Abstract
Award-winning Australian poet
Leo returned to India but was again harassed, and so undertook the long journey to Australia, during which he was placed in a detention camp in Sumatra, Indonesia, for six months, and was also tortured there. When he reached Australia by boat he lived in Darwin, before settling in Geelong. His abiding hope of becoming an Australian citizen, and eventually bringing his family to Australia, was rendered impossible by the announcement in October 2013 by Scott Morrison, the minister for immigration and border protection, that all Tamil asylum seekers would eventually be returned to Sri Lanka.
While living in Geelong, Leo, who had wanted to be a Catholic priest earlier in his life, became part of a church community, volunteered in an aged care facility, joined Amnesty International, donated blood to the Red Cross and registered as an organ donor; his friends sometimes needed to persuade him not to give what money he had away.
Leo took his own life, by self immolation, in June 2014.
In Memory of Leo Seemanpillai
1. Let me, first, take my bearings by speaking of weather, the season. A spell of summer in late autumn has lasted until this first day of winter, will last beyond it. I step outside, tilt my face up to receive the sun. Inside the cave of my closed eyes a cloudy webbed white is set against lava-red; as in a lit cavern there are many flashpoints of mica, each a single flare then gone. Soon my eyes will hold the image of a burning man. On this day, at 9.15 a.m. Leo Seemanpillai died in a Melbourne Hospital after an act of self-immolation. 2. I read the newspapers, learn of Leo’s life: of how, when he was six, his family fled from Sri Lanka to a camp for refugees in India. Returning as a young man to Sri Lanka he was tortured by the military; beaten by police and left to die. Back in India, more persecution. Then the journey to Australia – en route, detention in Sumatra, grave abuse and cruelty there. In sum, a tidal wave of suffering has broken over Leo Seemanpillai and left him on an unlit shore. Once here in Australia he responds to others in need with generosity, kindness, turns his suffering into hope, sows hope in others. When, two days before his death, a loved gift, a turquoise tile painted with a butterfly, breaks, he laughs it off. 3. Leo Seemanpillai arrived in Darwin from India on 9 January 2013,
and was held in detention before being granted a bridging visa
with work rights in June of that year.
When he settles in Geelong Leo, who knows English well, may have seen the bumper stickers –
They came. They saw. They sank.
But here he will find friendship, enter the life of his community. In the week after Leo’s death a workmate will speak of his keenness to do his job – one day a week cleaning trucks, mowing the lawn; of how he’d lay out his uniform with care, finish his lunch break five minutes early to return to work.
Diane Fahey
Credit: Irena Zdanowicz
4. “Anyone who may have come from Sri Lanka should know that they will go back to Sri Lanka.” – Scott Morrison, Australian minister for immigration and border protection, October 2013 A man on fire is running from the front garden of the house where he lived into the street. A neighbour who is a nurse tries to help him. Later that day, in a Melbourne hospital dying in agony he asks for his organs to be donated. His parents, speaking from their refugee camp, support his wishes. Five people will benefit from the gift of an eye, both kidneys, his liver and one lung from Leo Seemanpillai.
A memorial for asylum seeker Leo Seemanpillai, with members of the Queenscliffe Rural Australians for Refugees group
Credit: Justin McManus/The Age
5. A man casts off and rows across a lake of fire in the small boat of his body because he feels, because everything he knows now tells him, that he can do no other. This last act of torture that will end all torture. 6. How can I venture to speak of such things? I step back now, insist that I do not know what Leo’s sufferings might have been like. I can only create – for myself, for others – a space for imagining. 7. A friend rings in the night from England. Of the terrifying mayhem that is now, (again), Iraq, she says: “When we can see no clear way forward, no way to offer help or hope, the way forward is to travel within and dwell inside the cave of stillness. There will be found the peace we can offer.” But here, now, in Australia new choices can be made, bad decisions reversed, so that the tortured, the persecuted, will not be sent back to the hellholes – old ones, new ones – where persecutors hold sway. 8.
“If I’m deported back to Sri Lanka, torture is certain because I’m a Tamil.”
– from the journal of Leo Seemanpillai
In a class on Mindfulness I take to heart these words:
Be aware of each breath; treasure it.
