https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8132-7248
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ABSTRACT
Since 2001 Australia’s offshore processing regime has turned asylum seekers into one of the country’s main destitute groups. No asylum seeker trying to reach Australia by boat is allowed to settle in the country. If their boat is intercepted by the Australian Navy in Australian waters, they are forced to turn back, or are forcefully transferred and indefinitely held in Nauru and Papua New Guinea until their refuge applications are processed. This article focuses on the testimony of one of these asylum seekers who was held in one of the detention centres on Manus Island: Behrouz Boochani’s memoir No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison (2018). It explores the author’s condemnation of the oppressive kyriarchal system on which the Australian detention regime is founded, and his embracement of the environment as a form of resistance against it. Contrary to the pejorative stereotyped images often used by governments and some mainstream media to justify their anti-immigration policies, Boochani’s first-person account reminds us that asylum seekers and refugees are not disposable objects, but active agents who should be treated in a more humane and ethical way all around the world.
Notes
1. See Refugee Council of Australia, “Australia’s Offshore Processing Regime.”
2. Fraenkel, “Australia’s Detention Centres,” 279.
3. See Refugee Council of Australia, “Australia’s Offshore Processing Regime.”
4. Amnesty International and Refugee Council of Australia, “Until When?” 18, 51.
5. According to the Australian Border Force, as recorded on the Refugee Council of Australia website, 4,183 people were transferred to Nauru or Papua New Guinea from August 13, 2012 to July 14, 2019. For more information, see the Refugee Council of Australia, “Offshore Processing Statistics.”
6. According to Article 14 of the UN 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.” https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/.
7. Boochani was co-founder, editor and journalist of Werya. On February 17, 2013, the magazine’s offices were raided by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and 11 of its journalists were arrested. Fearing imprisonment, Boochani decided to flee Iran. Cf. Popescu, “Behrouz Boochani.”
8. Boochani was held on Manus for six years. In November 2019 he was able to leave the island thanks to the 30-day-visa he was granted by the Government of New Zealand to participate in a Christchurch literary festival. In 2020, he was granted asylum and is currently working as writer in residence at the University of Canterbury. For more information on Boochani’s life, see Zable, “Iranian Journalist”; Doherty, “Day of the Imprisoned Writer”; Popescu, “Behrouz Boochani”; Whitting, “Refugee Behrouz Boochani”; Byrne, “Behrouz Boochani”; Sydney Writers’ Festival, “Behrouz Boochani” and Overland, “Author Biography.”
9. Coetzee, “Australia’s Shame.”
10. Tratzier, “The Emotional Confluence of Borders,” 5–6.
11. Ibid., 5
12. Boochani’s book also won a Special Award of the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards (April 2019) and the General Fiction Book of the Year at the Australian Book Industry Awards (May 2019). Cf. Matthews, “Boochani Bound,” 60.
13. Boochani, “Behrouz Boochani’s Literary Prize Acceptance Speech.”
14. Flanagan, “Foreword,” vi.
15. Olubas, “We Forgot Our Names.”
16 Tofighian, “Translator’s Tale,” xxvi.
17. Boochani, “For Six Months I was Jesus,” 4.
18. Boochani, No Friend but the Mountains, 124. Hereafter page numbers are cited in the text. The term “kyriarchy” was first coined by the feminist theologist Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza in 1992.
19. Boochani, “Manus Prison Poetics/Our Voice,” 528.
20. Badiou, Our Wound, 36.
21. Bauman, Strangers at Our Door, 23–25, 35.
22. The Cow “is always the first person to enter the dining area, and this is the reason for his nickname.” He is described as a person who “seems to construct his sense of self through disturbing others” (Boochani, No Friend but the Mountains, 199, 202).
23. Pugliese, “Penal Asylum.”
24. Moones Mansoubi, together with Sajad Kabgani, worked with Omid Tofighian as their translation consultants. Moones Mansoubi’s cited words are included in one of the conversations Omid Tofighian held with Mansoubi during the process of translating Boochani’s work, which he transcribes in “Translator’s Tale,” xxv.
25. The Australian weekly, The Saturday Paper, published Boochani’s letter as “a poet’s manifesto for the refugee resistance” (Boochani, “A Letter From Manus”). Other critics who have used the term “refugee manifesto” are Surma, “In a Different Voice,” 518; and Olubas, “We Forgot Our Names” and “‘Where We Are Is Too Hard’,” 3.
26. Boochani, “A Letter from Manus.”
27. Braidotti, Transpositions, 37, 38.
28. Ibid., 99. Braidotti defends the same stance in The Posthuman.
29. Braidotti, Transpositions, 103.
30. Boochani, “For Six Months,” 17.
31. See Thompson, Tozer, and Harley, “Manus Island”; Rebgetz, “Hamid Khazaei.”
32. Anderson and Ferng, “The Detention-Industrial Complex,” 470.
33. Boochani, “Four Years after Reza Barati’s Death.”
34. Tofighian, “No Friend but the Mountains,” 359.
35. Ibid., 360.
36. Boochani, “A Letter from Manus.”
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Pilar Royo-Grasa
Pilar Royo Grasa, PhD, teaches modern English literature at the Department of English and German Philology, the University of Zaragoza, Spain. Her research interests are contemporary Australian fiction, and trauma and postcolonial studies. Her work has been published in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Commonwealth Essays and Studies, Journal of the European Association for Studies of Australia, and Odisea: Revista de Estudios Ingleses.
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