Behrouz Boochani
Writer and refugee
Seven years is a long time to be away from the world. You notice the big changes and the tiny ones too. Behrouz Boochani stood in a car park in central Christchurch as the person who drove him to an interview punched a code into a machine. What on earth, he wondered, was this?
‘‘We are not only behind in technology, we are behind in many things,’’ he says a few minutes later. ‘‘Seven years is too many. Seven years living in a jungle or in a prison. It is so difficult. I have been like a computer that you enter so much data into suddenly. It needs time to digest it.’’
The 36-year-old Kurdish Iranian writer fled Iran for political reasons in 2013 and made his way to Indonesia. After hiding for more than a month, he took a barely seaworthy boat with other asylum seekers, hoping to reach Australia. Instead, Australian authorities sent him and the others to Christmas Island and then to Manus Island, Australia’s notorious offshore detention centre.
He wanted to write, to bear witness to the suffering. He got hold of a mobile phone that he hid in a mattress and tapped out stories about the brutality on Manus, the degradation and even torture, for the world’s media. He contributed to a documentary about Manus, filmed on a phone. And, most remarkably of all, he wrote an entire novel about Manus, sentence by sentence on a messaging app.
The book, No Friend But the Mountains, appeared in 2018. By now the best-known Manus detainee, Boochani was quickly recognised by the greats of Australian writing, to the embarrassment of the government. Five Australian writers picked it as one of the best books of 2018 in the Sydney Morning Herald.
‘‘Behrouz’s writing is lyrical and poetic, though the horrors he describes are unspeakable,’’ wrote Sofie Laguna. ‘‘Every Australian household should have a copy,’’ agreed Maxine Beneba Clarke.
Eminent writers, including JM Coetzee, Peter Singer, Helen Garner and Tim Winton, signed an open letter to free Boochani. When he covered Boochani in the New York Review
of Books in September 2019, South Africanborn Coetzee puzzled over his adopted country’s harsh politics. Both main parties ran strongly anti-refugee policies.
Coetzee wrote: ‘‘Given the fact that the foundational event of the Commonwealth of Australia was the arrival on the island continent’s east coast of a fleet of uninvited vessels captained by James Cook; given further that since the end of World War II Australia has taken in hundreds of thousands of refugees, most of them from Europe but many from Asia and Africa too, it is hard to comprehend the dogged hostility of the Australian public to the latest wave of refugees fleeing strife in the Middle East, Afghanistan, the Indian subcontinent, and northeast Africa.’’
Boochani’s status, and his story, meant he was invited to literary festivals, but visas and various permissions were tricky. By late 2019, the Manus camp was closed and the remaining detainees were in Port Moresby, including 46 in Bomana prison. Others have found refuge and Boochani has technically been accepted by the United States. But it was literature that finally got him off Papua New Guinea.
Boochani accepted an invitation from WORD Christchurch and was granted a onemonth New Zealand visa. He left PNG with a return ticket; the trip to Auckland took about 35 hours, including 19 hours stuck in transit in the Philippines. Unable to stop over in Australia, he had to take the long way round. He reached Auckland late on a Thursday night and then Christchurch on a Friday morning.
There was the strangeness of travel and freedom and arriving. A thin and sometimes haunted-looking man, Boochani appeared exhausted as the world’s cameras saw him pass through an airport. Being free in a city, even a quiet one like Christchurch, is draining. It took a week until he felt he had finally caught up on sleep.
As he has said, he wanted to be in Christchurch because he sees that the treatment of the Manus refugees and the March 15 terror attacks have the same source. ‘‘There is a deep connection between what happened here [in Christchurch] and what’s happened on Manus Island.’’
He also noticed a ripple effect in Australia. In the run-up to the last election, both the government and the media increased attacks on asylum seekers. Boochani remembers another refugee reduced to tears after his photo appeared on the front of a tabloid. The man had liked a terrorist post on Facebook. The paper turned that into a dark warning about ‘‘terror-loving refugees trying to reach Australian shores’’.
But the political focus had to shift after the horrors of March 15. Boochani has not yet visited Christchurch’s Al Noor Mosque but is interested in doing so. He was also thrilled by the greeting from Nga¯ i Tahu on that Friday morning at the airport.
‘‘Because of my indigenous background, it was so special and so important,’’ he says. ‘‘In the book, the film and my articles about Manus, you can see a layer of anti-colonialism and respect to local people.’’
The local people were also victims of Australia’s policy of dumping asylum seekers thousands of kilometres across the Pacific. Boochani wrote about a rundown hospital on Manus Island that could have been improved for a fraction of the sum Australia paid to private security contractors. Local people who could not afford to fly to Port Moresby were dying.
He developed a solidarity with these forgotten people. ‘‘Who killed people? The Australian Government. Who exiled people? The Australian Government. Who tortured people? The Australian Government. They used the land as a place for exile. The local people were not happy but no-one listened to them.’’
Boochani speaks English well but occasionally breaks into Farsi to explain more abstract subjects. His first language is Kurdish, which got him into trouble. He was working as a journalist in Tehran while helping Kurdish friends in his hometown, Ilam, produce a monthly magazine. The Ilam province has a Kurdish population but Farsi has been enforced in Iran.
The Kurds are 40 million people without a homeland, spread across Syria, Turkey, Iran and Iraq. A struggle for freedom is central to their identity, Boochani says. ‘‘This long history of resistance impacts on poetry, music and everything else. When you are a Kurdish artist or writer, you have this commitment to work to keep this culture alive.’’
Boochani and his friends were doing just that. Some were arrested and jailed. Others were questioned and monitored. Boochani was in the second group but knew he could not stay. Hence his departure from Iran and the long ordeal that brought him here.
He will keep writing, even now that he is free. ‘‘I don’t claim I am a novelist or a poet,’’ he says. ‘‘I know myself as a political activist. I did all of this work to challenge this power structure, the picture the Australian Government created about us. The ideology.
‘‘We just suddenly found that we were on a remote prison on a remote island. An island I didn’t know about. We went through a long process. We were looking for bosses. Who is responsible? Who is running this prison? Who is running this system?’’
It sounds like something written by Franz Kafka and he agrees that Kafka’s The Trial was one influence on his book. That impression of a confusing and absurd system, the trials of a man who committed no crime, the various courts and judges, the sense of being a number, not a name. Talking to media this week, Australia’s Minister for Home Affairs, Peter Dutton, still referred to Boochani only as ‘‘this individual’’.
Dutton insists Boochani will never visit Australia. But Boochani smiles when he thinks of the cover of his book. There is a closeup of his face, staring out and confronting Australians with the horrors that have been done in their name.
‘‘The Australian Government for years was ignoring us and ignoring me,’’ he says. ‘‘They treated me like I didn’t exist. But I existed. I exist in Australia through my work. In the bookshops, I’m looking at people. Very surreal.’’
‘‘Who killed people? The Australian Government. Who exiled people? The Australian Government. Who tortured people? The Australian Government.’’
The WORD Christchurch event with Behrouz Boochani, hosted by John Campbell, has sold out but will be livestreamed. Go to wordchristchurch.co.nz for more information.