'They All Hate Us'
Daniel Trilling, Lights in the Distance: Exile and Refuge at the Borders of Europe
Picador, 304pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781509815630
reviewed by Daniel Whittall
It has become all too easy in the last couple of years, as media coverage of refugees, asylum seekers and other migrants arriving in Europe has waned, to look disparagingly and somewhat smugly across the Atlantic at Donald Trump’s blunt approach to border politics. Overt calls for the building of a wall (or, more accurately, the completion of an already partially-constructed fence), coupled with footage of children separated from their parents and kept in cages, have allowed citizens in Western Europe the opportunity to reflect on how much more enlightened our liberal democratic governance of migration is than that currently operating across the Atlantic.
Daniel Trilling’s Lights in the Distance should immediately disabuse European readers of any such pretensions. By following closely a group of people from across the world as they struggle to enter, to move through, and finally to settle in Europe, Trilling sheds some deeply troubling light on the functioning of Fortress Europe. The book ought to give pause to any over-enthusiastic comparisons implying that the European treatment of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers is somehow more enlightened than Trumpian America.
Though the book is based around what has come to be known as Europe’s ‘refugee crisis’, Trilling argues that this moment is better understood as a broader ‘border crisis’. Borders, for Trilling, can no longer be conceived as merely being lines on a map. They are, instead, a ‘system for filtering people that stretches from the edges of a territory into its heart’. This filtering process is ‘particularly complex and often violent’ for asylum seekers, in theory entitled to due process and to an accurate and fair assessment of their claim but in reality often met by a system that, in Trilling’s words, ‘tries to place them into categories – refugee or economic migrant, legal or illegal, deserving or undeserving – that do not always fit the reality of their lives’.
For all that Hillary Clinton might think that the solution to rising nationalism in Europe is to be tougher on migration, the reality is that Fortress Europe’s defences are already plenty tough enough. Between 2007 and 2013, for example, the EU spent almost 2 billion euros on fences, surveillance and border patrols. To set this in context, in the same period only about 700 million euros was spent on facilities for receiving refugees. Not for nothing does Trilling call Europe’s border management system ‘perhaps the world’s most complex system to deter unwanted migrants’.
How, then, to get a handle on such a complex system? Trilling’s approach is to suggest that ‘the starting point should be the migrants themselves’. Lights in the Distance recounts Trilling’s travels around the front lines of Europe’s border crisis – from Calais to Kiev, the Evros River to the island of Sicily – but most importantly it introduces us to the life stories of a series of human beings all, in different ways, caught up in and negotiating their ways through Europe’s border crisis.
One such individual is Caesar. Trilling comes into contact with him initially through Facebook, having met and spent time with Caesar’s cousin Boubacar. From the start Caesar is interested in and opinionated on the nature and extent of Europe’s border crisis. ‘I don’t understand the EU’, he tells Trilling, because ‘it feels like we’re not being protected by the [Refugee] Convention’. This is made all the more galling for Caesar by the recognition that European countries themselves ‘sowed chaos in African countries and if it wasn’t for that we wouldn’t have to flee for our lives’.
The chaos to which Caesar refers is the civil war and European military intervention in Mali. Tuareg rebels used weapons – many originating in Europe but looted from arms dumps in Libya – to launch a push for an independent state in northern Mali. Caesar led a protest against efforts by the Malian army to retake his town from the rebels, knowing that such an attempt might cost the lives of many villagers. In recompense, militiamen and government soldiers murdered Caesar’s mother, assaulted his wife in front of him, and took Caesar and his brother away into the Sahara desert where they left them to die. Through a combination of good fortune and initiative Caesar navigates his way across the desert travelling from well to well, using the lights of distant cities to guide him. Along the way the miserable experiences compound themselves: imprisonment, travelling at the behest of armed and intoxicated smugglers, facing racism and violence in Libya before, after one final beating from the smugglers, being forced onto an inflatable boat on a beach outside Tripoli.
After three days afloat in the Mediterranean, Caesar’s ship is picked up by the Italian navy. After that he enters the system of camps and centres that constitutes Europe’s efforts to contain its border crisis and to keep as many migrants as possible in some of the most economically challenged southern European states. When Caesar is unable to provide documentation to prove his story of coming from Northern Mali, his claim for asylum is put on hold, and it is in that limbo – not yet accepted into Europe completely, but not yet rejected either – that we encounter him.
Caesar and his family have been on the receiving end of such brute violence that the further violence inflicted by the border system almost seems minute in comparison. Indeed, Caesar himself is grateful for Europe’s system of border management. ‘They could have let me die at sea’, he reflects, in parallel with his reflections on Europe’s role in initiating the problems that forced him from his home initially.
Not everyone is so understanding in their reflections on Europe’s border crisis. The most challenging story in the book is also based on one of Trilling’s shortest interviews. In late Autumn 2012, whilst reporting on the political crisis in Greece, Trilling is introduced to Hakima from Afghanistan. Her husband, Sakhi, had been beaten by racists and sacked from his construction job whilst in hospital. After that he received a further beating, this time from the police and in front of his children. Without work the family were utterly dependent on the kindness and support of other migrant friends and their local church. To provide for the family Hakima rummages through bins for food and other useful items at night, when the racist thugs aren’t around to offer up their beatings. With baby in hand she expresses to Trilling her disappointment in the complete absence of safety her family have found in Europe. ‘The people here don’t treat us like human beings . . . They all hate us’.
Eventually, as Trilling questions her, Hakima snaps completely, yelling at him about the inability of all the journalists who come to speak to her to actually change anything about her situation. It’s a powerful moment, one that prompts Trilling to reflect on ‘the luxury of distance’ that allows writers to remove themselves from the circumstances of their interviewees. He suggests that it is a requirement for good journalism to ‘step back from a situation, try to untangle the web of cause and effect that surrounds it, and retell it in a way that makes sense.’
