Cirrus@Austlit

'Over six years of imprisonment on Australia's offshore migrant detention centre, the Kurdish Iranian journalist and writer Behrouz Boochani bore personal witness to the suffering and degradation inflicted on him and his fellow refugees, culminating eventually in his prize-winning book - No Friend but the Mountains - which was painstakingly typed out in text messages while he was incarcerated.

'In the articles, essays, and poems he wrote while detained, he emerged as both a tenacious campaigner and activist, as well as a deeply humane voice which speaks for the indignity and plight of the many thousands of detained migrants across the world.

'In this book, his collected writings are combined with essays from experts on migration, refugee rights, politics, and literature. Together, they provide a moving, creative, and challenging account of not only one writer's harrowing experience and inspiring resilience, but the wider structures of violence which hold thousands of human beings in a state of misery in migrant camps throughout the western hemisphere and beyond.'  (Publication summary)

 (Introduction)

'In June 2019, Australian Book Review announced the ABR Behrouz Boochani Fellowship, an initiative generously funded by Peter McMullin in association with the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness (University of Melbourne). This initiative was not only created to highlight issues pertaining to displacement and exile, but also as an important act of naming in the face of a border regime designed to strip human beings of their personal identities and dignity. Behrouz’s work has meticulously illustrated how Australia’s border politics drives people into submission and insanity by systematically erasing their names.' (Introduction)

'On 31 October 2017 the Australian Government officially closed down the Manus Island immigration detention centre in Lombrum and ordered PNG authorities to evict the incarcerated refugees. The detainees refused to move to another prison camp and demanded freedom. A 23-day siege began with water, food, electricity and other services discontinued or shut off. The following dialogue between Behrouz Boochani and Omid Tofighian through Whatsapp voice/text messaging communicates the anticipation of various acts of resistance leding up to the closure and the articles written and translated with urgency during that period.' (Introduction)

'Sydney academic Omid Tofighian writes about his role as translator of the book, No Friend but the Mountains: Writing From Manus Prison, by refugee Behrouz Boochani who has been incarcerated on Manus Island for five years.' (Introduction)

'No Friend but the Mountains: Writing From Manus Prison is a literary work typed using mobile phone text messaging and produced after five years of indefinite detention in the Australian-run immigration detention centre on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. Behrouz Boochani’s Manus Prison narratives represent the fusion of journalism, political commentary and philosophical reflection with myth, epic, poetry and folklore. By experimenting with multiple genres he creates a new literary framework for his uncanny and penetrating reflections on exile to Manus Island and the prison experience from the standpoint of an Indigenous Kurdish writer. In addition, the narratives he constructs function as political and philosophical critique and expose the phenomenon of Manus Prison as a modern manifestation of systematic torture. Drawing on scholarship from social epistemology, this article emphasises the situated nature of Boochani’s writing and the interdependent way of knowing uniquely characteristic of his positionality. This study also demonstrates, from the perspective of the translator, the interdisciplinary nature of the translation process and indicates how a particular philosophical reading was required, particularly in order to communicate the work’s decolonial trajectory. The Manus Prison narratives depict a surreal form of horror and are best described in terms of anti-genre: the stories redefine and deconstruct categories and concepts; they resist style and tradition; and they show the limitations of established genres for articulating the physical, psychological and emotional impact of exile and indefinite detention on refugees.'  (Publication abstract)

'Where have I come from? From the land of rivers, the land of waterfalls, the land of ancient chants, the land of mountains...

'Since 2013, Kurdish journalist Behrouz Boochani has been held in the Manus Island offshore processing centre.

'People would run to the mountains to escape the warplanes and found asylum within their chestnut forests...

'This book is the result. Laboriously tapped out on a mobile phone and translated from the Farsi. It is a voice of witness, an act of survival. A lyric first-hand account. A cry of resistance. A vivid portrait through five years of incarceration and exile.

'Do Kurds have any friends other than the mountains? '  (Publication summary)