Witteborn, Saskia - Testimonio and Spaces of Risk - 2012

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TESTIMONIO AND SPACES OF RISK

Saskia Witteborn
Published online: 19 Jul 2011.
To cite this article: Saskia Witteborn (2012) TESTIMONIO AND SPACES OF RISK, Cultural
Studies, 26:4, 421-441, DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2011.587881
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Saskia Witteborn
TESTIMONIO AND SPACES OF RISK
A forced migrant perspective

Asylum seekers and refugees tend to be marginalized in physical and discursive

spaces, especially in times that are orchestrated as socially, politically, financially
and environmentally risky. This article explores the interrelationship between
genre and social space from the perspective of asylum seekers and refugees, and
how refugees and asylum seekers in the USA, Germany and Hong Kong exposed
spaces of risk through testimonio (testimonio is a genre term used throughout the
paper and will be explained later). Asylum seekers and refugees testified to social
practices like lengthy asylum processes, immobility, criminalization of asylum
seekers, or distrust by locals in virtual space and in face-to-face encounters.
Testimonio, thus, reflected on social practices and through this reflection, exposed
spaces of risk that threatened the well-being of forced migrants. However, asylum
seekers did not dwell in those spaces of risk. By publishing testimonios in virtual
environments, some asylum seekers became agents of their biographies and created
spaces in which they could voice themselves on their own terms.
Keywords forced migrant; space; risk; asylum seeker; refugee;

testimonio
Introduction
During my research in asylum shelters in Germany, a young woman from
Kosovo with a child narrated the following:
I was tortured and raped several times. My son was born in 1998. You see
him here. It is not easy to find a good school as he has had special needs
since his birth. I love him so much (she smiles, one of the few smiles
during her witnessing). I don’t have a permanent refugee status and only a
permit to stay for six months. I am grateful that I have a roof over my
head, food, and clothing. And yet, I can’t sleep. I am scared. I don’t have
many contacts with Germans except when I go to see officials or when I
see a therapist who can help me with my fear. I watch TV and my brother
and sister call me but that’s it in terms of contact with the outside world. I
Cultural Studies Vol. 26, No. 4 July 2012, pp. 421441

ISSN 0950-2386 print/ISSN 1466-4348 online # 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandfonline.com http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2011.587881
422 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S
don’t know how to use a computer and can’t read the local newspaper. I
want to work, want to live in peace with my son.
I have listened repeatedly to personal experiences like the one by the woman
during my research about asylum seekers and refugees1 in the USA, Germany
and Hong Kong. A woman in a collective accommodation for asylum seekers
in Munich/Germany said that her neighbour was deported within a couple of
days back to Kazakhstan, which scared her because of the uncertainty of asylum
decisions while another woman from Azerbaijan said how life in the shelter and
the daily stress of uncertainty had made her grow old. Asylum seekers from Sri
Lanka wrote about sleeping in the streets in Hong Kong, and Kurdish women
in Germany wrote about depression, again because of the uncertain asylum
processes. While some of the younger men I met were optimistic about their
future and gaining asylum, many of them still pointed to the long and uncertain
asylum processes, a topic which was replicated by asylum seekers’ virtual
stories in Hong Kong. And even after being recognized as a refugee and
extradited to countries like the USA, I listened to refugees who were
concerned about the political climate and the distrust that had developed in the
local population with regard to the discourse on the War on Terror. In all of
those narrated accounts that I listened to or read, asylum seekers and refugees
gestured towards spaces of risk produced by social practices like slow asylum
processes or detention.
The meanings of living in the risk society have been much discussed (Beck
2007). The risk society, according to Beck, is characterized by an orientation
towards the future; a fictive presence which steers human as well as
institutional agency and actions to prevent anticipated risks. The media and
political discourses strengthen perceptions that we live in a risk society,
perceptions which are constructed by reports on terror attacks on a global
scale, epidemics like HIV/AIDS or bird flu, or people crossing oceans to
escape poverty and wars (see Andrejevic 2006, Bratich 2006, Beck 2007).
Especially in this media-savvy time, people in industrialized countries are
constantly reminded of the dangers of living in a mobile age through pictures of
people crossing the Atlantic towards the gates of Europe or the Indian Ocean
towards Australia, acts of public terror, as well as a sense of imminent
displacement due to political and economic instabilities. Forced migrants2 have
become main actors in the risk scenarios of states.
The examples of people fleeing their countries to seek asylum and
responses by governments to the asylum seekers can be found on all
continents. In 2009, there were more than 43 million people displaced
globally. Out of those, 15.2 million were refugees and 983,000 were asylum
seekers. In 2009, 922,000 claims for asylum and refugee status were lodged
globally (UNHCR 2010a). States engage in efforts to minimize the social,
economic and sociopolitical risks that asylum seekers might pose to the state
and the nation. These efforts are evidenced in the detention of the majority of
S PA C E S O F P R O T E C T I O N 423
people arriving by boat ‘unlawfully’ in Australia (97% according to Australia

Government 2011), the deportation of ethnic Hmong and Karen from
Thailand (www.unhcr.org), or efforts by political forces in European countries
like France to close its borders (Haedicke 2009). Although asylum seeker
numbers have reached a historical low in EU states, for example, 238.084 in
2008 (Pro Asyl 2009), this is not an indicator that there are less asylum seekers
worldwide. According to the asylum seeker advocacy organization Pro Asyl
(2009) in Germany, 85% of asylum seekers never make it out of their
countries, as transit countries such as in North Africa have been actively
included in the protection and extension of European borders. Whether North

