Story as refuge

Bambo Soyinka will explore the ways in which story can act as a lifeboat: both refuge to and from liberation. Her provocation will begin with an exploration of the Trickster mythology. In the second part of the presentation, we will see what, if anything, trickster can teach us about the freedom to author stories and the freedom to author life. It has been written that creative writing in prisons is a kind of refuge, ‘the only legal form of escape’*. However, in response to Bambo’s provocation Ella will suggest that escape is an equivocal notion. While it is possible to get pulled through the long drag of a sentence by taking flight on the wing of fictional form, narrative also has powerful potential for those who want to reshape their lives in ways that defy the straight and narrow path of conventional reform. Stories, in this view, don’t stay on the page, they break out of their cage, narrative is no longer contained within its plot, and becomes a defiance not a compliance to the rules that once held it prisoner to someone else’s history