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ABSTRACT
No Friend but the Mountains: Writing From Manus Prison is a literary work typed using mobile phone text messaging and produced after five years of indefinite detention in the Australian-run immigration detention centre on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. Behrouz Boochani’s Manus Prison narratives represent the fusion of journalism, political commentary and philosophical reflection with myth, epic, poetry and folklore. By experimenting with multiple genres he creates a new literary framework for his uncanny and penetrating reflections on exile to Manus Island and the prison experience from the standpoint of an Indigenous Kurdish writer. In addition, the narratives he constructs function as political and philosophical critique and expose the phenomenon of Manus Prison as a modern manifestation of systematic torture. Drawing on scholarship from social epistemology, this article emphasises the situated nature of Boochani’s writing and the interdependent way of knowing uniquely characteristic of his positionality. This study also demonstrates, from the perspective of the translator, the interdisciplinary nature of the translation process and indicates how a particular philosophical reading was required, particularly in order to communicate the work’s decolonial trajectory. The Manus Prison narratives depict a surreal form of horror and are best described in terms of anti-genre: the stories redefine and deconstruct categories and concepts; they resist style and tradition; and they show the limitations of established genres for articulating the physical, psychological and emotional impact of exile and indefinite detention on refugees.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. This passage is from a chapter that was published separately in Island magazine a year prior to the book’s release: Boochani, B. (Citation2017a) ‘Chanting of Crickets, Ceremonies of Cruelty. A Mythic Topography of Manus Prison’. trans. Tofighian, O. Island 150: 96–115.
2. Examples of personal correspondence in this article took place either through Whatsapp voice messaging or during my two visits to Manus Island in 2017 and 2018. These are my own translations from Farsi to English.
3. Pohlhaus classifies wilful hermeneutical ignorance under what Charles Mills calls epistemology of ignorance (Citation1997).
4. Kristie Dotson refers to this phenomenon as contributory injustice (Citation2012).
5. Samia Mehrez analyzes the relationship between the famous French writer and scholar Azouz Begag and Ahmed Beneddif. Both are from the beur generation; they were born in France to Algerian parents who immigrated for work. While Begag is a French citizen, Beneddif never acquired citizenship due to his father’s insistence to keep his Algerian nationality. Beneddif’s life, in stark contrast to the successful writer and academic, has been impacted by disadvantage and intense discrimination, crime, imprisonment and multiple instances of deportation. The two develop a problematic relationship based on writing and publishing Beheddif’s story; one that Begag describes as originally based on pity for the beur with Algerian nationality, pity for the clandestine who had experienced a difficult and tortuous past (Mehrez Citation2002).
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Omid Tofighian
Omid Tofighian is Assistant Professor of Philosophy, American University in Cairo; Honorary Research Associate for the Department of Philosophy, University of Sydney; faculty at Iran Academia; and campaign manager for Why Is My Curriculum White? - Australasia. He is author of Myth and Philosophy in Platonic Dialogues (Palgrave Macmillan 2016) and translator of Behrouz Boochani's book No Friend but the Mountains: Writing From Manus Prison (Picador 2018).