"The book begins with Boochani
boarding a boat somewhere on Java, hoping to reach Australia. In elegant prose,
he brings to life the refugee journey through detailed observations of his
fellow travellers. He describes a rapid collapse of order:
Men lie in the arms of another’s
wife, children lie on the bellies of strangers. It seems they have all
forgotten … the energy spent establishing a gender-based order.
A storm destroys the boat with waves
the size of mountains that transport him back to the mountains in his native
land.
Where is this place? Why is my
mother dancing?
After being rescued, a short
interlude on Christmas Island begins the clinical process of dehumanising the
asylum seekers. They are issued flip-flops and ill-fitting clothes, regularly
strip-searched, exposed to CCTV in toilets, moved from cage to cage through
layers of bureaucracy, and finally escorted (or carried) by two guards per
prisoner to an plane bound for Manus Island.
From this moment, the sense of a
journey ends, and the book is a meditation on survival in a prison system
intent on destroying the prisoners’ will.
Australians accept detention on
Nauru and Manus as a “necessary evil” to prevent an uncontrollable flow of
asylum seekers to Australia by boat. Boochani dissects this necessary evil. He
sits us on a white plastic chair, our feet on the wire border fence,
overlooking the jungle.
Behrouz
Boochani on Manus last year.
Amnesty International handout
Boochani takes us on a sensory tour
of the Manus prison.
The smells – body odour and bad breath, rotting vegetation,
diesel and excrement. The rubbing against one another in the tight spaces –
flesh on hairy, sweaty flesh.
The uniforms are reminiscent of
dystopian regimes – nurses in orange carrying boxes of yellow pills, local
guards in purple, medical staff in white, and Australian federal police in flak
jackets with shields and black gloves with metal spikes.
The heat is oppressive. The bottled
water so warm it does not quench one’s thirst. The only relief is a huge shade
tree in the middle of the complex.
We learn of the daily routine, the
constant queuing for meals,
for the toilet, for cigarettes, for the telephone.
Through a detailed analysis of how these queues operate, we begin to understand
the way institutional power breaks the spirit of the prisoners by pitting one
against another, and using an unbending authority to remove all human
compassion.
In one incident, a man cannot swap
his place in the telephone queue to speak to his dying father because the
regulations make no provision for it. An appeal to a higher authority brings
out the Boss, backed by 12 police officers. The Boss places his hand on the
shoulder of The Man with the Dying Father (as Boochani calls him) and calmly
explains that the rules are the rules.
The queues mean that stronger
prisoners eat well, and weaker ones starve. Bouchani marvels at the fortitude
of The Cow, a brick of a man, who is prepared to sit in the heat of the sun for
hours to ensure his place at the front of the meal queue.
In the first few months of
detention, there is still a sense of resistance. Maysan the Whore entertains
prisoners most nights with wild dancing in innovative costumes of bed sheets,
“pretending to be happy as a form of revenge”. But eventually Maysan begins to deteriorate.
“We must find another way to cope with exile”, Boochani laments.
Boochani shares his own weakness,
anger, frustration and despair. He does not romanticise these feelings. He
simply observes.
Periodically, he tries to make sense
of his experience, musing on the strategies of oppression. He describes Manus
prison as a Kyriarchal system, a system of total psychological control.
The generator, which Boochani calls
Mr Generator, breaks down periodically, leaving rooms unbearably hot and filled
with mosquitoes. Just when the tension is unbearable, the generator resumes.
Games are not allowed. When
prisoners create a makeshift backgammon board on a table using bottle lids, it
is destroyed.
How can it be that soccer balls are
prohibited, but cigarettes are always available?
Milk is offered as a special treat.
The allocation is always half a cup. If a cup is overfilled, even slightly, it
is removed and binned. Why not just redistribute the milk? The lack of logic
“confines the mind of the prisoner”, Boochani writes, “leaving him just trying
to cope”.
The toilets flow with excrement.
They are a place for sex. A place to cut wrists with a razor. Despite risk of
punishment, people prefer to piss behind bushes after dark.
The sights and sounds outside the
walls are important for retaining hope and sanity – the sound of the ocean just
behind a thin strip of forest, the coconut trees, the chauka birds and
crickets, the sunsets and phases of the moon, the white flowers along the
sewage line.
The prisoner’s imagination is always
occupied with the world beyond the fences.
Poetic streams of consciousness
intersperse the narrative, and Boochani is occasionally transported back to the
Kurdistan of his childhood. At these moments, the reader is with Boochani at
the fence as he lets his mind run free, interpreting the confusion of his
existence in this place of torture. These interludes make the book more
intensely personal without descending into romanticism or self-pity.
The book ends with the description
of a riot in the prison. The full brutality of authority is unleashed in
response. We learn that The Gentle Giant, Reza Barati, has been killed.
No Friend but the Mountains reveals that Manus prison is designed to break the
will of refugees so they see no option but to return home. It leaves no doubt
that any prisoner who chooses to repatriate has been driven to do so through
the brutality of the prison system, in clear breach of Australia’s non-refoulement
obligation under the UNHCR’s 1951 Refugee Convention."
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