Making sense of exile as a family

This chapter aims to bring together conceptual and methodological insights from discourse and memory studies in order to understand how families experience and make sense of exile. The concept of ‘Family memory’ (Švaříčková Slabáková, 2021) aims to capture the ways in which the family knowledge (i.e., their collective identity, as well as the dispositions and orientations transmitted intergenerationally) are shaped and transmitted amongst different family members. Discourse, in the form of storytelling, plays a central role in this process; it is by recounting stories, perhaps associated with family artefacts, that families can relate to their past. The data for this chapter come from a sociolinguistic ethnographic research project with a group of Colombian families exiled in London. The chapter focusses specifically on the members of two families in which the parents’ work as social leaders exposed them to harassment, political agitation, and death threats. This obliged them to make ¬¬the decision to flee Colombia with their children, more than twenty years ago. Drawing on ethnographic notes from the time we have spent with the families, including both individual and group interviews with other family members, and on collected artifacts, we interrogate the memories of exile that are recounted in these families and what younger members of the family do with these memories. We ask how these younger members, mainly daughters, make sense of their past and deal with it in order to project a future. More precisely, we will ask how the young daughters of both the families understand ‘Colombia’, a motherland in which they have never lived, but images of which they borrow from their parents, and how these understandings influence their own engagement in social and political activities.