African states will retain this role is yet to be seen after the rapid political
changes in North African countries like Tunisia or Egypt in early 2011. The
anticipation of economic, political, terror and other social risks becomes also
evident in the containment of the forced migrant body in marked and
segregated locations, exclusion from local sociopolitical and language
communities, as well as news coverage that portrays migrants as illegal,
victims and in need of control (Witteborn forthcoming, Zetter 1991, 2007,
Freedman 2007, Horsti 2008;).
This paper switches the perspective from how states deter unwanted
immigrants to how asylum seekers and refugees themselves exposed risk spaces
through a performative politics of personal witness accounts. After listening to
and reading through the narratives told and written down by asylum seekers
and refugees in the USA, Germany and Hong Kong, I recognized testimonio as
one common genre through which the asylum seekers and refugees narrated
their experiences and exposed social practices that created risk spaces for
them. Testimonio is a literary genre which refers to personal narratives about
important, and often traumatic, experiences narrated as eyewitness accounts
and presented as a written text (Beverley 2005). Those personal eyewitness
accounts stand for the experience of whole groups. Testimonio grew out of the
political upheavals in Latin and South America in the 1960s and has been
described as combining historical and literary as well as subaltern studies (Del
Sarto and Herbert n.d.). The person testifying is usually one who does not
have a voice in the sociopolitical, economic and ideological make-up of the
state and the nation. The stories are written down by a researcher, journalist,
or other writer and brought to public attention.
Testimonio is a genre with ‘special ethical and epistemological demands’
(Beverley 2005, p. 550) as listeners become complicit in the narrated events
as they have either chosen to listen or write down the stories. A testimonio
seeks coalition and solidarity (Beverley 2005). It represents the lives of many
others and stands in contrast to narratives that recount an individualized fate in
an authorial voice that appeals to the aesthetics of a white, middle-class
audience. In the literature, testimonios have thus been considered as ‘tete-a-
tete’ encounters (Sommer 1996, p. 143; in Beverley 2005, p. 555) and not
autobiographical stories or life histories told by a ‘native’ informant to an

academic.
The paper asks in particular how the asylum seekers and refugees in this
study use testimonio to expose social practices and hence risk spaces that
threaten them. Witness accounts like testimonios can position the self into
sociopolitical relations, which in turn are reflective and constitutive of social
spaces, as cultural and political geographers, anthropologists, sociologists and
communication researchers have discussed extensively (Urry 1987, 2007,
Lefebvre 1991, Deleuze and Guattari 1994, Massey 1994, Castells 1996,
Casey 1997, Couldry 2000, Falkheimer and Jansson 2006; to name only a
few). This study thus stands in the tradition of the spatial turn in the social
sciences and humanities, specifically cultural geography. Scholars have started
mapping the processes through which social relations and identities are
produced, which relate people, economies, ideas and daily practices across
locales. The assumption is that space is constituted relationally through
practices, which are shaped by global economic, political, gender and race
relations (Massey 1994). Spaces are hence defined as being produced through
social practices and webs of social relations in which asylum seekers and
refugees are situated and situate themselves.
As forced migrants tend to be arrested in space (Witteborn forthcoming)
and as people in this study used personal witness accounts to expose social
practices and hence spaces that were risky for them, studying the
interrelationship between testimonio, social practices and spaces is theoreti-
cally important and politically urgent. I will first discuss the ways in which the
testimonios were collected, then focus on the ways in which testimonios were
told and recorded and how those modes of narrating exposed risk spaces. I will
close with a discussion of how the testimonios implicated the state and the
nation and how virtual space enables forced migrants to tell their stories
without regulating intermediaries like advocacy organizations or researchers.
Methodology
The testimonios were collected over the time period from 2002 to 2008 in the
cities of Seattle/United States, Munich/Germany and Hong Kong/China. In
contrast to testimonios traditionally described in the literature like novella-
length stories by Menchú (1984), testimonios by the asylum seekers and
refugees were shorter. They were told in the personal voice and ‘testified’ to
social practices related to asylum or being a refugee.
Seattle was a location where I conducted my dissertation research and first
came in contact with recognized refugees, mostly from Iraq and Palestine. Out
of this dissertation research developed a focused interest over the years in
forced migration and how asylum seekers and refugees cope with the discursive
frames of risk and intervene into political and social discourses and challenge
them. I found those instances in Germany while doing field research in
collective accommodations for asylum seekers. I also found them in Hong
Kong when reading asylum seekers’ virtual accounts.
Munich, Seattle and Hong Kong are similar in that asylum seekers live in
these locations. They are different in that Hong Kong SAR is not a signatory to
the Geneva Refugee Convention. Therefore, UNHCR handles asylum seeker
applications in the city, with recognized refugees being resettled in countries
such as Canada, Germany, or the USA. The United States has been the largest
recipient of asylum claims since 2005 (UNHCR 2010b) with 39,279 asylum
applications in 2009, 10.186 of which were granted (US Department of Justice

