Justice-To-Be-Done, Telling-Stories, Before-The-Birth-Of-The-Plot

This major paper is divided into three sections, which represent three approaches to one constellation of ideas: settlement services for refugees, narrative, and ethics. They are also three dimensions of one project: the preservation of the alterity of the other.

Section One is a more formal academic essay outlining what the thinking of Emmanuel Levinas has to offer this project vis-à-vis settlement services in general. It does so by contrasting his ethics with the two main ethics that presently shape and inform settlement services in Toronto: Christianity and Marxism. Using Levinas' formulation of the 'height and humility' of the other as a motif, the discussion identifies how both these currents of thought over-narrativize and so collapse the alterity of refugees. It analyses how the ethical relation shows itself in stark relief in a hosting dynamic, and describes the uncanny position of the host/hostage which any member of the settlement community is in by virtue of her or his job. Asymmetry of the relation, proximity and incarnation, and politics and responsibility are central themes in a consideration of how behaviour toward refugees might differ starting from this new ethical orientation.

Section Two is a discursive meditation on the use of arts practices with refugees, focusing on the notion of storytelling. Thinking around trauma, narrative, testimony, witnessing, autobiography and self-representation is explored and analysed. Here again, taking the preservation of radical alterity as the central project, Levinasian ethics are privileged in a discussion of Saying and the Said, the present/ce of the Same in synchronic time versus the diachronic time of the other, and language itself. The pivotal ideas see Levinas in dialogue with Jacques Derrida (in particular his analysis of hospitality) and Roger Simon. Psychotherapy and nature poetry also make appearances in this consideration of the intersubjective ethical relation.

Section Three, performed in a prose/poetic voice, is an enactment of the type of 'de-narrativization' that the other two papers ultimately call for. Out of active commitment to the notion of embodiment, it is my own story of why I am devoted to refugee issues (why I am triggered to feel compassion and responsibility toward whom and what I do; the story of my own exile, my own home, my hauntedness and dispossession).