To cite this Article: Perera, Suvendrini (2006) ''They Give Evidence': Bodies, Borders and the Disappeared', Social Identities, 12:6, 637 — 656

‘They Give Evidence’:

Bodies, Borders and the Disappeared1

Suvendrini Perera

In the face of ongoing regimes of racialised punishment, Indigenous people across Australia

have opened ways for the rest of us to think about the responsibility of giving evidence. The

tenacity of their insistence holds the present accountable to the past and reminds us of the

duties of the living to those who have died. What follows is a meditation, enabled by these

histories and interventions, on relations of accountability, witness and responsibility to

bodies encoded by the racist political violence of the state.

This essay is part of my still unfolding attempt to understand the role of the border and the

camp as threshold spaces in Australian history (Perera 2002b, and 2006). The camp as a

juridco-political formation (Agamben 1997) encompasses the colonial camp in the form of

the native camp, reservation or slave plantation (Mbembe 2003, Gilroy 2000) as well as the

European concentration camp and the contemporary immigration detention camp (Perera

1 My special thanks to Amal Basry for permission to cite her testimony in this essay, and to Mary Dagmar

Davies for facilitating this. I am very grateful too to the artists and Sherman Galleries for allowing me to

reproduce works by Guan Wei and Dadang Christanto. An earlier version of this paper was presented as a

keynote address at the Body Politic Conference at the University of Queensland in December 2004. Thanks to

Tseen Khoo for the invitation and to the conference participants for their moving responses and comments on

this paper.

2

2002b). These locations of terror are spaces for the enactment of what Paul Gilroy refers to

as ‘camp-thinking’ (2000:88), although they are spaces also subject to a continual stretching

and renegotiation of limits by their inhabitants (Turner 2005). In this paper I consider, as

corollary to previous discussions of the territorial space of the immigration detention camp,

the technologies by which Australia produces a sequence of spaces of exception at sea.

Since 2001, Australia’s surrounding waters have seemed awash with bodies: the phantom

bodies of children who were not thrown into the water (as suggested in a false government

report to discredit asylumn seekers on the even of the 2001 general elections); the unknown

bodies, mostly of children, lost when SIEV X, the unknown boat in a sequence of such

vessels, went down with 353 asylum seekers on board; and the bodies symbolically set

afloat a year later following the bombing on Kuta Beach in Bali (Marr and Wilkinson 2002;

Kevin 2004; Perera 2006). Beginning with the disappeared of the SIEV X sinking,

euphemistically referred to in a later Senate Inquiry as a A Certain Maritime Incident, I am

interested in both how this maritime space of exception is produced and the ways in which

nameless bodies of the dead and disappeared in this space are made present in contemporary

Australia as evidence, as political bodies.

My title refers to Dadang Christanto’s installation, ‘They Give Evidence’, a series of

standing, naked figures, bearing in their outstretched arms the remnants of burnings,

drownings, beatings and other mutilations that leave their subjects stripped of markers of

identity, yet mark them, unmistakably, in an order of contemporary political violence.

Christanto’s powerfully resonant work prompts me to reflect, in the latter part of the essay,

on the simultaneous inscription of these nameless bodies in another series of circuits and

relations: the relations between the bodies of living and dead, between modalities of bearing

witness and giving evidence, and the role that the bodies of the dead play as border or

threshold spaces marking separation and connection and functioning as ongoing bearers of

powerful political meanings.

3

Dadang Christanto, They Give Evidence 1996-1997

Reproduced with permission, courtesy of the artist and Sherman Galleries, Sydney

Giving Evidence

An act of violence for which the Australian body politic is accountable is the story at the

centre of my paper, the story of SIEV X. At the time of writing (November 2004) it is just

over three years since 353 people died in the seas around Australia, in militarised territory

whose borders were intensively patrolled and monitored by the Australian navy to prevent

the arrival of asylum seeker boats, known as SIEVs (Suspected Illegal Entry Vessels). In

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late 2001 this was a space of terror where war was waged in our names with the aim of

protecting and securing a national geo-body (Winichakul 1994) perceived as under siege.

Ships were forcibly boarded, fired on, and the navy authorised to use ‘necessary force’ to

prevent asylum seekers setting foot on Australian soil. This state of war, characterised by

the militarisation of maritime borders and a mobilisation of extreme nationalist sentiment

that seemed to place the entire landscape under arms, is powerfully invoked in two recent

works by Guan Wei, titled simply Looking for Enemies and Target.

Guan Wei, Looking for enemies No. 2, 2004 Reproduced with permission, courtesy of the artist and Sherman Galleries, Sydney

This backdrop of war and mobilisation against the enemy is a context for the testimony of

Amal Basry, one of 45 survivors among the hundreds who died on board SIEV X. The

testimony was written for the third anniversary of the sinking on October 18 2004. It needs

to be cited in its entirety, keeping in mind that not one of the SIEV X survivors was invited

5

to give evidence at the Senate Inquiry, A Certain Maritime Incident, the only official

attempt to account for what happened.2 Nor was any mainstream newspaper or journal in

Australia willing to publish this testimony in full on the anniversary of the sinking.3

Amal Basry’s Testimony

Amal means hope in Arabic. That was why my father gave me that name and

maybe it was why I survived SIEV X. 146 children, 142 women and 45 men died in

the tragedy of SIEV X. I was one of the 45 survivors I saw it all. I saw so many

people die and I have to tell the story.

