Freedom, Only Freedom - The Prison Writings of Behrouz Boochani

Over six years of imprisonment in Australia's offshore migrant detention centre, the Kurdish-Iranian journalist and writer Behrouz Boochani bore personal witness to the suffering and degradation inflicted on him and his fellow refugees, culminating eventually in his prize-winning book - No Friend but the Mountains. In the articles, essays, and poems he wrote while detained, he emerged as both a tenacious campaigner and activist, as well as a deeply humane voice which reflects the indignity and plight of the many thousands of detained migrants across the world.

In this book Boochani's collected writings are combined with essays from experts on migration, refugee rights, politics, and literature. Together, they provide a moving, creative and challenging account of not only one writer's harrowing experience and inspiring resilience, but the wider structures of violence which hold thousands of human beings in a state of misery in migrant camps throughout Western nation-states and beyond.

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"Unpublished Reports: Untitled and Two Souls, One Body" by Behrouz Boochani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