In 2018, No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison became a literary sensation. It was written by Behrouz Boochani, a Kurdish-Iranian journalist and refugee who was incarcerated by the Australian government on Manus Island. Like thousands of others, Boochani had travelled by boat to seek asylum in Australia. From Manus, he texted passages to collaborators in Sydney. There, Omid Tofighian and Moones Mansoubi developed the work further. Through reportage, storytelling and poetry, it bore witness to the horrors of immigration detention. By 2019, No Friend had won some of Australia’s major literary awards and Boochani had become internationally renowned. In November 2019, he was invited to attend a festival in Christchurch, New Zealand. After six years in detention, he was free. The system that had imprisoned him remained intact.

Freedom, Only Freedom can be considered the sequel to No Friend. It is a collection of Boochani’s journalism, an interdisciplinary work, and another collaboration between Boochani, Tofighian, and Mansoubi. This time they are joined by nineteen writers, journalists, scholars, and refugees, who respond to Boochani’s articles. Together, they undertake a ‘duty to history’. It entails examining Australia’s policy of exiling refugees to dystopian prison islands. This ‘carceral archipelago’, they argue, is neither novel nor rare. Rather, it is an extension of Australia’s settler-colonial history and the White Australia policy. Here is the modern face of the penal colony, the mission, and the outstation. Boochani calls this the ‘kyriarchy’, a term borrowed from feminist theory, which Tofighian describes as ‘multiple, interlocking kinds of stigmatisation and oppression’.