STILL LIVES
2021
Oral history + image project.
Created with André Dao, Michael Green and Nicole Curby.
Published in Meanjin Winter 2021.
A still life is both a life that has been arbitrarily arrested, and a life that is settled, at home. For a stateless person, life is stasis and frustrated potential. At the same time, the lack of citizenship can push people to ceaseless migration in search of a home—a place in which to settle and belong.
In this series, five people now in Australia and New Zealand tell about their lives. You will meet two men who have spent more than seven years in immigration detention—Abbas, a Faili Kurd who remains in detention, and Khan Safdari, a Hazara man from Afghanistan, via many places, who has recently been released. You will also meet Jasmin, a Palestinian woman now living in Sydney with her children, and two Rohingya women, Aziyah in Brisbane and Hafsar in Auckland.
They spoke with André Dao, Michael Green and Nicole Curby. In response, and in consultation with the storytellers, artist Sarah Walker has photographed a series of objects drawn from their stories. These objects represent each teller’s idea of home, coalesced into a still life image whose edges and forms are as enigmatic and irretrievable as the notion of belonging.
It has been more than a decade I am away from my country, from the place where I was born. Whenever I lie down to fall asleep, I remember everything—the house that I grew up in, the village. The houses are made of bamboo and the roofs are made with the leaves of coconut trees. The chickens in the yard. And how we pluck the mangoes from our mango trees. And I remember that when we were young, we just ran to the rain — Hafsar.
Look, you have citizenship, belong in one country. When you’re travelling in another country, just you show your ID card, passport. You think I like it, travelling illegally? No way. Put myself in the dangerous, the very small, old boat and coming to Australia? If I have that piece of paper, I sit in the plane and coming. But I have no choice.
You have choice. Look how different, when you have citizenship, when you have that paper. Only paper — Abbas.