Behrouz Boochani was once told – by then home affairs minister Peter Dutton – that he would never be allowed to come to Australia. This week, he did.The Kurdish journalist and refugee, who fled persecution in Iran in 2013, was detained on Manus Island’s detention centre for six years, after the boat carrying him from Indonesia to Australia was intercepted. He wrote his award-winning memoir, No Friend But the Mountains, from Manus Prison, as text messages sent from his mobile phone. “Writing is a duty to history,” he says. Boochani, who was awarded refugee status by New Zealand in July 2020, is in Australia to promote a second book, Freedom, Only Freedom. It combines more of his writing from Manus Prison, detailing his experience of Australia’s offshore detention regime – alongside essays from experts on migration, refugee rights, politics and literature. One of those experts is University of Melbourne’s Jordana Silverstein, whose Jewish Holocaust survivor grandparents once came to Australia as refugees. She sees Boochani’s project of writing the histories of Manus Prison as “part of the same project of history-writing as the writing about the ghettos, camps and bureaucracies of violence that made up the Holocaust”. In her thought-provoking reflection, Silverstein compares Boochani’s writing about Manus to that of Italian Jewish Holocaust survivor Primo Levi’s, about Auschwitz. “They testify to history in order to do work, to make clear the workings of the world.” Levi wrote of needing “another language” to properly articulate the experience of Auschwitz. While Manus is not Auschwitz, they need to be remembered on a continued historical trajectory, Silverstein says. Boochani gives language to the violence and trauma of Manus Prison; writing in a tradition of histories written around the world by persecuted and marginalised people. He writes those people into the public record, makes us see them. “This is history from down below,” Boochani writes. His work makes us see the depth of horror experienced by those who were imprisoned at Manus. “Horror is of course too simple a word (as Levi taught us), as is pain, trauma and devastation, though they all apply,” writes Silverstein. She says his writing reminds us we’re not separate individuals – our lives are interconnected. “We are reminded of … the ways our lives are inextricably linked to other peoples’ lives. This act of memory-making, of remembering across difference, is also a profound act of solidarity.” | 