It has been three years since the sinking of SIEV X but I am still in the water. I can

still feel the dead woman whose body I clung to so I could keep afloat. I never saw

her face, it was in the water but I talked to her all night. I prayed for her soul and

she saved my life.

I still see what I saw when I first opened my eyes under the water. I saw children

dying. I can taste the oil and the salt of the sea, I feel my fear and I smell death.

Little children, dead babies, desperate parents, families dying one by one, and I

was alone believing all the while my own son was dead.

I was in the water for 22 hours waiting for my death. I was like a camera I saw

everything. When the sharks circled I prayed for my death and suddenly a whale

rose up beside me it was as big as an apartment block it blew water from it's blow-

hole all over me and I thought it would suck me and the woman I clung to into the

deep. But the whale also saved me. It saved me from the sharks.

Sometimes when the pain wakes me in the night, in that moment between

frightening dreams and the shock of reality, I think the sharks are feeding on my

body, tearing parts of me away, and ripping at my soul.

2 Two years after the sinking Amal Basry was called as a witness in the trial of one of the accused people

smugglers in Brisbane in 2004. 3 Information from Mary Dagmar Davis in a posting on the Ausnews network. The testimony was, however,

published on a U.S site, www.axisoflogic.com, and writers such as Arnold Zable cite quotations from Amal

Basry. A comprehensive list of materials citing SIEV X survivors’ narratives is available on

www.SIEVX.com.

6

On the second anniversary of the sinking of SIEVX I knew I was ill. On October 27,

2003 I lost my left breast to cancer and now the cancer is in my bones and is eating

away at me.

The cancer eats like a shark. My doctors are kind and try to manage the pain but

there is a deeper pain, the pain of loss, the pain of rejection. In those hours when I

cannot sleep l see the lights that were shone on us as we fought to live in the

water.

The lights came from ships, I could hear the voices of the men on board so safe

and so dry but I could not make out the language they were speaking. I screamed

to them to help, we all cried from the sea but they went away. The pain of SIEVX

will not go away.

I cry so often. I cried and cried when I saw the Australian families in Bali mourning

their friends and relatives, I knew how each of them felt. That is how I feel. I cry

when I see the families of the American soldiers who have died in Iraq. That is how

I feel. And like them I need to talk about the things that have happened to my life

and my family because of tragedy.

I cry when I think of my beloved Iraq the land of my birth reduced to rubble and my

people dying and I cry when I think of my father who is still in Baghdad so ill and so

poor. When I was a child we spoke English in our house and my father took me

round the world and I learnt so much and met such wonderful people.

Our family was torn apart by Saddam Hussein. My mother died hungry. My

husband and I were forced to flee to Iran with our children. But we knew we could

not stay there and we believed in Australia so my husband went ahead. He was

waiting for us for when SIEVX sunk.

When we were rescued I spoke English again. I said ‘I want to go to Australia and

learn very good English and then I want to go on Larry King and tell the world what

happened to us’.

7

In all the months we waited in Indonesia and were questioned over and over I still

believed in Australia. And I still believe in Australians because they do care about

us and they are kind and loving friends. But none of us from SIEVX feel safe; we

cannot be safe until we know we belong, until we can be citizens.

I may not have long now but I speak English well enough to give evidence for

Australia in a court of law without a translator. And I can speak in public without

notes and I want to tell my story. The Australians who have spoken up for us are

my angels and I thank God for them. And now I want to spend what time I have left

telling people what it was like to be there, awaiting my death, there in the water

being kept afloat by the body of a dead woman and seeing it all happen.

We still need help. All of us from SIEVX still need your help. On the eve of the third

anniversary of the sinking of SIEVX I pray to God for the people who died and for

all the people who loved them and I pray too for the survivors. We are all in

different places and our lives will never be the same but now I know Australians will

never forget. I don't have time to write a book but I want to talk and I want to talk

now.

My name is Amal. It means hope. And I will not give up hope until the day I die.

***

Amal Basry’s story is a testament of hope that bears witness to terror. Encircled by sharks,

surrounded by the dying, she keeps alive, clinging to the body of an unknown dead woman.

Little children, dead babies, desperate parents, families dying one by one, and I was alone

believing all the while my own son was dead. Three women are reported to have given birth

in the water as they drowned during those desperate hours, the waters of new life hopelessly

mingled in the engulfing waters of death. Amal Basry is a medium and a witness for these

unimaginable events. Her body detaches itself, becomes a camera, all-seeing, recording

whatever falls in its line of vision. On shore again, she is consumed by the need to speak: to

learn very good English, to appear on Larry King Live, to communicate to the world, in the

language it understands, the knowledge inscribed on her body during those 22 hours.

8

Two years after the sinking of SIEV X the pain of the dying, of the sharks, of agonised

waiting during a whole night and day, the pain of continued rejection, of waiting for

citizenship and the imperative to tell her story become indivisible from the pain of cancer.

