59 pages • 1 hour read
Content Warning: This Important Quotes section contains references to distressing scenes, including the death of children.
“A pair of plump orange-necked birds, stragglers from a northbound flock, take rest on the lamppost from which hangs one end of a police cordon. In the breaks between the wailing of the sirens and the murmur of the onlookers, they can be heard singing. The species is not unique to the island nor the island to the species, but the birds, when they stop here, change the pitch of their songs. The call is an octave higher, a sharp, throat-scraping thing.”
The sunhead swifts that visit the island every year mark the change of seasons. Their migration is symbolically linked to both the migrants, such as Amir, and the “natives,” many of whom, like Marianne Hermes and Madame El Ward, are not truly native to the island, their families only having lived there for a few generations.
“Amir read, captivated—not by the plot or the impossible contraptions, but by the way Zaytoon and Zaytoona’s little town always seemed to reset at the beginning of every new story, as though none of the previous ones left a mark. He had never noticed this before, but he noticed it now and, although he couldn’t articulate it, the thing that amazed him was the sheer lightness of such a repairable world. To live so lightly was the real adventure, the biggest adventure.”
Zaytoon and Zaytoona, Amir’s favorite comic book, depicts an idealized world in which any damage is magically repaired by the time of the protagonists’ next adventure. Amir is fascinated with this idea because he exists in a fractured world: His home in Syria has been destroyed by bombs, and because there is no way to fix this, he and his family are now refugees. The comic book thus introduces the theme of The Limits and Possibilities of Escapism.
“She is fifteen and fifteen feels empty, an absence of an age. Some part of her is becoming a stranger to the rest. The first time she sensed it was a year earlier, while wandering among the rocks by the sea at the foot of the sleep-gum forest—the first time she’d seen the severed wings. They sat there in the soil, the bones small and L-shaped at the site of the breaking, dollops of blood like rusted coins on the feathers.”
Vänna’s discovery of the bird wings is symbolically related to her dawning recognition of the unfair situation that the migrants that come to her island are forced into. The bird-eating creature is linked to Colonel Kethros and his soldiers, and it makes an appearance later on in the novel.
“Amir sat silently, listening to his mother snap her tongue up toward the roof of her mouth, trying for a harder-sounding g, a deeper-sounding h. In moments such as these it was difficult to think of her as a single person, the same person he’d known all his life. When she was with her friends she was someone named Iman and when she haggled with the vendors at the market she was someone named Umm Amir and when she pleaded with the British man whose position seemed to entail passing judgement on whether she and her family were sufficiently destitute to be called refugees she was Mrs. Utu, and all of these people seemed to be entirely different and engaged in entirely different attempts at survival.”
In the “Before” chapters of the novel, many of the refugee characters are preoccupied with fitting in with their newly adopted or future societies. Language is a key part of fitting in, so Iman practices speaking Egyptian Arabic while the Utus live in Alexandria. Amir sees his mother’s code-switching as her taking on different personalities.
“These People don’t think,” he says. “They don’t plan.”
Ronis, the guard at the migrant detention center, expresses a common negative stereotype concerning undocumented migrants, his xenophobia developing the theme of Differing Attitudes Toward the Stranger. The “Before” chapters, which depict the depth of the migrants’ preparation and planning, directly contradict his claim. What Ronis and others fail to consider is that the desperation and fear that drive people to seek refuge cause them to take risks a person in a stable situation would never consider.
“Hello. I am pregnant. I will have baby on April twenty-eight. I need hospital and doctor to have safe baby. Please help.”
Umm Ibrahim repeats this over and over on the Calypso, almost as a mantra. She never reveals what led her to flee her home country, but she wants to have her baby in safe conditions. Amir, who does not know English, later mistakes Umm Ibrahim’s words as the correct thing to request help from the maid at the Hotel Xenios.
“He has never seen a girl like her before—perhaps on television, on the American shows, but not in the flesh. He felt when he saw her that she looked familiar, but it is only now he understands why. She looks like the illustrated girl on the canister of powdered milk his mother buys for his baby brother. […] He quickly learned you could tell the quality of a product by how Western the people on the packaging looked. White skin, blue eyes, blond hair—these things spoke of luxury, betterment, possibility.”