2010). Germany was the fifth largest recipient in 2009 with 27,600 claims. In
Hong Kong SAR, 1112 asylum seeker applications were lodged in 2009
(UNCHR n.d.).
In the city of Seattle, 10 recognized refugees from Iraq and Palestine
testified, most of them several times during the years of 2002 and 2003. The
refugees had all been politically active in Iraq under Saddam Hussein or in
Palestine. They tended to be in their 30s and predominantly male. People
worked in restaurants, shops and sometimes factories, or continued their
education in community colleges or the university. In addition, I observed
three public events during which people told testimonios. One panel
discussion was organized within an Arab community festival in 2004, which
happens yearly in the city of Seattle. During this panel, I listened to the
testimonios of Iraqi refugees about their experiences after being accepted as
refugees in the USA. Another panel discussion on Iraqis and the War in Iraq in
2003 enabled me to listen to more testimonios by Iraqi refugees while one
event organized by a local church in Seattle in 2002 helped me to listen to
testimonios told by Palestinian first- and second-generation refugees.
In Germany, 33 asylum seekers testified about personal experiences in the
city of Munich in 2007 and 2008. Asylum seekers came from Chechnya,
Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, the Congo, Nigeria, from
Syria and Iraq (mostly Kurds) and from China (Tibetans, Uyghurs, Mongolians
and Han Chinese). They were male and female, singles and married couples
with children. I encouraged people to tell me their experiences with questions
like ‘Please tell me about your journey to Germany’, ‘Please tell me how you
interact with Germans’, or ‘Please tell me about your daily life in the shelter’.
People then told me about their personal experiences in the form of
eyewitness accounts. In the words of Beverley (2005), they used ‘the
possibility the ethnographic interlocutor offers to bring his or her situation to
the attention of an audience’ (p. 548). I talked with people in English and
German, or in some cases in their local languages (Russian, Kurdish, Bosnian,
Romany, Putonghua and Uyghur) through translators.
In Hong Kong, I analyzed virtual testimonios of asylum seekers, such as
letters from asylum seekers to UNHCR in Hong Kong, a campaign which was
organized by the Society for Community Organization (SoCO) and Voices of

the Rights of Asylum Seekers and Refugees (VORAR). In addition, I analyzed
testimonios from a website by asylum seekers in Hong Kong, which went up in
June 2010 (www.seekingrefuge.hk). The testimonios were thus collected in
three different locations over a time period of six years and represent different
statuses of the narrators (asylum seekers in Hong Kong and Munich and
recognized refugees in Seattle). The purpose of the paper is not to compare the
ways in which asylum seekers constructed risk in the three research locales.
Instead, the purpose of the paper is to illustrate how asylum seekers and
refugees across locales reflected on social practices which composed risk spaces
for them in similar ways. In the following, I will discuss different modes of
testifying and how those exposed risk spaces for the narrators.
Testimonio in face-to-face settings

Limited space and privacy in the collective accommodations. The power of
shelter officials, long and bureaucratic asylum processes, communication with
officials, physical and social immobility and criminalization of the asylum
discourse were social practices that were repeatedly addressed in the
testimonios by asylum seekers in Germany. Those were also the practices
that created spaces of risk for the asylum seekers. For example, a woman who
identified as Lezghinian from Azerbaijan said the following. I have translated
the testimonio from German into English:
I have a husband and a daughter. We have come here as we belong to an

ethnic group that is marginalized in Azerbaijan. We fled in a truck and had
to leave our documents with the driver. We have been living in shelters
for six years. When I was in my sixth month of pregnancy, I had a terrible
talk with some of the local officials who took care of our case. They talked
with me like a dog. I did not speak German well at the time. I was so
nervous because they told me I had to go back to Azerbaijan (she is crying
now). On top of that there was all this noise in the shelter, stress, the
terrible talk in the administrative unit and the fear. My child has
neurodermatitis and we lived in such a small room. A new shelter
manager helped me and gave me a bigger room. Shelter officials have a lot
of power. There are good ones and not so good ones.
In the discourse of the woman and the asylum seekers in general, collective
accommodations. Were time and space capsules, presented in the poetics of
being in place at a particular time, with the past reaching into the present and
the present into the past. The limited space in asylum collective accommoda-
tions. The density of people interacting within this space, and the power of
officials representing the state have created physical and social relations for
asylum seekers characterized by psychological stress and hierarchical structures

based on institutional but also personal power. The experience of margin-
alization and flight mixes with the fear of another physical and psychological
displacement. The situation of living in the collective accommodations. Is
difficult for many but especially for women, according to my research. Like
the woman above, women often followed their husbands into exile and had to
endure long and excruciating treks over mountains or trips in crammed ships
or trucks. Then, they encountered more hardships by living in the small spaces
of the collective accommodations, bringing up children who spoke German as
their first language, and supporting husbands whom some women said to be
despaired by their inability to continue political work in their home countries,

being unemployed, and not able to provide for the family.
The collective accommodations and bureaucratic processes of gaining
asylum from the perspective of not only the Lezghinian but also other women I
talked with, are spaces of protection turned into spaces of risk as they instil a
sense of social isolation and dependency on bureaucratic processes and officials
that sometimes distrust asylum seekers. The asylum seeker is at the mercy of
those processes and asylum laws, for example, the requirement at the time of
the research, to live in collective accommodations during the asylum process in
Bavaria/Germany (Bayerischer Flüchtlingsrat 2010) or moving only within the
city limits or in a particular region (Bundesministerium der Justiz 2009).
Asylum seekers’ fears of deportation and reported mental stress are evidence
of the disciplining effects of the state and its representatives. The need for safe
spatial relations and physical rest was strong for the women but contrasted
with the condition of living in a temporary state of being that is neither here
nor there, neither past nor future.
Collective accommodations were characterized by a web of spatial
relationships; not only as spaces of refuge and human company but also as
spaces of risk to the physical and mental health of people. A woman from
Kosovo who had been threatened by her father-in-law of being married to her
brother-in-law after her husband died in the Balkan wars in the early 1990s fled
with her little daughter to Germany and started out in a reception camp for
newly registered asylum seekers. She described the place with the following
words: ‘We spent six weeks in the camp. It was difficult. I was there with my
little girl. Young men with knives fighting each other. It was not a good place
for children, not a good place to feel safe. . .’. The reception camp as a space of
risky social relations and experiences is at the centre of this excerpt from her
brief testimonio. At the same time, the woman was happy to have moved to a
different collective accommodation where she had her own room with her
daughter and felt a sense of security, despite some problems like other asylum
seekers littering the place or not cleaning up public spaces.
The collective accommodation as a space of survival and a space of shame
has also been at the centre of other testimonios. The mother of a family of five
who identified as Uyghur, living in Munich told the following:
It was very difficult for me to get used to living in the accommodation,

