Jaivet Ealom's "Escape From Manus Prison" Book Launch

This event was the book launch of Jaivet Ealom's Escape from Manus Prison: One Man's Daring Quest for Freedom (Penguin Random House Canada, 2022). Moderated by Elizabeth Wijaya, the roundtable featured Jaivet Ealom, Thy Phu, Maral Aguilar-Moradipour, Matthew Walton, and Palita Chunsaengchan.

 

 

 

The awe-inspiring story of the only person to successfully escape Australia's notorious offshore detention centre--and his long search for freedom.

 

In 2013 Jaivet Ealom fled Myanmar's brutal regime, where Rohingya like him were being persecuted and killed, and boarded a boat of asylum seekers bound for Australia. Instead of finding refuge, he was transported to Australia's infamous Manus Regional Processing Centre.

 

Blistering hot days spent in shipping containers on the island melted into weeks, then years . . . until, finally, facing either jail in Papua New Guinea or being returned to almost certain death in Myanmar, he took matters into his own hands.

 

Drawing inspiration from the hit show Prison Break, Jaivet meticulously planned his escape. He made it out alive but was stateless, with no ID or passport. While the nightmare of Manus was behind him, his true escape to freedom had only just begun.

 

How Jaivet made it to sanctuary in Canada in a six-month-long odyssey by foot, boat, car, and plane, with nothing but his instinct for survival, is miraculous. His story will astonish, anger and inspire you. It will make you reassess what it means to give refuge and redefine what can be achieved by one man determined to beat the odds.

 

 

Jaivet Ealom was born in Myanmar and now resides in Toronto, where he has become a prominent spokesperson for the Rohingya community. He is a member of the Refugee Advisory Network of Canada and is on the leadership team of the Canadian Rohingya Development Initiative. In his roles as co-founder of the Rohingya Centre of Canada as well as Northern Lights Canada he aims to help some of the world’s most vulnerable refugees. Jaivet recently completed his study at the University of Toronto and is currently serving as the CEO of Rohingya Center of Canada.

 

 

Maral Aguilar-Moradipour  is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Toronto Scarborough, in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media. She holds a PhD in English Language and Literature from the University of Western Ontario. Her research interests include critical refugee studies; cultural studies; digital humanities; diasporic literature and theory; Indigenous literature and thought; and critical race and gender studies. She has published in literary and academic journals such as English Studies in Canada and Postcolonial Text.

 

Palita Chunsaengchan is an assistant professor of Southeast Asian cinema at the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. Her book manuscript, A History of Chimeric Cinema: Thai Film Culture (1880-1942), traces cinema’s complex intertwinement with questions of sovereignty, modernity, and democracy in Siam/Thailand. Her past publications appeared in Asian Cinema and SOJOURN. Her upcoming article on cine-poetry in one of the earliest Thai film magazines is currently in production at the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies. She is also one of the contributors of The Films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, which will be out in print in February 2024.

 

Thy Phu is a Distinguished Professor of Race, Diaspora and Visual Justice at the Department of Arts, Culture, and Media at the University of Toronto. She is author of two books on photography, war, and citizenship, and co-editor of the book volume, Refugee States: Critical Refugee Studies in Canada. She is also a co-founding member of the Critical Refugee and Migration Studies Network of Canada.

 

Matthew Walton is an Assistant Professor in Comparative Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. Previously, he was the inaugural Aung San Suu Kyi Senior Research Fellow in Modern Burmese Studies at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. His research focuses on religion and politics in Southeast Asia, with a special emphasis on Buddhism in Myanmar. Matt’s first book, Buddhism, Politics, and Political Thought in Myanmar, was published in 2016 by Cambridge University Press. He is currently working on a comparative study of Buddhist political thought across the Theravada world. Matt was P-I for an ESRC-funded 2-year research project entitled “Understanding ‘Buddhist nationalism’ in Myanmar” and was a co-founder of the Myanmar Media and Society project and of the Burma/Myanmar blog Tea Circle.

 

(Moderator) Elizabeth Wijaya is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Studies and in the Cinema Studies Insititute, University of Toronto. She is the Director of the Southeas Asia Seminar Series and the Interim-Director of the Dr David Chu Speaker Series, Asian Insitute. Wijaya works at the intersection of cinema, philosophy, and area studies. She is especially interested in the material and symbolic entanglements between East Asia and Southeast Asia cinema. Her work emphasizes a multimethodological approach, which is attentive to media forms, ethnographic detail, material realities, archival practices, international networks, and interdisciplinary modes of theorization. She received her PhD from the Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell University, where she was affiliated with the East and Southeast Asian Programs.