´No Friend but the Mountains´

´Wandering homeless/Starvation/Battling against the waves/Almost drowning´.

Trying to escape prison in his homeland Iran, Kurdish journalist and cultural activist Behrouz Boochani arrives to Indonesia, his last destination before embarking on a risky boat journey for reaching the shores of Australia. His second attempt is successful but once caught by the Australian border police he is transferred to Manus Island, in the middle of the Indian Ocean, in Papua New Guinea where Boochani lives as an inmate between 2013 and 2017 when the center was dismantled. 

No Friend but the Mountains is based on single messages that were tapped out in Persian and further translated by the Sydney-based Iranian philosopher and translator Omid Tofighian. The book won the Victorian Prize for Literature and the Victorian Premier´s Prize for Nonfiction and will be turned into a movie in 2021. Boochani authored several articles in the international media and was invited to talk via WhatsApp to conferences around the globe on topics related to resistance and immigration. This July, he was finally granted visa and refugee status in New Zealand.

I´ve heard about the prison systems created by Australia for the people applying for immigration status but I was not aware of the extent and cruely of it. Thinking about people that in most cases escaped torture and prison in their home country, crossed the Ocean in very dangerous conditions to be throwned in prison and humiliated only because they want a better and safer life is another example of how cruel and inconsiderate humans can be to one another. The fact that Australia, a democratic country, allows that, it´s even sadder.

´I have always despiswed waiting. Waiting is a mechanism of torture used in the dungeon of time. I am a captive in the cluthes of some overbearing power´. But there, on the cruel island, there is nothing to do. Inmates are kept for weeks that turn into months that turn into years. In their metal cages, surveilled by Australian officers and local law enforcers, they are reduced to bodies in waiting. The legal help comes late, the communication is limited, there is nothing happening that can give hope for a better change. Hope is also an excruciating feeling but waiting without hope means also deep torture. ´In can do nothing else but accept the reality. And the reality in this day is that they have determined to exile me to Manus Island, exile me nice and peacefully, somewhere out in the middle of the ocean´.

´During this period in prison, there is nothing to occupy our time. We are just thrown into a cage and made to wear ridiculous loose-fitting clothes. It´s even prohibited to play cards´. 

I´ve listened recently to a TED speech by Boochani where he says that literature and writing is a form of resistance. His memoir No Friend but the Mountains is a resistance manifesto. How can one survive under pressure whose aims is to reduce one person to the dare physical needs? Through the strength of the spirit. People thrown in communist prisons, in concentration camps, in immigration camps, in solitary confinement resisted through the strength of their spirit. Sickness and loneliness and human disappointment can be survived also when the spirit is stronger. When you don´t believe in the refuge of your spirit and your words you are dead before your execution term.

Every line of No Friend but the Mountains is a story of resilience. ´I have reached a good understanding of this situation: the only people who can overcome and survive all the suffering inflicted by the prison are those who exercise creativity. That is, those who can trace the outlines of hope using the melodic humming and visions from beyond the prison fences and the beehives we live in´. 

His daily careful observation of the daily routines and the human characters and their interactions bring his closer to the reason of his departure from Iran. His condition as member of the oppressed Kurdish minority, his identity and his cultural roots. The author´s positioning towards the world, his spiritual escape secrets and his hopes are the results of his upbringing, of his educated freedom that grew up wild with one single friend: The Mountains.

No Friend but the Mountains will be listed probably among one of the most important books of the 21st century. It seems that humans cannot advance too much their conditions of oppressing other humans. Only the resilient human spirit can find every time creative ways to survive.

Rating: 5 stars