Luke Davies, Dreams and meaning

Catching Up With Luke Davies

Luke Davies in the "Charlie Brown" Sweater and Ball Cap (above)


There is a wonderful new post from Luke on his blog, The Daily Totem, to update everyone on what's going on with him, his new short film and directorial debut, "Air", and his much awaited new book of poetry, "Interferon Psalms". I can't wait for this book!

Check out his new post and photos here:

http://lukedavies.blogspot.com/

On Death Row With Luke Davies - Interview Transcript

Source: The Book Show - ABC National Radio

Interview Transcript - Ramona Koval and Luke Davies

Ramona Koval: What do the condemned think about while they're on death row? This is one of the questions Luke Davies wanted to ask when he spent time with two men on death row at Bali's Kerobokan Prison, Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran. They are two of the 'Bali 9' who were arrested in 2005 and charged with drug trafficking. Three of them are on death row and they have one more legal option to have their sentences reduced from death. It's currently before the Supreme Court in Indonesia.

Luke Davies has written about his time at Kerobokan Prison in the essay 'The Penalty is Death' which is in the latest Monthly magazine. This is his first foray into journalism, he's usually introduced as an Australian novelist, poet and screenwriter. Luke Davies joins me now from Los Angeles, and because these men are waiting for the determination of their final appeal, we won't be talking about any of the details of their arrest, nor about their guilt or innocence. Luke Davies, welcome to The Book Show.

Luke Davies: Hi Ramona, thanks for having me on the show.

Ramona Koval: You spent a week in Bali visiting these young men in the prison. Can you describe firstly what was involved in visiting the prison every day?

Luke Davies: It was a very slow bureaucratic process that involved several checkpoints and security stops, and that was very trying. A lot of the people who visited were family members and old women and so on, and they'd be waiting in the baking concrete yard sometimes for up to two hours before you could get in. But everybody did it with fairly good humour and patience, and eventually made it in. Sometimes the process took so long that the visiting hours were of course cut short because you'd spent so long waiting in queues and then going to the next stage and waiting yet again and taking a number and waiting yet again and being searched and frisked and so on. But it was worth it in the end, in its completely exhausting way.

Ramona Koval: The week you were there Andrew Chan's family was there too. How were they dealing with his incarceration and the looming death penalty, given that it was so physically and psychically draining being in proximity to I suppose what must be the fear around the prison?

Luke Davies: 'Physically and psychically draining' is a good description, and for me as an outsider who in a sense had nothing invested other than the desire to get to the emotional heart of the story of these men and their families, it was bad enough. I can't even begin to imagine how distressing that week must have been for Chan's family. At other times Sukumaran's family have visited. Beyond all the basic exhaustion that the visiting brings on, I think there was the deeply distressing factor of these families living in a nightmare; their loved one is there and there's a possibility that he's going to die. I think dealing with that must be beyond comprehension.

Ramona Koval: You visited Sukumaran's family in Australia, you were one of the first outsiders to speak to them. What sort of responsibility did you feel towards the family in terms of what you were going to write about them? Because their experience of the media was a difficult one.

Luke Davies: Yes, I felt nervous. Partly I felt nervous because this was really new territory for me, I don't really consider myself a journalist and yet suddenly I was asked to write this story that spread outwards to the family members. But look, I felt the responsibility to tell to the best of my ability the emotional story that I saw going on surrounding this case, and I felt very privileged and fortunate that the families opened themselves up to me and said 'we will take the risk and we will speak, even though our experience of the media is a very unhappy one'.

Ramona Koval: As you say, you're the author of Candy, and most recently God of Speed about the drug-addled Howard Hughes. What did it take to entice you into writing in this mode?

Luke Davies: I was very reluctant at first when the idea was first floated to me. I just thought I don't think I'd be good at that, I don't think I'd do that, I don't know how I would do that...

Ramona Koval: Why do you think you were asked?

Luke Davies: I think I was asked because Julian McMahon, the barrister who's in charge of the Australian end of representing these guys, and Sally Warhaft, my editor at The Monthly, thought that I was a writer who might somehow be able to capture the moment and that in fact my lack of journalistic background would be a strength, because there was a standard sort of story that probably could be told about these two of the Bali 9 and they didn't want that story.

Ramona Koval: As you portray them, they are different from the 'gangster 1' and 'gangster 2' that they've been portrayed as. How do you see the characters?

Luke Davies: Well, they've been demonised and the demonising has been extreme, and I guess myself as a person who has far from a spotless past was able to humanise and to see the human elements more clearly in what they and their families are going through...

