'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)
No Friend but the Mountains : A Symphonic Song Cycle
Luke Styles
(composer),
Australia
:
Zelman Symphony Orchestra
,
2021
27676083
2021
selected work
lyric/song
Dedication: For Janet Galbrouth - who is a bird.
'In 2018, Behrouz Boochani’s testimonial memoir No Friend but the Mountains confronted Australian readers with their complicity in the nation’s carceral border-industrial complex. In the five years since its publication, it has been translated and sold into eighteen languages in twenty-three countries and adapted for film, theatre and a song cycle. This article uses a book-historical approach to present a short biography of No Friend, analysing how it has evolved as a noteworthy work that has taken on distinct lives in the nation and beyond. It analyses two significant moments of recognition in the biography of this book: the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, and the special issue of the life writing journal Biography. The life of this book—its production, reception and material form—suggests the potential for allegiances between cultural and literary elites in the reception of life narratives by forcibly displaced people. These allegiances mark the early versions of No Friend and have been central to its extensive mobility to new readerships.' (Publication abstract)
'The refugee novel is a problematic classificiation, especially when one adds a national label to it. This chapter examines the writing of Behrouz Boochani, Michelle de Kretser, and Felicity Castagna in the context Australia’s treatment of refugees. It argues that refugee fiction can play a vital epistemological and ethical role in the Australian context, while also emphasizing the dangers of commodification that dog the category of “refugee writing.”' (Publication abstract)
'From early Australian writers such as Henry Savery and Barron Field through to modernist luminaries such as D. H. Lawrence and contemporary refugee writers such as Behrouz Boochani, authors who have had only a temporary, contingent, or ephemeral relationship to Australia have been a major feature of Australian literary history. This chapter surveys these writers, showing how they pose perennial problems for the institutionalization of Australian literary studies.' (Publication abstract)
'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 Mountains has 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 Mountains is 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)
'In his 2018 memoir, No Friends but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison, Kurdish-Iranian journalist Behrouz Boochani bears witness to the abuses of human rights he and his fellow refugees suffered in the Manus detention centre. While Boochani’s memoir has been largely read in terms of its political criticism of the oppressive system of the prison and colonial and neo-colonial discourses that form its basis, existing readings of his work have also pointed to and celebrated its universal aspect and its broader scope beyond the Manus prison. On this basis, the book has been rightly celebrated. While agreeing with these emphases in previous studies, this article offers a new reading of Boochani’s work that accounts for the transnational and diasporic nature of Boochani’s suffering, struggle and resistance. In doing so, it shows how Boochani’s work – as his own mode of resistance against his unjust ‘offshore’ incarceration – should also be read through the lens of the transnational Kurdish struggle.' (Publication abstract)
'No Friend But the Mountains, the electrifying “memoir of ideas” by the refugee journalist-philosopher Behrouz Boochani is my book of the year. Boochani defied every attempt of successive governments to deny refugees such as him a voice, transmitting the manuscript via text and WhatsApp messages from a smuggled-in phone to his translator and interlocutor, Omid Tofighian. Such heroic defiance alone would make it a worthy book. But this is a great book, with a voice, as The Saturday Paper review had it, that is “acerbic yet compassionate, sorrowful but never self-indulgent”.' (Introduction)
'Behrouz Boochani is a Kurdish-Iranian journalist, playwright and activist whose book, No Friend But the Mountain was written by text message over a couple of years on Manus Prison. The resulting work is a powerful, readable memoir with poetry that is a searing indictment of the offshore detention regime. His other works of documentation include writing for The Guardian, a play ‘Manus‘, and a film ‘Chauka, please Tell us the Time‘. (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)
'It is a matter of wonder that Behrouz Boochani was able to write No Friend but the Mountains at all. He did so while in Manus prison, using text messages in Farsi on smuggled mobile phones. Egyptian and Australian academic Omid Tofighian worked closely with Boochani to translate the text into English. In a detailed introduction to the book, Tofighian explains that Boochani’s writing contributes to a Kurdish literary tradition. He describes his style as “horror surrealism”.' (Introduction)
'Australia’s government tries to stop stories from being told but a new wave of authors are rallying against injustice.'
'In his astonishing book At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a survivor on Auschwitz and its realities (1980), Jean Améry devotes a chapter to intellectuals in the Nazi camp. An essayist and novelist himself, he focuses on how writers made sense of their incarceration. ‘Did intellectual background and an intellectual basic disposition help a camp prisoner in the decisive moments?’ he asks. ‘Did they make survival easier for him?’' (Introduction)
'Behrouz Boochani describes being smashed into the sea by the boulder-like weight of an overpacked, splintering boat transporting asylum seekers from Indonesia to Australia. The wreck’s ‘slashed carcass’ gashes the flailing survivors and the bodies of those who have died, and Boochani settles under a wave, finding refuge ‘by imagining myself elsewhere’. Finding the strength to surface, he sees a group of men clinging to a wooden spar torn from the battered boat. Its spikes lacerate Boochani’s legs as he sinks and surfaces amid violent waves. A British boat approaches: ‘our gruelling odyssey has come to an end’. Having faced death in those underwater moments, Boochani reflects that ‘even a brush with mortality gives life a marvellous sense of meaning’.' (Introduction)
