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Chapter 5 responds to providers of care for patients with disabilities. It addresses questions about what takes place once a patient is discharged from hospital and how disabled patients live day-to-day. These issues led me to explore the notion of quality of life. Using the patients’ own definitions of quality of life, I examine how they perceive their lives today. The impact of treatment in the hospital on patients’ quality of life appears to be multidimensional. Many patients stress the immense difference the treatment made to their lives – talking about functional improvements that led to improved access to employment, for instance. Emotional relief was also reported, motivating my participants to become involved in more social interactions that, in turn, resulted in an improved sense of self-esteem and security. Improvements in the quality of life of the participants were, however, largely dependent on the participant’s own ability to adapt. Despite describing their struggle to find viable coping mechanisms, this chapter testifies to the great strength and resilience residing in each of them. It is obvious that participants do not look at their bodies purely through the lens of function. They attach a number of symbolic and social meanings to their injuries. Regardless of the role played by MSF or any other care provider, recovery is very much dependent on patient’s own agency, coping skills and creativity.
The Introduction opens with a description of the book’s intent and my position as an anthropologist examining the humanitarian field. I introduce the story of one war victim – Ismael – who presents in microcosm the unique aspects of the patients in the MSF Reconstructive Surgery Programme (RSP). I go on to explore the invisibility of the war-wounded, especially those who have never participated in combat. The Introduction continues with a discussion on the delivery of humanitarian surgery, a specific field in the larger world of humanitarian aid. I touch briefly on the history of MSF surgical programmes and capture some of the history of MSF’s surgical practices, which go back to the very origins of the organization itself. RSP is a programme that reflects the cumulative MSF experience. The Introduction concludes with an in-depth description of MSF’s RSP in Amman, Jordan. Currently, patients in the RSP, who often sustain critical injuries years before they are admitted to the hospital, have various levels of disability or have lived with significant post-surgical complications. The Introduction explores several of the aspects that make the RSP unique. Among them are surgical procedures focused on functional improvements, the months and sometimes years-long rehabilitation undergone by patients away from their home countries, the scale of the programme, and the multi-disciplinary treatment provided.
In this last chapter, the limitations of the research are presented and discussed in the context of the findings. I also describe the process of reflexivity, through which I examine how my personal background and experiences in war may have influenced the interpretation of the research results. The need for multiple rehabilitation components is also debated. We start by reflecting on the relationship between healthcare providers and patients in the two predominant theoretical models of disability, namely medical and social. Continuing with a brief overview of the change in attitudes towards disability over time, we note how attitudes in the humanitarian field have also transformed. We focus on the victims of war and their need for social recovery. This was an essential part of the rehabilitation process in past centuries but has been mostly forgotten in recent decades especially with regard to the care of civilian victims of armed conflict. The last component of rehabilitation that I discuss is symbolic healing, a component essential for the victims of war. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the potential for implementing the findings in the broader context of disability care and the proposed avenues for further research.
In migration the production of space is ontological: the ground is not given (the host faceless, Indigenous sovereignty unceded), the imagined community and its habitus are projects rather than realities. Another way to say this is that the representational space of democracy is suspended. The work of a migrant artist does not represent anything: it aims to produce a new situation. Such art is ‘dirty’, intervening in change rather than offering an aesthetic equivalent. These considerations lie behind a series of ‘creative templates’ or dramaturgies of public space devised for major urban redevelopments in Melbourne and Perth. Characterising the new spaces of public encounter as an endless compilation and renewal of lines and knots (visualised as a flexible string figure), the ’creative template’ reconceptualises ‘public art’ as the unscripted performances of public space that reclaim it as a place where something happens. The ‘something’ is likely to be the return of the repressed history of colonisation, as our work Sugar, devised for the Liverpool (UK) Capital of Culture festival, illustrates.
Migrant sense of place radiates from the concrete site of first encounter. Material thinking, the signature of my creative practice, also extrapolates from the particular. These related propositions fuse in a discussion of a major wall work, Rival Channels, commissioned for downtown Brisbane. Features of Rival Channels accurately depict the inner landscape of migration, which is not linear but involuted. The turbulent flow paths modelled in the stone relief tap into an environmental unconscious – in my case associated with oolitic Cotswold stone whose turbulent history is amplified and glorified in the Kimberley sandstone of Rival Channels – but identified in Central Australian Aboriginal art with periodic inundation and its depiction. Staging the turbulence of coexistence (like another river work, Mirror States), Rival Channels evokes a primary environment where signs are ambiguously auditory and eidetic –the inclusion of a sonogram alludes to the totemic custodianship of the site (the Brisbane River) and my words allude to change as return: ‘The strings of shadow creep / underneath where I keep my eggs the water laps / it is rising like the future under the present.’
