Why no friends but the mountains: a new reading of Behrouz Boochani’s memoir in the Kurdish context

ABSTRACT

In his 2018 memoir, No Friends but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison, Kurdish-Iranian journalist Behrouz Boochani bears witness to the abuses of human rights he and his fellow refugees suffered in the Manus detention centre. While Boochani’s memoir has been largely read in terms of its political criticism of the oppressive system of the prison and colonial and neo-colonial discourses that form its basis, existing readings of his work have also pointed to and celebrated its universal aspect and its broader scope beyond the Manus prison. On this basis, the book has been rightly celebrated. While agreeing with these emphases in previous studies, this article offers a new reading of Boochani’s work that accounts for the transnational and diasporic nature of Boochani’s suffering, struggle and resistance. In doing so, it shows how Boochani’s work – as his own mode of resistance against his unjust ‘offshore’ incarceration – should also be read through the lens of the transnational Kurdish struggle.

KEYWORDS:

• Behrouz Boochani
• no friends but the mountains
• Kurdish struggle, politics, and poetics

Introduction

In 2013, Behrouz Boochani, after days of an insecure journey across the sea to reach Australia in search of asylum, with hundreds of his fellow refugees, was forcibly exiled to Manus Island, where Australia’s refugee detention centres were located. In his first years on Manus, Boochani began his struggles against their imprisonment through his journalism. Using a smuggled mobile phone, Boochani shared accounts from Manus on his Facebook and Twitter pages, in which he decried human rights violations by the Australian government. Before long, his voice reached the world and drew people’s attention within Australia and across the globe. While media access to these camps was heavily restricted, Boochani’s testimonies voiced the critical situation of these refugees and rallied international support for them. In 2018, Boochani published his memoir, chronicling his journey across the sea and his six years of imprisonment on Manus. He tapped out his memoir in Farsi on his smuggled phone and sent his writings to Omid Tofighian, the translator of the memoir, in the form of thousands of text messages.

In his memoir, Boochani described the system ruling the prison as an oppressive structure that employs systematic forms of domination against the imprisoned refugees. To make some sense of this oppression, he employed the term ‘Kyriarchy’ (Boochani 2018, 124, 370), derived from the work of Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza (1992). Fiorenza used this term as an alternative to patriarchy to indicate how multiple forms of oppression operate and intersect, beyond gender-based oppressions, in various interconnected contexts. As explained in the ‘Translator’s Tale’ of the memoir, ‘the Kyriarchal System is the name Behrouz gives to the ideological substrata that have governing function in the prison; it is a title denoting the spirit that is sovereign over the detention centre and Australia’s ubiquitous border-industrial complex’ (xxvii). Boochani, through his testimonies, demonstrated how diverse but intersecting forms of oppression produce the structure of the Manus prison.

Boochani’s memoir is an act of witnessing and of resistance to Kyriarchy: not only an exhibition of the ways Boochani and other refugees struggled against the oppressive system of the prison. The memoir itself is an act of resistance; it is what Barbara Harlow (1987) has called ‘resistance literature’ in her book of the same title. His memoir is, to use the words of Elleke Boehmer (2018), ’resistance writing’ or what she calls ‘writing-becoming-resistant’ (52). As Boehmer argues, ‘in situations requiring resistance, literary writing can not only stimulate but in some cases even enact or indeed simulate resistance’ (Boehmer 2018, 5). Boochani’s work is indeed ‘a counter-hegemonic practice of writing, which both organizes and documents resistance’, to use Harlow’s description of the prison memoirs of the Third World detainees (1987, 124). Moreover, as a piece of prison writing, Boochani’s work provides a critique of both the prison system and the society of which that prison is a microcosm. It challenges colonial and neo-colonial discourses that form the basis of Manus prison, which according to Boochani and Tofighian is rooted in Australia’s colonial history (Tofighian 2018, 2020). Boochani’s memoir is thus far more than the life story of an individual. It was a ‘decolonial intervention’ (Boochani 2018, xxvi). It was a call for action (McDonald 2018, 2019), ‘a testimonial narrative that summons Australian readers to bear witness to the perverse cruelty of offshore detention’ (Whitlock 2020, 706).

In this task, Boochani seems to have been successful. As Whitlock states, ‘the reception of No Friend by the Australian reading public in its first year of publication was enthusiastic’ (708). From the very outset, Boochani’s memoir attracted the attention of numerous human rights activists, academics and politicians. Its publication generated a wave of reviews and scholarly critiques, which almost unanimously praised it for both its political importance and literary merit. It has also received several literary awards. Well-known Australian novelist Richard Flanagan praises Boochani’s words – ‘their beauty, their possibility, and their liberating power’ (Boochani 2018, viii) – and claims that Boochani ‘alerted the world to Australia’s great crime”, proclaiming the book “a profound victory’ (ix), and adding that ‘Boochani’s revolt took a different form. For the one thing that his jailers could not destroy in Behrouz Boochani was his belief in words’ (viii).

Boochani’s memoir not only helped him to get his voice and that of his fellow refugees heard, but also led to his freedom. New Zealand granted him residency in 2020—a development that demonstrates the liberating power of his words. Boochani’s circumstances have changed dramatically since the publication of his memoir, and he has been offered research fellowships at several universities (Tofighian 2020, 1142). He now works as a researcher and activist in New Zealand. Although Boochani’s circumstances have changed for the better, it is important to consider how his writing brought forth the Kurdish struggle against a brutalizing migration regime and for his own freedom.

