Weighted Disposition

From the depths of the mind of one of Australia’s most notorious refugee detainees, Freedom Only Freedom follows in the footsteps of Behrouz Boochani’s first book, No Friend but the Mountain, in accurately, painstakingly, and directly describing the conditions for people locked in detention after seeking asylum in Australia via boat.

As a Kurdish-Iranian author and journalist, Behrouz Boochani wrote directly from Manus Island, where he spent over half a decade in detention. His writings are poetic, raw and aim to hold authority to account for what he described as the routine torture of detainees.

I’ll read a brief piece of poetry from his chapter entitled ‘A Letter from Manus Island’:

“The refugees have been resisting with their very lives.

Against the real politics of the day.

With their very bodies.

With peace as a way of being and as an expression.

With rejection of violence.

With a kind of political poetics.”

Former Minister for Immigration and Border Protection Peter Dutton famously stated Boochani would never be allowed to step foot on Australian soil.

However Boochani, who was granted refugee status in New Zealand in 2020, has recently visited Australia promoting Freedom Only Freedom and calling for the Royal Commission into both offshore and onshore detention, to investigate deaths and systemic harms.

“Forty people have been killed on Manus Island and Nauru, hundreds of people have been damaged,” Boochani told the ABC.

Since 2013, the Australian government has forcibly transferred more than 3,000 asylum seekers who sought to reach Australia by boat to offshore processing camps in Papua New Guinea and Nauru. Human Rights Watch says: “Under international law, immigration detention should not be used as punishment, but rather should be an exceptional measure of last resort to carry out a legitimate aim.”

Boochani’s advocacy shines a light on some of the darkest human rights breaches in modern Australian history, he is a man who has refused to be silenced and in Freedom Only Freedom his voice echoes loud and clear.