No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison

by Behrouz Boochani

Everything has been done by our government to dehumanise asylum seekers.

What has become of us when it is we who now commit such crimes?

Seeing how low he has come, famished and terrified, the others grow bolder and more confident — a wicked disposition. The weak always consider themselves powerful when they see others suffering. But the collapse of others appeals to the oppressor in all of us. The collapse of others becomes a cause to celebrate our own state. A

have always despised waiting. Waiting is a mechanism of torture used in the dungeon of time.

Perhaps no-one is sure that the deck on that warship is Australian territory; no-one can believe they have really arrived in the land of freedom.

For years I had pondered the mountains / For years I had dwelt on the war involving occupiers of the Kurdish homelands / A war against those who had divided Kurdistan between themselves / An occupation that has devastated an ancient culture / An invasion that has decimated what was of cultural value to the Kurds / Destroyed what was cherished by the Kurds / What was necessary for the preservation of Kurdish identity.

To this very day I don’t know if I have a peace-loving spirit or if I was just frightened. I still don’t know if I was afraid of fighting in the mountains, if I was afraid of taking up the gun, or if I truly believed that the liberation of Kurdistan couldn’t be achieved through the barrel of a gun. This plagued me: maybe I was a coward; maybe my cowardice redirected my thoughts towards a preference for peace, redirected my thoughts to privileging the power of the pen, compelled me to pursue cultural expression as resistance.

But I think that it is only when our theoretical positions are put into practice that we can know their profundity. Only one who contemplates and theorises death to its fullest extent is truly unafraid of death. Theories are theories in the real sense of the word when we internalise them, and only become something more when we embody them. We

Airy fairy

cannot practise contemplative and sincere theorising in relation to monumental concepts such as death and life if we choose to be dispassionate.

Theorising? is this xa career/litetarfy exercise? As in I might as well make the most of this and write a book?

Getting on any one of those boats is an extraordinary risk, a massive danger. It is truly a battle against death. Before

The narrative showed this

As I reflect on the few months living in Indonesia and the second trip out onto the ocean, I have arrived at a more complete concept of courage, although I still don’t feel a deep trust in my theoretical ruminations on the topic.

This I know: courage has an even more profound connection with hopelessness / The more hopeless a human being, the more zealous the human is to pursue increasingly dangerous exploits.

Death is death / Plain and simple / Absurd and sudden / Exactly like birth.

The essence of death is reduced to this: non-being. Annihilation

The tugboat arrives at the pier. The waves along the shore are tame. A little blonde girl is bathing there, playing in the water; she isn’t paying the slightest attention to us. She takes no notice of the weary and worn-out people, no notice of those standing on the pier. The image of that little girl playing is still fresh in my memory. She is laughing, she has drifted into the kindness of the inviting waves. In the world view of that child there is no place for affliction. In her world, there is no space for the hardship that comes from injustice. She is free / She is innocent / She is like the cool gentle breeze on this sunny day / My first real impression of Australia.

Very Powerful. I felt angry earlier when his theorising anout courage tore me from me immersiokn in his journey.

I think that Manus must be an island with a warm climate and full of insidious, strange insects. That instead of wearing clothes, the people of Manus cover their sexual organs and waists with broad banana leaves.

each person’s number

Sometimes experiencing suffering and hardship up close is easier than being terrorised with impending torment. It isn’t as though I haven’t had to endure adversity in my life.

Journalists inquire into everything. They are always seeking out horrific events. They acquire fodder for their work from wars, from bad occurrences, from the misery of people. I remember when I used to work for a newspaper I would become agitated from listening to all the news about, for instance, a coup d’état, a revolution, or a terrorist attack. I would begin work with great fervour and scramble for that kind of research like a vulture; in turn, I fed the appetite of the people. The

This is the second time in a short period that we have become the objects of inquiry for these intrusive people. The airport on Christmas Island has become a studio for a photo shoot. It seems that they are waiting in ambush, waiting for the time they can see me helpless and fragile. They are waiting to make me a subject of their inquiry. They want to strike fear into people with the movement of my possessed corpse. —— Exile from Christmas Island / Exile from Australia / The airport marks the point of exile / The airport is completely empty / The airport is totally quiet.

