Reading No Friend but the Mountains: From National to Transnational Contexts of Recognition

ABSTRACT

In 2018, Behrouz Boochani’s testimonial memoir No Friend but the Mountains confronted Australian readers with their complicity in the nation’s carceral border-industrial complex. In the five years since its publication, it has been translated and sold into eighteen languages in twenty-three countries and adapted for film, theatre and a song cycle. This article uses a book-historical approach to present a short biography of No Friend, analysing how it has evolved as a noteworthy work that has taken on distinct lives in the nation and beyond. It analyses two significant moments of recognition in the biography of this book: the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, and the special issue of the life writing journal Biography. The life of this book—its production, reception and material form—suggests the potential for allegiances between cultural and literary elites in the reception of life narratives by forcibly displaced people. These allegiances mark the early versions of No Friend and have been central to its extensive mobility to new readerships.

KEYWORDS:

• Behrouz Boochani
• No Friend but the Mountains
• life writing
• Australian literature
• book history

Introduction

Thumbed over thousands of text messages from Australia’s offshore immigration detention centre on Manus Island, Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison (2018)¹ is a unique creative feat. These messages were sent from a smuggled smartphone to a transnational collaborative network that translated No Friend from texts to page, and from Farsi to English. No Friend bears the marks of this unique process of writing and translation in both its episodic structure and its use of different registers of writing that range from testimonial and theoretical, to folkloric and journalistic traditions. The result is a generically hybrid work that defies taxonomy to narrate life from Australia’s system of offshore immigration detention under Operation Sovereign Borders (2013–), the second generation of Australia’s offshoring policies that relies on “aggressive interceptions at sea, redirecting all asylum seekers to Nauru and Manus with no chance for resettlement in Australia”.² Suvendrini Perera locates these spaces as “black sites” in a global network of detention that function under systems of deferred state accountability—in their position outside the nation, their recourse to private contractors, and the logics of secrecy and non-visibility that leverage the “spectacle of what yet remains non-visible” in service of “object lessons in ‘deterrence’”.³ The publication of No Friend in 2018 marks a spectacular act of resistance against the logics of the Pacific black sites, and its subsequent recognition in Australia and beyond has facilitated the unique biography of this book within and beyond the nation.

Five years on from its initial publication, No Friend continues to travel and generate new readers, scholarship and activism. Just as Boochani overcame distance, incarceration and stigmatisation to write this life narrative from detention in Manus Prison,⁴ so too No Friend has achieved acclaim through translation and adaptation in Australia and internationally. These transits are recorded in paratexts—textual productions at the “fringe” of the text in Gérard Genette’s structuralist narratology—shaping and conditioning the book and its presentation for publics and readers.⁵ At the time of writing, No Friend has been translated into 18 languages and sold in 23 countries, adapted for ebooks and audiobooks, and inspired adaptations such as No Friend but the Mountains: A Symphonic Song Cycle (2020), composed with Luke Styles, and a film that is currently in production with Aurora Films, Sweetshop and Green, and Hoodlum Entertainment.⁶ New covers and peritexts circulate as No Friend finds new readerships internationally, and the lives of this book continue to unfold. This article traces a biography of this singular book, studying No Friend as a material object to follow the lives of this work as it has garnered recognition in Australia and beyond.⁷

The success of No Friend’s Australian reception has garnered scholarly attention that analyses “the new currency of refugee literature and its agency to subvert the literary sphere”.⁸ However, this currency has limits because No Friend’s extensive public life imposes boundaries on potential textual readings and reveals evidence of the continued exoticisation of the refugee writer in contemporary publishing.⁹ Scholars have also analysed Boochani’s creative portfolio for insight into future possibilities for resisting and re-appropriating refugee identity from subaltern positions, and for disrupting and unsettling the “border of disappearance” established by these offshoring policies.¹⁰ This article consolidates and extends on existing scholarship to provide a book history of No Friend. Paul Eggert, in his Biography of a Book, argues that “it can be productive, as a form of literary study, to follow the lives of works over time, both at the hands of the author and his or her collaborators in production, and in the reception of readers”.¹¹ This article draws on these remarks in a book-historical analysis of No Friend that seeks to explain how it gains currency in Australia, in the first instance, and subsequently offshore. It argues that the life of this book—its production, reception and material form—reveals the potential for allegiances between cultural and literary elites in the reception of life narratives by forcibly displaced people. These allegiances mark the early versions of No Friend and have been central to its extensive mobility to new readerships.

Two key moments of recognition form the focus of this biography: the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards and their impact on the reception of the book, and the forum in life writing journal Biography dedicated to No Friend. Both are productive moments that modified the reception, production and readings of the text. The first recognised this life narrative as a significant work of Australian literature, conferring a literary prestige that was ultimately instrumental in Boochani’s escape from the Pacific black site. The second, the forum in a prestigious journal, engaged with this text as a singular work of life writing and cultivates new transnational readings. Before I analyse these moments in the biography of No Friend, it is necessary to catalogue the material object of the book itself.

“A Strange and Terrible Book”:¹² No Friend and Its Paratexts

No Friend was published in July 2018 in Australia. This version features a striking portrait of Boochani’s face. His piercing eyes stare back at the prospective reader from the book jacket: demanding recognition and drawing attention to the tensions at work for citizen readers in that initial reception. Although Boochani remained imprisoned on Manus Island, his image was mobilised and immediately recognisable on the book cover from his earlier journalism and documentary film, Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time (2017). In Genette’s formulation, the space of the book cover is concerned with presenting the book to a public, and this portrait demanded engagement.¹³ It is significant that Boochani appears to us as a refugee because, as Keyvan Allahyari argues, this image took on a talismanic function: positioning the book as refugee resistance and “broadening its readership base to include readers of adversity memoirs”.¹⁴ A study that is attentive to book-historical approaches and the material object of the book must necessarily engage with paratexts because it is the paratext that “enables a text to become a book and to be offered as such to its readers and, more generally, to the public”.¹⁵ These fringe productions reveal the competing interests that organise a book’s presentation for a public, those concerned with a pertinent reading of the text, and those with “generat[ing] interest for various actors in the literary marketplace”.¹⁶ This cover illustrates the significance of the paratexts surrounding No Friend and the competing interests at play in the peritextual performances travelling with Boochani’s narrative.