Amal Basry loses her left breast, the one over her heart, as her body, the site of pain and

trauma, bears its own witness to these events. After SIEV X this body is remade. Amal,

whose name means hope, now also embodies the dead. It is three years since the sinking of

SIEV X but I can still feel the dead woman whose body I clung to so I could keep afloat. The

body of the dead woman, whose face she never sees, is now Amal. Amal Basry’s body is

neither whole nor singular. Part of her is in Australia waiting to give evidence for the living

and the dead. Another part is in the water, in limbo with the dying, beset by sharks, crying

out to the people safe and dry on the ship, and on the land beyond, people who speak an

unknown language. In the water and on land Amal Basry’s body cries out to be heard, to

bear witness.

The ‘License to Kill’

Apart from brief moments, such as the photograph of the three drowned al Zalimi sisters

Eman (aged 8), Zharara (aged 6) and Fatima (aged 5), published in the Sydney Morning

Herald immediately after the sinking, the dead of SIEV X and stories like that of Amal

Basry remain outside our consciousness. National imaginaries of absolute sovereignty and

carefully sustained mythologies of the island-fortress as geo-body have proved more

powerful, cohering an Australian body politic up in arms against an imagined invasion by

unknown and alien enemies. As Michael J. Shapiro puts it in a discussion of warfare and the

identity affirmation in the contemporary state, these alien bodies are ‘indispensable to the

armament of the body politic and to the pleasurable experience of community’ (1996: 469).

Achille Mbembe’s discussion of necropolitics is helpful for understanding how the lives lost

on SIEV X were enlisted, in the summer of 2001 and after, in the task of asserting a

sovereign Australian body politic. Necropolitics is Mbembe’s term for describing

‘contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death’ (Mbembe 2004: 39). Here

Mbembe inverts the shift in the exercise of sovereign power over life and death that

Foucault identifies at ‘threshold of our modernity’ (Foucault 1986: 269), when he proposes

that sovereign power, in effect a power exercised through the right to kill, was displaced in

nineteenth century Europe by no longer ‘bringing death into play in the field of sovereignty’

(1986: 266), but instead exercising ‘the organization of power over life ... whose highest

9

function was perhaps no longer to kill, but to invest life through and through’ thus ‘marking

the beginnings of an era of “bio-power’’’(1986: 262). Mbembe questions whether this

Foucauldian concept of biopower, the notion that the sovereign power of modernity is

organised around the ‘management of life rather than the menace of death’ (Foucault 1986:

268) is still

sufficient to account for the contemporary ways in which the political, under the

guise of war, resistance or of the fight against terror, makes the murder of the enemy

its primary and absolute objective? War, after all, is as much a means of achieving

sovereignty as a way of exercising the right to kill. Imagining politics as a form of

war, we must ask what place is given to life, death and the human body (in particular

the wounded and slain body)? How are they inscribed in the order of power?

(Mbembe 2004: 12)

Mbembe’s questions return us to Foucault’s distinction in The History of Sexuality between

an old ‘society of blood’ or ‘sanguinity’, where ‘power spoke through blood’ (to ‘shed

blood’, to ‘have a certain blood’ to ‘be of the same blood’ to ‘risk one’s blood’) and a

society of sex or sexuality, addressed to ‘the body, to life, to what causes it to proliferate …

its stamina, its ability to dominate,’ through the ‘themes of health, progeny, race, the future

of the species’ (Foucault 1986: 268-9). Mbembe proposes that contemporary bodies

wounded or slain in ‘the guise of war, resistance or of the fight against terror’ cannot be

accounted for solely in the register of modern biopower, but are inscribed in the order of

both life and death, in the anatamo-politics of the individual body and the biopolitcs of the

mass or race simultaneously; through new concatenations and recombinations of

disciplinarity, biopolitics and necropolitics (Mbembe 2004: 27; Foucault 2003: 242-3).

I want to explore the interrelated questions raised by Mbembe in the passage above -- of

contemporary war, resistance and the war on terror as means of achieving sovereignty by

exercising the right to kill, and of how in this war death and the individual human body, ‘the

wounded and slain body’, are inscribed in the order of power -- through considering the

ways in which power is exercised over asylum seeker and refugee bodies in Australia as a

form of war. This is not to equate some of the instances examined in detail by Mbembe with

Australia. I am interested rather in exploring the formation of the necropolitical, and the

conditions that activate the assertion of the ‘sovereign right to kill’ where ‘power speaks

10

through blood’, with all the resonances identified by Foucault above, in the context of

Australia’s domestic politics of the war on terror.

Mbembe, drawing on Foucault’s definition of sovereignty as the power to ‘take life or let

live’ asks, ‘[U]nder what practical conditions is the right to kill, to allow to live or to expose

to death exercised? Who is the subject of this right? (Mbembe 2004: 12, my italics). In this

context I remember the declaration of sovereignty that dominated the election campaign of

2001: ‘We decide who come into this county and the circumstances in which they come’.