For sure, she is also a Kurd who has suffered. Suffered — because of the stigma attached to her — because of the stigma attached to being a Kurd; because she is a person who dares to dream — because she is someone with roots in the Middle East; because she is always a thorn in the side of others — because she always speaks out of place, speaks about things like liberation, speaks about democracy. Her fate is like mine; she has left everything behind and come to Australia. It doesn’t matter on what vessel she has travelled to get to this land: whether on a rotting boat or by plane. I feel that when she looks at me, she recollects her pain. I feel she remembers the days when she was perceived as someone out of place; and it is this that provokes her look of simultaneous disdain and empathy.

Where the ocean meets the shore,

It is a riot of colours,

Now they’ve been imprisoned on Nauru. I’m sure Parnya can’t fathom this life of affliction in any way, this life she finds herself in, a life that could break the will of the most macho of males. She has no idea what that prison was built for, she has no idea why a harmless child has to be there, why a child with no bad intentions has to be held there. She has no idea why she has to be locked up.

The mood of sorrow that has tormented us all over the last few days emerges again / Once again sorrow bears down oppressively / Once again the questions smash against the rim of my mind / Why does the Australian government have to exile little girls of six or seven years old? / Why does the Australian government have to incarcerate them? / Where in the world do they take children captive and throw them inside a cage? / What crime are those children guilty of? / And thousands more questions that have no answers / Thousands more questions that cause me more headaches / Even greater headaches.

We are four hundred people / Four hundred lost souls in a tightly confined space / Four hundred prisoners / Anticipating the nights / . . . so we can leave / . . . and enter our nightmares.

Hopeless visions worse than monsoon winds blow away our dreams in the nights and everything becomes tainted by bitter nightmares.

Most prisoners evaluate their health and vitality through regular close examination of their bodies, developing fragmented and disrupted identities, and a warped sense of self, that makes them cynical of everyone else. This is the objective of the prison’s Kyriarchal System, to drive prisoners to extreme distrust so that they become lonelier and more isolated, until the prison’s Kyriarchal Logic7 triumphs with their collapse and demise.

During this period in the prison, there is nothing to occupy our time. We are just thrown into a cage and made to wear ridiculous loose-fitting clothes. It is even prohibited to play cards. In Corridor L, a few people were able to get hold of a permanent marker and draw a backgammon board onto a white plastic table. They began to play, using the lids from water bottles as counters. Almost instantly, a group of officers and plain-clothed guards entered Corridor L and crossed out the game. They wrote over it in bold letters, ‘Games Prohibited’. It seemed that was their only duty for the entire day: to shit all over the sanity of the prisoners, who were left just staring at each other in distress.

In the meantime, the Australian officers watch over the excited community with contempt. This is the social dynamic between the Australians working in the prison and the imprisoned refugees. The Australians’ perspective is a mixture of abhorrence, envy and barbarism — the crowd is aware of that. At times this even encourages the audience to cheer louder. For them, this pretend celebration is a good opportunity to get on the officers’ nerves, to mess with those who hold them captive, a kind of childish spite that expresses a desire for revenge. This is one of the only forms of power available to the prisoners.

The prisoners dance because they have to dance, to spite those people who exiled them to the prison. This infuriates the Australians. Sometimes the officers chatter through their communication devices, confused because they don’t know why these imprisoned and humiliated refugees are partying and dancing. What infuriates them more is that they have no excuse to break up the festivities — ruin them just like they did with the backgammon table, spoil them by writing, ‘Games Prohibited’.

The spirit of Maysam The Whore contrasts with the desert of solitude and horror of the prison.

Many of the guards are ex-servicemen who have served for years in Afghanistan and Iraq; they have been waging wars on the other side of the world. They have killed humans.

This space is a meeting point for emotions, a space where emotions meet to negotiate. In this space, there is no solace except the face of brotherhood looking back at you, there on the face of a fellow inmate. A solace invoked by the face of a fellow prisoner who himself is at the last frontier of helplessness.

