No Friend but the Mountains
Behrouz Boochani. PICADOR, Pan MacMillan, Australia
Tr. Omid Tofgighian
Review and commentary by Bronwyn Mills
Among the more recent and most dastardly practices of the current US regime, is its treatment of refugees. But that behavior is not a unique chapter in the unfolding tale of Western arrogance, cruelty, and ignorance. Like the US, Australia has most recently inaugurated a Dranconian immigration policy rooted in its deep-seated xenophobia and current relapse into populism. No people via boats. Asylum seekers? Pah! Let them go home. Right. Having been close to someone working with such folks, I remember the one outstanding criteria: Why can't you go home, Sir/Mme./Mlle./hey you!?
Because I will be killed. |
What on earth is wrong here? How can such abuses be put, adequately, into words?
In No Friend but the Mountains, Kurdish Iranian, Behrouz Boochani offers his readers a diagnosis of one of the systems of domination, regulated, elaborated, and otherwise implemented against those in detention--Kyriarachy, derrived from a neologism coined by feminist theologian, Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenzi. Or, as Boochani's translator, Omid Tofgighian, applies it to Australia's version,
…the ideological substrata that have a governing function in the prison…denoting the spirit that is sovereign over the detention center and Australia's ubiquitous border-industrial complex.
We could launch into a further, perhaps scholarly, analysis of this diabolical means of imprisonment: experientially, novelist Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Detained (republished as Wrestling with the Devil: a Prison Memoir) describes his own incarceration in a Kenyan prison a number of years ago; and many other writers have recorded their similar experiences. The essay we have reprinted by Joe Dimow analyzes the knuckling down to authority on the part of persons asked to enact acts of cruelty towards their fellow human beings (simply, as Adolf Eichmann protested, following orders.) But Dimow's experience was in the guise of an 'experiment' about responses to authority in a Western, so-called democratic state—the empirical 'why' of compliance with what one knows to be wrong/cruel/immoral. Metaphorically, in a state where the majority appears to move about freely, pockets of 'contained' authoritarianism exist and are policed as necessary institutions: 'regular' prisons such as the one where Ngugi was incarcrated, boot camps, and institutions reserved for populations where special restraint is deemed necessary. The zing taken out of the latter's sting by silly nicknames like "funny farm," "nuthouse," etc.; and, among others, such confinement has been immortalized in such novels as Ken Kesey's novel, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. And presently we have increasing numbers of detention camps for refugees, persons incarcerated not on the basis of having comitted a crime, but on the basis of untenable assumptions about what constitutes "them" and "us" —no charge, no trial, no defense. The Trial, by Franz Kafka, in which a nameless person is arrested and persecuted, comes to mind: neither Josef K. (as much as a name as Kafka's character is given) nor the reader knows for what crime.
Even in a "regular" prison, as Ngugi wa Thiong'o has related, political prisoners, in particular, are carefully, but casually, robbed of their identity as human beings. Forget a first name and an initial: "Here I have no name. I am just a number on file: K6,77." It is essential to the system to do so, to strip the imprisoned of their humanity; for a number is not a name.[1] As a detained refugee, too, Behrouz has a number, MEG45, instantly more relevant to his captors than his name. Ultimately, believing in authority rather than trusting their own judgement, as Ngugi also points out, even "[n]ight warders [guards] are themselves prisoners guarding other prisoners." The system feeds on itself.
Such bizarre situations, then, invite the surreal, the darkly satirical, the descriptive tools of the novelist, even the poet. Indeed, I find it difficult to imagine how any writer in such circumstances could not see that such experiences require the surreal, the mythical, the distorted when set down to words.
As a refugee, Behrouz Boochani fled Iran in well-founded fear of harm and took a boat from Indonesia, heading for Australia; and No Friend but the Mountains begins with a straight narrative, the harrowing account of his first boat ride. At sea, the boat begins to sink; but the occupants are rescued by a passing British ship and returned to Indonesia. But then the experience is, with variation, repeated. Boochani sets out once more; and, though the travelers are not party to that information, the Australian government's policy that they would accept NO more refugees coming by boat was announced mid-crossing. Australian military waylaid the refugees, including Behrouz, and, instead of refuge, he and the others were taken to Manus Island, part of Papua New Guinea, where Australia had made some sort of treaty or accord with Papua New Guinea to do Australia's dirty work, and incarcerated in what is and was euphemistically called a "detention center." In reality, a prison. (One is reminded of Orwell's "doublespeak," as we see the gap between semantics and propaganda close.)
