Abstract
While scores of informal camps for refugees and migrants have sprung up across Europe, none has received more media coverage than the ‘Jungle’, a camp on a landfill site on the outskirts of the French port of Calais. By the time it was bulldozed in October 2016 with the assistance of the riot police, there were 10,000 people, overwhelmingly young men and boys, living there, the British tabloids having whipped up fears about the Muslim invaders and illegal Africans there waiting to cross the Channel. More liberal outlets framed the crisis in humanitarian terms, highlighting the personal plight of camp residents, recording their long journeys and life-threatening attempts to board UK-bound trucks and trains at the port and Eurotunnel in Calais. 1 Yet even well-intentioned accounts do not give adequate space to the camp’s inhabitants, with journalists interpreting and making palatable the experience of displacement for their readership. Voices from the ‘Jungle’ goes the other way. Though edited by five people, their names do not even appear on the cover, which lists, instead, those of the twenty-one male and one female refugee and migrant contributors – the owners of this ‘co-authored text’. (The preponderance of male contributors derives in large part from the camp’s make-up.)
The book had its genesis in a short undergraduate course on ‘Life Stories’ offered by the University of East London in collaboration with educational associations working in the ‘Jungle’ in 2015/16. The participating residents desired above all to have ‘the life stories they were telling and writing … reach a wider audience’ and to ‘be heard’. They wanted the world to know ‘the truth about them’ and the obstacles they had encountered – from ‘childhoods in violent places’ and ‘dangerous journeys across mountains, deserts and seas’ to ‘abject conditions’ in the ‘Jungle’ and ‘for many, after Calais, poverty and discrimination in the countries where they claimed asylum’. This collaborative process of storytelling so clearly described in the book’s introduction states that, ‘the stories in [the] book are very close to those originally produced by the authors: editing has been minimal’ so that their voices could be heard ‘through [a process] they could control’.
There is something very powerful in hearing first-hand accounts about the struggles and despair of those at Calais, written in a vocabulary and sentence structure which is simple and direct. Shikeb, from Afghanistan, for example, was sent to Europe by his mother, against his will. His experiences in France were also traumatising. He writes: ‘I had two friends in France, but they took everything from me – my trousers, jacket, some English books I had bought. Now I don’t have that many friends.’ These are not long poetic passages or internal monologues but rather frank and guileless accounts of lived experience.
Authenticity is a very powerful tool and also, on occasion, disconcerting. As the narrators of these stories do not meet the West’s stereotypes of refugees – malicious devil, on the one hand, or hapless angel, on the other – the reader faces not just the raw telling of these ‘other’ lives but also their own preconceptions.
These are not simple stories. Muhammad, from Syria, talks about migration as a huge adventure, about being ‘excited about having a journey to discover life in the hardest way possible’. At first glance he seems to undermine one of the central purposes of the book – to defend the young refugees at Calais from their relentless demonising as immoral marauding gangs of young men, roaming Europe free and unhindered (‘testosterone bombs’ in the words of the far-right Dutch leader Geert Wilders). But such honesty, which does not make him less deserving of rights and refuge, lends crucial authenticity to the book’s ‘truth telling’.
However, while the foregrounding of individual stories, with the very minimum of editorial interference, does make for compelling reading, there are problems with this approach. An amount of knowledge is expected of the reader. To give just one example, Milkesa, is a member of the Omoro, the largest ethnic group in Ethiopia. But, as the book does not explain the history of the Omoro people or the broader political situation they face, our understanding relies solely on Milkesa’s account. ‘The Omoro people governed themselves using a unique African democratic system, call the “Gada”’, he tells us, adding the ‘Gada system is an indigenous democratic socio-political system of the Omoro … My father was an active member of the Omoro Liberation Front (OLF) when OLF was part of the 1991 to 1992 Transitional Government of Ethiopia.’ For this reviewer, and I suspect other readers, the lack of background information, which could have been given in an appendix or note, proved an unfortunate obstacle. (I constantly had to put the book down to research issues on the internet and this inevitably had a fragmenting effect.)
This lack of background material is somewhat exacerbated by the book’s structure which tends to fracture the narratives. Chapters are organised around themes, ‘Home’, ‘Living in the “Jungle”’, ‘Journeys’ and ‘Life after the “Jungle”’, with the corresponding part of each narrator’s story placed in each section. Perhaps the editors’ intention was to compare and contrast. But the stories come at you in strange bursts, with the overarching biography of each narrator lost. With twenty-two different voices and stories competing for attention, keeping track of which events happened to which narrator becomes ever more difficult as the book progresses. Though the editors do provide at the end of each section some context in the form of a brief summary of the overall migratory experience, it is not quite enough to overcome the difficulties posed by the structure.
Despite this, it is an important book. For it highlights the complexity of living in the Calais ‘Jungle’ in the overall context of the ‘refugee crisis’ from a perspective that has not been given before. It has a power that keeps you thinking long after you have put it down.