Ramona Koval: Tell me about your far from spotless past?

Luke Davies: I just mean it's...I live with the fact now that given the success of Candy, my first thinly-veiled semiautobiographical novel, when I've been the subject of interviews about my past experience with drug addictions and coming through the other side of that and questions of redemption and so on...so in some deep background way I think all these things figured in why it might have been that they thought I'd be an interesting person to go to Bali and write this story.

Ramona Koval: The questions you asked Chan and Sukumaran were things like what did they dream about, did the clouds they see when they're in the prison yard become interesting. These are very unusual questions to be asked in this particular circumstance. What were you trying to bring out about their experience from these questions?

Luke Davies: There was no master plan, those kind of questions were...I asked a lot of questions and they happened to be questions that got extremely interesting answers. Basically I just asked the questions that came from the ways in which I tried to imagine what this would be like for me. In a sense it became an essay on the passage of time. Basically I think in all my writing all I ever write about is the passage of time and mortality and death and how we are to act now in the face of our impending death and how that would change if you were in a situation where your impending death was very impending potentially.

So questions of the passage of time fascinated me, trying to imagine what it would be like never to leave that place and yet to have these endless idle hours on your hands. It was a really disturbing thing to try and imagine and so hence those kinds of questions; dreams and daydreams and looking at the sky and what was important and so on. Because you're very hemmed in there. I hadn't had experience with visiting prisons before or being in prison, so it was a visceral sort of...I didn't have to imagine much to ask those kinds of questions.

Ramona Koval: You asked, 'How often do you think of the worst-case scenario?' What was their response?

Luke Davies: I found that really sad. In a sense they both avoid...Andrew Chan said to that question, 'I don't have a bond with negativity. If I let that grow, it will grow forever,' which I thought was an extraordinary answer, an admission of the necessity for a kind of denial in order to survive. And Myuran Sukumaran, when I asked him the same question, he said, 'I don't think about it at all. I think it's not going to happen. It can't happen. Whatever happens you can deal with, as long you have the future.'

So I guess a lot of my story is about the constant anxiety of living with an uncertain future. It's that question of, if we really think a lot about the speed of life, then death is very imminent for all of us, and the question is very important of how we live each moment. But in this kind of compressed, pressure-cooker situation it becomes deeply moving. I found the experience of being in there really moving because being in close proximity to people's anxiety and fear and uncertainty is not necessarily a pleasant experience but it's a very vivid and real one.

Ramona Koval: In your essay, Luke, you refer to many writers and how they have written about the process of the death penalty. You refer to Tolstoy's experience of watching a beheading. What did he say?

Luke Davies: Yes, Tolstoy said at the moment he saw that head separate from the body he knew without any doubt that...what did he say? 'If every man now living in the world and every man who had lived since the beginning of time were to maintain, in the name of some theory of other, that this execution was indispensable, I should still know it was not indispensable, that it was wrong.' And that was in 1857 when he saw a beheading. The background literature on this story was really, really elegant and interesting and there was a lot of it. There was a lot of it that didn't make it into the story too, but there was some great...

Ramona Koval: You talk about William Thackeray, author of Vanity Fair, who saw a hanging in 1840.

Luke Davies: Yes, and he also said something about...I can't remember the exact quote, but it was, 'I came away that day with horror and disgust, not for the murder which I saw committed...' in other words, not for the murder which the person was being hanged for. And then there was that judge Falco that Camus mentioned. He was actually one of the judges in the Nuremberg trails, but he sentenced a man to death in France, a man who killed his own daughter and threw her down a well, and decided that it was his moral duty as a sentencing judge to witness the execution, and it completely changed his opinion about the death penalty. He called it 'administrative assassination'.

Ramona Koval: So could we say that once a writer has witnessed this that they are all against it?

Luke Davies: I didn't find any literature in the great amount of research that I did and that others helped me do that showed the opposite happening. I never actually found a case of a conversion in the opposite direction where someone wrote about having been against the death penalty, seen it, and then deciding that is was a good thing. So it certainly does seem that seeing it changes things, and Camus wrote very eloquently about that.

He said; 'If society really believed its own words about the appropriateness of the death penalty, we would be shown the heads, executions would be given the same promotional campaign ordinarily reserved for government loans or a new brand of aperitif. We must either kill publicly or admit we do not feel authorised to kill. If society justifies the death penalty as a necessary example then it must justify itself by providing the publicity necessary to make an example.'

