“[A]ny man’s death diminishes me,” wrote the seventeenth century poet John Donne, “because I am involved in mankind.” This question of humanitarian allegiance, and its role in alleviating suffering, lies at the heart of Adele Dumont’s extraordinary memoir No Man Is An Island (2016). Recounting her stint teaching English to asylum seekers between 2010 and 2012, first on Christmas Island then at Curtin Detention Centre in Derby, Western Australia, it is an invaluable record of bare life inside this country’s modern day torture factories.
The madness of the system is apparent upon her arrival at Christmas Island, where asylum seekers can be locked up indefinitely but there is a $5000 fine for killing the island’s famous crabs. Positivity is mandatory, and the centre’s operators regard bingo as an adequate salve for the traumatised souls in their care. The linguistic distortion favoured by totalitarian regimes is also at play: detainees are to be referred to as “clients” and their guards “client service officers.” In predictable bureaucratic fashion, the centre runs on its own timetable regardless of the needs of its so-called clients; headcounts are undertaken four times a day, depriving the detainees of their daily English lesson if they run overtime. At Curtin, her classes are interrupted by officers pulling pranks, and by hunger strikes. Neither offers her adequate resources for the role they have engaged her to fulfil.
As the book’s title suggests, Donne’s poem ‘Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions’ flows like a current throughout the narrative. The famous stanza is quoted as an epigraph:
No man is an island
entire of itself;
every man is a piece of the continent,
a part of the main.
Donne’s poem displaces the notion of individuality in favour of collective solidarity. Besides the applicability of this sentiment to her subject matter, Dumont invokes it for its use of the word island, which she uses to denote both the Australian mainland and the nation’s carceral geography. Dumont also plays on the idea of isolation, both physical and emotional, that is present in Donne’s poem to trouble the distinction between inside and outside that lies at the heart of the detention system.
Refugee advocates commonly claim that the perceived indifference of the broader Australian population to the plight of asylum seekers can be explained by the government’s use of detention centres in remote areas to isolate ‘us’ from ‘them.’ As Dumont notes, however, many Australians, such as herself, are in the centres, which immediately calls into question their positioning in the national discourse as places beyond the understanding of the mainstream population. Physical presence, however, is not enough to surmount the mental boundary marked by the barbed wire. At Christmas Island, Dumont is able to retain her self-conception as an outsider who morally objects to the system of detention because she is a volunteer. When she transfers to Curtin however, she is employed by Serco, which marks the beginning of the end, as she is “no longer comfortably separate from a system that I do not really want to be a part of.” Her classroom becomes an island of focus and activity amidst the languor of indefinite detention: “[l]ike a painter who crops her world to fit her canvas, I have to keep my focus within the four walls of my classroom.” Her students, meanwhile, are aware that detention is intended to segregate them; she reports that they ask to photocopy a map of Australia “as though it is a secret document.”
Dumont also painfully learns that physical proximity is not in itself a bridge to understanding. Despite her willingness to bear witness to the detainees’ stories, she acknowledges that she can never fully grasp the impact of their experiences, either of persecution in their countries of origin, or their treatment by her own government. While she is aware of the limits of her own empathy, a number of guards seem reluctant to even attempt to mentally overturn the stereotypes of refugees that are so willingly perpetuated by the federal government, preferring to retain their view of them as queue-jumpers who are ungrateful for the (questionable) assistance they have been given. Misunderstandings and prejudice also exist between detainees; some of the Iranian and Hazara detainees express racial prejudice towards their Tamil counterparts, and have a paranoid belief that their applications are treated preferentially.
Nevertheless, Dumont’s work thrusts her into a constellation of contrived intimacies that are by turns poignant, awkward and damaging. The way the “clients” treat her is heartbreakingly reverential. During Ramadan, although they are fasting, the students make her tea and bring her biscuits and dates, content to sit with her while she reluctantly accepts their offerings. When their regular classroom unexpectedly becomes unavailable through an administrative error, she is shepherded through the compound by her doting pupils as they search for a new one: ‘A man about half my size swiftly steps in to take my notebooks and pencil case off me, as though he is unburdening me of a great load… One of my students fans out his notebook and holds it in an attempt to shield my face from the already fierce sun.’ Outside of class, they continue to address her as “my teacher” and share with her pots of tea and cups of salted yoghurt that they have secretly fermented from a clandestine hoard of long-life milk. Their attachment is mutual; she feels homesick away from the centre, and detainees also keep tabs on where she is, mournfully confronting her about the length of her absence when she returns from a trip home that lasted longer than she had planned.
