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Freedom, Only Freedom: The Prison Writings of Behrouz Boochani
Over six years of imprisonment in Australia's offshore migrant detention centre, the Kurdish-Iranian journalist and writer Behrouz Boochani bore personal witness to the suffering and degradation inflicted on him and his fellow refugees, culminating eventually in his prize-winning book – No Friend but the Mountains. In the articles, essays, and poems he wrote while detained, he emerged as both a tenacious campaigner and activist, as well as a deeply humane voice which reflects the indignity and plight of the many thousands of detained migrants across the world.
In this book Boochani's collected writings are combined with essays from experts on migration, refugee rights, politics, and literature. Together, they provide a moving, creative and challenging account of not only one writer's harrowing experience and inspiring resilience, but the wider structures of violence which hold thousands of human beings in a state of misery in migrant camps throughout Western nation-states and beyond.
In this book Boochani's collected writings are combined with essays from experts on migration, refugee rights, politics, and literature. Together, they provide a moving, creative and challenging account of not only one writer's harrowing experience and inspiring resilience, but the wider structures of violence which hold thousands of human beings in a state of misery in migrant camps throughout Western nation-states and beyond.
- GenresNonfiction
344 pages, Paperback
Published November 15, 2022
18 people are currently reading
286 people want to read
About the author
Behrouz Boochani
10 books233 followersBehrouz Boochani (Persian: بهروز بوچانی) holds a Masters degree in political geography and geopolitics. He is a Kurdish-Iranian journalist, scholar, cultural advocate, writer and filmmaker, founder of the Kurdish language magazine Weya, an Honorary Member of PEN International. In 2013, he fled Iran and became a political prisoner of the Australian Government incarcerated in the Manus Regional Processing Centre (Papua New Guinea).
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
February 2, 2023
(4.5)
This confronting collection of the prison writings of Behrouz Boochani will stay with me. In his first publication, “No Friend but the Mountains”, the Kurdish detainee of Australia’s unjust off-shore detention centres at Christmas and Manus Islands had texted his poetry, journalistic observations and personal responses to incarceration using his mobile phone. In this more assured collection, Boochani humanised the refugee to counter the racist and colonialist perceptions that the Australian government was feeding to the public, presenting the refugees not as criminals, but as those desperate to “breathe free”.
Boochani’s own texts are accompanied by essays written by activists, cultural historians, journalists, political scientists, and academics in fields such as immigration and cultural history, whose commentaries reinforce the perspectives expressed by Boochani regarding the links between Australia’s colonial past, its White Australia Policy, and its government policy of detention of those seeking asylum. Nothing can prepare the reader for the violence and indignity suffered by those imprisoned in these off-shore centres, “designed to strip people of their identities, threaten their existence and cultivate a sense of powerlessness in them.” Boochani considered it a “duty to history” to expose the horror of the agencies employed by the “border control industry”, an account that “most Australians from across the political spectrum had never encountered through the media.”
What distinguishes this writing from other accounts is notably Boochani’s humanisation of the detainees. We finish reading knowing many of his fellow prisoners by name, by their distinct characters, and by the horror of their deaths through untreated illnesses, through suicide, through the violence of those who were meant to protect them (and to protect the Australian public from them!). Foremost, we come to understand the level of their personal resistance to the torment, indignity, and maltreatment they suffered. The collection is enlightening and left me adding my voice to those protesting against Australia’s deceptive misrepresentation of refugees and the blatant inhumanity that characterised its detention of those under such soul-destroying conditions.
This confronting collection of the prison writings of Behrouz Boochani will stay with me. In his first publication, “No Friend but the Mountains”, the Kurdish detainee of Australia’s unjust off-shore detention centres at Christmas and Manus Islands had texted his poetry, journalistic observations and personal responses to incarceration using his mobile phone. In this more assured collection, Boochani humanised the refugee to counter the racist and colonialist perceptions that the Australian government was feeding to the public, presenting the refugees not as criminals, but as those desperate to “breathe free”.
