No Friend but the Mountains: The True Story of an Illegally Imprisoned Refugee

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I am also horrified. The first part of the book nearly finished me, where he describes why he needed to flee Indonesia (after he escaped that far) and then why he set off to sea for Australia a second time in 2013. Some choice: Giving this book a ‘star rating’ seems almost embarrassing — how can you judge the literary worth of someone’s cruel prison treatment which is unfolding in real time? Of course, we now know that didn’t stop the judges of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards — who just today gave ‘No Friend But the Mountains’ their top prize. Australia will give Boochani a prize for this book, but seemed to do everything to stop him writing it. The Kyriarchal System also reinforces the divisions between the prisoners themselves. Boochani describes how the authorities engineer rivalries and competition for small ‘privileges’ such as who gets the first and best piece of cake. During these moments, he writes, ‘the prisoners are transformed into something way beyond sheep — maybe more like a group of predatory wolves’. Boochani contemplates a particular prisoner he calls ‘the Cow’ — a man calculatingly determined to get his share of cake, and anything else he can obtain in the prison. ‘Competition arises. but competition always ends in the victory of a single individual: the person known as The Cow’. In the first part of the book, in which Boochani describes the sea voyage out of Indonesia, he makes clear that the asylum seekers are people thrust together by circumstance, and do not have an automatic collective sense of identity of themselves as ‘asylum seekers’ (indeed they are often quite hostile to one another). A sense of unity does not arise among the prisoners until the protests that Boochani describes at the end of the book.

Some of the punitive tactics of the systematic torture in Manus Prison are the prohibition of card- and board games (designed “to shit all over the sanity of the prisoners, who are left just staring at each other in distress” (126)) and compulsory queuing of the prisoners under the scorching sun to acquire food, basic hygienic necessities, cigarettes, anti-malaria pills, access to phones, toilets and bathrooms. These repetitive instances of waiting, together with the reality of indefinite detention, engender an experience of purposelessness and existential waiting (Hage 2009) – perhaps the most characteristic state-of-being-in-refugeehood. “Waiting is a mechanism of torture used in the dungeon of time. I am a captive in the clutches of some overbearing power,” writes Boochani, “ A power that strips me of the fight to live life/ A power that tosses me aside and alienates me from the very being that I was supposed to be/ A power that tortures me/ A power that torments me” (62). Boochani, Behrouz; Tofighian, Omid (2018). "The Last Days in Manus Prison" (Summer 2018). Meanjin Quarterly. Archived from the original on 9 March 2019 . Retrieved 23 February 2019. {{ cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= ( help)In At the Mind’s Limits, Améry distinguishes the literary intelligentsia in Auschwitz from the political activists or religious believers whom, he says coped much better with their incarceration. A victory for humanity': Behrouz Boochani's literary prize speech in full – video". The Guardian. 1 February 2019 . Retrieved 1 February 2019. A magnificent writer. To understand the true nature of what it is that we have done, every Australian, beginning with the prime minister, should read Behrouz Boochani's intense, lyrical and psychologically perceptive prose-poetry masterpiece.' The Age

