Small boats: Can migration fiction broaden Britain’s rhetoric on refugees?

“Immigration” has long been a hot button topic in Britain but it now looks increasingly likely to determine the next election. Where political debate and media coverage too often simplify the refugee experience, could fiction offer greater depth? Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi considers the current rhetoric and examines three migration literature novels that engage deeply with the notion of borders.

Public debate on immigration in Britain, whether in parliament, online or on news broadcasts, quickly descends into barbs about flags, “fake” asylum applications or hollow handwringing over British people overwhelmed by the new faces in their towns and cities. We hear repeated slogans about small boats, an invasion, a “swarm”.

A recent Guardian investigation using a large language model built to analyse the speeches of parliamentarians discussing immigration between 1925 and 2025 revealed that hysteria on the subject isn’t limited to public debate and social media. Taking a sentiment score for every year, the researchers discovered that the last five years showed the “biggest swing from positive to negative attitudes”.

All of which can feel jarring when compared to real life, which, though far from a multi-cultural idyll, is still more layered, contradictory and even mundane when it comes to immigration than public debate suggests.

Where I live in East London there has always been a St George’s flag raised outside a neat semi-detached house by my son’s primary school, where his friends trace their ancestry to Ukraine, Bulgaria, Korea, Romania, Turkey, Nigeria, Gambia, France, Pakistan, Iraq, India, Italy, and to just down the road in Barking & Dagenham (a target seat for Reform). These communities juggle the impact of seemingly far away global crises alongside life in Britain, the two cannot be disentangled. War within and over contested borders, the climate crisis, remittances, precarity in the UK, precarity “back home”, and the movement of people is their normal.

Integration means different things to different people. This year Eid and Easter celebrations were bundled into one, and everybody partied. Towards the end of last year more St George’s flags were erected along one busy high street, and the year before that a game of cat and mouse ensued after a lone Palestinian flag was erected on a lamppost, removed by the council, resurrected, removed, and so forth.

One borough along from us there are regular history walks celebrating Jewish, Bangladeshi, and working-class women workers, all of whom at one time or another made these ever-changing streets of East London their home and site of struggle, the outcome of which – better working conditions, improved race relations, housing rights – benefit every British citizen today, regardless of their ancestry.

And yet this rich history and our complex realities, here and in other parts of the country, rarely seems to feature or inform current political and public discussions about immigration.

This paucity of nuanced discussion on immigration isn’t new. In her 2019 book Hostile Environment Maya Goodfellow traced the historic development of British immigration law and found similar points of “crisis” whether about numbers, crime or integration. These are nearly always followed by political outcry and racist rhetoric, which goes on to inform poor policymaking. The most evidenced recent example is the Windrush Scandal (and ongoing injustice).

Goodfellow writes: “When I ask Dianne Abbott, Shadow Home Secretary, whether politicians have shied away from talking about immigration, she baulks at the idea. After reeling off immigration acts introduced through the decades, she says, there has been ‘a series of legislative measures, which were ill thought out … and that was all about pandering to anti-immigrant feeling … contrary to what everyone says [that has] always been very much close to the centre of political debate.’ So it’s not that we don’t talk about immigration enough or that there’s some kind of covert plan to shut down members of the public from airing their grievances about immigrants. The problem is that the ‘debate’ has run on mistruths, hysteria and racism for decades, if not centuries.”

MISTRUTHS, HYSTERIA AND RACISM

Stories built on “mistruths, hysteria and racism” have seeped beyond anti-migrant street protests into the mainstream; political pundits predict that the next election will be fought and maybe even won on these myths.

New research by thinktank British Future reveals a major gap between public perception and reality as net migration is currently dropping to its lowest level in decades. Half the public (49%) believe it increased in the last year, when, in fact, it halved and is projected to decline by the end of the year to levels not seen since the late 1990s.

Reporting on the streets of Dover a few years ago, I tried interviewing angry protestors about their cause. Many told me to “go home”, others said I was being watched, a few did stop to talk.