Amir, like many of the migrants in the novel, associates the West with opulence and opportunity. He links this sense of luxury with white skin; he has only seen white people on the packages of luxury products and thus associates these qualities with Vänna. While this passage comments on the racism that underpins Western societies, Vänna does represent “possibility” for Amir, as she proves crucial in his escape.
“Amir puts his hand to his chest. The bell-shaped locket Quiet Uncle gave him is still there. But for a thin scratch along its exterior, it has not been damaged, and the tiny portraits of his mother and brother inside are untouched.”
Amir’s locket symbolizes his connection with his mother and brother—his former life. It also represents his regrets: He is unable to contact his mother to apologize for leaving her. At the end of the novel, the locket identifies Amir’s body on the beach.
“‘We’re not coming from outer space,’ Umm Ibrahim said. ‘You’re telling me they’ve never seen a Muslim before?’
‘I’m telling you the exact opposite,’ Mohamed replied.’”
Mohamed is jaded regarding the hopes of the passengers of the Calypso. He takes any opportunity he can get to make fun of them and dispel their preconceived notions of the West. Here, he indicates that Westerners’ stereotypes of Muslims will make the refugees’ lives more difficult when they arrive in Europe.
“He is one of the largest men on the island—not fat and only a little taller than most, but well built, solid in a way she associates with military men […]. In the thick straightness of his jawline and the width of his shoulders, the inverted triangle of him, he seems to have been built to excel at work that demands uniform and Insignia. But he also has a charming smile, and this, more than any other facet of what he projects to the world, is what Vänna distrusts the most.”
Colonel Kethros, the man in charge of hunting down undocumented migrants on the island, is the main antagonist of What Strange Paradise. He is the Captain Hook to Amir’s Peter Pan, chasing Amir relentlessly across the island. Vänna is quick to distrust his charm, which he uses to great effect on other island residents.
“Perhaps this is what made him stand out, the day after another half-dozen children were arrested for spray-painting slogans on the walls and swept into the underground prisons, and Loud Uncle convinced him to march with him in the protest, and when the screaming and shooting subsided they were never to be seen again. Perhaps it was not the presence of a revolutionary at a revolution that so enraged the secret police who took them, but the presence of an ordinary man.”
Amir’s father and one of his uncles were disappeared a long time before the beginning of the novel. Amir’s father and his uncles make up Amir’s concept of masculinity. Amir’s father was a good man and the most levelheaded of his brothers—not a revolutionary like Loud Uncle or a coward like Quiet Uncle.
“‘There’s a man I know who runs a boat to the mainland,’ Madame El Ward says. ‘Once a week, Sunday at noon. It’s not something he’s allowed to do, and he’ll get in a lot of trouble if he’s found out, so you need to keep this just between you and me. But if you can get this boy there before the ferryman leaves on Sunday he can take him where there’s a community of people from the same place he came from, a community of people who can help him. He stands a better chance that way, Vänna. Do you understand?’”
Madame El Ward believes Amir is better off living among a Syrian refugee community on mainland Greece than facing the agonizingly slow bureaucracy of being processed in the migrant detention center. This status of being constantly in between communities is part of the migrant experience that El Akkad highlights. The ferryman evokes Charon, the Greek mythological figure who ferries the dead across the River Styx.
“Every day. Every day. And then one day they said I’d left one of the fields empty on a form. I said, ‘What field?’ They said, ‘Apartment number.’ I said, ‘I live in a house.’ They said, ‘It doesn’t matter—the new policy is if there’s any blank field at all, it’s an automatic rejection.’ And that was that.”
Kamal describes the reason his visa application was rejected when he tried to emigrate legally. His rejection for an arbitrary bureaucratic reason emphasizes the often insurmountable hurdles immigrants face. Had it not been for the blank field, Kamal might have lived, as he would not have crossed the sea on the doomed Calypso.
“Through the small slit in the floorboards near where he sat, Amir could see them without seeing them. No more than a thin rotting deck and a few feet of air separated him from the men and women whose panicked shouting shook the Calypso’s stomach. He felt the breath of them brushing against his cheek, the heat of them, of bodies constrained and blinded. Still, in the black of night he could not see them, and when suddenly the tips of three fingers shot through the terror and the floorboards, Amir screamed and leapt up. The hand, bloody from where it scraped the wood and drew splinters, shot out from below, reaching for him. Elsewhere the passengers were hypnotized by the looming freighter, but Amir could only watch the bloodied hand, grasping at him and then drawing back into the darkness of the lower deck.”
