Suvendrini Perera

What can make a mother take an axe to her baby daughter?

This is the question the Nobel prizewinner Toni Morrison sets out to answer in her famous novel, Beloved. Like all Morrison's work Beloved centres on an event of seemingly incomprehensible horror. Reading a novel by Toni Morrison begins with an act of courage. The reader must resist the instinct to turn her head away from the unthinkable, must learn to listen as the story unwraps the unspeakable, must bear to contemplate the unbearable, before finally approaching something like understanding, within her own limits, of what had appeared so monstrously incomprehensible.

In Beloved the racial terror of slavery is slowly, relentlessly, revealed until the most awful and unnatural of actions, the murder of an almost-crawling baby girl, becomes intelligible as a deed of profound love. The reader achieves understanding of what is truly criminal and unforgivable -- the inhuman environment that confronts the mother with so obscene a responsibility.

Beloved is based on a historical event in which a young slave woman, Margaret Garner, killed her children rather than have them returned to slavery by slave-catchers. At her trial she repeated simply: 'They will not live as I have done'. To its proponents, Garner's actions provided a fine justification for slavery: the ultimate proof of Afro-Americans' less than human status, and absolute distance and difference from whites. Yet more than anything Margaret Garner's actions testify, in the words of the critic Paul Gilroy, 'to the indomitable power of slaves to assert their humanity in restricted circumstances'. By her actions Garner keeps faith with her children, and asserts her own absolute love and responsibility for them. Through Morrison's novel we move from a complacent belief that slaves could not have loved their children as 'we' do, to the true meaning of the word Beloved.

More than a world and a century away, Margaret Garner's story hovers like a warning spirit over Australia. Are complacency, denunciation and dissociation the only responses we can muster in the face of that which we find unbearable to contemplate?

This year in Australia we have seen too many terrible events. A broken-hearted Sharaz Kayani set himself ablaze in despair outside parliament house after a protracted struggle to be united with his family, especially his daughter with cerebral palsy. The Ombudsman's report described the case as a history of 'administrative ineptitude and broken promises' (Sydney Morning Herald Aug 23, 2001). Responding to Minister Ruddock's comment that Kayani's act was 'not something we are used to or experienced with' Tony Birch wrote bitingly in an essay in the UTS Review: 'This man had done something very ''unAustralian''. He had publicly expressed his grief and anguish at his treatment at the hands of Australian government officials'.

Despite official attempts to paint the manner of Sharaz Kayani's death as essentially foreign and 'unAustralian', the image of his flaming body immediately recalls a moment from Plains of Promise, Alexis Wright's historical novel of the stolen generations. Here a succession of indigenous women forcibly separated from their daughters go up in flames one by one in an agony of longing, loss, despair and love. Like Beloved, Plains of Promise is a story of mothers and daughters, and of despairing, anguished, enduring love in the face of systematic, legalised inhumanity. The burning bodies of these Australian women in Wright's novel stand as powerful images of unspeakable suffering in our not very distant history.

In the few months since Sharaz Kayani's charred body was covered with a white sheet outside parliament house, we have heard of a procession of more terrible events: of a six-year old boy, Shayan Badraie, too traumatised to eat or speak in detention; of teenage detainees who sewed their lips together in protest against years of incarceration; of Vulliame Tanginoa, a detainee who leapt to his death from a basketball pole; and a number of other stories of despair and desperation. Now we are assailed by allegations of asylum seekers flinging their children into the sea as their boats were fired over, boarded and turned back by the Royal Australian Navy.

The image, regardless of its veracity, should give us pause. So should its gleeful reception by our politicians as ultimate proof that these asylum seekers are not the 'kind of people we want in Australia'. It is a reaction that signifies an imaginative and human failure of truly frightening dimensions.

Australians need to ask ourselves: What country dares claim a monopoly on humanity? How long can we hide behind 'unAustralian' as a response to events and emotions that challenge us? Is 'decency' really an innate national attribute of any one people? For how much longer can we disown the terrible incidents that happen in our detention camps and along our coastline as too alien or foreign for our understanding? Or denounce the people who commit them as 'barbaric' and inherently different from -- and lesser than -- ourselves? What responsibility do we bear to contemplate the unbearable, or try to understand the incomprehensible? How long can we refuse any implication in the hateful events occuring with increasing frequency at the edges of our society?

On the day after the Prime Minister asked 'what kind of people would throw their children into the water?' Paul Sheehan argued (Sydney Morning Herald October 10, 2001) that the question of asylum seekers was 'not a moral or political crisis' for Australia. Yet the Prime Minister's question was fundamentally a question of morality. It questioned the humanity and morality of the asylum seekers now on board the HMAS Adelaide and concluded on those grounds that they were not the kind of people who could be allowed to live in Australia.

There is no way Australians can ignore that the terms on which the asylum seeker debate is being played out are terms of ethics, morality and humanity.

This debate is also political. Close to three years ago, in a time that now seems impossibly remote, Senator Brian Harradine 'blinked' in the debate over the Wik legislation because the possibility of a 'race election' seemed too awful to contemplate. Today Australia indeed faces a race election, with remarkably little display of public repugnance by any of our major politicians. The consensus between the chief parties should not obscure the fact that the 2001 election is being fought in a climate of war against primarily Arabic, Middle Eastern and South Asian asylum seekers at home, as well as war abroad.

Dehumanising the enemy is a time-honoured tactic of war: in World War 1 Germans were objectified as 'the Hun' and denounced as baby killers. Our internal war on refugees and asylum seekers uses disturbingly similar tactics: people become 'cargo', 'traffic' and 'illegals'; a sick six year-old child is described as 'it', while his parents are implied to be manipulating his condition; asylum seekers are demonised as the kind of people who would exploit their own children, forcibly sew up their lips, and even throw them overboard to drown. Meanwhile politicians advocate the firebombing of asylum seekers' boats, and Australian armed forces are given the unprecedented legal authority to use 'necessary and reasonable force' to 'push off' asylum seeker boats from our waters. Warning shots and even automatic fire are used to scare off asylum seekers.

If these are not issues of morality, what are they?

In 1901, at Federation, Australia locked itself in a fortress of whiteness, consumed by phobias of marauding Aboriginals within and encroaching Asians without. Exactly one hundred years later we are a nation that, in Prime Minister Howard's words, will not be 'held hostage to our own decency'. (Our self-definitions, like our coastlines, shrink to a barrage of rebuttals.) But how shall we name the thing that does now hold us hostage, cordoned anew in a sea of delusions, with a few unarmed asylum seekers we have 'unpeopled' (Tony Birch's phrase) into 'the enemy'?

Can our decency and humanity be substantiated except by acknowledging the humanity and suffering of others? To the degree we deny the human suffering of others, isn't it our own humanity that we imperil?

© Suvendrini Perera

October 2001