Richard Flanagan’s remarks also grace the cover of the book—“Our government jailed his body, but his soul remained that of a free man”. This statement confronts Australian readers with a call to action—to reckon with the text, and to do so within the parameters of the national literary field. It also draws the prospective reader through to the first peritextual essay. Here Flanagan, a celebrated Australian author, provides the “foreword”, where he introduces the metaphor of the bookshelf to canonise No Friend as a “book that can rightly take its place on the shelf of world prison literature” and as a testimonial work that demands a reckoning from citizen readers.¹⁷ It is a third-party allographic (publisher’s) peritext that demands a response from an Australian readership in the form of a political “reckoning” and a celebration of No Friend as a literary achievement. It draws on discourses of morality to emphasise Boochani’s treatment at the hands of the nation—“our government jailed his body”—and leverages Flanagan’s cultural capital as a celebrated Australian author to confer No Friend with literary prestige.

These paratexts to the Australian version also feature two essays from Boochani’s main collaborator and translator, Omid Tofighian: bookends that introduce and conclude Boochani’s narrative. Here, he presents the translation process “as a framing narrative for the book itself”, producing a polyvocal account of a collaborative network operating between Australia, the Middle East and the Pacific Islands to produce and translate Boochani’s work. Tofighian describes a unique authorial formation that is necessarily collaborative (a “shared philosophical activity”), both digitally mediated and iterative, and displaying a strange temporality.¹⁸ The work was sent over thousands of WhatsApp messages on a smuggled smartphone to collaborator Moones Mansoubi, who translated these messages from screen to page and, subsequently, with Tofighian and the fellow collaborators, translated the work from Farsi to English. The process itself was an iterative collaboration between Boochani and the translation team that was attentive to the strange temporality that meant, “in some instances, the events and occurrences were taking place at the exact moment of writing”.¹⁹ This process also involved interventionist translation. For example, Tofighian narrates his decision to overcome syntactical issues by translating passages of prose in Farsi into English verse.²⁰ Similarly, he stresses the intentional unsettling of genre conventions at work in the translation. He introduces terms such as “anti-genre” and “horrific surrealism” to describe the textual strategies that produce an intentional “generic and interpretive indeterminacy”, signalling the complexity of this narrative and Boochani’s explicit desire to move away from taxonomies that reduce him to the category of the refugee.²¹ Here, the tensions among peritextual elements become clear. Boochani’s narrative is surrounded by framing productions that reiterate both his exceptional resistance and his disempowerment in offshore detention—and that frame him as a canonical writer and as the face of a unique authorial formation.

These conflicting paratexts continue to travel with No Friend, and they speak to the complexity of this book in the Australian market. As to their role in the presentation of the narrative, Gillian Whitlock argues that paratexts tend to “proliferate around and about life narratives of refugees, asylum seekers, prisoners, and migrants … [mediating] their presence in a global marketplace where there is a strong yet fickle market for exotic and traumatic life narrative, those ‘soft weapons’ of cultural diplomacy, humanitarian activism, and human rights discourse”.²² Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson also suggest the peritextual apparatus confers “authenticity to the tellers who may lack narrative authority at that moment and to their stories that contravene dominant narratives”, such as a refugee resisting from an immigration black site.²³ Both impulses—the authorising and the commercialising—are present here. Paratexts continue to proliferate around and about No Friend, Boochani’s escape from Manus Island and his permanent settlement in Aotearoa New Zealand, contributing to the dense “paratextual surround”—“the framing produced by [a text’s] publication, reception, and circulation”—that marks the material book and conditions its lives with new readers.²⁴ Therefore, this biography of the book turns to the paratextual surround to describe and analyse two key moments of recognition to trace the shifting role of the paratexts in mediating the negotiation between literary prestige and political action for new readers.

Moment 1: “This book is difficult for any Australian”²⁵

Looking back on the Australian reception from its initial release, we must necessarily acknowledge the improbability of No Friend’s success in the Australian literary field. The dense paratextual surround is symptomatic of the extraordinary intellectual and ethical demands No Friend makes on readers, particularly Australian citizens. Morally, No Friend calls the citizen reader to acknowledge the offshoring policy, narrating this black site in a specifically Australian genealogy of incarceration that traces a lineage through the historical (mis)treatment and imprisonment of Indigenous peoples since invasion. It enacts “epistemic transformations”²⁶ that counter governmental discourses of border protection and refugeehood with a narrative affirming the humanity of those held on Manus and their unique contribution to knowledge. It also remains as a historical record of the offshore prison, which has since been demolished.²⁷ Despite these challenges, and Boochani’s distant, marginalised position, No Friend was released to critical acclaim characterised by the urge to celebrate and canonise No Friend as a significant aesthetic and political achievement.

In the first year after its publication, No Friend was widely reviewed in the literary and mainstream press, it was the subject of public events that mobilised literary appreciation and activism, and it was awarded prestigious prizes. Throughout this period, Flanagan’s foreword proved influential to the unfolding process of recognition. Flanagan names Boochani as a “great Australian writer”, drawing Boochani—and consequently, No Friend—into a national literary tradition that brings the offshore prison into the canon of Australian literature.²⁸ Flanagan lauds this book as “great”, conferring a citizenship status markedly at odds with Boochani’s status as a refugee. This gesture, a form of activist position-taking based on citizenship, recognised No Friend within the national literature and shaped the text’s reception. Book reviews and literary prizes emerged as key sites of canonisation, celebrating the autobiographical novel’s aesthetic achievements and positioning No Friend as a literary achievement of uniquely political significance.

