Wainer, D: Beyond the Wire -

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Résumé :

How does a witness write about the experiences of seekers of asylum held in a detention centre without further silencing and invisibilising them? And how can she validly speak of her relationships with those who are incarcerated, and theirs with each other? Levinas' ethic of the face-to-face encounter provides a way. In this award-winning book, Devorah Wainer employs Levinas' ethics to do justice to the lives of refugees inside the Villawood Detention Centre. Her book is a tender-hearted page-turner, a soul-filled work of scholarship. At the heart of this book is an examination of the relationship between the free and the locked up and the hostilities a free person experiences visiting detainees. Written like a mosaic, a tapestry of thought, poetry and theatre, the book opens new spaces for asylum-seeking refugees to inhabit; and it shows us how to occupy those spaces face-to-face with them. Beyond the Wire is a brutally honest, thoughtful, and personal account of the conflicts entailed in taking ethical responsibility for the Other.