The Stories We Tell

A Reflective Essay in Three Parts

The opposite of love is not hate, its indifference. Elie Wiesel

I: Narrative and Relational Identity

What was the first thing your mom asked you when you got home from school? The thing your
roommate asks when you trudge in from Suzzalo, drop your bag on the floor, and go straight for
the ice cream and a spoon? The questions we hear nearly every day, and yet are perhaps the most
important ones:

How are you?

How was your day?
Whatd you do?

Its automatic. We ask and we tell. We tell our stories to others as much to our own
benefit as theirs. There is a critical way in which telling my story confirms my own identity. I am
me because of my day to day experiences, my choices and my actions, yes, but I cannot exist in
isolationin doing so much of me becomes meaningless. The self is the story of everything
that weve experienced, choices weve made: the continuous experience of the individual. I am
the baby that grew into the person writing this, and every step along that path shaped that person,
I am my story.
Critically, ones narrative becomes fixed in reality when share it. It is in the interpersonal
exchange of iteration and confirmation, the giving and receiving of storiesmy day, my
thoughts, my ideas, preferencesthat I begin to compose a self. By having that narrative
received and validated it becomes real. When I describe myself as a daughter, a sister, a friend
each obviously gives a relationship. But this is true too when I say that Im a student, a
bibliophile, a backpacker. It is our social world, our relationships that give these things content
and which limit them in scope. The choices I make, the way I define myself, the story I tell, each
of these is reliant on others for support, up-take, and validation. Not only is identity relationally
structured, it is also relationally constrained. Everything that one believes about themselves or
their reality has to be checked by others around them. Any story one tells about themselves has
to be accepted and taken up by their community. There is a power in that communal reality. In
hearing my story, those around me communicate a respect for me as a person. The uptake of
ones narrative is in many ways what allows movement from object to person: endorsement of
the story is recognition of its narrator.

II: The Narrative and the Label

Studying migration in Italy has led me to think almost constantly about the relationships
that migrants find themselves in, the way their experience falls out in terms of this critical
interaction between narrator and author. Specifically, interactions with men at the Joel Nafuma
Refugee Center revealed to me important ways in which migration impacts ones relational role
as narrator.
My first reflection on this started with the preparation given to us, visitors to the center,
in the laying down of the ground rules for interacting with the individuals using the centers
resources. One in particular stood out to me: dont ask for their trauma1. I hadnt even paused to
consider the need for such a rule, and yet its importance became immediately clear to me upon
entering the center and interacting with those making use of its resources. My own interaction
with the center was one of incredible privilege, I was here to study, to observe, and in many ways
to question these men. I had, and have, to interrogate myself: what questions had I unconsciously
lined up? In what ways had I already written a narrative that I expected to come along implicitly
with the labels in my head refugee or asylum seeker?

When people flee their own country and seek sanctuary in another country, they apply for asylum
the right to be recognized as a refugee and receive legal protection and material assistance.
An asylum seeker must demonstrate that his or her fear of persecution in his or her home country
is well-founded2.

1
This is paraphrased.
2
UNCHR 2017 Definition of Asylum Seeker.
A refugee is someone who has been forced to flee his or her country because of persecution, war,
or violence. A refugee has a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion,
nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group3.

These definitions are legally important. They help to conceptualize the context under
which certain protections and rights ought to or can be put in place. There are good and
necessary functions that thinking in terms of refugee status provides. In regard to the question of
relational and narrative identity it may aid others in recognizing the reality of the trauma implicit
in that experience, and yet there seems to be a way in which it becomes the only context in which
these individuals exist in our heads, their narrative is bound tightly to the confines of their legal
status. It seems to me that the transformation of the legal status of refugee or asylum seeker into
a social status in some meaningful ways impacts ones relational and narrative identity.
For one, when the label refugee moves from its narrow legal context to a broader social
identity it functions to erase an individuals autonomy in regards to their identity and to quiet or
silence elements of their broader personhood. The label of refugee or asylum seeker comes with
a social baggage, a social expectation of what it does to a person and who being one makes
someone. These assumptions, often informed by media representations, political platforms, and
other indirect sources, are imbedded in our social cognizance in problematic ways. Interacting
and conversing with the men at the refugee center I realized that there was so many aspects of
their personhood I had invisiblized. I found myself genuinely surprised to talk to these men and
learn about things which should have by no means been surprising. My ignorance and surprise at
the mens descriptions of their skilled former jobs, at their language skills, their desire to return
home, and their bigger dreams and goals is something that has bothered me viscerally since it
was revealed to me that I was there expecting a specific story. It seems that somehow by thinking
of these people in terms of their legal status led me to assume specific things about them, and to
really be open to only a very narrow narrative.
The way narrating to the narrow criteria of the legal definition in order to gain access to
resources and protections has expanded to become a social identity, a narrative that one is
expected to tell takes away from respecting and validating the real people experiencing the

3
UNCHR 2017 Definition of Refugee.
tragic, challenging, traumatic reality of forced migration. These people are people with the same
psychological needs and wants as every other humandignity, respect, humor, kindness,
acknowledgement. To have ones audience, the recipients of your narrative, restrict ones
identity to such narrow bounds is dehumanizing. I think it becomes critical to remember as a
society, and especially for us in positionalities of privilege, that one must always acknowledge
the person before their label.