This declaration of sovereignty rang out as a call to arms and a declaration of war on three

levels: at the level of the war on our maritime borders, a call that resonates powerfully with

deeply embedded fears of an alien invasion by sea; of the war on terror, declared two weeks

after the Tampa arrived in the waters off Christmas Island; and finally of the war at home,

which mobilised an already primed and armed body politic against the figure of the alien

and un-Australian (Perera 2002a and 2002b).

This declaration was backed up by a series of measures that have been addressed more

systematically elsewhere, but that can be summarised as follows: the militarisation of

national borders through mobilisation of the navy and the mounting of, in Prime Minister

John Howard’s words, ‘saturation surveillance’ of the international waters between

Australia and Indonesia (cited in Kevin 2004: 108); the assertion of the right to use

‘necessary force’ to push back asylum seeker boats, authorising the enactment of terror on

the bodies of unarmed asylum seekers, mostly women and children (Perera 2006b);

enactments of sovereignty, such as the boarding of the Tampa by the SAS in full combat

gear (Rajaram 2003), a set piece that immediately connects this moment to a long line of

imperial performances of power; the enactment of ‘border protection’ legislation excising

parts of Australia from the migration zone, again as an assertion of sovereign control,

subsequently to be followed up by other acts exercising sovereignty not only over space but

also over time, such as the retrospective excision of Melville Island from the migration zone

in November 2003 (Perera 2006a; Rajaram 2006); and finally the ‘Pacific Solution’

asserting Australian hegemony over the sovereignty of regional states (Rajaram 2003, Fry,

2002; Fonteyne 2002).

These multiform assertions of sovereignty over borders amounted to the declaration of a

condition of siege and the authorisation of the state of exception, in turn licensing the

11

demarcation of certain spaces located both inside and outside the law for the containment of

offending bodies. Bodies held in these spaces of exception are held to have no claim on

protection from either domestic or international law (a recent example is the 2004 ruling by

the Australian High court that the Family Court holds no jurisdiction over children held in

detention camps). At the same time, by virtue of the power exercised over the bodies in

these spaces, for example the power to imprison, to deport, to deprive of legal rights under

international law, or to subject to ‘necessary force’, the space of exception remains within

the control of the state. Agamben’s discussion of the state of exception is extended in Didier

Bigo’s elaboration (2006) of what he describes as ‘the state of the ban’ in the war on terror,

where bodies are placed in suspension subject to administrative trial rather than the rule of

law, and are thus in a state of ‘permanent exceptionalism’ whose maintenance through

extra-legal means is represented as vital to the survival of the state under siege.

Building on Agamben’s discussion of the inhabitants of the space of exception, Mbembe

argues that necropower is exercised where

the state of exception and the relation of enmity have become the normative basis of

the right to kill. In such instances, power … continually refers and appeals to

exception, emergency and a fictionalized notion of the enemy. It also labours to

produce that same exception, emergency and a fictionalized enemy. (Mbemebe

2004: 16)

I am proposing that the declaration of absolute control over maritime borders in the Spring

and Summer of 2001 -- ‘We decide who comes into this country’ -- activated specific

Australian ‘imaginaries of sovereignty’ (Mbembe 2004: 18) to produce, through the body of

a fictionalised enemy of the refugee, a climate of emergency and state of siege. This state of

emergency and siege provided the conditions for the exercise of necropolitics, ‘the right to

kill, to allow to live or to expose to death’ in the case of asylum seekers arriving in boats.

At the same time, evidence is mounting that the camps which hold those who survived the

voyage, and despite all attempts to halt them, arrived on the Australian mainland, are spaces

that can only be described as deathscapes in their own right, where power is exercised over

the bodies of inmates through a sustained culture of mania and terror (eg. testimonies given

on the SBS Insight program, ‘Behind Closed Doors’, April 26, 2005). And, as Joseph

Pugliese describes in a series of unforgettable essays, these are spaces of living death,

12

whose reach even extends to those officially outside, but who still inhabit the limbo of

‘Temporary Protection’ (Pugliese 2002; 2003; 2004).

The connection between politics, the state of emergency and the death of the fictionalised

enemy is manifested most obviously, but at the same time most occluded, in the instance of

SIEV X. Australia was quick to officially wash its hands of any responsibility for the

deaths, the Prime Minister protesting ‘We had nothing to do with it, it sank, I repeat, sunk in

Indonesian waters, not Australian waters’ (cited in Kevin 2004: 96). Despite this disowning

of any connection, in what ways does the sinking of SIEV X demonstrate the exercise of

sovereignty through the ‘right to expose to death’? Firstly, it is now established that the boat

sank, not in Indonesian waters as at first vehemently claimed by the government, but in

international waters and in the territory that was extensively monitored by the Australian

navy’s Operation Relex, under the regime of surveillance established by the new Border

Protection legislation (Marr and Wilkinson 2003: 239-40; Kevin 2004: 95-100). Yet

apparently no trace of the boat was detected in these operations, although Indonesian fishing

boats managed to find and pick up survivors after, reportedly, seeing their luggage floating

on the water. Secondly, Amal Basry and other survivors repeatedly testify that they saw

lights and boats in the water that night that seemed to sail away from the survivors every

time they seemed within hailing distance of those in the water (Kevin 2004: 70-73). Third,

and most disturbing, there remain serious questions about the unknown role played by the

covert disruption program funded by the Australian government in Indonesia. The most

chilling line in the entire parliamentary debate over SIEV X comes from Opposition Senator