Migrant identity is defined by movement. Migration is usually portrayed as an external pressure applied to an otherwise static subject. This chapter posits a predisposition to flight, illustrated in my own early identifications with birds and balls. This thought suggests another: a migrant prehistory begins in an account of the impersonal movement forms that have shaped the lives of generations of forebears. There are two sides to this: the ‘dream’ in which my great-great-grandfather Joseph Terry made his way (industrialisation of the trades and waterways of Yorkshire’s West Riding) and which my Carter forebears endured (land enclosure and smallholding expulsion); and their continuously creative adaptation, characterised by political utopianism and religious radicalism. Illustrating the point that ‘Australia’ begins within, as a projection of historical necessities, the chapter concludes with the story of Buscot Park, near where I grew up. In this picturesque Eden (so it seemed) I used to study bird migration; later, I discovered it was largely the creation of a mid-nineteenth century Australian immigrant, a curious hybrid of home thoughts from abroad.
The ’native informant’ is an essential figure in colonial anthropology. My radio work The Native Informant gives a migrant twist to this ideal translator, showing, in a different context, that she or he is a projection of the host’s narcissism. In a number of high-profile art commissions, I have been cast as ‘native informant’ to the Australian public. My poetic responses restage the enigma of communication where the parties have nothing in common, deriving from the culture of guesswork a migrant poetics. James Dawson, whose 1881 publication Australian Aborigines, is rich evidence of this differential power politics (and perhaps incommensurable expectations) in action, is introduced. As a colonial ethnographer and linguist, Dawson is unusual in laying bare the dialogical dynamics of language-getting. He establishes what every migrant also finds, that improvising rules of communication precedes any intellectual exchange: externalising the desire of communication exposes fundamental presuppositions about the other and the enigma of mutual encounter opens up the possibility of a new poetics able to escape the native informant double-bind.
The experience of creative encounter navigated through a migrant ethnography develops new perspectives applicable to the reinterpretation of the Western tradition. This is illustrated by my engagement with classical sites and their literature in Italy. A brief discussion of my creative encounter with the classical site of Paestum (southern Italy) leads to a ’migrant reading’ of Plato’s Symposium, where my role there is compared to that of Aristodemus, the ‘stranger at the feast’; this leads to a résumé of the migrant as human symbolon, a half person who lives metaphorically in search of the other. Because of this, it is suggested that, in the creative encounter, ethnography and aesthetics habitually fuse. Recalling the Prelude’s discussion of Oedipus, Translations makes the case for identifying migrant incompleteness (division as doubling) as a form of sovereignty that contains, rather than splits, others (voices, places, ghosts and hosts).
This is a personal history of the intersection of colonial anthropology, creative practice and migrant ethnography. By way of setting the scene, I refer to Vincenzo Volentieri, a hoax ‘genius’ I invented for the 200th anniversary of Australia’s white colonisation: Volentieri is a parody of migrant precarity and creative resourcefulness, uniting mishearing, mimicry, multiple role-play and a constitutional reluctance to settle down (and in) to suggest a new world concealed inside appearances. It is an easy-to-read introduction to the experience that lies behind the creative encounters discussed in Translations. After a non-allegorical summary of the following chapters, two contrasting mythological frames are presented: a creation narrative told by Kulin Nations of the Melbourne region; a re-interpretation of Sophocles’ Oedipus trilogy. The conjunction of stories from different cultural matrices typifies the self-division/self-doubling nature of migrant place-finding and storytelling: both have in common the idea of the journey as a continuous, ever unfinished, creative translation.
One object of a migrant ethnography is to establish migration as an end in itself: the migrant generates the meaning of a life from the quality of the journey, not from its beginning or ending. A corollary of this is that the migrant’s identifying ‘story’ is not given: it is produced by the journey, here imagined as an endless translation and its concomitant performances. The migrant who goes back brings with him the experience of distanciation; the primary ‘break’ is treated as constitutional, offering a critical perspective on mythic constructions of the ‘old country’ that depoliticise its history of organised land theft and institutionalised exile. I illustrate these propositions with the personal example of the Bronze Age hill figure, the Uffington White Horse, dear to me from childhood. Here is an archetypal ‘connection’ to an ancient ‘sense of place’: how is it renewed? James Dawson returns in this chapter in a new guise: showing how his Aboriginal interests were connected to his pre-migrant family interests in Scotland, he becomes my historical ‘native informant’, showing how ‘the Break’ (as poet David Jones calls it) is historical, internal to the culture. The new outsider is uniquely qualified to bear witness to this.