THE LIFE AND DEATH OF THE BOY ON THE BEACH
Coquitlam woman’s book revisits the painful moment that sparked global outrage and illuminated the human tragedy of the Syrian refugee crisis,
Coquitlam woman’s memoir revisits her family’s ill-fated flight from war-torn Syria
The pressure had been building for days. Abdullah Kurdi, his wife Rehanna and children Ghalib, 4, and Alan, 2, were holed up in the port city of Izmir, Turkey, the place where Syrian refugees desperate to get to Europe meet up with human smugglers.
Abdullah had $5,000, sent by his sister Tima Kurdi in B.C., to pay for the voyage, but every day he found another reason not to go. He was terrified of putting the children in the flimsy dinghies the smugglers used. Rehanna was afraid of the water. There wasn’t enough money for a good boat. How would they know if the life jackets they purchased were real or fake?
One night he sent Tima a video of the water, the roiling high waves.
The sight of those waves terrified Tima. Six days later, another text came. The water was calm. She pushed her brother to make a decision: take a boat, or return to Istanbul.
Then the texts stopped coming. Tima messaged over and over again. “Where are you?” “What happened?”
Her questions were never answered.
“All my messages were sent to the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea,” she writes in her new memoir, The Boy on the Beach: My Family ’s Escape from Syria and Our Hope for a New Home, to be published on April 17 by Simon and Schuster.
Alan, Ghalib and Rehanna drowned when the smuggler’s boat capsized just five minutes off the coast of Turkey.
Two and a half years later, Tima Kurdi sits in the living room of her home in Coquitlam, wearing a small picture of Alan and Ghalib around her neck.
Since that fateful night, the former hairdresser has been thrust on to the world stage, dealt with news media, met heads of state and become a vocal advocate for refugees.
This is not the future she imagined while growing up in Damascus with her five siblings, Mohammed, Maha, Abdullah, Hivron and Shireen. As a carefree girl, she tossed away the hijab, idolized Madonna, danced around the house to Boney M and dreamed of travelling the world.
As she touches the small picture of her nephews, she repeats these words like an incantation: “I am nobody. Nobody.”
The living room is spotless, painted a dark olive green, its windows hung with heavy crimson draperies. In her book, and in conversation, Kurdi uses the word “nobody” to describe herself.
“Nobody ” is also a word she also uses to describe how the world has viewed refugees.
She says that when her phone overloaded with texts on Sept. 2, 2015, she knew something had gone terribly wrong. When she received word that her family members had perished, she fell to the floor, screaming.
Hours later, her husband, Rocco, came into the room with an iPad and said, “I don’t know if you should see this.”
She grabbed it.
There was the photo: her twoyear-old nephew, Alan, lying dead on a beach in Turkey, foam and waves lapping at his face. He was wearing the red shirt and blue shorts that she had carefully selected as a gift for him on a trip to Istanbul the year before.
Kurdi stops speaking, bows her head and presses her hands to her temples as if to counteract some deep pressure.
“It begins, it begins,” she says, under her breath. She takes a moment to compose herself.
The photo went viral and sparked global outrage, drawing the attention of international leaders and illuminating the human tragedy of the refugee crisis.
The family’s personal tragedy almost instantly became a political issue: Canadian immigration officials had rejected an application made by Kurdi and some friends to sponsor her brother Mohammed and his family.
An application for Abdullah and his family had also been shut down. Abdullah saw the four-kilometre crossing from Bodrum to the Greek island of Kos as his only hope.
Kurdi touches the necklace lightly. She doesn’t remember where it came from, only that it arrived in the mail from a stranger during those tumultuous, dark months after the tragedy when she was drowning in a sea of grief.
She wears it every day.
“If you go inside my heart, I don’t wish this on anyone. I don’t eat, I don’t sleep. My life has changed completely. That’s why this book. It has given me so much healing.”
Kurdi spares no one, least of all herself, in the story she recounts.
“I have reserved the most vicious condemnations for myself,” she writes. “’Why did you send Abdullah that money for the smugglers? Why didn’t you send him more money, so that he could take a safer, seaworthy boat? … I’m still lost at sea, drifting. Sometimes I float. Other times I sink like a stone and drown.”
Kurdi wants the world to understand the hellish choice that refugees and their families face.
“I said in the book, I gave them the wind so they can die. But the truth is, it wasn’t like that. We are family, we were trying to help. They were happy when I sent them the money. But the regret, of course, I will take it to my grave.”
Since the tragedy she awakens every night at 4 a.m. with the feeling that someone is choking her.
In those dark, lonely hours, she says she talks to God, to her mother, who had died years before, and to little Alan.