My name's David Herd, I'm Professor of Modern Literature and Head of English at the University of Kent and the title of this lecture is, Walking with Refugee Tales. 

So, one, setting. As the subtitle of the project had it Refugee Tales was a walk in solidarity with refugees, asylum seekers and detainees from Dover to Crawley via Canterbury. The route was the North Downs Way, which largely coincides with the Pilgrims Way being the ancient track along which people once travelled from Hampshire and points in between to Canterbury. Organised by Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group in collaboration with Kent Refugee Help the walk took nine days punctuated at every stop by the public telling of two tales, one the tale of an asylum seeker, former immigration detainee or refugee. The other of a person, for instance a lawyer or interpreter, who worked with people seeking asylum in the UK. Each tale was a collaboration between an established writer and the person whose tale was being told and the overarching purpose of the project was to call for an immediate end to indefinite immigration detention in the UK. Drawing structurally on The Canterbury Tales the project thus had three fundamental elements: a culturally charged sense of space; the visible fact of human movement; and an exchange of information through the act of telling stories. It is interesting also to note the dates of the project 13th to 21st of June 2015. Dates matter. When Refugee Tales took place it was ahead of the historical curve only just as it turned out but ahead nonetheless. For those who witnessed it the site of, at any one point between 80 and 150 people, a good number of whom were asylum seekers and ex-detainees, crossing the landscapes of southern England was a powerful spectacle. The point of the spectacle, it came to be understood as a spectacle of welcome, was that people who are hidden by and from the culture rendered invisible by the procedures of the state were here taking and asserting their places in the landscape. The project was blessed by the weather, it only rained once, and so there were days when it was possible to see the whole party strung out across the countryside, walkers in solidarity, stretched a mile or more into the distance. It is this aspect of the project, its sheer conspicuousness that has most been altered by subsequent events, although it is important to register a shift in chronology. At the moment of the project reporting on the so called migrant crisis was concentrated on Calais. The repeated images on which organisers were invited to comment were of people running alongside vehicles or climbing into lorries and the tone of the reporting was one of hostility, that was June 2015. By mid-august the images had decisively altered. The sights of tens of thousands of refugees or people seeking asylum walking through Hungary towards Germany and other parts of Northern Europe became the trigger for a notably different tone and temporarily at least the makings of a different discourse. As the project relates to these historical events the consequence is that it can't ever look the same. When Refugee Tales walks again, as it will in July this year, and insofar as it achieved a visual impact it will be walking after the historical fact. In crucial respects, however, the geopolitical shift effected by the so-called migrant crisis makes the Refugee Tales project, which is to say the space it opened up, all the more consequential. I mean space in the larger metaphorical
sense, in the sense of a cultural and political environment. There is, however, a more literal sense of space that the project addressed and to understand that sense of space we need to know a little bit about the processes of immigration detention and about detention and post- detention existence. 

