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

Product Information

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. Contents derived from the Sydney , New South Wales ,: Pan Macmillan Australia, 2018 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details. Translator's Tale : A Window to the Mountains , Behrouz Boochani, Brilliant writing. Brilliant thinking. Brilliant courage.' Professor Marcia Langton AM (@marcialangton 01/02/2019) A chant, a cry from the heart, a lament, fuelled by a fierce urgency, written with the lyricism of a poet, the literary skills of a novelist, and the profound insights of an astute observer of human behaviour and the ruthless politics of a cruel and unjust imprisonment.' ARNOLD ZABLE

selected work prose Abstract 'Behrouz Boochani’s memoir of his arrival at Christmas Island as an asylum seeker, and his subsequent indefinite incarceration on Manus Island, is a miracle of survival and of testimony. To tell the unthinkable in impossible circumstances is an extraordinary act of courage and truth-telling. It is a searing, confronting, powerful testimony of indefinite detention and systematic torture. More than that, it is a work of resistance in the genre of decolonial literature, 1a significant piece of prison literature, and a scorching critique of refugee policies here in Australia, and by extension, globally.' (Introduction) Behrouz Boochani and the Manus Prison Narratives : Merging Translation with Philosophical Reading Omid Tofighian, In Manus, Boochani describes a man he calls ‘Maysam the Whore’ who mounts a cultural rebellion that would have been impossible in a Nazi camp. Maysam performs a kind of satirical cabaret, both to annoy the Australian guards (no noun in the book conveys as much contempt as the ‘Australian’) and to entertain the inmates. His act, Boochani writes, is a form of resistance, intended to ‘spite those people who exiled them to the prison.’ With the guards posting notices declaring ‘games prohibited’, the pretence of happiness allows refugees to preserve their humanity. Film based on Behrouz Boochani's story in the works". SBS News. 23 February 2020 . Retrieved 1 March 2020. The mountains of Kurdistan offer asylum and freedom when these are being denied and stolen by the oppressors. It is often said that Kurds, the largest nation without a country, have “no friend but the mountains,” referring to their geopolitical marginalization and exploitation. As Boochani remembers the flight of women and children to the mountains from warplanes during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), similar scenes from the Dêrsim massacre in Turkey/North Kurdistan (1938) and the ISIS’ genocidal campaign against the Yazidis of Sinjar, Iraq/South Kurdistan (2014) come to mind, as well as the continuous exile of Kurds from their ancestral lands under occupation. This collective memory of “a child of war” and a particularly Kurdish way of engaging with the natural environment through personification, mythology, and language, as he analogizes human characters and behaviors to animals, position this book within the body of Kurdish literary tradition. Boochani’s personal and collective history of violence, resistance, and exile thus engender a particular cultural, political, and ethical standpoint, recognition of which is essential for a proper understanding of this book.

No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison

On Manus, 400 men were at first imprisoned in an area smaller than a football field. In Boochani's Kurdish homeland, sunshine "graced human skin". Here there is a "heat that sears the eyeballs". The Manus inmates are "like pieces of meat in a metal pressure cooker". In his tiny room Boochani suffocates. Fans blow "a hot vicious kind of air". There is an ever-present foul smell of the men pressed up against each other – of dried sweat, of bad breath, and of shit, producing a stench "so vile that one feels ashamed to be part of the human species". A beautiful and powerful piece of writing from detention on Manus Island, where Kurdish refugee Behrouz Boochani has been held for more than six years. The book is an impassioned letter to those who would define Boochani as MEG45, who insist he is nothing more than a number; it speaks to the importance of life writing and of the human need to tell our stories. 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. He wrote the book, which details the riots which erupted in 2014, in Persian on WhatsApp on a contraband phone smuggled onto the island, which was subsequently translated into English by academic Omid Tofighian.

Behrouz Boochani is a Kurdish-Iranian journalist, playwright and activist whose book, No Friend But the Mountainwas 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) Behrouz Boochani : No Friend But the Mountains Suzanne Marks, In July 2013, just four days before Boochani’s arrival, the Australian Parliament had accepted a new legislation on the “Offshore Processing of Asylum Seekers.” This legislation included a Regional Resettlement Arrangement with PNG, under which all asylum seekers who arrived by boat would be transferred to PNG for processing and settlement, preventing them from ever receiving asylum in Australia. The only option to leave the island was to return to their country of origin by risking their lives and enduring further suffering. Despite the torture and humiliation in the detention and asylum system, very few refugees saw the possibility of giving up and returning to their countries of origin. Australia’s offshore detention camps were declared illegal by the PNG in 2016 and closed in 2017, while the detainees were resettled on the island. Boochani was trapped on Manus for six years and was granted a refugee status in New Zealand only in 2020. Overcoming so much, they found asylum on the cliffs and within the dark caves. Under the roofs of abandoned village homes, abandoned but still with a vestige of home life. Similar to a candle burning but unlikely to last the night. Old men with long clay pipes. Men of old age ... sacrificed ... sacrificed as the more able fled ... sacrificed as the young men fled. They remained there through the nights and recollected, remained there with their memories until they died of hunger and thirst, remained there till the end. The older and weaker among them wasted away. Whoever couldn’t reach the mountains had to die. These were the rules, this is how things played out during those times, this is what was expected. – Behrouz BoochaniBut despite the displacement of our people and the dispossession of our land, we still resist. We celebrate Newroz in our vibrant traditional clothing and dance the halparke. We yell “jin, jiyan, azadi” even when our occupiers try to take this phrase away from us. We raise our Kurdish flag higher and higher, we preserve our mountains to reaffirm our connection to our lands, and we tell the stories of our people. We say we are Kurdish — not Iraqi, Syrian, Turkish, or Iranian.