John Faulkner speaking about this secret program:

At no stage … will I break … the protocols in relation to operational matters

involving ASIS [Australian Secret Intelligence Service] or the AFP [Australian

Federal Police]. But those protocols were not meant as a direct or indirect licence to

kill. (cited in Kevin 2004: 8)

This speculation about the possibility that there could exist a ‘direct or indirect licence to

kill’ refugees and asylum seekers comes from a highly respected politician and leader in the

Australian Senate. In a speech to the Fabian Society in 2003, Faulkner elaborates further

what he means by the ‘direct or indirect licence to kill’. He spells out the type of sabotage

activities the Senate Inquiry into the sinking could not categorically rule out as part of the

13

official ‘disruption’ program: the committee could not rule out that food was not provided

to people aboard smuggling vessels; it could not rule out that sugar was not put into the fuel

tanks of vessels carrying asylum seekers or that sand was not put into the engines of these

vessels (Faulkner 2003: 6). These statements spell out the kinds of deliberate sabotage and

threats to human life included under Faulkner’s reference to ‘the direct or indirect licence to

kill.’ It is a chilling catalogue that fleshes out what is involved in Mbembe’s definition of

necropolitics as ‘the right to kill, to allow to live or to expose to death’.

Although the Senate Committee that Faulkner chaired exempted the government and its

agencies from any responsibility for the fate of SIEV X, findings made on the basis of

heavily censored official documents and without hearing evidence from any of the

survivors, the only eyewitnesses to what happened, Faulkner took care to put on record

elsewhere a number of unanswered questions and submerged fears about the extent of

Australian involvement. A further quotation from Faulkner’s speech refers to a meeting

between the then Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock and the Inter-Agency Coordination

Group on People Smuggling at the Australian Embassy in Indonesia.

Mr Ruddock allegedly asked in a joking tone, ‘Well could we interfere with the

boats?’ Apparently in response, the Federal Agent Dixon reminded Mr Ruddock of

obligations under Australian law. The conversation ended when Ruddock laughed

the matter off and said it was just a concept in the air (Faulkner 2003: 8).4

While the deliberate sabotage of asylum seeker boats by agents of the Australian

government may have been only ‘a concept in the air,’ the then Immigration Minister’s

comments on the actual sinking of SIEV X are on the public record. In his first statements

to the media on October 24, 2001, after the hundreds of deaths became public, Ruddock

commented that ‘this tragedy may have an upside’ because of its value as a deterrent to

others (Marks 2001: 14).

The questions placed on record by Faulkner support Kevin’s statement that in the process of

setting out to investigate the sinking of SIEV X, ‘the unthinkable becomes thinkable’

(Kevin 2004: 15). However, even some of the most severe critics of government policy

4 Ruddock’s response was: ‘ I have no formal recollections of any of those discussions which I am prepared to

discuss’ (Faulkner 8).

14

baulk at the unthinkable implications of the sequence of events leading to the sinking of

SIEV X. Defined by the limits of their eminently rational and determinedly liberal humanist

approach, David Marr and Marion Wilkinson, for example, stop short of pursuing the

implications of their own observations when it comes to SIEV X. Their book, Dark Victory,

a fine piece of reportage on the children overboard affair and its framing events, includes a

detailed analysis of the Liberal Party’s Campaign Launch in 2001, an event held at City

Recital Hall in Sydney’s Martin Place just ten days after the sinking of SIEV X. Marr and

Wilkinson describe the tumultuous audience response that greeted Ruddock and Howard at

the launch as follows:

In the centre of Sydney on a quiet Sunday morning, ringed by police, inside an

elegant recital hall, a crowd of prosperous, white Australians was baying for border

protection. (Marr and Wilkinson 2002: 246)

In this remarkable sentence Marr and Wilkinson identify a moment when the racist truth of

Australia’s border protection policy is laid bare in the savage applause of the party faithful

at this triumphal meeting at a concert hall in the heart of rich, cosmopolitan Sydney. The

clean, well-groomed, white audience ‘baying for border protection’, is baying, in effect, for

blood. The use of the bloodless phrase ‘border protection’ here is double-edged: it adopts

the euphemistic and bureaucratic terminology of management, self preservation and

national security favoured by government, yet betrays what it seems to repress by preceding

it with the aggressive, savage and alliterative ‘baying’.

