At the 2009 TEDTalk, the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie spoke insightfully about “the danger of a single story.” She argued that when we characterize people as one thing, that is who they become. Amidst Europe’s refugee crisis, the media and other information sources circulated a single story about refugees where they were univocally characterized as abject, miserable, and helpless. Such stories render invisible the specificities of experiences of refugees and asylum seekers by erecting a generalized portrait of abject victimhood. Furthermore, these essentialized representations raise important questions about the very communicability of trauma caused by forced displacement. In this essay, I explore the function of the imaginary in redressing the need for what Chinua Achebe has described as “a balance of stories,” especially in the context of disenfranchised groups such as refugees who have limited access to self-representation. Sénouvo Agboto Zinsou’s novel Le Médicament is an example of a text that engages with the specificities of statelessness and explores how refugees negotiate liminal situations such as living in transit camps. The representational strategies that Zinsou uses make apparent the socio-political vectors that undergird the refugee condition. Such a portrayal, I argue, veers away from the myth of passive victimhood of refugees, that is propped up and circulated by mainstream media, and instead shows the innumerable ways in which refugees claim their agency through a careful negotiation of the marginal spaces they inhabit. Representations of refugees have been a vexing issue: on the one hand, they seem too essentialized and on the other hand, the trauma of displacement seems incommunicable. Scholars such as Liisa Malkki and Prem K. Rajaram have commented about the representations of refugees in media and in human rights discourses, which show a tendency to portray refugees as universal victims. Citing Feldman, Malkki writes:

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超越“光秃秃的生活”：推翻SénouvoAgbota Zinsou的《悲剧》中的难民定型观念

在2009年TEDTalk上，尼日利亚作家Chimamanda Adichie深刻地谈到了“单一故事的危险”。她认为，当我们将人们描述为一件事时，那就是他们成为谁。在欧洲难民危机中，媒体和其他信息来源散发了一个关于难民的单一故事，这些难民被鲜明地描述为苦难，悲惨和无助。这样的故事通过竖立一幅广泛的受虐受害者画像，使难民和寻求庇护者的经历的特殊性无形。此外，这些本质化的表示提出了有关由强迫流离失所引起的创伤的高度可传播性的重要问题。在本文中，我探讨了虚构人物在解决Chinua Achebe所说的“故事平衡，”尤其是在被剥夺权利的群体（例如难民，他们很难获得自我代表权）的背景下。塞努沃·阿格博托·津索（SénouvoAgboto Zinsou）的小说《 LeMédicament》是一部文本的例子，该文本涉及无国籍状态的特殊性，并探讨了难民如何解决诸如居住在过境营地中的情况。Zinsou使用的代表性策略使支持难民状况的社会政治媒介变得显而易见。我认为，这种描述偏离了主流媒体支持和散布的难民被动受害神话，而是显示了难民通过谨慎地协商其所居住的边际空间来索取其代理权的无数种方式。 。难民代表制一直是一个令人头疼的问题：一方面，他们似乎过于必要，另一方面，流离失所的创伤似乎是无法传达的。诸如Liisa Malkki和Prem K. Rajaram之类的学者评论了难民在媒体和人权话语中的代表性，这表明人们倾向于将难民描述为普遍受害者。Malkki引用费尔德曼的话写道：