Behrouz Boochani, 35, is a Kurdish journalist, poet and film producer. On his second attempt to make a boat crossing from Indonesia to Australia he was intercepted, detained on Christmas Island and after one month was transferred to the Manus Island detention centre in August 2013 where he remains. This is his latest report from detention.
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It is one of those hot, sweltering days in Manus Prison. A guard takes me to a room located deep within a cluster of offices. The imprisoned refugees know these rooms as spaces for the immigration officials, and they are also places for interrogation.
No windows.
Totally grey.
A CCTV camera installed on the ceiling.
Two chairs.
One table.
One room. Like a typical interrogation room.
One of the officers stands in front of the door. He stands like a dutiful soldier. The other officer sits on the opposite side of the table to me. He places a parcel on the table. He looks up at the CCTV camera and opens it. The parcel contains dozens of letters and postcards. The officers smile at each other. One of them says in amazement: “It seems that a lot of people really love you. This huge batch of letters is pretty amazing.”
The letters were from members of PEN; the organisation had sent me letters from people living in different cities and who wrote directly to me. I must admit, that at moment I was like a little kid at a party who had just received gifts from all his loved ones. I experienced that simple feeling of joy particular to childhood. However, more than anything else, I felt proud. I felt proud as I confronted the smiles of the prison wardens. I felt proud as I stared back at the astonished prison warden guarding the door.
You see, the pride I felt represented something special, a remarkable feeling that signalled I am a human being. It confirmed that there are people who love me, that I was worthy of love just like everyone else. Without a doubt, for people looking at this prison from the outside, for people who are not incarcerated, there may not seem to be anything particularly significant about this scene. It is like one of those same encounters one goes through thousands of times a day, the same for thousands of people, in thousands of places around the world. But for me, imprisoned here in a remote and forgotten prison, this was no everyday experience. It was a source of an incredible realisation, I was reminded that I am still alive, I am still a worthy human being, and there are people who are watching out for me.
Actually, this scene revealed something unique; it evoked a particular emotion in direct opposition to the dehumanising politics of the Manus prison, a system that has made an example of my body and soul for years, made an example of the bodies and minds of thousands of other refugees, and tried to exclude us from the very category of human being.
Living in Manus prison is nothing other than extermination of the self through rules and regulations, erasure in accordance with a system that lasts for years. The system implements its method with the objective of distorting your sense of self so you forget that you are human. In fact, this encounter with the parcel of letters was an existential challenge to rise up against a system that has clearly tried to experiment with and destroy our personal identities over the years.
In that setting, the prison wardens represented the system and I represented the human beings who have been incarcerated in Manus prison, humans who have been debased to such an unfathomable extent, debased to the point where one has no identity, reduced to nothing but a number.
However, this is just one side of the coin. The other side is as significant. The fact is that this experience – or similar such experiences – should have occurred many years earlier. I am a writer and for years I have felt the same way a young schoolboy feels when he gets into a fight with an older kid but knows that he has a big brother in the playground. The schoolboy expects that at any moment his older brother will come to back him up. But on every occasion the big brother never turns up to help.
I am like this schoolboy, left to fight against a giant bully. What I am saying is that like many people in the world, PEN was not able to understand or believe what Australia, a so-called democracy, was doing to us in the Manus prison and so was slow in supporting our cases and promoting our voices.
I have shared this feeling with poet and writer Janet Galbraith and writer Arnold Zable. They are my best friends and have been my greatest supporters for years. They have had a pivotal role in the journey, they have traversed this path with me throughout the years. They know how I wrote critical letters on a number of occasions. They know that I threw them in the rubbish every time and did not publish them for one reason or another.
Let me put it in simple terms, as an imprisoned writer I am adamant that the organisation has not supported me in the way that it should have.
I am an imprisoned writer from a country controlled by a religious dictatorship and I have experienced five years of living and writing unrelentingly in Manus Prison. I have arrived at a unique understanding of concepts such as politics, liberty and freedom of speech. In a country like Iran you do not have the freedom to write what you wish, but in a liberal democracy you are relatively free to write as you like. However, the system can censor you with ease, censor you in a systematic way, silence you in ways that even if you were to shout no one would hear. And even if they hear you, they do not have the capacity to understand. This has been my experience on Manus Island.
The two major Australian political parties practically control ninety percent of the media landscape, they have the power and dominate the Australian political sphere. For nearly five years they have conducted a program of systematic censorship against me and the other imprisoned refugees on Manus Island and Nauru. During these years I have basically been able to work with ten percent of media organisations, the only space I could access to scream out and convey the suffering in this prison. The forms of systematic censorship are various. Sometimes, I am ignored; other times I am insulted; and other times the censorship is accompanied by political propaganda. When combined, the distortion becomes so intense that the Australian people cannot receive any correct information.
During all these years I have tried to break through the barriers of systematic censorship with the support of the other refugees and human rights advocates, including PEN Melbourne which has been active in promoting my work, active in re-telling some of the suffering inflicted in this prison. But I must admit that after five years I have been unsuccessful. The Kyriarchal System has determined that we must remain forgotten, remain wretched. Throughout this time I have pursued the same path. And now, after so much struggle, I feel I am still at the very beginning.
It is this systematic form of censorship, this understanding of the Kyriarchal System that needs to be examined by PEN in order to understand the evolving forms of torture and censorship by liberal democracies like Australia and to inform new critical and creative actions.
