Behrouz Boochani and the biopolitics of the camp

Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains, a literary sensation upon its publication in Australia in August 2018, and soon to be released in the United States, deserves a place alongside classics of the prison writing genre. At the same time, it contains important lessons for everyone thinking about power in the contemporary world. In particular, it prompts to reconsider the kind of power that is exercised in camps, where it comes from and how it could be resisted. The fact that Boochani remains indefinitely detained in Manus makes his book all the more powerful, his message all the more pertinent and urgent. It places the onus on us, the recipients of this message that should never even have been sent in the first places, to join in the resistance, everyone with whatever means at their disposal, against the violent logic that justifies Boochani’s incarceration and which more broadly sustains the “PNG Solution” and indefinite detention