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

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He is a Kurdish-Iranian writer, journalist, scholar, cultural advocate and filmmaker. Boochani was a writer for the Kurdish language magazine Werya; is Associate Professor in Social Sciences at UNSW; non-resident Visiting Scholar at the Sydney Asia Pacific Migration Centre (SAPMiC), University of Sydney; Honorary Member of PEN International; and winner of an Amnesty International Australia 2017 Media Award, the Diaspora Symposium Social Justice Award, the Liberty Victoria 2018 Empty Chair Award, and the Anna Politkovskaya award for journalism. He publishes regularly with The Guardian, and his writing also features in The Saturday Paper, Huffington Post, New Matilda, The Financial Times and The Sydney Morning Herald. Boochani is also co-director (with Arash Kamali Sarvestani) of the 2017 feature-length film Chauka, Please Tell Us The Time; and collaborator on Nazanin Sahamizadeh's play Manus. He immerses the reader in Manus' everyday horrors: the boredom, frustration, violence, obsession and hunger; the petty bureaucratic bullying and the wholesale nastiness; the tragedies and the soul-destroying hopelessness. Its creation was an almost unimaginable task... will lodge deep in the brain of anyone who reads it.' Herald Sun He was a political prisoner incarcerated by the Australian government in Papua New Guinea for almost seven years. In November 2019 Behrouz escaped to New Zealand. He now resides in Christchurch.

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. Hello, I would like to say hello to everyone. I am very excited. I am sitting with an Australian friend and hear this news. Thank you very much. Contents derived from the Sydney , New South Wales ,: Pan Macmillan Australia, 2018 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details. Translator's Tale : A Window to the Mountains , Behrouz Boochani, Superfluous to say that only very rarely did the lawyer or gymnasium teacher know how to execute an uppercut properly; rather, he was far more often the receiver, and in taking it hardly more able than in giving it. As a student of Kurdish and Syrian-Arab heritage, I have grappled with the reality of these two conflicting identities for years. In Arab spaces especially, I have tried to amplify the stories of Kurdistan as much as possible. While there are many in my community who have expressed support and advocated for Kurdistan, I have noticed the lasting effects of bigotry and tribalism still taking place in our own campus spaces. Whether defending songs that mourn Saddam Hussein, chanting the Farsi translation of “jin, jiyan, azadi” without crediting its Kurdish origin, or claiming that a Kurdish state will only cause chaos in the Middle East, many on campus have reminded me that being Kurdish in diaspora does not make me immune to the erasure and oppression people in Kurdistan face.The plan is to shoot in mid-2021, primarily in Australia. No creative team has been attached yet. Hoodlum’s first-look deal with ABC Studios International is still intact despite the axing of the London-based unit headed by Keli Lee. Working class prisoners fared better not only because of their physical tenacity but because they could integrate the experience into their existing knowledge of social brutality. Poor people already understood that the powerful mercilessly persecuted the weak and were accustomed to mounting small resistances. For them, ‘the camp logic was merely the step-by-step intensification of economic logic, and one opposed this intensification with a useful mixture of resignation and the readiness to defend oneself.’ 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 ]

A veteran war correspondent journeys to remote mountain communities across the globe-from Albania and Chechnya to Nepal and Colombia-to investigate why so many conflicts occur at great heights It is a matter of wonder that Behrouz Boochani was able to write No Friend but the Mountainsat all. He did so while in Manus prison, using text messages in Farsi on smuggled mobile phones. Egyptian and Australian academic Omid Tofighian worked closely with Boochani totranslate the text into English. In a detailed introduction to the book, Tofighian explains that Boochani’s writing contributes to a Kurdish literary tradition. He describes his style as “horror surrealism”.'(Introduction) Books of Resistance : The Writers Pushing for a Revolution in Australia's Refugee Policies Brigid Delaney, The French novelist and revolutionist Victor Serge explains in Men in Prison (1930) why the first encounter with prison uniform so consistently features in narratives of jail:After this near-death experience, the refugees are saved by a British cargo ship and taken to Christmas Island, Australia, but only to be denied the right to refuge. They are imprisoned for a month under intense and degrading surveillance (including strip-searches and CCTV cameras in the toilets), and later exiled and incarcerated indefinitely in dehumanizing conditions of the Australian off-shore detention centers in the Pacific islands – men being sent to the Manus Island of Papua New Guinea (PNG), and women and children to the Nauru Island. The thoughts that rush through Boochani’s mind are likely shared by many refugees, as they realize that they will not be allowed to reach their intended destination: “ I can’t believe what is happening to me/ All that hardship/ All that wandering from place to place/ All that starvation I had to endure/ All of it…/ So that I could arrive on Australian soil/ I cannot believe I am now being exiled to Manus/ A tiny island out in the middle of the ocean” (88). Some of the punitive tactics of the systematic torture in Manus Prison are the prohibition of card- and board games (designed “to shit all over the sanity of the prisoners, who are left just staring at each other in distress” (126)) and compulsory queuing of the prisoners under the scorching sun to acquire food, basic hygienic necessities, cigarettes, anti-malaria pills, access to phones, toilets and bathrooms. These repetitive instances of waiting, together with the reality of indefinite detention, engender an experience of purposelessness and existential waiting (Hage 2009) – perhaps the most characteristic state-of-being-in-refugeehood. “Waiting is a mechanism of torture used in the dungeon of time. I am a captive in the clutches of some overbearing power,” writes Boochani, “ A power that strips me of the fight to live life/ A power that tosses me aside and alienates me from the very being that I was supposed to be/ A power that tortures me/ A power that torments me” (62).

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). Tofighian, Omid. 2018a. “No Friend but the Mountains: Translator’s Reflections.” In No Friend but the Mountains: The True Story of an Illegally Imprisoned Refugee, Behrouz Boochani, 359-374. Sidney: Picador. What do other people’s plans to come to Australia have to do with me? Why do I have to be punished for what others might do?” a b c Ponniah, Kevin (31 January 2019). "Behrouz Boochani: Refugee who wrote book using WhatsApp wins top prize". BBC News. Archived from the original on 1 February 2019 . Retrieved 1 February 2019.

Boochani has defied and defeated the best efforts of Australian governments to deny asylum seekers a face and a voice. And what a voice: poetic yet unsentimental, acerbic yet compassionate, sorrowful but never self-indulgent, reflective and considered even in anger and despair. ... It may well stand as one of the most important books published in Australia in two decades, the period of time during which our refugee policies have hardened into shape - and hardened our hearts in the process.' SATURDAY PAPER

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