(Re)Telling as remembering during COVID-19 and its aftermath in Refugee Tales IV and Refugee Tales V

Abstract This article offers an interdisciplinary approach to the intersection of memory, narration, and migration as a fruitful theoretical framework to analyse Refugee Tales . These are the publications of the Refugee Tales Project, fostered by the Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group with the goal of abolishing indefinite detention in the UK. The tales give voice to the refugees’ experience of forced displacement, asylum claim, and detention, and most of them are collaboratively narrated by the refugee and an established writer. My contention is that the exercise of (re)telling inherent in Refugee Tales can be examined in the light of the concept of communicative remembering, considering how the refugee and the writer engage in a dialogic co-construction of the refugee’s autobiographical memories. In this context, the article aims at exploring how (re)telling and remembering go hand in hand in a selection of narratives from the latest volumes of the series: Refugee Tales IV (2021) and Refugee Tales V (2024). Both include the experience of COVID-19 as a context or as content of remembering, and so the pandemic becomes one more factor in the process of giving voice and listening to the refugees’ testimonies of indefinite and arbitrary detention in the UK.