As Beth Driscoll suggests, book reviews perform key functions in the Australian literary sphere, acting as “gatekeepers, constructing canons and identifying cultural movements”.²⁹ Reviews perform a “public articulation of literary values”³⁰ that frame a newly released text as “worthy of legitimate discourse”³¹ and recommend it to readers. This process entails an exchange of symbolic capital, which holds the potential to develop an emerging writer’s public profile and, in No Friend’s case, confers a sense of legitimacy.³² In the first year following its release, No Friend was reviewed in mainstream newspapers such as the Sydney Morning Herald, literary magazines such as Overland, and the academic journal Life Writing. Modelling a variety of diverse and, at times, conflicting reading practices, these reviews nevertheless consistently demonstrated an urge to celebrate No Friend as a profound literary and political text: emphasising its testimonial qualities.

Reviewers aligned No Friend with various literary traditions and precursors, ranging from prison literature and Holocaust testimony to Australian literature, that modelled appropriate reading practices for prospective readers.³³ This identification of literary precursors reflects the vital role paratexts play in guiding responses in the national literary sphere. Both Tofighian’s and Flanagan’s peritextual essays model readings that draw No Friend into networks of affiliation. Generic associations figure in Tofighian’s “Translator’s Reflections” and “Translator’s Tale”, where literary precursors are used to demonstrate the text’s hybridity—its “anti-genre” orientation—and to suggest interpretive frameworks that align with No Friend’s philosophical vision. In contrast, Flanagan’s influential foreword both declares No Friend “can rightly take its place on the shelf of world prison literature” and recognises Boochani as a “great Australian writer”.³⁴ Flanagan’s affiliations confer literary value by interpolating No Friend into existing canons of work, and they offer directives or provocations for appropriate frames to guide a citizen reading.

These peritextual instructions proved influential, and reviewers engaged with these affiliative gestures in three ways. First, reviewers actively called back to the foreword to expand or refine Flanagan’s suggested corpus, such as an early review in The Saturday Paper that expanded the “shelf of world prison literature” to include William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and Franz Kafka’s works.³⁵ Second, reviewers such as Jeff Sparrow referred to Flanagan’s affiliative gestures to contest them, arguing that designating Boochani as a “great Australian writer” obscures the reality that “Boochani is presented as possessing distinctive insights precisely because he’s not Australian”,³⁶ while still affirming the association with prison literature. Finally, reviews tended to echo Flanagan’s insistence on the political necessity of engaging with this book, drawing on discourses of morality and shame to engage prospective readers.³⁷ Consequently, reviews for the initial Australian edition were deeply invested in recognising this text by drawing it into established genres and traditions.

Writing on the modes through which prestige is accumulated in the Australian literary sphere, Alexandra Dane identifies three key areas where this work is done: “book reviewing and criticism, literary festivals and literary prizes”.³⁸ Dane argues: “The discussion of titles and authors as part of a notional literary canon is a mode of legitimisation that serves to establish a belief in the cultural value of a text and power of an author.”³⁹ Flanagan’s imaginative projection of No Friend onto a series of “bookshelves” was taken up in several reviews and performed a dual function: directing prospective readers on how to approach this text and conferring literary value through an association with canonical works. Book reviews tended to adapt Flanagan’s interpretive strategy to legitimise and confer symbolic capital and to draw on moral discourses to implore readers to engage with the text. This tendency formed a vital component of this first life of the text, when intermediaries leveraged the infrastructure of the literary sphere to recognise and canonise the work.

The most significant moment of recognition came with No Friend’s success at the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards (VPLAs). This award marked a critical moment for both author and book, energising the Australian reception in a gesture of symbolic recognition. Winning the VPLAs, as Dane notes, signified an “accumulation of cultural capital within the political field”⁴⁰—a politically sponsored entry to the field of Australian cultural prizes. The news of Boochani’s success radiated internationally through publications such as the New York Times, France 24, the BBC and CNN, as well as most publications domestically. Images from the event circulated by The Wheeler Centre in the wake of the award document the tension at play. The unique authorial partnership was centre stage: Tofighian, as Boochani’s translator, physically accepted the prize on Boochani’s behalf before inviting him to speak. Australia’s offshore detention centre was brought into the cultural heart of the nation as Boochani, stateless, delivered a pre-recorded acceptance speech that interpolated him into the Australian literary field as a prize-winner.

The scene staged a confrontation between national border protection policies, which exiled Boochani from Australia, and the Victorian State Government, which—through then Minister for Creative Industries Martin Foley—gets “to bask in the refracted cultural rewards” of conferring the prize.⁴¹ It is a powerful moment of solidarity and recognition, a celebration of No Friend as a significant literary achievement and reiteration of the urgency of this testimonial account. This moment marked a fundamental shift in the life of the text as it travelled through the Australian market, and beyond. It conferred literary prestige and, as Brigitta Olubas noted in the aftermath, “demands of [Boochani’s] readers that they engage not simply with his work but with the idea of him as an Australian writer, and with the cognate locution of Australian literature”.⁴² This shift manifested in the material form of the book as badges and paratextual notes came to feature on the cover of subsequent versions—signalling No Friend’s accumulated symbolic capital as both marketing strategy and readerly instruction.