You will never have this breath again.
I have started to imagine all the breaths Leo might have had, the days and years he might have had, and the kindness friends and others would have known from him, and he from them. 9. Leo had, pinned to his wall, a slip of paper that read, “It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.” Leo, one of the light-bearers, had reason, though, to fear the dark. When a friend gave him a night-light to help him sleep, he told her it was like “a shiny moon” always there inside his room. 10. I watch a mica-cloud of midges above the winter sun – small winter suns themselves; their shaped flux set against that far-off cypress, like dust motes in a green-walled room. I think of sky-loving murmurations, of spaces within the mind, the heart, drawn tightly close then flowing outwards, oceanic, within a split second. When I look up again the clouds are seamed with chrysolite; no sun; the air blank. 11. During a stay in a mental hospital early in 2014 because of
severe depression, Leo tried to hang himself with a towel.
Who, exactly, is ill here? Doctors sometimes forsake medical language, to speak of heart murmurs, shadows on a lung. We live now with fear, its murmurs, its shadows, carried in the heart, the lungs: the fear of losing – even of sharing – the smallest part of what we possess. Some of us have plighted our troth with fear: in the caves of the heart, the lungs, loving our fear. It is time to breathe freely, to feel. 12. On the day I hear of Leo’s death I pass a tall maple, its star-like leaves, blood-red and flame-red, irradiated. Many leaves have fallen, many leaves are still hanging; all will be gone by the Solstice. Tree of fire, tree of blood. 13. In search of spiritual composure, I walk the cliff path under a cloud-marbled white dome – having just missed, I’m told, two sea-eagles flying around the bay, their eyes mapping the coast. Back home I listen to Early Choral music that has echoed inside cathedral domes, caves of light mixed with incense, each note a mica glint ascending into the light beyond the light we see – that further light that presses back on us. We live, sub specie aeternitatis – “under the aspect of eternity”. They carry their bodies, their spirits, so quietly. Some of them, I know, have cigarette burns on their backs and many other scars 14. “We get to listen to the silence in the cave,
and perhaps we can even hear our own heartbeats.”
– Werner Herzog
And now I watch Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams – a film that takes me inside the Chauvet Cave: sealed by a rockslide for twenty thousand years, newly discovered. A held light presses into the darkness and that ancient darkness, pricked with mica glints, presses back against the light. There are scratches from bear claws on walls painted with horses, wild and strange, in the mystery of their nature, the light in their eyes preserved through thirty millennia. And, among bones on the floor of the Cave – the province now of archaeologists, forensic scientists – there is the skeleton of a golden eagle. Outside, in this present world, and less than twenty miles from Chauvet Cave, run-off from a nuclear power station has formed toxic lagoons where crocodiles multiply, mutate. A white crocodile with white eyes curves up to the surface, to breathe. 15. Spirit of Life may you guard the afflicted, those who have suffered beyond reason, beyond imagining, those who fear certain persecution – may a haven be found for them somewhere this side of death. Spirit of Life save us from the white crocodiles. 16. Some speak of the solace of eternity some believe that in death we become part of everything, our spark of awareness carried by all the winds that blow, then above them into the light beyond light. May Leo rest in peace May his mother and father, his brothers, know peace May the many people here who loved him know peace. 17.
“We want to be by our son’s side when his funeral takes place.
That way our lives will be more peaceful.”
– Leo’s father
The Australian government refused the visas applied for by Leo’s family so that they might attend his funeral. As three Tamil men at a microphone sing a long hymn in Tamil the Basilica fills with an undertow of sound, a faint bass humming by many voices that I cannot account for until, at the end, Leo’s coffin is carried out followed by a long procession of Tamil men who’d sat, unseen by me, at the front. They carry their bodies, their spirits, so quietly. Some of them, I know, have cigarette burns on their backs and many other scars. We all wait in the clear winter light.
It is achieved.
The funeral car starts its slow journey. The elderly woman I had sat beside, who’d travelled three hours to be here, turns down my offer of a lift, chooses, despite her damaged leg, to walk with her stroller to the railway station. “It’ll be thinking time,’ she says, calmly passionate. ‘There is a lot to think about”.