Paper short abstract

This presentation looks at how people traveling to Calais in order to seek asylum in the UK, attempted to re-construct their stories, through existential questions, imaginations, memories and silences. A question the paper asks is: how can anthropologists get access and represent these imaginative worlds?

Paper long abstract

This paper is based on a journey I took with a group of Ethiopian, Eritrean and Sudanese people who left Italy to reach Calais, and from there the UK in order to ask asylum.

For some days we shared the same roof, the same blankets and the same food. They were there like many others, to cross the Channel to reach the 'promised land' of 'security, freedom, education and labour' and I was there to try to listen to their stories and understand their motivations. What part of that lived life is 'sayable'? If imagination, dreams and hopes may find a language then so must disillusionment, silence and desperation. This paper and the audiovisual documentary I intend to share at the panel, are an attempt to put the unspeakable within the many words that usually find an easier flow in texts, the shadows into the light that is impressed onto photographic images, and the many silences that make up the voices of the people I met on this journey.