Boochani’s own texts are accompanied by essays written by activists, cultural historians, journalists, political scientists, and academics in fields such as immigration and cultural history, whose commentaries reinforce the perspectives expressed by Boochani regarding the links between Australia’s colonial past, its White Australia Policy, and its government policy of detention of those seeking asylum. Nothing can prepare the reader for the violence and indignity suffered by those imprisoned in these off-shore centres, “designed to strip people of their identities, threaten their existence and cultivate a sense of powerlessness in them.” Boochani considered it a “duty to history” to expose the horror of the agencies employed by the “border control industry”, an account that “most Australians from across the political spectrum had never encountered through the media.”
What distinguishes this writing from other accounts is notably Boochani’s humanisation of the detainees. We finish reading knowing many of his fellow prisoners by name, by their distinct characters, and by the horror of their deaths through untreated illnesses, through suicide, through the violence of those who were meant to protect them (and to protect the Australian public from them!). Foremost, we come to understand the level of their personal resistance to the torment, indignity, and maltreatment they suffered. The collection is enlightening and left me adding my voice to those protesting against Australia’s deceptive misrepresentation of refugees and the blatant inhumanity that characterised its detention of those under such soul-destroying conditions.
February 15, 2024
This is a harrowing but necessary read for all Australians.
March 14, 2023
A deep dive into the humanitarian disgrace that is Australia’s ‘Sovereign Borders’ program. Confronting & heartbreaking. Great contributions from a number of super talented writers.
Read
July 3, 2024this was super interesting and i learnt alot. it was very cool to hear from someone who actually experience all of this first-hand. also i saw alot of interpretivist-style stuff (meaning in pols course vibes) as well as ext his/eng (power of narrative, historiography, etc.). however i did find it quite repetitive so it became a bit of a slog towards the end.
regardless, i have bookmarked alot of pages with stuff i want to write down and remember. i will probably try to summarise/paraphrase some of it plus add my own thoughts throughout. if there is a quote but no person cited assume it is Boochani.
- the way language is used throughout the book and how it self-reflexive about it eg. 'Manus prison' (bc it really is a prison -> deprivation of liberty, the whole construct of time as a means of torture thing, actual torture - starvation, abuse or otherwise, solitary confinement etc.). another example is 'kyriarchy' which is a neologism because Boochani's work was translated from Kurdish. it refers to 'interlocking systems of oppression' and allows us to connect the prison with Autsralian colonial history, as well as racism, heteronormativity, class-based violence, militarism, xenophobia, etc. etc.
- Anne McNevin (p82) talks about how Boochani uses the literary/poetic form and narrative to resist the 'epistemic violence' created/perpetuated by the carceral system. She references Boochani's protest by climbing a tree in 2016 and how the language used to report the 'incident' basically made him out to be a crazy person (namely the bureaucrat).
- the 'Duck man' (Mansour Shoushtari is an animal rights activists and feeds the dogs, crabs, etc.) and how his 'very being conflict with the prison in fundamental ways' (p83)
- 'Facts can be overwhelming, compiled in order to document the real by virtue 0f scale and repetition. But accumulated facts also banalize their onstituent parts: irrevocable loss, for instance, or a man's depth of feeling for a creature whith whom he shares sa form of displacement. In fiction and in stories, paradoxically, the real becomes visible more precisely for what it is.' -Nevin, p84
- '[t]ime is unlike any other capital. [...] [n]o matter how rich we are or what cultural capital we accumulate, we can never, ever re-accumulate time Exile in Manus Island, like immigration detention globally, is life theft.' -p88, Victoria Canning
- re the 23-day protest where 600 refugees refused to transfer to the new camps in November 2017. (a cool detail: no one could get mad at anyone for leaving the protest, and instead had to thank them for the time they could give up). anyway this is particularly significant given that in political discourse refugees are quite passive actors - they had to leave because war, etc. was something done to them, this new rule where they had to leave the camps was again something done to them. so the protest was important because 'the refugees have been able to reconfigure the images of themselves as passive actors and weak subjects into active agents and fierce resistors.' -p119
- p143-44 highlights the importance of hearing actual stories behind the statistics. important to humanise refugees and also not treat them as a homogenous group. i think this is key to garnering public support (because personally i found it very powerful).