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In her 2015 book Strangers Drowning, Larissa MacFarquhar details the struggles of individuals who have strived to live within altruistic frameworks often bordering on the extreme. There is the couple who adopt twenty children; the health worker who offers refreshments to armed rebels after they have threatened her clinic; the family who renounced all material comfort to establish a refuge for sufferers of leprosy. One of the book’s salient questions is the origin of the subjects’ desires to do good. A number come from abusive backgrounds and are implicitly motivated to prevent others from suffering like they have, but those who grew up in comparatively stable homes appear to have latched on to altruistic ideas, seemingly inexplicably, from a young age. Dumont is honest about her own doubts and motivations. Her natural predisposition is characterised by an emotional porousness which she knows is potentially a vulnerability. But, tired of teaching English to privileged international students in Sydney, she is lured to Christmas Island by the possibility of making a difference.
Dumont’s overarching mission in penning her memoir is to interrogate what working in a detention centre does to a person. She quickly finds herself isolated among her colleagues, who can more readily turn a blind eye to suffering than she can. Indeed, their ability to recount a suicide attempt as though it is a hilarious anecdote compounds the horror she feels at confronting the detainees’ circumstances. But despite their callous bravado, she also notices moments in which the officers let their guards down, recalling “that practically all the staff shift a little when they are faced with clients.” A case worker from the department of Immigration and Citizenship is visibly uncomfortable when a wad of newspaper articles detailing attacks on Hazaras in Pakistan is thrust upon her by a detainee who has had his asylum claim rejected. Dumont, too, finds the images hard to look at, but acknowledges that ‘this is the point- to force us to look at death squarely, to see it in black and white.’
The guards and DIAC caseworkers are easy targets for cynicism and blame, but Dumont manages to sketch them with a compassionate eye, acknowledging “that people’s motivations for being here can be mixed; that some of the clients are bullies; that my own reasons for being here are not completely altruistic; and that everyone is bigger than the roles they perform in this place.” She ponders the possibility that turning a blind eye to the suffering around them is their survival mechanism. But their positions can also nurture a sense of superiority, a feeling from which Dumont is not immune; she reports, to her dismay, that within the centre she is treated like she is ‘special,’ and is conscious of her anonymity when she visits Sydney. The guards also don’t hesitate to turn on each other; bullying among them is rife. A number of the male officers view Dumont as a sexual object, and consequently her interactions with them are often fraught, requiring her to adopt a demeanour of exaggerated passivity to prevent their misogynistic banter from escalating into outright harassment. Dumont notes early on that detainees are watched but not seen; it is hard not to feel that the guards’ inability to fully see her is an extension of this logic.
Feeling increasingly remote from her colleagues at Curtin, Dumont seeks refuge in teaching. But her sense of the classroom as a nourishing space begins to break down when the centre’s routine is challenged by a hunger strike. She helps set up a makeshift medical facility with another teacher ‘[t]o try to make ourselves feel less useless,’ but remains uncertain of how to acknowledge the gravity of the detainees’ distress; it is an inescapable confrontation with her own inadequacy as an individual in the face of such overwhelming need. Like the individuals in Strangers Drowning, she finds herself questioning whether she is doing more harm than good. The centre transforms her perception of society and her place within it; she becomes more aware of the suffering of homeless people that confronts her back in Sydney, and inability to ameliorate their circumstances. Back at Curtin, she starts saying ‘no’ more often to requests made by her students outside the classroom. Where before she saw preparing detainees for life outside as a constructive activity, it increasingly appears to her that the men’s lives are moving in ‘futile circles,’ and the same could be said of her work.
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Running throughout Strangers Drowning is an implicit critique of the notion of purity. Despite their intense desires to do good, many of MacFarquhar’s subjects must eventually confront the fact that they are inescapably compromised by the systems that they emerge from, and by those that they must live or work within. Despite their commitment to principle, conflict between their circumstances and their charitable missions is unavoidable. One “do-gooder,” recognizing that being miserable hampers her ability to be useful to others, becomes uncomfortably aware of her need for a certain level of happiness and comfort. Another feels conflicted about her deeply held desire to become a mother, because it will absorb energy that she could direct towards caring for others. The health worker who has treated people indiscriminately during Nicargua’s civil war learns that a man she saved subsequently went on to kill several people. But they find that ultimately, grappling with the enormity of humanity’s suffering is as much a part of their work as the actual provision of care. And so it is for Dumont: when she starts to feel numb in the face of suffering, she knows it is time to leave.
While she conveys the barbarity of the system overall, Dumont also beautifully captures the voices and personalities of her “clients” as she recounts their solicitude and careful attention, their capacity for humour and their subversive resilience, a trait especially apparent in the man who fashions a kite from a plastic bag and dental floss. Similarly, although she delineates many instances of individual suffering – a suicide, self-harm, the hunger strike, the rejected applications and the torture of waiting- there is also a subtlety to her writing that conveys an air of quiet devastation, which underpins her larger point: she is a lone individual doing the best she can in a system designed to fail. Nevertheless, each of her tender ministrations constitutes a small island of mercy.