They told a tale of teenage girls sexually assaulted by men who’d arrived on their shores in small boats from France. Convinced every woman should fear the arrival of ‘these men in particular’, they clung to this narrative to explain a general sense of hardship and unfairness.

I come away from such reporting trips thinking about all the stories we miss or forget or don’t even realise form part of our history when it comes to immigration. We are so quick to tell a story framed by nationhood and outsiders, culture values of this group versus that, yet these stories often exclude the historic significance of Great Britain as a colonising and imperial power, a shaper of borders, and its role in the journeys people take today.

There has long been a national forgetting, the clinging to a narrative of pride and exceptionalism that glosses over any suggestion of tyranny or self-interest, which confuses people who have yet to see the fruits of this “greatness”. Someone must be to blame, someone else, not us, invaders, people not from here. This is the story we have, but what’s the truth? What would it look like to question the silences and gaps in our national story? And what role can fiction play in that?

WHAT CAN LITERATURE TEACH US ABOUT MIGRATION?

In her 2020 paper, ‘What Can Literature Tell Us About Migration?’, Dr Amy Burge of the University of Birmingham considers the value of literature in academic investigations of migration. Burge asks how literature can combat dominant narratives, challenge nationalist ideologies, provide historical perspectives and form therapeutic practice. She looks at the power of poet Nayyirah Waheed whose short, minimalist migration verses propelled her to Instagram fame.

And she asks how popular fiction, such as Ausma Zehenat Khan’s detective novel ‘A Dangerous Crossing’, can introduce the so-called Syrian refugee crisis to fans of crime fiction, one of the publishing industry’s most popular genres.

Contemporary writers are examining the refugee experience by spotlighting forgotten chapters of history and reframing current events. In the following examples, the sea and the journeys made across it loom large, a constant reminder of the moveability of imposed geographical borders. One is a recent Booker Prize-winner, another was translated from French and shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, while the third, published by a radical Turkish publisher – istos – is an outlier. Yet to be published in English, this is one of many stories we don’t get to hear in the UK.

OPERATION MITILINI– ELIF GÜLEZ

Elif Gülez’s novel is set in the seaside Turkish town of Ayvalık, across from the Greek island of Lesbos, also known as Mitilini. The year is 1982, just two years after the harshest military coup in the history of the Turkish Republic. As the horrors of the military regime loom over the nation, a greater tragedy haunts the characters of the novel.

This is the 1923 compulsory population exchange through which borders between Greece and Turkey were arbitrarily drawn in an attempt to create homogenous nation states. The exchange was part of the Lausanne Peace Treaty followed by the Greco Turkish war of 1919-22, and led to the displacement of 1.6 million people on both sides of the Aegean. Muslims left their homes in Greece to move to the Asian side of Turkey (Anatolia), while Christians were forced to make the opposite journey.

The exchange of populations’ legacy was a powerful influence for policy makers around the world. It proved it was possible to engineer borders along ethnic, racial and religious differences, to maintain them through apartheid, partitions and forced migrations. In Gülez’s book, the possibilities of the novel form offer new opportunities to reflect on the historical roots of contemporary states’ approaches to migration and borders, as well as the policies surrounding them.

The protagonist of the novel, a ten-year-old girl named Deniz, is insulated from the current political crisis by the love of three women: her mother Canan, a judge; Aunt Hale who’s linked to an organisation smuggling leftists to Greece; and her great-aunt, Yaya, the keeper of memories. Yaya is amongst nearly two million people displaced by the population exchange.  Like almost all who came with her, she has never expressed her grief openly. Deniz knows next to nothing about her tragedy.

There is a moment in Operation Mitilini (Midilli Operasyonu in Turkish) where Canan and Hale have a conversation on history and memory. Canan questions whether it is in fact better to remember everything or forget altogether, while Hale asks how we can have agency when “the past keeps repeating itself one way or another. No one learns a lesson from previous sufferings.”

