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Abstract
Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains gives a horrifying yet poetic account of the torture he endured on Manus Island in immigration detention. His work, written in Farsi and translated into English from thousands of text messages, was first published in English so as to give voice to Australia’s dehumanizing treatment of refugees in both a national and global discourse. This essay presents No Friend as the expression of a translating|translated self, positing that it imagines new possibilities for the narration of identity and, more specifically, of Australianness. By focusing on the bordering of translation, the essay contrasts Boochani’s expression of selfhood, which integrates linguistic, geographic, and literary borders, with a national identity that relies on unbreachable borders between us and them, Australia and Manus Island. It concludes that by using translation as an origin, like No Friend does, it is possible to conceive of an inclusive and decolonizing Australia.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Tofighian, “Translator’s Tale,” xxvii. Boochani renames the Manus Island Regional Processing Centre “Manus Prison” so that, “conceptually, he owns the prison” (Tofighian, “Translator’s Reflections,” 360).
2 Tofighian, “Translator’s Reflections,” 360.
3 Manus was briefly used for immigration detention in the sixties, when Papua New Guinea was an Australian colony, and mandatory detention was introduced by the Keating government in 1992. The Tampa affair of August 2001, however, marked a new phase in Australia’s refugee policy. When 438 asylum-seekers were picked up by the Norwegian MV Tampa after their Indonesian fishing vessel en route to Australia failed, Australia sent troops to board the ship, preventing it from sailing toward the nation’s Christmas Island. The Liberal government introduced the Pacific Solution in response (Baker, “A History”).
4 Parliament of Australia, “Migration Amendment Act 2001.”
5 McAdam, “Australia and Asylum Seekers,” 436; Hodge, “A Grievable Life?” 124.
6 On Oxfam, see Rajaram, “Humanitarianism,” 251.
7 Smith, “Performativity,” 17.
8 Whitlock, Soft Weapons, 10.
9 For an examination of the relationship between translation trends and conceptions of identity in different contexts, see Lefevere, Translation.
10 Santaemilia, “Woman and Translation,” 21.
11 Bertacco, Language and Translation, 5–6.
12 See, amongst others, Glissant, Poétique de la relation; Spivak, Outside; Cronin, Across the Lines; Ricoeur, Sur la traduction; Karpinski, Borrowed Tongues.
13 Karpinski, Borrowed Tongues, 27.
14 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 2.
15 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 5.
16 Sakai, “How Do We Count?” 83.
17 In recent years, Bhabha himself has criticized the discourse surrounding hybridity, saying that the term, harnessed by a privileged population, has become a symbol of a homogenous and acontextual idea of the multicultural, trans-, and global (see “Foreword,” x).
18 Dash, “Remembering Edouard Glissant,” 673.
19 Tofighian, “Translator’s Tale,” xxvi.
20 “The Blue-Eyed Boy” is evocative of E. E. Cummings’ poem “Buffalo Bill’s.” This example of intertextuality in translation points to the ambivalence No Friend’s translation process produces around originality and hierarchy. (Does the connection come from Boochani and Farsi, from English translation, or from a reader? There is no stable source text to refer to.) It is also representative of the violence of the physical and, as I will come to shortly, conceptual meeting places that No Friend depicts and dwells in.
21 Boochani, No Friend, 44.
22 Sakai, “How Do We Count?” 72.
23 Boochani, No Friend, 63, 67, 47.
24 Tofighian, “Translator’s Tale,” xvii.
25 Mignolo and Tlostanova, “Theorizing from the Borders,” 206. Mignolo and Tlostanova also make an important distinction between studying borders, as I am doing here, and dwelling in them, as Boochani is forced to do (214).
26 Boochani, No Friend, 113.
27 Boochani, No Friend, 68; Tofighian, “Translator’s Tale,” xxiv.
28 Boochani, No Friend, 353.
29 Boochani, No Friend, 347.
30 As Steiner said of translation (After Babel, 318).
31 Tofighian, “Translator’s Tale,” xxix.
32 On this note, Boochani is an activist for Kurdish rights and language.
33 Nauru gained independence from Australia in 1967 and Papua New Guinea in 1975.
34 Senate Select Committee, “Pacific Solution,” 295–299.
35 Papua New Guinea’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, Honorary Professor John Waiko; qtd. in Senate Select Committee, “Pacific Solution,” 301.
