This essay contains audio produced by the Manus Recording Project Collective (Michael Green, André Dao, Jon Tjhia, Abdul Aziz Muhamat, Farhad Bandesh, Behrouz Boochani, Samad Abdul, Shamindan Kanapathi and Kazem Kazemi). The full archive of recordings produced by the collective can be accessed here.
The ocean has always been a place of escape for me. Each year I look forward to the first plunge of the season, a moment that signals winter’s last gasp as the days begin to lengthen and thaw. The ocean – with its tidal ebbs and flows – is a moving relation, and I sense this when submerged: one watery body entering another. But the ocean, like the tidal movements that define it, is a shifting signifier. Lately I have been thinking about the chaos and violence of oceans, about the anxieties they betray and the ghosts that lie in their depths. We can think of modern history as a history of ocean crossings: the traffic in humans between Africa, Europe, and the Americas through what was known as the Middle Passage; the criss-crossed routes that litter the Indian and Pacific oceans as traces of global colonial projects; the rising sea levels that threaten small island nations around the world as the climate crisis reaches catastrophic levels.
In the settler-colony called Australia, the ocean marks the edge of the nation state, the leaky and porous boundary of territorial sovereignty. The figure of the island conjures the fantasy of a self-enclosed and self-contained world. This sense of insularity underpins the Australian national imaginary, grounded in the histories (and afterlives) of invasion and occupation. The limits of the ‘island’ nation find their most anxious and assertive expressions at the site of its physical border – the beach. As Aileen Moreton-Robinson tells us, the beach is a crucial site for the (re)production of ‘the possessive logics of patriarchal white sovereignty’, which describes a regime of power that asserts and naturalises the idea of the nation as a white possession.(1)
Cook’s act of claiming possession for the British Crown occurs more than once in the popular imagination. The actual declaration of ownership was performed by Cook on Bedanug, the small island off the coast of Queensland that he would name ‘Possession Island’. This event then becomes conflated with various other landings and arrivals, such as Cook’s landing on the beach at Kurnell or the arrival of The First Fleet seventeen years after he had been and gone. In the popular imagining, Cook’s declaration of possession always takes place on the beach, a scene marked by the ceremonial raising of the Union Jack and canonised by E. Phillips Fox’s 1902 painting Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay, 1770 . That the beach is the site where Cook is imagined to have taken possession of Australia goes some way to explaining the current anxiety around protecting the nation’s sovereign borders. This illegal and illegitimate act of possession, retrospectively justified through the fiction of terra nullius, establishes an unresolvable tension for the settler state: imposed on top of the pre-existing sovereignty of First Nations, the act of claiming possession establishes a confrontation between sovereignties that, as Patrick Wolfe tells us, ‘are primordially external to one another’.(2) Indigenous sovereignty is an externality that sits outside the jurisdiction of the settler state, a foundation that unsettles its claims to legitimacy and authority. ‘For the settler state’, writes Wolfe, ‘the struggle to neutralise Indigenous externality is a struggle for its own integrity’.(3) The process of claiming possession is never as straightforward as simply declaring sovereignty – rather, settler sovereignty is a claim that must be continuously remade over and over again.
The beach, as the point where Australia is imagined to begin and end, indexes the anxieties of the settler-colonial project and its fantasy of a white nation. The vast and porous nature of the border marks it as a site where whiteness comes under attack, threatened internally by the continued assertion of Indigenous sovereignty and externally by the arrival of boats carrying (non-white) refugees.
Recently I have been thinking about the sound of whiteness. This continues my interest in the relationship between sound and subjectivity, an ongoing investigation into the politics of listening. Partly, my interest in sound is in the way it refuses containment. Like the ocean, sound leaks and flows – it is an immersive phenomenon that permeates visible barriers and reverberates through spaces and bodies. But the sonic is also central to processes of demarcation, such as the claiming of possession or the construction of subjectivity. Simply, some voices are heard as speech while others are dismissed as noise.
