“As Told to”

When in 2015 media announced a “migrant crisis” in Europe, questions of how to represent migration became crucial. How and in which medium can refugees' stories be told? Two collections of short fiction immediately responded to this question. Refugee Tales as told to Ali Smith, Patience Agbabi, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Inua Ellams and many others (Eds. David Heard/Anna Pictus, 2016) contains texts written by 14 authors who went into the Gatwick Airport detention centres to listen to refugees. The second volume, Refugee Tales as told to Jackie Kay, Helen Macdonald, Neel Mukherjee, Kamila Shamsie, and many more (2017), comprises short fiction written by 11 authors. This chapter shows how one of the central trajectories of Refugee Tales consists of countering common media representations of refugees as enemy, victim, or hero. Since questions of voice, medium, and representation as well as of the role of the listener are negotiated by the texts, Miriam Wallraven first analyses how Bakhtin's dialogic approach can provide insights into the heteroglossia and polyphony of the narrative dynamics. Second, the possibilities and limits of mediating voices indicated by the expression “as told to” are explored as an attempt at highlighting the complex negotiation of representation created in a globalized contact zone.