‘Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.’
Jean-Paul Sartre
I had always loved reading, but there were no books in the detention centre. If you wanted a literary experience you could log onto the internet for half an hour twice a month – hardly enough time to scour a few newspaper articles, let alone lose yourself in a novel.
Detainees were permitted to print five A4 pages every fortnight – nominally for asylum claims and legal proceedings. When the old black-and-white printer was replaced by a colour model, a craze swept the prison that had nothing to do with reading. I couldn’t decide whether it was funny or heartbreaking, but people started printing mouth-watering photos of food and sticking them to their walls.
It was common to dream about food in the detention centre. Hours could be spent discussing your favourite dishes in minute detail. ‘The first thing I’ll eat when I get out…’ was a fairly normal way to start a chat. While I often thought along these lines, I didn’t see the point in adding to my troubles by staring at photos of fine cuisine all day.
Instead, I printed out a grid so I could tick off the days since the start of my incarceration, like an old-time prisoner, and stuck the calendar on the wall next to a poem that I looked to for inspiration. I’d vaguely remembered a few lines from a documentary I’d once seen and looked it up online. ‘Invictus’ was written by the English poet William Ernest Henley in 1875.
Henley’s defiant poem – penned in a moment that should have silenced him with despair – shed its light on me, from afar:
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
Every line opened up a new path of possibility and understanding. The only area Henley and I diverged was on the matter of tears: he might not have cried aloud but there were times I could hardly stop.
I found myself discussing ‘Invictus’ with a former Salvation Army worker who’d stayed on after Transfield took over prisoner welfare. We were in fairly deep conversation about the ordeals of being detained when she made a suggestion. ‘I’ve read something you might like. It’s called Man’s Search for Meaning. It’s about what you’re going through.’
The caseworker couldn’t just walk through the gate and hand me a copy. Like sharpened toothbrushes and cell phones, books were contraband at the detention centre. Since she had access to the same computer as me, however, she left an electronic version of the text discreetly on the desktop. I was able to print it off – five pages at a time, twice a month.
To begin with I read each little bundle straight away, but quickly grew frustrated at having to wait two weeks to print off another five pages. I decided to be disciplined and hold out until I’d printed the entire book before I resumed my reading. After all, it wasn’t as if I was going anywhere. It took me many months, but I eventually ended up with a large ream of A4 paper containing Man’s Search for Meaning.
There was an occasional sewing class in the detention centre where we could repair tears in our clothing. I took the loose pages along one day and neatly sewed them into a basic book, using a needle and thread. It may have been the first-ever copy of Man’s Search for Meaning hand-bound inside a prison.
If so, it would be fitting. Written by the Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, the book is an account of his experiences as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps. Frankl managed to survive the Holocaust with his body and spirit intact. Even as he faced cruelty and depravity on a scale that was unprecedented in history, he realised he was ultimately the one in control of his humanity. Not even the Third Reich could take that away.
‘When we are no longer able to change a situation,’ Frankl wrote, ‘we are challenged to change ourselves. Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.’
Reading those words was a revelation. Until that moment, I felt like I had lost control, and that ending my life was the only way to take it back. Writing as a fellow prisoner, the survivor of a genocidal effort that took the lives of millions, Frankl was in a unique position to show me the terrible flaw of this stance.
‘It did not really matter what we expected from life,’ Frankl observed, ‘but rather what life expected from us.’
It was a turning point. While I may not have had agency over the conditions in which I was held, my inner life was still my own. Suffering was ultimately external. Whatever constraints imposed by the guards or the governments of PNG and Australia, they could never touch my soul. The choice of how I responded, or who I wished to be, was still my own to make.
There was no higher power or guide to what it all meant. Meaning itself lay in the hands of the individual. The insight was both strange and powerful, especially coming at a time when I was just losing my faith. With no afterlife awaiting me, and the clock ticking on the current one, I realised that the present – and what I did with it – was all I had left.
Meanwhile, the prison expansion continued. By this point there were penal colonies on Port Moresby and Nauru, with a plan to ship other arrivals to the latter island. As early as 2015, Australia had built a ‘transit centre’ in Lorengau, for those who succeeded in qualifying as refugees after going through a hearing with PNG immigration – a group that included a number of my fellow detainees.
The only town to speak of on Manus Island, Lorengau was a humble community of just 6000 people – and we lived in fear of every one of them. And now the Australians wanted to push us into their arms.
As work progressed on the lock-up in Lorengau and the upgrading of fortifications on our own nearby detainment centre, the mood among detainees sank further. We had been kept in our tropical cage for more than a year. We had been beaten, shot at, stabbed, maimed, humiliated and degraded to the point of suicide – with no public recognition of our ordeal, or of the conscious efforts to intensify it.
For many, the threat of forced relocations to Lorengau was the last straw. Since vocal demonstrations and even a riot had proved to be of no use, people stopped eating. The hunger strike started small. Guards put the strikers in solitary and refused to let them use the washroom or sleep until they caved and agreed to eat. In response to that tactic, some guys used a needle and thread to sew their lips together.
Before long it became almost morally impossible for the rest of us to line up for meals. By the time I joined the hunger strike in solidarity, three Burmese guys in my inner circle had stitched their lips closed.
A hunger strike has to be the saddest form of protest. You sacrifice your own flesh, blood and bones on the altar of your cause until your body starts to feed on itself. Men were falling like flies. I lasted four days before I collapsed and blacked out, waking upon an army cot on the local football oval, an IV drip inserted into my arm.
‘If you don’t have something to eat, you are going to have irreversible organ damage,’ a nurse from the IHMS warned. ‘This is no way to fight for a cause. You’re not getting any response from anyone. Nobody is hearing you.’
It was not a very nurse-like thing to say, but it was the truth. Hunger strikes, suicide attempts, a self-harm epidemic – none of these mattered to our tormentors, for whom this nurse was a representative, willing or not.
Recalling Viktor Frankl’s time as a living skeleton in Auschwitz, I ate the apple she handed me and was sent back to Mike the next morning.