Catrin, 72, 74–76, 79, 99, 105 Exile, 2, 9, 12, 13, 17, 19, 44, 54 Exilic experiences, 10, 43, 52, 53

253

F Farsi, 126, 156 Feminism, 180, 182–185, 189, 193, 195, 200, 222 Feminist ethics of care, 182, 184, 185, 195 Fröden, Lucy Cathcart, 114n2, 178n2, 201, 219 G Gender, 123, 124, 124n4, 179, 180, 182, 183, 187, 189 Geopathic dramaturgy, 12 Geopathology, 12 Geopolitics (of exclusion), 5, 6, 42 Geopolitics (of space), 35 Ghorashi, Halleh, 205, 206, 223 Giant and her Daughter, The, 92 Glasgow, 5–7, 10, 21, 23, 55, 71, 74, 75, 80, 179, 181, 183, 188, 189, 191, 200 Good Chance Theatre, 13 Good Chance Theatre Company, 91 Guidelines on the Protection of Refugee Women, 179 H Haraway, Donna, 90, 102 Hayward, Mark, 99 Heidegger, Martin, 32–35, 34n2, 39 Hogwarts, 247 Home, 2–24, 30, 31, 33, 34n2, 35, 36, 38, 42–46, 49, 54, 55, 64, 74, 80, 81, 89–91, 93, 94, 97, 101–104, 109, 114, 115, 121, 123, 128, 130–133, 138, 140, 143, 144, 146–148, 159, 183, 187–192, 196, 201, 202, 207, 212, 214, 221–224, 244–249

254 

INDEX

Home (Alison Blunt & Robin Dowling), 9 Homelessness, 12, 13, 30, 35, 44, 64, 103, 190 Homeless Souls, 2, 5 hooks, bell, 180, 183, 184 Hospitality, 133, 151, 188, 192, 219, 221 How Not to Drown (play), 98, 104, 108, 109, 224 How ought we to live, 18, 31, 63, 90, 127–128, 133, 152–154, 156, 157, 159, 182, 184, 186, 187, 194, 202, 208, 249 Human rights, 30–32, 36, 38, 39, 44, 49, 52–54 I Ice and Fire Theatre Company, 76 Imagination, 2, 8, 12, 13, 71, 76, 95, 99, 101, 102, 129, 134, 144, 150, 177–196, 201, 213, 248, 249 Imagination (political), 35, 42 Indigenous, 31, 33, 34n2, 39, 45 Ingold, Tim, 4, 17–19, 31, 63, 88, 89, 94 Institutional, 15–17, 31, 38, 67, 69, 107 Institutional creativity, 128–129 Institutional disbelief, 152, 153 Interdisciplinary methodology, 18–20, 88 International School of Theatre Anthropology, 91 Intersectional feminism, 182, 183, 185 Intersectionality, 180, 183–185 Iran, 131 Irigaray, Luce, 62, 72, 79, 122, 123, 144

J Jackson, Michael, 8, 9, 12, 18, 43, 244, 246 Jeffers, Alison, 5, 15–17, 51, 66, 67, 72, 79, 153 Jestrovic, Silvija, 12, 13, 17, 153 K Kærshovedgård Deportation Centre, 115 Kastrati, Dritan, 104, 105, 108, 109 Kin (kinship), 179, 183, 193, 223 L Le Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées), 14 Lenette, Caroline, 69, 70 Levinas, Emmanuel, 62, 64, 64n1, 72 Lorde, Audre, 102 M Madison, Soyini D., 88, 90, 91, 95, 101, 108 Malkki, Liisa, 44, 45 Manus Prison, 32, 49, 119 Marschall, Anika, 38, 39, 128 Massey, Doreen, 5 McCartney, Nicola, 81, 94, 97, 98, 104, 105, 108, 109 Meerzon, Yana, 13, 16, 52–54, 62, 80, 81 Metaphor, 43, 44, 50 Metaphorai, 46, 50 Micropolitical, 93, 94, 98, 126, 128, 129, 133, 145, 157, 182, 221 Migration (forced), 2, 4, 15, 50, 70, 128, 180, 183, 185, 187 Migration (theatre of), 4, 50, 92, 100 Migration management, 119

