“On Their Own Terms”: Agency, Advocacy and Representation in Refugee Webcomics

ABSTRACT

In Australia, refugees remain on the margins of the public imaginary as subjects of aversion, erasure and suspicion. The unknowability of the foreign Other carries sharp political dimensions borne out in policies of strict border control and mandatory detention that have restricted public access to the voices and stories of refugees for over two decades. However, recent life narratives by refugees provide an antidote to this dominant discourse, by testifying to the traumatic precariousness of living in detention and confronting readers with unflinching visual displays of subjects often silenced and invisible. Safdar Ahmed’s Walkley Award–winning documentary webcomic, Villawood: Notes from an Immigration Detention Centre (2015), documents the lives, experiences and drawings of detainees in Sydney’s Villawood Immigration Detention Centre. This article reads Villawood as an example of the vital rhetorical and representative work done by webcomics to expose the violences of Australia’s border spaces and put the personal stories of detainees in dialogue with vast audiences online. By attending to the collaborative and mediated process of its construction, this article maps the critical literacies needed to interpret webcomics as testimony and considers what this medium might offer life narrative studies and the project of ethical witnessing more broadly.

KEYWORDS:

• Safdar Ahmed
• autographics
• webcomics
• comics journalism
• refugees

Narratives of disruption, extremity and the limits of the human pervade literature around and about refugees and people seeking asylum in Australia. Gillian Whitlock argues that powerful, incarnate emotions are attached to these subjects—suspicion, fear, contempt, anger—that “trigger passionate engagement and estrangement alike”.¹ Stanley Cohen writes more explicitly that the Australian public is primed to respond to the plight of forced migrants in “a single, virtually uninterrupted message of hostility and rejection”.² Discourse that constructs refugees as a threat to the nation-state, and produces anxieties around belonging and citizenship, carries sharp political dimensions. Australia’s borders constitute fraught spaces in which sovereign powers are enforced through the mobilisation of policies and politics designed to discredit the humanity of refugees, particularly those who travel by boat.³ However, recent life narratives by refugees provide an antidote to these dominant discourses, by testifying to the traumatic precariousness of living in detention and confronting readers with unflinching visual displays of subjects who are often rendered silenced and invisible.

A critical junction between both major Australian political parties for the last 20 years has been the dehumanisation of refugees through performances of “political closure” explicitly invested in securitisation against a perceived invasion from threatening foreign Others.⁴ The federal election campaign of 2001 distils the various and violent dangers of Australia’s border policies, as the incumbent Liberal–National Coalition, led by then Prime Minister John Howard, deployed a propaganda campaign that sought to depersonalise the humanity of refugees as an issue of national security, referring to “floods” or “waves” of displaced peoples bound for Australia.⁵ The sociopolitical conditions established by prevailing notions of “us” threatened by “them” were enforced through the implementation of the Pacific Solution, a policy that transported so-called illegal arrivals to offshore detention centres on the Pacific Islands of Manus and Nauru in Papua New Guinea. Predicated on the Coalition’s 2013 federal election campaign promise to “Stop the Boats”, Operation Sovereign Borders was later enacted to further restrict border mobility by prohibiting Suspected Illegal Entry Vessels (SIEVs) from entering Australian waters. These official policies garnered bipartisan support and, combined with strict scrutinisation from the Department of Home Affairs and its predecessor, the Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs, have successfully restricted public knowledge of the asylum process, and the refugees suspended between its systems, for over two decades.

Against the weaponisation of Australia’s border spaces and the totalising effects of indefinite detention, the voices and stories of transnational subjects emerge in increasingly communicative and creative forms of self-expression. In particular, life narratives that converge visual, verbal and performance modes—what Whitlock terms “autographics”—are powerful sites for refugees to represent their complex relationships to national space.⁶ Conceptualised as “life narrative fabricated in and through drawing and design using various technologies, modes, and materials”, autographics are a mode of self-display that demands “a practice of reading the signs, symbols, and techniques of visual arts”.⁷ These artistic interventions necessitate a critical approach to “showing and telling” that prioritises the ambiguities and silences embedded in experiences of forced mobility in ways that may preclude written testimony and storytelling.⁸

This article reads documentary webcomics as a form of autographics that affiliates the visual-verbal conventions of graphic narrative with modes of production and publication online to establish vital dialogues between individual artists and diverse digital audiences. For Michel Eliatamby-O’Brien and Daniella Trimboli, autographics can “effectively capture the turbulent experience of diaspora while allowing individuals to reinsert themselves—by a literal ‘drawing in’—into a past that has become temporally isolated though affectively recurrent”.⁹ Their recent work in migration studies suggests the significance of the term “digital autographics” as a mode of self-representation that addresses the slippages in narrativising displacement and consolidates the “migratory rupture” at the centre of diasporic experience.¹⁰

In line with a groundswell of testimonies published and circulated online that centre the unknowability of detention, this article argues that digital autographics such as webcomics reveal both the urgency of autobiographical writing by refugees and the dynamic literary and visual forms through which these stories emerge in the 21st century. Safdar Ahmed’s Walkley Award–winning documentary webcomic, Villawood: Notes from an Immigration Detention Centre, is a prominent example of the rhetorical and representative work done by webcomics to expose the violences of Australia’s border spaces by inscribing this experience through personal stories of displacement.

