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

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Winner of The Victorian Prize for Literature, and the Prize for Non-Fiction, Victorian Premier's Literary Awards 2019 It is a matter of wonder that Behrouz Boochani was able to write No Friend but the Mountainsat 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 totranslate 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) Books of Resistance : The Writers Pushing for a Revolution in Australia's Refugee Policies Brigid Delaney,

My mother always sighed and would say: ‘My boy, you came into this world in a time we called the flee and flight years.’” The prisoners themselves become ‘pieces of meat in a metal pressure cooker’. But the camp also stinks of other bodily odours – in particular, human shit: Last November he was granted a one-month visa to go to New Zealand to speak at a special event organised by WORD Christchurch. He remains in New Zealand. That network now includes Kirrily Jordan at the Australian National University, the Iranian intellectuals Najmedeen Weysi, Farhad Boochani, Toomas Askari; the translators Moones Mansoubi and Sajad Kabgani; and others. Before Boochani secured a contract with Picador, sections of what would become No Friend but the Mountains appeared in Mascara Literary Review and Island magazine. He thus credits literature with saving his life. Greenspan said: “Behrouz’s story is highly important and deeply moving. It is our goal to produce the film as an international co-production and share it with as many people around the world as possible.”Omid Tofighian is assistant professor of philosophy at American University in Cairo and honorary research associate at University of Sydney The adaptation was initiated by writer and producer Ákos Armont and producer Antony Waddington, the companies said in a statement. Boochani’s strategy for survival is different. It rests precisely on the high literary culture that Améry declares ineffective in Auschwitz. As translator Omid Tofighian explains, the manuscript of No Friend but the Mountains emerged from the surreptitious transmission of short passages in Farsi, sent from the camp via WhatsApp and similar platforms. Translated and compiled by Tofighian, the messages make a text that is deliberately and defiantly literary – ‘rich with cultural, historical and political frames of reference and allusion’.

A regular correspondent for Guardian Australia, Boochani wrote about seeing his friends shot and murdered by guards, his time in solitary confinement after reporting on a hunger strike, and the mental harm inflicted on fellow asylum seekers inside the Manus Island detention centre. Associate Professor Behrouz Boochani graduated from Tarbiat Moallem University and Tarbiat Modares University, both in Tehran; he holds a Masters degree in political science, political geography and geopolitics. He publishes regularly with The Guardian, and his writing also features in The Saturday Paper, Huffington Post, New Matilda, The Financial Times and The Sydney Morning Herald. Boochani is also co-director (with Arash Kamali Sarvestani) of the 2017 feature-length film Chauka, Please Tell Us The Time; and collaborator on Nazanin Sahamizadeh's play Manus. selected work prose Abstract 'Among the many fates Behrouz Boochani has suffered is that the importance of his political struggle has obscured his achievement in making literary art out of the situation he finds himself in. Boochani’s insistence that people read No Friend But the Mountains as art is grounded in his sense that it is only via literary language that people can understand the lives and conditions of those held on Manus Island.' (Introduction) [Review] No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison B Christina Houen,

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The film adaption of No Friend But The Mountains will be a collaborative project between three Australian production companies: Aurora Films, Sweetshop & Green and Hoodlum Entertainment, and will be filmed primarily in Australia. a b c Ponniah, Kevin (31 January 2019). "Behrouz Boochani: Refugee who wrote book using WhatsApp wins top prize". BBC News. Archived from the original on 1 February 2019 . Retrieved 1 February 2019. ABC TV BROADCAST: No Friend But the Mountains - A Voyage Through Song". Wise Music Classical. 26 April 2022 . Retrieved 10 July 2022. 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 ] This is why we continue to speak. Because attempts at ethnically cleansing Kurds still persist today.

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] Working class prisoners fared better not only because of their physical tenacity but because they could integrate the experience into their existing knowledge of social brutality. Poor people already understood that the powerful mercilessly persecuted the weak and were accustomed to mounting small resistances. For them, ‘the camp logic was merely the step-by-step intensification of economic logic, and one opposed this intensification with a useful mixture of resignation and the readiness to defend oneself.’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) The Boochani Effect : Public Feelings and the Limits of Refugee Authorship Keyvan Allahyari, No Friend But The Mountains is a masterpiece of prisoner literature, up there with Solzhenitsyn and Levi (and no, I'm not going the Godwin's Law route, but I had visceral shivers reading some of the familiar conditions in that hellhole). Moreover, it is an instant Australian classic. Probably the most important book published here this century. The prose is stunning, the poetry sublime. It is dignified and courageous, honest and excoriating. And yes, it is heartbreaking. Horrified mothers ... mothers wrapped their children within the instincts of motherhood and escaped to the mountains. Young girls were searching for their dreams within the hearts of men rounded up into groups – so many groups – and being led down a road to the front lines of war. Groups – so many groups – returned as corpses. Again, it is those same chestnuts that became the solace for buried dreams. Jefferson, Dee (29 Apr 2019). "History of Aboriginal archaeology wins Book of the Year at NSW Premier's Literary Awards". ABC Arts. Australian Broadcasting Corporation News . Retrieved 6 May 2019.

Man imprisoned differs from man in general even in his outward appearance. Prison marks him from the very first hour. … He feels as if he has been stripped of part of himself, reduced to an impotence inconceivable an hour before. His clothes hang loose, with nothing to fasten them, constantly in the way. His shoes yawn open. He is disheveled from head to foot.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 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 Boochani Publication of Behrouz Bouchani's book in Iran". BBC Persian Service. 2020-04-23 . Retrieved 2020-12-09. Prison literature generally doesn’t dwell on the conventional judicial assessments. Instead of assessing the guilt or innocence of people behind bars, the genre focuses on the opposition between those imprisoned (whatever their crime) and those guarding them. In No Friend but the Mountains Boochani does not ask why inmates ended up on Manus: rather, he takes for granted their shared interest in freedom. Boochani’s book chronicles how the road unfurls for detained refugees: specifically, how they’re gradually and systematically destroyed. ‘I am a piece of meat thrown into an unknown land,’ he writes, ‘a prison of filth and heat.’ The overcrowding in a crudely built camp leads to what he calls ‘a confrontation of bodies, a confrontation of human flesh.’ That flesh then begins to rot in the tropical heat of Papua New Guinea. Again and again, Boochani shows how the camp transforms living people into decaying flesh. The decomposition reaches its logical and grotesque apotheosis with self-butchery as inmates carve away at their own bodies. ‘When someone cuts themselves,’ Boochani explains, ‘it elicits a form of respect among the prisoners. However, the criterion pertains to the depth of the slit, the severity of the wound. The more terror inflicted, the greater the credibility. It is unwritten and cryptic – but it is real.’