Decolonial imaginaries of sanctuary in Behrouz Boochani’s work

Abstract

This article explores Kurdish–Iranian writer–filmmaker–activist Behrouz Boochani’s work, at the centre of which philosophical and aesthetic questions concerning displacement and defamiliarization fuel a rethinking of the tropes, practices and policies that mark the parameters of sanctuary, thus allowing its re-imagining from an environmentally informed, transcultural decolonial perspective. The article addresses the genre-crossing interdisciplinary framework of ‘horrific surrealism’, in Boochani’s book No Friend But the Mountains and his film Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time as well as other publications that together gesture towards re-conceptualizing sanctuary both on the basis of its historical associations and in visionary anticipation of its urgent renewal. The critical location of Boochani’s work in new conceptual islands off the mainland of thought enables a visible, embodied voicing that goes beyond haunting the oppressor in the struggle for more-than-human rights by proposing sanctuary in terms of relational, indigenously formed imaginaries of resistance disrupting the thanato-political, speciesist border-industrial complex.