Throughout the journey on the Calypso, Amir is the only passenger who is acutely aware of the crowd of passengers in the cargo hold, likely because Quiet Uncle is among their number. These passengers, whose undesirable position reflects the fact that they could not afford to be above deck, are often described as a living mass rather than a collection of individuals. There is no chance for any of them to escape the catastrophic outcome of their voyage.
“‘Yallah, yallah!’ Amir yells. The word is foreign to Vänna’s ears, but its meaning is clear—it speaks of restlessness, movement. That she understands what the boy means on some instinctual level doesn’t surprise Vänna, nor does the subconscious realization in that moment that it is natural for certain words to be subject to universal understanding—that, following its phrases for greeting and introduction, every culture’s first linguistic export should be the directive Let’s go.”
Despite the language barrier between them, Amir and Vänna gradually develop linguistic cues that help them understand each other. “Yallah,” meaning “let’s go,” is used several times in the novel by both children. When Vänna says it after rescuing Amir from Colonel Kethros, it signifies her resolve to help her friend no matter what.
“The colonel points south, beyond the hotel grounds to the sea and what lies on the other side of the sea. ‘Your bosses are letting them colonize us,’ he says.
‘You’re getting melodramatic in your old age,’ Lina replies. ‘It’s not a colonization, it’s just a bunch of people on boats.’
‘Every colonization is just a bunch of people on boats,’ the colonel says.”
Real-world nativist movements often use the term “colonization” hyperbolically to describe the influx of migrants during times of crisis. Kethros represents this nativist backlash in countries impacted by the migration crisis following the Syrian Civil War. Framing immigration as attempted colonization ignores the fact that refugees are fleeing desperate, dangerous situations and making a choice between possible life and certain death.
“At first they don’t see the thing emerging; it’s too slow, too low to the ground, too much the color of the brush. And when they finally do, it’s not the eyes or the teeth or the claws they see first, but the scales. A line of bruise-green plates rise from the animal’s back. It looks prehistoric, its claws and tail tracing ruts through the sand as it shuffles out into the clearing. Vänna has never seen it before, but it looks as she imagined it would, the bird-eating thing.”
The bird-eating creature, whose existence Vänna only imagined, is one of the novel’s few fantastical elements; there are no reptilian animals in Greece that match this description. This suggests that the creature is also a migrant—either by nature or because it escaped from somewhere. The creature is also evocative of the crocodile that pursues Captain Hook in Peter Pan, though its bird-eating habits align it closer with Colonel Kethros in What Strange Paradise.
“Now the place is overrun with tourists and locals. The sand is a loose mosaic of beach towels and coolers and shoes with money and keys stuffed in the toes. He has always been able to tell them apart, the tourists and the locals, but now it is by their appearance, the wealth implied in the tourists’ clothing and their accessories and their pristine rented cars, whereas before it was by something in the marrow of them. It induces a kind of nausea in the colonel to see it, to see how nondescript these foreigners and their money and their utter absence of culture have made his island, his people.”
Colonel Kethros’s distaste for tourists extends to locals whose culture has been “watered down” due to the tourism industry. Although Kethros’s romanticization of a vanished past feeds his anti-immigrant views, the novel is sympathetic to his view of the tourism industry, which does hurt the island in many ways (e.g., by rendering its residents more vulnerable to fluctuations in the global economy). This passage illustrates How the Rise of the Precariat Class Generates Conflict, as Kethros projects his frustration with the ills of globalization onto those most hurt by it: the refugees.
“‘We are stranded somewhere South of the continent,’ Maher said. he leaned on that distorted Oxford English accent that bound so much of the previously colonized world, from North Africa to India to all the places over which the sun never set, in each place tinted with turns of the local tongue but still possessed of its most potent quality, a veneer of implied civility, that gentlemanly air. ‘Our destination was the island of Kos, but we don’t know where we are. We have a child and a pregnant woman on board and we need help.’”
