“Stateless is a disease, like the cholera, like the malaria, like any other disease.”
These are the words that Mohin Shahin, a Palestinian man who was stateless when he was born in Lebanon, shared with me in an interview in 2022. Mohin now lives in Adelaide, in Australia, along with his immediate family and some members of his extended family.
For Adrian Factor, a Jewish Holocaust survivor from Germany who now lives in Melbourne, “statelessness is a fearful way to lead a life.”
Hasib Hourani, a Lebanese-Palestinian writer and arts worker who lives in Sydney explained that he does not “necessarily think [his former statelessness is] integral identity-wise. But I do bring it up just because I feel like there are so few images of what statelessness looks like.”
The Oral History Project
These three people are part of a larger group with whom I’ve conducted oral history interviews over the last few years. The interviews have taken place in Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide with people who have had experiences of statelessness and who migrated to Australia in the second half of the twentieth century. In these interviews we talk about statelessness within the context of their whole life, including their migration journey. I talk with people about how they remember their statelessness, what effects it has had on their lives and their relationships with family, community, and friends, where they feel like they are at home, and where they feel a sense of belonging.
My interest in talking with people about their experiences of statelessness comes from both my prior research into other aspects of immigration history in Australia and into cultures of memory-making and from my familial history: two of my grandparents were stateless refugees who migrated to Australia after the Holocaust.
And so I sat with people in their homes, and talked about their lives, gathering together their memories, testimonies, critiques and knowledge. The conversations we had reflect moments in time, conversations that took place in a certain way. If we think about how we express ourselves to different people, we know that what we share with one person probably isn’t the same thing as what we’d tell everyone: we change what we say. Our opinions and thoughts evolve. So these interviews tell us something, but they don’t tell us everything.
The interviews are rich texts with so much information. We can see ways in which stateless people from different backgrounds – I spoke to Jewish Holocaust survivors, Palestinians, Tamils, Kurds, and people from the former USSR – express similar sentiments and describe similar experiences. But we can also see sharp differences in how they understand and express their statelessness and their ongoing relationships to the very idea of statelessness.
It is an incredible honour to get to interview people – to be welcomed into their homes and hear their stories. The interviews are being made accessible online. This project has been undertaken in part in collaboration with the National Library of Australia, which provides a repository for some of the interviews. The rest of the interviews are being housed on a specially developed website.
The Podcast
These interviews have now become the basis for a recently-released podcast, called Being Stateless: An Oral History Podcast. My hope is that with these snapshots of people’s stories, more listeners will get to meet these incredible interviewees.
Listen to Being Stateless: An Oral History Project.
In the first episode we meet Niro Kandasamy, who is Tamil. I asked her where feels like home to her and she responded,
“I think about this question a lot and I actually don’t know. Because I don’t feel rooted. Like I feel like I’m constantly in this – I’m kind of hovering, right? Like I’m hovering. I don’t actually have – I can’t think of a – I don’t actually know what home is, to be honest, which is why I think I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s really just about the connections… with people.”
Bobby Bryx, who is Jewish and was born after the Holocaust in Dachau, explained that home is elusive, saying that
“obviously Melbourne has been my home, but I don’t have that feeling and I don’t quite get it, people saying we’re attached to this earth and this earth. That’s never been anywhere in my upbringing, even up to currently. I’m not attached to the earth around my house or anything. So, nowhere, really. I could – it feels like it just happens that way, just luck that I ended up in Melbourne, and other people ended up in other places. I barrack for Australia when they’re playing in the tennis or in the – you know what I mean? That’s all rubbed off, and I’ve still got that part of it. A very slight identity thing. I’m not anti that.”
When I asked Timea Partos, who came to Australia from the former USSR, about whether the label of ‘stateless’ feels meaningful to her, she talked to me in part about her sense of belonging:
“it’s an important question for people like, ‘what’s your background, where do you-’, it’s one of the first things that people ask you. And you kind of almost don’t fit in to that conversation, if you’re stateless in a belonging sense. And if you’re stateless especially in the bureaucratic sense. I’m thinking of those movies where they, like I couldn’t tell you a specific one, of those people that have become stateless or they’re in a situation where they’ve been prisoners of war and whatever and like, there’s that trope of like ‘I will always hold on to my beliefs of where I’m from, and I will remember that’ and it’s just so strong in them, that kind of ideal. I’ve never had that, I don’t think I’ll ever have that. I don’t know that I want it, but maybe I kinda do want it? I’d at least like to know what it’s like, to just believe in, I guess society in that way.”
These are the rich reflections that come through as people share their stories. Interviewees are reflective, thinking through their lives and histories as they speak to me.
Thinking reflectively, and cautiously
I try to be cautious in interviews: I want to provide a space to share stories, not to extract them. As a researcher, I need to be careful about my place in peoples’ lives and homes. To always tread as gently as possible, and offer space for the interview to be of use to the interviewee.
But there is a difficulty too, that people will feel compelled to share more than they’re comfortable with, that they will be exposed. This problem – of how to ensure that the sharing of stories remains useful and not exploitative, either personally or politically – is discussed in the final episode of the podcast, in a conversation that I held with Niro and Hasib. We need to be thoughtful and careful even as we do the work of researching statelessness. The sharing of personal stories can only do so much, should only be used for so much, and must always be approached with caution, whatever the topic.
But these interviews, and now these podcast episodes, do provide a space for witnessing and listening. A space for people to be heard. And listeners of the podcast can be brought into that witnessing circle: they can become part of that testimonial moment and help these stories to circulate.