In existing studies, Boochani’s work is read as either highly localized – in the Australian context – or universal, as shedding light on the universal condition of the refugees at this historical moment. Critics often referred to and celebrated the universal aspect of Boochani’s memoir and its scope beyond the Manus prison. For instance, Christina Houen (2018) considers Boochani’s memoir ‘a scorching critique of refugee policies here in Australia, and by extension, globally’ (149). Felicity Plunkett (2018) observes that ‘the work transcends memoir’ and that Boochani ‘examines larger questions of the nature of human behaviour’ (7). Jeff Sparrow (2018) asserts that Manus ‘is a place of punishment’ and the oppressions Boochani writes about in his memoir are examples of ‘universal oppression’. Tofighian, Boochani’s long-time collaborator and translator, also points out that ‘Manus prison is a location but for Boochani it is also a concept that functions within a complex ideology and set of institutional cultures’ (2020, 1144). However, existing readings have not yet explored in depth the Kurdish context of Boochani’s memoir and its significance in his work; that is, Boochani’s Kurdishness and the Kurdishness of his critique and testimony.

The present article seeks to expose this context of Boochani’s memoir – an important aspect to address as it reveals Boochani’s wider geopolitical objectives of his work. However, by Kurdish context and the Kurdishness of Boochani’s memoir, this study does not mean how his Kurdishness has affected the way he understood, interpreted and resisted the system of the Manus prison. Nor does it mean the way Kurdish literary and folkloric traditions inspired his writing. Existing studies have already addressed these issues, particularly Özlem Balcim Galip’s recent and only Kurdish reading of the memoir, ‘From Mountains to Oceans’ (Galip 2020). Indeed, Galip’s reading reveals much about the memoir’s Kurdish identity and the Kurdish presence in Boochani’s story of the Manus Prison. Further, it raises important issues that warrant deeper exploration.

For instance, Galip begins her article with the significance of the mountains for the Kurds and Boochani’s use of this title for his memoir. The current study builds on this observation by considering why Boochani chose such a title for the story of Manus. Boochani could have used the memoir subtitle, Writing from Manus Prison, as the title, but he did not. The title Boochani chose, this study argues, is a conscious attempt and deliberate strategy to draw readers’ attention to the Kurdish people. The title of the memoir and its subtitle, individually and jointly, reveals two contexts within Boochani’s text – apart from the universality of the text discussed earlier in this article – the Manus prison context and a Kurdish context. First the title alerts readers who, in the course of the memoir, find out why Kurds have no friends but the mountains. Galip’s reading goes beyond the title to give examples from the text where Boochani, directly and indirectly, refers to the Kurdish history of oppression and the geopolitical condition of Kurds (725, 728). Galip rightly argues that through the remembrances of his war-torn childhood, Boochani ‘wants the readers to remember the past and repeated atrocities that Kurds face, not just his personal experiences’ (726). However, further work is needed to interrogate important parts of Boochani’s memoir where he evokes his homeland and his past. This study aims to do this and build on the existing body of work on Boochani’s memoir. Specifically, it is a Kurdish reading of No Friend, which is made possible owing to my own positionality as a Kurdish-Iranian and researcher in Kurdish diaspora literature.

While part of the reason that this aspect of Boochani’s memoir has remained unexplored or only briefly addressed is the question of the reader, what he evokes may not be so apparent to a non-Kurdish audience, the greater reason might be the political urgency of his memoir and its Manus context. It is perhaps for the same reason – the political aspects – that the literary components of his memoir appear only briefly, and their significance is not highlighted in existing studies. In Postcolonial Poetics, Boehmer (2018) argues for the importance of the formal structure of postcolonial writings in understanding them. She remarks that ‘consideration of the creative shape, formal structures, and patterns of postcolonial writing might in fact sharpen rather than obscure our attention to those pressing themes’ (1–2). Boehmer believes in ‘the heuristic power of literature as literature’ and argues for ‘the verbal and structural dynamics, the poetics, through which our understanding of the particular postcolonial condition being represented (race, resistance, liberation, reconciliation, precarity, and so on) may be shaped and sharpened’ (3; original emphasis). In the case of Boochani’s memoir, previous studies have almost exclusively focused on its politics and, to the best of my knowledge, no study to date has examined the poetics or the politics of poetics in his work.

Thus, this study contributes to the scholarly examination of Boochani’s memoir in two ways. First, it reveals how Boochani’s work bears witness to his colonial past and Kurdish history. Second, it explores what literary techniques have been employed in his memoir to evoke the past and to what effect. This includes analysing of narrative form, rhetorical techniques, modes of attention the text invites, and certain tropes and their use. Specifically, this study explores the textual strategies that direct the readers’ attention towards the Kurdish colonial experience, not the story of Manus, and how the poetics are used to sharpen the focus and understanding of Boochani’s readers to this colonial/postcolonial condition. A full discussion of the memoir lies beyond the scope of this essay and its central argument, which is the contribution of Boochani’s memoir to the long history of Kurdish resistance and struggle for recognition and justice. However, before embarking on the analysis of the text, a discussion on the question of the reader and my positionality as a Kurdish-Iranian reader and researcher is necessary.

The Kurdish context of Boochani’s memoir and the question of the reader

In ‘No Friends but the Mountains: How Should I Read This?, Whitlock (2020) offers a Southern reading of both the memoir and its existing Southern readings, such as Coetzee’s review, titled ‘Australia’s Shame”, and Flanagan’s ‘Foreword’. Whitlock asks how Australian readers are engaged or should engage with Boochani’s memoir, and how they should bear ‘adequate witness’ as Australians (706). For Whitlock, the memoir’s paratexts – both its peritexts and its epitexts – ‘are entangled in questioning of ethics of reading this book’; they ‘bring us to a halt, call us to account, question what we can see, hear and know’ (706). She states these paratexts attribute responsibility to the Australian readers for the crimes committed in their name and their interest as Australian, a responsibility to answer (709). Whitlock also argues that the shame that the text and its paratexts represent feels different to Australian readers, ‘who are implicated in such national shame’ (705).