So, two, detention. In theory, typically at least, a person is held in immigration detention at the point at which they are imminently to be removed from the UK. This arrangement which is to say the detention is temporary but it is also indefinite. The consequence is that a person who is who is not at that point charged with any crime can be detained for months and years pending their removal. At the recently closed Dover Immigration Removal Centre shown on the slide for example the longest period of detention was over four years. Pending is the word, we are deep here within the lexicon of suspension. Following that period of indefinite detention some people, less than half as it turns out, will actually be removed, the others for whatever reason, often to do with the impossibility of securing travel documents, will be, quote unquote, released back into the community. Once having been released some will be accommodated in Section 4 bail accommodation which the conditions of their bail will specify they have to return to every night. An attendance requirement sometimes reinforced by an electronic tag. Since people who have been detained, former detainees, can't work they receive a form of relief paid not in cash but in the form of vouchers called an Azure Card, a form of top-up card that can only be used in certain shops or supermarkets and which, as the British Red Cross reported in 2014, carries certain critical restrictions including the fact that it can't be spent on public transport. There are other functions of the Azure Card more symbolic to do with the relation it establishes between the ex-detainee and the currency. A person using an Azure Card in a supermarket is quickly picked out as somebody outside the cultural norm, like wearing a badge, a visible marker of difference. The restriction on public transport however is among the most material effects, one consequence being that when they have to report at a Home Office Reporting Centre on a weekly, fortnightly, or monthly basis depending on the conditions of their release from detention, many former detainees will have to walk long distances just to make the report. The more general effect however is to fix a person in a given location often for months and years on end, over a decade is not at all uncommon, except that with that stasis, again part of the lexicon of detention, comes the risk that at any point they might be dispersed, relocated to another part of the country or re-detained, which is common. The result of all of the above is that ex-detainees who are frequently so-called failed asylum seekers but who might sometimes, perhaps years later, secure refugee status having a deeply and structurally compromised relation to public space. We will come back to this compromised relation to space and to the way the ways in its occupation of the landscape Refugee Tales sought to address the question. We will come back also to the word structurally because one thing above all may be that reading the series of tales confirms is that in the asylum system there are no accidents that for all the seeming confusion of the processes and the ad hoc nature of the determinations the effect on the individual of deep and protracted demoralisation, to put it politely, is systematic. For the moment though having mentioned space it is necessary to register also the detainees relation to time. To be clear an immigration removal centre is a place where people who have come to the UK many seeking refuge and whose rights of appeal have apparently been exhausted pending removal are indefinitely detained. Some but by no means all of the people detained will have committed a crime for which they will already have served the required prison sentence. Frequently such crimes will be asylum related, for instance attempting to leave the country by false papers a somewhat contradictory misdemeanor on the face of it since the country has made it plain it doesn't want such people to stay. Other detainees will have reached a legal limit such as those who first arrived in the UK as unaccompanied minors typically from countries affected by war such as Afghanistan or Iraq and whose entitlement to stay expires when they turn 18. Having lived here since he was 15, having left Afghanistan when his father was executed by the Taliban Gulab was detained without warning waking one night to find his room in South London occupied by more than 20 border police. As Teresa Hayter puts it in her excellent book Open Borders, people may be picked up in the street on the Underground or at work or their houses may be raided in the early hours. Following which, pending deportation, they are indefinitely detained. Durations vary, turnaround times can be as little as two to three weeks; in the past decade periods of detention often followed by periods of further detention have quite commonly been between six months and two years. As was widely reported at the time, at the end of 2012 Nick Hardwick, the Chief Inspector of Prisons, discovered a Somali man in Lincoln Prison who had been held in immigration detention for nine years. Under British criminal law it is not permissible to detain a person indefinitely. In normal circumstances the maximum period a person can be detained without charge is 24 hours rising to 96 hours, four days, if a serious crime is suspected. The only exception to these limits relates to persons suspected of terrorism who under special powers granted by the 2006 Terrorism Act could be detained for up to 28 days. This length of time was fiercely contested at the time of its introduction and the temporary powers granting it were allowed to lapse in 2011, the period of detention reverting to its pre-2006 limit of 14 days. The significance of these periods lies in the sense of a limit, a limit that relates to the question of sovereignty and that ties the question of sovereignty to the issue of time. The question cuts both ways, sovereign law establishes its ethical character by the degree to which it encroaches on and also protects the sovereign actions of the individual citizen. Currently one key measure of that relationship in the UK is the period of 14 days being the point beyond which the interests of the individual cannot be overridden by the interests of the state. Unless, that is, the individual is held in immigration detention. This begs the question, how is the institution of the removal centre legal or rather, since in conventional terms it plainly offends legal principles, what relation does such a site have to the law. The answer is that it stands just outside subject to the laws authority but not governed by its defining protections. A setting where different rules of sovereignty and temporality apply. 

