Art-based, narrative research with unaccompanied migrant children living in Johannesburg, South Africa

Migrant children are often represented through stereotypical narratives by media, governments and even researchers. These representations range from institutional narratives that reduce their experience to “pre-flight, flight, post flight” to psychological narratives that can represent them as traumatized victims of war. Using narratives collected over five years with unaccompanied migrant children, this paper shows that their past and present realities are perceived by the children to be much more complex and fragmented than the meta-narrative suggests. Additionally, their identities are so much more than “victim.” The narratives were collected through an art-making process with 27 children who had fled political conflicts in central and southern Africa and were now living in Johannesburg. Through a literal and internal “open space” created by the art-making, the children made some measure of meaning from the extreme events they had experienced. Often this meaning-making was done through the art alone, sometimes through stories told in metaphor and sometimes in small fragments that were pieced together over time. The narratives that emerged allow the children to be seen in their own terms and present us with what Chinua Achebe would call a “balance of stories” that move beyond the stereotypes that dominate our view.