Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains is an extraordinary piece of writing tapped out on a mobile phone from the hell-hole of Manus Island, a terrible and poetic account of the degradation and brutality of Australia’s immigration detention system, and a formidable act of survival and resistance. Boochani, a journalist, writer and film-maker, has come to symbolise the grinding cruelty of Australia’s border policing policies. A Kurdish refugee from Iran, his second attempt to enter Australia to claim asylum ended in July 2013 when he and his fellow passengers were rescued from their foundering boat and handed over to the Australian navy, which took them into immigration detention on the Australian territory of Christmas Island. Four days earlier, the Australian government had announced it would be transferring all unauthorised boat arrivals to the detention centres on Manus Island and Nauru and denying them the right ever to be resettled in Australia.1 As a consequence, Boochani and several hundred other men (women and children were sent to Nauru) found themselves imprisoned indefinitely, propelled into the toxic mainstream of Australian politics as proof of the resolve of successive governments to ‘stop the boats’, and offered the miserable non-choice of returning ‘home’ or remaining trapped in a government-contrived limbo. Boochani’s narrative covers his two attempted boat journeys from Indonesia, his month spent on Christmas Island and ‘life’ in the ‘Manus Prison’ up until the attacks on the detention centre in February 2014 that resulted in the murder of another Iranian Kurd, Reza Barati. But this is not a conventional diary, detailing daily events, from the trivial to the traumatic, as they gradually unfold. Rather, drawing on Kurdish and Persian literary traditions amongst other devices detailed in the translator’s Introduction, it is a series of reflections that restores humanity to those who have been reduced to a number (in Boochani’s case, MEG45), documents the relentless reconfiguration of that humanity by the routine iniquities and violence of detention, and explores the nature of power and control within the Manus Prison. In doing this, Boochani deploys the concept of the ‘kyriarchy’, drawn from the work of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza ‘to describe a theory of interconnected social systems established for the purposes of domination, oppression and submission’ (p. 124, n. 6). Reflecting on increased tensions between Iranian and Afghan refugees, he writes:

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评论：Behrouz Boochani 的《除了山外没有朋友》

Behrouz Boochani 的 No Friend but the Mountains 是一部非凡的作品，是在马努斯岛的地狱洞中用手机敲出的，对澳大利亚移民拘留系统的退化和残暴以及令人生畏的生存行为进行了可怕而富有诗意的描述和阻力。Boochani 是一名记者、作家和电影制片人，他已经成为澳大利亚边境警务政策残酷无情的象征。一名来自伊朗的库尔德难民，他第二次进入澳大利亚寻求庇护的尝试于 2013 年 7 月结束，当时他和他的同伴从他们沉没的船上获救并移交给澳大利亚海军，后者将他们带到澳大利亚领土上的移民拘留所。圣诞岛。四天前，澳大利亚政府宣布将所有未经许可的船只抵达马努斯岛和瑙鲁的拘留中心，并剥夺他们在澳大利亚重新安置的权利。 1 结果，Boochani 和其他数百名男子（妇女和儿童被被送往瑙鲁）发现自己被无限期监禁，被推进澳大利亚政治的有毒主流，作为历届政府“停船”决心的证明，并提供了返回“家”或继续被困在政府中的悲惨的非选择- 人为的边缘。Boochani 的叙述涵盖了他从印度尼西亚出发的两次企图乘船旅行、他在圣诞岛度过的一个月以及在“马努斯监狱”中的“生活”，直到 2014 年 2 月对拘留中心的袭击导致另一名伊朗库尔德人被谋杀，雷扎·巴拉蒂。但这不是传统的日记，详细描述日常事件，从琐碎到创伤，随着它们逐渐展开。相反，利用库尔德和波斯文学传统以及译者引言中详述的其他手段，它是一系列反思，将人性恢复到那些已经减少到一定数量的人身上（在 Boochani 的案例中，MEG45），记录了对这些人的无情重构人类通过拘留的日常罪恶和暴力，探索马努斯监狱内权力和控制的本质。在此过程中，Boochani 运用了从 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza 的作品中汲取的“kyriarchy”概念，“描述了一种为统治、压迫和服从目的而建立的相互关联的社会系统的理论”（第 124 页，第 6 期） ）。