Freedom, Only Freedom

Behrouz Boochani is a Kurdish-Iranian writer, journalist, scholar, cultural advocate and filmmaker. Boochani was a writer and editor for the Kurdish language magazine Werya in Iran. He is a Visiting Professor, Birkbeck Law School; Associate Professor in Social Sciences at UNSW; non-resident Visiting Scholar at the Sydney Asia Pacific Migration Centre (SAPMiC), University of Sydney; Honorary Member of PEN International; and winner of an Amnesty International Australia 2017 Media Award, the Diaspora Symposium Social Justice Award, the Liberty Victoria 2018 Empty Chair Award, and the Anna Politkovskaya award for journalism. He publishes regularly with The Guardian, and his writing also features in The Saturday Paper, Huffington Post, New Matilda, The Financial Times and The Sydney Morning Herald. Boochani is also co-director (with Arash Kamali Sarvestani) of the 2017 feature-length film Chauka, Please Tell Us The Time; and collaborator on Nazanin Sahamizadeh’s play Manus. His book, No Friend But The Mountains: Writing From Manus Prison won the 2019 Victorian Prize for Literature in addition to the Nonfiction category. He has also won the Special Award at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, the Australian Book Industry Award for Nonfiction Book of the Year, and the National Biography Prize. Omid Tofighian is Adjunct Lecturer in the School of the Arts and Media, University of New South Wales; and Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck Law, University of London. He is an award-winning lecturer, researcher and community advocate, combining philosophy with interests in citizen media, popular culture, displacement and discrimination. He is the translator of Behrouz Boochani's multi-award winning book No Friend but the Mountains: Writing From Manus Prison (2018). Moones Mansoubi is a community, arts and cultural development worker based in Sydney. Her work is dedicated mainly to supporting and collaborating with migrants and people seeking asylum in Australia. She has managed numerous community and cultural projects and the first translator of Behrouz Boochani’s work when he began writing from Manus Island. She was translation consultant for Boochani’s book No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison (Picador Australia 2018). Her translation of the article “An Island Off Manus” (Saturday Paper 6 May, 2017) was included in Boochani’s winning nomination for the Amnesty Media Award in 2017. Moones has a Masters Degree in International Relations and is passionate about social justice and social cohesion. She is currently coordinator of the Community Refugee Welcome Centre in Inner West Sydney and a content producer for SBS Radio, Persian program.

List of Figures
Foreword by Tara June Winch

Writing in Languages of Freedom by Omid Tofighian

Map

Part One
2013-2015 - ‘Fighting to Take Back My Identity’: Creating a New Language in Collaboration

“Becoming MEG45” by Behrouz Boochani
“Unpublished Reports: Untitled and Two Souls, One Body” by Behrouz Boochani
“Translating Manus and Nauru: Refugee Writing” by Moones Mansoubi
“Collaborating with Behrouz Boochani: Journalists Against a System” by Ben Doherty

Part Two
2016 (Feb-April) - A New Theory: Examining the Prison, Exposing the System

“This is Manus Island. My Prison. My Torture. My Humiliation” by Behrouz Boochani
“Life on Manus: Island of Damned” by Behrouz Boochani
“Australia, Exceptional in its Brutality” by Behrouz Boochani
“Testifying to History” by Jordana Silverstein

Part Three
2016 (June-Dec) - Journalism as Minor Epics: Confrontation, Survival and Death

“What it's Like in Solitary Confinement on Manus Island” by Behrouz Boochani
“For Refugees Kidnapped and Exiled to the Manus Prison, Hope is Our Secret Weapon” by Behrouz Boochani
“Untitled” by Behrouz Boochani
“The Day My Friend Hamid Khazaei Died” by Behrouz Boochani
“Faysal Ishak Ahmed’s Life was Full of Pain. Australia Had a Duty to Protect Him” by Behrouz Boochani
“Time and Borders, Policy and Lived Experience: A Posthumanist Critique” by Sajad Kabgani
“Kurdish Identity and Journalism: Reporting to Record History” by Roza Germian

Part Four
2017 (Mar-Sept) - Introducing the Kyriarchal System: Knowing Manus Prison

“A Kyriarchal System: New Colonial Experiments/New Decolonial Resistance” by Behrouz Boochani
“Unpublished Report: Untitled” by Behrouz Boochani
“An Island off Manus” by Behrouz Boochani
“The Tortuous Demise of Hamed Shamshiripour, Who Didn’t Deserve to Die on Manus Island” by Behrouz Boochani
“‘The Man Who Loves Ducks’: The Refugee Saving Animals on Manus” by Behrouz Boochani
“Epistemic Violence, Aesthetic Breaks, and the Man Who Loves Ducks” by Anne McNevin
“Exposing ‘Incalculable Cruelty’: Writings on Border Harms and Atrocity as Resistance” by Victoria Canning


