A BOOK A WEEK – Week Two. ‘No Friend But The Mountains’. Journalist and refugee Behrouz Boochani wrote this chilling account of his 4-years detained in Manus prison. He wrote the book on a mobile phone he kept hidden under his mattress during his incarceration.
I read this book as quickly as possible because I needed to get out of his harrowing experience. I could barely breathe. The pages were physically painful as Boochani is a phenomenal journalist and poet and his descriptions grab you by the scruff of the neck and whisper the hot madness into your ear until you’re choking on your heart. It was equal parts stunning and truly awful.
I believe it was my duty as an Australian to listen to his story because it is my story, too. My taxes paid for this torture. The kind of torture that has innocent men slicing their own skin open just to make sure they are still alive.
One thing the Australian government was not counting on was that a storyteller as perceptive and articulate as Boochani would be one of its victims, it didn’t count on his beautiful documentation of the systematic horror it so cunningly crafted. I’m truly gobsmacked and feel completely ignorant. I had no idea. I always imagined the Australian government just wasn’t concerned about these people. Just couldn’t be bothered taking proper care of them. But it was concerned, very concerned with driving them back to where they came from by means of making this prison a living hell.
Boochani doesn’t use names or detailed physical description for his fellow refugees but refers to them as archetypes – The Hero, The Cow, The Whore, The Comedian, The Smiling Boy, The Prophet, The Prime Minister. These inmates become all of us. Hearing of their conditions, of how they struggled to keep sane but were ultimately crushed is devastating. This is a masterpiece with Boochani creating his own genre that his translator describes as «Horrific surrealism».
The global refugee crisis is a CRISIS, we don’t know what to do. We are stuck. It’s complicated. But before you let any ideas cement in your mind…read this book.
A Book A Week 