During the years Behrouz Boochani spent in Australia’s prison on Manus Island, his dream was always the same. “Walking on the streets. Just that,” he says, as we start down Wellington’s lively Cuba Street on a bright, muggy summer evening, Boochani balancing a coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other. “It’s something that is a part of my identity. The best description of myself is ‘a man who always walks’.”
After his writing about conditions for refugees in Australia’s offshore jails started to appear in the world’s newspapers, Boochani became the recognisable face of those detained. But in Wellington, New Zealand’s capital, where he has found a home in the alternative arts scene, Boochani is not the man from Manus prison.
That particular horror is still the theme of his journalism and activism, but it was never him. As a Kurdish investigative reporter in Iran and during the years on Manus, he was a writer. So when he arrived in New Zealand four years ago from Papua New Guinea, he returned to his one constant.
“I found my way through my writing again,” says Boochani. “Writing not as a place where you escape to or rely on, but writing as a life.” He adds: “Also through writing, I met people.”
For Boochani, writing and going out are inextricably linked. As an act of discipline, he no longer allows himself to consider walking as work.
“I believe it is working, because I think,” says Boochani. “But it makes me lazy at writing.”
Boochani does not drive and looks horrified when asked about the bus. If his destination is hours away, he walks. During Wellington’s notorious winters of gale-force winds, he walks.
Often he sings. Once, another Kurdish man heard Boochani singing and pulled over in his car. It was the only time he had met another Kurdish person in Wellington.
“I think I know many people in Wellington city centre who don’t know me, but I know them,” he says. “In my mind, I create stories about them.”
We meet in Glover Park, a small green square where drinkers sprawl on bean bags in the sun. Wellington is heaving: in other places, a 23C day might not seem like much, but here – where the elements are often hostile – it generates a carnival atmosphere.
“After a while, the city dominates you: you must love me, because I’m lovely,” Boochani says with a smile. After two years, he is a Wellingtonian down to his daily “three or four” cups of the city’s famously strong coffees and his sense of humour about the weather.
Four years ago, Boochani made world headlines when he left Australia’s offshore detention regime to speak at a writers festival in New Zealand, where he later received refugee status. After years of tirelessly revealing layers of pain and torment for refugees in Australia’s island jails – his reporting painstakingly filed by WhatsApp message – he had become a celebrated writer and documentary-maker.
But when he arrived in Christchurch, a free man, Boochani was profiled with a single mythology: he was lonely and sad.
“When people approach you as a person from a refugee background, no matter if you are a writer or not, they approach you with an image that they have about you,” he says. “That image is victimisation.
“I was not a victim. I was a fighter. I was fighting. I wrote two books about that system. I wrote many articles about that system.”
When interviewed, he presents himself “in a way that won’t fit” the image he thinks readers have of him. Reporters miss, Boochani says, that he is funny. It’s true: No Friend But the Mountains – his aching and lyrical memoir written from Manus prison – is in parts laugh-out-loud silly. As we walk, his conversation is peppered with whimsy and mischief.
Boochani is 40 but doesn’t feel it. One Christmas, his partner – a publisher, who joins us on the stroll – edited his age on Wikipedia to record him as six years younger, winding back the stolen time in jail (the change was reversed in 12 minutes).
In his prison writings, Boochani yearned for community and in Wellington he found it: an underground literary and arts scene, youthful and anarchist. Being part of it “helps me to understand this society better”, he says.
His Wellington flat hosts live music and speakers; living there is a rite of passage for a certain kind of artistic, political young Wellingtonian. There, Boochani – who is studying cinema theory – holds movie nights, inviting “five, 10, 20” people around each week to watch his assigned films.
“As a writer, cinema always helps,” he says. “It makes your writing more visual and simple.”
The previous night, Boochani and his friends had watched the 1957 Ingmar Bergman film Wild Strawberries, which he enjoyed. The week before had featured the 2015 biopic Steve Jobs, which he did not.
Boochani’s head is overflowing with writing projects, on which he prefers to collaborate because otherwise, he says, “I find myself being lazy”. He insists he is properly lazy: sometimes his partner comes home at lunchtime and finds him still in bed.
After six years of relentless work in prison, should he not cut himself some slack?
“I did that. It was enough,” he says. “It was four years ago.”
Our walk takes us to the waterfront, where we raise our voices over the blustery wind. Sunbathers on Oriental Bay beach are packed shoulder to shoulder, the water full of swimmers. The teeming footpath requires careful navigation. We are yelled at by a cyclist.
At the quiet end of the bay, we sit on a low sea wall, looking back at the city where it nestles into the hills. Boochani lights another cigarette.
With his long, black hair, he cuts a distinctive figure but nobody stares. It is different from Australia, where Boochani is approached often.
“When people come and say, ‘we are sorry’, I find that hard,” he says. “Always I change the conversation. I ask them questions.”
No one could blame Boochani if he did not want to visit Australia, the country responsible for his detention, and where Peter Dutton famously said he would never set foot. But he says that would be ignoring the “hundreds and thousands of stories of people damaged” and forgo the chance to empower minority communities.
“I am not working just as a witness,” Boochani says. “To make colonisers angry, that is my job. It is not about sending a message.” Messages, he insists, are “white, comfortable” things to want.
Boochani spent last year travelling: to Australia, where he urged the establishment of a royal commission into the asylum system; to Brussels, where he addressed the European parliament. His relentless advocacy for Kurds in Iran – for which he was persecuted when he lived there, forcing him to flee in 2013 – occupied much of his time. It also drove him, for the most part, from social media, where he is barraged by abuse.
“I think it is a fucked-up world, not because of all the war but in terms of media and social media,” he says.
He does not have hope for a better public conversation. “When the internet is dead,” Boochani says, “then we will go back to normal.”
For him, writing now is different from before, in Iran and on Manus. “In that time, it was an act of survival. It was fighting,” he says. But he is driven by the same questions.
“This year, I’m going to write more about refugees and their lives,” he says. He will also learn to drive.
Boochani has become enough of a Wellingtonian to convince himself on a sunny day that the freezing sea looks inviting. As we walk the curve of the sparkling harbour back towards Cuba Street, he peers into the water and sighs. “I really want to swim here,” he says. “Not now, because I don’t have clothes.” He will fetch some and come back, he decides.
When Boochani returned to Wellington in December, “I felt like I came back to home”, he says. “I look at that as an achievement.”
