Vanessa Russell - The World is Not Big Enough: The Truth Is a Foreign Country for a Refugee

For A, an even bigger whirl of pure joy

Contents

And when that

Tomorrow comes.

Why should anyone remember me?

Why should the busy world waste time remembering me?

Ahmad Shah Abed

They want to do something

They want to slap the policy makers in the face

They have hearts full of pain and eyes full of kindness

Old hands and young hands full of warmth

Shame and embarrassment visible in their pupils

They cannot do anything, just share a moment of their life and sadness

from Visitors by Mohsen Soltany Zand

In December 2001, I received an email from the Refugee Action Collective (RAC). I must have signed up to their email list at some point: probably after quickly signing a petition outside the Baillieu Library at the University of Melbourne.

In the email, someone called Kate Durham had started up something called Spare Rooms for Refugees and was asking if anyone could put up a refugee in their spare room.

The email used the second person and purposely got into your head: Your wish is to reduce the numbers of asylum seekers held in detention centres, and to accommodate the now growing numbers of homeless asylum seekers in the community. If you agree with this sentiment, click here and send us your name and contact details.

Well, of course I agreed with the sentiment but that one click was a big commitment. I was twenty-eight and had recently left the insular religion Id grown up in and was making up for lost time by studying full-time at university. At the time, I was living in the Dandenong Ranges and technically had a spare room, but the owner was selling. I also wasnt sure if a homeless asylum seeker would appreciate being housed halfway up the mountain with little support, transport or community.

And who were these people who could theoretically be living in my spare room? Would they be traumatised? Would they be homeless, with matted hair, dirty fingernails and that musty stench of urine, sweat and unwashed clothes? Would they be male? Would I wake up with one of those scimitars pushed up against my neck?

And what about those days when I just didnt want to speak with anyone?

Durhams email continued with more palatable alternatives to housing asylum seekers: if you didnt have a spare room, you could make a donation. Or, if you couldnt help with a room or a donation, you could email Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock at the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs (DIMA).

Durhams email was pretty foolproof. The commitment grew smaller and smaller as it went on, but the only option was to do something.

Right at the end, it offered even the most misanthropic person something to do.

Write to some refugees: it will help them realise that someone in Australia is thinking of them.

I was thinking about them. A little. I was thinking that I felt guilty whenever I walked by the RAC and Socialist Alternative stands at uni and, although I agreed with the issues on their posters, I didnt want to join. Some people are joiners, some people are huggers: Im neither.

Maybe I could write a letter to an asylum seeker, a little note. It wasnt too much to ask. Id feel so much better, like I was doing something. So, I pressed that last button and sent off my name.

I was soon emailed a male name to write to: Mr Ahmad Shah Abed, WAG 18 from Afghanistan. I wondered what WAG 18 meant. He was in the Port Hedland detention centre right at the top of Western Australia.

It was the barest of information and I immediately began filling in the gaps. It was only three months since 9/11 had happened and the world still felt shaky and suspicious. In my mind, Ahmad Shah looked like one of the terrorists whod hijacked a plane on 9/11. Or maybe he looked like a male version of that Afghan girl with the ferocious green eyes from National Geographic.

I feared that as soon as I wrote a letter with my return address on the back, this guy and his two hundred mates would come around when they were let out of detention and try to move into my spare room. Or rob me. Or worse.

I even had to send the letter straight to the Port Hedland detention centre, so every ASIO man and his dog would know I was writing to this guy.

What the heck had I gotten myself into?

It was 2013 and I was bored. I couldnt sleep, I couldnt read, I couldnt do anything except listlessly cruise the internet. I had Facebook stalked ex-boyfriends, revived old crushes on band members and was up to date with celebrity gossip. Who else could I look up?

What about that guy, that asylum seeker guy I wrote to years ago what was his name? That guy in Port Hedland, the detention centre? I hadnt thought about him for years. Afghan, three names, started with an A.

He was probably slip-slapping around Perth in thongs, loving the freedom after years of mandatory detention. It would be fun, wouldnt it, to get back in contact, to say hi, to catch up with what hed been up to since wed lost contact.

What was his name though? It had a rhythm to it. I scrolled through Facebook but there was nothing doing. What was his name? I was going to have to get out of bed to get his letters, which Id kept for all these years. I knew exactly where they were, in the bookcase in the back room, but it was a whole ten metres away.

What if we got in contact and he was really grateful that I had written to him all those years ago because it had helped him through detention and then we ended up getting married?

That did it; I got up and found his letters, which were neatly filed in a black display folder. I opened to the first letter and found his name: Ahmad Shah Abed. Yes, I remembered now. Memories came back of awkward letters and me feeling resentful and terrible that I wasnt gracious enough. Him with his pain, asking me to help set him free from detention, but me not having any kind of clout to help him.

Ah, that was in the past: wed be able to laugh about it now.

I also had some other memories buried deeper about him declaring his love for me and asking for stuff constantly, and me thinking he was being both creepy and not grateful enough.

Back in bed, I typed his name into Facebook but there were no results. There were no Ahmad Shah Abeds in the whole world. Weird.

Instead there was a link to show me more results. I clicked, and my eyes snagged on a partial quote from a newspaper: to kill Abed Ahmad Shah I stopped breathing.

That wasnt him. It couldnt be him. My Ahmad Shah? I took a deep breath and clicked on the link. It opened on a news story from 4 February 2011 from the West Australian newspaper WA Today.

Western Australia. It would fit.

I scanned the article, barely daring to take it in. It was a report from a murder trial in progress where an Afghan refugee called Osman Ahmadyar had pleaded guilty to the 2009 murder of another Afghan refugee called Abed Ahmad Shah.

My mind tried to make itself believe that it was a different Ahmad Shah to the one Id written to. This persons name was back-to-front, for one thing. But the dearth of any person on Facebook called Ahmad Shah Abed, in any configuration, chilled me.

The article had a photograph of Ahmad Shah, slightly blurry. Between 2002 and 2004 Id written to him about a dozen times, spoken to him on the phone three or so times, but had never seen him. He hadnt been able to send photos out of the detention centre, but Id always imagined him looking like the Hazara people from the mountainous regions of Afghanistan because that was all I knew of Afghanistans refugees.