BEHROUZ BOОCHANI

Behrouz Boochani (23 July 1983, Ilam, Iran) is a Kurdish-Iranian journalist, writer, filmmaker, and human rights and refugee rights activist. With a master’s degree in political science, political geography, and geopolitics, he founded and edited the socio-political magazine Werya (Kurdish: informed, aware, wise), which promoted Kurdish language, culture, and politics, bringing him to the attention of the Iranian authorities. After the Iranian Revolutionary Guard raided the magazine’s offices in February 2013 and arrested his colleagues, Boochani left Iran and travelled to Indonesia. During his four-month stay in Indonesia, he twice attempted to reach Australia by boat. The first attempt ended in a shipwreck, while the second resulted in his being detained on Manus Island, a small province of Papua New Guinea, where the Australian government, in cooperation with the government of Papua New Guinea, had established the Regional Processing Centre for asylum seekers as part of the so-called Pacific Solution. Boochani remained detained on Manus from August 2013 until November 2019, when he was granted a one-month New Zealand visa to speak at a literary festival. The following year, he was granted refugee status in New Zealand, with the possibility of applying for permanent residency.

Boochani regularly writes for The Guardian, and has also published in The Saturday Paper, HuffPost, New Matilda, The Financial Times, and The Sydney Morning Herald. For his human rights reporting, he received an award from Amnesty International (AI), as well as the Anna Politkovskaya Award. Boochani also co-directed the documentary film Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time? (2017), and collaborated with theatre writer Nazanin Sahamizadeh on the play Manus (2017). Boochani also writes poetry, which he publishes online.

His book No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison (2018) won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and the award for the best work of non-fiction in 2019, while in New South Wales it received the Premier’s Special Award for Literature. Boochani’s memoir also received the Australian Book Industry Award for Best Non-Fiction Book and the National Biography Award.

TRUTH-SEEKING IN THE PRISON OF TIME

No Friend but the Mountains follows Boochani’s perilous journey across the Indian Ocean, bears witness to what took place inside the Manus detention centre, and offers critical reflections from the perspective of asylum seekers. It contributes to a broader understanding of the intersection of colonial histories, power relations, life under constant surveillance, and the formation and breakdown of interpersonal relationships within a destructive system. Boochani describes a system that dehumanises asylum seekers in various ways, including by using numbers instead of their names and forcing them to live in overcrowded and suffocating rooms without adequate food, water, or sanitary conditions.

Boochani’s writings were created in the hope that the language of art would convey to Australian and international audiences, in a far more powerful way than the language of journalism, the true picture and reality of refugees on Manus Island—people trapped in limbo, waiting in uncertainty in the “prison of time.” Accordingly, in his memoir, Boochani challenges both the stereotypical image of the powerless victim, the somewhat exotic refugee fleeing from East to West, and the image of the dangerous, malicious migrant seeking to enter Australia by “jumping the queue.” In the book, Boochani emerges as a philosopher, intellectual, creative artist, and activist who exposes the violence and torture inflicted upon asylum seekers, as well as the pervasive colonial logic that the author sees not only in the treatment of Kurds by Iran and Iraq, but also in the relationship between Australians and Papuans on Manus Island and in the relationship between Australian settlers and the Aboriginal population of Australia. Furthermore, drawing on feminist theory, Boochani adopts the term “kyriarchal system” to describe a punitive system designed to deprive refugees of their freedom and identity while fostering mutual hatred and unhealthy competition.

At a time when journalists were prohibited from accessing Manus Island, while medical personnel and social workers faced two-year prison sentences if they made information about the conditions and events at the Regional Processing Centre public, the process through which this book came into being, and the journey it made from author to reader, was an odyssey in its own right. Boochani wrote his accounts of Manus prison secretly in Persian on a smuggled phone using the WhatsApp application, then sent them as messages to his translator, Moones Mansoubi, who compiled them into PDF files and forwarded them to the translator Omid Tofighian. Boochani sometimes sent messages directly to Tofighian, usually additional paragraphs to be incorporated into the chapters. The themes of individual chapters reflect specific events and the dynamics of relationships within the detention centre, as well as Australian policy towards asylum seekers. Consequently, the narrative technique, style, and voice in the work – which Tofighian describes as “surrealism of horror and terror” – change according to the setting and time of the events and the conditions in which Boochani was writing.

The Serbian translation of Boochani’s book was based on the English text No Friend but the Mountains (2018), which is the only published version. Although, from a translator’s perspective, translating a translation inevitably entails certain losses and imperfections, Boochani’s text remains, even in Serbian, a powerful testimony to an inhumane policy and an effective means of bringing the refugee experience to a wider audience. Regardless of the position of official Australian policy, the Australian literary community recognises Boochani as an important Australian writer and considers No Friend but the Mountains a valuable contribution to the genre of prison literature.

(Nataša Kampmark)