Personal Reflections on the ‘Being Stateless' Podcast: Listening to Lives Lived with Statelessness

November 2024

This blog is drawn from a speech by André Dao, recipient of the 2024 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for his book “Anam”, at the launch event for the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness’ new oral history podcast, Being Stateless.

Being Statelessis a podcast that, among many other things, takes seriously the intersections of statelessness, migration and asylum. Based on interviews conducted by Jordana Silverstein – a historian and descendant of stateless refugees – it brings together the stories, insights and knowledge of people living in Australia with experiences of statelessness. In this regard, it is exemplary of what scholarship, oral history and media can, and should, be.

The first episode begins with a series of voices telling us where they were born: in Dachau, in South Lebanon, in Saudi Arabia, in Awali in Bahrain, in Cluj in Romania, in Kozienice in Poland, in Paruthithurai on ‘the island we call Sri Lanka now’. It is a simple beginning. It suggests, commonsensically, that home is where you are from, where you are born. Of course, that is immediately complicated. And it is complicated not by the academic voice – the expert who knows the right answer – but by those same voices telling us where they were born. One voice tells us that Australia, the country of her resettlement, is the best country. Other voices tell us about having made a home there and the beauty of finally finding somewhere to belong.

We also hear from Niro Kandasamy, whose hesitation, when asked whether she feels she belongs in Australia, tells us as much as her words. That hesitation, that pause – the expressive silence, or breath – these are the moments the audio recording captures where text would flatten. It is the moment when someone is thinking rather than giving a rote response. Hesitation, uncertainty, silence – these are particularly resonant ways of expressing the experience of being stateless. As the interviewer Jordana Silverstein tells us in the podcast, this legal status is defined by an absence – specifically, an absence of recognition – the failure of the state, of any state, to recognise a person as belonging to it.

We hear, in words, in the gaps between words, and in all the feelings contained in silence and speech, that being stateless is like being an orphan. Being stateless means being abandoned, without a state to look after you. It is a kind of deeper homelessness. Being stateless means lacking the right to remember, having no corresponding category in bureaucratic forms, and being unable to travel. Or, as Hasib Hourani insists: being stateless can also lead to constant motion. As he writes in the beginning of his debut book of poetry, rock flight: 'born flying and landing and flying again.'

We hear that receiving a passport brings elation. So does a memory of dancing, of eating as many bananas as you could want. Niro tells us that she doesn’t know what home is – then, pause, silence – she says that home is connections with other people. We hear from Adeeb Shahin, a Palestinian Australian who has made a home in Adelaide. But we also hear that he is homesick in two places, town between two homelands. We hear that one can feel stateless even after citizenship. To have been stateless is to continue to feel unattached to the earth.

Being stateless, then, as the title suggests, is an ongoing status. More than that, it is an ongoing practice. People are made stateless and are made to feel that they do not belong. And the processes are myriad: citizenship laws, of course, but also bureaucratic forms, media discourse, everyday moments of racism, or just the absence of a familiar landscape, a smell, or the loss of the family and friends that made home a home. And – lest we forget – people are made stateless through genocidal force.

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Part of the beauty of the Being Stateless podcast is the clarity, strength of politics, generosity, warmth, and capacity for self-reflection and self-criticism exhibited in its creation. This is decidedly not history from on high, objective history, a cold history for all time. Rather, as Silverstein makes so clear in the first episode, this is a moment in time and place. A real feature of this podcast is that the interviews were made in people’s homes as a part of their everyday lives. We hear the background noises of people’s homes as they talk about belonging and not-belonging. Through that aural insistence on the everyday, a life lived, Being Stateless makes a critical intervention into what oral history can and should be.

What, then, is oral history? It is not truth with a capital T, but a kind of performance. In Silverstein’s words, it’s a kind of reciprocity – a kind of intimate sharing. The gift and risk of oral history is that this intimate moment is recorded. The risk is that the contingency of the testimony is erased, that the interviewees' experience is ossified into a monument – and that their memories might be used to justify violence and exclusion. Or simply that by being recorded, these testimonies are seen as definitive, representative, or the only stories that matter. Yet despite – or perhaps in part because of – these risks, recorded oral history testimony is also an inestimable gift. It allows the listener to become a witness – out of time and out of place, but still a witness.

I think of the witness as someone with a special responsibility for what they have seen and heard. For the interviewer, the oral historian, a large part of that responsibility entails the reciprocity of active listening, of showing and saying that you recognise the humanity of the person sharing their story with you. For the listener to the recorded podcast, though, the responsibility of being a witness necessarily plays out differently. We can't reciprocally give back to the speaker. So how might we fulfil our responsibility as second-hand witnesses? What, in other words, is asked of us when we listen to a podcast like Being Stateless? I don’t know that I have an easy answer to that. But I do think that the oral history interviews in Being Stateless are a very particular kind of performance. Whenever someone asks about home, belonging, citizenship, or statelessness – the interviewee is asked to perform their identity in its deepest and myriad senses.

Indeed, Adeeb Shahin talks about wanting to be free from the questions: who are you? where are you from? In one sense, I understand entirely what he means: listening to each of the interviews in Being Stateless, I can hear the way in which those questions haunt the stateless person; all the more so when it is the state, and its officials, asking. At the same time, I have been trying to talk to my children about who they are and where they come from. I’ve tried to explain that when their grandfather, their ông, left Vietnam, his passport was stamped ‘not to return’. That their grandmother, their bà, left without permission at all on a tiny fishing boat. And that home is here now, that we are Australian, and that we have to be responsible for that.

When I listen to the interviewees in Being Stateless tell us who they are, where they are from, where they might or might not belong – I am reminded of responsibility, the responsibility of recognition. Not because I somehow have the power, the entitlement, to determine who belongs here and who does not – far from it. But because my own liberation, sense of belonging, and emancipation are tied up with theirs.

We do not, in the end, become free or come to belong through unilateral declarations of our own rights –  by insisting that this is my patch of the earth – but through the mutual recognition of others. Being Stateless calls on us to remember, to bear witness to, that truth.

_{Image by Joel Filipe on Unsplash}