Spirits of Resistance: Collective Practices of Freedom in Behrouz Boochani’s Prison Writings - Dr Rebecca Hill (RMIT)

This paper reads Behrouz Boochani’s prison writing, especially his autobiographical novel No Friend but the Mountains (2018d) and his manifesto, “A Letter from Manus Island” (2017a). He wrote these works while incarcerated in Australian immigration detention on Manus Island. His writing is acclaimed for its meticulous description and analysis of the atrocities of the immigration detention regime. I argue that his thought should also be read as a sustained thinking of collective practices of freedom. The practices of freedom that Boochani articulates emerge in “profound relations” of feeling between people, animals, plants, the oceans, and winds who resist the prison or what he calls Manus Prison Theory (2017a; 2018d). His thinking of freedom is a thinking with place and his writing is traced with the places that he writes in.