It was late when I picked up Emmanuel Mbolela’s memoir Refugee (2021), nearly time for bed; it occurred to me that another book might make more suitable bedtime reading. I’ll just start, I thought, because it was a borrowed copy and due back soon at the library. Straight away, however, he captured my attention in the history of Democratic Republic of the Congo. (The kind of ‘democratic’ that wears bunny-eared quotation marks. The kind that decimates bedtimes around the world.)

His narrative is exceptionally clear and direct; in short order, he fills any gaps in understanding that might exist for an historical understanding of the region. “The prerequisite for a true decolonialization of the mind is to take an active and differentiated approach to the history of individual African countries and regions. We need to understand that this history is very closely interlinked with the history of Western colonialism starting with the Atlantic slave trade from the early sixteenth century onward.” Immediately afterwards readers are engaged in his personal story, just as clear and direct.

By the third chapter, I was wholly engaged; I knew, based on the existence of this publication, that his escape was ultimately successful, but the intricacies and personal details made this narrative gripping and his style increased my investment while the difficulties he experienced in his journey intensified too.

Although a personal narrative, he frequently re-centres the narrative to focus on others who experienced different struggles: “Police raids and brutal arrests were the most frequent cause of suffering and death among migrant women at that time.” It’s a far-reaching story, and there’s nothing far-fetched about it: “No African dictator can remain in power for long without the support of the West.” (Translated by Charlotte Collins)

Goose Lane, 2021

Patricia Robertson’s Hour of the Crab (also discussed in this season’s Short Story Quarterly) is her third collection of stories, which sports an impressive trio of blurbs from David Huebert (the writer whose horse story made me cry on the subway), Joan Thomas, and Wayne Grady.

Some of the stories fit with my climate change reading project, but the ones which really slapped me up the side of the head focus on migration. In “The Gate of Charity”, for instance, readers confront the tragedy up close:

“Ahmed, like Yunes, like hundreds of others, was keeping the fish and the seaweed company at the bottom of the Mediterranean.”

Robertson does not skirt the reality, the small percentage of survivors who leave their homelands in hope of surviving elsewhere, but even a statement like this one presents the situation as part of a broader landscape, not a story of just one man, but a universal truth which has created a legion of lives lost below the surface, with the fish and the seaweed.

Because we really are “all in this together” but not all of us are sinking yet.

In an interview with Scott Simon on NPR’s “Weekend Edition”, Valeria Luiselli speaks about how she paused her writing of Lost Children Archive (2019) to write “Tell Me How It Ends,” a “straightforward short essay nonfiction that’s a kind of X-ray of the American immigration system… of children arriving alone and undocumented at the border and seeking asylum”.

Afterwards, she was able to resume work on her novel with a new clarity: “It is not, in fact, a novel about the immigration crisis. It’s a novel that grapples with how to document and write about and think about political violence and about political crisis. It’s not a novel about immigration but a novel with immigration.” The novel begins, however, with the story of a marriage, against the backdrop of a journey and, because there are two children in the context of both, the story of the two children who have been lost in the process of crossing a border take on a peculiar weight and presence.

Like Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant, Luiselli’s handling and processing of absence is as significant as her story; I enjoyed following in her footsteps and I particularly appreciated the overarching conceit of how boxes and folders can both contain and obscure stories. “I suppose that documenting things—through the lens of a camera, on paper, or with a sound recording device—is really only a way of contributing one more layer, something like soot, to all the things already sedimented in a collective understanding of the world.”

It’s easy to draw connecting lines between Omar El Akkad’s first novel, American War (2017) and his follow-up: “With nowhere else to turn to, the refugees began to rally around the rain-damaged tents like antibodies to an infection.”

Even though I resisted the idea of it (partly cover illustration, partly misconceptions on my part), I was deeply affected by his debut; I still think about the characters in that story periodically—nearly five years later and a few hundred reads later.

What Strange Paradise (2021) is leaner, but I suspect these characters will stay with me too. He works with profound ideas—time and geography—but allows them to spiral against the backdrop of a young boy’s flight.

So a bus ride that normally takes 90 minutes takes more than a day; so on a boat ride, “the geography of movement was indistinguishable from the geography of stillness.” But his characters manage to express complex ideas in such simple terms and recognizable ideas that their perspectives burrow into your consciousness. Consider:

“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’re 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 aren’t good and bad—they’re engines and fuel. Go head, change your identity, change your name, change your accent, pull the skin right off your bones, but in their eyes they will always be engines and you will always, always be fuel.”

Nanjala Nyabola’s Travelling While Black: Essays Inspired by a Life on the Move (2020) is voice-driven and I immediately felt comfortable with the balance of declaration and exploration; sometimes, her tone is very direct and knowing and, other times, she lays out complexities and seems to be navigating through them in real time. In general, she is reflecting on how, in one instance, she is perceived as a “harmless” “Western traveller overstaying their visa” and, in another instance, she is perceived as “a criminal who must be met with the full force of the law”.

The essays display experiences from both extremes and in-betweens and, along the way, consider debates that appear distinct but are united by their focus on the social construction of race and how that effects everyday lives. (The essays on Bessie Head and the potential and peril of Pan-Africanism really appealed to me, and following the thread of her Kenyan identity was particularly informative in how she perceives the nation and its colonial past and post-colonial developments.)

Her book “sits somewhere between the philosophical and the personal” and as such it will resonate most meaningfully with those who feel a personal connection to her tone and style but, even in the absence of that link, these are thought provoking topics.

“The experience of travelling while black—either as a voyager, as a migrant, or as a refugee—is united by this narrow thread of a soul rubbed raw from the disorientation of leaving what is familiar behind.”