The majority of the book then deals with Boochani's experience on Manus Island, his observations, his thoughts about the system that energizes it. He does not go completely fictional, as did Kafka or Kesey, but he deliberately constructs his narrative using what he calls "literary language." Thus, while the book does not hide Boochani as having been an academic, specializing in geopolitics, he uses lay language, narrative, and certain tropes employed in contemporary Kurdish literature to describe his experience. It is not a thesis, struggling towards neutrality and to be, however thoughtfully, "discussed" as one might in a classroom. As such, the book is a remarkable piece of engaged literature, a hybrid of experience and, as noted above, the elasticity of the word in the service of a bizarre reality.
Even the manner in which this his book was written approaches the surreal: text message after text message, on smuggled cell phones; translated from Farsi; and—much as I have inveighed against this sort of thing—moved along a lifeline of WhatsApp (purveyor of thousands of hate messages re: the Rohingya in Burma/Mayanmar,) and social media channels. Of course, unlike the majority of privileged users, Boochani does not mess around. No implement of narcissistic 'entertainment' this.
Further, one could become distracted by turning to the question of language: I know not one word of Farsi, and so cannot judge Boochani's language, its play, its music, or its construction of metaphor. Certainly, the translation into English reads idiomatically and smoothly; and Tofgighian has included some useful notes on Boochani's writing which also help orient the Western reader to how Boochani uses and is situated in Kurdish literary tradition, and the latter despite his use of Farsi rather than Kurdish (another theme which Tofgighian touches upon.)
Indeed, I have taken a shamefully cursory look at a few of the Kurdish writers listed in Tofgighian's introduction: all indications are of a highly sophisticated corpus badly needing more international exposure. Take just one example, I Stared at the Night of the City by Bakhtiyar Ali, trans. Kareem Abdulrahman. Ali dances around narration, myth, slippery characters both real and unreal including a thoroughly unreliable fiend who is hunting down three men. Quickly we are thrust into an unfettered consideration of good and evil. Now, though Boochani disguises the identity of a number of those he writes about to protect them, his book is neither mendacious nor moralistic. But its author does not shrink from exposing the pervasive evil in Australia's offshore soft white underbelly. The words of Ali's amoral narrator could easily be Boochani describing the methods of the Australian kyriarchy: "He had to get inside the souls of the three men, carve them [out] from the inside and rewrite them."
Further, translator Tofgighian emphasizes that the "fragmented or disrupted stream of consciousness" manner of Boochani's…writing [which is] is poetic and surreal, often presenting a theatre where both secular and scared narratives and rituals are adapted and performed…[which] revives Kurdish oral and literary history to meet modern accounts of resistance, political amibition and persecution—an established approach in Kurdish literature….
Boochani's "disrupted stream of consciousness" takes flight, if one can put it that way, when he is tormented by the convergence of sounds of a prisoner in solitary confinement moaning and his own physical pain—a toothache. Boochani imagines himself as a multispecied creature, like a cat, then a monkey, and leaps to the roof of a corridor. He recalls his boyhood in the mountains raiding pidgeon nests in Kurdish chestnut oak trees:
By now I am sure than anyone who could climb the coarse trunks of chesnut oak trees could also climb the
hardest and most slippery obstacles with ease. It's no joking matter—I'm a child of the mountains. No different
to a cat.
And then he acts:
I have forgotten my toothache now that I am in the mood and state of mind of being a cat….In three moves I
quickly manage to get myself onto the roof of the corridor….It is still twilight and focusing my eyes I make
another move; with the concentration of a hunter pursuing prey…"
In transmogrifing from cat to monkey, he says admonishes himself, "Imagine carefully. Exactly like a monkey that dangles off the branch of a tall tree." And that "imagine carefully" leaves the reader in an ambiguous state: is Bochani really leaping onto a roof, or are we meant to imagine that he is? Is that no man's land between imagination and reality, as he puts it in the chapter's title, the "Mythic Topography of Manus Prison"? Not unlike tropes in recent Kurdish literature, such unanswered questions leave readers in an ambivalent state of uncertainty. The no man's land of Kurdish statelessness (in Iran, at least), of being neither fish nor fowl (human nor cat?), not a criminal but criminalized…
Boochani's myth, dream, psychology, and analysis mixes with obervation of his and his fellow prisoners lives, and these too hit home. Rather than numbers, partly to protect their identities, but also as a fictional trope in the midst of the absurdity of incarceration, his characters have fanciful nicknames. There is, for instance, "Maysam The Whore" who outrageously performs, satirizes, minces and enlivens the camp, once dressing up as a religious leader but with slits down the side of his robes (these made from blue bedsheets,) eliciting whoops and cheers for his his agile dancing and wriggling of his backside, always outrageous. He declares gay sex completely permissable. "He can be seen making hilarious props and making the prisoners burst with laughter…" His humor and ridicule are all that are needed to upset the system and remind the prisoners of "the essence of life." Another character is Reza, the Gentle Giant, whom Boochani does name, to commemorate his loss: he is murdered by the camp guards.
