Still Alive: Notes from Australia's immigration detention system
Shortlist year:
2022
Shortlist category:
Young adult literature
Published by:
Twelve Panels Press
About the book
In early 2011, Safdar Ahmed visited Sydney's Villawood Immigration Detention Centre for the first time. He brought pencils and sketchbooks into the centre and started drawing with the people detained there. Their stories are told in this book.
Interweaving journalism, history and autobiography, 'Still Alive' is an intensely personal indictment of Australia's refugee detention policies and procedures. It is also a searching reflection on the redemptive power of art. And death metal.
About the author
Safdar Ahmed
Safdar Ahmed is a Sydney-based artist, musician and educator. He is a founding member of the community art organisation Refugee Art Project, and member of eleven, a collective of contemporary Muslim Australian artists, curators and writers. He is the author of 'Reform and Modernity in Islam' (2013) and the Walkley Award–winning documentary web-comic 'Villawood: Notes from an immigration detention centre' (2015). He also sings and plays guitar with the anti-racist death metal band Hazeen.
Judges’ comments
This confronting work of graphic non-fiction stands as a powerful statement about the impact of Australia's refugee politics in recent decades. Both the writing and the art are unadorned – the images and text work together to illuminate the lived reality of life under Australia's refugee system. It is uncompromising in its account of the forces and agendas which have seen attitudes towards refugee communities manipulated for various ends.
'Still Alive' does not shy away from uncomfortable and difficult questions; bringing together the voices and art of refugees and their advocates with a forensic account of Australian refugee policy. It evokes the idea of horror in art and music as a motif to convey the idea of abjection and to portray the impact it has upon the mental and physical health of those caught in the system.
The work is illustrated in black and white, however it refuses to take a similarly binary approach to its subject matter. Instead, the moral and ethical questions raised are treated with nuance; refugees are neither valorised nor demonised but are portrayed as humans; messy, complex and lost as they struggle to maintain their connections and a sense of self in a system designed to silence and conceal their stories.
Towards the end of the work, Ahmed asks the reader; "As an Australian citizen, aren't I implicated in the abuses of my government? Aren't we all?" It is this feature of the book – the way it raises significant questions of culpability without didacticism or judgement, and asks the readers to carefully consider their own standpoint – that makes it an important and powerful piece of cultural memory. As a work of literature 'Still Alive' is a significant contribution to the ongoing national conversation.
