Life narratives of refugees

between testimony and resistance

Abstract

Considering contemporary migratory flows as a sensitive and controversial issue, the main objective of this article is to examine life narratives of two refugees who moved to France in the light of French Discourse Analysis in dialogue with Ethno (sociology). Those narratives are part of the book La parole est aux migrants (2015) by the journalist Olivier Geai. In general, the authorities (governors, experts, media etc.) speak about and for subjects in vulnerable situations and often just transform them into numbers, percentages and statistics. Therefore the idea is to “give voice” to these subjects so that they themselves can tell their story, in the case of this work, their migratory experience. The device for analyzing the selected life narratives resumes planes from Dominique Maingueneau's Global Semantics (2005), whose focus is to carry out an integrated approach between the enunciation and the utterance. The planes are: the themes, the vocabulary, the enunciative deixis and the mode of enunciation, which refers to the rhetorical notion of ethos. A secondary objective is to discuss the notion of life narrative to verify its status (or not) as a speech genre, as well as its relationship with the close notion of testimony. The results of the analysis of the narratives show that, albeit unique and irreplaceable in themselves, there are aspects that approximate them, allowing for the construction of a common discourse: the recurrence of themes such as violence, dehumanization, xenophobia; the predominance of a self, which unfolds between a here-now (in France, in the present) and a there-then (in the country of origin, in the past); the proposition of an ethos of resilience. These findings show the testimonial content of life narratives and enable the destabilization of the official discourse as well as of stereotypes surrounding refugees (invaders, criminals, terrorists, among others), thus working as a discourse of resistance.