Reza is the most powerful and tallest man in the prison and engages in a way that is completely different from the rest.
Throughout the prison are many men who try to maintain their dignity. But the gentleness in Reza’s behaviour is much
greater than you might see in others. In some particularly kind and forgiving people, there is also a strain of self-centredness,
which gives them fortitude to tolerate life, to see its sophistication, to see it with balance. But Reza is different. His generosity
amazes those around him. All the Kurds, and then everyone else in the prison, know him as The Gentle Giant. Although,
sometime later, we drop the adjective ‘Gentle’, as it makes his name too long. We just call him The Giant.
There is the "Cow" who "seems to construct his sense of self by distrubing others." And so on. The prison becomes a theatre; Boochani's memoir, a picaresque novel, even experimental fiction. Though prose sections are divided irregularly by a poetic distillation—a typical Kurdish literary trope apparently, though the weaker of Tofgighian's otherwise masterly translation, when all is said and done, the book is a tough read. No picnic in the park. In detention Ngugi has stated,"the urge to write is almost irrestistable to a political prisoner." Boochani, not even so much the recipient of at trumped up charge, and we see the important achievement Boochani and others have made,
The prisoner constructs his identity against the concept of freedom. His imagination is always preoccupied with the world
beyond the fences and in his mind he forms a picrure of a world shaped by the notion of freedom. It's a basic equation: a cage
or freedom.
For in that cage, freedom comes with the determined exercise of the human imagination.
…the refugees held in Manus Prison have modified their perception and understanding of life, transformed their
interpretation of existence, matured their notion of freedom. They have changed so much—they have transfigured into
different beings….all of them are unique in their own special way; they have become distinctly creative humans, they have
unprecedented creative capacities. And in my view, this is incredible, it is phenomenal to witness.
And, indeed, we may never know, is that cat's eye view real or fictional?
I have reached a good understanding of this situation: the only people that can overcome and survive all the suffering inflicted by the prison are those who exercise creativity. That is, those who can trace the outlines of hope using the melodic humming and visions from beyond the prison fences and the beehives we live it.
Certainly, a refugee is, if not a political prisoner, a prisoner of politics. In a subsequent interview via Al Jazeera, often a substantial source for news, an interviewer whom I can only describe as a priviledged twit is recorded as asking Behrouz if he cannot understand why Australia needs to/is blocking more refugees.[1] If that is not politics—and very shallow politics at that—then I shall eat my shoes, dammit. On one side stands a man, incarcerated, asserting the importance and essential creativity of his humanity and of those around him; on the other, interviewers and various politicians nattering on about the inconvenience (of all things!) to Australia or any other such entity of behaving like human beings.
In a far better discussion/interview with his translator, Behrouz speaks with a depth that said interviewer would not understand.
For his efforts to expose the conditions on Manus Island, while being incarcerated there, Boochani was arrested right after he finished this book, without being charged, and later "released." His clandestine video clips have also been made into a film. The detainees have been released onto the larger island, and are being pressured to accept Papua New Guinea as their new home—from which they cannot leave—or go back to the country from which they have fled. Current news is hard to come by though Amnesty International is one source; PEN Melbourne, another. Many Australians are working to gain Boochani's genuine release, as well as to see that places like Manus do not continue as institutions sanctioned to violate human rights. Behrouz has written several ongoing pieces for The Saturday Paper, an online Australian magazine and for The Guardian newspaper originating in the UK. The Melbourne PEN site also has information on how to be of support to him. While it may seem easy enough to write a support letter, the accumulation of these can have an effect.