There are obvious and audible expressions of whiteness that we can point to: the cacophonous violence of the Cronulla riots converging as the univocal chant ‘we grew here, you flew here’; the sound of fascist white nationalists gathering to ‘reclaim the beach’ of St Kilda as a white possession; the countless media bites of right-wing politicians and journalists who declare the country as under attack by non-white refugee and migrant communities. In these sounds the fantasy of the white nation is revealed in all its insecurity, entitlement, and rage. But part of the power of whiteness is in the way it naturalises itself, becoming an unnamable ideology that assumes neutrality. What does whiteness sound like when it is cloaked in invisibility?
We can hear the sound of whiteness in the silences of the archive and the absence of certain voices and subjects from dominant accounts of history; in the implicit demand that difference be made transparent and legible; in the formalisation of political narratives; and in the selective and performative celebration of diversity. In short, white possession is maintained by a complex, and often subtle, series of soundings and silences.
This week I was reminded of Annabel Crabb’s ABC show, Kitchen Cabinet. In the show, Crabb shows up to the houses of various Australian politicians, they cook her dinner as she ‘grills’ them on their personal and political lives. In an episode from 2015, Crabb visits now Prime Minister Scott Morrison, then the country’s Treasurer having recently moved on from his role as Immigration Minister. During his time in charge of the Immigration portfolio, Morrison oversaw the deployment of Operation Sovereign Borders. The operation implemented a ‘zero tolerance’ stance toward so-called ‘illegal boat arrivals’ and further entrenched the Federal Government policy of mandatory detention in offshore facilities. Morrison also introduced legislation that removed Australia’s duty to comply with international law when detaining refugees at sea, significantly curtailed refugees’ legal rights to appeal Immigration Department rulings and brought back Temporary Protection Visas which left many refugees in a state of limbo.
I watched in disbelief as Morrison announced he would cook Crabb, a Lankan meal of fish curry and samosas (which he nicknamed ‘ScoMosas’). His breezy appropriation of Lankan culture – my culture – was a ham-fisted attempt to prove that he is not racist. Absent from Crabb’s interview was any mention of Morrison’s draconian treatment of Tamil refugees fleeing the violence of Buddhist ethno-nationalism during, and following, the civil war. Absent was any mention of refugees detained indefinitely in Manus Prison, to use Behrouz Boochani’s term. The inane kitchen chatter that Crabb and Morrison performed is the sound of patriarchal white sovereignty in action. The instrumentalisation of cultural difference is, to borrow a formulation from bell hooks, the ‘seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture’. But such ‘celebrations’ of difference are only tolerated as long as they do not threaten the integrity of the white nation and its ‘values’.
Increasingly, I find myself suspicious of empathy. I am not against the idea of understanding, but I am not so sure that empathy moves us toward this end. The structure of empathy requires a type of identification in which one must substitute the self for the other. In order to close the gap between self and other, empathy requires that we project ourselves onto, and into, the other. This act of projection means that we end up centering ourselves in this imaginative experience of otherness, a gesture that ultimately effaces the one we are trying to get closer to. Saidiya Hartman, writing about antebellum USA, cautions us against this felt state:
the effort to counteract the commonplace callousness to black suffering requires that the white body be positioned in the place of the black body in order to make this suffering visible and intelligible. Yet if this violence can become palpable and indignation can be fully aroused only through the masochistic fantasy, then it becomes clear that empathy is double-edged, for in making the other's suffering one's own, this suffering is occluded by the other's obliteration.(4)
Empathy has come to dominate how political narratives get told. The push to make political stories immediately accessible and instantly relatable is put forward as a way to cut through the ‘noise’ of the contemporary media landscape. But this demand to make difference and suffering transparent – and therefore relatable – places an unfair burden on those whose lived experiences form the basis of political struggles. Narratives that produce occasional moments of empathetic identification – such as the SBS series show Go Back to Where You Came From, which followed a group of Australians with largely anti-refugee positions on a journey mirroring those undertaken by many refugees – foreground the personal transformation of the empath, relegating the experience of the refugee to a forgotten footnote. Such spectacular displays of empathy can occur at the same time as inhumane, illegal, and murderous policies are implemented and celebrated. Here the experience of the refugee is reduced to stock narratives of suffering that serve as vehicles for the performance of white innocence, fragility, and transformation. More and more, I am convinced that empathy might foreclose a more meaningful politics of solidarity.
