As she watches (the sunhead swifts) flying up over the eastern cliffs this morning, they break into strange new formations, asymmetrical and chaotic. All but a handful turn in one direction, a trickle dissents, and then a fault line runs jagged through the heart of the flock like a landmass coming undone. Something about the island is changing, she thinks, and the birds are the first to feel it.
Winner of the 2021 Giller Prize — Canada’s “richest” literary award — What Strange Paradise is an empathetically written account of one nine year old Syrian boy’s journey as an unwilling refugee. Separated into alternating “Before” and “After” chapters, we learn how Amir ended up on a decrepit boat crossing the Mediterranean (and follow the frightful voyage he took with a varied cast of other desperate people) and watch as a local girl tries to help the foreign boy who washed up on her home island’s shore (all while keeping one step ahead of the military forces looking for Amir). I say this is “empathetically” written because author Omar El Akkad gives voice to every possible point of view (from cosmopolitan Syrians who believe that reports of razed villages are “fake news”, to the human smugglers who justify their efforts to make their own way in the world, to the Greek colonel who believes that the boatloads of refugees are an attempt at back door colonisation), and despite acknowledging all of the arguments against refugees taking this most desperate leap into the unknown, El Akkad never lets the reader forget that little boys do wash up on foreign shores and they deserve to be treated with kindness and humanity. How do we keep forgetting that in the debate over “what should be done”? With truly crisp, thoughtful, and balanced writing, I think this is a thoroughly worthy and timely Giller winner.
Once, years earlier, Amir’s father told him that none of this started with bombs or bullets or a few stupid kids spray-painting the slogans of the revolution on the walls. It started with a drought. You come from farmers, he said, and five years before you were born the earth turned on us, the earth withheld. We are the products of that withholding. Every man you ever meet is nothing but the product of what was withheld from him, what he feels owed. Don’t call this a conflict, Amir’s father said. There’s no such thing as conflict. There’s only scarcity, there’s only need.
This is a rather short read, but with characters organically stating profound truths, it has both heft and nuance. And with the storyline split the way it is — getting to know Amir through the before chapters, and following along with his flight for freedom in the after — there’s an earned tension to the plot; you eventually identify with Amir and want what he wants. Along the way we meet tourists who are put out that corpses washing up have closed the beach at their resort for the day, we meet right wing politicians who want to know why these “so-called refugees” all seem to have cell phones, we meet desperate people fleeing desperate circumstances who believe that just reaching the West will equal safety, and we meet the clear-eyed pragmatists who would disabuse them of that notion:
The West you talk about doesn’t exist. It’s a fairy tale, a fantasy you sell yourself because the alternative is to admit that you are the least important character in your own story. You invent an entire world because your conscience demands it, you invent good people and bad people and you draw a neat line between them because your simplistic morality demands it. But the two kinds of people in this world are not good and bad — they’re engines and fuel. Go ahead, change your country, change your name, change your accent, pull the skin right off your bones, but in their eyes they will always be the engines and you will always, always be fuel.
I agree with other readers that the final chapter (“Now”) seems to undermine the essence of this book, but in this interview, El Akkad explains what’s happening there and it serves to remind me how cosy and removed from the refugee experience I am. Once again, I’ll call this a compelling read and a very worthy winner.
2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize shortlist:
- What Strange Paradise by Omar El Akkad * Winner
- The Listeners by Jordan Tannahill
- Fight Night by Miriam Toews
- Glorious Frazzled Beings by Angélique Lalonde
- The Son of The House by Cheluchi Onyemelukwe-Onuobia
