Reflective Encounters

“Stories are the means by which entire peoples define themselves, conduits between the past and the present which set the directions for the future. They need not be verbose to carry potency: “Make America Great Again” trumped Hemingway’s famously concise tale – “for sale: baby shoes, never worn” – by two words, and its narrative of a return to an unspecified glorious past was enough to carry its standard-bearer to the highest office in the country. There is a clear echo of that departed demagogue’s rhetoric in Salvation Has No Name, depicting a priest ordering the construction of a wall between islanders and a newly-arrived refugee, though the refugee’s arrival in a small boat evokes a further allegorical layer closer to British shores. 

The specifics may differ, but xenophobia is at root the same tall tale wherever it is told and whoever the teller may be. These stories may eventually ossify into orthodoxies, but brittleness is just weakness in a different form; the defensiveness of Empire apologists in recent years is if anything a tacit acknowledgment of the fragility of that handed-down narrative. Such stories can be retold, and Salvation Has No Name makes an eloquent plea for those hitherto silenced voices finally to be heard.”

— Jonathan Bygraves