A collaboration between Australian artist and academic Ahmed and detainees of Sydney’s Villawood Immigration Detention Centre, Villawood employs both drawn and digital modalities to convey the hostility of a detention system that dehumanises those who occupy an ambiguous space between nations. Crucially, the webcomic braids Ahmed’s own autobiographical experience as a visitor to Villawood with testimony and artwork from those still awaiting resettlement in Australia. In reanimating refugee identity and experience, the webcomic “fits with many recent refugee and migrant comics projects that use the form to interrupt static media images with the plenitude, fragmentation, and unruliness of the comic’s page”.¹¹ Comics and graphic narratives establish particular methods for interrogating connections between experience, history and testimony. As Hillary Chute writes, comics on war and atrocity present a visual distillation of time and space that is disposed to representing traumatic experiences habitually thought unspeakable, invisible and unknowable.¹² Unlike other visual documentary modes, such as photographs or film, the plenitude of the graphic medium directs attention towards complex, fragmented experiences that frame and fill gaps of meaning.¹³

Villawood works within this mode to acknowledge what has been denied by the Australian Government: the everyday, intimate lives of refugees who build and occupy space in diaspora.¹⁴ Ahmed’s darkly illustrative style—specifically, his thick line work and bold colour palette—foregrounds the humanity of refugees often obfuscated by rhetorical labels of “boat people”, “illegals” and “queue jumpers”.¹⁵ In this way, the webcomic disrupts ways of perceiving “the migrant gaze” that pervade culture and politics, highlighting the rupture and fluidity of refugee livelihood through digital (and thus networked) autographic displays.¹⁶ This article explores the radical mobility of Villawood, across internet platforms and towards online audiences, that shares synergies with the decentred identity positions of refugees themselves, whose lives largely occupy “the realm of stateless” between shifting borders and nations.¹⁷ In engaging Villawood as a key example of how webcomics function as sites for powerful visual-digital testimony, this article considers what the medium might offer life narrative studies, a discipline attentive to the value and urgency of personal stories as well as their ethical and aesthetic dimensions. As life narrative trends continue to prioritise marginalised stories and web-based forms of activism, webcomics raise questions around agency, advocacy and representation in refugee testimony—particularly, how these stories call readers to form affective and ethical connections to complex subjects caught in the violent spaces between geopolitical borders.

Mediation, Collaboration and Comics Journalism

Writing on Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Rocío Davis argues that “contemporary transcultural autobiographies negotiate renewed forms of experiences” and work as “experimental and revisionary narratives, which challenge textual authority and prescriptive paradigms”.¹⁸ As a medium with antecedents in complex autographical display that exploits a networked position within the sharing ecologies of the internet, webcomics centred on marginalised subjects also negotiate thematic and representational forms of revision. Understanding how Villawood puts lived experience in dialogue with larger questions of cultural and political mobility requires some brief context from comics journalism, a form of literary reportage that blends words and images with personal, politicised representations of news and current events.

Emerging amid the burgeoning cultural authority of comics and graphic narratives, comics journalism draws legibly from the New Journalism movement of the 1960s to document and testify to experiences otherwise neglected by mainstream news media.¹⁹ The movement came to cultural recognition primarily through the work of Joe Sacco, an artist whose specific brand of non-fiction comics uses techniques of self-referential, investigative reportage to critique and engage with foreign conflict and atrocity. Through the visual-verbal narrative tracks of comics, Sacco’s work ranges over military conflicts and geopolitical crises to interrogate ideological assumptions of nationhood and invoke human rights discourse pictorially through a “politics of recognition”.²⁰ A politics of recognition, according to Rebecca Scherr, includes “the modes in which certain groups and individuals claim humanness up against counter-discourses that attempt to establish the limits of human intelligibility within a specific context”.²¹ In the context of war, conflict and civil unrest, a politics of recognition frames the humanity of marginalised subjects against the very system that—through imprisonment, exile or dehumanisation—not only denies that humanity, but also “frames who counts as ‘human’ and who does not”.²²

From the print tradition of comics journalism, increasingly dynamic digital autographics are changing the way political discourse functions, implying certain kinds of relationships between their authors and audiences. In the last five years, for example, dedicated platforms for webcomics such as Cartoon Movement, The Nib and Upworthy capture audiences both attuned to, and shrouded from, the plight and rights of marginalised populations. In Australia, the Global Mail’s “A Guard’s Story” was a watershed moment for digital-visual forms of critique and dissent,²³ followed by others that address the silencing of the refugee experience: Nam Le and Matt Huynh’s interactive webcomic based on Le’s short story of the same name, The Boat; Alia Malek, Peter van Agtmael and Josh Neufeld’s The Road to Germany: $2400; and Audrey Quinn and Jackie Roche’s Syria’s Climate Conflict present a portion of the diversity of visual styles and documentary narratives that bring crises of transnational atrocity and violence to a digital reading public.²⁴

Villawood marks a powerful contribution to a growing portfolio of webcomics that document the hidden suffering of refugees through frames of intimacy, identity and affect. Ahmed’s expansion of the webcomic into the book-length graphic narrative, Still Alive: Notes from Australia’s Immigration Detention System, in 2021 connects it formally to an established canon of comics journalism.²⁵ Arguably the most celebrated Australian comic in the literary mainstream, Still Alive adopts the premise of the original webcomic, weaving together stories and drawings from refugees in Villawood Immigration Detention Centre with Ahmed’s experience as a volunteer community worker and visitor.²⁶ Important distinctions between the digital and print versions emerge, as Ahmed frames and contextualises the testimony of refugees with greater attention to the history of Australia’s punitive detention system—and, interestingly, he includes larger autobiographical sections reflecting on his ethical responsibility as a citizen also implicated in his government’s treatment of refugees.

