“The story of humanity is essentially the story of human movement,” writes Kingsley in New Odyssey. When I thought about this, some of my most favourite stories are about journeys. In most of these stories, the protagonist would often flip a switch and realise “Yep, it’s time for a change. Let’s go on a trip.” On the Road is like this, Travels with Charlie, Wild, Into the Wild just to name a few. And they are all great reads.
But how can you compare a voluntary trip to find one’s selt to an involuntary journey for survival? There was no such privilege in the migrants in this story as they battled to survive to settle in a country outside of their own’s. In Syria, the men would be conscripted by force, houses are destroyed, they will be tortured and imprisoned — it is not a life that is easy to imagine, and this is where our faults lie. The media does a terrible job informing us of these stories, and we remain in our coffee shops sanitised.
I respect the way Kingsley told a migrant’s story from the frame of one journey. The anxiety is real, the context is heavy, and somewhat it helps you to understand the experience. For a father of three children, working in an office job, Hashem al Souki would prefer to stay in Syria than risk his life and his family’s life crossing through the Mediterranean. The atmosphere is claustrophobic, there is risk from everywhere, and money runs out quicker than water out of your hands. his train journey to Sweden is intense, as he tries to stay clear of police and immigration officials.
And for Hashem, he was one of the lucky ones. There are millions of other undocumented stories, no less impactful included by Kingsley as he met them in his journey. As he said, these journeys are heroic and comparable to Ulysses’s journey in the Greek isles.
There are good Samaritans along the way, who will restore your faith on humanity. It is a comfort to know while everybody else is watching the news in the comfort of their TV, some are on the other side, welcoming the migrants as they cross the Aegean. I’ve questioned myself more than once whether I can do the same.
Kingsley also opens the general debate of what the authorities can do. It is difficult to define who these authorities are. Sweden and Germany played the good Samaritans and as a result, there was an imbalance of migration and their infrastructure heated up more than they could handle.
The question of how to manage the migration must be done systematically and by more countries other than just Sweden and Germany. If all the European countries pitch in, the load is much more manageable. But we know that politics are ugly — we know that when Sweden and Germany opened up their borders to migrants, they faced a huge backlash from various right wing conservatives.
The story continues now. It is difficult to know now what happened to Hashem al Souki, as I cannot find any articles after 2017, and I’ve only read this book in 2020. The message is clear that it is impossible to live in a world where mass migration don’t exist: the sooner everybody pitches in and get their act together to find a solution, the better.
