The Naked Don't Fear the Water: A Journey Through the Refugee Underground

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DAVIES: Right. And he certainly would have qualified. I mean, he had done translating for coalition forces. He'd seen combat. He - but they wanted a lot of documentation that people, when they're in action, don't think to collect. So you decided you would go together and report on this, which meant you would be traveling as an Afghan. But, of course, you are, in fact, a Westerner. You're Canadian-born. What advantages or risks did that pose to the two of you, that you were there kind of looking like an Afghan refugee, but really a Western journalist? This is a gripping, devastating book, and it must have taken great courage and determination to write. The best way to honour this book would be for us all to read it and ask ourselves what we can do for the thousands of unknown and unrecognized people who are treading this terrifying path.’

The most affecting book I have read about the iniquity of the refugee crisis since Exit West. The reporting is totally immersive, without ever losing its clarity, and gives a heartbreaking insight into the lives of normal people taking terrible risks to save themselves.’ Aikins offers a kaleidoscopic view of fragmented families and dispossessed people trying and failing and scheming and planning and hoping and praying to complete the next leg of their journey... Unique, gripping, and beautifully written.’AIKINS: He's forced to get out of the van at gunpoint when he wouldn't leave, insisting that we be taken to a different island.

DAVIES: You would need a lot of money, both just for traveling and living expenses and to pay smugglers, who are not cheap. Where did the money come from? How did you hide it? DAVIES: He said, this is not what we paid for. And he saw a weapon and said, you're going now. So that's - you got into this little boat. In 2016, a young Afghan driver and translator named Omar makes the heart-wrenching choice to flee his war-torn country, saying goodbye to Laila, the love of his life, without knowing when they might be reunited again. He is one of millions of refugees who leave their homes that year.Highly readable, empathetic and revealing, Aikins’s book is brutally honest and often deeply moving – a work of great sympathy and understanding.’ Matthieu Aikins is a contributing writer for The New York Times and a contributing editor at Rolling Stone. His reporting has won numerous honors, including the George Polk and Livingston Awards. His new book is "The Naked Don't Fear The Water: An Underground Journey With Afghan Refugees." 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.’ AIKINS: Yeah. Well, it was the only way that I could do it because, you know, if I had my passport on me and we were caught by thieves or, you know, could be kidnapped or the police would separate us. So there was no other way to do it. I think that it probably added some risks, but it also meant that we were traveling together. We could, you know, take care of each other. And, of course, if something really serious did happen, you know, I was going to do everything I could to help him.

DAVIES: Yeah, you said a million people reached Europe by sea during this movement, the largest movement of refugees across waters in history. By the time Omar decided he was going to go, he had some personal considerations that delayed him. Things had changed. How did they change?AIKINS: That's one of the hiding places, is to climb onto the axle itself, often with, like, a little board so you don't get caught in the spinning shaft. A riveting and heartrending look at the hidden world of refugees that challenged everything I thought I knew about the consequences of war and globalization. It’s the most important work on the global refugee crisis to date, and a crucial document of these tumultuous times. It will go down as one of the great works of nonfiction literature of our generation.’ AIKINS: No. A lot of times they're counterfeit, and they'll actually absorb water. And after an hour or so, they will take you down. You know, a lot of people drowned making that crossing. AIKINS: I was the only reporter on the ground for a while, along with two photographers, Jim Huylebroek and Victor Blue. But because we were freelancers, we were able to choose to stay behind, whereas all the staff had to evacuate.

DAVIES: You know, when you were on the smugglers' roads, one of the things you said was, like, if you were known to be a Westerner, there was a risk of being kidnapped and being held for ransom. Did you have that fear in this period, when the Afghan government had collapsed and the Taliban were taking over? AIKINS: Well, it was the Taliban who were going to kidnap you beforehand a lot of times. And now that they were the government and supposedly claimed to want to protect foreign journalists and NGO workers because they wanted to portray themselves as a responsible authority, there was actually less threat of kidnapping in the beginning, at least. We were more worried about ISIS, who might want to kill a foreigner, or just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. There was a lot of shooting around the airport. DAVIES: Right. Yeah, there was no legal way for you to get on a boat and go to a Greek island. And it's interesting because you - word had spread that some islands were better than others to land on. The island of Lesbos was one that you wanted to avoid. Why?AIKINS: Well, I was trying to leave choices up to Omar 'cause it was his trip, after all, and not mine. And there was a few options. You could try to go through the mountains of Bulgaria or cross over land to Greece, but he thought the best idea was still to go to the Greek islands. The problem was now the islands were kind of like prisons and you couldn't leave them but figured there'd be some way with smugglers. And so that's what we did. That's how we ended up in the little boats. AIKINS: I thought maybe we'd all go in the water, and if we did, people are going to die. You know, I'm a strong swimmer. I've grown up on the ocean. Many of the people there, they had never seen the ocean before; this is Omar's first time in a boat. So I just knew that things were going to get really bad if we capsized.