The recordings are varied: some take the form of a first-person address to an imagined audience, one that would attend an art exhibition in a capital city in Australia; some document daily interactions between refugees or between refugees and Manusians; some index the labour of political organising in its visible and less visible iterations – the work of collecting signatures for a petition or the work of addressing refugee forums and advocates ‘onshore’ in Australia; and some simply document daily life in detention – a walk into the town centre, the waves on the beach, the singing of songs, a soccer game.
At times, the recordings are moving, at other times banal. But the power of this archive is in the way it seems to refuse the given grounds of representation available to the refugee. The recordings move against empathetic identification, preserving the opacity of difference. The moments of transparency and disclosure are complicated by the absence of an overarching narrative. The recordings are cut at the ten-minute mark and the transition from one to another can bring with it a radical shift in tone and affect. I keep coming back to this archive, listening again and again to these vignettes of imprisonment, particularly those that index a certain sense of everydayness: Farhad, trying to do his washing and waiting; Kazeem, taking a shower; Aziz, watching the World Cup final with the guys. In these recordings I hear an assertion of the right to representation, a mode that refuses the demands of the white nation and complicates the stereotypes that cloud our imaginings of the refugee. Here listening becomes an exercise not oriented toward empathy but rather toward acknowledgement – of difference, opacity, unknowability.
But these recordings also index the brutality of Australia and its anxious investment in reproducing whiteness. The different temporalities at play – the ten-minute recording, the 14 hours of the archive, the indefiniteness of detention – interact to illustrate how this process of imprisonment functions as a kind of state-sanctioned slow death, to borrow Lauren Berlant’s terminology. For Berlant, ‘slow death describes populations marked for wearing out’.(5) It is the production of a temporality outside the timescale of the crisis, the production of a suspended temporality in which the state can critically endanger subjects through the very act of keeping them alive. ‘The temporalities of the endemic’, as Berlant puts it, produce debility in ways that often obscure the explicit violence of the nation state.(6) In the rhetoric of the state, indefinite detention is cast as a necessary measure to protect both the sovereignty of the nation state and the vulnerable (but ‘illegal’) asylum seeker. Here the state seemingly seeks to keep the refugee alive but in actuality implements a range of policies designed to slowly wear this population out. This suspended animation also works to diffuse the urgency of calls to end mandatory detention by removing the temporal parameters around which action might be oriented.(7) For many refugees, the only escape from slow death has been suicide, which occurs with increasingly regularity in Manus Prison.
Yet despite the insularity that defines the Australian nation state, its borders leak and shift with the movement of the tides. These tidal movements establish a connection between the island of Manus and the island of Australia, a repetitive movement backwards and forwards that interrupts the suspended temporality of slow death on the one hand and the amnesia of history on the other.
When we listen to the ocean, perhaps we might also consider how we listen against the state.
(1) Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
(2) Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (London and New York: Verso Books, 2016), 34.
(3) Ibid., 37.
(4) Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 19.
(5) Lauren Berlant, ‘Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency)’, Critical Inquiry, 33 (2007): 760.
(6) Lauren Berlant, ‘Slow Death’, 756.
(7) As my friend Tom Melick pointed out, the notion of suspended animation is might also be thought in relation to the history of coloniality. He tells me that ‘anthropologists refer to this as ‘the ethnographic present’, a term that is used to describe the way an artificially constructed colonial gaze sought to suspend people in an imagined time outside of time, where those who are its concern either exceed or disappoint the structure of containment’.
Andrew Brooks is an artist, writer, editor, researcher, and teacher whose work takes the form of installations, videos, texts, sound recordings and objects. His work is interested in the regulation and mediation of bodies, systems of power and discipline, infrastructure and labour, and histories of resistance and survival. Along with Astrid Lorange, he is one half of the critical art collective Snack Syndicate.
Runway Journal acknowledges the custodians of the nations our digital platform reaches. We extend this acknowledgement to all First Nations artists, writers and audiences.
Runway Journal is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Runway Journal receives project support from the NSW Government through Create NSW.
Runway Journal acknowledges the custodians of the nations our digital platform reaches. We extend this acknowledgement to all First Nations artists, writers and audiences.
Runway Journal is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Runway Journal receives project support from the NSW Government through Create NSW.