- THE BORDER-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX. so i am just going to SOC explain this. Divardar and Ghadiri characterise this as a complex web of 'private corporations, contracts and governments.' basically these entities profit off the refugees' detention (eg. security companies are hired to patrol the camp, run the camp, etc.). thousands of people are employed, including Nauruan people. but, the companies that operate this prison, and the Aus gov, literally rely on tensions between the communities to maintain control. The companies misrepresent the refugees as people who threaten the livelihoods of Nauru and its people, while the Aus gov (alongside conservative media outlets) do the same to the Australian people (think Dutton in question time: these criminals, these terrorists, etc.). detention centre workers assume all Naurauns are lazy and uneducated while the Naurans resent the colonial attitudes of Australians towards them. note that this has very practical effects eg. violence between these communities. also when i was googling the 'industrial complex' note that these businesses being incorporated in political processes for profit often have some sort of goal, but profit when that goal is not reached. so obviously the 'goal' of detention on Manus Island/Nauru is to deter refugees from entering Australia, but these businesses profit when refugees continue to come and are deported to these places. anyways i thought this was really interesting. i should learn more about it.
- on p187 Mahnaz Alimardanian makes a really good point about including people from Papua New Guinea's perspectives (ie Indigenous perspectives) in activist spaces like rallies. he highlights clear commonalities between the groups.
- link between 'anxieties'/xenophobia and the oppression of vulnerable groups. see p225: 'Under an instrumentalist and financially competitive global order, governed by a structure of rationality in which human beings are accorded worth merely according to their ascribed market (dollar) value, the refugee, along with other marginalised groups, is increasingly narrated as criminal threat, or looming burden of debt, or both. [...] The criminal (and here, by extension, the refugee) thus becomes a "strange attractor for displaced anxieties around the brutality of the neoliberal economy"'
- consider how the Manus Prison system tried to establish an environment of 'competition and hate' and quash collective resistance (eg. food queues, etc.) and seemed to fail. now consider how people responded in the pandemic. see p226.
- 'Learning about this struggle [for survival] educates us on how we should restrain from talking about or for refugees, and instead speak with them and finding creative and practical ways to support them' -Arianna Grasso, p241
- the fact that this whole thing is actually incredibly racist (kind of embarrassing that this was not obvious to me). Boochani argues it is an extension of the White Australia' policy (which only ended in 1958). see p246 for more.
- ALSO! almost forgot. everything about Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton. the fact that Scomo actually visited the prison, met with refugee reps and literally told them to go back to their homeland. the riots that ensued as well as spike in self-harm (even the guards agreed that what he did was stupid). then the genuine fear felt across the community that Boochani describes when he became PM.
regardless, i have bookmarked alot of pages with stuff i want to write down and remember. i will probably try to summarise/paraphrase some of it plus add my own thoughts throughout. if there is a quote but no person cited assume it is Boochani.
- the way language is used throughout the book and how it self-reflexive about it eg. 'Manus prison' (bc it really is a prison -> deprivation of liberty, the whole construct of time as a means of torture thing, actual torture - starvation, abuse or otherwise, solitary confinement etc.). another example is 'kyriarchy' which is a neologism because Boochani's work was translated from Kurdish. it refers to 'interlocking systems of oppression' and allows us to connect the prison with Autsralian colonial history, as well as racism, heteronormativity, class-based violence, militarism, xenophobia, etc. etc.
- Anne McNevin (p82) talks about how Boochani uses the literary/poetic form and narrative to resist the 'epistemic violence' created/perpetuated by the carceral system. She references Boochani's protest by climbing a tree in 2016 and how the language used to report the 'incident' basically made him out to be a crazy person (namely the bureaucrat).