What is the use of confronting the pain and upheaval of past unless we can learn from it? This sentiment could apply to many a national story, the wanting to move forward, to forget, to remember only in a carefully curated way and imposed from above. The magic of Operation Mitilini is in the journey of little Deniz, who in youthful rebelliousness chooses to push against the forgetting of the adults around her, in the process finding and shaping her own truth about the war and borders that haunt her loved ones.

In fact, Deniz knows very little of what has shaped her family, where they live, how they came to be in Turkey and their true connections with Greece. In the space of the book, she goes on a journey of discovery, not necessarily of discovering her family’s “true story” but her version of it, which goes on to shape who she will become. Deniz’s version is built on the overheard snatches of conversations, what she reads in her mother’s silences as she gazes out to sea, adults whispering, learning to fear without understanding why.

“I was suddenly exhausted. I didn’t want to see my aunt sad. I didn’t want my mother to stare at the sea for hours on end. I didn’t want to feel Alekos’ heart pound like it was going to leave his chest. I didn’t want My Colonel barging into our house whenever he felt like threatening us. I didn’t want Yaya looking for dead children on the beach. I didn’t even care about the revolution anymore. I just wanted to go home and take Alekos with me.”

Deniz’s feelings are entangled with the mistiness of her family’s narrative about the past, the present-day tyranny of military rule, people who died trying to escape as borders were redrawn, and the families (her family) forced to make new homes within and outside of the new border lines. Like many communities forced to leave their homes during conflict and war, it will take generations for them to settle and find new homes. Perhaps the search is what will define Deniz and those like her, children of refugees.

There were facts every Turkish child was taught in school, Deniz reflects, that Greece and the Greeks were the enemy. But what about her relatives just over the border in Greece? “The facts I learned in school did not match with the facts I learned at home: According to my parents, there had never been animosity between the two nations. It was the politicians who were responsible for all the hostility between us. One day, these two free nations would be best friends, because their tzatziki was not in any way different from our cacık and although supermarkets in Europe sold our yogurt with labels that read ‘Greek Yogurt,’ we knew deep down that yogurt was Turkish just as much as it was Greek.”

Throughout the novel we come back to the recurring theme of ordinary people trying to find a way of living with the past while forging new homes. Gülez weaves a delicate story of family and intimate reckonings, while the brutality of dictatorship and the horrors of war past play out in the background. “We sat there without uttering a word, sweating under the orange canopy of the tea garden. My aunt’s eyes travelled back and forth between her hands and the open sea. It was amazing how grown-ups stared at the sea for hours on end, as if it was not the sea at which they were staring but an impassable mountain keeping them away from life’s endless possibilities. All they wanted was to observe from a safe distance.”

But the sea, for Deniz, can be a source of hope. That is where the novel ends in 2015, more than thirty years after the events of that summer. The leap in time is not coincidental. Once again, the blue waters of the Aegean had become the stage for human tragedy, as unprecedented numbers of people embarked on dangerous small-boat crossings from the Turkish coast to Greece, while Moria, on the island of Lesbos, had become the largest refugee camp in Europe. Our protagonist, now a mother herself, accompanied by Yaya’s memory, once again sails to Greece on a clandestine rescue operation. This time, her passengers are not socialist revolutionaries, but people from the East fleeing war and persecution.

SMALL BOAT – VINCENT DELECROIX

Vincent Delecroix’s Small Boat is a remarkable novel. Told through the perspective of a radio operator whose job is to oversee the rescue of small boats in distress in France’s territorial waters, the novel is an invitation to feel radical empathy about the migrant experience. But it also reflects on empathy’s limits.

The book – told in just 90 pages and translated by Helen Stevenson – is inspired by a true story, one of the many attempted Channel crossings from France to the UK. The story is based on the catastrophic events of the night of 23/24 November 2021, when a small boat carrying at least thirty people capsized in the Channel. On the afternoon of 24 November, twenty-seven floating bodies were discovered in French waters. This was the largest single loss of lives in the Channel since 2018.