This article makes a case for reframing refugee literature through reading Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains, translated from Farsi by Omid Tofighian. Written in detention on Manus Island via text messages on WhatsApp, Boochani’s book has won wide acclaim in Australia and internationally, not only among literary critics, but as a work of popular appeal in writers’ festivals and cultural prizes. The popular narrative around No Friend but the Mountainshas introduced it, on the one hand, as a representative specimen of refugee literature, and more specifically as an example of life writing of a stateless Kurd. We argue that Boochani’s work resists reductive characterisations of refugee literature both through its literary investments and its multiple affiliations with political and discursive interests. By attending closely to stylistic properties and its discursive contexts, we emphasise that No Friend but the Mountainsis not just a protest against Boochani’s own treatment by the Australian government but a tracing of how the lived experience and literary subjectivity of refugees in the Global South contests facile categorisation and unitary nationalism.'(Publication abstract) Why No Friends but the Mountains : A New Reading of Behrouz Boochani’s Memoir in the Kurdish Context Zhila Gholami, From the perspective of a displaced person, the distinction between (good) refugees and (bad) economic migrants has never made much sense. If you’re starving, you’re in just as much danger as if you’re menaced by armed men. Should we classify the Irish who fled to Australia during the Great Famine in the nineteenth century as refugees or migrants? More importantly, what about the millions who, scientists tell us, will be soon displaced by climate change? How will the current framework handle them? The concept is that the high mountains of the world result in isolated populations that distrust or mistrust authority and want to be left alone to run their own affairs, including violence, from blood feuds like the Hatfields and McCoys on steroids to tribal warfare against each other or central governments. Or both. He was a political prisoner incarcerated by the Australian government in Papua New Guinea for almost seven years. In November 2019 Behrouz escaped to New Zealand. He now resides in Christchurch. We were gripped by Behrouz’s incredible book and have been in discussions with Ákos and Antony for some time,” Hoodlum’s Nathan Mayfield tells IF.A powerfully vivid account of the experiences of a refugee: desperation, brutality, suffering, and all observed with an eye that seems to see everything and told in a voice that’s equal to the task.' - Phillip Pullman It won Australia's richest literary prize, the Victorian Prize for Literature, as well as the Victorian Premier's Prize for Nonfiction, awarded by the Wheeler Centre on 31 January 2019. [1] [12] There were questions about Boochani's eligibility for both prizes because entrants had been previously limited to Australian citizens or permanent residents, but he was given an exemption by prize administrators and the judges were unanimous in recognising its literary excellence. Wheeler Centre director Michael Williams said that the judges thought that the story of what's happening on Manus Island essentially is an Australian story, and that "made it completely consistent with the intention of the awards". [13]

No Friend but the Mountains: Writing From Manus Prison is published by Picador Australia and released on 31 July. It will be launched at UNSW on 2 August, presented by Live Crossings, UNSWriting, Pan Macmillan Australia and Picador. Flanagan, Richard (11 February 2019). Foreword. No friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison. By Boochani, Behrouz. Translated by Tofighian, Omid (1st Canadian EPUBed.). House of Anansi Press. ISBN 9781487006846 . Retrieved 11 September 2020. single work prose A Stateless Rohingya Boy Sent Away to Follow the Star of Exile , Behrouz Boochani, A grim-looking officer gives a set of clothes to anyone who passes through the strip-and-search stage, even though the clothes don’t match the size of the person in any way whatsoever. There is no choice. We have to wear whatever they issue …. Yellow polyester T-shirts – they transform our bodies, they utterly degrade us. A powerful account ... made me feel ashamed and outraged. Behrouz's writing is lyrical and poetic, though the horrors he describes are unspeakable' SOFIE LAGUNAHello, I would like to say hello to everyone. I am very excited. I am sitting with an Australian friend and hear this news. Thank you very much. As Sarah Lazare has recently argued, the distinction between refugees and migrants, so central to Australian discussions, was This is a captivating book, beautifully written and logically put together. It wasn't an easy read but it was very interesting and informative, educational, important. All men who have experienced prison know that its terrible grasp reaches out far beyond its physical walls. There is a moment when those whose lives it will crush suddenly grasp, with awful clarity, that all reality, all present time, all activity – everything real in their lives – is fading away while before them opens a new road onto which they tread with the trembling step of fear. The Persian translation of No Friend But the Mountains was published in early 2020 by Cheshmeh Publications in Tehran. In April 2020 also the audio version of the book (narrated by the actor Navid Mohammadzadeh) was released in Iran with the permission of Boochani. [21] Film [ edit ]

As Judith Matloff shows, the result is a combustible mix we in the lowlands cannot afford to ignore. Traveling to conflict zones across the world, she introduces us to Albanian teenagers involved in ancient blood feuds; Mexican peasants hunting down violent poppy growers; and Jihadists who have resisted the Russian military for decades. At every stop, Matloff reminds us that the drugs, terrorism, and instability cascading down the mountainside affect us all.In 2013, Kurdish journalist Behrouz Boochani sought asylum in Australia but was instead illegally imprisoned in the country’s most notorious detention centre on Manus Island. This book is the result. One hesitates to invoke Auschwitz in a discussion of Australia’s asylum seeker detention regime, a system that, for all its horrors, does not implement genocide. But Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend But the Mountains – a book about, among other things, the power of writing – invites the comparison, as a text self-consciously positioned within a broader literature of incarceration. The uniform externalizes the transformation of the detainee. In civilian clothes, he’s a citizen; in the ill-fitting costume of the jail, he becomes a prisoner.