- the 'Duck man' (Mansour Shoushtari is an animal rights activists and feeds the dogs, crabs, etc.) and how his 'very being conflict with the prison in fundamental ways' (p83)
- 'Facts can be overwhelming, compiled in order to document the real by virtue 0f scale and repetition. But accumulated facts also banalize their onstituent parts: irrevocable loss, for instance, or a man's depth of feeling for a creature whith whom he shares sa form of displacement. In fiction and in stories, paradoxically, the real becomes visible more precisely for what it is.' -Nevin, p84
- '[t]ime is unlike any other capital. [...] [n]o matter how rich we are or what cultural capital we accumulate, we can never, ever re-accumulate time Exile in Manus Island, like immigration detention globally, is life theft.' -p88, Victoria Canning
- re the 23-day protest where 600 refugees refused to transfer to the new camps in November 2017. (a cool detail: no one could get mad at anyone for leaving the protest, and instead had to thank them for the time they could give up). anyway this is particularly significant given that in political discourse refugees are quite passive actors - they had to leave because war, etc. was something done to them, this new rule where they had to leave the camps was again something done to them. so the protest was important because 'the refugees have been able to reconfigure the images of themselves as passive actors and weak subjects into active agents and fierce resistors.' -p119
- p143-44 highlights the importance of hearing actual stories behind the statistics. important to humanise refugees and also not treat them as a homogenous group. i think this is key to garnering public support (because personally i found it very powerful).
- THE BORDER-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX. so i am just going to SOC explain this. Divardar and Ghadiri characterise this as a complex web of 'private corporations, contracts and governments.' basically these entities profit off the refugees' detention (eg. security companies are hired to patrol the camp, run the camp, etc.). thousands of people are employed, including Nauruan people. but, the companies that operate this prison, and the Aus gov, literally rely on tensions between the communities to maintain control. The companies misrepresent the refugees as people who threaten the livelihoods of Nauru and its people, while the Aus gov (alongside conservative media outlets) do the same to the Australian people (think Dutton in question time: these criminals, these terrorists, etc.). detention centre workers assume all Naurauns are lazy and uneducated while the Naurans resent the colonial attitudes of Australians towards them. note that this has very practical effects eg. violence between these communities. also when i was googling the 'industrial complex' note that these businesses being incorporated in political processes for profit often have some sort of goal, but profit when that goal is not reached. so obviously the 'goal' of detention on Manus Island/Nauru is to deter refugees from entering Australia, but these businesses profit when refugees continue to come and are deported to these places. anyways i thought this was really interesting. i should learn more about it.
- on p187 Mahnaz Alimardanian makes a really good point about including people from Papua New Guinea's perspectives (ie Indigenous perspectives) in activist spaces like rallies. he highlights clear commonalities between the groups.
- link between 'anxieties'/xenophobia and the oppression of vulnerable groups. see p225: 'Under an instrumentalist and financially competitive global order, governed by a structure of rationality in which human beings are accorded worth merely according to their ascribed market (dollar) value, the refugee, along with other marginalised groups, is increasingly narrated as criminal threat, or looming burden of debt, or both. [...] The criminal (and here, by extension, the refugee) thus becomes a "strange attractor for displaced anxieties around the brutality of the neoliberal economy"'
- consider how the Manus Prison system tried to establish an environment of 'competition and hate' and quash collective resistance (eg. food queues, etc.) and seemed to fail. now consider how people responded in the pandemic. see p226.
- 'Learning about this struggle [for survival] educates us on how we should restrain from talking about or for refugees, and instead speak with them and finding creative and practical ways to support them' -Arianna Grasso, p241
- the fact that this whole thing is actually incredibly racist (kind of embarrassing that this was not obvious to me). Boochani argues it is an extension of the White Australia' policy (which only ended in 1958). see p246 for more.
- ALSO! almost forgot. everything about Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton. the fact that Scomo actually visited the prison, met with refugee reps and literally told them to go back to their homeland. the riots that ensued as well as spike in self-harm (even the guards agreed that what he did was stupid). then the genuine fear felt across the community that Boochani describes when he became PM.
Read
March 3, 2024marking it as read even though I read only parts for class but this is a reminder to me that I have to return to it because I know it’s a kind of book that will be printed in my memory for a long time. I can’t really explain it but it gave me a similar feeling to reading 1984 and inny świat Gustawa Herlinga-Grudzińskiego. every page I read my heart was breaking a little bit more. I also read parts of his other book no friend but the mountains and was amazed by both the beauty of his words and the horror of his story. I still can’t form the right words to express what I felt reading both of the books, my mind still trying to process all of it but frankly I don’t think it ever will…
January 24, 2023
Another important book by Behrouz. I really appreciated the setting of the scene at the beginning of each chapter, and the jump between Behrouz's writing and other writers. Incredibly written and informative.
