Language, identity and resilience: young refugees in contemporary English fiction

This article seeks to explore ways in which young refugees in Europe are constructed in contemporary narrative texts that place special emphasis on the role language plays for young characters in particularly fraught interactions where lives are at risk and survival is not guaranteed. The novels chosen for this analysis are Benjamin Zephaniah’s Refugee Boy (2001) and Chris Cleave’s The Other Hand (2008); as this article argues, in both works “learning the Queen’s English” (Cleave 2004: 3) becomes a high priority for their pro- tagonists, and competence in the host country’s language acquires multiple meanings. Language becomes a passport for acceptance, a key to survival and a strategy to build resilience.