Recognition and narrative identities: Is refugee law redeemable?

Almost all the survivors … remember a dream which frequently recurred during the nights of imprisonment, varied in its detail but uniform in its substance: they had returned home and with passion and relief were describing their past sufferings, addressing themselves to a loved person, and were not believed, indeed were not even listened to. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (Abacus, 1986), pp. 1–2. [T]hose who have been forced out of all political communities have lost all those parts of the world and all those aspects of human existence which are the result of our common labour, the outcome of the human artifice. Hannah Arendt, The Perplexities of the Rights of Man, in Origins of Totalitarianism (Harcourt, 1973), p. 300. It is pleasant, hard and pleasant at the same time because somebody understand[s] you. They understand you and that’s the object, the purpose of my presence here. Refugee describing experience before the Canadian IRB. That an asylum seeker often has a transformative experience in their encounter with a status determination regime is uncontentious. The practical need for legal recognition of a pre-existing status as a 'refugee' for the purpose of protection marries with a very personal need for recognition of one's experience. The granting or withholding of either type of recognition has consequences for the various identities created and new allegiances forged. Both depend upon the story told, and the manner of its reception. This chapter initially arose out of my own anecdotal experience as a legal representative for refugees over many years. It found its genesis in reflections on the role I played in helping shape the stories that would be told to administrative decisions-makers by my clients, and my growing concern that I was complicit in a process of legal institutionalisation, distortion and even alienation of something 'authentic' in the refugee experience and identity. As will become apparent, I am no longer so damning of my role and that of my fellow lawyers and decision-makers, or indeed of the 'regulatory discourse' imposed by refugee law itself. The refugee has more agency, the law more promise, than perhaps appears at first blush. I am also more questioning of my own original assumptions about authenticity, categorisation and recognition.