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

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A powerfully vivid account of the experiences of a refugee: desperation, brutality, suffering, and all observed with an eye that seems to see everything and told in a voice that’s equal to the task.' - Phillip Pullman 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.”

Boochani’s strategy for survival is different. It rests precisely on the high literary culture that Améry declares ineffective in Auschwitz. As translator Omid Tofighian explains, the manuscript of No Friend but the Mountains emerged from the surreptitious transmission of short passages in Farsi, sent from the camp via WhatsApp and similar platforms. Translated and compiled by Tofighian, the messages make a text that is deliberately and defiantly literary – ‘rich with cultural, historical and political frames of reference and allusion’.

No Friend But The Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison

This book is the result. Laboriously tapped out on a mobile phone and translated from the Farsi. It is a voice of witness, an act of survival. A lyric first-hand account. A cry of resistance. A vivid portrait through six years of incarceration and exile. Boochani has also won the Anna Politkovskaya award for investigative journalism and an Amnesty International Australia media award. The prisoners themselves become ‘pieces of meat in a metal pressure cooker’. But the camp also stinks of other bodily odours – in particular, human shit: He spent almost five years typing passages of various chapters into his mobile phone and using Whatsapp to text message them to Moones Mansoubi who filed the writings. She then arranged the text messages into chapters based on Boochani’s instructions and subsequently sent to me for translation. Early on in the writing process, Boochani had his phone confiscated during one of the brutal early morning raids and for a period of time was forced to write on paper and dictate to Moones using voice messaging (who obviously had to transcribe the new sections). Boochani’s book is a contribution to the Kurdish literary tradition and Kurdish resistance. Interpretations need to be situated within the styles and structures that have characterized Kurdish creativity for centuries, collective memories of historical injustice and Kurdish political history, and their relational concepts of being and becoming that are connected to the land.

My mother always sighed and would say: ‘My boy, you came into this world in a time we called the flee and flight years.’” But for the Kurds, living in Kurdistan, (now mostly part of Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria), they weren’t riding into the Valley of Death. They were being squeezed up into the hills during the war between Iran and Iraq – the flee and flight years. Boochani is an Iranian Kurd.The Persian translation of No Friend But the Mountains was published in early 2020 by Cheshmeh Publications in Tehran. In April 2020 also the audio version of the book (narrated by the actor Navid Mohammadzadeh) was released in Iran with the permission of Boochani. [21] Film [ edit ] The term kyriarchal system is used in the book to identify these interconnected systems of domination and oppression; an examination of the meaning and significance of this concept is provided in my essays accompanying the work. UPDATE JULY 2020 Boochani has just been given formal refugee status in New Zealand and granted a visa to live there! Boochani has created a book that resists classification. It overlaps with genres such as prison literature, philosophical fiction, clandestine philosophical literature, prison narratives, Australian dissident writing, Iranian political art, transnational literature, decolonial writing and the Kurdish literary tradition. Australia’s government tries to stop stories from being told but a new wave of authors are rallying against injustice.' A Place of Punishment : No Friend But the Mountains by Behrouz Boochani Jeff Sparrow,