Hopelessness arises when the prisoner realises that his discovery about the order of things is wrong. He continues trying to unlock the logic of the system, looking for solutions in his surroundings. This induces perpetual questioning. He searches for the answers to the questions that plague his mind, searches for them in the eyes of the cooks, searches for them in the eyes of the officers. Maybe there are differences in the personalities of the head chefs. Maybe some officers are less brutal. The

Starvation has two objectives: to implement a variety of control mechanisms on the minds of prisoners, and to make the prisoners enmeshed and complicit in the system. The prisoner’s stomach leads him to know the system. And after reacting with resistance, and going through draining, drawn-out phases of action in solidarity with others . . . nothing. It leads nowhere / Nothing / No answers to his futile questions / Nowhere / Nowhere except the threshold of insanity.

The system discriminates between the prisons. Sunday is scheduled for Oscar, Monday for Delta, Tuesday for Fox. But, at the moment, the prisoners from Fox can also access the phones every day from morning till noon. They have so much more time than those in the other prisons. This program is not permanent — there are some weeks, for instance, when the prisoners in Fox can’t use the phones at all. The rules and regulations change weekly. Sometimes at the beginning of the week all the numbers are recorded on perplexing schedules. And it is confirmed that, for instance, MEG45 can make a call on Thursday morning at ten past eleven. But this is not always practised. At the start of the following week the rules and regulations might become less formal. Whoever stands in line earlier might get to call. There are times when the telephone queue starts at nine o’clock in the morning. Sometimes at eight. And other times at ten. And telephone time expires maybe at midday. Sometimes at one o’clock. And other times at two. For weeks these rules and regulations seem not to change, but when the prisoners get used to them new rules and regulations suddenly emerge. More distortions within an incomprehensible system; a system that engulfs one’s consciousness deep inside it. The system fragments and disorients the prisoner to such an extent that he is alienated from his sense of self.

The sound of the deepest kind of affliction / The sound of hopelessness. A nightmare about the nights. A nightmare about loneliness / The sound of moaning inside the cauldron of the dark night / The sound of moaning floating over the ocean / The sound of moaning wading through the jungle that lies beyond the fences / The sound of moaning drags itself along in combination with other sounds / The sound of moaning, like a poisonous arrow from the archer’s bow / The sound of moaning, a sound without rebound against the darkness of night / The sound of moaning, then it disappears out into the universe.

I do not find these poems out of place at all! Gayle did

This creature is engaged in an inseparable friendship with the night / This creature knows full well the language of the night / This creature has full knowledge about the dark / This creature has a full understanding of terror.

The cricket

Animosities reached climax and teeth gnashed from extreme hate. Old wounds were opened and blades of battle tapped into the cesspool of history, the history of hate, and disseminated its loathing, spread across what once were fields of goodwill; our vivid, green and bounteous homeland. A putrid smell came over the whole place. Enemy also didn’t recognise enemy. On one side, corps with steely determination whose objective was to fight in the name of religion. On the other side, corps who also fought in the name of religion. On one side, Iraqi Ba’athists16 would empty their rounds. On the other side, Iranian zealots would open fire. In the middle were our homes — our homes left desolate. Two grand war elephants — administering nothing but hurt.

The Peshmerga17 also battled from within the mountains. Their very name represented defence of homeland and dignity. It was a war with no end, like all the other wars of history. A war with roots in earlier wars. And those wars had roots in other wars. A chain of wars born out of the nether regions of history. And so it was a seed of resentment that blossomed after centuries with the colour of blood once again. It

Escape and standing firm are two irreconcilable positions, two uncompromising positions. The virtue of each one is reflected in how the individual manifests their capacities, how the individual displays volition, through tenacity, through a rebellious spirit.

him.

Reportage? Dream? Hallucination ? I don't know.

And I am now part of the jungle.

Reportage? Dreazm? Hallucination?

It happens one night, right at the end of the night, when I am suffering from toothache. These Papus are extremely kind. Two of them hold my arms. One shines the flashlight on my tooth. One of them lights his lighter, and another inserts a red-hot wire right into the hole in my bastard of a tooth. It blows my mind. It tears my gum. My eyes well with tears. I stop breathing, but it is good. The black cavity in my tooth is punished good and proper. And as I scream, the Papu places his hand on my head. He says nothing. But I can tell what he is thinking from the touch of his hand: ‘Son, your pain will cease.’ The hot wire does its job. A few traditional surgeries in the style of the Papus kill off all the nerves in my tooth. I know it. This I know all too well — if I had confronted the IHMS system my soul would have been engulfed in thousands of IHMS letters, reports and forms . . . and then annihilated. ——