![]() In this article I argue that by addressing the literary aspects of the book and investigating the way in which Boochani uses a variety of literary tools and topoi, new and understudied aspects of the narrative come to the fore. The book is thus framed as testimony and non-fiction, and consequently it has attracted critical commentary that is largely dedicated to the content, only occasionally addressing the complex form of the narrative, its intricate interweaving of fact and fiction, dream and reality, prose and poetry. The cover announces ‘The true story of an illegally imprisoned refugee’, and the reader is faced – directly scrutinized – by the author, whose photo forms the cover of the book. The inclusion of the quotation is an indication of why the book is (understandably) marketed as non-fiction. 1 A quotation from The Guardian article which states this is reproduced on the first page, which presents a selection of quotations from different media and foregrounds this important fact. Even so, as pointed out in an article in The Guardian, the author of the book was not welcome in Australia at the time of receiving the Victorian Premier Prize for Non-Fiction and the Victorian Prize for Literature in 2019, nor at the time of writing this article. Since its publication in 2018, Behrouz Boochani’s prize-winning No Friend but the Mountains has quickly conquered Australia and many other countries alike. After losing the right to their place, the detainees gradually lose their ability to conceive of a different world that includes the homeless. I argue that the loss of home is normatively and performatively repeated in Manus Prison, presenting the prisoners with a form of discipline and violence both physical and metaphysical. ![]() This article explores an important nucleus of Boochani’s book, a motif that runs through his narrative, both explicitly and figuratively: home and homelessness. Although understandably sold as non-fiction and therefore marketed mostly as a testimony, Boochani’s interweaving of different genres renders the book resistant to classification, just as its author is difficult to define and ‘categorize’ in our world of nation states and borders. ![]() During these years of detention, he wrote a book in WhatsApp messages on his phone: No Friend but the Mountains (2018). Behrouz Boochani is a Kurdish-Iranian writer who was detained on Manus Island, in northern Papua New Guinea, for more than four years.
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