without a house, just to survive. I never thought we would live like this
for so many years. In 2003 we got the deportation papers but then we
finally got two months of the right to stay. We were scared. One of my
boys is wetting himself at night; the two girls are very nervous. They
don’t want to live here in the accommodation, so they try to go to
German friends and play there. They are ashamed to live in the shelter.
Like many of the women who talked with me, this woman had also followed
her husband after he had to flee China. The Uyghur identity was very
important to the family. Uyghurs are groups from northwestern China who
speak a Turkic language. The husband said he had protested with many others
against Chinese political and economic dominance and Uyghur marginalization
in the early 1990s and had to leave China eventually after the unrests were put
down by the Chinese government. The wife had followed him and cared for
the children but said she had attempted suicide several times as she was not
able after eight years to live with the uncertainty of being an asylum seeker
anymore.
Although eight years is not the average amount of time spent with pending
asylum processes, the testimonio by the woman illustrates generalized fears of
asylum seekers as deportation, challenges for children and shame are faced by
many of them, according to my observations. Many of the women who talked
with me had symptoms like sleep apnia and chronic headache which in turn
were related to depression and suicidal thoughts as well as a sense of shame of
living in the shared accommodations. The following testimonio was told by a
Uyghur woman who had lived in a shared accommodations for six years:
We are Uyghurs. We moved into the asylum home and were grateful. My
husband is a recognized refugee, I have the ‘Duldung,’ a permit for
temporary protection. We are separated now. We have two children. We
got two rooms after the officials realized that it was very difficult for us. I
work eight hours every day. We only had one room. When the child needs
to make her homework, the little one who goes to a crèche was around.
The teacher said she was a good student but there was never space to make
her homework. Never quiet. It was very stressful. Then, officials were kind
and gave us another room. Now I live here alone with the children and we
have only one again. I cannot invite friends or German colleagues. We have
German friends. One woman sometimes picks up my daughter. There is no
space. I am ashamed. When they come and I want to make tea, the
communal kitchen is full of garbage and it reeks. Then they think we are
dirty. Sometimes I am scared to be deported.
Like in so many of the other testimonios, threatening social practices related to

asylum like limited space and uncertain asylum statuses, and eventually shame
are brought up again. From the perspective of the asylum seekers, those
practices created spaces of risk to their social, economic and psychological
well-being.
One way through which the asylum seekers maintained a sense of being
and community was through sociocultural practices. People who described
themselves as Uyghur, Kurdish, Iraqi, or Palestinian pointed out that their
ethnic or ethnonational identities were important for their personal and
communal well-being as speaking the language, watching satellite programs
‘from home’ or movies, going to church or mosque, eating home-cooked food
and sometimes celebrating cultural and religious festivals with other migrants
from similar backgrounds enabled them to maintain a sense of belonging and
‘not getting completely lost’, as one asylum seeker put it. When asked, asylum
seekers in Germany said that they rarely say they are asylum seekers, except in
interactions with officials. Their ethnic or national identities were important to
many of the asylum seekers as was the identity of a person contributing to
society. For example, a woman from Armenia who sought asylum in Germany
stated: ‘I am in a foreign land but I don’t see myself only as an asylum seeker
or refugee. I pay taxes if I work and pay for my ticket for the tram. I do
everything here like any other citizen. I am not only a refugee or asylum
seeker’.
Testimonio in public settings

Even recognized refugees gestured towards social practices which created
spaces of risk for them. One such practice was expressed distrust by the nation
state in times of sociopolitical tension. One example is Iraqi refugees. Iraqi
refugees who had been recognized and had lived in the Northwest of the USA
from 1 to 10 years constructed an image of a refugee community that was
characterized by resistance and survival and that transcended national, cultural
and political borders. During the War in Iraq starting in 2003, the Iraqi
refugee community came under close scrutiny by US security forces.
Rumours about Iraqis being detained in the event of a war in Iraq, Federal
Bureau of Investigation (FBI) visits to Iraqi homes, and implied accusations of
collaboration with governmental forces in Iraq encouraged Iraqis to recode
spaces of protection as risk spaces. Here is an example of a testimonio. It was
told by an Iraqi man in his 30s who fled Iraqi as he had participated in an
uprising against Saddam Hussein. He told the testimonio during a panel
discussion organized as part of an annual Arab festival in the city of Seattle
(Witteborn 2008). The purpose of the panel discussion was to inform the
audience about the conditions in Iraq and about the Iraqi community in the
greater Seattle area:
My name is Murat.3 I was born in the South of Iraq, Basra, ehm and I left
Iraq 1988 after problem with government. I stayed in Kuwait for more
than a year and then the Gulf War. I was arrested in Kuwait then went
back to Basra and then I participated in the uprising in 1991 eh and I left
Iraq and went to Saudi Arabia. I stayed three years and three months in the
refugee camp in Saudi Arabia and I get accepted by the INS and I came to
the US as a in 1994, as a refugee. And we’re trying to establish ourselves
here but we didn’t have a chance. We were trying really hard. We really
couldn’t have chance to prove ourselves here or anyone can hear our
voice. . . . Then after when the FBI were trying to search us Iraqians here,
it gave us the time to speak up. And we have to tell everybody why we left
Iraq and why we’re here. We came here as refugee. We left our country
and our home and our family. If there is anymore question, I will answer.
Like I have observed with Palestinian refugees in the USA (Witteborn 2007),
the man appropriated the label refugee although he had lived in the USA for
several years. He identified himself and other Iraqis as refugees as a response to
discourses of suspicion (e.g. FBI visit) and risk to his reputation and future in
the country (‘And we have to tell everybody why we left Iraq and why we’re
here. We came here as refugee’). Positioning himself as refugee was one
strategy to intervene in the public discourse on national loyalty during war
times, ensuring the nation that Iraqis are no risk to internal security but also
demanding solidarity. Through public testimonio, Iraqis engaged with US
Americans, educating the general public and highlighting the inter-relations
between US foreign policy and migration to the USA. Through their
witnessing, the narrators also refuted the one-dimensional ascription as victim,
a topos often created in media discourse (Leudar et al. 2008). The testimonio
also illustrates that the label ‘refugee’, as a label indicating that a person is
worthy of protection after careful examination, fails this function in times of
sociopolitical tension.
Another example for how recognized refugees perceived spaces of risk
comes from a Palestinian speaker. Through his testimonio, he exposed
ignorance by the public about what it means being a refugee and the practice of
labelling some displaced persons as terrorist. The man told the testimonio in
the setting of an informational event about Palestine, which was called
‘Palestine 101’ by the organizers. The event was organized by a Palestinian
interest group in a church. The moderator introduced the speaker by saying:
‘This is (name). He will give you his view on Palestine’. The speaker told his
testimonio as an answer to this introduction:
I’m a Palestinian refugee. I was born in 1967 in a refugee camp. I was not
able to go back to the village down the hill. And we grew up with this
mentality by living day by day. It gets into your blood, you cannot let it
go, you have to resist. When you are 13, 14, 15 years old you pick up a
rock and throw. We used to go facing the soldiers. It wasn’t that bad in
the first Intifada. We’d throw rocks at them. It’s different if you’ve never
lived as a refugee. My family was in this situation. If you are under curfew
it goes for months. Imagine you cannot provide for your kids, imagine you
cannot get food for them, the world ignores it, the media choose to ignore
it and talk about terrorism. We are human beings like everyone, we
wanna be free, and we keep being in resistance. I think nonviolent ways
are better and we keep resisting until we are free.
The witness who describes himself as a ‘Palestinian refugee’ testifies to his

