Blommaert Jan, Investigating narrative inequality : home narratives of African asylum seekers in Belgium. 1 FWO Research group on Language, Power and Identity LPI Working paper Nr 1 Gent, 1999. http://bank.rug.ac.be/lpi Investigating narrative inequality: >Home narratives= of African asylum seekers in Belgium Jan Blommaert University of Gent Abstract: Home narratives are particular sub-narratives found in stories told by African asylum seekers in Belgium, in which details of the situation in their home society, the conflict from which they fled, and their own position in that conflict are being sketched and documented. Despite the fact that they contain sometimes crucial elements for an understanding of their motives to apply for asylum, they are hardly ever taken into account in the asylum procedure. The story told by asylum seekers is molded into a text- ideology in which home narratives are seen as >noise=. In this paper, we first touch upon the issue of linguistic-communicative resources: the >broken = varieties of European languages in which asylum seekers tell their stories. Next, the structure and functions of home narratives are explored, with special emphasis on their role as contextualizing, localizing discourse. Finally, the role of such narratives in the asylum procedure is discussed, and the contrast in contextualizing directions between home narratives and text trajectories in the procedure is highlighted. Keywords: narrative, contextualization, institutional discourse, inequality, asylum seekers, Belgium.