Abstract
In a crowded marketplace of books on migration, journalist Daniel Trilling’s book stands out for its breadth, its depth and its humanity. It is hugely informative – on the reasons people leave their home countries and travel to Europe; the different forms of destruction caused by western military adventures in the Middle East (corruption, warlordism produced by the massive influx of money and arms, the ripple effects on neighbouring countries); the EU’s and member states’ militarised anti-migrant policies which have caused thousands of deaths, from the Sahara to the Mediterranean and beyond; the failure to organise, supervise or fund adequate reception; the deals, rules and border closures which have made of Greece a stinking open prison, and of Calais a hostile environment where migrants run a police gauntlet to get food and clean water; the forced dependency and loss of dignity endured by those living in conditions formed by institutionalised neglect and callousness.
But most importantly, we see all this through the eyes of those making the journeys. Trilling has the story-teller’s gift, which brings to vivid life the migrants and refugees he meets, whose stories we hear and whose hopes, fears and frustrations we share. He doesn’t just interview them once, he goes back again and again, keeps in touch through social media, and tracks their progress – or lack of it – in their odyssey through Europe. He has spent the best part of six years, since 2012, meeting refugees and displaced people – displaced by war, by vested interests and corruption, by broken economies that can’t provide a livelihood for them. The lights of the title refer to the lights of the cities twinkling in the darkness of the Sahara, used to navigate the desert in the darkness. But they could also refer to the mirage of hopes fading to disillusion as Trilling’s interlocutors, with thousands of other migrants and refugees, confront the reality of a continent that doesn’t want them.
We first meet Jamal in Calais. He’s from Khartoum, He was 18 when he left, and by the time Trilling meets him, in 2014, he has spent over four years in Europe, as a non-person, an outcast, stuck without papers, livelihood or money, surviving in refugee camps, abandoned factories, squats and shanties and tents, in Greece and France. His life consists of delving into supermarket bins for food (he takes pride in his acknowledged expertise in this), walking across town for a shower, looking for second-hand clothes in a church, finding a squat where he can charge his phone, listening to the older men in the Sudanese camp as they discussed politics and music, and spending the nights dodging police and trying to get on or under a lorry without being seen. Jamal was luckier than some. His mother had raised the money for him to fly from Sudan to Istanbul, so he did not have to make the lethal journey by land across the Sahara made by others, including West African teenagers Ousmane and Caesar (from Guinea and Mali respectively), who met in a derelict Syracuse school now housing over a hundred teenage migrant boys.
At the major border bottlenecks, Trilling found people who would talk about themselves and describe their journey – in Calais, Jamal and Zainab (an Iraqi woman fleeing IS-occupied Iraq with three children in 2014); in Sicily, as well as Ousmane and his friends, he met Fatima, a Nigerian widow. In an area of Athens which had become a base for Golden Dawn he met Hakima, from Afghanistan, whose builder husband was beaten up by fascists and who would only leave the house at night; the Syrian Kurds Nisrin and her sons were in a container camp for asylum seekers in Bulgaria, and later in Germany; and Farhan, a Punjabi from Pakistan, in Amygdaleza detention camp in Greece. Without papers, some worked in the informal economy; some begged outside supermarkets, all felt keenly the thwarted desire to study, to learn, to work. Some learned English through pop songs on their mobile phones. The mobile phone is the one necessity none of them would be without, used to contact networks of countrymen for help on the journey, to keep in touch with family and friends, to find out how others were doing on their odyssey and as an entertainment centre, to watch YouTube and listen to songs of home. Fatima used her phone to record the testimonies of trafficked women and to warn others about the journey through Facebook, having bargained with God on the leaky boat: ‘Let me survive and I’ll make it my mission to help those coming through Libya, especially the women and children, and to raise the alarm about them.’
Trilling’s African interviewees were reluctant to talk about Libya. Some, like the West African teenagers and Fatima, had gone there in search of work. (One of the book’s reminders is the amount of migration for work within Africa – now made infinitely more difficult by the EU’s anti-trafficking measures, which often have the effect of pushing people towards Europe.) After the fall of Gaddafi, the popular hostility towards black Africans, fuelled by Gaddafi’s employment of sub-Saharan mercenaries, emboldened by the power vacuum and the easy availability of guns, vented itself in killings, rapes, and systematic ill-treatment of black migrants held as hostages-cum-commodities by smuggling militias – they were kidnapped, beaten and forced to work for their freedom. Despite continuing reports of slave trading and torture, the EU’s anti-migration efforts currently concentrated on Libya are to prevent people from leaving and to ensure that the Libyan coastguard ‘pull back’ those who embark.
The author reveals a deep anger expressed at Europe. Zainab, a maths teacher married to a military engineer before the IS occupation which killed her father, saw her husband abducted, and destroyed her and her parents’ homes in targeted violence, expressed surprise ‘when people ask me why refugees are coming to the UK. Hasn’t Iraq been occupied by Britain and the US?’ she said. ‘I want people to see the connection.’ Caesar, too, was angry at the EU’s refusal of responsibility for refugees after military interventions in Mali and Libya, and disgusted at the institutional response to the shipwrecks in April 2015 which claimed over a thousand lives, when the EU declared it would focus on combating the traffickers by destroying their boats and blocking migration routes through Africa. He fumed at media disinformation about Africa, portrayed as sick, needy and backward. His cousin Boubacar also felt the injustice of their treatment: ‘We remember the past: slavery; they started the world wars and we fought for them.’
In the last section, Trilling tells the story of his own grandmother, Teresa, twice a refugee – first from Russia and then, as a Jew, from Germany, and reminds us of those who did not escape. He does not just want to tell stories, though. He demands that we recognise not only the humanity of those he has encountered, but also the racism which governs their lives, which makes their travel so fraught with danger, which renders them unwanted and their needs of no account. And he calls on us to act, to protest, to resist the betrayal of the founding values of the EU their treatment represents.