AustLit

'This introduction to a forum of essays on Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison situates the book as a work of life writing and political theory, arguing it is a landmark moment in the evolution of life writing as a cultural, social, political, and epistemological practice. It introduces the essays that make up the forum, and situates Boochani’s text as a direct challenge to the genre of refugee memoir and its privatizing modes of reading.' (Publication abstract)

'This essay engages with Behrouz Boochani’s critical documentation of the Manus Island prison as part of Australian society. The current practices of detention and torture of refugees and asylum seekers need to be understood as part of the system that has been founded upon the violent theft of Indigenous lands, and one that continues to perpetrate ongoing colonial violence against Indigenous people. Considering the experiences of Indigenous people and asylum seekers together reveals the logics of Australian colonialism, which operate through, and are sustained by, white supremacy. In spite of these conditions, Indigeneity endures settler colonialism. One way that people exist, persist, and resist (Kauanui) is through building solidarity and undertaking actions that are grounded in, and center, Indigenous sovereignty.' (Publication abstract)

'This essay turns to the paratexts of No Friend but the Mountains, and the question of how this book should be read in these margins of the text. Focusing on both peritexts and epitexts—Richard Flanagan’s “Foreword,” Omid Tofighian’s “Translator’s Tale” and “Reflections,” and a review of the novel by J. M. Coetzee, “Australia’s Shame”—it examines the ethical challenge to Australian readers at this threshold of interpretation, and asks what responses we might make as beneficiaries and implicated subjects, and as Southern readers.' (Publication abstract)

'The political autobiography No Friend but the Mountains revolves around the lived experiences of Behrouz Boochani, first as a Kurdish undocumented refugee, through his boat journey to Australia, and then as a detainee in an Australian offshore immigration detention center on Manus Island (Papua New Guinea). By considering diverse literary techniques and forms of expression and the dichotomy between poetic language and realistic mode, this essay analyzes Boochani’s reflections on the systematic violence and abuse in the prison and immigration system, and the “coloniality of power” in general from the perspective of a Kurd whose preoccupation with his cultural/national “identity” and “homeland” is greatly influenced by the traumatic experiences of war and conflicts that led him to flee Kurdistan. It also examines the influence of Kurdish oral and written literary traditions on his narration.' (Publication abstract)

'Behrouz Boochani’s political prison writings authored from Manus Prison from 2013 to 2019, especially his notion of kyriarchal power, strike at the heart of colonial Australia and its ongoing imperial ordering. The vast body of intellectual work Boochani produced during his imprisonment makes a powerful and embodied contribution to an already established and influential body of work produced in the last two decades that has articulated the patriarchal and imperializing function of Australian sovereignty, while drawing crucial links between Indigenous dispossession and refugee imprisonment. Australia’s history as a colonial state is indissociably bound to incarceration as a practice that is critical to the exercising of illegitimate and colonial sovereignty. This violence is traceable to the foundational and ongoing function of the colonial nomopoly.' (Publication abstract)

'After the publication of No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison and the book being awarded the 2019 Victorian Prize for Literature, Behrouz Boochani and translator and collaborator Omid Tofighian (Farsi-English) were invited to speak at many festivals together, in addition to seminars, workshops, and other venues. A small number of events focused on translation, and in June 2019 Tofighian participated in two sessions at the Emerging Writers’ Festival in Melbourne, Australia. Stephanie Bennett, then the senior editor of RMIT’s magazine The Gazette, interviewed Tofighian.' (Publication abstract)

'This essay examines the absence of mobile phone technology from the narrative of No Friend but the Mountains in order to reflect on the centrality of mobile digital technology for the intellectual work the book undertakes. Examining a key scene from No Friend but the Mountains where telecommunications technology is represented as a limited resource within Manus Prison, it draws on media theory and life writing theory to argue that the affordances of mobile digital technologies enabled the emergence of a new, collaborative form of life writing that both affirms the value of an individual life, while also making powerful claims regarding the collective suffering and dehumanization at the heart of Australia’s mandatory detention policy.' (Publication abstract)