In Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea (2001) the supplicant claiming asylum in Britain conceals his knowledge of English. Later, having dropped the deception, he justifies the silence: “I preferred not to.” In this deliberate echo of Melville’s Bartelby a complicated relationship between silence and assertion is seen; a relationship which resonates in recent fictions of asylum seekers and illegal immigrants in Britain. The unwanted body within the national space is easily inscribed with the racist fantasies of the majority. Accepting the name of asylum seeker and illegal immigrant inevitably facilitates the mobilisation of an oppressive machinery, yet to retreat from naming and seek shelter in anonymity and silence risks an effacement of identity or, at the very least, precludes the act of assertion that makes possible the claim to rights.
This paper looks at a range of recent novels in Britain to excavate forms of articulation of the selfhood of the unwelcome foreigner that attempt to evade containment within degrading labelling while preserving the integrity of the enunciating subject. I suggest that this articulation must always refuse the self-defeating consolation of silence, and instead insist on the claims of the subject as a bearer of rights by deferring meaning and emphasizing an encoded gap between speaker and utterance that dislocates racist fantasy. The deferral of meaning caused by the dissonant act of speaking allows for a conception of rights that can perhaps begin to avoid current patronising discourses of rights that too easily symbolically disenfranchise the materially dispossessed.