Six years ago, the world was shocked by the widely circulated photo of Alan Kurdi’s lifeless body sprawled across the sand at a picturesque Turkish beach. The image was inescapable across the internet, eliciting a powerful social response. As time has passed, though, international media has moved on from the refugee crisis in the Middle East–what at first dominated headlines and charity fundraisers has slowly faded into the background, at least in the United States.
In What Strange Paradise, Omar El Akkad brings back the conversation by refocusing through the lens of one boy’s fictional story. He follows Amir, a nine year-old boy shipwrecked as he crosses the Mediterranean aboard a smuggler’s boat. It’s incredibly effective–the novel is fast-paced and engaging, while still taking time to discuss the politics and even philosophy of the crisis. As Amir’s story unfolds, it becomes both unique and universal; his lived experience is of course fictional and one-of-a-kind, but his broader situation and some of the dynamics in his life are much more universal, applicable to so many millions across the globe.
Amir’s story is an allegory for those of many others like him: What Strange Paradise illustrates the loss of agency experienced by many refugees as they abandon their homes and families–in many cases, their futures are entirely up in the air, dependent on dumb luck alone. Amir, an unaccompanied young child on the run from government officials in a foreign country where he does not speak the language, faces this loss of agency to a profound degree.
Rather than being able to create his own path, Amir is primarily a passive object to be acted upon by the events and individuals in the novel. He ends up crossing the Mediterranean in the first place simply by chance because a stranger told him to board a boat, leaving behind most of his family. He’s shipwrecked by a perfect storm of negligence and bad luck, and he washes ashore by pure luck. Even the characters who at the very least have his best interests at heart seem to hold very little regard for the preferences Amir may have regarding his own future–he’s shuttled across the island, the military hot on his heels, without so much as a question about how he wants to proceed. Throughout What Strange Paradise, outside forces wrestle for control over Amir’s fate, from the smugglers looking to traffic him to Colonel Kethros, who’d rather see him in handcuffs than let Amir or any other refugee “colonize” the island. From the moment Amir sets foot on the smugglers’ boat, his future is not his own to control.
Even the novel’s narrative structure alludes to this theme of predetermined fate–it’s told in two alternating sections, divided by the fatal shipwreck. Throughout the Before section, detailing Amir’s days afloat on the Calypso, the reader knows the boat’s tragic destiny. While the passengers scramble last-minute for rescue, the futility of their efforts is obvious; the story has a prescribed ending, and we understand its inevitability. Rather than taking away from the story, though, the lack of suspense does the opposite–it allows the narrative to take its time, letting the passengers tell us their thoughts and ideas and giving us space to process them.
In the moments on the Calypso between spurts of action and danger, El Akkad takes the opportunity to bring cultural discussion to the front and center. The passengers talk about the future beyond their Mediterranean destination: “Which America [are we going to]?” somebody asks. “There’s a lot of countries within that country.” Mohamed, an employee of the smugglers, brings back the realities of control with his reply: “The America that gets to decide what to do with people like us.”
Throughout the journey, Mohamed continues to comment on the role of power in the West. “The two types of people in this world aren’t good, and bad–they’re engines and fuel,” he says. “You will always, always be fuel.” These brief passages were some of the best in the novel; they were pointed observations and universal truths, woven seamlessly into the fast-paced narrative.
The novel’s very last scene mirrors its very first–a boy, laying on the beach as the hustle and bustle of a wealthy, self-absorbed world goes on around him. The ending is different, though; this boy never wakes up. It’s not clear how to interpret this scene, or even if it’s up to interpretation at all–are we seeing Amir, unable to escape his original waterlogged fate no matter how far he runs, or are we seeing another boy, a parallel story? Maybe it’s Alan Kurdi, or maybe it’s an alternate reality where Amir never makes it out of the sea alive in the first place. Ultimately, though, it doesn’t matter. The brief image on the last page of What Strange Paradise could depict any little boy who made a treacherous journey like Amir’s–that’s the point.
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