Hage, Ghassan. 2009. “Introduction.” In Waiting, edited by Ghassan Hage, 1-14. Carlton South: Melbourne University Press. It has been sold to 19 countries and won a slew of awards including the Victorian Prize for Literature, which the author accepted via video link while in detention. The feature adaptation was initiated by writer and producer Ákos Armont and Waddington for Aurora Films, later joined by Hoodlum Entertainment.

Written in prose and poetry, it chronicles Boochani's boat journey from Indonesia to Christmas Island in 2013 and his subsequent detainment on Manus Island, describing the lives (and deaths) of other detainees, the daily routines and various incidents, and reflecting on the system in which they are trapped, up to the point of the prison riots in early 2014. He also makes observations on the Australian guards and the local Papuan people. He characterises individuals about whom he writes using epithets rather than using their real names, with a few important exceptions such as his friend Reza Barati, also known as The Gentle Giant. Our freedom rests on the preservation of our cultures, the rise against our occupying powers, and the storytelling of our past. I truly believe that one day, we will no longer be silenced, but liberated. One day, it will no longer be considered “divisive” or “provocative” for me to say that I am both Kurdish and Arab. One day, others will see that my two ethnic identities do not oppose each other, but work to uplift one another. Kurdish-Iranian journalist Behrouz Boochani chronicled his harrowing experiences in the tome No Friend But The Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison. That network now includes Kirrily Jordan at the Australian National University, the Iranian intellectuals Najmedeen Weysi, Farhad Boochani, Toomas Askari; the translators Moones Mansoubi and Sajad Kabgani; and others. Before Boochani secured a contract with Picador, sections of what would become No Friend but the Mountains appeared in Mascara Literary Review and Island magazine. He thus credits literature with saving his life.The Kyriarchal System also reinforces the divisions between the prisoners themselves. Boochani describes how the authorities engineer rivalries and competition for small ‘privileges’ such as who gets the first and best piece of cake. During these moments, he writes, ‘the prisoners are transformed into something way beyond sheep — maybe more like a group of predatory wolves’. Boochani contemplates a particular prisoner he calls ‘the Cow’ — a man calculatingly determined to get his share of cake, and anything else he can obtain in the prison. ‘Competition arises. but competition always ends in the victory of a single individual: the person known as The Cow’. In the first part of the book, in which Boochani describes the sea voyage out of Indonesia, he makes clear that the asylum seekers are people thrust together by circumstance, and do not have an automatic collective sense of identity of themselves as ‘asylum seekers’ (indeed they are often quite hostile to one another). A sense of unity does not arise among the prisoners until the protests that Boochani describes at the end of the book. 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. ideological from the outset, formally emerging in the early 1950s as an anti-communist tool wielded by U.S. and Western European governments. Under U.S. law, the concept of a ‘refugee’ first emerged to describe individuals seeking sanctuary in non-communist countries. On the international level, the United States played a key role in developing norms that emphasize the liberties of political dissidents, while denying the right to live free from poverty. One hesitates to invoke Auschwitz in a discussion of Australia’s asylum seeker detention regime, a system that, for all its horrors, does not implement genocide. But Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend But the Mountains – a book about, among other things, the power of writing – invites the comparison, as a text self-consciously positioned within a broader literature of incarceration.

I think it is not the altitude that causes the violence but the isolation and insular nature of those isolated (as well as the fact that the govts responsible for/to them mostly ignore them when not raiding them for men or materials). It is true that "mountainous regions host a disproportionate share of the world's conflicts." The question is Why. (The author posits that in part it is because "lowlanders" or "flatlanders" cannot fight in the mountains, cannot follow fighters into the mountains successfully (as the US learned in A'stan but could have learned from Russia's experience there.... but that's another story).) Switzerland, by the way, is the exception that does or does not prove the rule. It is entirely mountainous and among the most peaceful nations on earth. The untreated sewage spilling out around the facility produces a ‘smell … so vile that one feels ashamed to be part of the human species.’ A regular correspondent for Guardian Australia, Boochani wrote about seeing his friends shot and murdered by guards, his time in solitary confinement after reporting on a hunger strike, and the mental harm inflicted on fellow asylum seekers inside the Manus Island detention centre. Young, Evan (1 February 2019). "How a man detained on Manus Island won Australia's richest literary prize". SBS News. Archived from the original on 1 February 2019.Tofighian describes in an article in The Conversation the process and the challenges brought about by translating such a work. Starting in December 2016, Boochani's words were first sent to consultant translator Moones Mansoubi, each chapter being one long text message of 9,000 to 17,000 words. Mansoubi would format them into PDFs, and send them to Tofighian, who then translated from Persian to English, consulting regularly with Boochani via WhatsApp along the way. Tofighian had weekly sessions with either Mansoubi or another Iranian researcher in Sydney, during which time Boochani continued to write the book while consulting his friends and literary confidants both in Australia and Iran. [8] 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). I know that soon, others around the world who work to understand Kurdistan’s history and reality will join the mountains in supporting us.

A victory for humanity': Behrouz Boochani's literary prize speech in full – video". The Guardian. 1 February 2019 . Retrieved 1 February 2019. The structural differences are between the two languages pose one of many challenges of translation. The author uses philosophical and psychoanalytic methodology to examine the political commentary and historical account, and Kurdish, Persian and Manusian myth and folklore support the narrative. Tofighian calls the style "horrific surrealism". [8] Author and translator comments [ edit ]

As Judith Matloff shows, the result is a combustible mix we in the lowlands cannot afford to ignore. Traveling to conflict zones across the world, she introduces us to Albanian teenagers involved in ancient blood feuds; Mexican peasants hunting down violent poppy growers; and Jihadists who have resisted the Russian military for decades. At every stop, Matloff reminds us that the drugs, terrorism, and instability cascading down the mountainside affect us all. More importantly, the system's purpose is to isolate the prisoners, to turn them against each other in the vicious daily struggle for survival, and ultimately to break their spirit. In general the system succeeds. The only moment of solidarity we learn about is the rebellion in Mike Prison. Once broken, some inmates are ready to be cast into "the rubbish bin", voluntary return to the country from which they fled, refoulement. 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. All men who have experienced prison know that its terrible grasp reaches out far beyond its physical walls. There is a moment when those whose lives it will crush suddenly grasp, with awful clarity, that all reality, all present time, all activity – everything real in their lives – is fading away while before them opens a new road onto which they tread with the trembling step of fear. Throughout No Friend but the Mountains, Boochani employs the concept of ‘kyriarchy’, a term taken from feminist theology to refer to a complex intersection of oppressions. The Kyriarchical System in Manus, he argues, pits the inmates against each other, ensuring their isolation and loneliness ‘until the prison’s Kyriarchal Logic triumphs with their collapse and demise.’