Against Expulsion: Walking, Writing and Collaborative Acts
David Herd, University of St Andrews
This paper will develop the claim, outlined in my book Writing Against Expulsion in the Post-War World,that the UK, in line with other Global North and Anglophone regimes, is increasingly operating an asylum environment which, while once designated ‘hostile’, is now ‘expulsive’. This drive towards ‘expulsion’ as a political strategy is evident, as the paper will discuss, in both recent policy pronouncements and in political rhetoric. The British Prime Minister’s description of the UK as an ‘island of strangers’ is a case in point. The paper will argue that in the face of such expulsive practices it is more than ever necessary to develop collaborative acts of resistance. The paper will consider the walking of the Refugee Tales project, now in its 10th Anniversary year, as one example of such collaborative resistance. It will also consider the need for writing practice that understands itself to be fundamentally relational, where it is the relationality of writing that constitutes its significance as an expression of human rights. The paper will conclude with a consideration of Behrouz Boochani’s ‘Manus Island Poem’, an act of poetic resistance to the reality of expulsion which presents the poem’s voicing as a defiantly collaborative and relational act.
David Herd is a poet, critic and co-organiser of the project Refugee Tales. His work is at the intersection of literature and human rights. David’s critical history, Writing Against Expulsion in the Post-War World: Making Space for the Human (OUP) was shortlisted for the 2024 MSA Book Prize and will be published in paperback in June 2025. His most recent collection of poetry, Walk Song (2022), was a Book of the Year in the Australian Review of Books. In collaboration with Anna Pincus and colleagues at Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group, David has co-organised the project Refugee Tales since 2014, through which he has helped articulate the call for a future without detention. Refugee Tales makes its call by sharing the stories of people who have experienced indefinite detention in the UK, now published in 5 volumes by Comma Press.