In a different voice: ‘a letter from Manus Island’ as poetic manifesto

Abstract

On 9 December 2017, The Saturday Paper published ‘A Letter from Manus Island’, an essay and manifesto written by Behrouz Boochani, a Kurdish journalist and refugee being held on Manus Island with hundreds of other men. Boochani writes in a radical, ‘poetic’ voice that makes the ordinary strange again, as he talks of love, the interdependence of human beings, and the strength to be derived from acts of solidarity. He challenges not only the prevailing vituperative tenor of contemporary public rhetoric, but also the dehumanising discourses within which humanitarian practices in Australia, and in the west more broadly, operate. This paper is written as a letter, in direct reply to Boochani’s own. It is inspired by Lilie Chouliaraki’s critique of contemporary practices of humanitarianism and the ways in which politics, the market and technology have transformed ‘the moral dispositions of our public life’. It explores the unsettling effects and provocative insights presented by Boochani’s poetic voice – the refugee as human subject and agent rather than victim or object of pity (or hate). The paper thus reflects on our conventional responses to the ethical call to solidarity from vulnerable subjects and imagines how we might respond otherwise.

Keywords:

• Refugees
• voice
• humanitarianism
• resistance
• Behrouz Boochani

Notes

1. Boochani (2017a).

2. On the same day that ‘A Letter from Manus Island’ was published in The Saturday Paper, writer and slam poet Maxine Beneba Clarke performed the manifesto at the Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne (https://soundcloud.com/the-saturday-paper/a-letter-from-manus-island).

3. The echo with Carol Gilligan’s now-classic (1982) text In a Different Voice, in which the idea of ‘the ethic of care’ is first developed, is intended. In her influential work, Gilligan proposes the gendered difference between the respective voices of ‘justice’ and of ‘care’. Over subsequent decades, this work has given rise to significant and sophisticated developments in feminist care ethics, in which the responsibilities for and practices of care are understood as central to human life, in both private and public spheres, and in cultural, social and political domains.

4. The focus of my response to Boochani’s letter is also inspired by the incisive work of Lillie Chouliaraki, particularly in The Ironic Spectator (2013). Chouliaraki analyses practices of humanitarianism and, as she calls its contemporary manifestation, post-humanitarianism. She traces the institutional, political and technological changes that have together instrumentalized the aid and development ‘market’, so that rather than orienting ourselves to the suffering of vulnerable others and to taking action on their behalf, we are now motivated to engage in humanitarian practices for consumerist and self-serving ends. I am interested in what happens when the suffering subject, in this case Behrouz Boochani, himself directly challenges the norms, hierarchies and relationships that constitute contemporary humanitarian practice.

5. In 2001, John Howard’s Liberal–National Coalition Government launched the policy of offshore processing (the Pacific Solution) in an attempt to stop asylum seekers arriving by boat in Australia. In 1992, the Paul Keating (Labor) Government introduced the policy of mandatory detention for people arriving in Australia without a valid visa. Subsequent governments have variously developed and extended these policies, so that today anyone attempting to arrive by boat will not only be held and processed offshore, but will never be allowed to settle in Australia. For an overview of the history and current practices relating to Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers arriving by boat, see McAdam and Chong (2014); Australian Human Rights Commission (2017).

6. For an account of Boochani’s use of social media as journalist and witness, see Rae, Holman, and Nethery (2017).

7. See Boochani’s Twitter account: @BehrouzBoochani. Boochani has also written a number of articles that have been published by The Guardian since early 2016. See, for example, Boochani (2016a, 2017b, 2017c). For a sample of Boochani’s poetry, see Boochani (2016b).

8. See, for example, Chouliaraki (2013); Kurasawa (2013); Little and Vaughan-Williams (2017).

9. To seek protection as an asylum seeker is not illegal, ‘but rather the right of every individual under international law’ (McAdam and Chong 2014, 52).

10. The word manifesto comes from the Latin, manifestare, meaning ‘to make public’; and from manifestus, meaning ‘obvious’.

11. In this paper, I understand neoliberalism as a ‘distinctive form of reason’ (Brown 2015, 35), which has progressively effected ‘the disenchantment of politics by economics’ (Davies 2014, 4). Under neoliberalism, the human subject is instrumentalized, normatively understood as homo economicus, a rational and competitive market actor; and all domains (social, governmental, private and public) are reconceived as markets (Brown 2015, 35–45).

12. See Parliament of Australia (2018).

13. See tweets in response to Boochani’s tweet about ‘A Letter from Manus Island’ (@BehrouzBoochani, December 8 2017).

14. McIlroy (2016).

15. Koziol (2017).

16. For a related discussion on dispossession and ‘the differential allocation of humanness: the perpetually shifting and variably positioned boundary between those who are rendered properly human and those who are not, those who are entitled to a long life and those relegated to slow death’, see Butler and Athanasiou (2013, 31–32; see also 32–37).

