Freedom, Only Freedom

The Prison Writings of Behrouz Boochani

Behrouz Boochani, Moones Mansoubi, Omid Tofighian, Moones Mansoubi, Omid Tofighian

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780755642670
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Writing in Languages of Freedom
• Part One 2013–2015 – ‘Fighting to Take Back My Identity’: Creating a New Language in Collaboration
• Becoming MEG45
• Unpublished Reports
• Translating Manus and Nauru
• Collaborating with Behrouz Boochani
• Part Two 2016 (February–April) – A New Theory: Examining the Prison, Exposing the System
• This is Manus Island
• Life on Manus
• Australia, Exceptional in Its Brutality
• Testifying to History
• Part Three 2016 (June–December) – Journalism as Minor Epics: Confrontation, Survival and Death
• What It’s Like in Solitary Confinement on Manus Island
• For Refugees Kidnapped and Exiled to the Manus Prison, Hope is Our Secret Weapon
• Untitled
• The Day My Friend Hamid Khazaei Died
• Faysal Ishak Ahmed’s Life Was Full of Pain. Australia Had a Duty to Protect Him
• Time and Borders, Policy and Lived Experience
• Kurdish Identity and Journalism
• Part Four 2017 (May–September) – Introducing the Kyriarchal System: Knowing Manus Prison
• A Kyriarchal System
• Unpublished Report
• An Island off Manus
• The Tortuous Demise of Hamed Shamshiripour, Who Didn’t Deserve to Die on Manus Island
• ‘The Man Who Loves Ducks’
• Epistemic Violence and the Man Who Loves Ducks
• Exposing ‘Incalculable Cruelty’
• Part Five 2017 (October–December) – The Siege on Manus Prison: 23 Days of Collective Resistance
• Days Before the Forced Closure of Manus, We Have No Safe Place to Go
• Diary of Disaster
• The Refugees Are in a State of Terror on Manus
• A Merciless Fear Provoked by Last Night’s Events Has Gripped the Manus Island Camp
• Manus is a Landscape of Surreal Horror
• The Breath of Death on Manus Island
• All We Want is Freedom – Not Another Prison camp
• I Write from Manus as a Duty to History
• A Letter from Manus Island
• 23 Days of Resistance Alongside Behrouz Boochani
• Words That Escaped from Prison
• Part Six 2018 (February–June) – A Duty to History: Dignity, Time and Identity
• Four Years After Reza Barati’s Death, We Still Have No Justice
• Policy of Exile
• Mohamed’s Life Story is a Tragedy. But it’s Typical for Fathers Held on Manus
• The Gay, Transgender and Bisexual Men on Manus Are Forced into Silence
• Salim Fled Genocide to Find Safety. He Lost His Life in the Most Tragic Way
• Manus Island Poem
• Journalism, Borders and Oppression
• On Mothers, Nature and the Body
• Part Seven 2018 (August)–2019 (April) – Manus Prison Theory: Creating a Body of Knowledge
• Manus Prison Theory
• Australia Needs a Moral Revolution
• Five Years in Manus Purgatory
• ‘Sam could have been saved’
• The Paladin Scandal is Only a Drop in the Ocean of Corruption on Manus and Nauru
• The ‘Papua New Guinea Solution’ in Australian Public Discourse and Human Rights Activism
• Australian Corruption and the Pacific
• Part Eight 2019 (May–October) – Writing to Keep Hope Alive: New Dimensions to Systematic Torture
• This Election is an Opportunity to Vote for Humanity and Freedom
• ‘The Boats are Coming’ is One of The Greatest Lies Told to the Australian People
• The Truth About Self-harm in Offshore Detention
• Purification by Love
• Emotion, Responsibility and Hope for Different Futures
• Prison Notebooks and the Oceanic–Kurdish Connection
• 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
• ‘A Human Being Feels They Are on a Precipice’
• Boochani’s ‘Political Poetics’
• Journalism as Dialogue
• Part Ten 2020 (September) – Neocolonial Experiments / Creative Resistance
• For the Refugees Australia Imprisons, Music is Liberation, Life and Defiance
• ‘White Australia’ Policy Lives on in Immigration Detention
• On Documentation, Language and Social Media
• Carceral Coloniality as a History of the Present
• Lists of Map and Plates
• Notes
• References
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Copyright