displacement, poverty and curfews in a refugee camp. The testimonio speaks

to ignorance about refugee biographies in the general public and the mediatized
fear of terrorism, conditions and practices, which create risk spaces for some
Palestinian refugees. Humanitarian support for Palestine and global under-
standing of the difficult life of Palestinians is vital in their opinion. Ignorance
and fear of terrorism are counterproductive to this support. The fear of
terrorism echoes the testimonio by the refugee from Iraq. He had addressed
FBI searches which had cast suspicion on Iraqis and their loyalties to their
country of settlement.
In the testimonios described above, speakers enacted their communal
identity as Palestinian or Iraqi through the prism of being a refugee. Political
activism in the form of telling testimonios was one practice to point to spaces
of risk but also a practice to enact ethnic and national loyalties. Those loyalties
cannot be separated from identifying as a refugee for the narrators, which
is also due to the imposed identity as an Other in the time of the War on
Terror.
Testimonio in virtual settings

Written Testimonio was one way in which asylum seekers in Hong Kong
narrated their experiences. Similar to the verbal testimonios by asylum seekers
in Germany, asylum seekers testified to uncertainty due to long asylum
processes, to social isolation, immobility, poverty and criminalization of the
asylum seeker, all of which was related to physical and mental health issues.
Testimonios were published (1) by forced migrant advocacy organizations and
(2) on a website designed by asylum seekers. The Society for Community
Organization (SoCO) and Voices of the Rights of Asylum Seekers and Refugees
(VORAR) had asked asylum seeker to write letters to UNHCR about their
experiences of living as an asylum seeker in Hong Kong. The letters were then
posted online. While those letters were elicited by the advocacy organizations,
some asylum seekers in Hong Kong had created a website themselves through
which they posted their testimonios. In all those virtual testimonios, the
importance of shelter in Hong Kong was emphasized. Here is one example,

elicited by the advocacy organizations in Hong Kong:
I am an asylum seeker and I have been in Hong Kong since July 2005. I
don’t have a right to work and can’t go to the hospital without getting
trouble with the police and getting arrested. I am now sleeping outside on
the streets. Even a dog has a house and a place to stay and to leave. I want
to ask you if the right to live, to be alive is only for a few people or for all
people in the world. And I want to know if you, the Human Rights
Committee, know about our lives in Hong Kong. We are not really living
here, we are just surviving. That’s all, thanks!

(Anon (a), December 21, 2005)
The speaker constructs a testimonio of exclusion from physical and relational

spaces and points to risk spaces created through existential uncertainty and
poverty. He talks about ‘human rights’ and relates them to the privilege of a
selected few. According to this testimonio, asylum is a humanitarian act, which
is determined by legal procedures that are inherently risky to the individual’s
basic survival.
In Hong Kong, there were 791 asylum seekers in January 2010
(UNHCR n.d.). Although the collective accommodations had composed a
risk for some asylum seekers in Germany in terms of social and physical
isolation, sometimes violence, and always uncertainty, not having shelter
presents the alternative. Asylum seekers in Hong Kong have access to a
monthly housing allowance of HKD 1000 and 900 HKD for food stamps
provided through Social Services, according to one asylum seeker. This
money is only available after reporting to immigration. Some asylum seekers
choose not to report out of a deep fear of government agencies, based on
their experiences in their home countries. Although the majority of asylum
seekers lives in apartments sponsored by the Hong Kong government or
rented out by private owners, there is a risk for people of not having
shelter, lacking medical support, or being detained:
We are F. and my wife B., my daughter R. and my son V. from Sri Lanka.
We now live in Hong Kong. We have been UNHCR asylum seekers since
September 2004. We have come to Hong Kong because we can’t live in
our country anymore. We have a political problem in our country. But
when we come here we also face lots of problems. When my wife was
pregnant she needed medicine and for seven months she had been going to
the hospital without problems. However, during August 2005 the hospital
asked for a valid passport or immigration paper for admittance. My wife
said she didn’t have such documents. Then they said that they couldn’t
give her medicine if she didn’t have these papers. On 9 September my
wife again went to the hospital, this time to the emergency and they did
give her medicine. However, when she was discharged from the
emergency ward on 12 September 2005, the hospital again asked for a
valid passport. My wife repeated that she didn’t have such a document.
Then the called the police and after that the police came to catch me, me
my wife and my daughter to go to the police station.
(Anon (b). December 21, 2005)
Asylum as a legal, political and social space of humanitarian protection

