“The only thing I have is luck,” says Omar, a young Afghan driver and translator who decides to leave his country and take the smuggler’s road to Europe. It is August 2015, and thousands of refugees are crossing from Turkey to the Greek islands in small rubber boats. Omar will soon be among them. Matthieu Aikins, disguised as a fellow Afghan migrant, will go with him in order to see the refugee underground from the inside, and to write this book.
There are dangers (aside from those of being kidnapped, arrested or drowning) to Aikins’s choice. Western war reporters taking risks in far-flung locations can become the story – think of John Simpson’s liberation of Kabul – but that would be to do Aikins an injustice, for this is not that book.
For one, this is because Aikins was based in Afghanistan for many years before undertaking his journey, thereby giving him knowledge and understanding. And he tries to be aware of his advantages. Although of mixed-race heritage (so able to pass for a native Afghan), he can leave the route at any time, for he has money and travel documents, which Omar does not.
Nor is the book merely an account of the duo’s odyssey, although there is no doubt reading about the refugee trail at this depth – the perilous boat ride across the channel to the Greek islands, the squalid misery of the refugee camp on Lesbos – forges insight and empathy. Aikins contextualises the narrative with historical, literary and anthropological sources, alternating his lens between this and his focus on Omar and his family.
Because, finally, this is a story about a group of ordinary people trying to survive. This is about Maryam, Omar’s mother, and Farah, his 20-year-old sister, who figures out that passing as LGBT is the most reliable way of gaining refugee status. It’s about Omar himself, going to Europe so he can marry the love he left behind in Afghanistan.
“We’re not criminals, we’re fleeing war in our countries,” Omar tells a judge in Athens, “If you were in my place, you would do the same thing.”
