No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison

"Books that are classics of their time often don’t get recognized as classics of their time at the time. It took Primo Levi up to 1948 to find a small Italian publisher for his work. Even then, it was only when the publisher Einaudi republished it that it took off and was translated into many languages. Boochani is an Iranian-Kurdish political theorist and writer who was imprisoned within the Australian migration and refugee regime in Manus Island up until the end of 2019. This book was first published in Australia in 2018 and was published in the US and the UK in 2019. I think it is remarkable. People either call it a refugee testimony, which it most certainly is not, or a novel, though it’s not made up. There’s a real question about what kind of genre this book is. And the short answer to that is that Boochani and his collaborators—and there’s something really interesting about the collaborative nature of this book—were inventing new genres to describe new forms of organized horror. The book was written via WhatsApp messages coming out of the Manus Island prison system and then translated by his collaborators and his main translator, who’s an incredibly interesting writer and thinker called Omid Tofighian, who is based in Sydney. Part of the book is very, very literary. There are references to various literary traditions, including Persian and Iranian traditions. And in part it’s a quest. There’s also a political theory that Boochani is trying to write from within the migration system, from within the prison of Manus Island. It’s an absolutely extraordinary piece of writing. It makes perfect sense with my other choices. The book talks to Levi and Arendt in terms of asking where we are now on detention and imprisonment and deliberate human degradation. Boochani says, ‘Well, let me tell you how it’s going from within this latest chapter of all that.’ On one level, Boochani is again describing a system where there is no why. What the prison system, in his analysis and Tofighian’s analysis, is doing is trying to force people to agree to go back to where they came from. It’s like the prisoner’s dilemma, but really much worse. They have to make that decision for themselves because it is now an international crime to send someone back to where they have come from. So, you have to get them to want to go, which is similar, but not identical, to the way in which totalitarian concentration camp systems aim to get prisoners to concede their own dehumanization, because then they became the very thing that the ideology wanted them to be. The whole Manus Island system is based on a deliberate strategic degradation that gets to the point where you will say, ‘OK, I’ll go back to Iran, even though I’ll probably be put in prison or killed’. Nothing makes sense in this system. There being no ‘why’ is the governing principle. The way Boochani describes the system has other strong echoes of Levi, like the precise description of queues for the doctor, which turn out to be for one painkiller, which is all the doctor ever gives you. There are economies of things like paracetamol and cigarettes that are set up just to keep these economies of pointless waiting going. “The novel helps make other people real to us” One of the really interesting things about the book is the relationship between the Australian system, the Manus Islanders who are themselves being paid by the Australians in a kind of colonial-settler legacy to do this work, and the refugees and migrants who are imprisoned by the system. He shares that, but he also shares with Arendt and with Levi a strong desire to affirm a different type of life to the one that he’s forced to live. That’s where the sheer poetry of the book comes from. Boochani’s writing about nature, his writing about his relationship with other people on the island, his writing about the interrelationships between different people in the camp, are extraordinary affirmations of that question, again, ‘is this a man?’, is this the world? is this nature? You get that re-creation of the very thing that’s been denied at the heart of this system, as well as the analysis of the system. So, for me, that’s why it’s one of the great human rights texts of our generation. Interestingly, the human rights lawyer Itamar Mann, who works for an organization called Global Legal Action Network (GLAN), sent a copy of If This Is a Man to the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. GLAN have been urging that Australia be held to account for its migrant refugee system. I loved Mann for doing that, because it suggests to me that, while of course we can all make overclaims for literature and human rights, maybe we can also start using writing in human rights cases not to play the empathy game, or talk in abstract terms about humanity; but to say that some new system of oppression is happening now, and that we need to pay attention. Perhaps many won’t recognize contemporary migrant regimes as atrocities because there’s some ideology that says that’s what you have to do—to treat refugees as if they’re criminals. And we don’t want them in our country, etc. But what books like Boochani’s do is reveal a situation as a moral atrocity – as a crime. In other words, our writers can give us new imaginative terms by which we can comprehend what it is we’re doing. This, maybe, is a very human kind of evidence. I hope I’ve persuaded you to read it! It also includes incredible poetry. The description of the shipwreck from Indonesia when they get picked up, just outside Australia, reminds me of Conrad in its evocation of humanity in the face of nature and risk—what happens when your whole life is about to disappear in front of you. It’s an absolutely extraordinary piece of writing. One of the reasons I think Boochani is very important is the way the book is written and talked about and has been talked about. It’s his viewpoint, but the book is also profoundly collaborative—a text that was written transnationally and between different constituents. I think Boochani is very, very aware of the dangers of universalising experience, and that’s why that collaborative and dialogic aspect is important. There’s a kind of conscious ethics and politics in the way he talks in the book and in his subsequent work and his filmmaking. But I’ve also heard people ask whether he can speak for all people on Manus Island. Well, no, of course not. But he’s eloquent. And now he is free. And he’s doing good work. Urgent advocacy is not like a dinner party conversation, where you take polite turns. If someone’s got the patience and the stubbornness to sit down and observe, to write, you really need to take that seriously. It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re universalising. And, of course, the counter to not speaking for others is silence. Yes. Maybe we need to have an old-fashioned conversation about literary value. I think most texts on my list will stand the test of time precisely because they’re not in the genre of ‘endless testimony to endless suffering to endless injury’. That may be a terrible thing to say, but you can get into this kind of competitive injury-telling genre of misery memoir, which may not, in the end, be a real challenge to power. There are some works of writing, just as there must be some works of music, that have changed the way a lot of people look at the world, because they do it really well, or because they’ve managed to look at the starry heavens above and find the moral law within. They’ve done something with that. There are those moments where you just know that something important in terms of morality and justice has been revealed in the world. You maybe only really know when the moment has passed. Yes, there’s a kind of worldliness in this kind of writing. I’m thinking here too of Denise Riley’s writings on her son’s death, or Max Porter’s on grief, which is something we certainly should be talking much more about right now. What makes Riley’s poems and her long essay on time and loss so valuable, is that she knows the grief is not just her own: she says over and over again, millions of parents lose their children, we always say, ‘no one should lose a child’. But the reality – and this is a human-rights or a least an equality and poverty issue, is that parents do all the time and all over the world. She’s trying to make sense of something which is so unimaginably painful. But she’s not just trying to find the words for herself, she’s actually trying to reach out to precisely what is shared about that experience. The context in which those stories are told is important. You can have a story of individualism, a story of triumph. But the stories which succeed best are those told by people not just speaking for themselves, those writers who attend to the other voices in their head. I find it hard to think of good human rights writing that doesn’t do that. You could perfectly well write brilliant books about human rights thinking yourself the happiest and most privileged person in the world."