Naturally he couldn’t attend because he has been detained for the past 5 years and counting on Manus island where many refugees are still stuck in perpetual limbo, unsure if there’s any hope in their future.
The book, which details the horrors and daily life in detention, was written on a smuggled in phone, crafted one text message at a time, and meticulously translated into English. It won $25,000 for the Victorian Premiere’s Literary Away and $100,000 for the Victorian prize for Literature.
I’ve read this book and it is phenomenal. Not just because it’s a harrowing examination of the unjust system of detention that our government has forced refugees fleeing persecution into, but it’s so intricately and poetically written. You’d think that the method of writing would limit Behrouz’s language and descriptiveness but perhaps because of the constant restrictions of his freedom he has worked hard to push an intricate yet bleak painting of his situation.
Honestly you should read this book. You should buy it right now and read it. It’s one of the best books I read last year and I cannot recommend it enough. This man continues to fight against the oppressive and torturous conditions our government has forced him - and many other innocent people - into. His twitter account is also a good source of first hand information about the cruelty and brutality of indefinite detention.
The Incas may not have bequeathed any written records, but they did have colourful knotted cords. Each of these devices was called a khipu (pronounced key-poo). We know these intricate cords to be an abacus-like system for recording numbers. However, there have also been teasing hints that they might encode long-lost stories, myths and songs too.
In a century of study, no one has managed to make these knots talk. But recent breakthroughs have begun to unpick this tangled mystery of the Andes, revealing the first signs of phonetic symbolism within the strands. Now two anthropologists are closing in on the Inca equivalent of the Rosetta stone. That could finally crack the code and transform our understanding of a civilisation whose history has so far been told only through the eyes of the Europeans who sought to eviscerate it.
I’ve been loosely following developments in research about khipus since reading about them in an obscure paragraph in the back of my high school history textbook and every time I read more about them, it’s more and more exciting.
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