Giving voice to a migrant’s story
A heartbreaking story of love between a mother and son
More than100,000 migrants have entered Europe this year, with 2,000 or so dead or missing after trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea to find a better life. This is part of the massive humanitarian crisis the world is facing, reports the UNCHR (the United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights), with the largest number of recorded refugees since 1950. Syria has replaced Afghanistan as the country with the conflict producing the most people on the move: there are now 3.8 million Syrian refugees and an estimated 6.5 million who are internally displaced within its borders. As Western countries limit the entry of asylum seekers, telling their stories has become a vital task.
But these are not the only reasons worth paying attention to Nadia Hashimi’s When the Moon is Low, a remarkable portrait of familial love between a mother and her teenage son as they become separated on their escape from Kabul to London.
That mother is Fereiba Waziri whose story has a dreamy, fairy-tale start, a remembrance of a life long past in Afghanistan where her stepmother treated her as the family drudge. All she wants is to be loved and to go to school like her younger stepsisters. While she attains the elusive happiness she has always craved after her arranged marriage into a loving family, it ends suddenly when her husband is taken from their home and murdered by the Taliban. Using false passports, Fereiba and her children, Saleem, Samira and 3month-old Aziz, embark on a brave and hazardous journey to her half-sister’s home in England.
Hashimi’s second novel — her first was The Pearl That Broke Its Shell — captures the anguish, uncertainty and loss of dignity that such flight produces as the family crosses into Iran with the help of human smugglers. On arrival in Turkey, Saleem transforms from a soccer-loving student to a farmhand, Samira stops speaking, the baby falls seriously ill and Fereiba cleans houses. They have become one more intransit migrant family struggling to survive, afraid of being imprisoned in overcrowded camps or sent back home.
The novel vividly describes the urgency and insecurities of a refugee’s existence. Border guards, traffickers and even fellow travellers are a source of fear, although a few sympathetic strangers do ease the burden. Yet mother and son cannot help but feel like criminals as they scramble to feed the family and avoid being caught by officials. Secrets grow as they both try to protect each other: “They would survive in this way, telling each other that things were better than they were.”
The story wobbles a little as it switches from the mother’s tale to the son’s coming-of-age as Saleem faces his adolescence on the run. Fereiba becomes a supporting character, anguished by her responsibilities to her children. She wrestles with a daunting reality: doubting the choices made by her husband and the rising tensions between herself and her maturing son.
Their circumstances worsen once in Greece; Saleem is caught by police and sent back to Turkey, “away from the privilege of a passport and family” — to be haunted by the harsh stories of solo young men he’s already met. Fereiba faces her own Sophie’s Choice — to wait for her son to reappear or continue on to England to save the youngest.
Hashimi’s strength is in writing about the heartbreaking ache for love, family and belonging. The two main characters wear sacraments heavily: a dead mother’s gold bangles, a father’s wristwatch. A friendly adult’s concerned touch is enough for Saleem to feel “as if his father’s hands were on his shoulders.”
Saleem’s lonely journey is vivid but not as gritty as it could be; U.S.-born Hashimi prefers the hopeful. The son’s desire to reunite with his mother helps him face the worst of refugee life. As the months go by, he navigates between countries — and members of the opposite sex such as a farmer’s daughter, a migrants’ rights volunteer and a sex worker — returning again and again to the terrors of slipping across countries by any means possible.
When the Moon is Low gives voice to migrants everywhere and the dream that “one day, we will not look over our shoulder in fear or sleep on borrowed land with one eye open or shudder at the sight of a uniform.” Despite a propensity for characters to drop out of the narrative, it is a heartfelt story of courage amidst a world short on compassion. Piali Roy is a writer living in Toronto.