English Language and Literature Commons^™

Unfairy Tales And Other Refugee Stories: Creating Relations Through The Humanitarian Imagination In Mohsin Hamid's Exit West And Helen Oyeyemi's Gingerbread, Gabriella Pishotti

Graduate Student Scholarship

Contrary to many analyses of refugee narratives that focus on how their subject matter becomes compromised by issues of authority, believability, and expectation, this article explores how refugee novels such as Mohsin Hamid's Exit West and Helen Oyeyemi's Gingerbread lean into such problems in a way that appeals to the humanitarian imagination. These novels recognize the incomprehensibility of the refugee experience and play upon this reality by intermixing their stories with fairy tale elements. In doing so, the tropes of fairy tales provide these stories with greater narrative flexibility while making the unfamiliar realities of refugees comprehensible through familiar narrative …