A further review can be read in October's Australian Book Review
___________________________________________________
[1]Unlike colonialists, who rename to claim ownership. Or, more tenderly, what one of my mentors, Kamau Brathwaite, the Bajan poet, used to say: "To name someone is to love them." Numbering, then, is what Aimé Cesaire famously called slavery—"thingification."
[2] Interview
In No Friend but the Mountains, Kurdish Iranian, Behrouz Boochani offers his readers a diagnosis of one of the systems of domination, regulated, elaborated, and otherwise implemented against those in detention--Kyriarachy, derrived from a neologism coined by feminist theologian, Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenzi. Or, as Boochani's translator, Omid Tofgighian, applies it to Australia's version,
…the ideological substrata that have a governing function in the prison…denoting the spirit that is sovereign over the detention center and Australia's ubiquitous border-industrial complex.
We could launch into a further, perhaps scholarly, analysis of this diabolical means of imprisonment: experientially, novelist Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Detained (republished as Wrestling with the Devil: a Prison Memoir) describes his own incarceration in a Kenyan prison a number of years ago; and many other writers have recorded their similar experiences. The essay we have reprinted by Joe Dimow analyzes the knuckling down to authority on the part of persons asked to enact acts of cruelty towards their fellow human beings (simply, as Adolf Eichmann protested, following orders.) But Dimow's experience was in the guise of an 'experiment' about responses to authority in a Western, so-called democratic state—the empirical 'why' of compliance with what one knows to be wrong/cruel/immoral. Metaphorically, in a state where the majority appears to move about freely, pockets of 'contained' authoritarianism exist and are policed as necessary institutions: 'regular' prisons such as the one where Ngugi was incarcrated, boot camps, and institutions reserved for populations where special restraint is deemed necessary. The zing taken out of the latter's sting by silly nicknames like "funny farm," "nuthouse," etc.; and, among others, such confinement has been immortalized in such novels as Ken Kesey's novel, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. And presently we have increasing numbers of detention camps for refugees, persons incarcerated not on the basis of having comitted a crime, but on the basis of untenable assumptions about what constitutes "them" and "us" —no charge, no trial, no defense. The Trial, by Franz Kafka, in which a nameless person is arrested and persecuted, comes to mind: neither Josef K. (as much as a name as Kafka's character is given) nor the reader knows for what crime.
Even in a "regular" prison, as Ngugi wa Thiong'o has related, political prisoners, in particular, are carefully, but casually, robbed of their identity as human beings. Forget a first name and an initial: "Here I have no name. I am just a number on file: K6,77." It is essential to the system to do so, to strip the imprisoned of their humanity; for a number is not a name.[1] As a detained refugee, too, Behrouz has a number, MEG45, instantly more relevant to his captors than his name. Ultimately, believing in authority rather than trusting their own judgement, as Ngugi also points out, even "[n]ight warders [guards] are themselves prisoners guarding other prisoners." The system feeds on itself.
Such bizarre situations, then, invite the surreal, the darkly satirical, the descriptive tools of the novelist, even the poet. Indeed, I find it difficult to imagine how any writer in such circumstances could not see that such experiences require the surreal, the mythical, the distorted when set down to words.
As a refugee, Behrouz Boochani fled Iran in well-founded fear of harm and took a boat from Indonesia, heading for Australia; and No Friend but the Mountains begins with a straight narrative, the harrowing account of his first boat ride. At sea, the boat begins to sink; but the occupants are rescued by a passing British ship and returned to Indonesia. But then the experience is, with variation, repeated. Boochani sets out once more; and, though the travelers are not party to that information, the Australian government's policy that they would accept NO more refugees coming by boat was announced mid-crossing. Australian military waylaid the refugees, including Behrouz, and, instead of refuge, he and the others were taken to Manus Island, part of Papua New Guinea, where Australia had made some sort of treaty or accord with Papua New Guinea to do Australia's dirty work, and incarcerated in what is and was euphemistically called a "detention center." In reality, a prison. (One is reminded of Orwell's "doublespeak," as we see the gap between semantics and propaganda close.)
