Freedom, Only Freedom by Behrouz Boochani, The Flirtation of Girls by Sara M Saleh.
Reviewed by Lisa Collyer
Freedom, Only Freedom
Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN, 9780755642656
The Flirtation of Girls/ Ghazal el-Banet
University of Queensland Press
ISBN. 9780702266287
The prison writings of Behrouz Boochani’s, Freedom, Only freedom1 and the poetry of Sara M Saleh’s, Ghazal el-Banet: The Flirtation of Girls2 triumph as celebrations of culture, love, and agency, as a form of political resistance in the face of oppression.
Freedom, Only Freedom is Boochani’s second book written on a prohibited mobile phone through WhatsApp, whilst being illegally detained in Manus Island prison by the Australian government. It also includes his reflections after his escape (with the assistance of activists) and success in gaining asylum and citizenship in New Zealand. The compilation includes essays, poetry, and journals as well as numerous essays by activists and human rights experts, bearing witness to the violations of bipartisan politics that dehumanises asylum seekers for political gain. The writings jubilantly transcend the individual experience of Boochani through the formulation of Manus Prison Theory.
‘This combined theoretical and activist framework brings together political, scholarly, cultural and aesthetic approaches and fuses genres in unprecedented ways to produce a unique literary and analytical tapestry: philosophical reflections, psychoanalytical examination, anti-colonial political commentary, as well as new forms of storytelling, poetry, myth, epic, and folklore.’ p. xvii
Manus Prison Theory centres on collectives; of refugees working together to survive and resist; with Manusians (citizens of Manus Island); and with scholars, translators, human rights lawyers, and activists all working together in real time to report and challenge injustice. Boochani’s poetry, storytelling, and mythologising (rooted in his Kurdish identity) repositions the non-fiction genre to political poetry, as a necessity, to celebrate one’s own humanity in the face of colonial structures of violence.
Another political theory that is central to the text is the Kyriarchal system drawn from radical feminist theologian, Elisabeth SchÜssler Fiorenza which Boochani identifies as ‘the colonial logic and ruthless structures that pervade the detention centre, Australia’s border regime… and, by extension, the foundations, social systems and conditions of the Australian settler-colonial state.’p. xviii
Queues and time are weaponised, as well as boredom and bureaucracy, to torture people living in perpetual statelessness and uncertainty.
‘If we want to describe life in the Manus prison, we could sum it up in just one sentence: A prisoner is someone who needs to line up in order to fulfil even the most basic needs of every human being.’ P. 32
Furthermore, the advertising and outperformance of brutality by successive governments, as a show of strength, under the guise of “national interest” is highlighted by Boochani to fit within a wider systemic form of hegemonic oppression.
‘These island camps on Manus and Nauru can be conceived similarly to the wheel cages that criminals, those accused and those sentenced to death, were put in and taken to cities to represent and advertise the power of violence.’ P.37
Similarly, Saleh’s, The Flirtation of Girls draws from a rich culture of Arab Muslim women to resist oppression in the face of occupation, and exile from Palestine to Egypt to Lebanon and finally in the host country, Australia. In the poem, ‘Reading Darwish at Qalandia Checkpoint,’ the weaponising of queues and time is evident at the Israeli military checkpoint at Qalandia, a Palestinian village ten kilometres from Jerusalem and home to a UNRWA refugee camp. Saleh deftly juxtaposes the interrogation of an Israeli guard’s questions with the personal lives of Palestinian people standing in the queue, as an act of survival and resistance.
‘How long have you been waiting?
I just got here …
How long have you been waiting?
Since the day I was born.
The law student eager to make it to the final exam,
Her messy bun pinned in place with a 2B pencil.
…
We find ways to survive this daily exercise
in humiliation, to numb the abyss of time. Each
moment any of us remains alive is a miracle.’ pp. 19-21.
The twin oppressive forces of racism and patriarchy feature in Saleh’s poem, ‘Headlines.’ In Australia, where the speaker is faced with Islamophobia (often employed as a false guise for feminism) in Australian society and in the media.
‘The first time we met, you asked me if I rode a camel to school
I hated myself
for laughing it off
the second time, why women weren’t allowed to drive’ p.76.
Patriarchal violence is omnipresent in ‘Stone,’ where the speaker, an eleven-year-old girl is faced with sexual violence and injustice. The first line indicates this will be the first in many resonating with girls and women globally and the loss of innocence.
‘To the first uninvited guest who
squeezed my chest
at the back of Ravi’s grocery store
when I was eleven
…
you got off with
a minor warning’ pp.36-37
The perpetuation of violence towards women and girls from migrant backgrounds in the United Arab Emirates in ‘Recipe for dinner and destruction’ makes commentary on the kafala system, a labour system likened to slavery.3 This poem explores the way in which other women too are complicit in maintaining women’s subjugation.
‘You hear the banks have fallen today & nothing is going
right & you starve Maria, send her to her room & you let
the stew simmer, flavours in hiding & your curse words trim
the air & seize her passports, hold her hostage.’ P. 16
Both Boochani and Saleh defy their oppressors’ attempts to dehumanise with poetic agency; celebrating their respective cultures and human collectives.
In ‘A Letter from Manus Island,’ refugees work together without food or power as they refuse to leave the camp to be settled on Manus Island (because of the danger to their lives) through ‘the principles of love, friendship and brotherhood.’ P.117
‘…our resistance and the three weeks of hardship we endured produced a new perspective…that was…transformative… We learnt that humans have no sanctuary except within other human beings.’ P.121
In Saleh’s, ‘The (Not So) Secret Life of 3arab Girls: Our Raqs Is Sharqi (an intermittent Ghazal)’ reappropriates cultural dance in a celebration of bodies and domestic spaces;
‘They can’t stop us 3arab girls, spring coil curls, sentimental lines of kohl,
hums, hollers and trills, Allah, Allah, dropping our raqs sharqi.
Stepping out in scarves and tassels, strong backs we strut and swing, on
streets, at weddings, in living rooms, chest to chest, pot belly to pot belly.’ P. 33
Both Boochani and Saleh, in their respective tomes resist the dehumanising language of colonial and patriarchal oppressors: to bear witness, transcend the erasure, and reappropriate the culture of love and humanity through a political poetics.
1translated & edited by Omid Tofighian & Moones Mansoubi and published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2023.
2 published by University of Queensland Press in 2023
3‘Every day I cry’: 50 women talk about life as a domestic worker under the Gulf’s kafala system’ by Katie McQue, 2024, The Guardian. Viewed on the 30/6/25
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2024/apr/25/kafala-labour-system-gulf-women-talk-about-life-as-a-domestic-worker-in-the-gulf
Lisa Collyer is a writer in Boorloo (Perth). She is the author of the poetry collection, How To Order Eggs Sunny Side Up (2023) (short-listed for The Dorothy Hewett Award), published with Life Before Man Books. Her personal essay, Prolonged Exposure is published in the anthology, Women of a Certain Courage (2025) with Fremantle Press. Her poem, ‘The Grape Pickers’ was short-listed for the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize (2025). She recently won an artist residence at Bundanon Art Museum (2025) where she will create new work on climate grief. Her second poetry collection, Gold Digger will be published in September 2025.