Whitlock borrows the term ‘implicated subject’ from Michael Rothberg’s The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (Rothberg 2019). Rothberg uses this term for people who are involved in events that are beyond their agency: ‘Implicated subjects occupy positions aligned with power and privilege without being themselves direct agents of harm; they contribute to, inhabit, inherit, or benefit from regimes of domination but not originate or control such regimes’ (1). Whitlock employs this notion to describe the responsibility of Australians to the imprisoned refugees on Manus, who were tortured in their name. More significantly, Whitlock connects her discussion of Boochani’s memoir to Rothberg’s use of the term for a case study of the struggle for Kurdish independence in the Euro-American context. As Whitlock explains, Rothberg focuses on Steyerl Hito’s artistic project about the murder of her childhood friend, Andrea Wolf, who is an icon of the Kurdish cause.¹ Whitlock directly quotes these lines from Rothberg: ‘I cannot suppose that most of my readers will be deeply knowledgeable or concerned about the Kurdish cause’; ‘the Euro-America world is not innocent of implication in the plight of the Kurds’; and ‘US and European policies continue to exacerbate the Kurds’ vulnerability’ (Whitlock, 714). Then, she links Rothberg’s arguments and the Kurdish conflict to Boochani’s memoir and its Southern readers:

Here in the South, beyond the Euro-American world, the Australian citizens cannot be innocent or unknowing about this. Liaising with artists and writers across the Iranian diaspora in a series of literary and artistic collaborative projects from the Manus prison, Boochani persistently mourns the violent death of his Kurdish Iranian friend, Reza Barati, drawing on Kurdish literature, music, tradition, and belief to document the solidarity and resistance of Kurdish Iranians in the Australian camps.

(714)

Then, she adds:

Reading No Friend as a Southern reader, in and through its paratexts and the cultural politics of shame, maps a volatile and ongoing response to this manifestation of Kurdish resistance in the South. and this responds to Rothberg’s invitation to explore how the figure of the implicated subject and degrees and kinds of implication (including the beneficiary) feature in the ongoing dispossession of settler colonialism.

(716)

What is significant for me in the above passages is, on the one hand, how Whitlock, as a non-Kurdish and self-defined Southern reader, is aware of Boochani’s engagement with the Kurdish resistance in his memoir and the films he has produced. On the other hand, and more significantly, Whitlock is aware of both the lack of knowledge about the plight of the Kurds and the need to consider the Kurdish vulnerability in the South. While Boochani’s engagement with his homeland and with the Kurdish people have been acknowledged and identified in some other studies of Boochani’s non-Kurdish reviews and critics, I believe Whitlock’s reading, is the first study that reveals the burden of witnessing and responsibility that Boochani and his memoir place upon his readers for the Kurdish people. She recognizes the kind of implication the readers of Boochani’s memoir are involved in regarding the plight of the Kurds and the Australian policies that exacerbated their vulnerability and ongoing dispossession and statelessness by denying them the right to live freely and safely in Australia.

Such a reading by Whitlock affirms that Boochani’s memoir created and can continue to create new spaces of global engagement with the Kurdish people. His work promises insights into the political situation of the Kurds and opens up critical spaces for engaging with Kurdish people in the new and broader cultural and geo-political contexts his memoir circulates, not only in the South and in Australia but globally. Within this context the current essay views Boochani’s memoir as a Kurdish voice of resistance and argues for its contribution to Kurdish resistance and struggle. In the condition that a regional project is the destruction of Kurdish identity, history and culture, and there is no significant global recognition of the Kurdish question – as affirmed by Rothberg and Whitlock – such an attempt by Boochani can be seen as a form of resistance against the obliteration of their identity and culture, and acts of struggle for Kurdish recognition beyond their imposed national borders.

To see how readers like Whitlock identify and apprehend the Kurdish cultural, historical and political elements at work in Boochani’s memoir and how readers come to identify the Kurdish experience of violence embedded in the Manus prison story, we need to look at the memoir itself and how the text shapes and sharpens the attention of its readers to those themes. For instance, as quoted above, Whitlock argues that Boochani persistently mourns the death of Reza Barati, a Kurdish refugee, and draws on Kurdish tradition and belief to document the solidarity and resistance of Kurdish refugees in his memoir and the films he has produced. The title of Boochani’s memoir and the story behind it is often referred to in the existing reviews and studies by his non-Kurdish readers. For instance, Willa McDonald (2018) touches on the memoir’s title and asserts that it ‘comes from a Kurdish proverb that speaks to the long history of persecution and isolation of Kurds’. She rightly points out that ‘the application of the proverb to the situation of the refugees and asylum seekers on Manus Island internationalizes and universalizes the writing’ (22). Patrick Kaiku’s (2020), in his review of Boochani’s memoir refers to ‘the backstory’ of its title, which he indicates “is revealed in chapter 11’, where Boochani ‘recount[s] his experiences as a Kurd’ (469). Arnold Zable (2018) also points to Boochani’s Kurdish cultural and political background, the element of nature in his memoir that connects Manus to Kurdistan, and the presence of Boochani’s mother in his memoir.

In her study on Boochani’s memoir, Janet M. Wilson (2021), argues that ‘the recall of images and memories identifies with his Kurdish upbringing […] distances him from camp life’. She points to ‘cultural images such as the sounds of Kurdish music and memory of folk ballads’ in Boochani’s memoir that ‘take him back to “the cold mountains of Kurdistan”’, which she suggests had ‘a healing effect’ for the author (12). In his review of Boochani’s memoir, Graham R. Fulton (2021) discusses the physical and mental journeys on which Boochani takes his readers. Fulton argues that while reading the memoir, ‘the mind must engage with the changing forests: from the chestnut oaks and walnuts in the mountains of Kurdistan, through Javan jungles, to the coconuts and mango trees of Manus’ (211). Vanessa Francesca (2020) also argues that ‘the trees, the birds, the flowers, the mountains and the sea all have a role to play in the unfolding story of Boochani’s experience’ (Paragraph 4).

