Book Review: ‘Escape from Manus’ – Jaivet Ealom
“Escape from Manus”, Jaivet Ealom, Penguin Viking, 2021, 347 pages
I expected this book to be like Henri Charriere’s 1969 memoir Papillon, about his escape from life imprisonment in French Guiana. Its popular appeal came from his racy and exciting adventures in South America, rather than its expose of the French justice system. Much of this new book is also about escapology, with false IDs, disguises, accents and bravado getting Jaivet Ealom, a Rohingya Muslim interned on Manus Island, to Bougainville, Fiji, Hong Kong, then Toronto, where his asylum application and settlement was successful in 2018. His arrests and escapes from authority are frequent, informed a bit by Prison Break, a television series he used to watch as a student. His takeaway is that “when you’re backed into a corner, you have to take any way out you can.”
His second attempt at escape from Burma, via Indonesia, gets him to Christmas Island just as Kevin Rudd announces the policy of Manus/Nauru offshore exile. Expecting a reversal, his fellow detainees cheered the Tony Abbott victory on 7 Sept 2013 but it quickly became clear there was to be no joy for them. The grim story here is of how the daily struggle for survival in a deliberately hostile environment damages the emotions and quality of life of internees and, for those on the run, develops personality traits of evasion, subterfuge, and cunning.
There is much personal detail about what daily oppression by the military caste in Burma means in practice, blended well with the historical events which have brought this about. But this account is more than a tale of woe and resistance to injustice. His journey is one of revelation as well as flight, with deep thinking and expansive comments which ring true. His people smugglers are “sneaky and unreliable” or worse, and the optimism of refugee advocates in Australia showed wishful thinking about how the political system worked; after much disappointment, he took a more sceptical approach since “the facts on the ground said otherwise”. Ealom turned his focus to extensive legal activity which failed, then to more fundamental decisions about the future when Manus became more violent. He gradually lost his Muslim religion.
Over many years his prayers had begged God to “Please, kill me before I wake up”, but “eventually, the prayers would stop.” His rejection of a God was liberating: “With him out of the picture, I had regained autonomy over my own soul. I had the power to make the biggest decision out there, whether to live or to die.” The only way out seemed to be suicide, and a failed attempt resulted in medication and psychiatric intervention. Then he was rescued by literature.
Half remembered from a TV documentary, the defiant poem Invictus by William Ernest Henley (1875) inspired him to be “the captain of his soul”, then (ironically) a former Salvation Army welfare worker at Manus pointed him to Man’s Search for Meaning by Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl. Books were contraband, so the worker could only send him small excerpts electronically. Months later, allowed to print five pages at a time, twice a month, he was able to collate the whole book. A visit to a clothing repair class enabled him, with needle and thread, to sew the pages into a book. These two works of literature gave him strength – “suffering was ultimately external” – but how to direct his energy then? He decided that hunger strikes, suicide attempts, and self-harm had little impact, and waiting for a fair process or divine intervention was not realistic. His next option was public influence, getting the stories out by the forbidden medium of a mobile phone, He ultimately was able to submit, via texting an Australian contact, seventeen pages of evidence to a Senate inquiry into abuses on Manus and Nauru. When the PNG government’s role in immigration control was expanded, his personal future looked bleak, and he needed to leave. Victor Frankl’s dictum of taking back control “meant getting the hell off of Manus.”
Jaivet Ealom is fortunate to have a strong publishing team, which has produced a serious but entertaining book. Each chapter starts with aphorisms or proverbs, which invite reflection by the reader. I was originally unsure how much the author, previously a chemistry and IT student in Burma, contributed to the literary embellishment, eg. an analogy made between the Manus prison guard booths and Jeremy Bentham’s 18th century panopticon, where prisoners could be seen by guards, but not themselves see. Yet his enrolment at the University of Toronto in politics and economics, and the inspiring role of literature in his journey, suggests a commanding voice. His literary heroes would be pleased.
Kevin Bain’s refugee reading guide is at Bayside Refugee Support.
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