A Canadian’s experience of the migrant’s ordeal

No one boards an overladen dinghy and sets out across a choppy sea without very good reason. Laden into migrant boats go backstories as well as bodies: tales of war-hit homes and bloodied police cells, of empty larders and decrepit schools. But illegal migration is as much about what lies ahead as what’s left behind: the hope of a better life, the chance to start anew.

That was certainly the case with Omar, a young Afghan taxi driver and former interpreter. Back when the Canadian-born freelance correspondent Matthieu Aikins first arrived in Kabul, the Corolla-owning Omar had been a single gung-ho guy about town. Seven years later, with foreign troops drastically reduced and dollar contracts hard to find, life was looking far less rosy.

Fortunately, that’s just when Aikins decided his time in Afghanistan was up. Perhaps Omar should join him? The Naked Don’t Fear the Water traces what happened next. With Aikins posing as a fellow Afghan, the pair spent four months travelling the underground route to Europe; first by foot and bus to Istanbul, then by boat to Lesbos before catching a plane to Athens. In the end Omar found sanctuary in Switzerland while Aikins returned to New York with his true identity restored and a dream story in his pocket.

The holding camp on Lesbos was built for 2,000 people but housed nearly triple that number

There is much to admire about this book, its first-hand perspective being the most obvious. When Aikins writes of the ‘sense of vertigo in handing yourself over to criminals’ it’s because he himself has been in their clutches. This isn’t a reconstructed account, pasted together from secondhand sources; it is embedded journalism in the raw, a personal dispatch from behind the lines of Europe’s intractable migrant crisis.