The reason for providing the above overview is to demonstrate that what Boochani has evoked in the text has been recognized and acknowledged by his non-Kurdish readers and critics. Moreover, I take these readings as points of departure to explore how the text shapes and sharpens the reader’s attention to this story within Manus prison’s story. This study also aims to fill the gaps in these readings and offer a deeper and more comprehensive analysis of what has been briefly discussed in the above-mentioned readings. For instance, it seeks to move beyond what Whitlock has mentioned in her reading to identify other losses and painful experiences, both personal and collective, that Boochani evokes and mourns in his memoir. It tries to explore the role of mountains and chestnut oak trees that Francesca argues for in his reading. What happens in the final chapters of the memoir that Kaiku believes reveals the backstory of the memoir’s title? How is the mind of Fulton, or any reader, engaged with the changing forests, mountains and the mango tree in the story? What is the story of this mango tree in the prison, and what does it reveal about Kurdish nationalism?

Notably, these images, motives and themes might not be so apparent for a non-Kurdish audience, which may explain why they have remained unexplored or only briefly addressed. Anna Poletti’s (2020), argument in her introduction to the forum on No Friend in Biography is one example that supports this argument:

As a white Australian scholar based in Europe […] I though the book offered a perfect opportunity for students and I to consider the role of literature in contemporary culture. […] While I was confident, I could provide the group with the necessary contextual knowledge about Australia’s immigration policy […], I knew I lacked the prerequisite knowledge and context to discuss how the text activated Kurdish literary and cultural traditions […], and how […] would be received by First Nations Australian or Papua New Guinean readers.

(686)

Poletti’s statement highlights the experience of reading Boochani’s memoir and understanding it is different for readers of different backgrounds, that some readers might lack the prerequisite knowledge and context to understand or discuss its Kurdish aspects. Indeed, Boochani’s memoir speaks to an Australian reader, a First Nation Australian reader, and a Papua New Guinean reader differently.² What I want to add to Poletti’s statement is that the experience of a Kurdish reader also might be different, and the memoir might speak to a Kurdish reader differently. A Kurdish reader might notice things in Boochani’s memoir that a non-Kurdish audience does not – or perhaps could not – comprehend. Galip’s Kurdish reading of the memoir discussed earlier is a clear example. Galip, as a Kurdish reader and scholar, has years of experience working on Kurdish diaspora literature, particularly Kurdish-Turkish diaspora literature. Galip’s deep understanding of the way Boochani’s experience, knowledge and understanding of the oppressive system of the Manus prison is rooted in his Kurdish background, and how Boochani’s strong sense of struggle on Manus and against the oppressive system of Manus prison could be traced back to his Kurdishness, and how his detailed analysis of the presence of Kurdish literary and folkloric traditions in Boochani’s writing and storytelling (725, 726) all stem from her Kurdish positionality. In the same way, my reading of Boochani’s memoir stems from my Kurdishness and my positionality as a Kurdish-Iranian researching Kurdish diaspora literature. In the following section, I shed light on how Boochani’s Kurdish origins influence his narrative, from the beginning of the memoir (the dramatic sea voyage) to the climactic events surrounding the story of Reza Barati’s tragic death at the end. This analysis serves to illuminate the extent to which Boochani’s Kurdish heritage permeates his accounts, shaping his perspective and providing essential insights into the memoir’s overarching themes and experiences.

The Kurdish context of Boochani’s memoir and its poetics

Boochani’s memoir and the central story begin when Boochani and his fellow refugees head towards the Indonesian coast to take a boat to Australia. At the beginning of the memoir and his journey, Boochani, sitting in a truck and imagining the possibility of death on the sea, tells his readers how unjust it would be for him to die far from the land of his roots: ‘I always felt I would die in the place I was born […] It’s impossible to imagine dying a thousand kilometres away from the land of your roots. What a terrible, miserable way to die, a sheer injustice’ (Boochani 2018, 4). Boochani, who cannot imagine dying away from the land of his roots, paradoxically cannot imagine returning home either, as returning to his home would be a death return. ‘I was condemned to traverse over the ocean, even it meant giving up my life’ (74), Boochani writes later in the memoir. ‘My past was hell. I escaped from that living hell’ and ‘I never had the courage to return to the life I once endured’ (75), he adds. Boochani’s story then moves to the sea narrative and narrates days and nights of a difficult journey across the sea and the refugees’ arrival on Christmas Island, from where they are exiled to Manus Island. The rest of the story is what happened to Boochani and other refugees during the six years of imprisonment on Manus.

Boochani does not begin his memoir with his past life in Iran and his war-torn childhood, though these are evoked constantly throughout the memoir. Instead of being told as part of the plot or the central story, Boochani’s narratives from home and his past life punctuate and merge into the main narrative repeatedly through multiple forms of crosscutting, flashbacks, dreams, repeated nightmares and interior monologues. Several times, Boochani takes his readers back to his difficult life in Iran, his childhood and the mountains of Kurdistan among chestnut oak trees, where people took refuge during the war between Iraq and Iran. His memories and stories of his homeland, and its accompanying images and motives, become an embedded narrative line within the main narrative-one that continues to the end of the story. This story within the story not only discloses Boochani’s background for his readers but also opens another experience of oppression somewhere else in the world for the reader.