Three, the tales. For the person who visits a detention centre perhaps under the auspices of an NGO, it is a striking element of the process that one is not allowed to carry a pen and paper into the building. In one respect this is a catch-all policy a person's pockets have to be emptied. In another respect this holding of the detainee and the ex-detainee outside the language is replicated across the asylum system. One sees an echo in the voucher system, the individual held symbolically outside the currency. More explicitly it is a surprise to discover that the immigration bail hearing one of the few mechanisms by which an individual might be released from detention is not a hearing of record. The judge asks a series of questions but nobody is writing the questions or the answers down, nobody that is except in recent times the excellent bail observation project realising as they did the necessity for documentation. More than this, the detainee himself or herself is typically not present in the hearing but is relayed by a video link from the detention centre itself. The effect of this video relay is inevitably to diminish the presence of the individual, to make their appeal as a person easier to ignore. More surprisingly still, given what is at stake in the occasion, the asylum appeal is not a hearing of record either. There will be a written determination composed by the judges but the exchanges themselves, the questions put by the home office for instance, that's all off record. It is this fact, the holding of people outside the skin of the language, that principally motivated Refugee Tales. The content of the tales is paramount of course but the process of composition was also important. To outline that process, each writer talked at length with the person whose tale it was either in person or where necessary, as in the case of the deportees tale, by phone. In each case the writer was invited to take the necessary formal decisions towards a 20-minute performance. Equally, the tale had to be grounded in the reality of the experience that the person's original tale presented. To understand what's at stake in such a telling we need some background thoughts. The question obviously is why should people not simply have told their own tales, the question being most pressing in the case of the asylum seekers refugees and ex-detainees. There are two principle answers to this question. The first is that in a number of cases the person concerned remained so traumatised by the events that had caused them to make their journey and also subsequently by the treatment they had experienced in the UK that it would have been inappropriate, simply not possible in practice, for them to speak in front of an audience of between 100 and 200 people. The second reason was that given the constant risk of re-detention those who had been detained did not want their names attached to their tales. To be clear, they very much wanted their tales to be told but not in a way that might identify them. Anonymity was at a premium because in the UK people in the asylum system have a fear of reprisal. There is much that might be said about this narrative dynamic, two things in particular however, should be remarked on by way of context. One is the fact that to tell another person's tale one has to listen at length and very closely, at such length in fact, that the experience being relayed grafts on to and alters the listener's language. This is what the writers reported that having collaborated in the way they did their relation to the language was significantly changed. More importantly there is a thing that the people whose tails were being told repeatedly said. What variously they said about the process was that it was a relief that the tail was being told though for the reasons given above they could not in the immediacy of the moment be the person who told it. More subtly what people said was that they were relieved the account was being passed on. What that passing on of a story means in this context is a matter for some consideration. What perhaps it means is that a story that belongs to one person now belongs also to other people, that other people have acknowledged the experience that constitutes the story but also that in making that acknowledgement they have registered responsibility. These are tales, in other words, that call for and generate a collective, that need to be told and retold so that so that the situation they emerge from might be collectively addressed. 

What this telling and retelling of other people's tales point to is the metaphorical sense of space mentioned at the outset, the cultural space that Refugee Tales hoped to help open up. Here again there are various things to say. The first is that this whole dynamic of storytelling is not sufficient that plainly it must be the objective of a project such as Refugee Tales to question any aspect of mediation including its own, that it must seek to create the circumstance in which anonymity is not a shaping conceit but a further, hardly negligible, thing to say is that for all the shifts in the discourse around migration that have followed the current so-called migrant crisis, the question of indefinite detention, a cornerstone of UK immigration policy, has remained almost entirely absent from the debate. The principle intention of Refugee Tales was to help communicate the reality of detention and post-detention existence to a wider audience and in the process call for such indefinite detention to end. Further demands follow: the entitlement to work and the entitlement to be educated; the entitlement, in other words for a life not to be held brutally in suspense. Various forms of pressure will be required to achieve these objectives but key to those pressures certainly will be the circulation of stories. Whatever else, the language needs to change. Thank you.