On the day that I got my visitor’s card at the library here, I borrowed Marie-Louise Gay’s Mustafa (2018): a children’s story (Gay illustrates, writes, and translates) about a boy who searches for himself, in the space between his old country and his new country.

Certains soirs, Mustafa rêve du pays qu’il a quitté, le pays d’avant. Ses rêves remplis de fumée, de feu et de grands bruits le réveillent. Et Mustafa ne sait plus où it est.

His mother reassures him: “You are here,” she says, in a gentle tone. As the scenes and seasons change, Mustafa feels more and more that he is part of this new place. He worries that he is invisible here, but by the end of the story, he understands that the connections we make with other people are what makes us feel seen.

Since then, while the media headlines have thrummed with relevant reporting, I’ve continued my Here and Elsewhere reading, chronicles more specific than the universal story captured in Gay’s illustrated volume.

One of the first narratives to follow that story for young readers was Steven Heighton’s Reaching Mithymna:  Among the Volunteers and Refugees on Lesvos (2020), partly inspired by the author’s death in April of this year. I’ve enjoyed Heighton’s writing in articles and the ideas he expressed in interviews, but because his debut novel was about boxing, I only now have realised how much I’ve overlooked.

His style is polished, his compassion evident, and his skill at the sentence level impressive. There are general statements here which gave me pause: “In any life, two impulses compete: the aspiration to be more awake—aware, intentional, passionate, engaged—and a longing for anaesthesis.” And detailed scenes that emerge from his work on that island:

The winds have died. Moonlight on the big-top shelters, the smaller tents and the prefab huts. The midnight camp might be a travelling circus in the respite between evening performance and morning tear-down. With Omiros and Asim I stand outside one of the shelters, its front flaps slightly open for air. The hum of space heaters and the sound of several hundred people’s sleep-breathing fold into a drone as peaceful as collective chanting in a temple, mosque, or monastery.

Here, I learned that, on the busiest day described to Heighton, in the July before his arrival, six thousand refugees arrived, in inflatable dinghies. Six thousand. There are other numbers, other ways of presenting data related to this migratory path, but it’s different hearing about it from a volunteer working there, on the sand and rocks.

Because Hassan Al Kontar had been working in the UAE when he was called up to fight for Syria, he never returned to his homeland and, ultimately, was deported to Malaysia; his story of finding another home in man@the_airport (2021) unfolds in social media and this book emerges from that public-eye chronicle.

For most of us, war is something you read about in history books, watch in movies or documentaries. It’s not something that happens in your home, to the people you love. If you were a Syrian living abroad in 2011, you changed the TV channel every minute, with the false hope that someone would suddenly say it had all stopped.

The pull-through compulsion in Heighton’s book, for me as a reader, was partly his dedication to craft; in contrast, the pull-through in Hassan Al Kontar’s was the matter-of-fact tone of his story erupting out of his experience, unpolished and direct. Interesting to read such different ways of telling a story, and the next was different yet again.

Via interlibrary loan (thanks to the Sioux Lookout Public Library for sending this copy my way), I read Karla Cornejo Víllavícencío’s The Undocumented Americans (2020). Divided into six sections, she chronicles narratives in a casual but compulsive style: Staten Island, Ground Zero, Miami, Flint, Cleveland, and New Haven.

She’s a graduate of an Ivy League school in the United States and she is the daughter of undocumented Americans originally from Ecuador: an impassioned writer who leans more towards activism than journalism.

Journalists are not allowed to get involved the way I have gotten involved. Journalists, to the best of my knowledge, do not try to change the outcome of their stories as crudely as I do. I send water. I fight with immigration lawyers. I raise money. I make arrangements with supernatural spirits to stop deportations.

The stories of the cleanup crews in the wake of the fall of the towers on 9/11 are anecdotal and powerful: “The workers were mostly Eastern European and Latin American. Many of the women knew the area well, having cleaned offices and apartments in Lower Manhattan for years. They knew they’d be called to dust. There was so much dust.” There are several instances in which an individual’s story occupies only a few paragraphs, but there’s a sense that their journey could fill an entire volume.

She sketches scenes swiftly and interjects when her personal experiences align with those she recounts: “I think every immigrant in this country knows that you can eat English and digest it so well that you shit it out, and to some people, you will still not speak English.” Even so, there are extensive endnotes for those keen to fact-check— but not the identities and personal details, because she keeps those confidential.

It’s an incredibly readable volume, one which adds much-needed nuance to conversations about families on the move. Other families: “Could I please tell the real story about them? Not the one we’re used to seeing in the papers, about them pissing in bottles and catcalling women. The real one. Yes, yes, I promise. I always promise things before I know whether or not I can deliver.” And her own, too: “My brother sure does love my mother, in a whole, pure, white-woman-at-a-farmer’s-market kind of way, but that’s because my mom didn’t leave him in Ecuador before he could speak, so there aren’t many things unsaid between them.”

