“The idea of quietly staring at a rock, piles of sand, or blinking stars for hours, if not weeks, seems, weirdly, profoundly countercultural today, in a world where people tweet bubbles, livestream the arching of eyebrows and spend holidays distracted by how best to market themselves on Instagram…”
Julia Baird’s Phosphorescence is full of personal stories of encounters with beauty that illuminate hope in situations of darkness.
‘I experience beauty as that which connects rather than removes…There is no transcendence here. It is embodiment and connection. It is enfolding, grounding, reminding, startling, unsettling, shaking and restoring.’
Can we see the beauty, the desirability, of atypical, even disabled bodies?…To recognise and accept our own beauty requires us to break away from the shackles of our social conditioning.
‘It reminds us that a violent state that has weaponised the physical and mental disintegration of ‘outsiders’ can also turn that violence within… We can glimpse the uncomfortable truth that citizenship – as the institution through which to be recognised as a political subject – is exclusive, elusive, and fragile…’
‘The story that we may not know, watching from the safety of our couches, is that of Ameer (Bazzi). A father who will stop at nothing to see his family in the imagined safety of Australian borders, only to have his family, hopes and sanity ripped apart…And this is where the drama lies. It lies in the truth…’
‘Stateless reminds me that it is my government that deliberately makes the lives of asylum seekers more difficult than is needed. It reminds me that people who have sought asylum on our shores continue to be locked up in indefinite detention…’
All of which speaks to a deeper and more prevailing problem of western storytelling. What’s missing in Stateless, and what’s missing in so much of our discourse around immigration, is a discussion of those true events inspiring our current global crisis…
Find out about The Cooperative Forum, a monthly dialogue that is launching in August.
