Former asylum seeker detainee and journalist Behrouz Boochani (author of No Friend but the Mountains) and his collaborator Omid Tofighian speak about the experience of indefinite incarceration on Australia’s Manus Island and the psychological toll of waiting. They compare this form of detention to prison and the existential impact to torture. This Kyriarchal System, they argue, strips the individual of identity and humanity and they explain how such a system can perhaps be questioned better through the poetic fiction that Boochani has used in his path-breaking narrative than through appeal to dry rational facts and figures.
Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time is a documentary film co-directed by Behrouz Boochani and Dutch Iranian filmmaker Arash Kamali Sarvestani and was released in 2017. For more information, see: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/chauka.
For further information on Australia’s use of offshore detention using Manus Island and Nauru, see M. Grewcock, ‘Australian border policing: regional “solutions” and neocolonialism’, Race & Class54, no. 3 (2013).