In their analysis of the SIEV X story Marr and Wilkinson stop short of confronting the full

implications of this moment of insight into the truth of asylum seeker policy: that racism is

a technology that licenses and enables the practice of a necropolitics, where power speaks

through blood. To understand this moment, it is useful to return to Foucault’s account of the

transition from a sovereign power organised around a ‘society of blood’ to a biopower that

relies on ‘sexuality’ and the disciplining discourses of management, health and self-

protection. In spite of his identification of a shift in European modernity towards the

‘management of life rather than the menace of death’, Foucault stipulates that the ‘thematic

of blood’ continues to ‘haunt’ the regulatory practices of modern statist biopower in the

form of discourses of scientific racism, racial hygiene and the protection of society:

15

Racism took shape at this point (racism in its modern, ‘biologizing,’ statist form): it

was then that a whole politics of settlement (peuplement), family marriage,

education, social hierachization, and property, accompanied by a long series of

permanent interventions at the level of the body, conduct, health and everyday life,

received their colour and their justification from the mythical concern with

protecting the purity of the blood and ensuring the triumph of the race. Nazism was

probably the most cunning and the most naïve … combination of the fantasies of

blood and the paroxysms of disciplinary power (Foucault 1986: 270-271).

This continued ‘thematic of blood’ -- or in Mbembe’s terms, ‘necropolitics’ -- remains

unspoken (a ‘haunting’) in the new order of biopower except when it is invoked at the point

where ‘racism intervenes’ in the form of the rationale, ‘Society Must Be Defended (Foucault

2003: 254). Indeed, racism is what enables the displaced power of sovereignty to take life or

let die be once again ‘inscribed as a basic mechanism of power as it is exercised in modern

States’: it is the ‘precondition for exercising the right to kill’ (Foucault 2003: 254, 256).

‘Once the State functions in the biopower mode, racism alone can justifythe murderous

fucntion of the state’ (Foucault 2003: 256). The inscription of racism ‘within certain limits

and subject to certain conditions’ (Foucault 2003: 254) in the modern state, however yet

remains unspeakable except where it can be named and therefore to a degree exorcised in

the extreme instance of Nazism. Only the ability to transgress what Gilroy describes as the

‘prescriptive uniqueness invoked to protect the special status of the Nazi genocide’ can

enable us to understand the conditions of the camp in other contexts where ‘if genocide is

not already underway, the raciology that energizes camp-thinking brings it closer and

promotes it as solution’ (Gilroy 2000: 88). The ability to name and identify ‘camp-

thinking’, with all its unthinkable implications, calls for an unpicking of the imbrication of

necropower and biopower in contemporary states where managerialist discourses of

‘security’ and appeals for the safeguarding of ‘our way of life’ and ‘national sovereignty’

operate hand in hand with the covert address of the power of blood.

Strange Deposits and the Role of Witness

One of the most telling indications of the exercise of necropower over the dead of SIEV X,

or in Agamben’s terms, their official status as disposable, bare life, homo sacer, is that to

date the government will not release all their names. The stated rationale for this refusal is

16

the need to preserve the safety of the state’s sources of information, the well-worn excuse of

‘operational matters’. To understand the true import of this refusal, Kevin points out, we

only need to imagine the public outcry if officials refused to release, say, the names of the

Australian citizens who died in the nightclub bombings in Bali for the sake of protecting a

source (Kevin 2004:17-18). But except where they have been identified by survivors or by

family members who know they were on the boat, the dead of SIEV X are by decree

unnamed, disposable casualties, whose value as ‘deterrents’ resides in their very anonymity.

In this they become akin to the casualties of necropower identified by Mbembe, those who

are inscribed in the ‘maximal economy now represented by the massacre’: ‘simple relics of

an unburied pain, empty meaningless corporealities, strange deposits plunged into cruel

stupor’ (Mbembe 2004: 35).

The public meaning of these bodies inscribed by necropolitics in ‘the maximal economy of

the massacre’ as nameless, undifferentiated deposits, nonetheless resides in their being

made present, in the register of anatomo-politics, as missing and disappeared fragments, in

order to testify to the very reality of necropower and absolutist sovereignty claims. The

anonymous wounded or slain body, Mbembe suggests, plays a very specific role in the

exercise of necropower, whether we think of the skeletons of Bosnia or the amputees of

Sierra Leone.

And yet. The meanings of these wounded, fragmented and scattered bodies will not be

contained and incorporated by necropolitics. Dadang Christanto’s installation, They Give

Evidence, reflects on the other meanings and registers in which the bodies unmade and

disappeared by political violence continue to signify. Christanto has said that while his work

refers to the people killed in Java during the 1968 coup by Suharto and his generals, the

installation speaks to all contemporary political violence. It is a work that explores the

complex relationships between living and dead, between presence and absence, and

between the acts of giving evidence and bearing witness, a relation also explored by

Agamben in Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. The witness, Agamben

elaborates, is a figure who bears contradictory meanings in law, morality and theology

(1999: 20-21), as a ‘the person who, in a trial or lawsuit is between two parties, is in the

position of a third party’ and as ‘a person who has lived through something, who has

experienced an event from beginning to end and can therefore bear witness to it’ (Agamben

1999: 17). Christanto’s title suggests some of the ambiguities and contradictions involved in

17

the role of the witness as a legal, ethical and political figure. In this installation, who or

what is giving evidence? Who or what is bearing witness?

