Looking for Esrafil: Witnessing ‘Refugitive’ Bodies in I’ve got something to show you

Abstract

The names of 221 asylum seekers and immigrants are listed in a ‘roll call of death’ catalogued by the Institute of Race Relations since 1989 (Athwal, 2006, p. 5). All are said to have met their deaths either in the UK or attempting to reach the UK, 57 of them at their own hand. It is thought that approximately nine asylum seekers have died as a result of setting fire to themselves, and this number includes the Iranian Esrafil Tajaroghi who set fire to himself in the offices of Refugee Action in Manchester on 28 August 2003, dying in hospital four days later. Vietnamese Buddhist monk Quang Duc’s act of self-immolation, sitting amidst the flames that engulfed his body on 11 June 1963 on a busy Saigon street, created images that have taken on an iconic quality. The impact of Quang Duc’s act was ‘immense and immediate’ (Biggs, 2006, p. 180), galvanising popular support which helped to bring down the Diem government. The ‘people burning brightly in death’ in the case of Esrafil and the eight other refugees have been less successful in ‘shedding light on what the rest of us refused to look at when they were alive’, namely the growing body of evidence about the effects of increasingly harsh immigration policies imposed by the British government.¹