'The voice of many' Behrouz Boochani's journey to freedom
Behrouz Boochani sent an award-winning book sentence by sentence from Manus Island. Cellphones also played a key role in a new documentary about his journey. Philip Matthews speaks to its creator.
If you say ‘‘the boats’’ in Australia, everyone knows what you mean. The boats still loom large in the Australian imagination or in Australian nightmares.
They are always on the horizon, always a political weapon to be deployed at useful moments.
Take the federal election last Saturday. After casting his vote in Sydney, former prime minister Scott Morrison talked to a crowd of supporters, onlookers and media about how two Sri Lankan asylum-seeker vessels had just been intercepted on the way to Australia, and urged voters to keep his coalition in to stop the boats.
A tough border policy, named Operation Sovereign Borders, has been in place since 2013, although a strict response has been enacted since at least 2001 when the Norwegian freighter the Tampa picked up more than 400 refugees heading towards Australia and former prime minister John Howard used it to outflank the farright Pauline Hanson.
Will anything change with a new government? Observers are not hopeful. Labor stressed before the election that it supports the existing policy. ‘‘Stop the boats’’ remains a populist mantra.
Kurdish-Iranian writer Behrouz Boochani is the bestknown of the refugees and asylumseekers whose boats were intercepted in the past two decades, not least because he so effectively gave voice to those imprisoned for years in offshore detention centres.
Boochani was a journalist in Tehran when the offices of his magazine, Werya, were raided in 2013 by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard during a crackdown on Kurdish expression. His colleagues were arrested and he went into hiding for three months, before getting to Indonesia and attempting to make his way to Australia.
‘‘The first boat broke down after 40 hours at sea,’’ Boochani explained in January.
‘‘I was arrested in Indonesia but managed to escape from prison and got on another boat.
‘‘There were 65 of us, and it took a week to get to Australia.
‘‘We were arrested as soon as we arrived and were sent to Manus Island.’’
Australian film-maker Simon Kurian was making a documentary titled Stop the Boats in 2016 when he first got in touch with Boochani through Facebook.
‘‘I contacted him to ask if he would do some filming for me inside the Manus Island Immigration Detention Centre, since no media was allowed in.
‘‘Behrouz then began to secretly film and started sending footage to me, a few shots at a time, on USBs.’’
The process was similar to the way Boochani was doing journalism on the island, reporting on the inhumane conditions and slowly writing his acclaimed book, No Friend But the Mountains, and sending it sentence by sentence on a messaging app.
The footage filmed for Kurian showed Boochani sitting behind bars in the hot sun, in what he called a concentration camp.
Sometimes he sat quietly and sometimes he sang.
The film showed how detainees, including children, were abused by guards or self-harmed. Their mental and physical health suffered. A riot was documented. A man named Reza Barati was murdered. An observer described it as ‘‘like a wartime process to break people’’.
People cautioned Kurian against using the awful phrase ‘‘stop the boats’’ as his title. But he wanted to remind generations to come ‘‘of the brutal and illegal Australian policy that destroyed the lives of thousands, holding them in limbo in offshore detention for years without end, going against all humanitarian obligations and breaking their responsibilities under the international conventions on refugees to which they are signatories’’.
Stop the Boats diagnosed the policy as a symptom of wider Australian racism. It played in 15 international festivals and is recommended to year 12 students in Western Australia, Kurian says.
It also highlighted the story of Munjed Al Muderis, one of Australia’s leading orthopaedic surgeons, who arrived in the country as a refugee from Iraq and spent 10 months in a detention centre. While working on it, Kurian suggested a second film, on Boochani and his personal journey. Boochani was happy to oblige.
‘‘Again, since the media was banned from the detention centre, I had to engage other detainees to film Behrouz using their mobile phones and send me a few shots at a time,’’ he says. ‘‘I reviewed the footage back in Sydney and sent specific directions to get shots and sequences I needed. Behrouz also filmed himself and other activities within the detention centre.’’
