The invisibility of southern migration: Coetzee, Boochani, Steinberg, Jennings, Wright

This essay explores life-writing and literary fiction as different but related modes of making visible and working through the predicaments and perils of migration in the south, specifically, to or towards Australia and South Africa. Within the framework of J. M. Coetzee’s Jesus trilogy in part about migration south (2013, 2016, 2019), I look at how Behrouz Boochani’s translated memoir No Friend but the Mountains (2019), Jonny Steinberg’s creative non-fiction A Man of Good Hope (2015), Karen Jennings’s novel An Island (2021), and Alexis Wright’s speculative fantasy The Swan Book (2013) give shape to the challenges and difficulties – the non-refugee might say the invisibility – of those banished from history and confined to the prison islands of the southern hemisphere. The investigation further considers whether these island conditions might typify migration in the region.