A right to opacity?

This final chapter details what we learned through our co-production of a large-scale public mural in Beirut with the young refugees and a local street or graffiti artist. Deepening our understanding of the young Syrians' and Iraqis' political subjecthoods – and indeed those of refugeedom more generally – the public mural allowed us to explore the more subtle dimensions of those political subjectivities that the young refugees wished to valorise, or to which they wanted to lay claim. More than this, we also put at issue a more general question around whether attempts to see refugees' political subjectivities might also require specific epistemological acknowledgement in our own research practices, or in our politics of knowing. To this end, we draw on Édouard Glissant's idea of a “right to opacity” through poetics, a modality for expression that involves a denser, mediated mode of relating to an Other and, in turn, a distinctive hermeneutic of interpretation. Then, as we interpret the mural, we draw loosely on Jacques Rancière's theorisation of the resistive potential of the aesthetic space. We found that the young refugees' public utterances, spoken to Beirut as “artists for a day” and not to us as research subjects, opened up possibilities for seeing very different political subjectivities, and in particular for seeing their distinctive politics of resistance and of generosity. We theorise their political utterances as the product of the freedom of the aesthetic-poetic space, wherein the young Syrians and Iraqi refugees could imagine and claim political subjecthoods beyond those found within the confinements of refugeedom.