Keyvan Allahyari and Paul Rae argue that this kind of “vocal political position-taking” by the Australian literary elites and that circulated around No Friend signals the intersection of discourses of humanitarian activism and the infrastructure of the Australian literary sphere.⁴³ They read the text as a powerful mediation in the “definition of ‘Australian writing’” that marks a significant “intervention by the literary community into the field of politics”,⁴⁴ which further demonstrates a key characteristic of this moment of recognition: the convergence of forms of literary celebration and activism. No Friend inspired activist events such as the Academics for Refugees National Day of Action read-in, and its success with literary prizes generated a renewed critical interest in the text that propelled No Friend into new spaces internationally.⁴⁵ The immediate Australian reception was fuelled by an urgent effort on behalf of Australian literary elites to celebrate this text, to recognise it as a work of artistic merit, and to support it in an act of solidarity. However, this symbolic recognition was not matched by political concessions. No Friend was widely purchased and read as a gesture of solidarity, yet the material realities of offshore detention remain unchanged,⁴⁶ presenting a valuable case study on the political potential of the literary field—the ability to facilitate a coalition of consecratory agents, intermediaries and readers to stand in opposition to Australia’s border policies. But what is the enduring value of symbolic and cultural capital in the political economy of Australian immigration?

Keyvan Allahyari has addressed the limitations of these manoeuvres in a series of articles. He questions the efficacy of these gestures that combine literary recognition and activist action by acknowledging that, while this political position-taking had considerable effect, this impulse to solidarity was matched by a “jubilatory rhetoric” of self-congratulation. He suggests there was a “shared sentiment that through doing the ‘right thing’ by refugees, the literary community has moved towards racial and social parity”.⁴⁷ This comment suggests No Friend’s success was contingent on reifying Boochani’s position as a refugee writer who is “subjugated and in need of humanitarian aid”.⁴⁸ Tofighian explicitly counsels against categorising Boochani’s work as refugee narrative or memoir because these genres participate in a so-called “thriving ‘refugee industry’ that promotes stories to provide exposure and information and attempts to create empathy”.⁴⁹ These are fundamental limitations in the power of the literary field when, as Viet Thanh Nguyen states, “literary awards function as symbolic reparations in a country that isn’t yet capable of real reparations”.⁵⁰

Allahyari develops this critique, questioning the limitations of contemporary book markets. It is necessary, he suggests, to distinguish between the activism of literary and cultural elites and the book markets, which act “not as a homogenous system external to border regimes, but as a heterogeneous cultural network that both clashes with and affirms the processes of othering refugees”.⁵¹ Where these moments of recognition, empathy and celebration staged valuable performances of solidarity, these agents of consecration—specifically, the literary prizes—remain tied to notions of nationhood and citizenship through their administration and mechanisms (such as eligibility requirements) that limit the field of contention based on citizenship and residence. These VPLAs marked an important moment of disruption and resistance from within a cultural institution that is not wholly external to border regimes but implicated in the logics of contemporary border practices.

However, it is worth acknowledging that the urgency in the recognition of No Friend by literary and cultural elites did precipitate renewed political and activist efforts that amounted to “an effective and timely intervention of the literary community into increasingly radicalized border protection policies”.⁵² This urgency also reflects the unique challenges posed by this testimonial work thumbed (and published) from active detention: Boochani’s narrative demanded immediate response. Despite these limitations in the initial reception in Australia, the moves to celebrate and recognise No Friend as a singular life narrative were instrumental in allowing the text to reach new international publics, granting him greater visibility and mobility. As Tofighian reflects, “Boochani managed to leave PNG for New Zealand partly due to the international success of his book”, inaugurated by the media spectacle the VPLAs generated.⁵³

The life of this book begins in affirmations of celebration and solidarity, and uneasy negotiations with Boochani’s statelessness in contemporary book markets and national cultural and literary institutions. No Friend was welcomed into the national literature as a significant life narrative, and this recognition propelled the book into international markets. Subsequent versions of No Friend carry the peritexts generated by this enthusiastic reception of the text in Australia. Flanagan’s remarks are now supplemented by those from the Age and the Australian, and a series of four medallions adorns newer Australian versions, attesting to No Friend’s prize-winning status.⁵⁴ Boochani’s stark portrait remains as the cover image, and Flanagan’s and Tofighian’s essays continue to surround the text. While its Australian reception continues to develop and inspire adaptations, the book’s journey into international markets now generates transnational networks of reading, scholarship and activism.

Moment 2: A Forum on Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains

A second moment of recognition comes with the publication of a “Forum on Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison” in the prestigious international life narrative journal Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly. Here, No Friend introduces a “new feature of the journal that aims to respond to and amplify specific examples of the power of life writing as a cultural, political, and social practice, and which document key moments in the evolution of the practice”.⁵⁵ In their introduction to the forum, Anna Poletti narrates their experience of reading, analysing and teaching No Friend as an Australian citizen living in the Netherlands and recognises the complex scholarly concerns in the essays selected for publication. These are transnational, political and, to varying degrees, pedagogical—asserting the value of the text for autobiography studies and fostering new lives in the biography of the book. Poletti introduces the so-called forum as providing a “partial framework for a non-privatizing reading of Boochani’s book”, affirming its status as a “landmark work of life writing”.⁵⁶ The concept of “non-privatizing reading” is significant here. It draws on Sara Ahmed’s work on the politics of shame and Lauren Berlant’s reflections on the problem of compassion in scenes of witnessing to trouble the ethics of the private relational response that is so often elicited by memoir. This framing reveals the tension between writing in a genre that “can construct these forms of intimate connection between reader and the narrated ‘I’” and subjects such as Boochani who seek to resist readerly responses that try to “separate my story from the other stories from detention”.⁵⁷ Here, recognition and empathy—which feature in the national reception of No Friend—are called into question, introducing a distinct shift in this book’s life offshore.