III: Confronting the Issue of Convenience and Respect

Every story has an audience. I feel it is critical that I analyze my own role as such. I have
had the chance to interact with Italy and the people living here, to engage with their stories, and
the more I have put time and energy into thinking about my exchanges here I have come to
realize the uncomfortable reality about my own choices in terms of engagement.
To start a critical engagement with my, and I hope relatedly others of similar
positionalities, interactions with the task of immersive research on trans-Mediterranean
migration, it is important to acknowledge my own position and the privileges that accompany it.
I am a student. A white student from a western country and I have come to this place specifically
to study these people. To learn about their experiences, and to contextualize them meaningfully
in history, politics, policy, law, culture. This is not to villainize the endeavor, much good can
come by it, but I feel the need to critically reflect on the fact that, ultimately, I have paid money
to be here studying a them.
Confronting my own implicit biases and perspectives has been a challenge. There seems
to be something which echoes back to an almost colonial narrative in the way in which I found
myself conceiving of refugees and asylum seekers. In particular, I remember my rude awakening
at hearing men at the refugee center stating that someday they hoped to return homeof course
they did, and yet I had unconsciously bought into the white savior complex of West is best. I had
assumed that life in our civilized Western nations would be inherently superior. In many ways,
I allowed the labels of refugee and asylum seeker spill over into my whole conceptions of the
people I interacted with, they had become diminished in my head somehow: I wasnt listening
for their narrative, I was seeking to confirm mine.
I came to this uncomfortable realization after my first visit to the refugee center, and so
on my second visit I tired even harder to leave my expectations of what story I was coming there
to hear behind me and just be the audience to hear and validate the narratives of the people I
came in contact with. I found myself having surprising, yet moving and meaningful
conversations about family pets, siblings, food, movies, goals and hopes and dreams. I found
myself capable of hearing the nuance and complexity that I had before missed in looking for the
refugee story.
On the way home from the center to write a reflection for my class I walked by the tables
of goods set up along my daily route: squish balls, jewelry, scarfs, fidget spinners, chargers,
selfie sticksa litany of things I neither want nor need. And I find myself everyday ignoring the
calls from these people: walking by, insisting no grazie, in harsh tones, sometime shoving by
in my haste. I walk by these people, callous to them often justifying to myself that I simply
didnt want or need what they were selling and I erased them from my mind. In so many ways
the men hawking their wares, beggars holding out cans and hats, the men holding a bouquet of
roses in my face have become features that I have restricted to features of the landscape.
The uncomfortable reality that Im still trying to navigate is that in so many ways I refuse
to slow down and recognize the personhood of these individuals. I dont think that buying every
squish ball and rose is going to fix this issue, but what I feel the need to confront here is that
convenience and self-preservation has allowed me to pick and choose when I attend to the
underlying personhood of those around me. This harkens back to my role as a student and its
colonial underpinnings. I can erase and attend to or erase the personhood of anotherpossibly
the very same other in a different contextat my own convenience, according to my needs. I
have both paid to visit the refugee center and be reminded of the humanity that exists in each
individual beyond their status and their tragedies, and to be rid of the begging man outside the
Rome Center with his sad tone and picture of his children. I have been careless, and allowed my
respecting of anothers narrative, attention to their dignity and complexity, to fall out in terms of
my own needs, the context in which I approach the them.
So I find myself grappling with the challenge: how do I not turn my interactions into a
form of exploitation? How do I always do my duty to respect the personhood existing in every
other individual around me? The answer certainly doesnt seem to be buy all the squishy balls.
More likely than not that is an act of silencingpaying to make another disappear, or to
disappear my guilt. Im still not sure how to traverse the difference between these contexts and
my engagement or disengagement, but I think perhaps that I saw a glimpse of it in Venice, sitting
at dinner the last night. Instead of buying a rose to be free of the bother, we bought roses and
conversed with their seller, a young man from Bangladesh. We conversed with him not out of
our own interest for research, but simply because the night was nice, he was nice, and we wanted
to listen to some of his story;

How are you?

How was your day?
Whatd you do?

It may just be the most automatic thing of all.