Making peace with the past? Applying theater to asylum seekers' trauma

Abstract Asylum seekers—by virtue of their political and bureaucratically structured social positions—carry, negotiate, and rehash traumatic pasts. These pasts are, often, the main way through which they are understood in public and scholarly imagination. Yet, as the author's work of making theater with a group of Washington, DC‐based asylum seekers shows, making peace with the past is less about understanding and packaging traumas endured and more about imagining and envisioning alternate futures. Drawing examples from theater workshops and interviews conducted with asylum seekers, in which the past featured centrally, this essay considers the intersection of peace and art by examining the role of past traumas in imagining alternate futures despite the uncertainty of the present. In so doing, this essay questions public and scholarly narratives that position the figure of the asylum seeker as solely beholden to traumatic pasts, exactly because being compelled to (re)tell one's story to acquire residency and citizenship documentation is a task that is firmly oriented toward the future.