Correspondences is a small and unsettling book, edited by poet Jessica Traynor with Stephen Rea. It contains entries by 38 artists – mainly writers – representing pairings of established Irish artists including Paula Meehan, Theo Dorgan and Emilie Pine with individuals tied up in Ireland’s international protection system. This is the system by which people apply for status as refugees under international law. Correspondences describes itself as an anthology to call for an end to direct provision (DP). It joins a small number of initiatives which allow the inhabitants of the system to tell it their own way (others include the Asylum Archive project by Vukasin Nedeljkovic; Melatu Uche Ochorie’s short story collection This Hostel Life; and the beautiful MASI journal published this autumn to mark five years of the existence of the Movement of Asylum Seekers in Ireland).
Some of the pieces are bare bones accounts of the difficulties, tedium and cruelty of the DP system, ably framed by Bulelani Mfaco’s introduction which describes a series of individual and collective resistances to the system, from the establishment of MASI during a lock-out at the Kinsale Road DP centre in 2014, to the suicides which proved the only possibility of escape for certain residents. Mfaco observes, simply: “It has always been difficult to complain in direct provision.” An anonymous contributor from Zimbabwe agrees. “How can I call this place home,” she asks, “when I am even afraid to speak up?”
For Irish contributors, the echoes with Ireland’s institutional past and its ongoing ramifications are inescapable. Emilie Pine and Jessica Traynor both invoke the troika of carceral institutions, the nightmare from which we cannot wake: the industrial schools; mother-and-baby homes; and Magdalene laundries. Both Dr Angela Byrne and poet Eileen Casey remember orphan girls deported from Ireland to Australia during the great famine. In her poem Workhouse, Casey traces the connections: “Once ashore, they were given shelter,/ weekly rations. Tea, sugar, flour./ Direct Provision by another name.”
Restless lives
The call and response of outrage at injustice between the Irish and our visitors is compelling. But an even greater strength of this volume is when it goes beyond outrage, to express the truths of the people hidden and segregated in Direct Provision centres around the country. Marwa Zamir, aged just 16, remembers the day she fled her home in Afghanistan (screaming and crying, policemen, dead bodies, American soldiers with tanks), and how her grandmother made lemon juice to stop the children crying.
In his poem They Will Come for You, Evgeny Shtorn reflects on the moment that a refugee life changes. He describes the things left behind, the small details of which the refugee is woven: half-finished lemon tea; photographs on one’s walls; lovers and crushes. Batur Nadir observes the robins screaming and quarrelling in a willow tree in Carlow: it is said, he notes, “that robins, like humans, have aggressive territorial behaviour”. Nadir’s despatches from a restless life are being written as a memoir, and judging by this short entry, it will be another essential addition to our understanding. He describes how he spends his weekly allowance in direct provision in a single day (€19.10 before it was raised in this year’s budget): on a Mach razor, a lottery ticket and a bottle of 7 Up, seeing as he had a stomach ache.
‘It isn’t home’
Owodunni Mustapha’s beautiful poem Up the Hill in Mayo juxtaposes Ireland and Nigeria deliciously, her small children scurrying up O’Connell Street as it almost resembles their home town: “everyone in a hurry as if they were at Lagos Island Market./ I feel at ease but it isn’t home.” My favourite piece, by Rehan Ali, shows life in direct provision through the eyes of the child he was when he arrived there from Pakistan, aged just six. He knows every centimetre of Bridgewater House and all the children living in it, wanders it in childlike boredom. His mother, he says, is familiar with the edge, though “she wanted to give us the open sky and unfolded sea”.
In some cases, the correspondence between mentor and mentee is laid out for us, most successfully between Rehan Ali and Ian Maleney, who each meditate from their different positions on the line between freedom, boredom and neglect with the surprising gaze of the child. Arnold Thomas Fanning sensitively explores the differences in meaning of the journey he takes to visit Donnah Vuma in Limerick and the sorts of journeys that she can take, for whom, as she observes, “seeking protection and safety comes at the price of one’s freedom”.
In the final coupling, Nokukhanya Dlamini and Jessica Traynor both reflect on their scars. Dlamini’s scars are something she needs to ignore, but is not allowed to: “How many more times/ do I have to tell the buried scar/ for you to believe?” Traynor’s is easily concealed, because, she concludes “I am lucky enough/ to live in a country/ where any/ small/ inconvenience/ is/ quickly/ (quietly)/ removed.”
This is an excellent book and disturbing as it needs to be. You should add it to your Christmas list.
