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The text examines the links between death in exile, whether potential, probable or actual, and the modalities of identity reconstruction at the individual and collective levels, through the prospect of perishing as a psychic and social reality present throughout the migratory experience, as an immanent fact, inherent to the perils of the journey, but also transcendent, linked to a political intention of dissuasion that can take on the appearance of destiny for the persons concerned. Based on therapeutic consultations in emergency shelters, the article looks at the different ways in which people in exile fleeing war, torture and genocidal persecution cope with the terror of the prospect of probable death, the defence mechanisms against the violence they have suffered, and the reception and elaboration of death as a feared and actual reality for the subject, his or her community and civil society as a whole. Burial in the land of exile according to rites that mark the cultural anchorage of the deceased allows us to explore one of the possible modalities of reappropriation of a post-mortem identity both for the deceased and for their communities of belonging and reference. The example of the Algerians in New Caledonia illustrates the construction of an intercultural identity based on the creation of a Muslim cemetery at the end of the 19th century, which serves as a means of inscribing identity in a land of exile by inscribing bodies that have died in migration. Finally, to exist through the mediatisation of one’s death, in the absence of having been recognised during one’s lifetime in one’s suffering humanity, is characteristic of people who died during a migratory journey marked by systemic violence. The inclusion of funeral practices in a cultural order specific to one’s culture of origin can be both a taming of the land of exile, which thus becomes a land of welcome, and a rehabilitation of one’s capacity for self-determination, constitutive of one’s recognition as a subject.