Death

Abstract

My contribution interrogates my experience of the role of lawyer-storyteller. It ironically adopts the form, style, and narrative techniques deployed in an appellant witness statement; the document presumed to convey a person's life story before the asylum appeals tribunal where they seek recognition as a refugee. The chapter, my statement, explains the role that statements play in a system organised around disbelief and considers the irreducible gap between the law's endless demand for 'credible' truth statements and the lives that the law disregards or condemns to death. It analogises asylum witness statements with the 'slave narratives', or fugitive testimonies, of escaped slaves seeking freedom and citizenship before white tribunals in the nineteenth century and asks what kind of archive today's system might one day leave behind. Drawing on John Berger, it suggests that lawyers act as Death's Secretaries when called on to produce the narrative lenses through which the law performs its metaphysics of justice.