Following a series of calls made by the people on the boat to the monitoring and rescue centre known as the CROSS in France, and more exchanges between the CROSS and the UK Border Force, the migrants’ pleas for help were left unanswered. In the aftermath, there were investigations, inquiries on both sides of the Channel, and lengthy reports. None of these changed the fact that the deaths of the men, women and children on that boat were avoidable.

The recordings of exchanges between the migrants on the dinghy and the Cross, satellite images, evidence of calls between the Cross at Cap Gris-Nez and the Coastguard in Dover, widespread press reports in the aftermath of the tragedy… Facts reflected in all of these may have been the starting point of Delecroix’s novel. However, what makes this novel remarkable is not Delecroix’s attention to the forensic detail. It is the writer’s ability to turn a critical eye on the Western reader’s complicity in the suffering of migrants. Citizens of Western democracies who move across borders with ease (and for whom travel is often associated with freedom, excitement and discovery) are put on trial in Delecroix’s pages.

The narrator of the novel, the radio operator at Cap Gris-Nez is now under police investigation because of her alleged negligence in the tragic loss of life on the night of 24 November. Struck by the investigator’s uncanny resemblance to herself, the operator answers her questions, while masking her indifference to the migrants’ lives, and reasons behind her refusal to proceed with the rescue mission, behind claims of impartiality and objectivity. Empathy, she declares to the investigator, “is an idiotic luxury indulged in by people who do nothing, and who are moved by the spectacle of suffering.” Her job is simply to “fish people out of the water.”

She has convinced herself that she does not need to have a conscience to do her job properly. She needs to be efficient, she needs to prioritise. Migrants, for her, are not human beings with hopes, aspirations, and feelings. They are responsible for their own predicament, they are “fools,” for setting off to sea. “I didn’t ask you to leave,” she says addressing the migrants in her mind, “if you didn’t want to get your feet wet, love, you shouldn’t have embarked,” as if embarking on deadly channel crossings were simply a matter of choice, and not a struggle for survival.

The radio operator’s claims of efficiency, objectivity, or professionalism become increasingly untenable, as the questions of the investigator echo in her mind as the investigation moves forward, leaving her with a growing sense of guilt. Why hadn’t she grasped “the reality of the situation?… as though this reality – people drowning – was just a game, as though I’d watched it as you might watch floods in Pakistan on the TV, while preparing the evening meal.”

A single mother of a young child juggling many modern-day responsibilities like all of us, separated from her partner who is implied to hold far-right views, she has enough on her plate; she surely cannot not be held responsible for wars, conflicts, and disasters unfolding in distant continents! Her obliviousness to the pain of others brings us to the central concern of the novel: to what extent can the privileged feel the pain of the citizens of poor/war-torn/conflict-ridden countries? The novel’s answer to that question is a wake-up call for the citizens of Western democracies. But it stops short of questioning this privilege, shaped by centuries of exploitation in “lesser” nations, along with foreign interventions and instigation of coups, conflicts, and wars by the world’s most prosperous. Perhaps, that is the concern of another novel.

Delecroix is careful about the issue of misrepresenting the pain of others in fiction. There is a section in the book speculating about the experiences of those on the distressed boat that specific night in November 2021.The unknown narrator of the section offers an account of what it might have felt like to be on that boat, in the dark and the cold. The narrator has almost no access to the thoughts and feelings of the passengers, except for one: a young man who made the calls to the Cross. Even then, this access is limited to the young man’s final moments before drowning. “When I get to England,” he thinks in his last minutes, “I will work in a grocery store.”

