parts of this were really excellent but i had trouble getting through a lot of it. his idea, of going underground with a refugee in order to show the way someone has to cross borders and escape to another place, was risky and important. it's a world that we don't see and have no access to. in practice, i'm not really sure how well it worked in this case. but clearly i learned something about how this works and the conditions people are forced to be in, while just trying to find a better life.

"Nothing is intolerable until an alternative exists, if only as a dream."

"Economists refer to a citizenship premium which measures how much--all else, such as education, being equal--someone earns simply as a result of living in a particular country. It is as much as ten times more valuable to be the same individual in America or Europe than in a poor country; that is how much he or she might gain by crossing a border. Inequality is the slope of the frontier. It is the height of the wall that a person will scale."

"Imagine the cities of the world connected by a network of paths that measure not physical distance but danger: the risk of getting arrested, stuck in transit, scammed, kidnapped, or killed. For the underground traveler, the shortest distance between two points is rarely a straight line; it might even be a flight halfway around the world to transfer in an airport with corrupt officials. The space between two people clasping hands through a fence could be wider than a desert."

a poignant quote from george orwell: "You cannot disregard them if you accept the civilization that produced them." ( )

“When does a migrant become a refugee?”

Canadian journalist Matthieu Aikins spent seven years covering the war in Afghanistan. In the course of his work, he meets and befriends Omar, who acts as his guide and translator. Despite his serving as an interpreter for the Special Forces and having worked with USAID, Omar’s efforts to emigrate to the USA are unsuccessful on account of his being unable to procure all necessary documentation. As the situation in Afghanistan worsens and fearing backlash from the Taliban, Omar plans to emigrate to Europe traveling via the refugee route. He is reluctant to leave without Laila, who he loves but whose family opposes their marriage. Eventually he has to leave without Laila, promising to come back for her.

In August 2016, the author, disguised as an Afghan migrant (using the alias “Habib”), accompanies Omar as he leaves Afghanistan through a smugglers’ route, hoping to be allowed entry into Europe as a refugee. The author, in the process of helping his friend, hopes to gather insight and report on the refugee experience. He leaves his passport and paperwork with friends, fully aware that being discovered with a Western passport by the wrong people could lead to dire consequences. Aikins is also aware of how different his situation is compared to that of Omar whose family is escaping Afghanistan for the second time, the first being in the past when his parents had emigrated to Iran to escape the Soviet invasion. (“There is no future for me here. You have a good job, you have documents, you can travel anywhere you want.” He looked out at his city. “The only thing I have is my luck.”) What follows is a harrowing journey across borders, unsafe passages and dire conditions- all for the hope of a better future for Omar. Though the author and Omar do get separated in the course of their journey, they reunite in Turkey, travel by inflated boat to the Lesbos(after being duped by a smuggler promising to deliver them to different destination), becoming one of the many “boat people” arriving at the Greek island of Lesbos and the Moria refugee camp (“Built for two thousand people, by that point there were around five thousand crammed inside Moria, with hundreds more arriving each week.”) from where they move to a “squat” in Athens from where Omar continues his efforts to secure safe passage onwards.

“The right answer to the question of why you left was: Because I was forced. Because I had no choice. But what does it mean to be free in our world? The refugee is freedom’s negative image; she illustrates the story of progress that we tell ourselves.”

“The Naked Don't Fear the Water: An Underground Journey with Afghan Refugees” by Matthieu Aikins is exceptionally well-written, factual and informative with a fluid narrative that paints a realistic portrait of the peril fraught journey refugees and asylum seekers are compelled to undertake for a life of freedom and liberty that they are denied in their home country. The author discusses in much detail the places and people he encounters through his journey- the smugglers, the migrants and the activists and welfare groups. We also get to know more about Omar’s family and Maryam, Omar’s mother, a high school teacher, who will do everything in her power to keep her family safe.

“Maryam had become a refugee almost forty years ago, and yet Afghanistan was still at war. In the future, her grandchildren would tell her story to their own children here, to Europeans. But if Maryam’s tale inspired because of the long odds that she had survived, then it was also a testament to the many who had vanished. In this way, our stories carry forward fragments of others, just as we pass on our siblings’ genes, though they be childless.”

Aikins's accounts of life in the Moria refugee camp and the squatters' residence in Athens are particularly moving. He describes the experiences of migrants in foreign lands and the hurdles they have to go through in seeking asylum and how when faced with rejection of appeals and failure, they are compelled to resort to means and methods that put their lives at risk- a risk they are willing to take to avoid being deported back to the country they are fleeing from. It takes a while to wrap your head around the fact that this is not a work of fiction but an eye-opening first-hand account of events, focusing on the human angle of the refugee crisis that we might read about in the papers or works of fiction, but is the reality for so many people. This is an important book , the kind that stays with you. I commend the author for his courage and initiative in undertaking such a daring endeavor and sharing his experiences through this hard-hitting and thought-provoking memoir.

