No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison

In 2013, Kurdish journalist Boochani was illegally detained on Manus Island, a refugee detention site off the coast of Australia founded by the Australian government. He has been there ever since. Over a period of five years, the author recorded his experiences by text message to his first interpreter and translator, Moones Mansoubi, who organized them based on Boochani’s instructions. Translator Omid Tofighian continues the story. The result is a modern classic of prison literature, even if the entire episode wasn’t technically in a prison but a detention center in Papua New Guinea. The mix of genres addresses what it means to be human and a refugee in countries that have become, in their response to the crisis, a modern version of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil.” Boochani provides a personal look at what is happening in these gray zones of the borderlands.