This adjustment in Ahmed’s position—from background observer and narrator in the webcomic to autobiographical avatar and agent in the print narrative—productively highlights the already present tensions and stakes of advocacy in life narrative that become pronounced through mediation. The personification of systemic issues such as forced migration and displacement is critical to cutting through the opacity of asylum processes and policy. But as Nina Mickwitz points out, ethical questions of representation and individual agency are needed to understand the wider context of reception in which these texts gain notoriety and acclaim.²⁷ For the refugees whose stories are inscribed in Villawood, “what is remembered and told is also situational, shaped not least through the contingencies of the encounter between narrator and listener and the power relationship between them”.²⁸

For Michael Jacklin, “an awareness of the circumstances of mediation” is essential to the process of exploring and reflecting on stories of arrival, departure, belonging and displacement in life narrative.²⁹ In comics journalism, this awareness is compounded by its broad ethos to narrativise visual depictions of atrocity in order to foster vital dialogue and connection between readers and subjects rendered foreign or other. In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag positions compassion, alongside pity and indignation, as the key affective sentiment aroused by images of suffering in news media.³⁰ Images of global precarity and displacement are perhaps the apex of compassion narrative, but they often require forms of advocacy from privileged stakeholders (that is, readers, translators, editors or publishers) who do not share this experience. While recognising that the humanity of refugees, people seeking asylum and other forcibly displaced communities often depends on sharing their stories, mediation in this context can be prohibitive or facilitative in determining how this testimony circulates within a larger body politic. Webcomics such as Villawood evince the significance of life narrative for intervening in the legal-political dynamics of silencing and, simultaneously, signal the densities introduced by the dissemination and circulation of these stories online, as digital mediation generates greater reach and accessibility for the human lives at the centre of a punitive migration system.

In Villawood, Ahmed engages in a complex process of mediation that, despite his relative privilege as a citizen of Australia, is mitigated and informed by his Indian-Muslim heritage and his role as lead organiser of the Refugee Art Project, a not-for-profit community arts organisation for those experiencing forced migration.³¹ Ahmed describes the project’s intent to “facilitate the agency and self-expression of people of an asylum seeker or refugee background, to deepen public understanding about the asylum seeker issue and the realities of Australia’s detention regime”.³² From 2011 to 2017, the core enterprise of the project involved running weekly art workshops in the visiting area of Villawood with incarcerated refugees awaiting settlement. There was little restriction on what participants could create; however, the extent that violent conditions of forced migration and claims processing had fundamentally affected their lives meant workshops more often solicited powerful testimonies of trauma and escapism. Ahmed explains: “Many had been held for around two years, after committing no crime, with no idea of when they would be released. This created intense uncertainty, stress and illness, and so our gatherings weren’t really ‘workshops’ as such, but social events where people could relax amongst friends and try to draw something fun or to develop a new skill.”³³

These collaborations between detainees and artists resulted in several creative publications and public exhibitions in Australia, including self-published zines of limited print runs that were later shared online via Tumblr, Instagram and Facebook. Emerging from these initial outputs, Villawood comprises drawings from consenting participants in workshops facilitated in 2011. Crucially, the work prioritises direct experiences of exile, isolation and diaspora that result from forced migration, though these decontextualised images are rhetorically linked by Ahmed’s own narration and storying. The collaborative process at the heart of the webcomic’s production thus contends with questions of representation and mediation by granting participants imaginative licence to “express themselves on their own terms”.³⁴ Their artistry brings into focus the brutality of state power and the dehumanising conditions of detention, “bearing witness to what would otherwise go unseen”.³⁵ In this way, Villawood intervenes in dominant perceptions of the foreign Other, aligning with detention comics that Candida Rifkind suggests “draw their subjects and readers closer together in a more engaged, intimate relationship of knowledge of the other and, crucially, the self, such that this dual recognition becomes a form of political intervention itself”.³⁶

Ahmed’s care for and commitment to making visible the plural and diverse lives of refugees contests official policies predicated on erasure and silence. As such, Villawood is politically salient in its attention towards the testimony, voices and images of refugees but also exercises deep awareness of the practices of mediation embedded in its creation and circulation online. Ahmed’s self-representation in the webcomic is overtly conscious of his artistic practice, which re-presents the likeness of detainees as avatars in addition to braiding their stories within a larger narrative driven by his own perspective. The risk of Ahmed’s mediation overwriting the storying of refugees deploys both the value and limitations of collaborative approaches, because although his autographical drawings outweigh those by detainees in the webcomic, they also rhetorically link and narrativise these images in ways that resonate with an audience.

Ahmed addresses these concerns in Villawood’s opening chapter, titled “First Impressions”, which adopts a self-reflexive narrative style reminiscent of Sacco to comment on the conditions of its production. In a close-up image, the top half of Ahmed’s face is set against a contained blue background, with heavy cross-hatching around the eyes illustrative of considerable anxiety. Thin, horizontal textboxes betray his thoughts: “I wonder about the refugees I’ll meet” … “Why did they flee their countries?” … “What have they really been through?” … “Could our politicians be right?”³⁷ These politicians are portrayed as headshots floating in the adjacent white space, whispering vitriol in Ahmed’s ears: “Economic migrants” … “Country shoppers!” … “Illegal arrivals”.³⁸ After listening to stories of trauma and oppression from refugees from Iran, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Myanmar, Ahmed contemplates the uncomfortable privilege of his position in the chapter’s closing image: “It’s enough to satiate my curiosity about refugees … and makes me feel like a prick for being so voyeuristic in the first place!”³⁹

Ahmed’s reflections engage questions around the ethics of witnessing, particularly the witnessing that intersects with marginal lives and identities, that have long occupied life narrative scholarship.⁴⁰ However, against the totalising space of detention, Villawood is suggestive of the value of collaborative approaches to life narratives that “cut across the divide between teller and listener, refugee and citizen”.⁴¹ In Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit, Whitlock’s analysis of refugee and asylum seeker life narrative addresses the platforms that mediate these testimonies—activist websites such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International or narrative anthologies compiled and edited by other advocacy groups—and suggests these fragments of mobile and disparate lives, constructed and controlled by editors, narrators and translators, have little hold over the Australian imaginary.⁴² Whitlock explores instead the impact of “wound culture”, a performative language in which detainees “write graffiti in blood, carve words on skin, and speak with sutured lips”, confronting readers in ways that stories written or framed by advocates cannot.⁴³ More recently, Whitlock has observed the role of digital technologies for micro activism, where mobile devices used to disseminate refugees’ experiences become essential to testimony that “stakes a claim to human rights and invokes the humanitarian obligations of citizens to strangers who seek sanctuary”.⁴⁴

