Un atelier d’écriture pour les exilés : une question de statut

This article considers the value of creative writing workshops for exiles. It draws on the author’s experience of multilingual creative writing workshops for students and for families engaged in therapy, and on the workshop that was organised for an international symposium on the theme of exile in 2015. It examines the proposition from the perspective of the exiles (an umbrella heading including economic migrants and refugees), then for research purposes. How can exiles benefit from a creative writing workshop? How can researchers interpret the writing produced during a workshop, given its hybrid textual status? Indeed, creative writing workshops are not designed to elicit first-hand testimonies as such, but to open a path to the imagination. However, today’s interdisciplinary tendency should help researchers approach these texts. Moreover, workshops are a form of intersubjective cultural mediation; this one, which is multilingual, takes its cue from English-language poetry and theory, postcolonial and transcultural, and directs the writing exercises towards issues relating to biculturality or an intersubjective pursuit of a multiple self. The outline of the workshop on exile, with facsimiles of the participants’ handwritten texts, can be consulted on line