The Biography forum is responsive to what Poletti identifies as the “several frames that haunt the narrative and the circumstances of [No Friend’s] production”,⁵⁸ which enhance and initiate new readings. Tofighian’s peritextual essays anticipate these frames, and in the forum, he recalls that the issue of reception dominated the production process: “One major concern for Behrouz is reception, and the interpretive frameworks and criteria employed to evaluate and engage with the book.”⁵⁹ In his interview with Stephanie Bennett in the forum, Tofighian further clarifies this as a responsibility of the reader: “It is not the case that every interpretation is a good or acceptable reading, but the reader’s position plays an important role. The reader is significant because the book is very deliberate in the way it wants to bring them into the prison and demands various responses.”⁶⁰ The forum sets out to initiate new frameworks for reading No Friend, to move beyond recognition and empathetic reading and introduce new readings—new lives—for the book. Three key trajectories emerge: reading forward the text’s contribution to life writing practice and technologies of the self, analysis of an ethics of reading, and analysing No Friend from Indigenous perspectives.

The unique authorial formation is central to several contributions that locate No Friend within the field of life writing. Gillian Whitlock analyses No Friend’s paratexts and reiterates “the full extent of the material, discursive, and aesthetic impact of the border and the Manus prison on conventional practices of authorship, translation, and reception”.⁶¹ Omid Tofighian and Stephanie Bennett’s interview is also interested in exploring the continued relevance of this unique carceral formation. Returning to the “strange temporality” that defines this collaborative authorship, Tofighian suggests new trajectories for readers and readings. Poletti provides the most sustained engagement with this formation by analysing the smartphone’s absence—the new media technology that was so central to Boochani’s authorship—from the lexical text. This is representative of Poletti’s methodological concern with the “unique transnational, mediated assemblage” that produces No Friend and its implications for the discipline of life writing. Poletti focuses on how Boochani leverages the affordances of this assemblage to resist the logics of Australia’s immigration system and “popular ontologies of representation relating to … refugees”.⁶² Their reading both affirms No Friend’s literary credentials and brings the narrative of production into the foreground of interpretation. It opens new avenues for textual reading and analysing the “assemblage of media materialities” that mobilised in support of Boochani’s account of resistance. Poletti’s interest in the unique methods of producing, translating and theorising this text reifies No Friend as a singular contribution to the discipline of life writing. It is attentive to how Boochani’s work calls for further intellectual work, and it also introduces new trajectories for reading the affordances of new media technologies in facilitating the life writing of forcibly displaced peoples.

While Whitlock’s contribution analyses the significance of No Friend’s unique production, the article’s broader contribution to this forum is to engage with an ethics of reading. This reading raises the question of how to read No Friend as a citizen reader and relocates her reading to a transnational, southern space, turning to Michael Rothberg’s concept of the implicated subject. Rothberg introduces the term “implicated subject” to refer to those who are neither victim nor perpetrator, but instead “occupy positions aligned with power and privilege without themselves being direct agents of harm”.⁶³ It is a term that helps account for what Tofighian suggests are subtle ways No Friend “shows the reader that they are complicit in what is happening to different degrees”.⁶⁴

In articulating an ethics of reading for settler-citizens via implication, Whitlock initiates a reading practice that attends to “historical and political responsibility” and engages in empowered dissent.⁶⁵ Implicated subjects, in Rothberg’s formulation, acknowledge their position as beneficiaries within a system and can enact empowered dissent: “to resist the system that empowers them, in solidarity with the prisoners on Manus who resist expulsion from the camp”.⁶⁶ It provides space for acknowledging historical forms of implication in systems of oppression, and to productively work against these systems from within. Whereas in the initial Australian reception, there were moments of political position-taking by literary and cultural elites who mobilised agents of consecration such as the literary prize to recognise No Friend and demonstrate solidarity, Whitlock’s reading of implication questions the limitations of these responses. Activists in the Australian literary field generated moments of recognition of collective responsibility for Boochani’s ongoing detention; however, Whitlock suggests the limitations of readings that seek to disrupt the logics and power of Australia’s ongoing attachment to offshoring through recognition, celebration and empathy. Alternatively, it maps a means of reading the text through implication and suggests the possibility of enacting what Rothberg identifies as empowered dissent and seeking out “new versions of collective politics that build on alliances and assemblages of differently situated subjects”.⁶⁷

Crystal McKinnon, Özlem Belçim Galip and Maria Giannacopoulos focus on critical Indigenous methodologies and Kurdish traditions of writing and resistance that are vital to the ongoing transnational life of the text. McKinnon, like Whitlock, begins with the peritexts that frame Boochani’s narrative. However, her reading draws on critical Indigenous methods to reframe Boochani’s work with histories of First Nations sovereignty and activism in the settler-colonial state. This reading moves beyond the urge to draw on cultural institutions and tenuous claims of citizenship to celebrate and recognise No Friend. McKinnon critiques Flanagan’s foreword to No Friend, arguing that the prospective reader of the foreword is moved by the discourse of exceptionalism and, like Flanagan, believes in a kind of national disposition towards “decency, kindness, generosity, and a fair go”.⁶⁸ This reader constellates Australia’s offshore prisons not with a history of violent white supremacist colonial institutions but the Japanese prison camps and the Thai Burma railway, the focus of Flanagan’s Man Booker Prize–winning novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013). This reader, like Flanagan, is also familiar with canonical works of world prison literature and invested in not only Boochani’s material resistance as a writer but also his recognition as a “great Australian writer”.⁶⁹ This is a member of what Driscoll refers to as the contemporary literary middlebrow, a formation of “cultural products, producers, and readers” that dominates the Australian literary field. McKinnon’s reading redirects politically or morally engaged responses to the text away from this middlebrow response that features emotional and earnest readings. Instead, she initiates a reading that draws No Friend into relation with a much longer history of decolonial activism and political resistance, further revealing “how Australian colonialism operates through, and is sustained by, white supremacy”.⁷⁰