“We all have things about ourselves we’d like to change, and it’s seductive to imagine it happening in one swift movement. That was the dream behind migration: a fresh start. The journey was a prelude. Life came afterward, and it might be harder, more heartbreaking than the smuggler’s road….But in truth, we can’t leave ourselves behind. We get only one story, which we narrate looking backward.” ( )

Der Kanadier Matthieu Aikins beschließt , seinen afghanischen Freund Omar bei der Flucht nach Europa zu begleiten. Er gibt sich ebenfalls als Afghane aus. Es ist Ende 2015, die Balkanroute bereits geschlossen, als sie sich auf den Weg machen. Das Buch zeigt, wie viel Energie zur Flucht nötig ist, wie viel Geld, wie viel Zufall eine Rolle spielt. Er zeigt zermürbende und gefährliche Situationen, das viele Warten, die Ausweglosigkeit. Niemand macht sich aus Jux und Tollerei auf diesen Weg, Sehr interessant und auch frustrierend ist dieses Buch. ( )

Interesting how a Canadian journalist undercover as an Afghan and a NATO translator and family escape war-torn Afghanistan. We get information on the global refugee crisis. Fascinating first-hand experience and descriptions. ( )

The well told story of an individual Afghan refugee’s journey to Europe helps illuminate the dilemma of the macro refugee “problem”.
Nothing is intolerable until an alternative exists, even as a dream. (Page 52)
This is Canadian/American journalist Matthieu Aikins’ human story of Afghan refugees, as represented by “Omar” and his family, with journalistic asides, such as During that decade [1980’s], more than six million people would flee across the border to Iran and Pakistan, forming the largest group of refugees in the world, a distinction Afghans would hold for the next thirty years. (Page 64), the start of a mini-essay about refugees and their treatment from the Second World War onwards.

There is a tension between us reading of Omar’s refugee journey as reported by Aikins in well written, well researched prose, and Aikins’ privileged position as a western journalist, voluntarily “embedding” himself with Omar for parts of the journey.
There is also the unanswered question as to why Aikins is so “obsessed” with reporting on Omar’s journey in particular. They have become friends, but from a journalist’s employer/employee relationship, with Aikins using Omar’s local knowledge, connections and language skills to put both of them in dangerous situations. For Aikins this allows him to pursue his vocation, to write his articles for The New York Times etc. For Omar, this allows him to earn a living and support his family.
But Aikins is conscious of this, making the difference between his and Omar’s positions clear on multiple occasions throughout the book; Aikins might be making the same physical journey as Omar, but he always knows that he is probably only a phone call away from returning to his life in the West, inside the “fortress”.

This first section of the book (The War) skilfully tells Aikins’ and Omar’s back stories, and the emigration of Omar’s family from Afghanistan (having already been refugees in Iran when Omar was born). Omar’s mother and his remaining siblings in Afghanistan have sufficient dollars in 2016 to fly to Istanbul on a tourist visa (from where they hope to be able to travel to Europe as refugees). They then also find sufficient funds for Omar’s estranged father to fly to Istanbul with a visa.

However Omar has insufficient funds for the flight (although I was confused about this, as it was unclear following the sale of Omar’s car that this was the case). So in the second part (The Road), Omar, his friend, Malik, and Aikins start the overland refugee journey by taking a bus in Afghanistan to Zaranj. At this point, Omar is reluctant to travel onwards through Pakistan, as he had thought they would be able to travel to Iran directly (and Iran having a border with Turkey), but Aikins doesn’t have this nervousness, noting that:
Something had switched off, the emotion recording apparatus, as Robert Graves called it. (Page 118, with Aikins using infrequent but apposite , mainly literary quotes throughout the book, Hannah Arendt, Kapka Kassabova, Steinbeck, Orwell. This may allow the reader to distance themselves from Aikins and Omar, but deepened the text for me).
But Zaranj is a false start, as Omar is too nervous to proceed, so they all return to Kabul, agreeing for Omar and Malik to fly to Iran and then journey to Istanbul (so avoiding Pakistan). As Aikins would have an escort in Iran (as a westerner), he flies to Istanbul, but is deported as a threat to national security, presumably as a journalist (he doesn’t know why). Wanting to meet up with Omar in Istanbul, Aikins therefore journeys in reverse from Bulgaria to Turkey, illegally.
I’d already apologised to Omar for how I had acted in Nimroz. I was treating this trip like another assignment where I was in charge. But if I was going to follow Omar as a journalist, which was my justification for going undercover, then I had to let him make his own decisions. Yet I could hardly be objective when it came to my friend, especially when both of our lives were on the line. (Page 125). Not sure about this final protestation of caution, as Aikins has said that he wanted to go on at Zaranj.

In the third section (The Camp), Aikins meets up with Omar in Istanbul, and Omar decides to journey to Europe by trying to get a boat with people smugglers to one of the Greek islands where he can claim refugee status (Omar had worked as a translator for the western military forces before working for Aikins). Although not wanting to go to Lesbos, where there had recently been a fire at the Moria refugee camp, this is where they end up. Aikins again skilfully provides relevant background on the camps, before recording his and Omar’s story. This was 2016 “And the mood on the islands was changing. The people in their houses, as Steinbeck once wrote, felt pity at first, and then distaste, and finally hatred for the migrant people.” (Page 243)
Having paid a refugee smuggler for fake papers (Lithuanian) and a plane ticket, Omar flies to Athens, although the Afghans who try to travel on the next flight are arrested and returned to the Moria camp. Aikins has decided not to travel on fake papers, as it would be a criminal offence, and so a friend brings his passport to him on Lesbos, so that he can fly legally.

Aikins’ meets up with Omar in Athens after a few days of illness and in the final section (The City) tellingly records Omar’s initial impressions of down-at-heel Athens, with the squalor of its drug dealers, junkies and prostitutes shocking him. They then move to an anarchist squat in Exarchia (in the “autonomous zone”), where friends Aikins had met as a journalist are now living. After visiting the port of Patras and deciding that trying to secrete himself under a lorry or in a transport container is too dangerous, Omar tries to travel as a foot passenger using his fake Lithuanian passport, but is “made” by a border guard as he is unable to understand Russian (which a Lithuanian would). They return to Athens before Omar pays people smugglers for another fake passport and flight to Switzerland, and onwards.

An engaging and thoughtful book. Although written by an outsider (journalist) and so subject to the criticism levelled at other books of reportage such as The Road to Wigan Pier (referenced in the book, page 247), the book aspires “rather than sympathy, appealing to intellectual honesty, “You cannot disregard them if you accept the civilisation that produced them.”” ( )