17. For a sample of critical perspectives see Hodge (2015); McAdam (2013); Surma (2016).

18. See the website of the Australian Border Force for an account of the state border as the site of risk calculation (https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/australian-border-force-abf).

19. Prominent Australian commentators who regularly feature the ‘problem’ of asylum seekers and refugees held in detention include Sydney Radio 2 GB’s Ray Hadley (‘The Ray Hadley Morning Show’: https://www.2gb.com/show/ray-hadley-morning-show/); Alan Jones (‘The Alan Jones Breakfast Show’: https://www.2gb.com/show/the-alan-jones-breakfast-show/); and Andrew Bolt (‘Andrew Bolt Blog’ for the Herald Sun, Melbourne’s biggest circulation print and digital daily: http://www.heraldsun.com.au/blogs/andrew-bolt).

20. Kafka ([1912] 1971).

21. Butler offers an incisive reading of this story, pointing out how it exposes the ‘very gap between what has become ordinary and the destructive aims it covers over and conveys’. In so doing, the text also propels the reader ‘into ethical responsiveness and alert’ (2014, 26).

22. Compare Athanasiou’s discussion of the conventional ways in which the category of the ‘proper’ human is differentially allocated, and ‘its presumed self-evidence as a predicate to a man with property and propriety’ (Butler and Athanasiou 2013, 32).

23. Butler claims that ‘the term and the practice of ‘civilization’ work to produce the human differentially by offering a culturally limited norm for what the human is supposed to be. It is not just that some humans are treated as humans, and others are dehumanized; it is rather that dehumanization becomes the condition for the production of the human to the extent that a ‘Western’ civilization defines itself over and against a population understood as, by definition, illegitimate, if not dubiously human’ (2006, 91).

24. See also Chouliaraki 2013, 58–60).

25. In other words, poetry’s disruption of conventional language (whether through its voice, graphics, grammar, word use, rhythm or rhyme, for example) both takes the reader aback (distances her) and takes her in (brings her close) to the richness, precision and ambivalence of poetic meaning. The distancing provides a critical space for working out how language works, and how and what the voice that utters it might mean. The bringing close enacts the communicative, social and interactive potential of language, as we capture and are captured by the meanings it evokes.

26. However, and as I show below, the use of the third-person voice does not necessarily relegate a subject to otherness.

27. See Chouliaraki and Zaborowski’s (2017) discussion of the 2015 refugee crisis in Europe, and how refugees ‘speak’ in the news.

28. See Fiona Robinson’s (2011) critique, from a feminist ethics of care perspective, of the notion of ethics as a dialogue between human beings as equals.

29. Thus, as stated above, the third-person voice does not always relegate a subject to otherness but, as here, may be used to declare, performatively, their real, material existence for recognition by others.

30. This idea resonates with Giorgio Agamben’s notion of ‘bare life’: human life understood in terms only of its biological dimension, rather than in terms of how it is lived – its social and political potential or possibility. Agamben argues that Western politics is built and thus depends on the exclusion of biological life from politics: ‘in Western politics, bare life has the peculiar privilege of being that whose exclusion founds the city of men’ (1998, 7). However, as Boochani shows, a bare life, consisting in ‘mere bodies’, must be refused by the refugees in order that they may formulate an alternative politics of resistance.

31. Patricia Owens notes that these acts of protest consist in ‘a re-enactment of sovereign power’s production of bare life on the body of the refugee’ (Owens 2009, 573). However, note that Owens (drawing on Hannah Arendt to critique Agamben’s position) also argues that an act of protest, such as lip sewing, ‘can form the basis of a new politics if it is acted upon and talked about over and over again; if, in other words, bare life is repudiated and a new worldly community is formed around resistance to injustice’ (Owens 2009, 577–78).

32. Athanasiou claims that ‘in the domain of dispossession, ethics and politics are not (or should not be) mutually exclusive’ (Butler and Athanasiou 2013, 108).

33. Rancière remarks that political activity ‘makes visible what had no business being seen, and makes heard a discourse where once there was only place for noise; it makes understood as discourse what was once only heard as noise’ (1999, 30).

34. The Australian Border Force represents a very specific understanding of the border as a commercial and competitive space and therefore, as suggested above, a space of risk: ‘Our mission is to protect our border and manage the movement of people and goods across it and, by doing so, we aim to make Australia safer and more prosperous’. See https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/australian-border-force-abf/protecting.

35. Emily Dickinson, ‘I dwell in Possibility’ (466). https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52197/i-dwell-in-possibility-466