becomes an existential risk to the forced migrant. The lack of legal documents,
encounters with the police and, therefore, the criminalization of asylum
seekers and access to health facilities were major concerns.

The social practices of long and uncertain asylum processes, social isolation,
poverty and criminalization of the body were consistently expressed on websites
such as the one established in June 2010 by asylum seekers in Hong Kong.4 It is
one of the few sites that have been composed exclusively by asylum seekers and
without institutionalized support. The stories were posted on the website in
June 2010, shortly after it came online and are the voices of people currently
seeking asylum in Hong Kong. The following testimonio is about detention:
Another problem was that whist you took your shower the security man
would often knock at the door telling you to stop your shower for a
minute so that women could go in and urinate. Whether you liked it or
not, you would then have to come out covering yourself whilst the
women would go urinate. If there was another man needing to use the
toilet whilst you were showering then the guard would let him enter
whilst you were naked showering in the corner. These were the problems
with the bathroom. The shaving blade given to us was also another issue.
They always gave us the same blade that was used by previous detainees.
Hygienically, I felt this was very dangerous.
(Admin 2010)
The writer addresses again uncertainty and insecurity as fundamental topics in

the lives of asylum seekers. Although people should find themselves in spaces
of protection after filing for asylum, the testimonio illustrates how they can
find themselves in spaces of risk in criminalized environments like prisons and
exposed to health dangers. The body is particularly implicated in this
testimonio about detention. Like in testimonios discussed before, where
health concerns and the body were central, the body in this testimonio
becomes the metaphor for an instrumentalized and interchangeable object. The
latter is exemplified through the shaving blades which several asylum seekers
need to use or the lack of privacy in the shower and bathrooms. The asylum
seeker body becomes a deindividualized object which is not entitled to privacy,
dignity or health. The use of the same shaving blade is one example for how
detainees are reduced to their identity as asylum seekers. They are forced to
share body fluids as the individual and cultural person has dissolved in the
criminalized context of detention into a homogeneous and anonymous asylum
seeker persona.
Moreover, the body in some of its most intimate moments under the
shower or in the bathroom becomes subject to the public gaze and subject to
shame as a third party is witnessing the action. The power of the guards to
decide whether a body can retain its privacy or not, exemplifies the power of
the state over the detained asylum seeker body. Research on Abu Ghraib and
the inversion of cultural norms and values speaks to the practice of public
shaming (McKenzie 2009). And even after release from detention, asylum
seekers remain deindividualized bodies and numbers in an asylum seeker

bureaucracy:
After being released, another horrible situation occurred. We received

little assistance. We were forced to undergo interviews at recognizance
office. This was difficult because we were given no travel allowance.
Sometimes asylum seekers had to travel from as far as Yuen long to attend
an interview in central. In that year, reporting to the recognizance office
was a weekly activity. This continued for many months, even more than a
year. Sometimes you were called in for an interview which they would
then cancel, without even telling you. Because of the problem of
transportation costs some of us would have to walk from Mei fu to Star
Ferry, and then to take the ferry to the interview centre. After the
interview we would again have to take the ferry from central to Tsim Sha
Tsui and then walk to Mei Fu . . . . During these times I, along with many
others, had to sleep under the cultural centre near star ferry. All because
of economic reasons. I slept near star ferry for many, many months.
About eight months in total . . . . There were many of us sleeping in these
areas. Imagine going through this situation for almost 3 years. How can
such a person have a clear mind under these circumstances? How could
these things happen? Why did they happen? Who is responsible for my
questions? Who is going to answer them?
(Admin 2010)
Poverty, homelessness and lack of fulfilment of basic human needs were

further dimensions that threatened asylum seekers. The risk of homelessness is
repeated here and touches upon one fundamental issue of uncertainty: of being
a nomad without support and affiliations (Peters 1999), and hence a person
deemed unworthy of attention by society. Lack of mobility and imposed
poverty create spaces of risk for the asylum seeker.
The asylum seekers gain a voice by engaging in virtual advocacy and
highlighting the interrelationships between protection and risk. The testimonios
told in public spaces like citizen forums and community centres or asylum
shelters might fade away over the course of time. However, the ones recorded
in virtual space have the potential to remain visible to a general public. Thus,
they can help the public gain insight into what it means being an asylum seeker,
become projection spaces for identifying with the stories, and give advice and
affirmation of what it means being an asylum seeker to other forced migrants.
The website created by asylum seekers in Hong Kong has these purposes.5 The
testimonios, which are virtually available are more than just stories appealing
to empathize with asylum seekers or pity them. The testimonios call for
accountability through such questions as, ‘Who is responsible for my
questions? Who is going to answer them?’ (Admin 2010). Therefore, one
could say that the main foci of the testimonios in virtual space were
accountability and appeal for solidarity with asylum seekers.
Spatial relations of risk for the forced migrant self