 INDEX 

Migratory aesthetics, 76, 80, 104 Mouffe, Chantal, 119, 120, 125, 126, 128, 130, 132, 133 Multidirectional memory, 31, 37 Multilingual, 144, 150 Multilingual dramaturgies, 77, 92 Multilingualism, 75, 91 N Narrative therapy, 89, 99–101, 108, 148, 158 Narratology, 47–51, 81, 91, 130, 146, 148, 244 Natality, 48 Nation, 31, 36, 38, 41–47, 51 Nationality, 37, 40–42, 44, 45, 54 Nicholson, Helen, 39, 51, 88, 92, 99, 100, 108, 125, 126, 148 Nomadology, 5 Non-refoulement, 37, 115 O Ontology (of belonging), 30–56 P Performing Dream Homes (Emily Klein, Jennifer-Scott Mobley and Jill Stevenson), 101 Phipps, Alison, 62, 68 Plurality, 48 Poetry, 94, 95, 102, 104, 107 Political listening, 89, 93–98, 100, 109, 127, 128, 133, 145, 156, 193, 205, 206, 221 Pupavac, Vanessa, 36, 44 Q Queens of Syria, 14

255

R Rachel’s House, 94, 97, 98 Rancière, Jacques, 73, 77, 79, 94 Read, Alan, 64n1 Red Cross, 41, 117, 138 Refugee, 62–70, 72–76, 79–81, 88, 91, 92, 96, 104, 105, 115, 117–123, 118n3, 125, 126, 128, 130, 131, 133, 140, 149–153, 155, 157, 178–180, 178n1, 182–185, 188, 191, 193, 213, 214, 221, 223 Refugee crisis, 4, 6, 12, 15, 20, 21, 23, 31, 43, 49, 63, 124, 129, 151 Refugee story, 14, 16, 66, 76, 150, 151 Refugee Tales, 3, 13, 24 Ridout, Nicholas, 63, 64n1 RISE: Refugees, Survivors and Ex-Detainees Undoing, 66, 67 Rogoff, Irit, 70 Rootedness, 44–46, 52 Rooted, to be, 32, 41–47 Rushdie, Salman, 102 S Semiotics, 65, 66, 82 Sistas, the, 7, 9–11, 14, 21–24, 41, 54, 71, 80, 88, 89, 92, 124, 133, 179–184, 187, 188, 190, 191, 193–196, 200–241 Sisterhood, 178–196, 201, 217 Sjælsmark, 34, 40, 41, 46, 51, 63, 71, 73, 82, 88, 89, 92, 103, 114–134, 138–141, 143–145, 148, 152–154, 157–159, 179, 184, 185, 189, 191, 192, 206, 207, 221 Smith, Ali, 78, 79, 248, 249 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, 69 Smukke fortælling, den, 22–24

256 

INDEX

Songwriting, 178, 178n2, 181, 201 Spectatorship, 13, 14, 65, 77, 98, 157 State-authored (belonging), 104, 129 Stevenson, Lisa, 107, 108 Stop Killing Us Slowly (report), 116 Story/storytelling, 13, 21, 62, 64, 76, 78–80, 140, 144–155, 157–159 Storytelling (literal and legal), 32 Syria, 3, 131, 155

Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 37 Uprootedness, 44, 52

T Theatre & Migration, 50 Théâtre du Soleil, 14 Thompson, James, 17, 66, 67, 75, 81, 94, 104, 106, 108, 110 Tofighian, Omid, 31, 49, 50 Tomlin, Liz, 98 Trampoline House, 6, 21–23, 30, 36, 40, 41, 66, 67, 69, 71, 73, 75, 76, 114–133, 138, 144, 145, 150, 154, 156, 159, 182 Translation, 16, 17, 19, 52–54, 67, 126, 127, 139, 144, 145, 153, 183, 188 The Trojans, 14 Turner, Victor, 90, 95

W Weil, Simone, 30, 30n1, 32, 35, 42, 44, 53, 62, 72, 73, 79, 123 ‘Where are you from?,’ 131, 142, 186, 191–196, 202 White, Michael, 99 Whyte, David, 107, 108 Women, 200, 201, 208, 209, 214, 216–220, 223, 224 Women refugees, 179, 214 Women’s classes, 121, 124n4, 184 Women’s collectives, 182 Women’s Day, 178 Woolley, Agnes, 31, 32, 47, 49, 76

U UNHCR, 2, 179 Unhome, 55, 74, 95, 109, 114, 131, 144, 193 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the, 39

Y Youth Community Support Agency (YCSA), 7, 178, 181–182, 200, 201 Yuval-Davis, Nira, 5, 8, 9, 46, 106, 107, 182, 184

V Verbatim theatre, 97, 98 Vulnerable observing, 89, 93–98, 100, 105, 107–109, 221