Sixteen anonymous, naked figures stand mute, impassive, motionless, bearing in their arms

the evidence: tatters, scraps and remnants, the ‘strange deposits’ that remain as witnesses to

violence. There is an eloquent contrast between the impersonality of these stone-like

figures, stripped of all attributes but gender, and the personalised objects they carry, their

details and variations of texture, colour and shape. The shreds and fragments speak of lives

and flux against the monumental stasis of the figures. In the 1997 Sao Paulo installation

(http://www1.uol.com.br/bienal/24bienal/rot/erotasichri03a.htm) the figures stand mired in

accumulations of flotsam and jetsam, the messy detritus of unknown lives and deaths. These

rags and tatters are metonyms for the missing, the lacunae, standing in for that which has

has been violently torn apart and obliterated. At the same time they remind us of

relationships between the dead and the living, the fragile remnants of everyday living that

will not be disappeared. The installation remnds me of Courtney Brkic’s recounting, in a

memoir of her work on the mass graves at Srebrenica in the 1990s, of how the clothing

found among the bones and shattered skeletons -- hand-sewn shirts, knitted socks, colurful

18

scarves -- spoke of homes and families left behind in a way that anonymous bones alone

could not. Broken scraps and tatters are a bridge between the living and dead, as between

what can and cannot be known, or counted as evidence.

Anonymous bodies, ruined, slain and wounded, their shreds, scraps and fragments are

defining images of contemporary political violence. Upon these bodies the sovereignty

claims of anatamo-politics, its exclusionary itineraries and assertions of necropower are

violently inscribed. The bodies function as both secret and public: they are unnamed,

undifferentiated, hidden from sight, but also signs of sovereignty’s power over life, markers

of warning and spectacles of ‘deterrence’. Michael Ondaatje’s novel of contemporary

political violence, Anil’s Ghost (like his better-known earlier novel, The English Patient)

has its centre a body made anonymous by state violence. In a sense the two novels share

detective plots that attempt to put back together, to emplace in history, bodies subjected to

political fragmentation and obliteration. Anil’s Ghost, mostly read as a comment on the civil

war in Sri Lanka, begins on a hillside in Guatemala, as UN archaeologists exhume body

parts from yet another newly uncovered mass grave. I read this text more as a parable about

the relations between art, history, political violence and the obscene solicitations of the

power of blood. In the texts of both Ondaatje and Christanto, the bodies of the dead, or their

remnants, shards and metonyms, work against this sanguinary appeal, to signify a space

between living and dying, past and present. Through acts of politicised re-memory, recovery

and reconstruction, the bodies are returned to the present, where they signify in relation to

other bodies, living and dead.

Understood as points of contact between past and present, living and dead, the bodies of the

dead themselves represent border spaces or thresholds. In the terms discussed by Agamben

on the role of the witness and the archive, they can be read too as intermediaries between

the unknowable ‘true witness’ of the dead and the ‘pseudo witness’ of the survivor:

The ‘true witnesses’, the ‘complete witnesses’, are those who did not bear witness

and could not bear witness. They are those who ‘touched bottom’: … the drowned.

The survivors speak in their stead, by proxy, as pseudo-witnesses; they bear witness

to a missing testimony. And yet to speak here of a proxy makes no sense; the

drowned have nothing to say, nor do they have instructions or memories to be

transmitted. They have no ‘story’ … no ‘face,’ and even less do they have ‘thought’.

19

Whoever assumes the charge of bearing witness in their name knows that he or she

must bear witness in the name of the impossibility of bearing witness. (1999: 34)

How do I understand Amal Basry’s testimony, a meeting point, both inside and outside the

positions Agamben identifies: the complete or true witness of the drowned, the one whose

face cannot be seen, and the incomplete or proxy witness of the survivor? If Amal cannot

speak for what is absent or missing, the faceless dead woman who kept Amal alive is

nonetheless not absent from the story that Amal performs in her testimony and speaks

through her body. Amal Basry’s body, testifying to the ravages of the shark and the shark-

like cancer in her flesh and her bones, encompasses both survivor and drowned, gives

evidence. In this body’s visible scars and lacunae, in the testimony of Amal’s missing

breast, those devoured by shark and sea, the drowned, the dead, the dead woman with no

face who keeps Amal afloat, too, are absent, yet present. Amal’s body ravaged,

reconfigured, embodies what is missing and yet made present in evidence.

Bodies and Borders

The bodies of the dead act as borders, thresholds and points of connection, between spaces

and between temporalities. In the words of Allen Feldman in his pioneering ethnography of

political violence in Northern Ireland, the bodies of those killed as markers where power

speaks through blood function as ‘mobile borders or interfaces’ and sites of exchange and

meaning (1991: 139). Thus the transgressive bodies killed on the wrong side of a map both

affirm and undo the logic of the border. As Nevzat Soguk (drawing on Michel de Certeau),

movingly describes, even the dead bodies of refugees washing up daily on Europe’s shores

‘mark the stages of an advance’, an unstable, mobile and evolving border:

Surely, where refugee bodies fall, they mark borders in their resourceful and rich

unfolding temporally and spatially. Bodies fallen, drowned, mangled, and suffocated

highlight borders’ capture of people daring to move unauthorized. On the other

hand, they also point to the trails through which border crossing people capture

borders and harness them to their movements. In this way, while reflecting the dead

certainties, stoppages and terminations effected by the border, they also point to the

ambiguities energized through border practices that manifest passages, continuities

and interactions. (Soguk, 2006)

