Political Drawings of the Calais Jungle: Learning to Listen

Abstract

This article points to the critical position against the exclusionary policies that migrants face when they enter rich countries in two works in comics’ form about the Calais Jungle. Kate Evans’s Threads from the Refugee Crisis and Yasmine Bouagga and Lisa Mandel’s Les nouvelles de la jungle de Calais are first person accounts meant to give access to introspective positions taken by allies. Developing works that combine interviews and first-person narratives of one’s presence with the interviewees borrows some of its characteristics from human interest journalism. In terms of their argumentative structure, both works use sensibly the same topics that have been identified by sociologist Luc Boltanski (1993). Agier (2015) describes the camp as a liminal space (hors-lieu), noting that, even as it tends to erase identities and enclose everybody within their refugee status, the fact that the migrant’s stories can be listened to is conducive for all those persons seeking refuge to reconnect with meaning in one’s life. The liminal space as described by Agier is represented in both books in a way that we can live it, experiencing the relationships that are woven within the camp and between the camp and local populations.