Page 23 - IB Mar 2020

Review

BEHROUZ BOOCHANI’S

NO FRIEND BUT THE MOUNTAINS

AN OCEANIAN LENS

By Michelle Nayahamui Rooney

I have resisted reading Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but
the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison, because as a
Papua New Guinean and someone who identifies as being from
Manus, I am angry about and tired of the incessant negative
portrayals of Manus unleashed by the presence there of the
Australian asylum seeker Regional Processing Centre (RPC).
I finally picked up the book last November as part of a small
project exploring some of the impacts of the RPC on Manus.
The book is a masterpiece. It has been critically acclaimed
and widely reviewed, but not from a Papua New Guinean or
Manus person’s perspective. Hence this review.
Central to Pacific history, society, politics, culture, and
identity is the ocean and oceanic journeys. Epeli Hau’ofa’s
famous essay, Our Sea of Islands, highlights the importance
of the ocean and calls for every Pacific island to challenge
dominant, usually outsider and usually negative, framings of
the region. Similarly, for Boochani, the ocean is omnipotent. From page 23
In the first part of the book, Boochani, an asylum seeker and
an outsider to the Pacific, embarks on his perilous crossings
across the ocean between Indonesia and Australia. The ocean
is the singular harrowing pathway he must follow in search
of freedom. It is the judge and the jury, capable of dealing
a death sentence. It is the canvas for Australia’s “Pacific
Solution”. It is where Christmas Island and Manus Island float,
their own agencies apprehended, appropriated as existential
parts of what Boochani presents as the oppressive “Kyriarchal
System”. In his journey Boochani totally immerses in the
ocean and in doing so internalises Oceanic narratives of
migration, settlement, and resettlement.
Scholars of the Pacific have extensively discussed the lens, sovereignty, self-representation, and portrayal.
historical and contemporary hegemonic power of Australia, Throughout the book, the sounds of birds, crickets, frogs, the
New Zealand and other geopolitical powers in the Pacific. In sea, the jungles, and the “free spirits” of locals, and others,
the second part of the book, Boochani makes these hegemonic all significant Manus people’s identities and social lives,
transnational powers visible by tracing his transfer within the vividly bring the local context to life. It is sad to see such
detention spaces through the borders between Indonesia, familiar features of Manus life inscribed into such sorrowful
Australia and Papua New Guinea. and horrific circumstances even though they all surrounded
I was keenly looking out for Boochani’s first impression of Boochani during his time on Manus, gifted him their spirits,
Manus. Arriving in Manus, Boochani notes (p. 101): and formed the fertile ground for his voice to grow. In
“Manus Island is in the distance. A beautiful stranger lying bringing these beautiful features of Manus to the global
in the midst of a massive breadth of water. Where the ocean arena, Boochani has rendered Manus a tabula rasa and Manus
meets the shore, the water turns white, but further out the people invisible, inscribing Manus indigenous lore and symbols
ocean wears swampy shades of green and blue. It is a riot like a palimpsest to serve his purpose.
of colours, the colour spectrum of madness. Now the ocean In the final part of the book, Boochani explores death as
is behind us and we are face to face with an exquisite and the ultimate outcome of the system; the countless acts of
pristine jungle … Manus is beautiful.” self-harm and the tragic deaths of two detainees. Violence
Sadly, but for very valid reasons because the book centres and self-harm became the public face of the centre leading
around the experiences of the asylum seeker, beautiful eventually to growing calls by Manus and PNG leaders for it to
Manus is quickly subsumed into Boochani’s “Manus Prison”.
Boochani’s book is a brutal blow to Manus’s epistemological Continue on page 35

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