5 Questions with 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 (IB Tauris, 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.
No.1
You mention it in the graphic novel itself, but for the benefit of readers who have yet to start reading Still Alive, can you briefly run us through how it all began?
The graphic novel emerged from my experiences visiting the Villawood Immigration Detention Centre on behalf of the not-for-profit community art organisation Refugee Art Project, which I founded with Bilquis Ghani and some other friends over a decade ago. That organisation supports asylum seekers and refugees through community events and art workshops. In the spirit of collaboration, artworks are curated and shown in public exhibitions, online, and in self-published zines. The intention is to amplify the agency and self-expression of people of an asylum seeker or refugee background, to challenge public misconceptions about the refugee issue and the realities of the detention regime in Australia.
The Refugee Art Project has fostered some wonderful friendships and a strong sense of community over the years, which is the source of many stories and collaborations that make up the graphic novel. Some artwork and short comics—made in Villawood by people who were then detained—are also included in the book, alongside my narrative about that time.
A small part of Still Alive was first published as the web-comic ‘Villawood: Notes from an immigration detention centre’ , which went online in 2015 and which won a Walkley Award that year. It was made with the support of GetUp! from a crowdsourcing venture to fund alternative journalism on refugee issues. At the same time Twelve Panels Press asked if I would adapt the web-comic for print publication and I remember saying it would only take a year and a half to complete. About six years of solid work later, it’s now released.
No.2
Still Alive effortlessly blends biography, reporting and polemic to tell the story of human rights abuses related to refugee detention in so-called Australia, both off- and onshore. It is also very personal in how it details your experiences getting to know the refugees in the book through the Refugee Art Project, as well as the stories of their lives. Tell us about the process, how did it materialise in this way?
The autobiographical bits of the book allowed me to be self-reflexive with my own observations and experiences, and to think more broadly about issues of representation and the stress I felt around telling stories which were not my own.
The process of collaboration in most cases came from the relationships that were formed initially in Villawood. From 2011 until 2017 some friends and I regularly visited with paper, pencils, drawing pens, and charcoal chicken from the amazing Lebanese chicken restaurants in nearby Granville. The gatherings were unstructured and led by whatever people felt like doing at the time. It was very informal and more about providing a sense of community and support than to churn out art. We would eat, chat and occasionally get drawing. Some detainees were already into art but most had never tried it before—the work that came from that was truly amazing.
We still gather regularly even though it’s been more than a decade. Most of our group are now living in the community on short-term visas. But they are still waiting to achieve permanent protection despite gaining refugee status many years ago. We meet these days in our studio at Thirning Villa [in Ashfield], where we put on events, exhibitions and sometimes engage in unplanned collaborations, which are often the most fun. So to answer the question, I think the process in most cases was an outgrowth of friendships that I’ve been fortunate to develop over many years, and everyone who shared their story with me knew pretty much what I do creatively, which hopefully allowed them to trust and have more confidence in me.
No.3
You also have a background publishing zines and playing in metal bands, and these all come through strongly in the book. How do these mediums come together for you personally?
I think if there is a line running through all of my stuff it would be the idea of art as a type of introspective self-exploration, but mobilised in a strategic way to hopefully address some aspect of the human condition or a pressing moral or social concern. When it comes to zine-making and metal, both have that capability. I’m inspired by the DIY approach—the sense that we make our own culture—which is ingrained in zines and underground metal music. For me, both belong in a political context that is pluralistic and inherently anti-authoritarian, and are well tailored to expressing the idiosyncratic quirks of a personal or subjective voice.
Zines afford a unique freedom insofar as there are no editorial constraints or sense of pandering to a hegemonic vision of the world. They give scope to explore the most arcane issues, generating material that is often deeply subjective, specialised and like nothing you’ll find in corporate media. Zines are particularly good at conveying voices and perspectives that are historically marginalised or ignored. (In this context the zines we made with Refugee Art Project are unique. They contain narratives, poetry, illustration and single-page comics made by people in detention or on temporary visas which you don’t come across anywhere else.)
The zine community exists in a small, autonomous ecology of annual fairs, social gatherings, swaps and a sense of community, because everyone does it for the art. And by that I mean zine-making is a creative vocation that exists largely outside the neoliberal art market. They are produced and sold quite cheaply, with a tiny margin of profit (if any).
