Talking About the Past, Locating it in the Present: The Second Generation from Refugee Backgrounds Making Sense of their Parents’ Narratives, Narrative Gaps and Silences

Talking About the Past, Locating it in the Present: The Second Generation from Refugee Backgrounds Making Sense of their Parents’ Narratives, Narrative Gaps and Silences

Refugees

Alice Bloch

Journal of Refugee Studies

Vol. 31

No. 4

2018

Journal article

English

Sri Lanka, Turkey, Vietnam

Restricted Access

This article focuses on intergenerational narratives of exile and persecution as well as the narrative gaps and the silences between generations from the perspectives of the second generation from refugee backgrounds. The article draws on data from interviews with United Kingdom-born adults with parents who had been refugees from Vietnam and Sri Lanka (Tamils) and Kurds from Turkey. While some parents shared pre-migration, flight and post-migration stories, others chose not to talk about the past. There were clear differences between the three heritage groups that related to the displacement contexts and to responses to loss and trauma. Both the stories told and the gaps and silences were made sense of and filtered, by the second generation, through the lens of their lives in the United Kingdom. The second generation developed their own narratives of their parents’ pasts, which were embedded in their everyday lives, but also framed around their distinctive heritages.

Kristen Walker