36 Boochani, No Friend, 270.
37 Boochani, No Friend, 332–333, 145.
38 McHugh-Dillon, “‘This Place,’” 93.
39 Boochani, No Friend, 220, 190.
40 Boochani, No Friend, 303.
41 Boochani, No Friend, 311.
42 Karpinski, Borrowed Tongues, 34.
43 Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, 20.
44 Polezzi, “Translation and Migration,” 348–350.
45 Whitlock, Soft Weapons, 18.
46 Whitlock distinguishes between the detached observer and the witness with responsibility, and discusses the way different projects, such as Boochani’s, call the reader|audience to account (“Implicated Subjects,” 495–497).
47 Flanagan, “Foreword,” ix.
48 Boochani, No Friend, 314, 272.
49 Boochani, No Friend, 331, 162. Notably, the lack of “original” text to refer back to produces ambivalence around the provenance of these terms.
50 Boochani, No Friend, 155, 292, 291.
51 Apter, The Translation Zone, 6.
52 Hage, White Nation, 18.
53 Boochani, No Friend, 284.
54 Boochani, No Friend, 284, 285.
55 Tofighian, “Behrouz Boochani,” 533–535.
56 Sakai, “How Do We Count?” 83.
57 Boochani, No Friend, 315.
58 Baker, Translation and Conflict, 1–2.
59 Baker, Translation and Conflict, 1.
60 Inghilleri, Translation and Migration, 12.
61 Yildiz, “Response,” 105.
62 Wilson, “Response,” 108. See also Cronin, “Response,” 350.
63 Yildiz, “Response,” 105.
64 Boochani, No Friend, 86, 96.
65 Boochani, No Friend, 265, 94.
66 Qtd. in Galbraith, “Not Always.”
67 Boochani, No Friend, 299, 111.
68 See Glissant’s Le discours antillais for his seemingly paradoxical linking of insularity, in terms of the geography of an archipelago, and interconnectedness.
69 Boochani, No Friend, 141.
70 Boochani, No Friend, 332.
71 Boochani, No Friend, 331, 193, 331.
72 Boochani, No Friend, 122.
73 Boochani, No Friend, 141.
74 Boochani, No Friend, 153.
75 Boochani, No Friend, 123.
76 All of Boochani’s characters, like “The Rohingya Boy,” “The Whore,” and at times the Papus, are caricatures to some extent, participating in the larger project of No Friend as mythical story, fable, or epic.
77 Boochani, No Friend, 124.
78 Boochani, No Friend, 145.
79 Boochani, No Friend, 136.
80 Inghilleri, Translation and Migration, 197.
81 Boochani, No Friend, 236, 319.
82 Boochani, No Friend, 158.
83 Boochani, No Friend, 99.
84 Boochani, No Friend, 82–83.
85 See Keller-Privat and Alexandre-Garner, “Introduction,” para. 10 ; Said, “Reflections on Exile.”
86 No Friend is careful, however, to contextualize Manus Island as the home of Manusians and of Indigenous culture before, during, and after the physical and conceptual colonization by the Australian government.
87 This is not unidirectional either. At the time of writing, Boochani is reportedly working on the Farsi text, editing it according to the English version for publication in Iran.
88 Ahmed and Stacey, “Testimonial Cultures,” 5.
89 Boochani spent four years in detainment on Manus and two in the continued inhumane conditions after the shutdown before being granted a limited visa to New Zealand to speak at a literary festival.
90 Boochani, No Friend, 310.
91 Ricoeur, “Responsabilité et fragilité,” 136. Farahani points out that “welcome cultures,” and an understanding of hospitality toward refugees and asylum-seekers, can “establish rather than destabilise one’s privilege” and “displace global responsibility” (“Hospitality and Hostility,” 666, 667). A translational framework endeavors to work against this by unsettling established identities.