‘To live well is to story well’: Co-writing and Polyphonic Writing with Denmark’s Asylum Community

Through the prisms of Halleh Ghorashi’s ‘polyphonic writing’, Miranda Fricker’s ‘epistemic injustice’, and the field of performance writing, this chapter reflects on two co-writing processes with Denmark’s asylum community. They share the contextual framework of Trampoline House, a refugee justice community in Copenhagen, being invited to contribute to the 2022 Documenta 15 festival held in Kassel, Germany. Firstly, collaborator Jean Claude Mangomba Mbombo and I conducted critical and creative writing workshops across the House and the camps, which culminated in making Guest Books, containing pieces from the workshops and writing prompts that the museumgoers could reflect on and respond to, thereby creating possibility for cross-border dialogue. Secondly, I wrote stories in close collaboration with two residents of Avnstrup Asylum Center, The Banker and Ali Gholami, for the magazine, visAvis—Voices on Asylum and Migration. Tying this examination together is Behrouz Boochani and Omid Tofighian’s suggestion that stories are integral for ‘living life well’ (No Friend but the Mountains. Sydney: Picador, 2018, 375), here used to reflect on writing across both space and the ‘complex set of historical, cultural, legal and ethical relations [between] citizens of nation-states and citizens of humanity only’ (Cox et al., Refugee Imaginaries: Research Across the Humaneties. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020, 4).