Behrouz Boochani on Manus Island: Contesting Refugee Experience in the Global South

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article makes a case for reframing refugee literature through reading Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains, translated from Farsi by Omid Tofighian. Written in detention on Manus Island via text messages on WhatsApp, Boochani’s book has won wide acclaim in Australia and internationally, not only among literary critics, but as a work of popular appeal in writers’ festivals and cultural prizes. The popular narrative around No Friend but the Mountains has introduced it, on the one hand, as a representative specimen of refugee literature, and more specifically as an example of life writing of a stateless Kurd. We argue that Boochani’s work resists reductive characterisations of refugee literature both through its literary investments and its multiple affiliations with political and discursive interests. By attending closely to stylistic properties and its discursive contexts, we emphasise that No Friend but the Mountains is not just a protest against Boochani’s own treatment by the Australian government but a tracing of how the lived experience and literary subjectivity of refugees in the Global South contests facile categorisation and unitary nationalism.