Maria Giannacopoulos also introduces a reading of No Friend as a decolonial project that demands engagement with First Nations histories. Importantly, Giannacopoulos’s work moves away from analysing No Friend textually to address the prospective scholarly futures of Boochani’s entire creative and critical corpus. Here his work becomes a vital contribution to the interdisciplinary field that establishes “the crucial links between Indigenous dispossession and refugee imprisonment”,⁷¹ which constellates No Friend with historical and contemporary forms of “global state violence … alongside other powerful, Indigenous, decolonial, scholarly, and activist voices”.⁷² It shifts to a transnational and global scale and draws No Friend into productive dialogue with studies in carceral geography and legal theory.⁷³ Finally, the Biography forum includes Özlem Galip’s decolonial reading focusing on Kurdish traditions of writing and resistance. This transnational reading reorients analysis beyond the Pacific, to introduce Boochani’s circumstances as a Kurdish-Iranian man. In this way, it reframes Boochani’s analysis of Manus Prison—both theoretically and textually—in terms of Kurdish identity, literary traditions and imperial histories.⁷⁴ This attention to collective, historical and cultural forms of Kurdish identity not only provides a necessary context to frame Boochani’s narrative but also decentres the nation. Reading this work in terms of traditions of Kurdish literature and resistance introduces a new life to this text in the Kurdish and Iranian diasporas, reading No Friend in terms of transnational forms of solidarity and displacement.

The Biography forum inaugurates a new feature of a prestigious journal and recognises No Friend as a singular work of life writing that necessitates multiple frames of interpretation. While these responses take a reflective or critical stance to initial Australian reception, the celebration of No Friend as a significant work and gestures of solidarity recur. The turn to non-privatising readings is a key feature of these contributions, and collectively they reveal the limitations of the middlebrow modes that dominated earlier recognition of No Friend in the Australian literary field. By decentring the nation, the forum features decolonial, Indigenous and Kurdish readings of the text that complicate and extend the biography of the book.

Conclusion

Analysing these moments of recognition in the biography of the book identifies the affirmations of affiliation and mobility, celebration and criticism that allowed this text to intervene in the social and literary life of a nation that continues its carceral regime of border protection. As a hybrid work of embodied testimony and theory concerning the lived experience of border detention, No Friend’s already challenging ethical demands took on an exceptional urgency in the initial Australian reception as literary elites mobilised in contingent displays of celebration and solidarity for the writer who remained imprisoned. Both factors—the urgency and the ethical demand—animated the first moment of recognition, which leveraged the infrastructure of the Australian literary sphere to stage fleeting moments of activism and solidarity. While this success necessarily required negotiations between Boochani’s position as both author and refugee, this moment introduced No Friend into networks of literary prestige that mobilised an international market. With subsequent versions, the urge to canonise and celebrate the book in the national literature is superseded by readings of No Friend that turn to critical Indigenous methodologies, implicated subjects, Kurdish traditions of writing and resistance, and new media ecologies and life writing.

No Friend remains a mobile text, reaching new audiences nationally and internationally. On 12 December 2022, Boochani took to the stage at Melbourne’s Capitol Theatre to launch his second book, Freedom, Only Freedom. This volume is a curated collection of essays by Boochani and several collaborators that focus on the years of Boochani’s detention in Manus Prison. This is a valuable companion work to No Friend and introduces a new phase in the lives of this book. For those of us who attended this book launch, it was a momentous event. Boochani had long campaigned for his right to appear in person at events such as this from Manus Prison. In 2017, he asserted his right to attend the premiere of the film he co-directed with Arash Kamali Sarvestani, Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time, for its debut at the London Film Festival. In a letter sent to Menna Rawlings, the UK High Commissioner to Australia at the time, and London Mayor Sadiq Khan, he appealed to them to recognise that “this is a great honour for any director and I would like to attend the festival”,⁷⁵ asking them to allow him to travel to London for the premiere. In the event, he remained on Manus Island, and Sarvestani attended the festival to represent him. Nor did he attend the ceremony when he won the VPLA on 31 January 2019. Omid Tofighian accepted the award on his behalf, and organisers played Boochani’s pre-recorded acceptance speech for those in attendance. In this speech, he spoke to the power of literature and of words: “I have been in a cage for years but throughout this time my mind has always been producing words, and these words have taken me across borders, taken me overseas and to unknown places. I truly believe words are more powerful than the fences of this place, this prison.”⁷⁶

Finally, it was a literary event that secured Boochani’s freedom. In November 2019, Boochani was given permission to leave Manus Island and travel to Aotearoa New Zealand to attend an in-conversation event for No Friend at the WORD Christchurch (writers’) festival. This trip engineered Boochani’s departure from Manus Island, and it was the first occasion he was able to attend a celebration of his work in person. Subsequently, in 2020 he was granted refugee status in Aotearoa New Zealand, and he attended the launch of Freedom, Only Freedom in Melbourne as a permanent resident of New Zealand.

