Re-rooting stories: refugee subjectivities and the Tree of Life in South Africa

What might emerge when we create a space where refugees and asylum seekers are invited to share their stories not only through pain, displacement, and trauma, but also through the strength that runs alongside and through their experiences? This presentation shares preliminary insights and findings from a narrative-informed research intervention conducted with refugees and asylum seekers in Cape Town, South Africa, where participants engaged in the Tree of Life—a collective narrative practice grounded in the approach developed by the Dulwich Centre in Adelaide and crafted to support individuals and communities facing collective traumatic experiences in re-authoring their lives through shared storytelling. In a context shaped by xenophobia, exclusion, and daily precarity, the Tree of Life became a space where participants could trace their roots, honour their strengths, and imagine new futures. Through symbolic metaphors such as the tree, the forest, and the storm, migration was narrated not only as rupture, but also as endurance, resistance, and belonging. Rather than presenting the Tree of Life as a definitive tool of liberation, the presentation concludes with a critical reflection on its possibilities and limitations. How can narrative practices like this support liberatory processes without becoming prescriptive or reductive? And how can we, as researchers and practitioners, continue to hold space for stories that humanise without simplifying, that foster healing without silencing pain? In response to AVReQ’s call to move beyond pathologizing frameworks, this work reflects on what it means to listen otherwise—and to witness the powerful work of collective narrative resistance.