Status
Available
Call number
Collections
Publication
London : Picador, 2019.
Subjects
Original publication date
2018
ISBN
9781529028485
Description
"In 2013, Kurdish journalist Behrouz Boochani was illegally detained on Manus Island, a refugee detention centre off the coast of Australia. He has been there ever since. This book is the result. Laboriously tapped out on a mobile phone and translated from the Farsi. It is a voice of witness, an act of survival. A lyric first-hand account. A cry of resistance. A vivid portrait through five years of incarceration and exile."--
User reviews
LibraryThing member questbird
Behrouz Boochani is a Kurdish journalist who is still imprisoned on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea as a result of the Australian Government's punitive policy toward asylum seekers who arrive in Australia by boat. This book is written in a poetic rather than pragmatic style, and it describes the
Show More
desperate monotony and the systematic oppression of the Manus Prison System, which is apparently designed to break the spirits of its inmates. Boochani names other prisoners with titles like The Cow, The Hero, The Man with the Thick Moustache. With his life stuck in an eternal stinking, hopeless present, the author manages to find some delight in the jungle and the ocean surrounding the camp. Show Less
LibraryThing member ElizabethCromb
Took a bit to get used to the style but every Australian should read this before deciding whether they agree with the off-shore solution as defined by successive Australian governments.
LibraryThing member PhilipJHunt
What an achievement! Documenting the legal cruelty of Australia's "Stop The Boats" policy, Boochani exposes the awful reality of these concentration camps (styled "detention centres" with Orwellian resonance). These are not mere prisons, and Boochani shows us what they really are--facilities for
Show More
the destruction of the human spirit. All the twisted cruelties of power without responsibility, the caprice of meaningless and constantly changing rules and routines, casual pointless violence. Soul destroying? That's the clear intention, too stark to dismiss as negligent incompetence. Every Australian should read this. And Boochani should get the Nobel Prize for Literature. As a piece of writing, this book is a phenomenon. Show Less
LibraryThing member brakketh
Harrowing tale from a refugee on Manus Island.
Similar in this library
Call number
BA BOOCHANI