Gail Jones’s “The Ocean” (2013) and A Guide to Berlin (2015): A literary challenge to asylum seekers’ precarity

ABSTRACT

Gail Jones’s fiction has received major critical attention due to its engagement with trauma, memory, modernity, the visual arts, and the Australian process of Reconciliation. This article seeks to extend the focus of research on Jones’s work by looking at her little-discussed representation of forced migration. For this purpose, it examines how Jones’s 2013 short story “The Ocean” and 2015 novel A Guide to Berlin respectively tackle the 2001 refugee Tampa affair and the 2013 Lampedusa refugee tragedy. It first offers an overview of the precarity suffered by contemporary asylum seekers and refugees and how this has been explored and fictionalized by contemporary writers. It then analyses and discusses the main narrative and stylistic strategies that Jones uses in order to represent the ties that bind together refugees and non-refugees in mutually dependent relationships, which challenge Australian and European governments’ fostered xenophobia aimed at tightening border controls.

KEYWORDS:

• Asylum
• refugee
• precarity
• Pacific Solution
• Lampedusa
• Gail Jones

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For other critiques of Standing’s approach to precarity, see Scully (2016).

2. Hereafter “the Refugee Convention”.

3. For more information on Australia’s current refugee policy and asylum seekers’ situation, see Fraenkel (2016), Amnesty International Australia and Refugee Council of Australia (2018), and Refugee Council of Australia (2019b).

4. For more information, see the Migration Data Portal (2019).

5. From October 2012 to April 2014, asylum seekers and refugees’ activists and supporters set up a “tent city” on Oranienplatz as a political site against western countries’ refugee politics (Bhimji 2016, 439–440).

Additional information

Funding

The research carried out for the writing of this article is part of a research project financed by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) (code FFI2017-84258-P), and by the Government of Aragón and the European Social Fund (ESF) (code H03_20R).

Notes on contributors

Pilar Royo Grasa

Pilar Royo Grasa is lecturer in the Department of English and German Philology of the University of Zaragoza. Her PhD thesis is titled “A Study on the Representation of Trauma in Gail Jones’s Black Mirror (2002), Sixty Lights (2004) and Sorry (2007)”. She has been a visiting scholar at the universities of New South Wales, Australia, and Northampton, UK. Her main research interests are contemporary Australian fiction, and trauma and postcolonial studies, and she has published articles in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Commonwealth Essays and Studies, Journal of the European Association for Studies of Australia, and Odisea: Revista de Estudios Ingleses.