Drawing out of Detention: The Transnational Drawing Practices of Eaten Fish, Refugee Cartoonist

Abstract

This article examines the drawings of Eaten Fish, an Iranian asylum seeker who became an internationally renowned cartoonist during the five years he was imprisoned in Australia's notorious Manus Island detention centre. Many of Eaten Fish's cartoons resist classification into the publishing genres established for comics, such as graphic narratives, comic strips and single-panel cartoons. Instead, his art is best understood as embodying a set of transnational drawing practices that connect his work with that of other cartoonists and artists across the world. This article proposes a framework of four types of drawing practices: Indexical Drawing, Reflexive Drawing, Drawing as Reportage, and Rhetorical Drawing. These modes of drawing each have their unique political dimensions, and were deployed by Eaten Fish and other cartoonists to bring light to the inhumane conditions on Manus Island, protest the imprisonment of asylum seekers there, and grow a transnational alliance that eventually brought Eaten Fish to freedom.