Conveying Migrant Experiences through Literature
In the last decades, the publication of personal stories has become a popular technique to democratize knowledge creation. Writing about experiences of migration, specifically, has allowed readers to receive firsthand information from those who undergo these journeys themselves. For author Gabriela Wiener, “through the rewriting of personal, intimate, familial, social stories I’m trying to recover a lost memory. The writing of fiction, the literary imagination, becomes a way to complete these broken memories for the people who have remained outside of official History.” As a result, these ‘Life Writing stories’ become part of our cultural memory in opposition to biased narratives presented by the media or by outsider’s perspectives.
In ILFU’s writing workshop on September 23rd, we will focus on two examples of Transnational Life Writing narratives, namely De waarheid zal me bevrijden (2022, Lebowski) by Alejandra Ortiz and Broken Object (2023, Austin Macauley Publishers) by Chérissa Iradukunda. These two authors are based in the Netherlands, and both published about their migratory experiences to this country, using different styles and approaches to Life Writing. Another reason this is a meaningful conversation is that both authors use a collective ‘I’ to denounce issues that concern an imagined community, in this case, migrant people. This collective ‘I’ does not speak for a whole group, on the contrary, it allows individuals to identify with the story and/or understand the migration experiences better. As scholar bell hooks mentions, to speak the truth is both an expression of creative power and an act of resistance against dominant powers that advocate for silence. In the case of Ortiz and Iradukunda, this creative power is used to advocate for migrant people, in general, and trans and migrant people in the Netherlands, more specifically.
Life Writing is an umbrella term that integrates all kinds of autobiographical expressions, such as autobiography, memoir, biography, diary, and essays, to mention a few. It even includes social media and other types of artistic productions. Life Writing acknowledges that all lives are interesting and are entitled to recognition, resulting in a more democratic and inclusive literary genre. Due to this inclusivity aspect, this genre's topics are as varied as the people who write them. Life Writing narratives combine fiction and the author’s personal truths. The information offered by these stories acts as pieces of a bigger puzzle of communities that, as Wiener mentions, have been left outside of history. Traditionally, the biographical and autobiographical genres were used by celebrities and privileged groups who felt entitled to share their stories. However, through time, this convention has changed, and the publication of other groups’ Life Writing narratives has increased greatly.
But why is writing about your own life so important?
Scholars emphasize the healing process that Life Writing offers through rethinking and revisiting authors’ own stories. In other words, by having to look back at their own life stories, authors decide which bits of the story to share and how and which bits to leave out. Using literary techniques, they may also modify their story to convey a certain message or highlight specific episodes to attain their purpose. Regardless of how they decide to tell their story, the process has proved to open a platform for them to reclaim their voice and to make the story their own, even when there has been trauma involved. Without overgeneralizing this tendency as it might work differently for different people, it has been proven that people are influenced and composed by stories they hear and tell. Storytelling is already part of humans’ everyday lives, and for some people, to share their stories with others has become a tool for understanding their place in this world. For example, Alejandra Ortiz, referencing the title of her book, writes how she “will tell the truth, the whole truth—even the things I am not proud of—and that truth will set me free. And they…they will help me. They must help me” (my translation).
In regard to migration stories specifically, authors present their own migration experience, or that of their families, and focus on topics such as identity, belonging, adaptation, xenophobia, racism, home, among others. In Chérissa Iradukunda’s case, the narrator recounts racist comments and behaviors against her, and therefore, she constantly questions her belonging: “I didn’t feel good enough, for some I was too ugly, for others I wasn’t African enough, for the rest I was too dark; and here I am black, in front of others with the same skin colour I have also forgotten my culture.”
What makes Life Writing narratives ‘transnational’?
As the word itself hints, ‘transnational’ refers to literature that deals with more than one nation. However, there is not only one delimited definition. To complicate this further, transnational literatures do not only involve more than one country, they also deal with subversive topics that question traditional ideas of border protection and people’s rights. This problematization is exemplified in Ortiz’s narrative when the author refers to Europe as a Fortress, a concept that reinforces discrimination and segregation. She declares: “There are rules and international agreements specifically designed to keep as many people out as possible. It has become increasingly difficult for oppressed and marginalized people to apply for asylum here. The walls around Fortress Europe are getting higher and higher.”
These two authors show how transnational Life Writing narratives offer valuable information about migration stories when told by migrant people themselves. Even though their stories are unique and different from one another, the use of a collective ‘I’ allows other people to identify with such situations and experiences, and this, in turn, invites people to participate in discussions about migration today. During our writing workshop, we will further dive into the power of using Life Writing in literary texts to convey migrant experiences to the broader public. As renowned Italian author Igiaba Scego states in an interview: “The system turns us into numbers. These numbers need to be transformed into stories, faces, relationships, eyes that gaze back at you, and this transformation is only possible through literature.”