The paper asked how asylum seekers and refugees used testimonio to expose
risk spaces. Testifying on websites, in public forums and in private were ways
through which asylum seekers identified spaces of risk, constituted through
sociopolitical, economic and legal practices like long asylum processes,
communication with asylum officials, stressful life in shelters, fear of
deportation, criminalization, social isolation, erasing individuality in detention
and distrust by the nation and the state. Asylum seekers regarded speedy
asylum processes as ensured by the state or transnational organizations like
UNHCR as essential for their physical and psychological safety. In reality,
many of the asylum seekers experienced lengthy asylum processes which
created ontological insecurities, including conditions like fear and depression
and situated the people into states of physical and social arrest. Legal labels like
‘refugee’ or ‘asylum seeker’ constituted a safety zone for the people as the
labels situated the body and its social relations within the protection of the
state and international asylum treaties. And yet, respondents found that even
the labels could not protect a person, a concern for asylum seekers in Hong
Kong, Germany and the USA.
In addition, recognized refugees exposed risky social practices, even after
asylum was gained. Protection from persecution as declared in the Geneva
Refugee Convention could not always be ensured as in the case of Iraqis in the
USA and their profiling through security services before and during the Iraq
War. The example illustrates that the refugee can still be regarded as an Other
and an internal risk in times of conflict. The positioning of the asylum seeker as
the Other and a body that needs to be regarded with suspicion due to
weakness, poverty and secrecy is a lingering motive in the asylum seekers and
refugees’ testimonios and is evidenced in the internment of asylum seekers in
detention centres and special asylum seeker housing.
Moreover, in the process of testifying, the asylum seeker body became

visible as disciplined by the state. People narrated their experiences during
their long asylum processes in detention, in reception camps and in shared
accommodations for asylum seekers. The state prescribed where to dwell, how
to live, how to be detained and for how long. Through the very process of
testifying, the people exposed the disciplining character of the state in relation
to asylum (for a related discussion of the imprisoned body, resistance and state
power see Anderson 2009, 2010, and Feldman 1991).
In addition to the state, the testimonios related the asylum seeker and
refugee self to the nation where they had been socialized. People spoke as
Iraqis, Palestinians, Kurds, Kosovarians and Uyghurs and hence implicated the
nation and ethno-national identities. Ethno-national identities became anchors
in face of exclusion from the nation through flight and uncertain asylum
statuses. Moreover, the enactment of ethnic and national identities in the
testimonios illustrates that the asylum seeker and refugee identities did not
define the person at all times. Instead, particular ethno-national identities were
enacted to identify with the nation and a political identity. Iraqi refugees in the
USA testified to their political activism against Saddam Hussein and
Palestinians to their resistance against the occupation of Palestinian territories.
Even though people had to flee the nation due to political engagement as in the
case of Iraqis fighting Saddam Hussein, Kurds resisting the Turkish state or
being marginalized in Iraq, or Kosovarians fleeing the aftermath of violence in
the Balkans, most people still identified through their native language, cultural
practices and the physical land they were born on. The latter was summarized
in the idea of ‘home’ or ‘my homeland’. Ethno-national identities became
salient through the prism of being a refugee as in the case of the Iraqi or
Palestinian testimonios from the USA. Refugee and ‘asylum seeker’ identities
were identities imposed on people due to political and historical events and
were intricately related to ethno-national identities, the salience of which had
triggered the process of flight in the first place (e.g. Lezghinians, Uyghurs, or
Kurds feeling marginalized in Azerbaijan, China, or Iraq).
This enactment of ethnic and political belonging and hence of difference
and dignity is important in light of asylum and detention procedures that
reduce the asylum seeker body to a bureaucratic entity, distinguishable only
through sexual markers. The testimonio about the forced usage of the same
shaving blades in detention or the power of the guards to regulate the basic
needs of humans in detention like hygiene are examples for how individuality
and difference can be erased during asylum process. The body becomes a
replaceable entity controlled by the state.
While ethnic and national identification was often more important for
people than an asylum seeker identity, gender identity merged with the latter.
Females not only became asylum seekers for political reasons but also as they
had followed their husbands into exile. The testimonios thus point to the
double-marginalization of being a forced migrant qua being a woman.
The insights above beg the question what asylum seekers and refugees
gained from testifying to their sociopolitical realities. Asylum seekers and
refugees testified to how they perceived spaces of protection as spaces of risk
and presented realities that diverged from the humanitarian and protection
discourses related to refugees (Zetter 2007). By testifying in virtual space,
face-to-face with me and during public panels in the USA, asylum seekers and
refugees performed their past and their present while implicitly and explicitly
appealing for solidarity. People appealed to audiences to become educated
about asylum seekers/refugees and their needs and contributions, to help
speed up asylum processes, help legally, or in social ways. The appeals do not
necessarily lead to action on behalf of the asylum seekers. However, they can
morally implicate the listener. After listening to the rape testimonio by the
Kosovarian woman, for example, I can choose to assist the woman or not, but
ignoring or forgetting her experience I cannot. I, as a human, woman and part
of the nation in which the woman has sought asylum, have become implicated
in her past and her possible future. The testimonio of the asylum seekers and
refugees thus not only reflect on past experiences but also expose spaces of
risk. By sharing their experiences asylum seekers and refugees reclaimed their
agency in being the creators of their own biographies. They became advocates
for improving the legal, political and social conditions for asylum seekers and
refugees and engaging in solidarity with people who need sociopolitical
assistance but not pity.
At the same time, some of the encounters I had with the witnesses
recreated power relations. For example, I became complicit in the social
practices of the state of leaving asylum seekers with uncertainty after recording
their testimonios. When asked questions like, ‘Can you help me speed up the
asylum process’? and not being able to do so, I replicated the power of the
dominant researcher who arrives, records and leaves. Although I tried to assist
the people with small services, I would argue that power relations between
researcher and narrator are not overcome in testimonio. Although I do report
the testimonios as told by the asylum seekers and refugees, the acts of
recording, translating and making them publically available still rest with the
researcher and the publisher, again conjuring up the power relationships that
were said to be overcome in testimonio (Beverley 2005). Even when the
asylum seekers or refugees told their stories during public events or in virtual
space, they were dependent on advocacy organizations, such as churches or
refugee organizations, which organized the storytelling event or helped publish
the narratives online. Dependency on advocacy organizations related to
refugee matters does not enable asylum seekers to achieve public attention on
their own terms. The advocacy organizations, not the asylum seekers, had the
power to initiate the recording and publication of their testimonios. This
observation relates to the question of access to the narrative situation and who
is allowed to speak, when and how. As the study suggests, asylum seekers and
refugees were able to tell their stories mostly because organizations or I as a

