The report was published on Friday and its findings are no surprise. It offers hope and a fresh, compelling voice. The violence they produce is reproduced within the population they claim to be ‘‘supporting’’; it regularly produces self-harm; epidemics of depression and mental illness; suicide. Such systems are violent and clever.
This violence can also manifest outwardly, in rage, anger, and desperation. Protesters gather in George Square on World Refugee Day These are the repeating hells of attempts to reach safety, where, when safety is thought to have been reached, it is ripped away again; when the washing is in the machine, and the dinner is on the stove, and Mears turns up to take you from your new home to hotel detention, under the auspices of their Home Office contract.
Park Inn and Maclays Guest House are two of the hotels being presently used by the Home Office contractor Mears Group to “house” people who are newly arrived in Glasgow and seeking asylum.
Necropolitics, or the politics of death, is a term developed by the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe. I can also share some general recommendations for Black feminist thinkers who are important to me. So it is to poets and philosophers we must turn for language to describe the horrors occurring in our city We don’t need varieties of restraint and deprivation, of cruel and unusual treatment if we have as an aim of the asylum accommodation provision in the UK that it will ensure a safe, calm, dignified environment as people have their claims decided in safe, calm and just ways.
No amount of depositing of clothes and phone chargers or even heartfelt welcomes or ‘more automated helplines offering value for money’ can mask this rotting hulk of an asylum system. It’s 8,384 miles.
It accurately describes what we are witnessing in the conditions at hotels such as Park Inn and Maclay’s guest house, where deaths of asylum seekers have occurred. He describes in minute detail the underlying logics of the system in which he experienced the full horror of the living death that is the asylum system in Manus Prison. It accurately describes what we are witnessing in the conditions at hotels such as Park Inn and Maclay’s guest house, where deaths of asylum seekers have occurred. This work occurred during the so called ‘refugee crisis’ and involved a step change in public profile and engagement from the specifics of research to the general headline engagements of capacity strengthening across a population and especially civil society. BEHROUZ Boochani is the poet, journalist, philosopher and author of the multi award winning book No Friend but the Mountains, a witness description of Manus Island and its system of detention.