Prayer for those who died
His latest book is Afghan-born author Khaled Hosseini’s way of keeping alive the memory of the thousands who lost their lives fleeing their countries.
THREE years ago, the body of a young Syrian refugee boy washed up on the shore of a Turkish beach.
The photo of three-year-old Alan Kurdi, who drowned along with his mother and brother in an attempt to cross the Mediterranean Sea to Europe, became one of the defining images of the global refugee crisis.
Among those left shaken by the photo was bestselling Afghanistanborn American author Khaled Hosseini, best known for his debut novel, The Kite Runner (2003).
“I am a dad, I have two kids,” the 53-year-old says over the telephone from his California home. “I kept going back, imagining again and again what his father was going through.
“I found myself searching for a way to tell the stories of refugees fleeing war and persecution – Iraqis, Syrians, Afghans – to keep alive the memory of the thousands who lost their lives at sea.”
To this end, he has published his first picture book, Sea Prayer ,a lushly illustrated letter from a Syrian refugee to his young son on the eve of a sea crossing, as he reminisces about the home they left behind and frets about the dangerous journey ahead.
Hosseini, who was a refugee himself and is now a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), initially wrote the piece for a private fund-raiser, but soon realised the powerful connection it provoked among readers.
Last year, it was turned into a short virtual-reality film by British newspaper The Guardian.
When his publisher Bloomsbury suggested he turn his story into a picture book, Hosseini agreed. His words are accompanied by watercolour illustrations from British artist Dan Williams.
Hosseini hopes that people reading it will “imagine their own family and how desperate someone must be to put the person you love the most on these overcrowded and unsafe boats, knowing many people have died before you on that same journey”.
“I want readers to know that it’s appalling and that no father or mother in their right mind would choose this for their children, except as a matter of last resort.”
Sea Prayer comes amid a wave of new books this year that tells the stories of the refugee crisis, from Butterfly, the memoir of Syrian Olympian swimmer Yusra Mardini, who swam for three hours when the boat she was trying to cross the Mediterranean in nearly sank; to My Country by Palestinian-Syrian activist Kassem Eid, who fought against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime after nearly dying in a sarin gas attack.
Earlier this year, Alan’s aunt Tima Kurdi published The Boy On The Beach, an account of her family’s refugee journey from Syria to Canada, where she now lives.
Hosseini was himself a refugee at the age of 15. His family had been in Paris, where his father was a diplomat, when a revolution plunged his home country into chaos.
When the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the family decided it would be too dangerous to return and sought political asylum in the United States. It would be more than two decades before he returned to Afghanistan.
With almost no grasp of English, he struggled in school while his parents did jobs such as being a driving instructor and a waitress.
Still, he says, his experience cannot be compared with the refugee situation nowadays.
“When I came here in 1980, my family was one of the first in the Afghan community here.
“We did not have the enormous displacement crisis we have today and the issues of refugees had not been tied to political rhetoric and security the way it is today.”
According to a UNHCR report in June, there were 68.5 million forcibly displaced people in the world at the end of last year.
Hosseini studied to become a doctor, but the urge to tell the world a story from an Afghan perspective drove him to write his first novel The Kite Runner, the harrowing tale of two Afghan boys, one who is privileged and seeks asylum in America while the other from a lower caste is left behind. It was made into a film in 2007.
Together, The Kite Runner and his second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007), about the plight of women in Afghanistan, have sold more than 38 million copies worldwide. His third and most recent novel was And The Mountains Echoed (2013), about a poor Afghan family forced to sell its young daughter.
Reading his old books is an “exercise in sobriety”, says Hosseini, who is now working on a new novel he is reluctant to say more about. “You’re not the person you were years ago, so when you go back to an old book, your instinct is to take a red pen and make changes.”
With Sea Prayer, he hopes to raise funds for the Khaled Hosseini Foundation, a non-profit humanitarian organisation he co-founded with his wife Roya, which helps Afghan refugee women and children.
He recalls visiting refugees in countries such as Lebanon, where he met Syrians living on less than US$4 (RM16.60) a day in garages or abandoned shopping centres, afraid to move around lest they were stopped at checkpoints. “If I was in that place, I might one day decide to risk everything for a chance at a better future.”
Yet, the refugees he met expressed a deep longing for their home country, which they would return to, given the chance. “One told me, even heaven is not home.
“A refugee is simply someone who once had a place in a world and no longer does.” – The Straits Times/Asia News Network