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

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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. 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 Bluey: The Beach' wins 2020 ABIA Book of the Year". Books+Publishing. 2020-05-13 . Retrieved 2020-05-14.

Also, I would like to thank all of my friends: Omid Tofighian, Moones Mansoubi and others for helping me in this way and in this struggle. I don’t know what to say, just thank you very much. I think history will judge this generation and will judge all of us in this hard and dark period of Australian history. Hoodlum Entertainment, Aurora Films’ Antony Waddington and Ákos Armont and Sweetshop & Green’s Sharlene George and Gal Greenspan are teaming up to produce an asylum seeker drama adapted from a 2018 book. 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

In saying this] I include the book and … the works that other people [created] about Manus and this exile policy. It is important that we created those and now others can use them. 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). The mediagenic publicity of the multiple prize-winning Kurdish Iranian author Behrouz Boochani has elevated him to an emblematic status for the struggles of refugees, and his 2018 book, No Friend but the Mountains, into a mega-text. These promotional strategies are marked by the mutation of humanitarian awards into convertible cultural capital in the Australian literary field. This article argues that the dissemination of Boochani’s image is qualified with a surplus of affect – in both registers of affectation and of feeling – in the public domain. What I term the “Boochani effect” mobilizes a large number of actors in the cultural sphere to engage with the burgeoning interest in refugee writing, while emphasizing Boochani’s position as simultaneously an “Australian” and a “refugee”. Boochani’s work and author-persona thus generate a “disciplinary trouble”, a problem of taxonomy that both refracts and resists the limits of the mechanisms of identity-making for the refugee writer.'(Publication abstract) Resisting Confinement Through Translation : Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend But the Mountains Frances Egan, Boochani, giving an acceptance speech for the award via video, said that this award "is a victory. It is a victory not only for us but for literature and art and above all it is victory for humanity. It is a victory against the system that has reduced us to numbers". [14] In an interview with the writer Arnold Zable following the award, Boochani said that he has many conflicting thoughts on it, but he sees it as a "political statement from the literary and creative arts community in Australia, and all those who do not agree with the government's thinking". [15] Mountainous regions are home to only ten percent of the world's population yet host a strikingly disproportionate share of the world's conflicts. Mountains provide a natural refuge for those who want to elude authority, and their remoteness has allowed archaic practices to persist well into our globalized era.

I don’t want to talk about literature , just I would like to say that I think the literature community as a part of civil society of Australia are part of our resistance in front of this system and I think it is very valuable, and I do appreciate everyone for recognising my work. 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). Allahyari, Keyvan; Rae, Paul (1 February 2019). "Behrouz Boochani's literary prize cements his status as an Australian writer". The Conversation. Archived from the original on 2 February 2019 . Retrieved 2 February 2019. 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.

The feature adaptation was initiated by writer and producer Ákos Armont and Waddington for Aurora Films, later joined by Hoodlum Entertainment.

In his book Boochani introduces us to different dimensions of his experience and thinking. Both a profound creative writing project and a strategic act of resistance, the book is part of a coherent theoretical project and critical approach. After five years of publishing articles with media organisations in Australia and internationally, co-directing the film Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time (2017) and presenting many influential speeches to various audiences, Boochani is adamant that people still do not understand the extent of the situation and the underlying logic of what he calls Manus prison.

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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: Clearly, they are taking us hostage. We are hostages – we are being made examples to strike fear into others, to scare people so they won’t come to Australia. Tofighian had already translated a number of Boochani's articles before he travelled to Manus to meet Boochani, which was soon after the death of another detainee, musician Hamed Shamshiripour, in 2017. When they meet, they discuss nuances, changes, meanings, and also explore ideas and theories outside of the immediate text, Tofighian describing the method as requiring literary experimentation and the process as "a form of shared philosophical activity". [8]