The first and most notable example is when the sea narrative reaches its terrifying climax in Chapter 2. When the boat nearly sinks, the reader’s attention is called out, captured and held by a set of images, sounds and settings that emerge suddenly within the narrative, and which are different from the ones the reader is witnessing on the boat in the middle of the sea. In the heart of the sea narrative, the text resists taking readers forward to follow the rest of the story. It holds them there on the sea among the oppressive waves and exposes them to images of war, tanks, mountains, the chestnut oak trees, and the image of a mother crying and dancing, which are mixed with the present setting and images on the sea, waves, crying children and women, and the boat filled with water. Here Boochani speaks:

I accept death, and while engulfed in this maelstrom of noise and oppressive anxieties …

I drown in the vortex of sleep.

[…]

The beating of waves/

The petrified, silent screaming/

The tormented wailing/

Waves rocking a cradle containing a corpse/

All within a domain of death and darkness/

My mother is present/

She is there alone/

Travelling over the ocean or emerging from within the waves?/

Where is she?/

I don’t know/

[…]

She is smiling and she is weeping/

Shedding tears from years of sorrow/

I don’t know/

Why is my mother cheerful?/

Why is she weeping?/

I witnessed a wedding celebration with rituals of dance/

I witnessed lamentations that dictated demise/

Where could this place be?

Grand mountain peaks covered with snow, full of ice, abounding in

Cold/

[…]

There is no ocean in sight/

From all ends, the territory is completely dry/

The presence of ancient chestnut oaks/

The presence of my mother/

(29–31; original italics)

Then the readers go back to the main scene and into the main story. The form reverts from poetry to prose:

… I am in one of the sleeping chambers, asleep. […] I can see my skeleton smoking a cigarette in the corner of the room. I am sure this place isn’t Kurdistan. The location is the ocean, the boat is crumbling … .

(31; the ellipses at the beginning and end of this paragraph in original)

Then, the from returns to poetry and the images of mountains, chestnut oak trees, and Boochani’s mother returned:

Again the vision of mountains upon mountains/

[…]

Mountains within mountains/

Mountains that carry on and on/

Mountains that are hiding chestnut ok trees/

[…]

The mountains transform into waves/

Transform into aggressive waves/

No, this place is not Kurdistan

So why is my mother here?

Why is a war going on in that place?

Tanks, rows of tanks, and helicopters

Blades of battle and dead bodies

Piles of the dead and women’s cries of mourning

[…]

A war is taking place

[…]

Mountains and waves

Waves and mountains

Where is this place?

Why is my mother dancing? (31–32; italics in original)

… I wake in a panic. Darkness in Panic. Darkness everywhere. (32; ellipses in original)

A scene of valleys/

Valleys full of chestnut oak trees/

In the furthest depths of the valley is a river/

[…]

We are confronted by the sky/

We are confronted by water/

[…]

The chain of mountain ranges/

The waves, the mountain ranges … /

The boat is a wreck/

[…]

The rescue boat is nearing/

[…]

Screams for help … /

Help …

Help!

I wake in panic. I have been sweating. It was a nightmare; a nightmare within a nightmare. (32–34; italics in original; ellipses not in brackets are in original)

In the above passages, as seen, the text crosscuts between the war-like scene on the boat, the refugees terrified on the boat, the waves, and women and children crying, and the scene of a war in Boochani’s homeland, the mountains and the dead bodies of people killed in the war. Readers are forced to move between past and present, prose and poetry, reality and dream, and between familiar and unfamiliar – the main story and what merged suddenly. These juxtaposed images and scenes put the readers in wonder and make them question these images they confront in the status quo. The reader sees that even the narrator, Boochani, is in a state of confusion between these two places: the ocean and Kurdistan. ‘Where could this place be?’, ‘No, this place is not Kurdistan’, ‘Why is my mother here?’, ‘Why is my mother dancing?’, ‘Why is she weeping?’, ‘I don’t know’, Boochani repeatedly says. This demands Boochani’s readers a constant imaginative bridging across and zigzagging back and forth between these two worlds while forced to read onwards both to try to make sense of them and to return to the main story. These repeated acts of going back and forth that the readers experience, the flashbacks and flash-forwards, crosscuttings, the interruptions and breakage that the narrative enacts, sudden shifts and return, are textual strategies that can engage the reader of the memoir and heighten their participation. Such textual techniques indeed build an active reading. As Boehmer (2018) argues, devices such as juxtaposition and other intercalated modes of writing, including layering, crosscutting and intertextuality, are powerful textual strategies and poetics often used in postcolonial writings. She states that ‘juxtaposition in writing demands of the reader a constant imaginative bridging across and zigzagging back and forth’ (11); it ‘can work to jolt the reader, pushing them back in shock or dismay or (at times) wonder, encouraging them into imagine or infer what till now has been silenced or suppressed’ (41). Boehmer believes that through this poetics:

our attention is directed at one and the same time to different contiguous items (images, themes, figures), and to their interstices between them or the spaces through which they relate, we are invited to work between and across, and to read in differential ways.

(53)

In the sea narrative and the final chapters of Boochani, as shown further below, our attention as the reader is directed at one and the same time to different images, themes and settings. We are invited to work between and across them and attend to the way they intersect and relate to each other. The embedded juxtaposition in Boochani’s memoir directs the reader’s attention towards the Kurdish colonial experience being represented in the texts. Although readers are exposed to these sets of images and themes a few more times – for instance in Chapter 4 (71–73) – they appear to be suspended for the rest of the story. The text builds suspense in the middle chapters and keeps readers intrigued and in suspense until near the end of the story. There are other literary techniques and rhetorical devices employed in Boochani’s memoir that can make his text more effective and further engage the reader. For instance, the above passages from the sea narrative are replete with different forms of repetitions, including anaphora, such as: ‘I witnessed a wedding celebration with rituals of dance/I witnessed lamentations that dictated demise/’ and ‘We are confronted by the sky/We are confronted by water/’; epistrophe, such as ‘The chain of mountain ranges/The waves, the mountain ranges … /’; and anadiplosis, such as ‘The mountains transform into waves/Transform into aggressive waves/’, ‘A scene of valleys/Valleys full of chestnut oak trees/’ and ‘It was a nightmare; a nightmare within a nightmare’. Further, the above passages are punctuated by ellipses, pauses and question and exclamation marks. They include several enjambments of lines and short, broken, unpunctuated sentences, which can be seen as textual elements at work in Boochani’s writing that can sharpen the reader’s focus.

