I first encountered No Friend But The Mountains by Behrouz Boochani through a professor’s recommendation. The recommendation was to my friend, but it’s mine now, too. It’s clear that the entire book is significant for countless reasons (politically, ethically, literarily, etc.). Its testimony about detention, displacement, and state power makes it essential in conversations about immigration and systemic violence. However, while the work as a whole is profoundly important, my focus here is on the first two chapters. These opening sections produced an intense and layered reaction in me, and I’d very much like to tackle it.
The first two chapters of No Friend But The Mountains discusses the group of refugee’s journey from Iran (and a few other surrounding states) and how they were displaced in Jakarta and Kendari for three months, just waiting and existing in this in-between space. Then, it shifts into them being loaded onto a truck and eventually onto a boat headed from Indonesia to Australia. The boat starts flooding and they have to use buckets to throw the water out over and over to keep from sinking.
My Experience
When reading, I didn’t feel panic or fear for myself, yet I felt the weight of the author’s reality. I knew the author survived, and was okay-ish, as it was clear from the blurb. So, I experienced the text knowing that he would have to live with whatever happened to him. I also felt the profound wrongness of not only having to flee one’s country to survive, but of punishing and condemning people for doing exactly that. There’s a tension in recognizing both the danger the refugees face and the societal systems that make their flight necessary. Realizing how easily empathy for these situations can be overridden by judgment or indifference adds even more to that tension.
Classifying my Experience
I think my experience was one of disturbance, which I see as parallel to distress. In our experiences glossary, distress is defined as “anxiety or mental suffering that you have not chosen.” Disturbance feels quieter and more lingering. It interrupts your assumptions and leaves a deep sense that something is fundamentally wrong.
Features Prompting my Experience
Several features of these passages amplified the disturbance because they reveal the systemic nature of the danger the refugees are facing.
The police that patrolled the city left no stone unturned in pursuit of us; I couldn’t relax for a second. They were throwing everyone they caught into prison, and then deporting them after a few days. Even contemplating that scenario is painful. Having to return to the point from which I started would be a death sentence.
-Boochani, p. 8
This passage emphasizes the systemic enforcement of borders and criminalization of displacement. The danger is not random, but the product of structured institutions, that actively creates the life-threatening conditions for these refugees. The disturbance comes from recognizing that their survival is dictated by the bureaucratic mechanism, not chance alone. They cannot fully beat the system, but they can survive within its constraints. However, even that is morally and psychologically exhausting, and recognizing that also contributes to the disturbance.
My life during these last three months has been mainly fear, stress, starvation, and displacement – but also those short hours sitting on the log in the divine plantation. Those three volatile months have culminated now, in this paralysing moment when a child’s scream could take us back to our journey’s beginning.
-Boochani, p. 9
This passage creates a sense of disturbance by exhibiting how the system shapes everyday existence. The refugee’s fear, hunger, and constant displacement are consequences of larger political and social forces that limit their access to safety and resources. Even small moments of rest are rare and fragile, which shows how systems of control and vulnerability can permeate life.
We are like someone falling from a great height, grabbing at anything. In striving to escape death, a belief in miracles arises. Faith intervenes. It would be a miracle to hear the roar of that water pump.
-Boochani, p. 22
This metaphor undoubtedly shows the desperation imposed by structural forces. Survival depends almost entirely on the unpredictable outcomes of oppressive systems rather than personal merit. The reliance on hope and “miracles” signals how significant the imbalance of power between individuals and the structures controlling their fate is. The sense of disturbance really came from the moral and existential implications: systems designed to regulate or punish create conditions where basic survival becomes contingent on luck (or possibly divine forces).
Narrative Technology
I couldn’t find a narrative technology in the technologies glossary that quite fit. I think what strikes me in these chapters is what I would call a kind of structural inevitability. This isn’t a tragedy in the more classical sense of hamartia, which is defined in the technologies glossary as “a situation in which a character is not guilty of a moral crime, but has instead made ‘a mistake of perception, like a misheard word or a moment of blurred vision’ (Fletcher 67).” It is not a personal flaw that leads to downfall. The system in this world (which is the real world) is designed to make danger and suffering unavoidable.
Boochani’s experiences are shaped by immigration laws and border enforcements that criminalize displacement itself. His fate is shaped by imprisonment, deportation, and indefinite detention, which are mechanisms that function regardless of whether he is careful, patient, intelligent, or morally good. Even if he complies with the system, waits, follows instructions, and harms no one, the structure still produces confinement and uncertainty. The institutional logic operates exactly as intended, maintains deterrence, and continuously punishes. One aspect within the narrative technology that particularly disturbs is that there’s no “one” villain. There’s no one to confront. The antagonizer is dispersed because it is the system.
Another narrative technology guiding my experience was I Voice, which is described in the technologies glossary as “a narrator who speaks in the first person.” The narrator’s diction felt extremely calm considering everything going on. However, the text was translated from Farsi, so I’m unsure whether the calm, reflective quality carries in Farsi as it does in English. This was one of those narratives where it doesn’t ask you to feel, but you feel in response to the steadiness of someone navigating imminent danger. While reading, every step forward felt like stepping into something worse and was very heavy, but he didn’t write with hysteria. He was observant, reflective, and measured. The steadiness of his voice was interesting, and quite disturbing, as it was not what I’d expect from someone in this situation.
These narrative technologies leaves me with that disturbance. There is no tragic flaw to pity, no single villain to condemn, and no resolution that can restore balance. Instead, there is the persistent awareness that systems are often designed to produce suffering. The disturbance is not just emotional, but ethical. It is a reminder that something is fundamentally wrong and that wrongness is intentionally built in.
Works Cited
Boochani, Behrouz. No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison. Translated by Omid Tofighian, House of Anansi Press, 2019.
Experiences Glossary. https://wonder-cat.org/experiences/. Accessed 15 Feb. 2026.
Technologies by Element of Narrative. https://wonder-cat.org/technologies. Accessed 15 Feb. 2026.
Featured Image
No Friend but the Mountains by Behrouz Boochani. U.S. edition cover published by House of Anansi Press Inc.. All Rights Reserved.
