Things for the future

I’d been sitting in John Gulzari’s living room for more than an hour when he suddenly jumped up and rushed from the room. John is a Hazara man who fled Afghanistan in 1999, and I had been interviewing him for a book of oral histories about people’s experiences in Australia’s immigration detention centres. John’s house was sparsely furnished, in the Afghan style, with no chairs or tables – we’d been sitting on cushions on the carpeted floor while John told me about fleeing from the ...