English is the lingua franca of the Western world; because of this, the passengers on the Calypso defer to those who speak English the most fluently. Maher, the English literature student, speaks with an Oxford accent—a reminder of the extent of British colonization in previous centuries and its continued influence in the postcolonial world.
“‘Listen, it’s our music,’ Umm Ibrahim said. ‘It’s “Khosara, Khosara.” I know it—it’s an Egyptian song. It’s our people.’”
Umm Ibrahim mistakes the song that the party yacht blasts every night (a song that Vänna hates) as a familiar Egyptian song. El Akkad revealed in an interview that the song is actually “Big Pimpin” by JAY-Z, which sampled the beat from “Khosara, Khosara” (Walton, Rhianna. “Powell’s Interview: Omar El Akkad, Author of What Strange Paradise.” Powell’s Books Blog. 19 July 2021). The familiarity of the beat creates the false promise that there may be Egyptians on the shore, leading to the first man jumping from the deck of the Calypso. The songs’ similarity and Umm Ibrahim’s resulting mistake also hint at the West’s cultural appropriation.
“The two children are only a few inches away from the young soldier who’s caught them. Vänna recognizes him by his lanky frame—she saw him around the Hotel Xenios a few days earlier and then among the gaggle of Colonel Kethros’s subordinates who came to her home. She suspects he is at most five or six years older than she is. He looks a way she doesn’t associate with soldiers—not so much weak or fearful or winded from chasing the children through the forest. He looks in pain.”
Nicholas is conflicted about Kethros’s obsessive desire to catch Amir. He previously questioned his country’s policy toward migrants, causing Kethros to distrust him. Kethros brands Nicholas’s compassion weakness, but it is this compassion that leads him to be merciful toward the children.
“With ease and without pain, he flew past the surface, past the depths, past the places where light and life surrendered, and the domain of stillness began. […] Until finally to a dry womb of a place in which were kept safe and unchanging everyone he had ever known, and everyone each of those had ever known, outward forever to encompass the whole of the living and the lived. And each of these the boy met in their old lives and their new lives waiting, and from each drew confession and each felt into as though there were no barrier between them, no silo of self to keep us all waiting. What beautiful rebellion, to feel into another, to feel anything at all.”
This passage depicts Amir’s death or near-death experience following the capsizing of the Calypso. Though he resurfaces and wakes up at the beginning of the novel, this passage and the final scene indicate that Amir dies in the shipwreck. In this sense, the “After” chapters of the novel may represent either the afterlife or his dying thoughts, which are also described in this passage.
“Vänna raises herself onto the balls of her feet. She lifts her arms up and outward and feels the breeze between her fingers. She leans back. The bridge turns to sky, the ground to air.
How beautiful in their simplicity are the constituent parts of flight. This magic endless falling that wraps itself around her, this way the body becomes lightness and the lightness a world. It requires no trajectory, no destination, only a parcel of air and the willingness to never land.”
Vänna escapes from the soldiers by intentionally falling off the bridge at the narrowest point of the northern part of the island. Her escape is figured as literal flight and evokes Wendy learning to fly in Peter Pan—an image that is reinforced by El Akkad’s use of “never land,” a direct reference to Neverland, the land where Peter Pan lives and where children never grow up.
“‘But you should know who you are,’ he says. ‘You are the temporary object of their fraudulent outrage, their fraudulent grief. They will march the streets on your behalf, they will write to politicians on your behalf, they will cry on your behalf, but you are to them in the end nothing but a hook on which to hang the best possible image of themselves. Today you were the only boy in the world and tomorrow it will be as though you never existed.’”
Colonel Kethros describes the typical media cycle that surrounds the refugee crisis. Children such as Amir are used to bring awareness to the plight of refugees, but once the initial outrage subsides, they are forgotten. Kethros is jaded regarding this cycle, but he does nothing to address the root cause and is a key part of the system that perpetuates the mistreatment of refugees.
“With great and delicate care, the masked man lifts the necklace from around the little boy’s neck.”
The final chapter of What Strange Paradise returns to its opening scene of a shipwreck. The locket on the boy’s necklace identifies him as Amir, indicating that he did not survive the wreck of the Calypso.
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