Villawood demonstrates how the accessibility of the internet attracts and solicits personal yet politicised forms of life narrative, displaying its broad counter-discourse through the individual lens of personal experience. By archiving and preserving in the webcomic otherwise ephemeral drawings produced in workshops, Ahmed embeds “wound culture” within a narrative curated from the testimony of incarcerated refugees. Readers perceive the physical marks of prolonged anxiety (clenched fists, grinding teeth) and pictorial evidence of depression and self-harm (sutured lips, scarred limbs); in a particularly painful chapter, they even witness the death of Ahmad Ali Jafari, a Hazara refugee from Afghanistan who suffered a fatal heart attack in the centre. In this way, Villawood works in defiance of legal-political discourse surrounding refugees that positions them on the margins of the public imaginary, forcing readers to contend with this lived experience in ways that reshape what it means to be global citizens and citizens of the internet.

Critical Literacies: Digital Mobility and Reception Discourse as Poetics

Drawings of and by refugees in Villawood constitute an embodied narration of dissent: in moments between shocking woundedness, there exists an intimacy that directly contests ubiquitous images of forced migrants present in the nationalist news cycle. Such autographical representations of human rights suggest the specificity of visual testimony over other kinds of self-witness and disclosure—a testimony for which reading becomes a vicarious experience situated in personal ethics. In the context of photography and war, Judith Butler argues that ethical obligations emerge from engaging with media that leverages or necessitates the experiences of others:

When any of us are affected by the sufferings of others, it is not only that we put ourselves in their place or that they usurp our own place; perhaps it is the moment in which a certain chiasmic link comes to the fore and I become somehow implicated in lives that are clearly not the same as my own. And this happens even when we do not know the names of those who make their appeal to us or when we struggle to pronounce the name or to speak in a language we have never learned. At their best, some media representations of suffering at a distance compel us to give up our more narrow communitarian ties and to respond, sometimes in spite of ourselves, sometimes even against our will, to a perceived injustice.⁴⁵

The ethics of witnessing requires not only implicating oneself in ulterior lives, as Butler argues, but also confronting the invisible structural powers that manifest and uphold particular methods of perception. As this article discusses, a range of historical, cultural and political drivers enforce the unknowable threat of the complex migrant subject in Australia—a dynamic intended to obscure their humanity. Its citizens thus occupy an uneasy and contested position, with large populations of the country condemning these human rights abuses while remaining implicated in them. As Rebecca Scherr writes, readers of human rights narratives “are addressed not as passive viewers, but as active participants in the gathering and hearing of testimony; our engagement with the material is corporal, physical, intimate”.⁴⁶ For Wendy Kozol, autographics “engage with the challenges of viewing human rights crises” through the dual legibility of words and images, making reading a distinctly political and personally ethical act.⁴⁷ This act is further complicated by the broad accessibility and immediacy of the internet, wherein the individual reader also forms part of a larger digital audience capable of advocating for marginal subjects through various methods of collective web-based activism. How stories are transmitted, circulated and publicised online can determine the extent to which refugees and people seeking asylum, for instance, negotiate themselves into public consciousness.

The vital accessibility of webcomics such as Villawood to record and disseminate narratives of human mobility constitutes its significance as an emerging testimonial form. Ahmed’s personal narrative of visiting the detention centre is embedded with experiences of trauma, precarity and violence transcribed by its detainees, a feature that solicits empathetic engagement and investment from its audience. Featuring drawings curated for affective impact and large-scale visibility, Villawood offers a form of self-representation that signals the “complex and interconnected relationship between the agent, the media and the audience”.⁴⁸ These interactions between agent (or author) and audience—afforded by advancements in technology, including social media—suggest important shifts in the act of witnessing, particularly as self-representation through digital media has become a generic expectation of modern refugee life narratives.⁴⁹ Where detainees co-opt the communicative possibilities of the internet to expose human rights abuses or document claims processes, support from citizens and activists ensures these testimonies gain broad critical recognition. The ethical function of mediation is self-evident in this context, as the incarcerated and invisible subjects of Australia’s punitive immigration detention system have little recourse for sharing their experiences. Beyond Ahmed’s position as author and narrator, the digital environment and context in which Villawood initially found its audience contributes to its mediation, and it is this element of its aesthetics to which this article now turns.

Webcomics represent a rich and composite site for digital autography. Far more than simply a new distribution model for comics or graphic narratives, these works are infused with both materiality (the image) and technology (the internet) to deploy narratives that are fundamentally graphic but also mediated and networked in ways that call for “more advanced visual and cultural literacies”.⁵⁰ Establishing such literacies requires attending to the medium’s poetics—a method that engages meaningfully with visual devices of representation familiar to comics (for example, framing, pacing, visual language/style) and also with the digital affordances, properties and platforms that inform the presence and reception of webcomics online. A critical framework of poetics demonstrates the complexities inherent in representing life narrative through webcomics, as well as the potential for the medium to introduce new dynamics to the practice of reading. As extensions of the medium’s literary features, poetics not only encapsulates the content of webcomics but also locates the context, genesis and processes of production as central to understanding their representational and rhetorical aims.

