Activist Rewritings: Reframing the Refugee Experience through Collaboration

This article shows how collaboration reshapes literary processes of retelling and reads activist rewritings of refugee stories against the backdrop of the frame tale, which constitutes one of the main genres for narrating someone else's story in literary history. Focusing on Dina Nayeri's The Ungrateful Refugee, Marie Cosnay's Des îles, and Matthieu Aikins's The Naked Don't Fear the Water, I argue that collaboration redefines the vertical relationship and spatiotemporal division that characterize the dynamics between storyteller and protagonist, between frame narrative and inner story in literary traditions of retelling. However, by engaging with the paradoxes of (in)visibility in processes of translation, the article also points to the asymmetries that emerge when Aikins, Cosnay, and Nayeri, take on more agency in their role as activist retellers and translators, unveiling the reverberations that the latent structures of the frame tale have in texts that, at first sight, do not classify as such. The source of this tension, I contend, is a reconfigured relationship between literature and politics that challenges the idea that writing, in and of itself, is already a humanizing act that can be detached from political action.