Reflections from Manus and Nauru

Image by Farhad Bandesh.

The following artworks, writing, poetry and music come from four asylum seekers—Mustafa, Abbas, Farhad, and Behrouz—who have been detained for the past five years by the Australian Government on Manus Island and Nauru. Hundreds of refugees have been detained illegally and inhumanely in prison-like detention centres on these two islands. This piece provides a small window into some of the journeys, voices, and feelings of those detained.

Chanting of Crickets, Ceremonies of Cruelty: A Mythic Topography of Manus Prison
by Behrouz Boochani

This is an excerpt from Behrouz Boochani’s book, ‘No Friend But the Mountains: Writing From Manus Prison’, translated by Omid Tofighian and published by Picador in 2018. This chapter was also published in Island Magazine 150.

The human being is born enduring affliction.

The human being lives while enduring affliction.

The human being dies by enduring affliction.

The human being realises affliction.

The human being is cognisant of whatever
pertains to affliction.

Lamentation
Crying out
Wailing
Weeping.
The human being experiences all of these things.
The human being has deep knowledge of all of
these things.

That night. The one night that I’m talking about is the
night when I was having convulsions as a result of toothache.
And I bashed my head a number of times against
the metal container holding the bathrooms.
I could hear a faint moaning sound.

The intensity and fear resonating in the sound completely
stopped me in my tracks. It was the sound of
painful moaning. It was the sound of a man that seemed
to be convulsing in pain. These particular kinds of
sounds make one’s hair stand on end.

The sound of the deepest kind of affliction.

The sound of hopelessness. A nightmare about
the nights. A nightmare about loneliness.

The sound of moaning inside the cauldron of the
dark night.

The sound of moaning floating over the ocean.

The sound of moaning wading through the
jungle that lay beyond the fences.

The sound of moaning dragged itself along in
combination with other sounds.

The sound of moaning, like a poisonous arrow
from the archer’s bow.

The sound of moaning, a sound without rebound
against the darkness of night.

The sound of moaning, then it disappeared out
into the universe.

The prison had fallen into a heavy silence; the
prison had fallen into heavy sleep. Only the
sound of crickets; they hollowed out the depths
of silence even further. The very great weight
of the silence had infused the moaning with a
destructive power.

My god, prison is so horrific. Prison is so
oppressive. Prison is so merciless. 

The moaning could’ve even been the sound of clouds tearing apart – this was the way it felt to me. Exactly like the intensity of wrath and power manifested by thunder and lightning strikes in springtime. Perhaps deep wounds and scars struck down from the clouds and heavens with higher voltage than thunder and lightning. The coconut trees, however, offered their hair up to the zephyr. They were quivering, they were also frightened.

A Papu rested his back against one of the contain­ers, his cap on his lap, twirling a stick in his mouth. I think he was at the peak of getting high off betel nut; his mind was free and he closed his eyes without a care for anything going on around him. This experience was a mix of slumber, wakefulness and a drug-induced state; however, it was a special moment of liberation unique to the Papus. The Papu paid no attention whatsoever to the moaning that spiralled out through the atmosphere. He had completely dedicated his mind and body to his betel nut intoxication.

And so the moaning continued. But on every occa­sion it hid deep within the heart of the dark sky with another kind of shudder and force. Every instance of moaning, more than anything, evoked the eerie sublim­ity of the jungle, the ocean, and the prison.

My toothache began to settle. Perhaps when the forces of two forms of affliction, from two separate origins, collide, one has to succumb due to the impact and resistance. Maybe something like this had occurred for me. My toothache was directly connected to inter­weaving nerves deep within the core of my gums. And my affliction was facing off with the affliction of another just a few metres away – behind the fences – it sounded like hopelessness – the sound emitted from a place of profound hopelessness – my toothache was forced to withdraw. Maybe we shared the same feeling of afflic­tion; one and the same substance: the affliction at the root of the moaning, the affliction down there in the depths of my soul.

Behrouz Boochani graduated from Tarbiat Moallem University and Tarbiat Modares University, both in Tehran; he holds a Masters degree in political science, political geography and geopolitics. He is a Kurdish-Iranian writer, journalist, scholar, cultural advocate and filmmaker. Boochani was writer for the Kurdish language magazine Werya; is Honorary Member of PEN International; winner of an Amnesty International Australia 2017 Media Award, the Diaspora Symposium Social Justice Award, the Liberty Victoria 2018 Empty Chair Award, and the Anna Politkovskaya Award for journalism; and he is non-resident Visiting Scholar at the Sydney Asia Pacific Migration Centre (SAPMiC), University of Sydney. He publishes regularly with The Guardian, and his writing also features in The Saturday Paper, Huffington Post, New Matilda, The Financial Times and The Sydney Morning Herald. Boochani is co-director (with Arash Kamali Sarvestani) of the 2017 feature-length film Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time; collaborator on Nazanin Sahamizadeh’s play Manus; and author of No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison (Picador 2018).

Artwork
by Abbas Alaboudi