Boochani’s presence in person on Australian soil has once again energised a national audience to engage with his work and the brutality of Australia’s offshore detention centres. As a curated selection of Boochani’s journalism from Manus, interspersed with essays and criticism from international activists, collaborators and academics, Freedom, Only Freedom is, like No Friend, a transnational book. In their introduction to Refugee Journeys, Jordana Silverstein and Rachel Stevens begin with a quotation from Boochani’s address during the Academics for Refugees National Day of Action read-in of No Friend. Here he implored academics to engage with Australia’s refugee and asylum seeker policies, stating that “it’s the duty of academics to understand and challenge this dark historical period, and teach new generations to prevent this kind of policy in the future”.⁷⁷ Silverstein and Stevens position their collection as “in part a response to Boochani’s call”, affirming the importance of scholarly interventions and demonstrating the influence that No Friend’s unique life continues to exert.⁷⁸ Returning to the biography of No Friend remains significant to the study of this text because it marks a unique confluence of literary prestige and celebration, political activism and solidarity, and local and transnational scales of reading and scholarship that are shaping the trajectories of a significant life narrative. While this biography, and the several texts that populate this vital testimonial culture, will continue to energise interdisciplinary study and activism into the future, reading and writing the lives of No Friend reveals the activist and political potential of the literary and cultural sphere that helped shape this singular work.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Behrouz Boochani, No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison, trans. Omid Tofighian (Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 2018), hereafter referred to as No Friend.

2 Alison Mountz, The Death of Asylum: Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement Archipelago (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 48.

3 Suvendrini Perera, Australia and the Insular Imagination: Beaches, Borders, Boats, and Bodies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 108, 110–11.

4 I take my use of this term from Boochani’s naming of Manus Regional Processing Centre, which Omid Tofighian outlines in “Translator’s Tale: A Window to the Mountains,” in Boochani, No Friend but the Mountains, xxvii.

5 Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 2.

6 Behrouz Boochani, “About,” Behrouz Boochani, accessed 24 February 2024, https://www.behrouzboochani.com/about-behrouz-boochani.

7 Paul Eggert, Biography of a Book: Henry Lawson’s While the Billy Boils (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2013), 9–10.

8 Nicholas Birns and Keyvan Allahyari, “Behrouz Boochani on Manus Island: Contesting Refugee Experience in the Global South,” Journal of Australian Studies 47, no. 3 (2023): 531–46, 531–32; Elio Attilio Baldi, “(Meta)Physical Homelessness in Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 57, no. 4 (2022): 399–416.

9 Birns and Allahyari, “Behrouz Boochani on Manus Island,” 531–46; Keyvan Allahyari, “The Boochani Effect: Public Feeling and the Limits of Refugee Authorship,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 59, no. 2 (2023): 1–14, 2.

10 Arianna Grasso, “Rewriting the Refugee Identity in Alter/Native Spaces: Behrouz Boochani on Twitter,” Journal of the European Association for Studies of Australia 10, no. 2 (2019): 22–35; Claudia Tazreiter, “The Emotional Confluence of Borders, Refugees and Visual Culture: The Case of Behrouz Boochani, Held in Australia’s Offshore Detention Regime,” Critical Criminology 28 (2020): 193–207, 197.

11 Eggert, Biography, 9.

12 Richard Flanagan, foreword to Boochani, No Friend but the Mountains, vii–x, ix.

13 Genette, Paratexts, 16.

14 Allahyari, “Boochani Effect,” 9.

15 Genette, Paratexts, 1.

16 Allahyari, “Boochani Effect,” 9.

17 Flanagan offers a glimpse of the other texts that might occupy this bookshelf of world prison literature alongside No Friend: “Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, Ray Parkin’s Into the Smother, Wole Soyinka’s The Man Died and Martin Luther King Jr’s Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Flanagan, foreword, vii.

18 Tofighian, “Translator’s Tale,” xvi.

19 Tofighian, “Translator’s Tale,” xiv.

20 Tofighian, “Translator’s Tale,” xiv.

21 Tofighian, “Translator’s Tale,” xxix; Birns and Allahyari, “Behrouz Boochani on Manus Island,” 531–46, 532.

22 Gillian Whitlock, “No Friend but the Mountains: How Should I Read This?,” Biography 43, no. 4 (2020): 705–23, 707.

23 Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 101.

24 Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 99.

25 Flanagan, foreword, ix.

26 Omid Tofighian and Behrouz Boochani, “Narrative Resistance and Manus Prison Theory,” Review of Middle East Studies 54, no. 2 (2020): 174–95, 192.

27 Behrouz Boochani et al., “Transnational Communities for Dismantling Detention: From Manus Island to the UK,” Community Psychology in Global Perspective 6, no. 1 (2020): 108–28, 109.

28 Flanagan, foreword, x.

29 Beth Driscoll, The New Literary Middlebrow: Tastemakers and Reading in the 21st Century (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 101.

30 Driscoll, The New Literary Middlebrow, 101.

31 Alexandra Dane, Gender and Prestige in Literature: Contemporary Australian Book Culture (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 43.

32 Dane, Gender and Prestige, 44.

33 Jeff Sparrow, “A Place of Punishment: No Friend but the Mountains by Behrouz Boochani,” Sydney Review of Books, 21 September 2018, https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/review/a-place-of-punishment-no-friend-but-the-mountains-by-behrouz-boochani/; Brigitta Olubas, “We Forgot our Names,” Public Books, 21 March 2019, https://www.publicbooks.org/we-forgot-our-names/.

34 Flanagan, foreword, vii, x.

35 CG, “Behrouz Boochani: No Friend but the Mountains,” The Saturday Paper, 4 August 2018, https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/2018/08/31/no-friend-the-mountains/15333048006654.

36 “Sparrow, “A Place of Punishment”.