In the Introduction to the novel, Jeremy Harding quotes Delecroix who has written: “a vague propensity to make things up isn’t enough to earn the right…to legitimacy, permission to write literature…” How do we, then, read the young man’s imagined last minutes in light of the writer’s words about legitimacy? Is it only realistic to imagine that the young man’s dreams and aspirations are limited to the confines of supermarket aisles? Or does the writer, by reassigning those limitations, end up replicating the very perceptions that he seeks to dismantle? What future self is left to a refugee to imagine, beyond the narrow roles society makes available to them?

Small Boat concludes with a dark note, a confession. The radio operator stands by the sea on whose shores men, women and children wash up every day. “You will not be saved,” she whispers again and again. But her words are not meant for the people swallowed by the sea. They are meant for us, humanity.

PROPHET SONG – PAUL LYNCH

Empathy is a central concern in Irish writer Paul Lynch’s Booker-winning novel, Prophet Song. In a powerful dystopian novel about Ireland under fascism, Lynch speculates about his home country in the midst of an unspecified political crisis, where the citizens are abducted, prosecuted, punished, tortured and killed by the state. A country on the brink of civil war, governed by a ruthless regime which leaves its citizens no choice but to take sides.

We meet Eilish Stack as some dark force is already creeping through the door of her family home in a suburb of Dublin, disrupting her life and pulling her into unchartered waters. At the start of the story, Eilish’s husband, a trade union leader, is detained by police and disappeared. What follows is the rapid crumbling of an increasingly claustrophobic society.

Eilish’s first response to the crisis is denial. She searches for solace in the endless minutia of domestic life, devastatingly striving to normalise daily life for the sake of her children and newborn baby. But it is her father Simon, the rational scientist, who urges her to take a radical step and leave the country for good before it is too late. To where? The highly likely destination is Canada, where Eilish’s sister Áine has now settled with her husband and children. With a sense of trepidation, Simon foresees the unfolding tragedy and offers his daughter a way out, but Eilish refuses to act upon it because of forces that lead most of us to inertia in the face of uncertainty: hope and optimism. Convinced that her father is overreacting, Eilish hopes the crisis is not as bad as it seems. She has a career to think about, her husband –even though he is probably in a secret detention centre now, waiting for interrogation– has a job, and the kids have school to attend.

Lynch’s success lies in his depiction of fictional Ireland’s rapid descent into authoritarianism through developments that closely mirror how similar crises have unfolded, and continue to unfold around the world in real life: the erosion of institutions and the rule of law, the distortion of facts, the rise of censorship and populist policies that seem to satisfy the masses without bringing about meaningful change. In the book, these are voiced through Simon.

“[I]f you change ownership of the facts, you can alter the structure of belief, what is agreed upon, that is what they are doing,” says Simon about the political regime’s motivations. “[T]he NAP is trying to change what you and I call reality, they want to muddy it like water, if you say one thing is another thing and you say it enough times, then it must be so, and if you keep saying it over and over people accept it as true…”

Simon’s words reflect modern realities we are confronting all over the world. Today we witness governments invoke state power to strip people of their rights, deport students, restrict the free movement, criminalise support for Palestine, go against international law and constitution in their hostile policies towards immigrants, impose draconian restrictions on LGBTQ+ rights, etc. Simon warns his daughter that the distortion of truth is not new, but imminent and real. “We’re watching it happen in your own time,” he cautions, “and not in a book.”

Read today, in light of the rise of far right and the undermining of the principles of liberal democracies all over the world, the book’s message is more relevant and crucial than ever: if we don’t pay attention to what is happening around us, the suffering of people who live in distant continents can become ours before we know it. But setting the story at the heart of a well-established Western democracy is not without complications.

Written in 2018 against the backdrop of the Syrian Civil War, Lynch says he set the book in Ireland to make the story “universal,” and describes his work as an “attempt at radical empathy.” Answering the questions of the reporter who interviews him on behalf of The Booker Prizes, he explains: “I was trying to see into the modern chaos. The unrest in Western democracies. The problem of Syria – the implosion of an entire nation, the scale of its refugee crisis and the West’s indifference… I couldn’t write directly about Syria so I brought the problem to Ireland as a simulation.”