The images of Boochani’s mother and the mountains that we see in the above passages are among those that recur in Boochani’s memories and recollections of home. Although his obsession with these images, particularly the image of mountains, goes back to his childhood experiences of war and displacement, their symbolism is rooted in Kurdish culture and history. As mentioned earlier in this essay, mountains are one of the most significant cultural and political symbols among Kurds, which symbolize Kurdish displacement, their victim status, and their protectors. Kurds believe mountains are the Kurds’ only friends, as they housed them and witnessed their sufferings (Galip 2020, 724). The image of Boochani’s mother crying and dancing on the sea, the corpse and the wedding celebration are also significant and rooted in Kurdish culture. In some parts of Kurdistan, when someone dies, particularly sons at a young age, close family members and relatives cry and dance at the funeral, which shows the deep sorrow at the loss of the loved one. Mothers are at the centre of this dancing ceremony. Facing death on the sea, Boochani sees his mother in the dream crying and dancing as if she is mourning the death of her son on the sea.

As mentioned above, the text builds suspense in the middle chapters, and it is in the final chapters that readers are again exposed to the images evoked earlier in the story, and they finally discover why Kurds have no friends but the mountains. In Chapter 10, Boochani gives his readers more detail about his past life, his homeland and its people. However, this time Boochani takes his readers to a silent place in the prison and tells them what has happened in his life and the lives of thousands of other people in his village. In this chapter, Boochani narrates a night he suffers from toothache and ‘a faint moaning sound’ of a man captures his attention while ‘the prison has fallen into a heavy silence’ (246). He takes his readers across the prison to follow the sound and finally discovers the source of the moaning in the Green Zone – solitary confinement behind the fences. He climbs on top of a hut to see what has happened to the man. ‘The crickets … the darkness … the silence … the awe … that is the entirety of the scene’, Boochani describes (250; ellipses in original). Here Boochani employs a similar technique used in the sea narrative; he leaves the reader in suspense, wondering what that sound is. He interrupts the flow of narration and drags the readers into his thoughts, “thoughts full of the smell of gunpowder and war, full of love and chestnuts, […] thoughts full of mountains’ (257). Then he recounts his past life and tells his reader who he is and where he is from. This is how he begins:

Truth to be told, I am a child of war. Yes, I was born during the war. Under the thunder of warplanes. Alongside tanks. In the face of bombs. Breathing gunpowder. Among dead bodies. […] A meaningless war; a pointless war. Absurd. A war with ridiculous objectives. Like all wars throughout history. A war that devastated our families and sizzled and incinerated all of our vivid, green and bounteous homeland.

(257)

I am a child of war. I don’t mean to say I’ve been sacrificed. I never ever want to be labelled with this word. That war has taken its sacrifice … and continues to make sacrifice.

(ellipses in original)

Sacrificing out of the blazing fires of war/

Sacrificing out of the desolate ashes of war/

On the threshold of life and death/

Smiles enamoured with staying alive; mothers wailing and soaked in blood/

A region full of storehouses of affiliation. Suffering and starvation

I have to say it. Hear me as I cry out: I am a child of war/

A child of an inferno. A child of ashes. A child of the chestnut oaks of

Kurdistan.

I’m insane, I am. Where is this place?/

[…]

Let me say something; let me surrender myself to the realm of the

Imagination and amnesia.

Where have I come from?

From the land of rivers, the land of waterfalls, the land of ancient chants, the land of mountains

The war elephants from the neighbouring lands had decided to wage battle for many years inside our vibrant and luscious planation. (258)

Their heavy legs bulging bellies rampaged; every place was crushed underneath. That war wasn’t our war, that violence wasn’t our violence. (259)

Boochani further elaborates on the harrowing experiences of individuals seeking refuge in the mountains among chestnut oak trees. Within this recollection, he portrays horrified mothers clutching their children, elderly men and innocent children grappling with the burdens of displacement, many of whom died of hunger and thirst, corpses on the grounds:

Everything they had and could carry they took with them. They found asylum within chestnut oak forests.

Do the Kurds have any friends other than the mountains?

Horrified mothers … mothers wrapped their children wrapped their children within the instincts of motherhood and escaped to the mountains. (Ellipses in original)

Those chestnuts were proud/

Those chestnuts joined in mourning/

Those chestnuts from those mountains/(259)

[…]

Dreams … hopes … fertility … smiles … beauty … all decimated. (260; ellipses in original)

[…]

It was these very mountains that witnesses the spectacle/

It was these ancient chestnut oaks that lamented/

[…]

I was born in a time of war. A war that plummeted down from above. And even the one-day-old child’s psychological schema and mental state were traumatized … like shrapnel within critical parts of the boy … imprinted … forever. (260; ellipses in original)

