Melissa Fleming, chief spokesperson of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, has clearly been tussling with the questions that those who work with refugees tend to ask a lot. How can we encourage more people to see refugees as individuals? How can we ensure that refugees are treated in a way that recognises our shared humanity?
Reading her book, an account of the refugee crisis as experienced by one Syrian woman, you can see immediately why Fleming thought that telling this particular story could be a way forward. Doaa al-Zamel is both ordinary enough to compel sympathy, and extraordinary enough to be unforgettable.
At the beginning of the book, we meet Zamel’s large and pleasant family, hear about her ambitions to be educated, and learn why she supports the fledgling revolution. But then she is pushed into a harsher world. As peaceful protesters are shot on the streets and tanks roll into her city, eventually she and her family decide to leave their homeland. They flee first to Egypt, and when life becomes miserably untenable there, she and her fiance take the dangerous, but understandable, decision to travel to Europe.
But their boat, full of 500 refugees, is attacked and left to capsize in the Mediterranean. When Zamel is finally rescued after four days in the water, she is found with two baby girls clinging to her. Zamel and one of the babies – and not her fiance – are two of just 11 people who survive from the boat.
The tragedy is real and harrowing, and the narrative moves with a steady drumbeat towards its horrific conclusion. While it is the story of so many Syrians, so many refugees, it is also the story of one woman, and as such it should enable us to see beyond the cold weight of the numbers, and into an individual’s own warm and vivid story.
Given the vital nature of this enterprise, I would love to be able to say that this is a book that demands to be read. But there is something missing. And that is Zamel’s own voice.
The great pieces of storytelling that I have encountered about the refugee experience give voice to those who know the horrors. They are told by those caught up in them, as in the documentary film Exodus; or by an author who has made a huge leap of imagination, as with Dave Eggers’s What Is the What, to speak in the voice of the refugee. And so they crash through our barriers of indifference. They press us into empathy.
At the end of this book, Fleming explains how she constructed her own narrative. She was looking for “distinctive accounts of survival and resilience that illustrate refugees’ predicaments” when she saw a report of Zamel’s story. She then worked with a number of colleagues to interview her, and first told the story as a TED talk, with the help of a couple of editors and a speaker coach. She then worked with more professionals, including an Arabic-speaking journalist who conducted some of the interviews without Fleming, and “added perceptive commentary and contributed descriptive writing”, and a writer who provided “edits and additions [which] helped bring the scenes into more vivid focus with colour and emotion”.
Fleming always accords proper respect to Zamel herself, who contributes a note of thanks to the book. But the large collection of professionals on whom Fleming has relied to frame the story has left an imprint throughout. An imprint of care, yes, but also of blandness. There is no moment in which you feel Zamel standing beside you, speaking in your ear.
Fleming writes with a cool omniscience, never admitting to any uncertainty about Zamel’s inner life, but too often her memories come over as generic. That is true of the happy times before the war: “The big house was still a place of happy memories: of intense smells of simmering meat and aromatic spices; of laughter and endless games with the cousins in the courtyard surrounded by fragrant jasmine flowers.” And it is true of the unhappy times that follow: “She struggled to overcome the despair and grief that would at times engulf her spirit … she couldn’t find the words to express the horror of the deaths and suffering she had witnessed.”
If we could hear Zamel’s own voice, this horror would surely have a much greater force. Fleming is also so eager not to assume any knowledge among her audience that explanatory asides on the political situation sometimes thud in too regularly. At other times these asides shade into the kind of rhetoric that few would disagree with, but whose simplicity is perhaps more suited to social media than a book: “No person fleeing conflict or persecution should have to die trying to reach safety.”
It is hard to criticise this book, which is clearly undertaken with the best intentions and tells the kind of tale that is too often unheard or forgotten. I hope that its rather guarded tone does not prevent Zamel’s story from breaking through to readers who have not heard such a tale before. Because if A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea does push more people into action and solidarity, then it will have done vital work; the most important work, perhaps, that a book can do right now.
Natasha Walter’s novel, A Quiet Life, is published by Borough Press. She is the director of Women for Refugee Women.