No Friend but the Mountains

Cummings and his friend William Slater Brown were imprisoned in a detention center for foreign ‘undesirables,’ and to this day we are guilty of locking people up because they are stateless or nationals of another country. Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains, translated by Omid Tofighian, recounts his imprisonment along with fellow refugees on Manus Island. It is a visceral and vivid account, and it speaks in an unrefusable voice. I think it is an act of true human generosity that someone who has suffered so much at our collective hands would still choose to reach out and… show more.

This book impacted me in many ways, not least for the hurdles the author had to overcome to write it. While detained on Manus Island, Boochani, a Kurdish-Iranian journalist and poet, secretly sent out his book in text-size excerpts on an illegal phone smuggled into the Australian detention centre. It documents the shockingly inhumane treatment of those seeking asylum on Australia’s shores. In a time when many across the globe are forced to flee their homes and cross borders, it is a powerful reminder to keep calling out human rights violations. Brave, beautiful writing of a devastating story.

This heartrending award-winning international best-seller puts the ruthless day-to-day existence of incarceration on Australia’s Manus Island refugee camp to the page with an exquisitely poetic voice.

Behrouz Boochani, a Kurdish-Iranian journalist and defender of human rights, wrote his story on a secret mobile phone while enduring firsthand the brutalisation of being locked up for six years for no crime. 

Boochani fled his native Iran due to political persecution against Kurds, and ended up stuck in refugee hell, namely Australia’s notorious Manus Island. Not for the faint of heart, his memoir details nearly dying at sea, and then spending years in unimaginably wretched prison conditions. Most remarkable of all is that he wrote his book on a cell phone, smuggling poems on WhatsApp to the world at large. How can “civilized” nations treat persecuted populations so dismally? A mix of prose and poetry, the book is a haunting examination of ethnic dignity in the face of global indifference.