What is a border? … My whole life has been impacted by the concept of “border”.

Humans have a unique capacity for both kindness, cruelty and survival, attributes that are displayed with stark vividness in this memoir about Australia’s archaic detention policies and what it was like to experience them as an asylum seeker shipped to Manus Island.

For some moments I exert everything to reach something far down inside the deepest existential places of myself. To find something divine. To grab at it… maybe. But I uncover nothing but myself and a sense of enormous absurdity and futility.

The phrase ‘truth is stranger than fiction’ is alive and well in No Friend but the Mountains by Kurdish refugee, Behrouz Boochani. Boochani is a journalist and poet with an education in politics and philosophy. He bore witness to, and survived, Australia’s inhumane detention policies by writing about them. His narrative was written in snatches and dispatched from Manus Island in a series of Farsi text messages over five years. His words were translated to English for the memoir by Omid Tofighian.

For some moments I exert everything to reach something far down inside the deepest existential places of myself. To find something divine. To grab at it … maybe. But I uncover nothing but myself and a sense of enormous absurdity and futility.

The narrative begins on the arduous journey from Indonesia to Australia with a group of mostly strangers gripping to the hope of a safe future beyond their boat that was not seaworthy. Boochani observes his fellow asylum seekers as a mixture of brave, selfless and selfish. As conditions at sea deteriorate, so do the passengers, some displaying their best, and others their worst selves.

The asylum seekers were rescued from their flailing boat and handed over to the Australian navy. A few days later, the men from the boat found themselves imprisoned on Manus Island where they experienced the brutality and degradation of Australia’s immigration detention system and the ‘stop the boats’ policy. The memoir takes us to February 2014 when attacks on the detention centre resulted in the murder of Iranian Kurd, Reza Bharati.

The bureaucratic ranks are determined by relationships of power. Every boss is subordinate to another boss. And the superior boss is also subordinate to another boss. If one investigated this chain it would possibly lead to thousands of other bosses. All of them repeating the one thing: ‘The Boss has given orders.

Nature offered Boochani some relief from the cruel reality of the day to day on Manus. There is beautiful imagery of the sea, mountains, trees, flowers and birds interspersed through observations of his fellow prisoners and captors and the hardships and humiliations they suffered.

The prisoner constructs their identity against the concept of freedom. Their imagination is always preoccupied with the world beyond the fences and in their mind they form a picture of a world where people are free. At every moment their life is shaped by the notion freedom. It’s a basic equation: a cage or freedom.

No Friend but the Mountains won the Victorian Prize for Literature and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards Prize for Non-Fiction in 2019. A must read for the socially conscious and those who need to be awoken to become so.

This will take time, but I’ll continue challenging the system and I will win in the end. It’s a long road, but I’ll do it