BEHROUZ BOOCHANI No Friend But The Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison. Reviewed by Suzanne Marks

Tags: Behrouz Boochani/ Manus Island/ No Friend but the Mountains/ Omid Tofigian/ Richard Flanagan

This award-winning memoir is a cry from the heart, revealing, through poetry and prose, the brutality of indefinite detention on Manus Island.

Behrouz Boochani is a Kurdish/Iranian asylum seeker who sought to come to Australia on a leaky, unseaworthy boat. He was fleeing Iran, a regime which wanted to imprison, torture and possibly kill him. As punishment, since 2013 he has been incarcerated by the Australian government in indefinite detention in Australia’s offshore processing centre on Manus Island, where he remains. According to the UN Convention on Refugees, to which Australia is a signatory and as such is obliged to implement its provisions domestically, his detention, and that of many others, is possibly illegal.

Boochani the asylum seeker is more than the nameless, faceless number to which the Australian government cynically seeks to reduce asylum-seeker boat arrivals. On the contrary, and as his book testifies, he has an impressive university record and is a gifted exponent of an ancient culture, rooted in its literary, philosophical and historical traditions.

At the 2019 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, his book won the Victorian Prize for Literature in addition to the Prize for Non-Fiction. It also won the Special Award at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, and was the Non-Fiction Book of the Year at the Australian Book Industry Awards.

Seguing seamlessly between poetry and prose, the book is a cry from the heart, a voice of witness, a metaphorical fist raised in protest against those who would deny him and others their human right to survive and live in dignity.

Written in Farsi, No Friend was laboriously thumbed on a mobile phone and smuggled out of Manus Island as thousands of text messages sent to his translator, Omid Tofighian. Andrew Hamilton, reviewing the book for Eureka Street, sees parallels with Homer’s epic narrative The Illiad, which, he says, are not accidental, both in its collaborative construction, involving Boochani, his translator and others, and in his designation of archetypal characters such as the Prophet and the Gentle Giant. To protect his fellow asylum seekers, Boochani’s characters are not real individuals but composite characters.

The story opens with Boochani and his fellow refugees on a people-smuggler’s truck taking them from Jakarta to the boats they hope will take them to Australia. Already a sense of fear and despair pervades the atmosphere as people start to absorb the reality that their fate is now in the hands of others who have no interest in them other than profit:

Under moonlight/

An unknown route/

A sky the colour of intense anxiety.

Two trucks carry scared and restless passengers down a winding, rocky labyrinth. They speed along a road surrounded by jungle, the exhausts emitting frightening roars. Black cloth is wrapped around the vehicles, so we can only see the stars above. Women and men sit beside each other, their children on their laps … we look up at a sky the colour of intense anxiety.

Boochani maintains the intensity and power of these opening lines till the end.

In the central sections of the book he describes the reality of imprisonment, the heat and overcrowding, the pervasive stink of sweat and latrines ankle-deep in urine. He conveys the hunger caused by the poor diets and the endless queues for everything. How the toilets embody ‘an uncanny sense of awe, an eerie spirit’:

Day after day, encounter after encounter, moment upon moment … recording memories of these encounters within the toilets. The place is a chamber that encapsulates history. The pain inside the prison seems to pile up in these isolated spaces, here within the toilets. The toilets are a cache for all the suffering spawned from other parts of the prison, suffering that culminates in incidents, incidents within these toilets. Perhaps unhealed wounds from long ago are opened up again in here.

A horrified youth with a face pale with fear /

Trying to protect himself for hours on end /

Fighting as he was cornered in different parts of the prison /

Fighting hopelessly /

Fighting till he can’t think straight /

Fighting till he loses control /

But the fighting finally stops /

It all stops /

It eventually stops right here /

It finally stops /

Here in this desolate place.

It is in the toilets that people seek some temporary sanctuary from the hopelessness of the day. It is also where razors are taken up and suicides attempted — ‘warm blood flows on the cement floor’. These are places of terror and deep anguish.

Boochani describes how the administrative hierarchy and arbitrary decision-making work to humiliate and oppress – where freedom is excluded, leaving detainees humiliated and dependent on a system that generates self-disgust and despair; where the regulations that govern their lives are set by distant politicians and bureaucrats disconnected from the people to whom their decisions apply.

In his foreword to the book, Richard Flanagan surely speaks for many of its readers:

Reading this book is difficult for any Australian. We pride ourselves on decency, kindness, generosity, and a fair go. None of these qualities are evident in Boochani’s account of hunger, squalor, beatings, suicide and murder.

In learning of Australian officials’ behaviour in the Manus camp, Flanagan is reminded of his father’s descriptions of Japanese commanders’ behaviour in the POW camps where he and many Australian POWs suffered.

There is a dark irony in Australian governments having chosen Manus Island to inflict similar cruelties on innocent people. Manus Island was one of the venues where Japanese war crime trials were held to bring Japanese war criminals to justice, trials in which Australia’s post-World War II government played an active role. Flanagan asks: ‘What has become of us, when it is we who now commit such crimes?’

Behrouz Boochani, translated by Omid Tofigian No Friend But The Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison Picador 2018 PB 416pp $32.99

Suzanne Marks is a member of the Board of the Jessie Street National Women’s Library and the Sydney University Chancellor’s Committee. Her professional life has been in equity, human rights and conflict resolution.

You can buy No Friend But The Mountains from Abbey’s here or you can buy it from Booktopia here.

To see if it is available from Newtown Library, click here.