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

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Australia’s government tries to stop stories from being told but a new wave of authors are rallying against injustice.' A Place of Punishment : No Friend But the Mountains by Behrouz Boochani Jeff Sparrow, ideological from the outset, formally emerging in the early 1950s as an anti-communist tool wielded by U.S. and Western European governments. Under U.S. law, the concept of a ‘refugee’ first emerged to describe individuals seeking sanctuary in non-communist countries. On the international level, the United States played a key role in developing norms that emphasize the liberties of political dissidents, while denying the right to live free from poverty.

Hello, 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. In a disturbing number of cases [during the Nazi era] the literary imagination gave servile or ecstatic welcome to political bestiality. That bestiality was at times enforced and refined by individuals educated in the culture of traditional humanism. Knowledge of Goethe, a delight in the poetry of Rilke, seemed no bar to personal and institutionalized sadism. Literary values and the most utmost of hideous inhumanity could coexist in the same community, in the same individual sensibility….Tofighian: "In my opinion, it's the most important thing I’ve ever been involved in. It’s had a profound impact on me, and I've learned a lot from you.... It has such remarkable literary, philosophical and cultural dimensions to it." [9] Reception [ edit ] The untreated sewage spilling out around the facility produces a ‘smell … so vile that one feels ashamed to be part of the human species.’ Boochani, giving an acceptance speech for the award via video, said that this award "is a victory. It is a victory not only for us but for literature and art and above all it is victory for humanity. It is a victory against the system that has reduced us to numbers". [14] In an interview with the writer Arnold Zable following the award, Boochani said that he has many conflicting thoughts on it, but he sees it as a "political statement from the literary and creative arts community in Australia, and all those who do not agree with the government's thinking". [15] Behrouz Boochani’s work, ‘No Friend But the Mountains: Writing From Manus Prison’ is very explicit in naming his experience as that of being a prisoner. The euphemisms of Australian policy — ‘regional processing’, ‘detention centres’, ‘detainees’ — are rejected. Boochani’s experience of Manus is prisoner like because it is, in fact, a prison. In the book’s afterward he states that ‘I avoid using [the Australian government’s] language as much as I can … I create my own discourse and do not succumb to the language of oppressive power’.

Superfluous to say that only very rarely did the lawyer or gymnasium teacher know how to execute an uppercut properly; rather, he was far more often the receiver, and in taking it hardly more able than in giving it. 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. Boochani’s book is a contribution to the Kurdish literary tradition and Kurdish resistance. Interpretations need to be situated within the styles and structures that have characterized Kurdish creativity for centuries, collective memories of historical injustice and Kurdish political history, and their relational concepts of being and becoming that are connected to the land. ABC TV BROADCAST: No Friend But the Mountains - A Voyage Through Song". Wise Music Classical. 26 April 2022 . Retrieved 10 July 2022. Boochani reveals the life of the Manus prisoners in part through the stories of vivid characters all given not names but monikers. We learn the names only of those who died on Manus during the course of the narrative – The Smiling Youth, Hamid Khazaei and The Gentle Giant, Reza Barati. Each story has a political meaning.Germian, Roza; Theodosiou, Peter (28 February 2020). " 'I never said I want to go to Australia': Behrouz Boochani rejects Peter Dutton barring him from the country". SBS Kurdish . Retrieved 1 March 2020. Daily life for the Manus prisoners is constituted by queues – for meals (hunger haunts Manus), the toilets, telephone access, cigarettes, paracetamol. The undisputed "leader of the queue" is a "notorious", even "popular" man Boochani calls The Cow, who waits for hours at the head of each meal line, "listening for the lids lifting off the pots." The Cow embodies the ideal of the perfect Manus inmate: "[W]hoever wants to endure less suffering must live like The Cow. Eat. Sleep. Don't come up with any questions." a b c Tofighian, Omid (16 August 2018). "Truth to power: my time translating Behrouz Boochani's masterpiece". The Conversation. Archived from the original on 5 November 2018 . Retrieved 12 February 2019. In saying this] I include the book and … the works that other people [created] about Manus and this exile policy. It is important that we created those and now others can use them. No pictures (I'd have loved to see some but I suppose that would have been "fluff"; instead she provided handdrawn maps of each mountainous area). That would have been icing on the cake and the book is focused on the cake.

Our freedom rests on the preservation of our cultures, the rise against our occupying powers, and the storytelling of our past. I truly believe that one day, we will no longer be silenced, but liberated. One day, it will no longer be considered “divisive” or “provocative” for me to say that I am both Kurdish and Arab. One day, others will see that my two ethnic identities do not oppose each other, but work to uplift one another.

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In his book, Boochani not only documents in detail the “soul-destroying” conditions to which the imprisoned refugees on Manus are subjected, but he also shares his observations and scholarly analyses in regards to (1) the effects of the conditions on the psychological states and interpersonal relationships among the refugees, and (2) the overarching, intersecting structures of power and domination, which are played out and reproduced in the 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". One island kills vision, creativity and knowledge – it imprisons thought. The other island fosters vision, creativity and knowledge – it is a land where the mind is free. The first island is the settler-colonial state called Australia, and the prisoners are the settlers. The second island contains Manus Prison, and knowledge resides there with the incarcerated refugees. Remembering my mother’s stories of childhood under the Saddam Hussein regime in Halabja, I am filled with anger each time I hear someone claiming Saddam Hussein was a good leader “besides the Kurdish issue.” I, along with the millions of other Kurds across the world, am tired of having our stories brushed off to the side. There should be no “besides.” Occupation does not vanish our population; it does not erase our stories, our culture, or our language. Our land.