June 6, 2025
Have had this book for so long and finally read it. Really sad reality and makes you reflect on how badly Australia treats anyone who is not white. Also found the discussion around how aus detainment of refugees on Manus impacted PNG locals (soemthing that might have been overlooked).
March 26, 2023
Every now and again you have to remind yourself of the conditions under which these articles were written. The fact that Boochani could respite with such love dignity and grace is breathtaking.
July 21, 2023
Read the first part but due to time constraints skip read the rest. Will get back to it. A smear on Australia's ethical standards.
May 10, 2024
Harrowing but layered and fascinating. An important record of the human impact of the indefinite detention of refugees from a first person perspective.
September 18, 2024
I find his books hard to read. Don't know what the answer to refugees is. Glad I don't have to decide
December 7, 2023
Good but a hard one to read cover to cover. Would better suit a coffee table read to read the writings in bite size bits.
September 19, 2023
‘Here in these pages is everything we must face if we are to save ourselves from the horror of repetition.’ (From the Foreword by Tara June Winch, 2022)
Behrouz Boochani, a Kurdish-Iranian writer, journalist and refugee activist was detained on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea for several years. He now lives in New Zealand. This book contains a collection of essays and poems that provide a first-hand account of his experiences in detention, and the struggles faced by those in offshore detention seeking asylum in Australia. Behrouz Boochani’s own writings are accompanied by essays written by other activists and by historians and journalists.
‘If we wanted to describe life in the Manus Prison, we could sum it up in just one sentence: A prisoner is someone who needs to line up in order to fulfil even the most basic needs of every human being.’
This is a powerful and confronting work. Behrouz Boochani writes about individuals, about people. He tells us their stories, their hopes and tragically in some cases their illnesses and deaths. We may be able to ignore people anonymised as numbers, but how many of us can ignore the stories of individuals and the impact detention had on them?
Behrouz Boochani writes of a kyriarchal system, a term borrowed from feminist writing, which he describes as ‘best described as interlocking and mutually reinforcing structures of violence obsessed with oppression, domination and submission, structures also characterized by their replication and multiplication.’ (page xviii)
I found this very uncomfortable reading. Australia’s colonial past should be history, uncomfortable as it is. Australia’s colonial past should not be shaping the institutions we build now and thereby influencing the decisions we make about the future. The people of Papua New Guinea and Nauru also deserve better treatment.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
Behrouz Boochani, a Kurdish-Iranian writer, journalist and refugee activist was detained on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea for several years. He now lives in New Zealand. This book contains a collection of essays and poems that provide a first-hand account of his experiences in detention, and the struggles faced by those in offshore detention seeking asylum in Australia. Behrouz Boochani’s own writings are accompanied by essays written by other activists and by historians and journalists.
‘If we wanted to describe life in the Manus Prison, we could sum it up in just one sentence: A prisoner is someone who needs to line up in order to fulfil even the most basic needs of every human being.’
This is a powerful and confronting work. Behrouz Boochani writes about individuals, about people. He tells us their stories, their hopes and tragically in some cases their illnesses and deaths. We may be able to ignore people anonymised as numbers, but how many of us can ignore the stories of individuals and the impact detention had on them?
Behrouz Boochani writes of a kyriarchal system, a term borrowed from feminist writing, which he describes as ‘best described as interlocking and mutually reinforcing structures of violence obsessed with oppression, domination and submission, structures also characterized by their replication and multiplication.’ (page xviii)
I found this very uncomfortable reading. Australia’s colonial past should be history, uncomfortable as it is. Australia’s colonial past should not be shaping the institutions we build now and thereby influencing the decisions we make about the future. The people of Papua New Guinea and Nauru also deserve better treatment.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
August 25, 2023
Boochani does a great job of explaining how offshore detention is both and infection of and further infects Australian society.
We should ask all 4000 people subjected to this system for forgiveness and guidance.
We should ask all 4000 people subjected to this system for forgiveness and guidance.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews