Paraphrasing by Alice Equestri https://padlet.com/ali_equestri/paraphrasing Barr, Helen, ‘Stories of the New Geography: The Refugee Tales’, Journal of Medieval Worlds, 1 (2019), 79–106 http://jmw.ucpress.edu/content/1/1/79 en-us 2019-04-27 17:06:23 UTC 2019-04-30 10:47:18 UTC hello@padlet.com ali_equestri https://padlet.com/ali_equestri/paraphrasing/wish/354691131 Refugee Tales holds a distinctive place in 20th and 21st century engagements with Chaucer. It is not an academic enterprise, though some of the writers hold tenured jobs in a university, or have an affiliation to higher education. It is not a tourist excursion in the fashion of the Canterbury Tales Visitor Attraction or the Royal Shakespeare Company’s dramatization of the Tales for the popular stage.2 These tales are a literary response with a live social agenda and purpose that sets them apart from other contemporary textual responses to The Canterbury Tales: there is no sustained re-telling of any of Chaucer’s tales by updating their plots and characters.3 Storylines do not travel across. Refugee Tales denies the pleasure of spotting coded resemblances between Chaucer’s taletellers and updated narrators. In Refugee Tales, the stories are too telling for the game of allusion.4 These stories are too true, and while the titles of the tales follow a Chaucerian format—“The Interpreter’s Tale,” for instance—neither the tellers nor the persons in the tales are modelled on specific Chaucerian characters. You cannot spot the resemblance between the Unaccompanied Minor, the Lorry Driver, the Deportee, the Support Worker, the Smuggled Person, and any of the pilgrims who assemble in the Tabard or who overtake the company as it travels.5 The generic “types” of taletellers are real people who are alive (some miraculously so), and in a number of cases, their tales have been scored into their flesh and bone. There are no names in the titles because it is simply too dangerous to put them in. Anonymity is vital: “[y]ou never know where . . . The UK Border Force’s eager beavers might be lurking.” They could appear “In a London Church on Mothering Sunday where the priest is giving a sermon on Moses and his Mother.”6 (Or in Bradford, perhaps, where an eight-year-old child fast asleep in bed wakes to the nightmare of the light suddenly switched on, “and the big man in uniform was standing there.”7 On the other hand, in Croydon at 6 AM, August 12th, 2012, when the UK Border Agency showed up at the door of a former Nigerian journalist who worked for the BBC World Service. You worked in Britain for 28 years, paying tax and national insurance. You were not dressed. They were acting on a tip-off.8]]> 2019-04-27 17:09:35 UTC https://padlet.com/ali_equestri/paraphrasing/wish/354691131 ali_equestri https://padlet.com/ali_equestri/paraphrasing/wish/354691694 Talking and walking are inseparable in the Refugee Tales project. A new language creates a new geography. The project realises in text and action Michel de Certeau’s theoretical account of the practice of walking: “a process of appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian.”12 Put simply, the act of walking can tell a narrative that contests those fictional pathways that keep us in our place. If you displace accepted geography, you can tell different stories from those that our maps foreclose. Tales yet unheard are bodied forth with every step.The declared intent of the Refugees Project is to share “stories of the new geography.”13The project reconfigures the terrain of the Weald of Kent to create a political carnival or “a spectacle of welcome.”14 A welcome is what the displaced are denied. A spectacle of community walking across the landscape in supportive solidarity remaps the journeys that the displaced and the isolated are forced to take.]]> 2019-04-27 17:15:21 UTC https://padlet.com/ali_equestri/paraphrasing/wish/354691694 ali_equestri https://padlet.com/ali_equestri/paraphrasing/wish/354692100 “The Detainee’s Tale” holds up for scrutiny another prevalent discourse that works to distort the experiences of refugees as actually lived: the discourse of public management speech. In her visit to the detention center, Smith notices the bright information posters that proclaim “in words and symbols how people of all origins, ethnicities, religions and sexual orientations will be treated equally here.” The placards contain inspirational messages about good teamwork and care. There is a jolly painted sign announcing “PROPERTY CHECK” and Disney jungle characters on the walls. Cold comfort for a detainee who can make himself understood only with the aid of a battered Vietnamese/English dictionary. The cheerful public facing posters are a grim façade. They cannot plaster over the starkness of the closing six words of the tale, the only words uttered by the detainee in a tone of muted anger: “I thought you would help me.”72
The searing plaintiveness of those six words is rendered all the more acute when placed alongside all the numerous occasions in the Tales where refugees are subject to hostile speech acts. They are promised boats that do not appear. They are informed that they must move on, or they are misinformed. Repeatedly they are given orders. They are constantly being interviewed with questions that do not make sense—for five hours at a time by three different people.73 They are shouted at. Linguistic action is withheld from them. Written permission is repeatedly refused to the Witness in “The Witness’s Tale.”74 The Dependent is not allowed to talk to his parents when his family is suddenly taken away in the early hours of the morning.75At 3am, the Deportee is sworn at when they come to arrest him: “[s]hut the fuck up mother fucker.” There is a rare moment of escape from such hostile discourse for the subject of this tale. Someone called Jim would come and visit him, and “Spoke to ask not where he’s from, why he’s been here but how he is, who he is. Jim was the first” to ask human questions, questions that respect another person’s dignity.76 How foreign they must have sounded to the Deportee after all the interrogations this 14-year-old child suffered who had walked from Afghanistan into Pakistan.

]]> 2019-04-27 17:19:42 UTC https://padlet.com/ali_equestri/paraphrasing/wish/354692100 https://padlet.com/ali_equestri/paraphrasing/wish/355362976 "The generic “types” of taletellers are real people who are alive (some miraculously so), and in a number of cases, their tales have been scored into their flesh and bone. There are no names in the titles because it is simply too dangerous to put them in. Anonymity is vital: “you never know where…the UK Border Force’s eager beavers might be lurking”


Paraphased:
 
Barr argues that the use of generic titles, inspired by those used by Chaucer (e.g. “The Merchant’s Tale”), are used to protect the real individuals who are telling their stories. She goes on to explain that the use of anonymity is crucial, due to the danger that being identified could cause, for “[y]ou never know where…the UK Border Force’s eager Beavers might be lurking”. 



]]> 2019-04-30 10:35:37 UTC https://padlet.com/ali_equestri/paraphrasing/wish/355362976 https://padlet.com/ali_equestri/paraphrasing/wish/355364482 Barr (2019) argues that the Refugee tales differ from other literary responses to The Canterbury Tales as they do not re-tell Chaucerian storylines; character and narrators within the tales are not parallel or recognisable. Instead in Refugee Tales, because the stories have a social purpose, the characters are real and this brings the stories alive.  ]]> 2019-04-30 10:42:58 UTC https://padlet.com/ali_equestri/paraphrasing/wish/355364482