As for metal, it has always felt exhilarating and transgressive to me. Bands like Napalm Death and Sepultura seized my imagination for their virulent social justice and anti-capitalist messages. Now that my graphic novel is finished I want to get recording and release some music with my band Hazeen, a two-piece that I share with my good friend, academic and fellow comic artist Can Yalcinkaya. He flays the drums whilst I play guitar and growl. We are an explicitly anti-racist Muslim death metal band who dress up in corpse paint to become the symbolic monster or ‘death cult’—which is our play on Australia’s racialised paranoia towards Islam.
Sometimes we finish our gigs with a ritualistic, communal cake-eating ceremony where we invite the audience to join us in devouring cake made up as an angry Muslim zombie or reviled Australian race-baiter. This is to symbolically ingest and so eliminate the signs of nationalist fear-mongering. I personally think our next cake should be [made to symbolise] Rupert Murdoch. We’ll fill him with bilious yellow custard, green jelly and slime. The custard should contain chunks of Violet Crumble. It should look like vomit.
No.4
Still Alive is a collaboration of sorts, where you work together with asylum seekers you know to help tell their stories. To me, this is rare and impressive, as those in the art, media and publishing worlds tend to see disadvantaged individuals as subjects to be looked at and told on, resulting in a remove that doesn’t provide a full picture. How important was it for you that Still Alive was to be a collaboration? And how did you maintain the integrity of the people you write about?
I think anyone entering a collaborative project with refugees needs to be aware of how the political discourse has slanted our understanding of the issue and embedded racist triggers in exactly how refugee stories are told. If it’s a positive story, then it is expected to follow the arc of officially endorsed migrant narratives: in which someone leaves their country in a state of unhappiness and undertakes a sometimes difficult journey to Australia where they eventually find happiness, once they are ‘assimilated’ into the community.
A strong view seems to be that refugees should be grateful to have set foot in Australia, and that such gratitude must be performed. I’ve seen people meet a refugee for the first time and automatically expect them to recount their life story and display their worst traumas by way of proof, in order to be validated. So much media coverage also focuses on issues of misery and persecution, which is a reductive lens to be viewed through. Journalists sometimes engage with refugees only to extract their story and film their tears, which might be good for the journalist’s career but not always for the person in the story. Sometimes people are left feeling used and exploited. In this context Still Alive had to be genuinely collaborative or there would have been no point in doing it.
The main character in Still Alive is Haider (a pseudonym), a good friend whom I see often. I showed him the work at many stages of the drafting process; the script was something we started working on inside Villawood back in 2014, when he approached me about sharing his story. Because we are good mates, I felt I could trust him to tell me if he wasn’t comfortable with something, which is critical to collaboration when there is an imbalance of power and resources. Sometimes people say ‘yes’ to something because they feel obliged, or because it would seem rude to say no, or because they worry they’ll regret losing you as a connection further down the track. So for me it was important that he knew me well enough to give honest feedback and to say if he wasn’t comfortable about something. Personally speaking, the best moment in our exchanges was from last year, when I showed him a newly drawn page of the book. It’s a cute page in which I rendered his mum acting like a boss and pointing her walking stick at people. Once he saw it he instantly pulled out his phone to take a picture, which he then sent to his mum in Iran. That was a sweet moment.
No.5
What do you hope the publication of Still Alive will do for the human rights conversation?
I hope Still Alive gets into the hands of young people, because they care about important moral issues. In this country the very idea of human rights is routinely trivialised by both the political right and some on the left. But as refugee cases clearly show, we need a Bill of Rights or some other legal framework to protect stateless people from our government’s intention to harm them. The harsh treatment of asylum seekers since mandatory detention was introduced in the 90s (and for Aboriginal communities it has been much longer than that): it represents a continuation of the historical racism embedded in the structures of the colonial state, and locking people up is a part of that.
If you need an example, just remember Peter Dutton was forced by the Federal court, against his will, to transfer sick women and children from Nauru to the Australian mainland for medical treatment at the behest of concerned doctors. He wasted taxpayers’ money, sending government lawyers to argue that a ten-year-old child who had been sexually assaulted on Nauru—and who had attempted suicide on five occasions—should be made to stay on the island. The boy and his mother were deeply traumatised and Dutton showed them no mercy.
I hope Still Alive makes some contribution to a cultural and political sea change in this country, away from policies that exploit racism and fear. Ultimately we need to dismantle and overturn the entire immigration and ‘border protection’ system if we are to ever treat people humanely.
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.
Safdar will be launching the book on May 26 at The Collective in Carlton (VIC) and on May 27 at Brunswick Bound (VIC) . More information can be found here and here.
Get a copy from Twelve Panels Press here or in all good bookstores.