• Avirup Ghosh

This paper intends to explore the migrant’s understanding of space and distances in A Seventh Man (1975) by John Berger and Jean Mohr. Considering that the conditions under which forced emigration takes place are often dehumanising, can the migrant worker still bring back communicable experiences and form solidarity? This paper will try to establish a relation between migration and photography – both of which concern absences. The photographs in the book are not conceived as illustrations but as a kind of collaborative text to go along with the written words. Generically unclassifiable, the book is an assemblage of images, poems, anecdotes and statistical data. This paper will examine the porous nature of Berger’s writing that allows literary genres to cross over (like immigrants) to other territories, and the usefulness of this kind of writing for recording experiences of exile and migration. It will also critique the ethical assumptions behind writing the book and examine how, despite the data presented in the book being outdated, it still is relevant in the 21st century when economic fascism has come to dominate the global economic order and the power of the national governments and trade unions has diminished, and when factories have become as movable as workers. Speculations will be considered whether, like the archaic figures of the resident master craftsman and the travelling journeyman in Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller”, the figure of the migrant worker, whose acts of survival involve cunning and innovations, can also be considered a repository of smuggled stories.

John Berger, Migration, Storytelling,

"Ways of Reading Migrant Experience: A Seventh Man", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.8, Issue 10, page no.b59-b71, October-2021, Available :http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR2110108.pdf

"Ways of Reading Migrant Experience: A Seventh Man", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org | UGC and issn Approved), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.8, Issue 10, page no. ppb59-b71, October-2021, Available at : http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR2110108.pdf