researcher enabled them to do so.
One of the ways I can see to enable a meeting with marginalized witnesses
‘tete a tete’ (Sommer 1996, p. 146), is to enable those marginalized to tell and
edit their stories on their own terms, when and how they see fit. Asylum
seekers in Hong Kong have started this project. While locals assisted them
technically to design the website which went up in June 2010, asylum seekers
living in Hong Kong can upload their stories on the website with the help of a
website administrator who is an asylum seeker himself. The existence of the
website is evidence that asylum seekers themselves can decide whether and
how to publicize their experiences with flight, asylum processes in Hong

Kong, their memories, their grievances and create spaces of opportunities for
advocacy.
One important message of this study is that asylum seekers and refugees
are not passive recipients of welfare or charity. They can take the role of social
activists by pointing to problems that are common for forced migrants in many
countries, and sometimes even to their solutions. Through testimonios and
new media technologies, asylum seekers and refugees reached out to
governments, UNHCR and the general public, and communicated a concern
for basic human rights like shelter, mobility, food and work. The testimonios
and the problems and solutions those exposed should be taken seriously as they
put a spotlight on the concerns of asylum seekers, concerns which proved to
transcend individual lives and apply to forced migrants transnationally.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the asylum seekers and refugees who participated in this
study for presenting their experiences to me. I would also like to thank the
anonymous reviewers for their very constructive feedback. The study was
made partially possible by a grant from the General Research Fund of Hong
Kong (RGC Ref. No.: CUHK451908) and a Direct Grant from The Chinese
University of Hong Kong (Project ID: CUHK 2020931).
Notes
1 While an asylum seeker is in the process of applying for protection from a
state, refugee is a term indicating that a state or organization like UNHCR has
accepted the asylum seeker claim based on sociopolitical grounds and grants
protection to the person. According to the Geneva Refugee Convention from
1951, a refugee is a person who had to leave the country of citizenship due to
persecution related to race, religion, nationality, political conviction, or social
group. http://www.unhcr.de/fileadmin/unhcr_data/pdfs/rechtsinformatio-
nen/1_International/1_Voelkerrechtliche_Dokumente/01_GFK/01_GFK_
Prot_dt.pdf
2 Forced migrant in this study refers to refugees and asylum seekers (Forced
Migration Online, accessed 22 May 2008, from http://www.forcedmigra
tion.org/).
3 The name has been changed.
4 http://www.seekingrefuge.hk/
5 See note 4 above.
Notes on Contributors
Saskia Witteborn is Associate Professor in the School of Journalism and
Communication at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She researches
transnational migration, culture and communication. Her current projects focus
on forced migration and transnational space and place-making.
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On: 08 October 2014, At: 09:39

TESTIMONIO AND SPACES OF RISK

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2011.587881

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TESTIMONIO AND SPACES OF RISK

A forced migrant perspective

Asylum seekers and refugees tend to be marginalized in physical and discursive

Keywords forced migrant; space; risk; asylum seeker; refugee;

Cultural Studies Vol. 26, No. 4 July 2012, pp. 421441

people arriving by boat ‘unlawfully’ in Australia (97% according to Australia

included in the protection and extension of European borders. Whether North

autobiographical stories or life histories told by a ‘native’ informant to an

applications in 2009, 10.186 of which were granted (US Department of Justice

organized by the Society for Community Organization (SoCO) and Voices of

Testimonio in face-to-face settings

I have a husband and a daughter. We have come here as we belong to an

asylum seekers characterized by psychological stress and hierarchical structures

despaired by their inability to continue political work in their home countries,

It was very difficult for me to get used to living in the accommodation,

Like in so many of the other testimonios, threatening social practices related to

Testimonio in public settings

The witness who describes himself as a ‘Palestinian refugee’ testifies to his

displacement, poverty and curfews in a refugee camp. The testimonio speaks

Testimonio in virtual settings

importance of shelter in Hong Kong was emphasized. Here is one example,

here, we are just surviving. That’s all, thanks!

The speaker constructs a testimonio of exclusion from physical and relational

Asylum as a legal, political and social space of humanitarian protection

seekers and access to health facilities were major concerns.

The writer addresses again uncertainty and insecurity as fundamental topics in

seekers remain deindividualized bodies and numbers in an asylum seeker

After being released, another horrible situation occurred. We received

Poverty, homelessness and lack of fulfilment of basic human needs were

Spatial relations of risk for the forced migrant self

Moreover, in the process of testifying, the asylum seeker body became

refugees were able to tell their stories mostly because organizations or I as a

how to publicize their experiences with flight, asylum processes in Hong

camps!]’, [in German], [online] Available at http://www.fluechtlingsrat-

Cultural Studies, vol. 20, no. 4 5, pp. 493511.

Peters, J. D. (1999) ‘Exile, nomadism, and diaspora’, in Home, Exile, Homeland:

UNHCR (2010b) ‘Asylum levels and trends in industrialized countries 2009’,

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