The Border Lives of the Unmourned: Olumide Popoola’s Refugee Stories “Counting Down” and “Expect Me”

Abstract

This chapter examines two short stories from the collection Breach. Olumide Popoola’s stories “Counting Down” and “Expect Me” are a fictionalised representation of real refugees’ stories from “the Jungle” refugee camp in Calais. In contrast to representations in mainstream media, these stories give a “face” (Levinas) to the otherwise anonymous mass of refugees that crossed European national borders during the so-called refugee crisis of 2015/2016. They make the lives of refugees visible and their deaths grievable by recounting their stories instead of counting their numbers. Furthermore, the two stories transgress the borders of normative representation and subject formation through de- and reconstructing narrative agency, othering and identity.