'What Strange Paradise' Explores Forced Displacement Through a Child's Eyes

KQED's Forum

KQED

News Commentary, News, Politics

4.2 • 727 Ratings

🗓️ 13 August 2021

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

For a few days in late 2015, global outrage coursed at the photo of Alan Kurdi, the lifeless two-year old Syrian boy found washed ashore in Turkey after the boat carrying him and other migrants sank on its way to Greece. Omar El Akkad's new novel "What Strange Paradise" imagines an alternative narrative: a young migrant child survives a shipwreck and tries to forge his way to safety. El Akkad, who's also a journalist and former war correspondent, says he wrote the novel to counter what he calls "the privilege of instantaneous forgetting." We talk to him about the ongoing global refugee crisis and the human stories that inform his work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:32.2	From KQED Public Radio in San Francisco, I'm Mina Kim.
0:48.8	Coming up on forum, for a few days in late 2015, global outrage coerced at the haunting photo of Alan Kurdi, the lifeless Syrian toddler, found washed ashore on a Turkish beach.
1:01.0	The boat carrying him and other migrants sank on its way to Greece.
1:04.0	Omar Al-Ackhad's new novel, What Strange Paradise, imagines an alternative narrative.
1:10.0	A young migrant child survives a shipwreck
1:12.6	and tries to forge his way to safety. El Akkad says he wrote the novel in part to counter
1:18.6	what he calls the privilege of instantaneous forgetting. He joins us after this news. This is Forum.
1:35.3	I'm Mina Kim.
1:36.3	What Strange Paradise, the title of a new novel by Omar L. Akad, is about a nine-year-old
1:42.3	Syrian boy named Amir, who is the sole survivor of a
1:45.7	capsized boat that carried migrants from Egypt to an island in Greece.
1:50.8	When men in white containment suits descend on the beach, Amir runs.
1:55.4	A 15-year-old girl named Vana becomes his protector, and together they try to get him to
	...

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