MIGRATION is one of the most talked-about subjects in Scotland today – now a new mixed-media installation at the Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) looks at it using the voices asylum seekers who have gone through the interview process to remain in this country.

In I Am Just My Words audience members don headphones to hear Elif, Hasani, Jade and others relate their deeply personal experiences from a Home Office substantive interview – the stage at which applicants have the chance to state their case.

An accompanying play, The Claim, is running at Summerhall, charting the journey of a single asylum claim. Writer Tim Cowbury and director Mark Maughan describe it as a “bold, imaginative response to the stories of those seeking refuge in the UK”, which asks what happens “when your life is at stake and all you have to save it are your words”.

They say one of the refugee testimony from Elif, will be used by the Home Office to help train staff in preparation for interviewing asylum seekers in cases involving medical evidence.

She is from Turkey, where tens of thousands of people were detained and many beaten, tortured and raped after a failed coup in 2016.

Elif said it was hard to manage her feelings about the interview, and how “desperate and helpless” she was. “I was like someone thrown out of the world. I was alone, much as I would have been on leaving hell,” she says. “Hell is Turkey and I didn’t want to go back there because of what might happen in this interview. It was very frightening … To me it looked like purgatory, not an interview, but a court case.”

She said the interview worried her because she had been in court in Turkey, which was “political”.

“All the bad things that happened in the court in Turkey remained in my head. I did not realise that this interview was different,” Elif added.

She couldn’t remember if her cousin took her to the interview or if she went alone, but said it didn’t matter after they took her to a little room with a big table and two men.

“Oh my God,” she says. “The room was the same as a police cell, small and no windows ... They asked me many questions, ‘How did the police treat me? How many men raped me? Could I give them any evidence proving this? Could I give them any evidence about the torture?’ It was as if my body was shedding its skin.

I wanted to say, ‘stop it, I can’t go on, I can’t, I can’t.’ “Why couldn’t they have been women – a woman interpreter and a woman home officer?

“I felt dead explaining about my rape to those men. I went to the toilet many times and washed my face ... I wanted them to stop the interview. But they didn’t. I thought if I stopped telling them what had happened to me they would send me back to hell in Turkey. I didn’t yet know that they were robots.”

Elif said she felt guilty after the interview, “as though I deserved everything that had happened to me in my life”.

She said: “It was all my fault. Their body language and their questions made me feel guilty. I had no-one to share my feelings with. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t. I felt like an empty vessel and only cried in my heart.”

Another asylum seeker, Hasani, said he froze after being asked: “Why are you here?”

He didn’t know how to respond but after “what seemed like an eternity”, he found his voice: “I fear for my life. ‘What do you fear?’ was the next question. ‘What was the last thing that happened to you that made you want to leave?’ A flood of memories came rolling back, wave after wave, but I had no choice but to endure the grilling in order to get the papers.

“After three hours the interview came to an end. It never occurred to me then that it was only the beginning, that after … my interview I would be reporting to the immigration office regularly, week in week out, for years.”

The show was three years in development, during which the company worked with asylum seekers and refugees. It has been backed by education and cultural agency Unesco and migrant organisations such as Freedom from Torture and Right to Remain.

Cowbury told The National: “The Home Office using this testimony – one written in response to our play by someone who themselves went through the traumatic process of claiming asylum – means more than any plaudits or prizes the play could win. This project was always about challenging institutionalised British prejudice towards refugees.

Sheila Hayman runs Freedom from Torture’s Write to Life group, which helped develop the play and audio, which was listened to by audiences when it went on tour.

She said: “After that, one of the pieces was played, via Freedom from Torture’s contacts, to senior asylum case holders at the Home Office, and is now going to be part of the official Home Office training for asylum case assessors.

“So, The Claim has already changed the way asylum seekers are regarded by the UK Home Office and Border Agency.”

The Home Office has been approached for comment.

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