20

The terminated bodies of refugees, fallen witnesses to the sovereign power of death, yet

create new border maps for the living; they fashion new passages and points of transition in

and through the border, marking the possibility of other spatial relations and new, as yet

unrealised, geographies that confound the militarised borders of national geo-bodies. And,

like the body of the fugitive Oedipus, ‘the foreigner outside the law’ (Derrida 2000: 103) in

Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, these bodies act as meaningful markers of place. In death

Oedipus’s body, unwanted and illegal in life, lays claims to rights of place, confers

responsibilities and benefits on the custodians of his grave, creates new spatial meanings.

I read Guan Wei’s magnificent painting Target as one representation of such emergent

border maps and the work performed by refugee bodies as new markers in space. Target

records both points of terminus and living trails of movement as Wei maps the psyches and

bodies of asylum seekers onto the Australian terrain, refiguring it as a contested and living

spatiality. Michel de Certeau has discussed how the modern European map immobilised

into a ‘tableau’, a static and totalising representation that privileges state boundaries and

‘colonizes space’ (de Certeau 1988:121). Against the mobility of the earliest medieval maps

that recorded the flow of human itineraries, the modern map ‘slowly disengaged itself from

the itineraries that were the conditions of its possibility’. This ‘erasure of itineraries’ wiped

from the map other configurations, ‘geographies of actions’ and contested, living histories

of the border (de Certeau 1988:122). Wei’s painting reads as an attempt to insert active

border practices, itineraries of movement, and new relationalities into the static space of the

contemporary map.

21

Guan Wei, Target, 2004

Courtesy of the artist and Sherman Galleries, Sydney

The painting shows a landscape both known and unknown, one made strange by a flat and

stylised representation that draws on Western cartography, the conventions of Chinese

landscape painting and the one-dimensional quality of video games. Its distancing effects

are reinforced too by the breaking up of the landscape into panels, challenging organic

representations of the island continent as geo-body and its enabling myths of territorial

wholeness and unassailability. The cartoon figures of the soldiers and their weaponry are at

once menacing and unreal. Viewed form a distance, target and pursuer seem

indistinguishable on this vast terrain. Viewed up close, it is clear that the hunted and prey,

their terrors and hopes, are now inextricable from Australian landscape. Names like

Backyard, Sentiment River and Chaos City mingle with actual Australian place names, and

environmental features are interspersed with names signifying the passage of refuge seeking

bodies: madness, kick, cool, boring, heart, suffer, awe, love, lust, duty, jolt, quake, bother,

babe -- names that also uneasily recall and parallel the violent (re)naming of Indigenous

land by early settlers. In this painting, refugee bodies leave their marks and traces on the

land despite the elaborate fictions that excise their places of arrival and incarceration from

the national map, demarcating them as ‘not-Australia’ or sealing them off as forbidden

22

spaces of exception. Despite the technologies of necropower that attempt to deny their

presence, the elaborate measures designed to prevent them ‘ever setting foot on Australian

soil’ Wei’s map records the defiant presence and hereness of refugee bodies.

Wei’s Target and an earlier painting, Dow: Island, record the complex unfolding across the

Australian landscape and its surrounding waters of refugee bodies, their other maps,

itineraries and stories -- stories like that of Amal Basry. In turn, these stories open out and

engender new spaces of relationality between bodies and across space and time. One

powerful instance is the November 2004 voyage, led, from her wheel chair, by the great

1950s Australian Olympic champion, Betty Cuthbert, when group of activists sailed from

Perth to Christmas Island. In the waters somewhere between these two ports, one still in

Australia, the other excised from the national migration map, they stopped at a nameless in-

between space to remember with flowers, paintings and stories the drowned children, those

whose names we’ll never know and those infants yet unnamed, who died in the wreckage of

SIEV X.

Proposed Memorial for SIEV X victims in Canberra

Such actions bears witness to emerging and hidden geographies in Australia’s surrounding

waters and the engendering of new border practices of place. They affirm continuities

between the bodies on shore and at sea and disrupt the dynamic of invisibility/visibility

through which the bodies of SIEV X operate as at once shameful spectacle and shameful

national secret. Refuting the power of blood, actions such as this enact new forms of

23

connection and continuity in space and time as they assert a kinship with the bodies

expelled to the limbo of not-Australia. The border advances, expands, to embrace and claim

the gravesites of these bodies as an Australian space, a site to which we owe

responsibilities, and to which we must bear witness. In these small movements that puncture

borders, and in the creativity of new border practices, the bloody power of necropolitics to

unmake human bodies is not defeated. But dare we claim it can be defied?

There was no book of the forest

no book of the sea, but these

are the places people died.

Michael Ondaatje

‘The Distance of a Shout’ (1998)

This essay is respectfully dedicated to the memory of Amal Basry who lost her battle against breast cancer

and other ravaging forces on 18 March 2006. She was fifty-two years old.

24

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