ABSTRACT
This chapter reads Elie Wiesel's memoir Night and Adnan Mahmutović's short story collection How to Fare Well and Stay Fair for how they alter commonplaces about refugee narrative agency in the context of trauma. Refusing a neat progression from victim to survivor, from trauma to healing, or from silence to speech, these works instead insist on the possibility of imagining refugee self-realization as living in displacement and suspension rather than transcending such conditions. They hold open the questions of what refugee self-realization beyond the therapeutic or redemptive might entail and of whether, contrary to definitions of traumatic experience as unclaimable, traumatic repetition might be a crucible in which identities are made, not born.