The majority of the book then deals with Boochani's experience on Manus Island, his observations, his thoughts about the system that energizes it. He does not go completely fictional, as did Kafka or Kesey, but he deliberately constructs his narrative using what he calls "literary language." Thus, while the book does not hide Boochani as having been an academic, specializing in geopolitics, he uses lay language, narrative, and certain tropes employed in contemporary Kurdish literature to describe his experience. It is not a thesis, struggling towards neutrality and to be, however thoughtfully, "discussed" as one might in a classroom. As such, the book is a remarkable piece of engaged literature, a hybrid of experience and, as noted above, the elasticity of the word in the service of a bizarre reality.
Even the manner in which this his book was written approaches the surreal: text message after text message, on smuggled cell phones; translated from Farsi; and—much as I have inveighed against this sort of thing—moved along a lifeline of WhatsApp (purveyor of thousands of hate messages re: the Rohingya in Burma/Mayanmar,) and social media channels. Of course, unlike the majority of privileged users, Boochani does not mess around. No implement of narcissistic 'entertainment' this.
Further, one could become distracted by turning to the question of language: I know not one word of Farsi, and so cannot judge Boochani's language, its play, its music, or its construction of metaphor. Certainly, the translation into English reads idiomatically and smoothly; and Tofgighian has included some useful notes on Boochani's writing which also help orient the Western reader to how Boochani uses and is situated in Kurdish literary tradition, and the latter despite his use of Farsi rather than Kurdish (another theme which Tofgighian touches upon.)
Indeed, I have taken a shamefully cursory look at a few of the Kurdish writers listed in Tofgighian's introduction: all indications are of a highly sophisticated corpus badly needing more international exposure. Take just one example, I Stared at the Night of the City by Bakhtiyar Ali, trans. Kareem Abdulrahman. Ali dances around narration, myth, slippery characters both real and unreal including a thoroughly unreliable fiend who is hunting down three men. Quickly we are thrust into an unfettered consideration of good and evil. Now, though Boochani disguises the identity of a number of those he writes about to protect them, his book is neither mendacious nor moralistic. But its author does not shrink from exposing the pervasive evil in Australia's offshore soft white underbelly. The words of Ali's amoral narrator could easily be Boochani describing the methods of the Australian kyriarchy: "He had to get inside the souls of the three men, carve them [out] from the inside and rewrite them."
Further, translator Tofgighian emphasizes that the "fragmented or disrupted stream of consciousness" manner of Boochani's…writing [which is] is poetic and surreal, often presenting a theatre where both secular and scared narratives and rituals are adapted and performed…[which] revives Kurdish oral and literary history to meet modern accounts of resistance, political amibition and persecution—an established approach in Kurdish literature….
Boochani's "disrupted stream of consciousness" takes flight, if one can put it that way, when he is tormented by the convergence of sounds of a prisoner in solitary confinement moaning and his own physical pain—a toothache. Boochani imagines himself as a multispecied creature, like a cat, then a monkey, and leaps to the roof of a corridor. He recalls his boyhood in the mountains raiding pidgeon nests in Kurdish chestnut oak trees:
By now I am sure than anyone who could climb the coarse trunks of chesnut oak trees could also climb the
hardest and most slippery obstacles with ease. It's no joking matter—I'm a child of the mountains. No different
to a cat.
And then he acts:
I have forgotten my toothache now that I am in the mood and state of mind of being a cat….In three moves I
quickly manage to get myself onto the roof of the corridor….It is still twilight and focusing my eyes I make
another move; with the concentration of a hunter pursuing prey…"
In transmogrifing from cat to monkey, he says admonishes himself, "Imagine carefully. Exactly like a monkey that dangles off the branch of a tall tree." And that "imagine carefully" leaves the reader in an ambiguous state: is Bochani really leaping onto a roof, or are we meant to imagine that he is? Is that no man's land between imagination and reality, as he puts it in the chapter's title, the "Mythic Topography of Manus Prison"? Not unlike tropes in recent Kurdish literature, such unanswered questions leave readers in an ambivalent state of uncertainty. The no man's land of Kurdish statelessness (in Iran, at least), of being neither fish nor fowl (human nor cat?), not a criminal but criminalized…
Boochani's myth, dream, psychology, and analysis mixes with obervation of his and his fellow prisoners lives, and these too hit home. Rather than numbers, partly to protect their identities, but also as a fictional trope in the midst of the absurdity of incarceration, his characters have fanciful nicknames. There is, for instance, "Maysam The Whore" who outrageously performs, satirizes, minces and enlivens the camp, once dressing up as a religious leader but with slits down the side of his robes (these made from blue bedsheets,) eliciting whoops and cheers for his his agile dancing and wriggling of his backside, always outrageous. He declares gay sex completely permissable. "He can be seen making hilarious props and making the prisoners burst with laughter…" His humor and ridicule are all that are needed to upset the system and remind the prisoners of "the essence of life." Another character is Reza, the Gentle Giant, whom Boochani does name, to commemorate his loss: he is murdered by the camp guards.
