Image via BBC News

In an essay entitled Is “Refugee Art” Possible? Alex Rotas asks whether the refugee or asylum seeker artist is limited, in the eyes of the dominant culture, to representing diplacement, loss, trauma and nothing else. She argues that the focus on special ‘diverse’ groups in the arts actually reifies boundaries and ethnicises artistic work in order to describe, define and confine what might otherwise be dangerous and complex. In the same way that work by black artists has become ‘black art,’ work by refugees and asylum seekers is considered ‘refugee art’ with expectations that it will contain certain themes – pain, loss, displacement, marginalisation. These are comfortable themes for what Rotas describes as a “right on” culture that wants to pat itself on the back for its commitment to diversity and giving voice to ‘others.’

This is something John Clifford considers in relation to Native Americans in the Northern USA, stating that:

Indians had long filled a pathetic imaginative space for the dominant culture; they were always survivors, noble or wretched… Native American societies could not by definition be dynamic, inventive or expansive.

I was reminded of this “pathetic imaginative space” when I read a BBC news article entitled Refugee Guides bring London’s V&A to Life, about a programme of gallery tours led by women from Iraq, Rwanda, Burma, Somalia, Uganda and Darfur in which they talk about the objects on display in relation to their memories and experiences of home and displacement.

That these women have powerful and moving stories to tell about trauma, exile and resettlement is beyond question, and their right to tell and be listened to is something we should respect. But how productive are these performances of memory?

Rotas argues that if the refugee evokes anything symbolic it is always related back to loss – flowers are always graveyard flowers, or exotic flowers, or ‘my lost little sister’s favourite flowers.’ Joy is at best complex and in most cases a bitter-sweet memory seen through the eyes of trauma.

This is certainly true at the V&A where a giant turquoise jar in the Islamic gallery brings back memories of the jars used by a mother to store pickles and syrup; a glazed earthenware horse represents fleeing from Iraq on horseback; a line of glass figurines evokes a group of Rwandans being chained up before they were killed.

If the aim of the programme was to approach the boundary between refugee and host and try to negate some of the negative associations of refugees and asylum seekers, some of the fear and hostility, it was probably successful – cathartic for the women giving the tours, eye-opening for the participants.

But if any kind of dialogue is to begin that tries to negotiate that boundary, making it more permeable and a less dangerous place, it will require that refugees and asylum seekers are given the opportunity to step outside of the pathetic imaginative space they occupy in the arts in order to represent and express something more than the loss and displacement they currently exemplify.

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