'The island continent has created an archipelago of incarceration spanning from South East Asia, Micronesia and Melanesia in the Pacific, the Indian Ocean and across mainland Australia. This issue of Southerly, titled Writing Through Fences, is devoted entirely to the work of past and present refugees in these detention centres.
'The records of their experiences are devastating; their creative responses, across genres and media, are astounding. The issue also includes responses from Australian writers, activists, essayists and students, who engage with refugee writing as well as the practices and consequences of refugee incarceration.
'Writing Through Fences is guest edited by the writer-activists Hani Abdile, Behrouz Boochani, Janet Galbraith and Omid Tofighian. Two of these editors have direct experience of Australian refugee detention. Three have been displaced and exiled. All four have worked for years with refugees as translators, enablers and publishers to bring the creative voices of refugees into public view and circulation. This issue presents the greatest range of new refugee writing assembled to date in Australia.' (Publication summary)
Only literary material by Australian authors individually indexed. Other material in this issue includes:
Companions, Screaming for My Beloved Country (Sudan) and In the Cage I Can Speak : MOHAMMED (full name withheld) Surabaya, Indonesia, 2017
Bon Voyage the Papi Family : Pius Posongan Pokris (PNG)
Animals Can Be Our Soulmates, Too : Erfan Dana/Shams Hussaini (Indonesia, 2020)
Lifelines : M. D. Imran (Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi–Chicago USA, 2020)
Indonesia, Land of Refugee Limbo : Erfan Dana/Shams Hussaini (Indonesia, 2018)
The Autobiography of Mohamed Adam : Mohamed Adam (Manus Island, 2019)
The Passenger of Time : Homaira Zamiri (Indonesia, 2019)
Home—Where Else to Go? : Abdul Samad Haidari (Bogor, Java, Indonesia, 15 January 2020)
On Poems by Abdul Samad Haidari : Erik Kennedy (Otautahi–Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand, 2020)
Barbed Wire: The Devil’s Rope : Victoria Grieve-Williams (West shore of the Hudson River in the country of the Woaranek peoples of the Lenape tribe and Algonquian language group, NY state, USA, 2020)
For Yesterday : Mohammad Asif Rahimi (Indonesia, September 2020)
I Speak : Homaira Zamiri (Indonesia, 2020)
Dedication 1 : M. D. Imran (Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi–Chicago, United States, 2020)
Dedication 2 : Erfan Dana/Shams Hussaini (Indonesia, 2020)
Excerpt from Eulogy : Erfan Dana/Shams Hussaini (Indonesia, 2018)
Racism at Jakarta Airport : Mohammad (Indonesia 2013)
Brutal : Uncle Davai Rarua (Motu-Koitabu Lands, Port Moresby, 2016)
Judgement : Ellie Shakiba / Elahe Zivardar (Nauru, 2017)
Shoes that left home with the spirit of hope... never to return : Erfan Dana / Shams Hussaini
Happy Bloody Christmas : Ali Dorani / Eaten Fish (Manus Island, 2016)
What Challenges Foreign Refugees Face in Indonesia! : J. N. Jonaid (Indonesia 2020)
Unfinished Story of a Girl Born Stateless : Nur Aziza (Indonesia, 2020)
Untitled : Mina (Indonesia, 2020)
We made this piece of work because we wanted to perform a possible process of seeking ways of being that show the beauty of encountering an-other with the many complexities that involves. For us, it is a poetics of being, not as disembodied philosophy but rooted in the earth, water, bodies, particular histories, the sensual and language. We wanted to perform possibilities of relationship that work to find places that complicate and shift fixed and binary thinking. Our writing together and subsequent performance was an attempt to move toward a language that grows from shared experiences and deeply held understandings of, and desires for, the world—including the sovereignty of an-other. We wanted to perform both the experiences of coming to ends that trail off into unshareable places; knowledges and experiences that are irrecoverably different as well as experiences of deep meeting. And importantly we wanted to reinvest the word and concept of “boat” with a shared commitment to love. As a starting point we worked from Sohrab Sepehri’s poem, “The Address.”
Long Paddock
Writing through Fences
vol.
79
no.
2
November
2021
23555999
2021
periodical issue
'The island continent has created an archipelago of incarceration spanning from South East Asia, Micronesia and Melanesia in the Pacific, the Indian Ocean and across mainland Australia. This issue of Southerly, titled Writing Through Fences, is devoted entirely to the work of past and present refugees in these detention centres.
'The records of their experiences are devastating; their creative responses, across genres and media, are astounding. The issue also includes responses from Australian writers, activists, essayists and students, who engage with refugee writing as well as the practices and consequences of refugee incarceration.
'Writing Through Fences is guest edited by the writer-activists Hani Abdile, Behrouz Boochani, Janet Galbraith and Omid Tofighian. Two of these editors have direct experience of Australian refugee detention. Three have been displaced and exiled. All four have worked for years with refugees as translators, enablers and publishers to bring the creative voices of refugees into public view and circulation. This issue presents the greatest range of new refugee writing assembled to date in Australia.' (Publication summary)
'It was while reading this issue of Southerly 7.2 Writing Through Fences— Archipelago of Letters that news emerged of the Australian government’s decision to allow some refugees in its care to resettle in New Zealand and for others to be released from a Melbourne hotel. It was as though the entire country gave a sigh of relief, attacks on the government coming thick and fast. Then the question of why it hadn’t happened sooner was overshadowed by Britain’s government announcing that it would establish an offshore processing regime with Rwanda as the linchpin. The problem of inequality had raised its head once more as another country tried to come to terms with its own attractiveness. It seems like the flow of migrants is unstoppable. Politicians’ job is to deal with it.' (Introduction)
'It was while reading this issue of Southerly 7.2 Writing Through Fences— Archipelago of Letters that news emerged of the Australian government’s decision to allow some refugees in its care to resettle in New Zealand and for others to be released from a Melbourne hotel. It was as though the entire country gave a sigh of relief, attacks on the government coming thick and fast. Then the question of why it hadn’t happened sooner was overshadowed by Britain’s government announcing that it would establish an offshore processing regime with Rwanda as the linchpin. The problem of inequality had raised its head once more as another country tried to come to terms with its own attractiveness. It seems like the flow of migrants is unstoppable. Politicians’ job is to deal with it.' (Introduction)