Boochani continues narrating his past life – shrouded as it was by the war between Iraq and Iran, two of the Kurds’ oppressors. Like the examples provided above, his testimonies in the whole section are marked by repetitions, breaks, ellipses, enjambments of lines and short, broken sentences, questions, and terrifying and traumatic images. Boehmer identifies such elements as reiterative poetics of trauma in Postcolonial Poetics: ‘not only compelling the reader to relive the traumatic experience along with the speaker or writer, but also drawing them into the difficulty of its articulation’ (88). Boehmer argues that in writings of terror and trauma, authors ‘evoke both its moments of violent rupture and also the experience of endurance and recovery that can, for those who survive, lie beyond’ (12; italics in original), as they ‘register not only the history but also the future consequences and repercussions’ (66; italics in original). According to Boehmer, this poetic of continuity, can ‘prompt in the reader or addressee an engagement or involvement that takes them through the spirals of history and on from the terror-stricken situation or unhomely home in which the speaker finds or found themselves’ (66; emphasis in original). Further, she believes that writings of terror also draw readers ‘into the difficulty of its articulation and comprehension’ (12), manifested in the text’s language, form and devices such as ‘hesitations, breaks, and repetitions’ (88). Similarly, Boochani takes his readers ‘through the spirals of history’ into the past and into the future; it ‘registers not only the history’, but also its ‘future consequences’ on the whole community. He laments the destruction the war left, its sacrifices, and how it destroyed their homeland and its beauties. The language of his testimony and the way his traumas are expressed create a sense of difficulty in articulating those lines, the poetics Boehmer identifies as ‘the difficulty of articulation’. In the above passages, we see that Boochani directly addresses his readers and demands they listen: ‘I have to say it. Hear me as I cry out’; Let me say something; let me surrender myself to the realm of the Imagination and amnesia/’. One can say that his bearing witness to his past life, emerged from a necessity and a need he feels to share and pass on these stories with others, with his readers of the story of Manus.

What is important to note is that the war Boochani bears witness to signifies more than just a war that happened in the past; it refers to an oppressive condition to which millions of Kurds were subjected. As Tofighian argues, in Boochani’s writing, ‘memory of war acts as a culturally and politically specific trope that works to convey something distinct about the oppressive conditions’ (Tofighian 2018, 536). In the above-quoted passages from Boochani’s memoir, he tells us that Kurds played no role in the war. He sees the war between Iran and Iraq-two of Kurd’s occupiers as an unjust war in which Kurds have played no role but were among its greatest victims, as they live at the border of Iraq and Iran. According to Boochani, for Kurds, that war was an oppression imposed on them. This could be linked to the memoir’s portrayal of oppression and oppressive conditions, which Boochani speaks up against as already discussed. However, Boochani deals with a greater war against his homeland and his people. As he writes:

For years I had dwelt on the war involving occupiers of Kurdish homelands/

A war against those who had divided Kurdistan between themselves/

An occupation that has devastated an ancient culture/

An invasion that has decimated what was of cultural value to the Kurds/

Destroyed what was cherished by the Kurds/

What was necessary for the preservation of Kurdish identity.

[…]

When I was younger, I had wanted to join the Peshmerga […] But every time I was impeded by some kind of fear masked by theories of non-violence and peace. On many occasions I reached as far as the colossal mountain ranges of Kurdistan. However, those theories about non-violent resistance drew me every time to the cities where I took up the pen.

[…]

I truly believe that the liberation of Kurdistan couldn’t be achieved through the barrel of a gun.

(70–71; italics in original)

Boochani believes in the power of the pen rather than the gun for the liberation of his homeland and he upheld his ethos of non-violent resistance in his struggle against the oppressive prison system. It was through his creative endeavours, both his journalism and his memoir, that he resisted and struggled against oppression on Manus. Through his journalism at home, he performed a non-violent resistance against the oppressions Kurds have experienced, which finally led to his flight from Iran. His attempts to provide a voice to the people of his homeland in his memoir can be seen as part of his continued sense of Kurdish resistance and struggle. Boochani has been engaged in the struggle over the Kurds’ homeland, identity and culture long before he fled to seek asylum in Australia.

Boochani’s ethos of non-violence for the Kurds is also seen in the way he condemns Kurdish prisoners on Manus and their violent rejection of other prisoners to harvest from the mango tree in corridor M, and his praise of the character known as the Gentle Giant – Reza Barati – and his generosity and hospitability towards Others. As Boochani describes, the Kurdish prisoners all lived together in corridor M, which, as Boochani writes, ‘has become known as Little Kurdistan’. ‘This terrain is marked as Kurdistan. Whoever knows the Kurds understand very well the level of respect they have for one another’ (239). Kurdish prisoners, Boochani writes, ‘have brought their repressed political aspirations with them into the prison and adorned one of the rooms with the tricolour flag: white, red, green, with the image of the sun painted brightly on it’. ‘It is interesting how even though they have been deprived of a single pen on one morning they awake to find the Kurdish flag emblazoned on the door’, Boochani describes (235–236). Kurdish prisoners also ‘promote themselves as the sole proprietors of the mango tree’ near corridor M and ‘drew kicks at anyone who came over and wouldn’t let them even look at the fruit’. ‘They had no tolerance for anyone who wanted to enjoy the offerings of the mango tree’ (239). However, Reza, the Gentle Giant, ‘is completely different from the rest’. This is how Boochani describes Reza:

In contrast to many others, when The Giant gets hold of some fruit, he offers it to others. […] And this is the behaviour that the other side reflect on, realising that they themselves are completely incapable of such an act. This is the way we create The Other.

(Capitalised in original)

The Kurdish prisoners form a kind of fraternity; they prefer to keep the mango tree for themselves. No-one else is granted a share. […] the Gentle Giant challenges this way of thinking […] He confronts them with a different way of being, he offers them new horizons, access to a better reality.

On the one hand, the above lines demonstrate the enduring and collective sense of Kurdish identity, which is maintained and practiced by living together in an imagined liberated space Kurdish refugees construct for themselves and by the solidarity and fraternity they cultivate among one another. At the same time, their exclusive control and ownership over corridor M and the mango tree and their hostility towards others who sought to partake in its offerings, are reflective of their historically suppressed sense of belonging and Kurdish history of dispossession. This struggle over territory, within the confines of the prison, resonates with the broader Kurdish history of longing for an independent homeland and their yearning to reclaim and protect their own territory. It echoes their ongoing resistance and struggle against external forces that have invaded and dominated their homeland.

