The Lightless Sky: My Journey to Safety as a Child Refugee

"The next book is The Lightless Sky , by Gulwali Passarlay. Gulwali is an Afghan in his early twenties who, like you, recently came to Britain. Like you, he is a deeply impressive person who undertook an extraordinary journey from a war zone in which he was at risk. He came across Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Bulgaria, he was sent back to Turkey, then he came to Greece, then he went to Italy, and then France, and finally to Calais, and Britain. It is just an astonishing journey that’s made all the more extraordinary by the fact that he was 12 or 13 when he made this journey on his own. I think it was terrifying. He was dealing with smugglers. He was on ships that were sinking in storms. He was stuck in little recesses of compartments on trains. He spent time in detention centres in Italy. He did all this when he was not yet a teenager — or just on the cusp of being a teenager. Finally, once he gets to Britain, he comes up against all the bureaucratic obstacles that the British system places in front of refugees and asylum seekers. It is the only book in this list that is written by a refugee and gives a first hand account of what it is like to have to flee your home and to move across so many different and dangerous contexts to find another home. For that reason, this is the most essential book in this list of five because it is the only one that tells you, in the words of a refugee, what it is like to be a refugee. It’s such a powerful text. There are so many moving scenes, like when he’s on a boat in the middle of the Aegean and is hit by a smuggler — or when he is trying to get from Northern France to Britain. Perhaps the most moving scene is—he’s been separated, at the beginning of his journey, from his brother and he’s been hoping to bump into his brother at some point on his travels— The smuggler just separates them very quickly, despite promising his family that they would stay together. They are put on different planes from Pakistan to Iran. So, very early on in the journey, he is separated from his brother, and then, when he is in Greece, several months and several countries later, he suddenly comes across people that recognise his face, because they’ve seen his brother several weeks or several months previously. It is such a moving moment when you realise there’s a chance that he will see his brother again. As you say, when Gulwali gets to Britain, they don’t believe he is as young as he says he is. Some people might argue that that’s the prerogative of the British government, the prerogative of any government who’s receiving asylum applicants. They need to have proof of who people are and how old they are and who their families members are before they can talk about giving them asylum or resettling their family from overseas. The flip side is that perhaps governments, particularly the British government, are trying to discourage people from coming and are trying to make it as hard as possible for people to live a normal life in Britain and to claim the asylum that they are rightfully allowed by international law and by the treaties that we came up with in the aftermath of World War II. Asylum officials are consistently trying to find ways to slow down—or even block entirely—people’s applications so that more people aren’t encouraged to come in their wake, or so that they can’t bring their families over. If you say that an Afghan is older than he is, then it is easier for you to send him back because he is not a child, and it is harder for him to bring his family over because you lose that right once you reach adulthood. So some might say that it’s the prerogative of government to be this cynical because they have to have some level of process. The counterargument is that they are perhaps being unnecessarily obstreperous and are disregarding the rights and the needs of people who are in very vulnerable situations and are fleeing genuine danger, and who need all the understanding and support they can get."