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

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Where have I come from? From the land of rivers, the land of waterfalls, the land of ancient chants, the land of mountains... Impassioned letter' from Manus Island wins 2019 National Biography Award". State Library of NSW. 2019-08-12 . Retrieved 2019-08-12. At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a survivor on Auschwitz and its realities, Jean Améry, Indiana Unversity Press, Indianapolis, 1980 Giving this book a ‘star rating’ seems almost embarrassing — how can you judge the literary worth of someone’s cruel prison treatment which is unfolding in real time? Of course, we now know that didn’t stop the judges of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards — who just today gave ‘No Friend But the Mountains’ their top prize. Australia will give Boochani a prize for this book, but seemed to do everything to stop him writing it. single work prose A Stateless Rohingya Boy Sent Away to Follow the Star of Exile , Behrouz Boochani,

Publication of Behrouz Bouchani's book in Iran". BBC Persian Service. 2020-04-23 . Retrieved 2020-12-09. Clearly, they are taking us hostage. We are hostages – we are being made examples to strike fear into others, to scare people so they won’t come to Australia. 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 ZABLEThe uniform externalizes the transformation of the detainee. In civilian clothes, he’s a citizen; in the ill-fitting costume of the jail, he becomes a prisoner. This is a crucial aspect of Boochani’s project: to understand Manus Island first and foremost as a place of punishment, where ‘waiting is a mechanism of torture used in the dungeon of time.’ Throughout No Friend but the Mountains, he pointedly refers to the facility in which he remains contained, not by its official description as a ‘Regional Processing Centre’ but rather as ‘Manus Prison’, a characterization that universalises his account. 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.

Imagine a community of four hundred people, neglected in a boiling hot filthy cage, still traumatised by the terrifying sound of waves ringing in their ears and the rotting boat fixed before their eyes. ––– Behrouz Boochani, (126) 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 both a brave act of witness and a moving testament to the humanity of all people, in the most extreme of circumstances.

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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.” 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, I am also horrified. The first part of the book nearly finished me, where he describes why he needed to flee Indonesia (after he escaped that far) and then why he set off to sea for Australia a second time in 2013. Some choice:

Just a few weeks ago, on Kurdish Clothing Day, Iraqi forces guarding the entrance to a university in the disputed city of Kirkuk denied entry to Kurds wearing traditional clothing. Kirkuk, an oil-rich city, has been subjected to land grabs by the Iraqi government as well as an Arabization campaign with roots in the Saddam Hussein regime. 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.As Judith Matloff shows, the result is a combustible mix we in the lowlands cannot afford to ignore. Traveling to conflict zones across the world, she introduces us to Albanian teenagers involved in ancient blood feuds; Mexican peasants hunting down violent poppy growers; and Jihadists who have resisted the Russian military for decades. At every stop, Matloff reminds us that the drugs, terrorism, and instability cascading down the mountainside affect us all. It has been sold to 19 countries and won a slew of awards including the Victorian Prize for Literature, which the author accepted via video link while in detention.