However, the hospitality and respect among the Kurdish refugees are extended inward and they ‘drew kicks at anyone who came over … [and] had no tolerance for anyone who wanted to enjoy the offerings of the mango tree’. As Boochani writes, this led to the growth of hatred among the prisoners in that area (239). While this exclusionary tendencies and inhospitality towards others can be understood within the historical, political, cultural, and psychological context of Kurdish oppression and discrimination, it also reflects a dystopian prediction of the future independent Kurdistan and its potential realities. Boochani criticizes the identity-based boundaries and xenophobic tendencies exhibited by some Kurdish prisoners, by juxtaposing them with the character of Reza, one of the Kurdish refugees, and his behaviour. Reza embodies the moral obligation to be hospitable to foreigners, and this presents an identity challenge among the Kurdish prisoners as the encounter with the Other coincides with the reconfiguration of the self. As Boochani says, Reza challenges ‘this way of thinking’. Boochani sees the better reality in the world beyond identity-based boundaries and insider/outsider binaries. He praises the Gentle Giant’s worldview, his different way of being, and the new horizon he offers to other Kurdish refugees. These themes are connected to the memoir’s themes and questions, including border and sovereignty, exclusion and inclusion of others and foreigners; the memoir’s main story of the refugees imprisoned on Manus; the Australian policies that served to exclude those refugees; and Australian government’s inhospitality towards them.

Boochani ends his memoir with the death of the Gentle Giant, who was killed in the riot that takes place in the final chapter. Near the end of this chapter, Boochani testifies to a gunshot: ‘The Sound of gunshots’, ‘The sound of death’, ‘It was the sound of someone who uttered in Kurdish ‘dalega!’³/It was the sound of someone who cried ‘Mother!’’ (347). Then, following his testimonies of the riot, he returns to the sound of Reza, who called for his mother:

Who was the man who called for his mother? […] The Kurdish mother-and-son relationship is different to the relationships of mothers and sons in other places and cultures. The tie between them is profound and complex. It is a relationship that is even hard for Kurds, let alone non-Kurds.

(348)

It is incomprehensible even to me. But in the same way that I feel blood flowing my veins, I feel a connection with my mother. […] It is so incomprehensible.

(349)

Boochani is well-aware that what he says and narrates about his identity and his culture might not be comprehensible for others, for non-Kurds; they might not deeply understand and feel Boochani’s strong engagement with his mother, who, as seen in this article, is always present in his remembrances of the past and his homeland. Boochani is aware of the cultural and historical differences between himself and his readers. He is also aware of the similarities that connect his homeland and Kurdish people to the story of the Manus prison and its oppressive system. By evoking his past life throughout the memoir, Boochani juxtaposes these experiences of extremity. He connects his colonial past and his then-colonial present and two formally discrete political systems from distinct geographies to show how people are subjected to oppression and violence, whether in a democratic country like Australia or in a small region in the Middle East.

Like the Kurdish imprisoned refugees with whom he shares the same background, Boochani redraws his homeland and his suppressed political aspirations in his writings and constructs a space within and through his memoir that he continues his Kurdish struggle for justice and liberation. While this space takes an earthly physical form in the case of the Kurdish refugees on Manus, however, for Boochani, it is formed imaginatively and in the realm of his resistant literary geography. In his memoir, Boochani remaps his resistant literary geography – in Manus – linking it to his homeland and creating a literary narrative space through which his homeland and oppressed Kurdish identity are reflected and negotiated. In his interview with Claudia Tazreiter, Boochani himself claims that his memoir ‘is not only about refugees or prison. It is also about Kurdish people and their resistance’ (Boochani and Tazreiter 2019, 372).

Conclusion

This article sought to shed light on the Kurdish context of Boochani’s memoir and indicate how Boochani’s homeland and Kurdish history of oppression are evoked in his writing about Manus prison. To develop a critical interpretation of the motives behind Boochani’s memoir and motivations to read the text in either its local context or its universal appeal, this article explored the literary techniques deployed in the text, the use of certain tropes, the modes of attention the text invites, the images, and metaphors employed by its author. This reading of Boochani’s memoir revealed that while making claims for justice and liberation for the imprisoned refugees on Manus through his memoir, he also reimagined Kurdish claims of justice from his carceral exile a world away. It provides a voice for Kurdish people – the people whose voice has been silenced, whose identity and cultural and political rights have been denied and violated, and whose place in history has been marginalized. Boochani subjects Kurdish oppressors to critiques by his readers in Australia and across the world. By doing this he has created the possibility of creating spaces of global recognition for Kurdish people and spaces of transnational and global engagement with Kurds’ claims of justice and equality. However, it is essential to recognize that Boochani’s memoir goes beyond the mere amplification of Kurdish voice. While providing a platform for the marginalized Kurdish community, he addresses the complexities of Kurdish heritage and activism, inviting readers to contemplate the intricate layers of identity and struggle. He raises questions about the dynamics of power, exclusion and the human capacity for hospitality and empathy. By examining these issues, Boochani prompts us to reflect on the complexities of human nature, the influence of historical traumas and the potential for transformation and change.

Acknowledgement

I express my sincere gratitude to Dr. Samid Suliman, my PhD supervisor, for his invaluable support. Hi guidance and feedback on multiple drafts of my article greatly contributed to its improvement. Furthermore, I extend my appreciation to the editors of the Continuum and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions on the earlier version of this manuscript. Their insightful input has helped enhance the quality and clarity of the final work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For more information read the last chapter of Rothberg’s book, titled ‘Germany is in Kurdistan’.

2. The reading of Michelle Nayahamui Ronney’s reading of the memoir, titled ‘Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains: An Oceanic Lens’ (2020), can be seen as an example of how the experience of reading the memoir is different for a Papua New Guinean or Manus Person.

3. The Kurdish word for mother.