ABSTRACT
Behrouz Boochani's No Friend But the Mountains puts forward a holistic understanding of human rights. This chapter draws attention to this ‘cosmological’ perspective the book purports: continuously conveying human situatedness in ecosystems, Boochani contrasts a ‘cosmic’ perspective with the violent, artificial and arbitrary order of the prison system, referred to as the Kyriarchy in the book. The cosmic is marked by a twofold sense: firstly, it acts as a kind of external truth and order, giving stability and sanity in the face of systems created to dominate and exploit others; secondly, despite the most adverse circumstances, the attention to beauty, abundance and grace instils the capacity for survival and joy in imprisoned people. The cosmic has the effect of restoring a kind of ‘placefulness’—the sense of sovereign belonging despite and beyond a system that treats refugees as ‘placeless,’ as ‘waste.’ With this landmark work, Boochani upholds the opposite of oppression: a sense of indestructible freedom amidst a vivid ecosystem.
