No Friend but the Mountains

This book by Behrouz Boochani is the true story of his attempted journey to Australia as a refugee. An Iranian-Kurdish* scholar, journalist & poet, Boochani fled political persecution in his homeland - and we follow him on a harrowing small overcrowded boat voyage from Indonesia, to his being intercepted by Australian immigration police, to his several years' detainment at Manus Island Regional Processing Centre (a prison camp in all but name) from which he wrote this book, one text message at a time, on a smuggled phone.

   The brutal dehumanising forces he and his co-refugees were to experience make this a truly difficult read at times, complimented with a cast of colourful characters** & real philosophical depth in his analysis of the kyriarchy that constituted the system & logic of the prison community, and juxtaposed with the haunting beauty of the many moments throughout the text in which he slips into verse to muse on his circumstances & the hope of their ending. Overall this book is a damning indictment of Australia's asylum policies at the time of writing; I was heartened to learn that Manus Island's camps were declared illegal by the Papua New Guinean government & shut down in late 2017, and nowadays, as far as I can make out from Wikipedia at least, Boochani is living in New Zealand safely & fruitfully. The book is appended by a couple of short reflections by translator Omid Tofighian on the style & impact of the book as well as the choices made in its translation process.

   This is not light reading; this is a raw, poetically told landscape of suffering & injustice. But I would strongly recommend it for anyone as it is truly eye-opening as to the inhuman ways border policy can serve truly evil means & ends.

* You may be familiar with the writings of Turkish-Kurdish political dissident Apo, many of whose books I have covered on this blog; I'd like to promise someday I'll read something by a Kurd that wasn't written in prison.

** With the exceptions of Reza & Hamid, both of whom died on Manus and are thus named in honour of memory, all the characters portrayed in the book are anonymous amalgams of types of personality & behaviour Boochani witnessed in the prison camp, to preserve the safety of those who may otherwise have been identified.