37 CG, “Behrouz Boochani”; Alexandra Dane, “Political Resistance by Way of Literary Prizes,” The Lifted Brow, 8 February 2019, https://www.theliftedbrow.com/liftedbrow/2019/2/8/political-resistance-behrouz-boochani-no-friend-but-the-mountains-literary-prizes-by-alexandra-dane; Andrew Hamilton, “On First Reading Boochani on Manus,” Eureka Street, 7 May 2019, www.eurekastreet.com.au/article/on-first-reading-boochani-on-manus; Robert Manne, “No Friend but the Mountains Review: Behrouz Boochani’s Poetic and Vital Memoir,” Sydney Morning Herald, 10 August 2018, www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/no-friend-but-the-mountains-review-behrouz-boochanis-poetic-and-vital-memoir-20180801-h13fuu.html; Myra Opdyke, “Book Review: No Friend but the Mountains by Behrouz Boochani,” Writing NSW, 7 November 2018, https://writingnsw.org.au/myra-opdyke-no-friend-but-the-mountains-by- behrouz-boochani/.

38 Dane, Gender and Prestige, 27.

39 Dane, Gender and Prestige, 22.

40 Dane, “Political Resistance”.

41 Dane, “Political Resistance”.

42 Brigitta Olubas, “‘Where We Are Is Too Hard’: Refugee Writing and the Australian Border as Literary Interface,” JASAL 19, no. 2 (2019): 1–15, 1.

43 Keyvan Allahyari and Paul Rae, “Behrouz Boochani’s Literary Prize Cements his Status as an Australian Writer,” The Conversation, 1 February 2019, https://theconversation.com/behrouz-boochanis-literary-prize-cements-his-status-as-an-australian-writer-110986.

44 Allahyari and Rae, “Behrouz Boochani’s Literary Prize”.

45 In the same year, No Friend received the ABIA General Non-Fiction of the Year Award, the National Biography Award, and Special Award at the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards.

46 As recently as 7 February 2023, the Albanese government has renewed the “Instrument of Designation” authorising the continued use of the Republic of Nauru for refugee processing, which is a key clause for the continuation of Operation Sovereign Borders. See Paul Karp, “David Pocock Blasts Albanese Government as It Reauthorises Nauru Offshore Immigration Detention,” Guardian, 7 February 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/feb/07/david-pocock-blasts-labor-over-bid-to-reauthorise-nauru-offshore-immigration-detention.

47 Allahyari, “The Boochani Effect,” 1–14, 4.

48 Allahyari, “The Boochani Effect,” 4.

49 Tofighian, “No Friend but the Mountains: Translator’s Reflections,” in Boochani, No Friend but the Mountains, 359–74, 372.

50 Viet Thanh Nguyen, “The Post-Trump Future of Literature,” New York Times, 22 December 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/22/opinion/fiction-poetry-trump.html.

51 Allahyari, “The Boochani Effect,” 2.

52 Allahyari, “The Boochani Effect,” 4.

53 Tofighian and Boochani, “Narrative Resistance,” 177.

54 Including the NSW Premier’s Award 2019, the ABIA General Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2019, the National Biography Award 2019, and the Victorian Prize for Literature 2019.

55 Anna Poletti, “A Forum on Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison,” Biography 43, no. 4 (2020): 685–90, 687.

56 Poletti, “A Forum,” 689.

57 Poletti, “A Forum,” 688–89; Boochani et al., “Transnational Communities,” 108–28, 109.

58 Poletti, “A Forum,” 686.

59 Tofighian, “Translator’s Reflections,” 362.

60 Stephanie Bennett and Omid Tofighian, “Translation as Freedom, Experimentation, and Sharing: Omid Tofighian on Translating No Friend but the Mountains,” Biography 43, no. 4 (2020): 748–54, 751.

61 Whitlock, “No Friend but the Mountains,” 712.

62 Anna Poletti, “‘This place really needs a lot of intellectual work’: Behrouz Boochani’s Innovation in Life Writing as Transnational Intellectual Practice,” Biography 43, no. 4 (2020): 755–62, 760.

63 Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019), 1, 20.

64 Tofighian and Bennett, “Translation,” 751.

65 Rothberg, The Implicated Subject, 20.

66 Whitlock, “No Friend but the Mountains,” 714.

67 Rothberg, Implicated Subject, 21.

68 Crystal McKinnon, “Enduring Indigeneity and Solidarity in Response to Australia’s Carceral Colonialism,” Biography 43, no. 4 (2020): 691–704, 691; Flanagan, foreword, xi.

69 Flanagan, foreword, x.

70 McKinnon, “Enduring Indigeneity,” 700.

71 Maria Giannacopoulos, “Kyriarchy, Nomopoly, and Patriarchal White Sovereignty,” Biography 43, no. 4 (2020): 736–47, 737.

72 Giannacopoulos, “Kyriarchy,” 739.

73 Mountz, Death of Asylum, 197.

74 Özlem Belçim Galip, “From Mountains to Oceans: The Prison Narratives of Behrouz Boochani,” Biography 43, no. 4 (2020): 724–35.

75 Ben Doherty, “Manus Refugee Behrouz Boochani Asks for UK Visa to Attend Screening of his Film,” Guardian, 5 September 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/sep/05/refugee-behrouz-boochani-asks-for-uk-visa-to-attend-screening-of-his-film.

76 Behrouz Boochani, “Behrouz Boochani’s Literary Prize Acceptance Speech – Full Transcript,” Guardian, 1 February 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/01/behrouz-boochani-on-literary-prize-words-still-have-the-power-to-challenge-inhumane-systems#:~:text=With%20humility%2C%20I%20would%20like,recognised%20us%20as%20human%20beings.

77 Jordana Silverstein and Rachel Stevens, eds., Refugee Journeys: Histories of Resettlement, Representation and Resistance (Canberra: ANU Press, 2021), 10; Boochani’s full statement is available at https://academicsforrefugees.wordpress.com/nda-public-read-ins/?fbclid=IwAR2ZGL1CJIvvGtYKo5vyG-rfVpcQ9_SR61orz6t19I3UMnL3eA-BruEide0.

78 Silverstein and Stevens, Refugee Journeys, 10.