Reza is the most powerful and tallest man in the prison and engages in a way that is completely different from the rest.
Throughout the prison are many men who try to maintain their dignity. But the gentleness in Reza’s behaviour is much
greater than you might see in others. In some particularly kind and forgiving people, there is also a strain of self-centredness,
which gives them fortitude to tolerate life, to see its sophistication, to see it with balance. But Reza is different. His generosity
amazes those around him. All the Kurds, and then everyone else in the prison, know him as The Gentle Giant. Although,
sometime later, we drop the adjective ‘Gentle’, as it makes his name too long. We just call him The Giant.
There is the "Cow" who "seems to construct his sense of self by distrubing others." And so on. The prison becomes a theatre; Boochani's memoir, a picaresque novel, even experimental fiction. Though prose sections are divided irregularly by a poetic distillation—a typical Kurdish literary trope apparently, though the weaker of Tofgighian's otherwise masterly translation, when all is said and done, the book is a tough read. No picnic in the park. In detention Ngugi has stated,"the urge to write is almost irrestistable to a political prisoner." Boochani, not even so much the recipient of at trumped up charge, and we see the important achievement Boochani and others have made,
The prisoner constructs his identity against the concept of freedom. His imagination is always preoccupied with the world
beyond the fences and in his mind he forms a picrure of a world shaped by the notion of freedom. It's a basic equation: a cage
or freedom.
For in that cage, freedom comes with the determined exercise of the human imagination.
…the refugees held in Manus Prison have modified their perception and understanding of life, transformed their
interpretation of existence, matured their notion of freedom. They have changed so much—they have transfigured into
different beings….all of them are unique in their own special way; they have become distinctly creative humans, they have
unprecedented creative capacities. And in my view, this is incredible, it is phenomenal to witness.
And, indeed, we may never know, is that cat's eye view real or fictional?
I have reached a good understanding of this situation: the only people that can overcome and survive all the suffering inflicted by the prison are those who exercise creativity. That is, those who can trace the outlines of hope using the melodic humming and visions from beyond the prison fences and the beehives we live it.
Certainly, a refugee is, if not a political prisoner, a prisoner of politics. In a subsequent interview via Al Jazeera, often a substantial source for news, an interviewer whom I can only describe as a priviledged twit is recorded as asking Behrouz if he cannot understand why Australia needs to/is blocking more refugees.[1] If that is not politics—and very shallow politics at that—then I shall eat my shoes, dammit. On one side stands a man, incarcerated, asserting the importance and essential creativity of his humanity and of those around him; on the other, interviewers and various politicians nattering on about the inconvenience (of all things!) to Australia or any other such entity of behaving like human beings.
In a far better discussion/interview with his translator, Behrouz speaks with a depth that said interviewer would not understand.
For his efforts to expose the conditions on Manus Island, while being incarcerated there, Boochani was arrested right after he finished this book, without being charged, and later "released." His clandestine video clips have also been made into a film. The detainees have been released onto the larger island, and are being pressured to accept Papua New Guinea as their new home—from which they cannot leave—or go back to the country from which they have fled. Current news is hard to come by though Amnesty International is one source; PEN Melbourne, another. Many Australians are working to gain Boochani's genuine release, as well as to see that places like Manus do not continue as institutions sanctioned to violate human rights. Behrouz has written several ongoing pieces for The Saturday Paper, an online Australian magazine and for The Guardian newspaper originating in the UK. The Melbourne PEN site also has information on how to be of support to him. While it may seem easy enough to write a support letter, the accumulation of these can have an effect.
A further review can be read in October's Australian Book Review
___________________________________________________
[1]Unlike colonialists, who rename to claim ownership. Or, more tenderly, what one of my mentors, Kamau Brathwaite, the Bajan poet, used to say: "To name someone is to love them." Numbering, then, is what Aimé Cesaire famously called slavery—"thingification."
[2] Interview