Recommended to me by my sister-in-law, Julia, I was very happy to find out that What Strange Paradise by Omar El Akkad is the winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize 2021, the most sought after book award in Canada. I am on a mission to read all of this year’s finalists and what better way to start a journey in a literary award than with the winner from last year? What Strange Paradise is a poignant story about immigration and belonging. The main character being a young child makes it even more heartbreaking, exposing the cruelty of the world.
What Strange Paradise
By Omar El Akkad | Goodreads
More bodies have washed up on the shores of a small island. Another overfilled, ill-equipped, dilapidated ship has sunk under the weight of its too many passengers: Syrians, Ethiopians, Egyptians, Lebanese, Palestinians, all of them desperate to escape untenable lives back in their homelands. But miraculously, someone has survived the passage: nine-year-old Amir, a Syrian boy who is soon rescued by Vanna. Vanna is a teenage girl, who, despite being native to the island, experiences her own sense of homelessness in a place and among people she has come to disdain. And though Vanna and Amir are complete strangers, though they don’t speak a common language, Vanna is determined to do whatever it takes to save the boy.
In alternating chapters, we learn about Amir’s life and how he came to be on the boat, and we follow him and the girl as they make their way toward safety. What Strange Paradise is the story of two children finding their way through a hostile world. But it is also a story of empathy and indifference, of hope and despair–and about the way each of those things can blind us to reality.
Content notes include death, xenophobia, racism, war, child death, pregnancy, violence.
What Strange Paradise
A few years back, I was taking a course in cyberliterature. I had the opportunity to experience the terror of being on a similar ship in Virtual Reality (We Wait VR): a congested boat, where everyone is in everyone’s personal space, in the middle of the ocean, leaving home or wherever the last destination was, behind, making a slow float trot to the next place, that will not welcome the people with open arms, but label them. I remember the faces of the people I was sitting around, the revolving lights from lighthouses illuminating them once in a while. I didn’t know it back then but that experience added so much context to my reading of this book, while What Strange Paradise brings that all into reality by painting history and character. I can give a name to the person who was on that boat with me.
What Strange Paradise is a short read at 235 pages, merely 6.5 hours in audiobooks at normal speed. I started this as an audiobook and felt a great urge (which I followed) to reread the chapters in print. It is that kind of a book – one that makes me want to study and make extensive notes on.
The Plot
As you probably gathered from the synopsis, What Strange Paradise begins with a child lying face down on a beach, surrounded by wreckage. The first chapter is centred around this child as he gains consciousness but it is mostly about these islanders where the shipwreck’s victims, alive and dead, are washing up. There are foreign dead on their lands and this has been happening more and more in recent years. This island used to be a tourist spot but with so many dead washing up, the livelihood of the people is threatened as tourists no longer want to visit. I was hooked. The way the author sets and unfolds each chapter is brilliant! The islanders are searching the bodies for valuables, speaking a different language, the contrast between what’s foreign and what’s native is evident from the very start.
In subsequent chapters, how Amir got on the boat, his history and roots, his family, are all revealed. The struggles of leaving home, travelling with strangers who are fleeing too, not just from the same country but from all over the area – Amir takes everything in with his eyes and Omar, the author, delivers it to the reader with precision and truth. He reflects on his Quiet Uncle, who married his mother and got them away from home. He doesn’t understand why they are travelling, why there are humanitarian workers misspelling his name and age, but it does not take him long to not trust anyone, especially when he lands on an island, the sole survivor.
On Integrating into a New World
There is no hiding the fact that life sucks, that a refugee, whether child or adult, has to do all they can to blend in with the general population. Imam, Amir’s mother, is the perfect example of a woman who watches English TV shows and imitates accents ‘to avoid the immigrant markup’.
She needed to sound like the place in which she was going to restart her life.
What Strange Paradise, pg 33
Imam is not the only one striving to blend in. The pregnant woman on the boat, Umm Ibrahim, recited the same phrase over and over,
“Hello. I am pregnant. I will have baby on April twenty-eight. I need hospital and doctor to have safe baby. Please help.”
What Strange Paradise, pg 68
All she knows are the sounds for the sentence, the meaning as a whole, nothing else in English.
From the Perspective of those taking in Refugees
I had never considered the perspective of a small island where more and more refugees are showing up. Through the chapters that focused on Amir on the island, I met all sorts of people – Vänna, the young girl who was willing to help the child, Madame El Ward who is in charge of the shelter, who knew bringing Amir into the system would not do him any good, the colonel who wanted to know the location of every last refugee to set foot on his island, dead or alive. He compares refugees to colonialism – how ultimately there will be so many refugees that they would take over and run the place. There is some deeply embedded hatred here, such a divisive way to look at humans that there is no space of compassion even for a little boy.
From the Perspective of the to-be-refugees
In contrast, the perspective of the people on the boat and those taking them from one place to another was also quite eye-opening. On the boat, all these people are huddled together, when there is nowhere else to be, they are confronted by their ambitions and darkness. A grown man wants to take away Amir’s life jacket because it does not make sense to him, he who paid as much to be on the boat, for a child to have a life jacket. Says so much about valuing one’s own life than a child’s.
The boat ride, even before it becomes a wreck, is not a pleasant place to be. Though Amir most likely does not comprehend a lot of what goes around him, as the reader, the conversations about money, the west, the need to leave home, the circumstances that have led to so many people on the boat, the tension of forged documents… it is impossible to read this book and not think. Sometimes these boat rides disillusion the very people hoping to make a better life:
“The west you talk about doesn’t exist. It’s a fairytale, 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 are 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.”
What Strange Paradise
I loved What Strange Paradise. The writing, the characters, the pacing, the brutality of reality… everything was perfect! Additionally, the audiobook performance is engaging.
This isn’t a story I was prepared for and it gave me new understanding about the life of refugees. Having moved countries by choice and lived through its challenges, to move with only hope for betterment, an up-hill battle that will last a long time, without any knowledge of what the final destination will be, the number of times they would need to leave and try a new place, What Strange Paradise questions humanity, our hopes and dreams and who we have become. If you want to expand your knowledge about the refugee experience, give this one a read.
Check out BBC’s We Wait VR. It is available on the Oculus Store.
I am reading the Giller Prize 2022 finalists! I have read 3 of the 5 so far and I am making good progress on the remaining two. I will be sharing all reviews and a wrap up in March so stay tuned for that! Read more about the shortlist here.
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