First published October 2009
Earlier this year an extraordinary story came out of Japan about a man who was experiencing long-term homelessness and who was regularly sending the most exquisite poems to a popular newspaper. There is nothing extraordinary about a person experiencing homelessness producing great poetry. Yet the scenario was regarded with astonishment.
In a similar vein, I recall, a couple of years ago, being interviewed on Sunrise on the issue of homelessness. There was a sense of shock about a story reported the day before, about a person experiencing homelessness who provided excellent medical assistance to someone, before disappearing as the ambos turned up.
Such surprise can only be explained by the strongly ingrained presupposition that anyone experiencing homelessness must be completely lacking in any kinds of skills; that their entire being, history and function is captured by the term 'homeless'. Quite the contrary!
According to a recent OECD report Australia has among the lowest
unemployment benefits in the developed world. Macro-economist, Professor Bill Mitchell, observes that 'since the
mid-1990s, the unemployed have been increasingly disadvantaged relative
to average weekly earners and the aged pension recipients'.
'This has
been a deliberate strategy of the successive federal governments,' he says, 'to
make life increasingly harder for that group and reflects their
conceptualisation of the problem as being of an individual nature
rather than a systemic failure.'
Social, economic and political exclusion is a systematic action that is done to people. It is not something that people happen into by means of bad luck, bad choices or bad karma. It is manifested in individual lives as a unique intersection between personal narrative and the axes of history and structure.
The dominant discourse on the persistence of exclusion is one that fundamentally un-knows people, especially in terms of their collision with unjust structures and de-humanising histories. It is this un-knowing that leads to the much-vaunted belief that the term 'homeless' or 'unemployed' captures the entirety of a person's story and that, therefore, they are denied the multi-dimensionality that comes as a class-privilege to others in society.
Let us return to our unknown Japanese poet. His poetry is as beautiful as it is incisive in its social analysis:
'Used to living without keys,
I see through the New Year.
Of what else must I rid myself?'
In these three dense lines he provides us with a window into his exclusion, teaching us that dispossession is literally imposed on him as a material and, therefore,