Sanctuary by Marina Warner review – the power of stories in an age of migration

The Guardian

17-06-2025

Marina Warner begins this dazzlingly protean book with a distinctly mundane memory. It is the 1950s, she is a young teen, and the highlight of her week is going to the Saturday morning 'flicks' with a neighbour's slightly older daughter. One particular movie scene has stayed with her: it involves a man dressed in a vaguely historical costume who is fleeing for his life. Face contorted with terror, he makes it as far as the door of a cathedral, whereupon he knocks loudly and cries 'Sanctuary!' The door opens a crack, the man slides inside, and the Saturday morning audience breaths a collective sigh of relief. Even if the plot points remain hazy – is Robin Hood somehow involved? – the underlying principle needs no explaining. The fugitive has invoked the ancient right by gaining entrance to a designated sacred space. As long as he stays put his pursuers can't touch him.
From these hyper-local beginnings, Warner sets out to explore and expand what 'sanctuary' means in an age when millions are on the move around the world, chased out of their homes by environmental disaster, economic collapse, war and political oppression.
It is in these grim circumstances that she proposes a new concept of sanctuary, one built not from bricks and mortar or even tents and blankets, but by tales and their telling. Over the past 50 years of her distinguished career as a cultural historian, Warner has immersed herself in liminal literature, tracing the way that fairytales, playground chants, lullabies, fables, patter and ditties manage to evade the censor, slip under the radar, and slide into conversations without attracting too much attention. Now she suggests putting these folk forms to work, using them to build bridges and forge connections between arrivants (a term she prefers to 'migrants') and their often hostile hosts.
It is at this point that sceptics might ask how Warner's proposed 'commons of wonder', filled with stories of myth and magic, can possibly help with the practical needs of displaced people more likely to be worried about clean water, healthcare, a job and, above all, the legal right to remain.
This is a challenge that she knows well and has spent her career confronting. Her earliest books on the Virgin Mary (1976), Joan of Arc (1981) and, especially, female statuary (the magnificent Monuments and Maidens, 1985), all made the case for allegorical forms having a powerful conditioning effect on the way that people understand and experience their own lives. She got critical flak for it, as well as a great deal of praise. Decades on she shows no signs of being abashed, insisting as strongly as ever that storytelling can function as a 'binding agent' between strangers, creating spaces for concepts of justice and coexistence to develop. As back-up she deploys the British anthropologist Alfred Gell's useful phrase 'art as agency' to underscore her belief that telling stories has real-world consequences.
This won't be enough to convince everyone, yet even the most literal-minded critic must admire Warner's commitment to making things happen. In 2015 she won the prestigious Holberg prize and used her £380,000 winnings to help set up Stories in Transit, a project designed to facilitate the exchange of stories between the young people, mostly men, who daily arrive in Sicily from the Middle East, the Maghreb, Bangladesh, Pakistan and the eastern Mediterranean. What might emerge, Warner wanted to know, if these travellers and their tales were encouraged to mix and mingle?
Din from Guinea, where civil strife has destroyed his family, arrived in Sicily after a two-year trek by foot across the Sahara followed by a journey across the Mediterranean in a boat. During a Stories in Transit workshop he tells a traditional tale from home called The Huntsman, the King's Son and the Enchanted Deer, a spirited mashup of politics and magic, comedy and sorrow, with one tale nestled inside another in the manner of One Thousand and One Nights. What strikes the comparatist in Warner is the way that this Guinean tale echoes animal stories from both the medieval Arab world and the even older Aesop's Fables. Still, it is not where a story has come from that concerns her so much as where it is going. Over the course of several sessions, The Huntsman, the King's Son and the Enchanted Deer develops into a promenade piece, complete with puppetry, song and animated film. From here another arrivant, this time from Gambia, takes the spirit of Din's story and turns it into something quite distinct, a comic parable with music called One for You and One for Me.
Sceptics once again might worry that this privileging of fantastical and shape-shifting narratives strikes the wrong note in a world where truth has become slippery and facts are optional. But Warner is ready for them, pointing out that the world in which the arrivants live is already fictional. Rhetorically marshalled into 'hordes' or 'swarms', these 'aliens' are routinely denigrated as 'scroungers' and even 'criminals'. The official maps that tell them where they have come from and where they should go are also imaginary, continually redrawn in the wake of colonial and nationalistic carve-ups that frequently take little account of linguistic, cultural and ethnic affinities.
There is another reason Warner feels strongly about encouraging the arrivants to play fast and loose with the materials to hand. At every stage in their hazardous journey they have been required to narrate their life stories to officials in particular ways if they are to be allowed to proceed to the next stage in their search for sanctuary. The dates must be right, the dangers consistent, and motives must be pure, involving escape from tyranny rather than desire for a better job. To deviate from the first telling of an account is to risk deportation. As a result, suggests Warner, in an exquisitely attuned reading of the situation, arrivants are sealed into versions of themselves that take no account of their changing feelings and experience. It is in this context that making up stories becomes vital in ensuring a form of survival that is as psychically healthy as it is physically safe.
Sanctuary: Ways of Telling, Ways of Dwelling by Marina Warner is published by William Collins (£22). To support the Guardian buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.