It was while he was detained that Boochani’s book won a series of major Australian literary prizes in 2019, including the A$125,000 Victorian Prize for Literature.
‘‘The irony was not lost on anyone,’’ Kurian says. ‘‘Here was a writer, writing about his detention in exile by Australia, not allowed to set foot here and yet winning one of the biggest literary awards this country offers.’’
As Boochani told Stuff in 2019: ‘‘They treated me like I didn’t exist. But I existed. I exist in Australia through my work. In the bookshops, I am looking at people. Very surreal.’’
‘‘Behrouz’s writing is lyrical and poetic, though the horrors he describes are unspeakable,’’ Australian writer Sofie Laguna said.
Writing became Boochani’s way out. In what must be the most daring act undertaken by a New Zealand literary festival, WORD Christchurch invited Boochani for a one-off event in November 2019, for which he got a one-month visa.
Unable to fly through Australia, he had a 35-hour journey from Papua New Guinea to Christchurch.
He stayed in New Zealand and was granted refugee status in 2020.
Kurian followed him to Christchurch and documented his new life as he settled into a role as a senior adjunct research fellow at the University of Canterbury.
‘‘I feel a real connection to New Zealand and am learning a lot about indigenous resistance and the process of decolonisation here,’’ Boochani said in January.
People who have met him might think he would resist the spotlight of a feature documentary. Kurian agrees.
‘‘Behrouz is a very quiet and private person,’’ he says. ‘‘Which is hard to believe given how loud his voice has been in bringing the atrocities in the detention camp to world attention.
‘‘But he does not seek the spotlight for himself. He will always shift the conversation to his representation of the cause for the hundreds of asylum-seekers who were detained in Manus and on Nauru. He always saw himself as the voice of many, rather than as this being about him.
‘‘He sees this not as a film about him or his life but rather as a film about how he exposed a brutal system through writing and creating, and a long struggle to challenge a system which is designed to dehumanise people.’’
The film, titled Behrouz, will have its world premiere in Christchurch on June 11. The event is copresented by Screen Canterbury, WORD and the Christchurch City Council. Kurian is appreciative of them all, and of mayor Lianne Dalziel, for making the premiere happen. Both Boochani and Kurian will be present for a postfilm Q and A.
Meanwhile, Boochani moved to Wellington in February. Will he ever travel further afield?
Australia’s former home affairs minister, Peter Dutton, , tipped to replace Scott Morrison as head of the Liberals, famously said in 2019 that Boochani would never set foot in that country.
Boochani responded by saying he never wanted to.
‘‘Behrouz bears no ill-will for Australia or the Australian people,’’ Kurian says, ‘‘but he has a strong dislike for the political system that exiled and tortured innocent people who have fled war and persecution, and sought refuge in Australia, trusting that it would do right by them as a signatory to the International Convention for Refugees.
‘‘I understand that Behrouz feels most Australians would not support the indefinite offshore detention of people seeking asylum. But unfortunately the governments of Howard, Tony Abbott and Morrison were able to justify the policy through fearmongering.’’
Kurian hopes both his films will last as records of Australian cruelty and inhumanity.
But there is a horrible, topical twist in the British Government’s new policy of transferring asylumseekers to Rwanda, which some say is directly inspired by Australia’s so-called ‘‘Pacific solution’’.
‘‘There are four types of Australians on this issue,’’ Kurian concludes. ‘‘First, the ones who are totally ill-informed and lean into the fearmongering narrative.
‘‘The second group is opposed to refugees and migrants due to their extreme right-wing racist ideology. Then there are those who prefer to look the other way.
‘‘And finally, there are the handful of advocacy groups and supporters who have campaigned for years to have this policy stopped. This latter group has grown over the last few years as the voices of people like Behrouz brought the reality to light.’’
Behrouz premieres at the Isaac Theatre Royal, Christchurch, on June 11, before it has its Australian premiere in Melbourne on July 16.