Villawood was first published as a story on The Shipping News, an investigative arm of the digital journalism platform Medium in collaboration with Australian political activist group GetUp. The Shipping News is largely funded by public donations from GetUp’s members and was named for now famous remarks made in 2015 by then Minister for Immigration (and previous Australian Prime Minister) Scott Morrison: “It’s not the government’s job to run a shipping news service for the people smugglers.”⁵¹ Grants are awarded to Australian journalists travelling to, or reporting from, immigration detention centres, or whose work otherwise exhibits in-depth coverage of refugee issues in Australia.⁵² Ahmed received financial support from GetUp’s internal funding scheme to create Villawood, without which the webcomic may never have been produced. Thus, Villawood foregrounds a visual shift in online storytelling also evidenced by the confluence of GIFs, memes and emojis as communicative devices, while exposing the liminal avenues available for these stories to manoeuvre into public recognition.

How Villawood contributes to GetUp’s broader activist mission poses complex questions around the imaginative hold of life narrative in the digital sphere: What implications arise from encountering works that articulate unseen and unrecorded trauma when the conditions of online publication solicit highly visible forms of interaction? How is this encounter further complicated by an expectation that audiences advocate on behalf of marginalised subjects? In an era when reading and listening to life narrative online appears transactional, and “sharing links on social media has become the digital version of handing out pamphlets on street corners”, the virtual pathways through which these texts find an audience become vital to understanding the multiple levels in which they resonate.⁵³ As a webcomic without some of the medium’s interactive trademarks—sound, motion or animation, for example—Villawood’s digital components are situated in aspects of its publication and dissemination online that become important in differentiating its versions both online and in print.

Hundreds of readers accessed Villawood online via Medium, the Refugee Art Project Facebook page (with its 8,000 followers), the Walkley Foundation website, independent media site VICE and Safdar Ahmed’s personal website. Subsidiary to this initial circulation, the webcomic is linked to several digital literary publications, including the Guardian, Overland, Meanjin, The Lifted Brow and The Conversation, which situate Ahmed’s work within broader dialogues on the visibility of refugees in immigration detention. While it may seem peripheral to reading the powerful drawings embedded and mediated in Villawood, reception discourse reveals the mobility of refugee testimony online and the critical function of this movement as a poetic feature of webcomics.

Working within the sharing ecologies of the internet, with bolstered visibility through its connection to GetUp’s public networks and status, Villawood intervenes in the exclusionary tactics of immigration detention to make visible and legible experiences that evade public knowledge. Emerging from the legacy of comics journalism, its images constitute forms of documentation and evidence that resist the ways knowledge is controlled and delimited in neoliberal print news media. Understanding the poetics of webcomics as inherently linked to both drawn and digital technologies suggests areas of innovation for life narrative that seeks to self-witness and self-represent marginal lives. On subjects conferred in detention, constituted by secrecy and heavily policed by an authoritarian regime, webcomics ennoble audiences to receive stories of the foreign Other through frames of intimacy and recognition translated from comics traditions. In other words, webcomics highlight in marked ways how the internet and the autographic can together communicate to a wider polity and infiltrate unknown, unrepresentable subjects.

Thinking with and through webcomics as a combined digital and visual apparatus for life narrative means examining digital properties and platforms—features embedded in their production and dissemination—as part of the medium’s genesis and poetics. Attending to these elements provides one method for tracing the boundaries of webcomics as a representative medium and for distinguishing the role of the digital in these life narratives. The following section considers how this expanded view of a webcomic’s poetics might reveal new dynamics of place-making in refugee life narrative that are rendered visible through textured readings of their lives and experiences.

Embodied Dissent: Mapping “Unarrival” and “Placelessness” in Villawood

The circumstances of forced migration reveal the significance of place to the complex legal-political implications of citizenship and belonging. Refugees confound place-making in politically contingent and salient ways—more so than subjects of internal immigration, emigration and expatriation—as their experiences of trauma and isolation are dictated by the very conditions of official policies.⁵⁴ Eliatamby-O’Brien uses the term “unarrival” to describe this specific method of exclusion, defined as “existing in-between migration and official arrival, of lacking formalized status and access to public spaces, and of experiencing tremendous ambiguity as to their relationship to national space”.⁵⁵ Unarrival conceives forced migration through the lens of displacement, revealing rhetorical connections between refugees and categories of the outsider or Other as produced from their denied presence and agency within domestic systems.⁵⁶ As Alwin Aguirre and Sharyn Davies also write, “from the point of view of diaspora and transmigration, place becomes conspicuous since it is the boundaries of space and the defiance of such that are at the core of moving”.⁵⁷ Despite its location in suburban New South Wales, Villawood Immigration Detention Centre is part of Australia’s excised migration zone, the boundaries of which encapsulate the entire mainland. This legislated obfuscation of the fixed border as national space compounds the uncertainty experienced by refugees in Villawood, demonstrating the need for alternative methods of representation to make legible places of strategic geographies and politics.

As this article argues, the mobility of webcomics online makes possible new engagements with life narratives by and about refugees—complex subjects whose global presence is often rhetorically framed as transient and isolated within the Australian imaginary. According to Chute, comics address themselves powerfully to haptic bodies, suggesting that “embodiment in comics may be read as a kind of compensation for lost bodies, for lost histories”.⁵⁸ As a form of self-expression that is exceedingly aware of how the self is physically and visually inscribed on the page, comics provide an opportunity to recast the ephemeral as material through embodiment—a process that is particularly vital for the representation of subjects suspended in liminal border spaces.