Manus prison is a product and logical conclusion of a system that also creates the institution known as PEN. This system produces the university, academia, and cultural industries; knowledge production and cultural production are integral parts of the system. I truly believe that if the cultural industries that function within liberal democratic countries were to critique the system appropriately and adequately the Australian-run prisons on Manus Island and Nauru would not have emerged.
Manus prison is a dangerous phenomenon. It impacts on other liberal democratic societies and has influenced the character of civil society in these countries. PEN and other literary and cultural organisations have not been able to grasp the philosophy driving Manus prison and its historical legacy.
Although the institution of PEN has not accompanied me on this path, for years it has played a central role in giving me a sense of safety in this prison. Due to the presence of PEN, I was sure that the Australian government could never get away with killing me like it did 10 other refugees in Manus Island, Nauru and Christmas Island. And I know that there are also many writers all over the world who are in significant danger.
Perhaps it is better to describe this as a letter from a younger imprisoned brother to his older brother. After years of resistance in Manus prison I have come to the conclusion that it is better to fight like the young schoolboy who is up against a much bigger bully, and not wait for my older brother to come help. I must remain independent. I must fight on my own. The only thing that stands with a writer is the pen, just the pen… the pen and nothing else.
In the coming weeks my first book will be released titled No Friend But The Mountains: Writing From Manus Prison. We are the forgotten people of history…we have no friend other than the mountains.
Behrouz Boochani is a non-resident Visiting Scholar at the Sydney Asia Pacific Migration Centre at University of Sydney. Translation by Omid Tofighian, American University in Cairo/University of Sydney. Editing by Janet Galbraith
PEN's Response:
PEN was not able…
Dear Behrouz,
These are your words and they haunt PEN members.
We have so little to fight the system, the “giant bully”. Only the conviction that governments can be shamed, that liberty and freedom of speech are irreducible conditions for civilised society and human fellowship. And our writing.
We write letters – to the newspaper, to ministers, to departmental heads. We demonstrate in the streets – memorials alas, protests. PEN verified your case (despite difficulty in getting details from “the giant bully”), recorded it in our Writers in Prison Casebook, and continues to coordinate our protests. Work that has verifiably brought about the release of prisoners and changes of policy.
Few in PEN have connections and political influence to stop the enactment of laws of surveillance and detention, but writers need not to give in to the worst, the silencing. We were not supposed to know about Manus and Nauru – no-one who had been there, was supposed to talk or write about it. But they DID talk. No-one was supposed to talk about navy and border force manoeuvres, conducted covertly.
You have achieved the miracle of direct communication.
It’s hard to express our frustration, at a time when bigoted politicians have promoted an inhuman belief: that resisting desperate immigrants is necessary for the nation - and, it seems, works for their electoral advantage. I can only answer, I don’t know anyone who believes that. Behrouz, thank you for telling us of the disappointment, the despair added to your burden - how could it be otherwise. We shall continue to work – to do what we can.
- Judith Rodriguez
Vice-President of International PEN
Dear Behrouz,
Please know that many of us seethe with frustration at a government that will not listen to its own citizens voices, not to mention yours and others in its putative care. Like many other members of PEN (and non-members too) I have written many times to our politicians on the importance of closing these camps, and behaving in a humane and responsible manner to people who ask us for refuge, and as befits our status as a wealthy and democratic country with ‘boundless plains to share’. I admire you immensely. Stay strong.
The situation is maddening. Essentially, the world has become one enormous prison – controlled remotely by surveillance technologies, propaganda and “reward and punishment” schemes – all devised by psychopathically inclined personalities who are recruited into systems management positions. Many people within socalled “liberal” or “democratic” societies of the early 21st century are no more free than anyone was in any other century, in fact many are more oppressed than ever. We live under torturous mechanisations with previously secret military codenames such as “Grillflame” and “MKULTRA”: constructed to literally overtake central nervous systems and control, thieve from, and burgalarise minds and bodies by remotely operated radar. Psychotronic torture has become a reality on a wide spread scale, where some victims struggle to describe what is happening – and others struggle to understand them. It is amazing, under these circumstances, that any letters are sent or any personal logs published at all!
Alan, the only person talking up Centrelink here is u …never met anyone on it who’d recommend it…and besides to even bring this up here is just monumentally insensitive and casts a poor reflection on your ability to empathise or even read…
maybe u should stop promoting Centrelink on comment sections if u don’t want ppl coming to a country im99% is. Not even yours coz I find it hard to believe you’re First Nations person..lu just have a strong white culture vibe lollike hateful N mean
Dear Behrouz, thank you for your heart-wrenching letter. I don’t know how you find the strength to keep fighting, analysing with so much wisdom and accuracy the evil deeds of this fascist government. We will never stop standing for you and all those on Manus, Nauru and Christmas Island until the very last is out and FREE at last, in a safe place where you can rebuild your lives. You have so much talent, so much resilience and so much courage. Australia is sadly blemishing its name forever, joining the infamous Nazi persecutors, the representatives of Apartheid at its worse, Israel persecuting the Palestinian people, and the Myanmar government committing genocide on the Rohingya people. We will not let history repeat itself without standing up, constantly, for human values against a psychopathic government. You are in our hearts and minds and we engage with you and your friends daily on social media. Please keep up the fight, and also the flow of information, as long as you humanly can. You are an extraordinary man. Thank you for all that you do.
Thank you Behrouz, beautifully written,
gut wrenching sad and as always -challenging.
I can only promise to never give up and to do everything I can to change this systemic inhumanity. We rely on your words for truth that can be shared. I am so very sorry you feel so alone. I have no doubt that so many are so very grateful that you continue to fight the bully.