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Asylum
'Just because you can't see the chains doesn't mean they don't exist.' In the Sanctuary, two robed men cut the hair of clients who have been called to pass through the White or Black Door. Along with their hair, the clients shed stories: of the horrors of their past, the Place they've inhabited since their escape, and what lies beyond the Doors. These stories are inscribed as Legends, but do they record a vision of Paradise or Hell? This allegory, echoing Kafka, illuminates the stark terror of the modern age, marked by a border in constant shift between gods and men, truth and deception, freedom and constraint, memory and forgetting, revealing a world whose essence is its hiddenness - a world that hides, not in darkness, but in the light. 'What I will tell you now is only guesswork. Because when a person is called they just disappear and are never seen again. We assume that their case is finally being heard, that they have moved on from here to the next stage. You seem to think of it as something dreadful, but it's why we came here after all. We came here of our own free will, you must remember that, and we are free to leave at any time.' [Subject: Fiction]
176 pages, Paperback
Published April 19, 2016
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July 1, 2016
Monday saw the celebration of World Refugee Day, an initiative introduced by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in 2001, as a result of the Australian Major-General Paul Cullen’s lobbying from the 1980’s. Australia also celebrates National Refugee Week to actively inform the public about refugees and to celebrate the positive contributions made by refugees to Australian society. This year the event runs from Saturday 19 June to Saturday 25 June 2016. Here is my small contribution to this week, I made time to find, read, and now review a new release from Australia, a work that touched my nerve when I read about how the book came into being.
I am going to be bold here and quote, in full, John Hughes’ “note” on the origins of “Asylum”, a note he wrote for Charlotte Guest, the Publishing Officer at UWA Publishing and a note that appears on the publisher’s blog.
In the European autumn of 2013, I took some leave in Venice to work on a novel about a Russian prince living in exile there after the Revolution. On my first day in Venice a boat sank off the island of Lampedusa and over three hundred asylum seekers drowned.
The Italian response to such an unconscionable tragedy was to declare a National Day of Mourning. No party politics; no pious utterances about people smugglers, border protection, or stopping the boats; no baying of radio talk back hosts. The fact that it was quite simply a human tragedy made, for the immediate response at least, everything else at best irrelevant, and at worst downright barbaric.
As the day wore on, though, I couldn’t help but think what our response back in Australia might have been if something similar happened there. The idea of an Australian National Day of Mourning struck me as so absurd as to be impossible. And the fact that it struck me in this way made me feel so angry I couldn’t do anything for the rest of the day but seethe. After that came the sadness and the shame, and finally the despair which even now, three years on, I still can’t shake off.
Asylum began in that anger and despair, when the absence of compassion in almost all Australian public discourse about asylum seekers hit me with such force I found it impossible to resist. The book I’ve finally written is some way from that book I started to write in Venice almost three years ago. It’s grown into a surreal allegory about an enormous experiment whose purpose is not scientific. But the original impulse and its heat are still there in what has emerged. And Australia has not changed; if anything the current election campaign has only shamed us more deeply.
It’s terrible for a writer when he thinks he’s pushed reality to an extreme, stretched a policy to what he believes is its reductio ad absurdum, only to find that he’s been trumped by the real! When allegory becomes realism there’s something very wrong. Suffice to say Asylum has a number of resonances in English, and they are all there in the book.
The opening epigraph comes from Constantine Cavafy’s poem “Ithaka” and is the closing line, “What these Itakas mean.” This is going to be a journey, we learn more from that experience than the arrival itself?
For my full review go to http://messybooker.blogspot.com.au/20...
I am going to be bold here and quote, in full, John Hughes’ “note” on the origins of “Asylum”, a note he wrote for Charlotte Guest, the Publishing Officer at UWA Publishing and a note that appears on the publisher’s blog.
In the European autumn of 2013, I took some leave in Venice to work on a novel about a Russian prince living in exile there after the Revolution. On my first day in Venice a boat sank off the island of Lampedusa and over three hundred asylum seekers drowned.
The Italian response to such an unconscionable tragedy was to declare a National Day of Mourning. No party politics; no pious utterances about people smugglers, border protection, or stopping the boats; no baying of radio talk back hosts. The fact that it was quite simply a human tragedy made, for the immediate response at least, everything else at best irrelevant, and at worst downright barbaric.
As the day wore on, though, I couldn’t help but think what our response back in Australia might have been if something similar happened there. The idea of an Australian National Day of Mourning struck me as so absurd as to be impossible. And the fact that it struck me in this way made me feel so angry I couldn’t do anything for the rest of the day but seethe. After that came the sadness and the shame, and finally the despair which even now, three years on, I still can’t shake off.
Asylum began in that anger and despair, when the absence of compassion in almost all Australian public discourse about asylum seekers hit me with such force I found it impossible to resist. The book I’ve finally written is some way from that book I started to write in Venice almost three years ago. It’s grown into a surreal allegory about an enormous experiment whose purpose is not scientific. But the original impulse and its heat are still there in what has emerged. And Australia has not changed; if anything the current election campaign has only shamed us more deeply.
It’s terrible for a writer when he thinks he’s pushed reality to an extreme, stretched a policy to what he believes is its reductio ad absurdum, only to find that he’s been trumped by the real! When allegory becomes realism there’s something very wrong. Suffice to say Asylum has a number of resonances in English, and they are all there in the book.
The opening epigraph comes from Constantine Cavafy’s poem “Ithaka” and is the closing line, “What these Itakas mean.” This is going to be a journey, we learn more from that experience than the arrival itself?
For my full review go to http://messybooker.blogspot.com.au/20...
Displaying 1 of 1 review