The age-old problem

September 20, 2008
Geoff Collett talks to English writer Chris Cleave about big questions and moral dilemmas, in advance of Cleave's visit to Nelson next week. -------------------- Chris Cleave is sure that he has come up with the definitive answer to one of the more fundamental questions facing the 21st century Everyman: what is your most important possession? And no, it's not your iPod, your cellphone, and most certainly no longer your share portfolio.
"The most important thing you own is your passport, " the English writer says with confidence down the phone from a Melbourne hotel, where he's stopped over on a breakneck promotional tour for his new novel, which will bring him to Nelson on Monday.
"People just forget that - people think it's their house or their savings or whatever, but the most essential thing to your survival is actually an identity document that's universally recognised."
Cleave is so sure of this because of his new novel, about the stateless, identity-less, lost souls known to the Western world as asylum seekers. His tale of the disturbing intersection between the lives of a bold but tormented Nigerian girl and a comfortably-off but similarly haunted English couple gestated for almost 15 years after his own first-hand exposure to the dark world of the unwanted refugee.
It is a place he wants to shine a light on, to make some noise about, to encourage the privileged of the West to reflect more deeply on.
In his home country, the presence of asylum seekers has become a huge issue, heavily - and perhaps dangerously - politicised.
"So in the tabloid press, there's an unbelievable ongoing diatribe against asylum seekers . . . The parallel is with the persecution of Jewish people in 1930s Berlin: they're made the scapegoat for everything. So if you don't have a job, it's the asylum seekers' fault. If someone stole your purse, it was probably an asylum seeker. It's become a dirty word. And if you were to believe the tabloid discourse, then the country is being over-run by a flood of them . . .
"What isn't really talked about is the reality of the asylum seekers' position in the UK, and the way they're treated, the abuses of their human rights and our failure to respect our obligations under the Geneva Convention. It's very hard to get people to have a real debate about it because it's so emotive and it's so polemicised in the lowbrow press."
Cleave's own exposure to a different view of the asylum seeker came in the early 1990s, when he was a student doing the usual crummy summer holiday work students take on.
Employed by an agency that sent him and his co-workers to deal with various mundane chores, one morning he found himself in a dreary fortified compound in the depths of Essex, where the unsuspecting labourers were set to work serving meals to the inhabitants - asylum seekers in a razor wire-festooned removal centre.
The experience is seared in Cleave's mind - he writes on his website of a "concentration camp" for people who had committed no crime. "They were simply the people my country had decided it wouldn't help. It was hard to look them in the eye. Everyone ate with plastic spoons. It would have been brave to provide people in their predicament with anything sharper, " he writes.
"It really was one of the most extreme places I've ever been, " he says now. "I mean, it's horrific. And it took me ages to work out what the place was, because nothing was explained to us and the people who were in there didn't really know what was happening to them either. It was really terrifying . . . It's stayed with me and I've always wanted to write it."
And finally, he did. The book is called The Other Hand and its central character is the Nigerian girl, introduced as Little Bee. She is an entirely imaginary figure used to encapsulate some of the human essence Cleave witnessed among the asylum seekers he encountered through his research, the proof that they are more than cheap fodder for tabloid headlines.
So she's young and with the indomitable spirit of youth; a woman, since women are inevitably the surviving non-combatants of Nigeria's oil wars; from a country that is both sophisticated but vulnerable to the intrusion of chaos; and, crucially, with a keen if bleak sense of humour, a typical defence mechanism of those downtrodden at every step.
Humorous or not, the events that see Little Bee flee to the UK for safety but without a passport - and so to doom - make a gruelling story, told with the unblinking matter-of-factness that reflects the short, brutal realities of life in large tracts of the world.
Cleave is intrigued by humanity's potential for both horror and the countervailing beauty. He is an optimist - to his observation, beauty usually prevails. But harrowing violence is the trigger for both The Other Hand and his first novel, Incendiary (about the aftermath of a terrorist attack on a premier league football match in London).
"You do have to talk about it, and without being gratuitous, you do have to show there is a reason why these people are running away from something, " he says. "It's not that the hairdresser in their village is no good. It's that everyone in their village has been macheted. I think in Incendiary and in this book as well, the act of violence sets up the story, but it isn't the story. It's what happens next that's interesting - these stories are about acts of love that follow acts of violence."
Little Bee puts it better, though. As she observes, to focus only on the horror, the tragedies, of the asylum seeker's lot is part of the system's conspiracy against them. "Because if you cannot read the beautiful things that have happened in someone's life, why should you care about their sadness? Do you see? That is why people do not like us refugees. It is because they only know the tragic parts of our life, so they think we are tragic people."
Cleave saw the conspiracy up close. His requests to be allowed to talk to immigration service officials during his research were consistently refused. The system thrives on silence and prejudice, and on the volatility that frightens politicians away, he says. "That's why I want to make a lot of noise about it."
That, and because of the great moral dilemma it encapsulates - one that ensures that even in a secluded place like New Zealand, spared the challenges of dealing with unwanted refugees, The Other Hand should resonate. The conflict between the urge to shelter those seeking a safe haven and the impossibility of harbouring all of the world's misery is simply a variation on the age-old challenge of anybody's humanity. As Cleave puts it: "How much are you prepared to give up to save the life of someone else? Are you prepared to give up $10 or 10 percent of your income, or one of your 10 fingers? Where would you stop? How much damage are you prepared to accept to your comfortable life in order for someone else's life to be saved?"