Part Five
2017 (Oct-Dec) - The Siege on Manus Prison: 23 Days of Collective Resistance

“Days Before the Forced Closure of Manus We Have No Safe Place to Go” by Behrouz Boochani
“Diary of Disaster” by Behrouz Boochani
“The Refugees Are in a State of Terror on Manus”bu Behrouz Boochani
“A Merciless Fear Provoked by Last Night's Events has Gripped the Manus Island Camp” by Behrouz Boochani
“Manus is a Landscape of Surreal Horror” by Behrouz Boochani
“The Breath of Death on Manus Island: Starvation and Sickness” by Behrouz Boochani
“All We Want is Freedom – Not Another Prison Camp” by Behrouz Boochani
“I Write from Manus as a Duty to History.” By Behrouz Boochani
“A Letter from Manus Island” by Behrouz Boochani
“23 Days of Resistance Alongside Behrouz Boochani” by Shaminda Kanapathi
“Words That Escaped from Prison” by Erik Jensen


Part Six
2018 (Feb-June) - A Duty to History: Dignity, Time and Identity

“Four Years After Reza Barati’s Death, We Still Have No Justice” by Behrouz Boochani
“Policy of Exile” by Behrouz Boochani
“Mohamed’s Life Story is a Tragedy. But it’s Typical for Father’s Held on Manus” by Behrouz Boochani
“The Gay, Transgender and Biosexual men on Manus are Forced into Silence” by Behrouz Boochani
“Salim Fled Genocide to Find Safety. He Lost his Life in the Most Tragic Way” by Behrouz Boochani
“Manus Island Poem” by Behrouz Boochani
“Journalism, Borders and Oppression: The Nauru Context” by Elahe Zivardar and Mehran Ghadiri
“On Mothers, Nature and the Body” by Fatima Measham

Part Seven
2018 (Aug)-2019 (Apr) - Manus Prison Theory: Creating a Body of Knowledge

“Manus Prison Theory” by Behrouz Boochani
“Australia Needs a Moral Revolution” by Behrouz Boochani
“Five Years in Manus Purgatory” by Behrouz Boochani
“’Sam Could Have Been Saved’: Where Does the Money for Healthcare Go on Manus?” by Behrouz Boochani
“The Paladin Scandal is Only a Drop in the Ocean of Corruption on Manus and Nauru” by Behrouz Boochani
“The 'Papua New Guinea Solution' in Australia's Public Discourse and Human Rights Activism” by Mahnaz Alimardanian
“Australian Corruption and the Pacific: Dollars, Displacement and Death” by Helen Davidson


Part Eight
2019 (May-Oct) - Writing to Keep Hope Alive/New Dimensions to Systematic Torture

“This Election is an Opportunity to Vote for Humanity and Freedom” by Behrouz Boochani
“’The Boats are Coming’ is One of the Greatest Lies Told to the Australian People” by Behrouz Boochani
“The truth about self-harm in offshore detention” by Behrouz Boochani
“Purification by Love” by Behrouz Boochani
“Emotion, Responsibility and Hope for Different Futures” by Claudia Tazreiter
“Prison Notebooks and the Oceanic-Kurdish Connection: Boochani’s Political Reflectivity” by Steven Ratuva

Part Nine
2020 (May-June) – New Narratives and Knowledge: New Writing and Collaboration


“As I learn to live in freedom, Australia is still tormenting refugees” by Behrouz Boochani
“’A Human Being Feels They Are On a Precipice’: COVID-19’s Threshold Moment” by Behrouz Boochani and Omid Tofighian
“Boochani’s ‘Political Poetics’: Subverting and Reimagining the Fiction of Politics” by Anne Surma
“Journalism as Dialogue: Creating Collective Activism Through the Prison Writings of Behrouz Boochani” by Lida Amiri


Part Ten
2020 (Sept) – Neocolonial experiments/Creative resistance

“For the refugees Australia Imprisons Music is Liberation, Life and Defiance” by Behrouz Boochani
“’White Australia’ Policy Lives On in Immigration Detention” by Behrouz Boochani
“On Documentation, Language, and Social Media” by Arianna Grasso
“Carceral Coloniality as a History of the Present” by Helena Zeweri

List of Contributors