Also accessible and engaging is Edafe Okporo’s Asylum (2022), which chronicles his decision to leave his homeland after being awarded for his grassroots work in the local queer community which, ironically, left him vulnerable to the authorities whose attention was thus drawn to his sexual identity: “This single blazing moment brought my life in Nigeria to an end. I had to run—the farther, the better.”

Here, I learned that 2019 alone, 79.5 million people were forcibly displaced, including 4.2M asylum seekers; 1 in 113 people on the earth is an asylum seeker, has been internationally displaced, or is a refugee.

From Gaia Vince’s Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World (2022), I learned that 1.2 million Americans were uprooted by extreme conditions in 2018 and in 2020 (just one year between these figures!) that toll rose to 1.7 million: “The U.S. now averages a billion-dollar disaster every eighteen days,” she writes.

Vince’s is a small book that fits comfortably in your hand, but the print stretches to the edges, underscoring the feeling that the volume is dense; it’s true that there are a lot of statistics and figures in her writing, but around that she employs a conversational tone, so that we understand that she is writing from the position of care-giver and a citizen (and more), not as an academic. “Climate change is everything change,” she writes, “because climate is the fabric on which we weave our lives.”

Ben Rawlence deliberately adopts a storyteller’s tone in City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World’s Largest Refugee Camp (2016) about his time in Dadaab. If you don’t usually read non-fiction, this is one to add to your list because while there are maps and endnotes for those who crave specifics and facts, the emphasis right from the beginning is on some of the human stories that unfolded in northern Kenya. It’s impossible to choose just one of the nine stories to summarise or excerpt, but consider this passage, to see how swiftly he contextualises the broader political situation in this passage but swiftly circles back to how an individual experiences that reality:

Caught between the ongoing war in Somalia and a world unwilling to welcome them, the refugees can only survive in the camp by imagining a life elsewhere. It is unsettling: neither the past, nor the present, nor the future is a safe place for a mind to linger for long. To live in this city of thorns is to be trapped mentally, as well as physically, your thoughts constantly flickering between impossible dreams and a nightmarish reality. In short, to come here you must be completely desperate.

From Rawlence’s creative non-fiction to Nishant Batsha’s Mother Ocean Father Nation (2022) fiction—here, we have a debut novel that is mainly preoccupied with the stories of a brother and sister, whose Indian family faces political persecution on a South Pacific island in 1985.

There are fractures:

“The silence behind their goodbye was filled with the wails of mothers watching their son leave, the shrieks of infants handed off to relatives, and the gruff shouts of the soldiers at the doors.”

But there is also respite:

“A library had always asked only for her quiet presence and given her everything in return.

Francesca Momplaisir’s novel The Garden of Broken Things (2022), follows the journey of a single mother returning to Haiti with her fifteen-year-old son. It begins with a pair of pages written in a poetic style, but the rest of the novel is characterized by a direct, clear voice which invites readers to witness and engage with deeply emotional scenes that feel real, but neither sentimental nor melodramatic. Hers is not a fancy style—rather, a mesmerising voice.

He flips through the [passport] pages, I assume to see where I’ve travelled. It is arrogant of me, but I assume that he wants one—an American passport. A passport to everywhere, anywhere. No visa required by most countries. I assume that, despite his status, gatekeeper to his homeland, he longs to leave, to see that place lòt bò an, over there.

It’s interesting to compare this novel with Sulaiman Addonia’s Silence Is My Mother Tongue (2018) which is also written in plain prose, but which remains decidedly poetic—and painterly even—throughout. Addonia’s prose cannot be rushed; I read Saba and Hagos’ experiences in the refugee camp in Sudan as if they were poetry, just a few paragraphs inviting more contemplation.

  Saba and Zahra filed past mothers who tied their babies on their backs with their embroidered zurias, mothers who rocked in harmony and hummed in unison.
A woman with a cross tattooed on her forehead sat on a man’s shoulders, her arms spread wide open calling for her missing daughter. But everyone is lost, Saba thought, as people strayed into each other’s path, separating one another.

Safia Elhillo’s home is not a country (2021) is actually constructed in verse, but like the work of Jacqueline Woodson, this verse reads more like prose, with a strong narrative line. She considers the life of a young woman from Sudan adjusting to life overseas, all the limitations and possibilities. One of the elements of the story that really appealed to me is her relationship with her brother: there is a sense that, as quietly interior and reflective as this volume is, as removed as she feels from everyone else (including him), there could be a companion volume for his story.

i think i could have been a better friend to you
instead of locking myself away inside my head
& invented memories    locking myself away
inside the old photographs    the old songs
& letting my whole life happen without me

You can imagine how this post has swollen with books throughout the year, but if I don’t get on with sharing them, it’ll be another reading year altogether—and, possibly another set of books on this theme.

How about you? Any book or author you could add to this list? (Naomi, I know one long-listed Giller title you are going to add!)
Or, is there a theme that has either accidentally or deliberately been part of your reading in 2022?