No Friend But the Mountains (2019)
Writing from Manus Prison
Behrouz Boochani, transl. from Farsi by Omid Tofighian
rating fantastic
type nonfiction/autobiography audiobook
concepts history
2025/06/16 This was one of those books that was incredibly uncomfortable to read (and especially, to listen to), both from the descriptions of gruesome, disgusting prison conditions and accounts of immoral, desperate human behavior. But that was the point: the secrecy of the prison only made its oppression more powerful, and one of its aims was to make the systematic torture more widely known.
- Written by an 🇮🇷 Iranian author, involving 🇦🇺 Australian systems and mostly set in 🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea, but this was a book more of humanity and human systems than any particular country.
- Boochani wrote this book from 2014-2017 through hundreds of thousands of text messages sent from a contraband phone while kept prisoner in Manus Prison in PNG, where he was held by the Australian government after seeking asylum. It was simultaneously translated from Farsi into English; with author, translator, and other correspondents working together to develop and convey the philosophical themes of oppression.
- Translator’s notes: Tofighian, an Iranian-Australian, describes how, while translating, he had to be conscious of the fact that the book was being written in the language of Boochani’s oppressors (in Farsi, rather than Kurdish), being translated into another language of oppressors (English), and that he himself was not Kurdish. Even just linguistically, the differences between Farsi and English made “faithful translation” (is this even possible?) challenging: the lyrical, poetic style of his attempt was captivating, and makes me so curious how it was originally written.
- Boochani describes prison as a kyriarchal system (took me a long time to figure out this word, since I was listening!), a concept from feminist theory, many forms of purposeful oppression combine to isolate and break down the oppressed. The casual abuse by Australian guards and loss of humanity by both the guards and refugees seemed like a spooky real-world instance of the Stanford Prison Experiment.
- Title reference: “No friends but the mountains” is a Kurdish proverb expressing the “betrayal, abandonment, and loneliness” felt by the Kurdish people as an often-stateless ethnic minority, and particularly of the tolerance of their oppression by US policy. (h/t Wikipedia)