In Villawood, embodiment translates into an act of place-making that is activated within parts of the narrative where Ahmed visualises and reclaims refugees from liminality. Some of the first refugees Ahmed meets, for instance, are “stateless Kurds [Mehdi, Adel and Hassan] who were born in Iran but are barred access to education, health care, and employment”.⁵⁹ Like many other detainees, these men are caught in a punitive and violent system that renders them powerless to appeal for release or settlement. Hassan’s non-status in Villawood is rooted in this insecurity. He compares asylum processing to “a legal maze” in which “our stories are doubted at every step by case managers, immigration officials and judges who make it their job to reject us”.⁶⁰

In a scene directly following this interaction, Ahmed metaphorically and physically articulates the legal-political systems that Hassan describes. A portrait view of Hassan is located at the top left of the screen, beneath which the central image features a Caucasian hand tightly wrapped around a gavel, bearing down on a man lying prostrate across the corresponding sound block. This image is crucially multivalent: the reader’s view is carefully directed from Hassan to the larger scene in which Ahmed visually constructs the gavel as an analogy for the crushing force of the judicial system, to an inset panel on the bottom right where the man’s gory remains ooze beneath the gavel’s immense weight. In this visualisation of human carnage, Ahmed draws pointedly on “wound culture”, linking embodiment explicitly to a remediation of place and communicating lived experience as deeply entwined with the strategic unarrival of refugees. In other words, it is against the very “placelessness” of this immigration detention centre that the physical presence of its occupants is materialised.

The term “placelessness” was coined by the geographer Edward Relph to describe an environment that “reaches back into the deepest levels of place, cutting roots, eroding symbols, replacing diversity with uniformity and experiential order with conceptual order”.⁶¹ Relph argues that a sense of place is essential in grounding and developing human identity: “To have roots in a place is to have a secure point from which to look out on the world, a firm grasp of one’s own position in the order of things”.⁶² As a theoretical concept, placelessness shares important synergies with unarrival: both signify in diverse contexts the ways that human affect and agency become inalienably connected with the spaces they inhabit. These terms are productive, also, for thinking through the contradictions in conceiving of detention as a physical place simultaneously in limbo, wherein refugees face political, ontological and psychological displacement on multiple levels. The specific placelessness that refugees experience carries urgent and threatening implications, as their non-status as neither citizen nor resettled suspends them within a perpetual cycle of systemic and geographic unarrival.

Australia’s immigration detention centres are cruelly placeless yet highly securitised in ways that uphold and justify the myth of the foreign threat. The cover image of Villawood enforces this sense of surveillance, as a thickly outlined fence stretches the width of the browser screen to form the backdrop of the title and author credits. In the opening scene depicting Ahmed’s arrival at Villawood, his narration describes the intense security protocols conducted for visitors: “No phones, cameras, money or anything sharp are allowed in the centre” … “You walk through a metal detector and are checked for traces of drugs” … “You are let through a number of security doors” … “All watched by the camera’s blinking eye.”⁶³ Alongside these boxes of dialogue, images of palisade rods topped with electric wire, metal detectors, electromechanical locks and the omniscient blinking camera situate detention as antithetical to human hope and survival. The smaller inset panels in which each of these images is contained are laid out on the screen in a collage of overlapping corners and edges that signals the singular technologies of surveillance that combine to enforce the highly securitised environment of detention.

In contrast to this depersonalised environment, the illustrative style adopted by Ahmed emulates the sketch-like quality of hand drawing, an effect heightened by a colour palette reminiscent of fine ink pens. These qualities underscore the humanity embedded in the webcomic’s narrative and construction, present not only in Ahmed’s artistic process but also in the drawings created by detainees using sketchbooks, pens and pencils. Ahmed introduces Villawood by enveloping the reader in the surveillance of the detention centre, but the significance of this violent environment is perhaps best felt within sections of the webcomic that feature artwork from the Refugee Art Project.

Like the encompassing picture of securitisation that comprises smaller panels, the workshop drawings gathered towards the beginning of Villawood deploy individual experiences of oppression, torture and trauma that speak simultaneously to a corpus of refugees beyond the centre with whom these experiences are shared. While Ahmed’s accompanying narration describes events in national history that locate these images in time (readers learn of the persecution of Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar, for instance, that informs the art of a refugee named Mohammad), a strikingly common feature of each drawing is the centralisation of individual pain over this context. Villawood visualises places that its readers may never see and, crucially, amplifies voices they may never hear, as the “textual presence” of detainees intervenes in official policies of oppression and denial.⁶⁴

Ahmed imagines the conditions of detention more overtly than the physical place, as Villawood’s interior is conveyed through small details—a cramped bunkbed, a bathroom sink, a dark doorway, a sunbathed rooftop, a sandpit—suspended against a white background and abstractly bound beneath the fence line of the title image. Haptic bodies are represented by ashen faces, falling tears and screaming mouths, over which Ahmed’s narration and the detainees’ own words connect these brief flashpoints to a collective cultural narrative of suffering that enables readers to apprehend a far more intimate and distressing picture of immigration detention. Focusing the force of its representative power on this affective experience of detention, Villawood usefully contrasts narratives of forced migration that “[draw] the viewer into the spatial configurations of migrant detention centres [and] the structures that frame migrant lives”.⁶⁵ Rather, the placelessness that Villawood exhibits becomes a situated site for the bodies and voices of refugees to become known.

Understanding the role of unarrival and placelessness in contributing to the precarity of refugees, and in determining public discourse that seeks to deny their humanity, demonstrates the rhetorical power of webcomics for practices of intervention and resistance. While Villawood shares the broad ethos of comics journalism to bear witness to personal experiences of systemic rupture, the testimony wrought through the accessibility and immediacy of webcomics requires new assessments of the relationship between drawn and digital modalities. The production of Villawood is, in part, prompted by a digital turn towards stories of political unrest and global suffering that put their subjects in dialogue with vast audiences conditioned by their times to receive and respond to such stories online. Further, the sharing ecologies through which Villawood was first circulated—across platforms, websites and social media—suggest productive parallels between the displacement of refugees as fundamentally mobile subjects and the ways webcomics surpass literary publishing traditions and become available to dynamic, fluid and, crucially, countercultural forms of storytelling.