I tend to agree with that. I went into this story without a really clear personal attitude towards the death penalty. I came out of it with slightly clearer attitudes but not...I'm still not 100% about what I think in all circumstances and so on. But I like that point that he made. I think it's kind of rhetorical. I think it would be an untenable situation to revert to that kind of state; heads on spikes or whatever, from the Middle Ages or even from more recent times. But I think it's a very good point.

Ramona Koval: Yes, reading your essay made me think more and more about the families of these men and the suffering that goes on around them as well. It seems to be a terrible punishment for the people around them too.

Luke Davies: Yes, Julian McMahon spent time with Van Nguyen's mother and brother before Van Nguyen was executed in Singapore in 2005. He was a young Australian who was caught smuggling heroin through Changi airport, and he was hanged in 2005. But McMahon made that point very, very eloquently, that at the moment Van Nguyen's mother collapsed sobbing into his arms after her final visit he understood more than anything that the death penalty was wrong, not so much because of the way in which it ends the life of the accused person, but because of the senseless cutting off of that live in terms of family relationships.

Ramona Koval: Yes, and he kept a diary too, Van Nguyen. What did he write about the experience of being on death row?

Luke Davies: His writings were very surprising. I was given access to this enormous sway...he wrote a lot. He had not much else to do. It was very sad. He got to measure time in prison by the length of time that a new pen would last for, between 14 and 16 days I think was the figure before a pen ran out after constant writing. He began slightly arrogant and slightly bewildered, as you might imagine someone might be in those kinds of circumstances. But it does seem to me that he underwent a genuine transformation, a kind of genuine moral transformation, and it's hard to imagine how this can be the case but it does seem that he died a happy person, a completely selfless person, who accepted his fate as being the price he had been deemed to pay for an unacceptable transgression. At a certain point when he knew he was going to die, he stopped worrying about it and he seemed to become happy, and it seems to be reflected in his very unusual writings which were all about how he can help others from his limited circumstances in a prison cell in Singapore.

Ramona Koval: If Chan and Myuran's sentences aren't reduced, what is their fate?

Luke Davies: Well, they've been sentenced so far three times already to the death penalty in Bali, each time as a result of different complex legal manoeuvres and appeals and so on. So that fact alone means that things don't bode well for their future. There's a team of lawyers here and in Indonesia who passionately believe that the death penalty is wrong and who fight this case pro bono simply because of that belief. That's really impressive. I found all of these people who fight this cause with such a kind of purity really impressive.

But the best-case scenario is that on appeal their sentences are changed from death to life or death to a sentence 'with a number', as the guys in the prison call it, anything with an actual number of years on it as opposed to life. And the worst-case scenario is the worst-case scenario, that these appeals will fail and that they will be led out in front of a firing squad and shot.

Ramona Koval: You say there will be two live bullets for every ten rifles. So there is a sense there that it's a big thing to kill somebody in these circumstances, so there's a way of masking this for the people who are actually in the firing squad.

Luke Davies: Yes, I came across the term 'diffusion of responsibility' that is a tradition of firing squads. It gives somebody in a firing squad at least the partial illusion that they may or may not have fired one of the lethal shots. Apparently the fact is that an experienced marksman can tell the difference between a live round and a blank because of the strength of the recoil. But anyway, it's a ritual that a certain number of rifles in a firing squad contain blanks.

Ramona Koval: Is this going to change your writing in any way? Are you going to say yes to more offers like this, that you'll go into the world and report?

Luke Davies: I don't see myself as suddenly becoming a journalist. I think I still have a next novel to write and so on, but I was really, really pleased to be able to go deep into the heart of this story and it was a journey for me. I learned a lot of new things that I didn't know before. I don't mean surface-level things, I mean things...I questioned my attitudes. And I had that privilege of being put in touch with human suffering at a deeper level than usual. That's not a pleasant experience but it is somehow a good one, and more than anything I really genuinely hope now that my article might make a difference. I believe that these two guys should not be executed. As you said at the beginning of the program, I'm not here to talk about questions of guilt. One of the conditions of my being allowed access to them and their families was that I focus on the human aspect of the story and what is happening for them now and not the background aspects. But regardless of that, I have now come to believe that it would be completely wrong to execute these guys.

Ramona Koval: The essay 'The Penalty is Death' is in the latest Monthly magazine. Luke Davies, thanks for being on The Book Show today.

Luke Davies: Thanks for having me, Ramona.

Ramona Koval: And Luke Davies' latest novel is God of Speed.