In July 2016 I contributed a piece on Primo Levi to Eureka Street. I briefly referred to Levi's Auschwitz incarceration, his brilliance as a scientist — his The Periodic Table was short-listed by the London Royal Institution as a candidate for the best scientific book ever written — and his untimely death. Whether tragic accident or suicide will never be known.
No one could have been further from the world of the Romantic poets than holocaust survivor Levi yet, like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, he was haunted by traumatic memories and somehow, in some form or another, doomed to retell them.
Levi recounts details of a recurring dream in which he is back in the concentration camp at Auschwitz. The realities of the camp are so overwhelming, so pressing that they still, years later, dominate his mind, his imagination, his memory, even his sleep. He is plagued by fleeting and fragmentary images of extraordinary endurance, good and bad luck, suffering, loss, slivers of hope brutally extinguished, desperate goals:
'Today, in this place, our only purpose is to reach the Spring. At the moment we care about nothing else'; ' ... scores of prisoners driven desperate by hunger prowl around, with lips half-open and eyes gleaming, lured by a deceptive instinct to where the merchandise shown makes the gnawing of their stomachs more acute ...
'I bite deeply into my lips; we know well that to gain a small, extraneous pain serves as a stimulant to mobilise our last reserves of energy. The Kapos also know it: some of them beat us from pure bestiality and violence, but others beat us when we are under a load, almost lovingly, accompanying the blows with exhortations, as cart-drivers do with willing horses'; ' ... we unload the [railway] sleeper on the ground and I remain stiff, with empty eyes, open mouth and hanging arms, sunk in the ephemeral and negative ecstasy of the cessation of pain'.
As Jeff Sparrow points out in a splendid piece in the Sydney Review of Books (21 September 2018), 'One hesitates to invoke Auschwitz in a discussion of Australia's asylum seeker detention regime, a system that, for all its horrors, does not implement genocide.' It is, however, tremendously difficult not to be haunted by the well-known images and, in concluding my reflection on Primo Levi in July 2016, I wrote, with no sense or implication whatsoever of prescience, merely blind hope:
'Some day, one of Australia's asylum seekers, of whose suffering Immigration Minister Peter Dutton seems simultaneously both proud and oblivious, will, like Levi and with the same sense of dread and horror, tell his or her story to ensure that someone bears witness.'
"For all its wrenching power and deserved literary accolades, No Friend but the Mountains is unlikely to make much impression on a philistine, opportunistic government."
Well, 'some day' has arrived. Asylum seeker Behrouz Boochani's testament No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison is a scarifying, beautifully moving, profound, painfully wrought personal consideration of the Manus Island detention centre. Among other effects, prison, in Boochani's words, 'maintains its power over time; the power to keep people in line. Fenced enclosures dominate and can pacify even the most violent person — those imprisoned on Manus are themselves sacrificial subjects of violence.
'We are a bunch of ordinary humans locked up simply for seeking refuge. In this context, the prison's greatest achievement might be the manipulation of feelings of hatred between one another ...'
For all its wrenching power and deserved literary accolades, No Friend but the Mountains is unlikely to make much impression on a philistine, opportunistic government which will readily use the sufferings of 'humans locked up simply for seeking refuge' if this will buy them votes. But lonely, eloquent figures like Boochani, who emerge from the squalor — ragged, unkempt, brutalised — won't finally stay 'in line ... fenced ... pacified ... sacrificial subjects of violence'. And more and more Australians, it seems, are beginning to realize that our asylum seeker policies constitute, in the words of Omid Tofighian, Boochani's translator, 'a modern form of systematic torture'.
In a national parliament where a senior senator announced she had 'never heard of' the Final Solution'; where a fellow senator tied himself in knots trying to justify his use of that phrase; where members pay lip service to something called the Westminster System which they seem scarcely to understand and which they and their leader ignore if it suits them; where 'Stopping the Boats' has been commemorated for one senior member with a trophy and masquerades as a political clarion call, there seems not much hope for human decency.
Nevertheless, like Primo Levi in his works, Behrouz Boochani's No Friend but the Mountains exemplifies among many other things 'the possibilities of human decency' despite the Manus prison's squalor. Like George Orwell in another time and place, he is buoyed by hope in irrepressible nature.
In tropical flowers Boochani detects a 'zeal for resistance/A tremendous will for life bursting out from the coils and curves of the stems/Bodies stretching out to reveal themselves for all to witness ... ' and, despite horrors and deprivations, the flowers fill him with love.
Brian Matthews is honorary professor of English at Flinders University and an award winning columnist and biographer.