Lynch states that he sought to “deepen the dystopian by bringing to it a high degree of realism.” His aim was to make the Western reader experience the problem themselves. This is, without doubt a great imaginative exercise, and Lynch’s extraordinary talent to write with radical empathy is what makes his book so compelling. What is problematic is the difficulty to ground this dystopian Ireland within the contemporary world system. Ireland is a well-functioning democracy with strong institutions and a high level of public participation. The structural internal and external problems and dynamics faced by Syria is unlikely to affect Ireland catastrophically in the near future. The book’s soft spot is the fact that it offers no historical, political, or economic rationale to explain this fictional Ireland’s transformation into a dystopian tyranny.

Despite its attempt to tell the story of a land that is less likely to be a site of chaos and tragedy, Lynch’s realist dystopia is a powerful book in its belief in resistance. And resistance is what Eilish resorts to, looking towards the sky only to see darkness, as she embarks on a dangerous channel crossing with her children. She knows that “she has been at one with this darkness” but she also knows that the sea is the only way, because the sea is and has always been “life.”

THE POWER – AND LIMITS – OF REFUGEE STORIES

Fiction – whether a speculation about an authoritarian Western democracy, a philosophical debate on radical empathy, or an investigation of the legacy of little-known histories – can deepen our understanding of migration, and open new avenues for understanding contemporary realities. But it also has limits. Like all literature, migration literature is subjective and while it has the power to reflect, it also has the potential to exaggerate and misinform. And to reach readers in the first place, these stories must pass the requirements of the publishing industry gatekeepers. Crucially, they must sell.

There is an essential place for literature when it comes to contemporary thinking about the movement of people, but it forms part of a larger inquiry. In Operation Mitilini, Deniz’s mother chastises her for asking “too many questions”, questions that could trigger dark memories of her aunt’s refugee past or force a reckoning of the political upheaval in which they lived. Deniz must study, work hard and live a good life, these questions mustn’t be asked. The girl’s defiance and insistence on rooting out the truth, any truth, feels almost compulsive; for Deniz to breathe is to want to know and understand.

This childlike desire to know everything is something to be guided by as we’re inundated with noise and clamour about migration. Listening to the radio shortly after local elections across Britain in May, my three-year-old daughter squealed because she’d heard someone say “Nigerian”. I tensed. The context was a recently elected official who’d said something on social media about melting Nigerians to fill potholes. But she was oblivious to the violence and instead became immediately embroiled in an argument with her older brother about whether she was in fact Nigerian. Which led to a discussion about who can call themselves Nigerian, and complaints that someone was claiming to be both British and Nigerian – was that fair? Their natural willingness to question everything means discussions about empire, history and the movement of people are less complicated than I anticipated.

Pulitzer Prize winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen, himself a refugee, brought together 17 authors from around the world to compose the anthology, ‘The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives’. He used his introduction to draw the attention of readers to the limitations of literature as an art form. The anthology, supporting the International Rescue Committee (IRC), was a response to rising xenophobia in the US following Trump’s 2017 travel ban on citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries. Trump’s anti-refugee rhetoric affected Nguyen on a personal level. He remembers his family fleeing Saigon in 1975 when he was only four, an experience that inspires him still to refer to himself as a “refugee” rather than a “migrant”. Nguyen says refugee stories are powerful in amplifying voices that often go unheard, but he warns that stories are potentially dangerous if they prevent us from doing more than just listening or reading. He writes:

“Readers and writers should not deceive themselves that literature changes the world. Literature changes the world of readers and writers, but literature does not change the world until people get out of their chairs, go out in the world, and do something to transform the conditions of which the literature speaks.”

Literature cannot change the world on its own, but it can surely start conversations or change the course of them. In today’s fast-paced political world where rhetoric often overrides truth, stories have the potential to raise questions that cannot be raised elsewhere. Action without words is as much meaningless as words without action.

Main illustration by Kassidy Dawn.