As refugees continue to occupy placeless spaces, autographical texts distil the extremity of their experiences to adequately represent their lives. In an era of speed-driven consumption of life narratives online, digital autographics such as webcomics “encourage readers to take time to create meaning, thereby stimulating the kinds of counter-cultural thinking associated with experimental or exploratory literature”.⁶⁶ As this article argues, Villawood directly contests official policies that enforce the silence and absence of forced migrants, signalling the value of collaboration and mediation as methods that afford these subjects greater agency over their stories. Crucially, Ahmed’s inclusion of drawings created by refugees in art workshops introduces new dynamics and potentials to materialising global mobility, engaging with the longer-term effects of displacement, such as indefinite detention and claims processing, and the lives rendered vulnerable and at stake within this process. While Villawood is a work without resolution—the forces that curtail human mobility remain at large in Australia—its mediation of personal stories, and its embodiment of places thought unknowable, broadcasts an alternative vision of forced migration for digital audiences to critically apprehend and ethically witness.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to colleagues and organisers of the 4th Asia-Pacific conference of the International Auto/Biography Association, where I presented a draft version of this article for feedback in November 2021. My sincere gratitude to the anonymous peer reviewers for their thoughtful comments and valuable suggestions, which helped strengthen the work.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Gillian Whitlock, Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 85.

2 Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2011), xix.

3 Suvendrini Perera, “Oceanic Corpo-Graphies, Refugee Bodies and the Making and Unmaking of Waters,” Feminist Review 103 (2013): 66.

4 Anne McNevin, “The Liberal Paradox and the Politics of Asylum in Australia,” Australian Journal of Political Science 42, no. 4 (2007): 622.

5 McNevin, “The Liberal Paradox,” 620.

6 Gillian Whitlock, “Autographics: The Seeing ‘I’ of the Comics,” Modern Fiction Studies 52, no. 4 (2006): 966.

7 Gillian Whitlock and Anna Poletti, “Self-Regarding Art,” Biography 31, no. 1 (2008): v.

8 Whitlock and Poletti, “Self-Regarding Art,” xvi.

9 Michel Eliatamby-O’Brien and Daniella Trimboli, “Archives and Autographics: Reanimating Diaspora in the Transpacific,” Continuum 36, no. 6 (2022): 793.

10 Daniella Trimboli, “Zines of Rupture: Theorising Migration Studies Using Comics by Racialised Migrants and Refugees,” Continuum 36, no. 6 (2022): 937.

11 Candida Rifkind, “Refugee Comics and Migrant Topographies,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 32, no. 3 (2017): 649.

12 Hillary Chute, Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), 4.

13 Chute, Disaster Drawn, 17.

14 I use the term “refugee” throughout this article to denote forced migrants both with and without status and associated rights in Australia, despite many detainees of Villawood Immigration Detention Centre still awaiting long-term protections.

15 McNevin, “The Liberal Paradox,” 621.

16 Alwin C. Aguirre and Sharyn Graham Davies, “Imperfect Strangers: Picturing Place, Family, and Migrant Identity on Facebook,” Discourse, Context & Media 7 (2015): 3.

17 Naluwembe Binaisa, “Negotiating ‘Belonging’ to the Ancestral ‘Homeland’: Ugandan Refugee Descendents ‘Return’,” Mobilities 6, no. 4 (2011): 523.

18 Rocío Davis, “A Graphic Self: Comics as Autobiography in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis,” Prose Studies 27, no. 3 (2005): 264.

19 Daniel Worden, “Introduction: Drawing Conflicts,” in The Comics of Joe Sacco: Journalism in a Visual World (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015), 4.

20 Rebecca Scherr, “Framing Human Rights: Comics Form and the Politics of Recognition in Joe Sacco's Footnotes in Gaza,” Textual Practice 29, no. 1 (2015): 114.

21 Scherr, “Framing Human Rights,” 114.

22 Scherr, “Framing Human Rights,” 114.

23 Nick Olle et al., “At Work Inside Our Detention Centres: A Guard’s Story,” Global Mail, 31 March 2014, http://tgm-serco.patarmstrong.net.au/.

24 Nam Le and Matt Huynh, “The Boat,” SBS, 29 April 2015, https://www.sbs.com.au/theboat/; Alia Malek, Peter van Agtmael, and Josh Neufeld, “The Road to Germany: $2400,” Foreign Policy, January 2016, https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/01/29/the-road-to-germany-2400-refugee-syria-migrant-germany-nonfiction-comic/; Audrey Quinn and Jackie Roche, “Syria’s Climate Conflict,” Films for Action, 1 September 2015, https://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/syrias-climate-conflict/.

25 The wartime visual journalism of Francisco Goya, Jacques Callot and Otto Dix is credited with the development of comics journalism, influencing the later non-fiction comics of Joe Sacco, Art Spiegelman and Keiji Nakazawa. Useful discussion of the inherited graphic print traditions that establish and uphold this canon can be found in Hillary Chute, Disaster Drawn, 1–68.

26 Safdar Ahmed, Still Alive: Notes from Australia’s Immigration Detention System (Victoria: Twelve Panels Press, 2021).

27 Nina Mickwitz, “Up Close and Personal: Mediated Testimony and Narrative Tropes in Refugee Comics,” in The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives, ed. Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi and Vinh Nguyen (New York: Routledge, 2023), 172. Notable critical accolades for Still Alive include Book of the Year at the 2022 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards; the Eve Pownall Award at the 2022 Children’s Book Council of Australia Awards; and the Gold Ledger at the 2022 Comic Arts Awards of Australia.

