When you hear of someone’s misery and can imagine their fate, a small part of you, often unconsciously, becomes invested.
So it was with Hakeem al-Araibi.
Since he was detained in November 2018, activists in Australia and abroad worked tirelessly on a campaign to free him. The campaign had several strands: a legal effort to stop the extradition proceedings to Bahrain, a diplomatic effort involving intergovernmental talks, and a public campaign lead by football commentator Craig Foster telling Hakeem’s story and highlighting the dangers of his predicament.
As a result of this highly effective public campaign, many Australians developed an awareness of Hakeem’s plight. There was his past: a fraudulent charge of graffitiing a police station in Iran, threat of persecution, flight and asylum in Australia. His present: a jail in Thailand on the request of Bahrain, which had convicted him in absentia. And then most vivid and haunting of all, his likely future: extradition to Bahrain, torture and possible death.
The future we had to imagine. It hadn’t happened yet. But in this collective act of imagining, what we saw was hard to turn away from.
It is these acts of collective imaging which can propel collective action. After all, if we can imagine what might happen to Hakeem, we are more likely to try and stop it, or at least feel some sort of emotional connection to his fate.
We have seen it before – the power of imagining someone’s potential future, and as a result, becoming invested in changing its course.
In January of this year there was 18-year-old Rahaf Mohammed, on her way to Australia to seek asylum, who barricaded herself in a Thai hotel room in an attempt to flee abuse. If she was sent back home, she said her family would kill her.
So an international public campaign was launched to secure her a safe future.
And another public campaign, the Mercy Campaign in 2015, which fought to save Australian’s Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan from execution in Indonesia. Hanging over the clemency campaign – the thing driving it – always the imagined future, which horrifically came to pass, when efforts to save the men failed.
And in the US last year, the gun control activism of the Parkland students who saw their classmates killed and didn’t want anyone else to go through that pain.
It is hard to be invested in someone’s future when you don’t know their story.
The Australian government is an old hand at this. Don’t release images of the camps on Nauru and Manus Island, except for a few benign stock images. Don’t release backstories or names of refugees. Put suppression orders on those who work there to stop the stories from getting out. Gag everyone.
Without the stories, it is hard to rouse empathy, and empathy is the energy that drives social change.
Empathy is an act of imagining yourself in the other person’s shoes. It’s imagining their past, present and future and allowing yourself to wonder: how would that life feel?
Once we ask ourselves that question so many thing become unacceptable. Rotting in a tropical prison camp and left to go mad, being returned to a regime which you fled from torture, being executed in a jungle clearing on an island off Java, a lifetime of psychological terror and spirit-crushing subjugation at the hands of your family in Saudi Arabia, being murdered in a school shooting while sitting in a maths class.
Those caught in the pinchers often don’t get the chance to tell their story unmediated. They are suppressed or incarcerated or traumatised. But when they do, such as the case of Behrouz Boochani detained on Manus Island, writing his story on WhatsApp messages, the result can be game-changing.
Boochani’s book, No Friend But the Mountains, is important for many reasons, but chief among them is:
getting the suppressed story out,
telling your own story,
putting the book in the hands of people who have the power to agitate for change.
When you can imagine someone’s misery – and even more, imagine what might be their fate – an alchemy occurs, however small.
You start to wonder if the grim future for that person could be averted.
And often, sometimes miraculously, it can be.
Brigid Delaney is a Guardian Australia columnist and was co-founder of the Mercy Campaign.
