No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison by Behrouz Boochani (review)

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, more than eighty million people worldwide have been forcibly displaced in recent decades because of persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations, and war. As a result of the huge influx of migrating populations, many countries have closed their borders to migrants, leading to the establishment of refugee camps around the world. One such camp was established on Manus Island off the coast of Papua New Guinea. It was officially referred to as Manus Island Regional Processing Centre, functioning under Australian jurisdiction.

Yet no processing seems to have taken place on Manus Island; it was effectively a refugee detention center with prison-like conditions. No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison, written by Behrouz Boochani, exposes life at Manus prison to the outside world from an insider's perspective. Boochani is a Kurdish-Iranian journalist, writer, and filmmaker who was illegally detained on Manus Island for more than five years after being forcibly taken there in 2013. He and other asylum seekers had traveled thousands of miles hoping for freedom in Australia, but due to the country's borders being closed to asylum seekers, their journey continued to Manus Island. Boochani asks: "Why did I have to arrive in Australia exactly four days after they effected a merciless law" (89)?

No Friend but the Mountains is an autobiographical account of Boochani's experiences and observations while detained in Manus Island prison. He tapped the book on various smuggled-in mobile phones on WhatsApp and sent it to his contacts in Australia by thousands of text messages. Although the book begins with descriptions of near-death experiences and starvation during his journey from Indonesia to Papua New Guinea by truck and by boat, the majority of the narrative refers to his forced detention in the Manus Island prison.

Boochani considers writing an act of resistance, an action to expose the unjust treatment of the prisoners on Manus Island. His writing is a blend of prose and poetry while many segments of his prose also reveal poetic tendencies. Writing music and poetry provided him relief from the atrocious conditions of the camp. True to his journalistic profession, Boochani describes events as an observer, as if he were an outsider relating what he witnessed, particularly when writing about physical torture of his fellow detainees.

However, he includes himself when referring to psychological torture, such as round-the-clock surveillance of the prisoners, seemingly interminable waiting in line for food, sometimes unsuccessfully, waiting for a turn to use a telephone as mobile phones were not permitted, waiting to use the toilet facilities or medical services, and waiting in line for his twice-weekly cigarette allotment. "I have always despised waiting" (88), writes Boochani. For him, waiting in line was a mode of torture: "A twisted interlocking chain of hungry men / Bodies mutate under the burning sun / Heads in an oven fired by the sun / Undergoing sickening transformation / A long line of men of different heights, weights, ages, and colors" (189).

The constant uncertainties of life at Manus prison, which Boochani considers another form of torture, is what Dr. Shanthi Robertson from Western Sydney University refers to as chronomobilities, profound changes in everyday experience of time. This is particularly relevant in detention centers such as Manus Island, where prisoners are confined within an enclosed area surrounded by barbed-wire fencing, not knowing when they might be released, where they would be sent once released, or what their eventual fate would be.

Boochani's will to survive was intrinsically tied to his memories of Kurdish mountains: "The vision of mountains upon mountains / Mountains within mountains / Mountains that are hiding chestnut oak trees" (31). Orchards of chestnut oak trees and waves of mountains surface in his memories throughout his time in captivity, inspiring him to write poetry and sing songs about them while sitting under a tree by the prison's fencing. Looking out...