Twentieth Dead Letter to Khodayar Amini

Dear Khodayar, with your name I honour each refugee that there is in the world. I honour those that have been killed and those who have made it this far. I honour all the perilous paths that people have fled along and all the dismal sea crossings that have been made. In your story I see myself and my ancestors and my children. I see my friends and family in your struggles and suffering. Yours was a gigantic and a mortal quest. Even as a child death was a threat that hung above you. You had to move; you had to try to find a place that was safe. Your only chance was to push apart the mountains and search for the key that would give you true freedom. You threaded a way through the mountains, passed over the water and managed to arrive here. But there were only dry and brittle hearts to be found – our arms refused to help you up and would only push you under. Relentless logic excluded you from our community. You were put in the camps and learnt there what a living death could be like. Peeling away your name and your past the Government made you like refuse to be burnt. Your future was a grey nothingness. You were forgotten and forgettable and utterly without love and dignity. But they could never stifle your voice, never negate your compassionate words. Love Stephen

Nineteenth Dead Letter

Dear Khodayar, this country that you came to looking for peace and safety has a violent and racist past. Now we re-enact that violence and racism in the present on people like you – the people of the road fleeing unthinkable misfortune. Our false slogans of humanity are both to strangle our own guilt and to harm your spirit. It is not just you bodies that we lock away from freedom but we also stuff your minds with lies and filth. We can not admit what we do to you so we deny the reality of your enslavement. We can not bear your weakness and vulnerability so we blacken your names and demean you. We can not bring ourselves to embrace our sisters and brothers so we deny your humanity and take away your voices.

You know all this Khodayar. This is what you lived and died, and this is what you taught to me. You bore witness to this crime that is being done by us. This was a difficult thing to do and I congratulate you. This crime that is decried in history books yet made afresh each day. Love Stephen

18th letter to Khodayar

Dear Khodayar, when I go to visit you I start from my home in Woiwurung country and drive to your final camp in Bunwurung land. In your plight you withdrew from the cities of concrete and asphalt and turned to the timeless landscape of Australia; to the animals and plants and stories that have always lived here. Settler Australia with its cities and towns is a recent growth on this land. You looked for the gaps between the carparks and the buildings and found some sort of respite in the indigenous paradigm of water, land and air. When I look at the eucalyptus leaves I see your name in their long curving shapes. It is as though this very land remembers you and sighs your name from its pores. As much as the city wants to forget you, the earth and roots and rocks won’t stop singing your name.

I am glad. This land is witness to your agony and to the others who came here and to those who will come after. This land holds the shape of your voice and the light of your face. Deep and large beyond reckoning, this place is witnessing the tragedy inflicted on you and remembering. Each of the cuts with cotton that killed you is folded in animal skin and fur. Love Stephen.