28 Marita Eastmond, “Stories as Lived Experience: Narratives in Forced Migration Research,” Journal of Refugee Studies 20, no. 2 (2007): 249.

29 Michael Jacklin, “Detention, Displacement and Dissent in Recent Australian Life Writing,” Life Writing 8, no. 4 (2011): 382.

30 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 63.

31 Ahmed is not a refugee, but he attributes his dedication to advocating for marginalised communities and working with people from migrant backgrounds to his outsider identity as an Indian-Muslim Australian citizen. See ABC Religion & Ethics, “Safdar Ahmed Is Still Alive,” Compass, embedded video, 27:00, 20 March 2022, https://www.abc.net.au/religion/watch/compass/safdar-ahmed-is-still-alive/13785438.

32 “Refugee Art Project,” Safdar Ahmed, https://safdarahmed.com/refugee-art-project/ (accessed 24 August 2023).

33 Safdar Ahmed, “Zines from the Refugee Art Project,” Museum of Australian Democracy: Old Parliament House, ed. Samantha van Egmond, 9 April 2021, https://www.moadoph.gov.au/explore/stories/your-voice/zines-from-the-refugee-art-project.

34 KapowComicBookShow, “Artist Spotlight: Safdar Ahmed,” YouTube video, 7:12, 19 August 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmEAFqVegM0&ab_channel=KapowComicBookShow.

35 Safdar Ahmed, “Bearing Witness: The Refugee Art Project,” Art Monthly Australia 272 (2014): 24.

36 Candida Rifkind, “Migrant Detention Comics and the Aesthetic Technologies of Compassion,” in Documenting Trauma in Comics: Traumatic Pasts, Embodied Histories, and Graphic Reportage, ed. Dominic Davies and Candida Rifkind (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 301.

37 Safdar Ahmed, “Villawood: Notes from an Immigration Detention Centre,” The Shipping News, Medium, 5 March 2015, www.medium.com/shipping-news/villawood-9698183e114c.

38 Ahmed, “Villawood”.

39 Ahmed, “Villawood”.

40 Life narrative ethics draws from foundational work in autobiography and biography that interrogates the risks and tensions of telling life stories. See Paul John Eakin, ed., The Ethics of Life Writing (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).

41 Perera, “Oceanic Corpo-Graphies,” 76.

42 Whitlock, Soft Weapons, 73.

43 Whitlock, Soft Weapons, 83.

44 Gillian Whitlock, “The Hospitality of Cyberspace: Mobilizing Asylum Seeker Testimony Online,” Biography 38, no. 2 (2015): 246.

45 Judith Butler, “Precarious Life, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Cohabitation,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26, no. 2 (2012): 149.

46 Scherr, “Framing Human Rights,” 115.

47 Wendy Kozol, “Complicities of Witnessing in Joe Sacco’s Palestine,” in Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature, ed. Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg and Alexandra Schultheis Moore (New York: Routledge, 2012), 167.

48 Maria Rae, Rosa Holman, and Amy Nethery, “Self-Represented Witnessing: The Use of Social Media by Asylum Seekers in Australia’s Offshore Immigration Detention Centres,” Media, Culture & Society 40, no. 4 (2018): 480.

49 Brigitta Olubas, “‘Where We Are Is Too Hard’: Refugee Writing and the Australian Border as Literary Interface,” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 19, no. 2 (2019): 2. Perhaps the most prominent example is Iranian-Kurdish journalist Behrouz Boochani, who famously wrote his memoir No Friend but the Mountains on WhatsApp as long text messages to his translators, Omid Tofighian and Moones Mansoubi, while incarcerated in the immigration detention centre on Manus Island.

50 Whitlock and Poletti, “Self-Regarding Art,” vi.

51 Emma Griffiths, “Immigration Minister Scott Morrison Touts ‘Rapid Increase’ in Asylum Seeker Transfers,” ABC News, 23 September 2013, www.abc.net.au/news/2013-09-23/immigration-minister-morrison-details-asylum-seeker-movements/4974758?nw=0.

52 GetUp, “What Is the Shipping News?,” The Shipping News, Medium, 6 June 2015, www.medium.com/shipping-news/what-is-the-shipping-news-5a6bb625a87f.

53 Aaron Humphrey, “Picturing Placelessness: Online Graphic Narratives and Australia’s Refugee Detention Centres,” in Making Publics, Making Places, ed. Mary Griffiths and Kim Barbour (Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press, 2016), 52.

54 Ruchira Ganguly-Scrase and Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt, “Dispossession, Placelessness, Home and Belonging: An Outline of a Research Agenda,” in Rethinking Displacement: Asia Pacific Perspectives (Surrey: Routledge, 2013), 3.

55 Michel Eliatamby-O'Brien, “Narrativizing Unarrival: Digital Autographics by Asylum Seekers in the Pacific,” in Gandhi and Nguyen, The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives, 129.

56 Eliatamby-O’Brien, “Narrativizing Unarrival,” 129.

57 Aguirre and Davies, “Imperfect Strangers,” 5.

58 Hillary Chute, “Comics Form and Narrating Lives,” Profession (2011): 112.

59 Ahmed, “Villawood”.

60 Ahmed, “Villawood”.

61 Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness (London: Pion Limited, 1976), 143.

62 Relph, Place and Placelessness, 38.

63 Ahmed, “Villawood”.

64 Golnah Nabizadeh, “The Lives of Others: Figuring Grievability and Justice in Contemporary Comics and Graphic Novels,” in Contexts of Violence in Comics, ed. Ian Horton, Ian Hague, and Nina Mickwitz (New York: Routledge, 2019), 159.

65 Rifkind, “Refugee Comics,” 651.

66 Golnar Nabizadeh, “Comics Online: Detention and White Space in ‘A Guard’s Story’,” ARIEL 47, no. 1/2 (2016): 342.