Till Human Voices Wake Us1: Responding to Refugee Testimony

Abstract

Personal narratives by people who have been displaced by injustice or war are often included in the genre of ‘testimonial’ witness to atrocity, and mobilised by human rights advocates as ways to promote sympathy. However as ‘refugee stories’, they also circulate within ‘refugee discourse’. This article undertakes a rhetorical analysis of the ways in which this discourse and its associated viewing and speaking positions can work to reduce the impact of such stories. To begin with it surveys some of the encounters and interactions which take place between individual refugee stories, international refugee discourse, and national border protection regimes, tracking the ways in which speech is alternately and in different contexts prohibited, demanded, circumscribed or objectified through these regimes. The essay then considers the question of how to read or respond to those testimonials that do reach public availability, arguing that the assumptions and rhetorical structure of refugee discourse must be taken into account, even actively resisted, if the testimonials are to have their full effect. So too must the structures which continue to work to prevent some of the people caught up within these regimes from coming to speech at all.