By and large Trilling accomplishes exactly this. Lights in the Distance is an exceptional exploration of the individual lives of those caught up in Europe’s border crisis. Its call to refocus the issue as being a crisis of borders, rather than of migrants, is an essential corrective. The politicians of Europe are involved in a massive exercise of denial, trying to mask the urgent need to reform and humanise their border policies from their populations out of fear that they will become the target of anti-migrant nationalists. But it is the very failure to take on the issue of migration, to explain to people the great value it has and to highlight its inevitability, that has allowed the issue to fester at the heart of European politics. A racist core has cohered at the centre of the continent, with the violent street-fighting racists that beat Sakhi only its most blatant expression. It needs to be called out and confronted, and not just by politicians.
Trilling suggests that ‘often, journalists like to think that what they’re doing is going to provoke a change . . . to uncover a shocking new piece of information that makes a government or a society change its course’. But of course, this is not at all what many of Europe’s media wants when it comes to the border crisis. Instead, all too many journalists shill for a system that systematically dehumanises already vulnerable people and exposes them to great violence. In an era of climate breakdown, when the number of people forced to move around the world will only increase in years to come, there can no longer be any justification for such an approach. Trilling’s book is a model example of how to rethink the border crisis, one that confronts us with the realisation of how violently malformed Europe’s border regime has become. In the face of such a realisation, it behoves us all to recognise that the only way to solve Europe’s border crisis is to transform the border regime into a more open and humane system, one whose first priority is the well-being of those arriving at our borders.
Daniel Trilling’s Lights in the Distance should immediately disabuse European readers of any such pretensions. By following closely a group of people from across the world as they struggle to enter, to move through, and finally to settle in Europe, Trilling sheds some deeply troubling light on the functioning of Fortress Europe. The book ought to give pause to any over-enthusiastic comparisons implying that the European treatment of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers is somehow more enlightened than Trumpian America.
Though the book is based around what has come to be known as Europe’s ‘refugee crisis’, Trilling argues that this moment is better understood as a broader ‘border crisis’. Borders, for Trilling, can no longer be conceived as merely being lines on a map. They are, instead, a ‘system for filtering people that stretches from the edges of a territory into its heart’. This filtering process is ‘particularly complex and often violent’ for asylum seekers, in theory entitled to due process and to an accurate and fair assessment of their claim but in reality often met by a system that, in Trilling’s words, ‘tries to place them into categories – refugee or economic migrant, legal or illegal, deserving or undeserving – that do not always fit the reality of their lives’.
For all that Hillary Clinton might think that the solution to rising nationalism in Europe is to be tougher on migration, the reality is that Fortress Europe’s defences are already plenty tough enough. Between 2007 and 2013, for example, the EU spent almost 2 billion euros on fences, surveillance and border patrols. To set this in context, in the same period only about 700 million euros was spent on facilities for receiving refugees. Not for nothing does Trilling call Europe’s border management system ‘perhaps the world’s most complex system to deter unwanted migrants’.
How, then, to get a handle on such a complex system? Trilling’s approach is to suggest that ‘the starting point should be the migrants themselves’. Lights in the Distance recounts Trilling’s travels around the front lines of Europe’s border crisis – from Calais to Kiev, the Evros River to the island of Sicily – but most importantly it introduces us to the life stories of a series of human beings all, in different ways, caught up in and negotiating their ways through Europe’s border crisis.
One such individual is Caesar. Trilling comes into contact with him initially through Facebook, having met and spent time with Caesar’s cousin Boubacar. From the start Caesar is interested in and opinionated on the nature and extent of Europe’s border crisis. ‘I don’t understand the EU’, he tells Trilling, because ‘it feels like we’re not being protected by the [Refugee] Convention’. This is made all the more galling for Caesar by the recognition that European countries themselves ‘sowed chaos in African countries and if it wasn’t for that we wouldn’t have to flee for our lives’.
The chaos to which Caesar refers is the civil war and European military intervention in Mali. Tuareg rebels used weapons – many originating in Europe but looted from arms dumps in Libya – to launch a push for an independent state in northern Mali. Caesar led a protest against efforts by the Malian army to retake his town from the rebels, knowing that such an attempt might cost the lives of many villagers. In recompense, militiamen and government soldiers murdered Caesar’s mother, assaulted his wife in front of him, and took Caesar and his brother away into the Sahara desert where they left them to die. Through a combination of good fortune and initiative Caesar navigates his way across the desert travelling from well to well, using the lights of distant cities to guide him. Along the way the miserable experiences compound themselves: imprisonment, travelling at the behest of armed and intoxicated smugglers, facing racism and violence in Libya before, after one final beating from the smugglers, being forced onto an inflatable boat on a beach outside Tripoli.
After three days afloat in the Mediterranean, Caesar’s ship is picked up by the Italian navy. After that he enters the system of camps and centres that constitutes Europe’s efforts to contain its border crisis and to keep as many migrants as possible in some of the most economically challenged southern European states. When Caesar is unable to provide documentation to prove his story of coming from Northern Mali, his claim for asylum is put on hold, and it is in that limbo – not yet accepted into Europe completely, but not yet rejected either – that we encounter him.
Caesar and his family have been on the receiving end of such brute violence that the further violence inflicted by the border system almost seems minute in comparison. Indeed, Caesar himself is grateful for Europe’s system of border management. ‘They could have let me die at sea’, he reflects, in parallel with his reflections on Europe’s role in initiating the problems that forced him from his home initially.
Not everyone is so understanding in their reflections on Europe’s border crisis. The most challenging story in the book is also based on one of Trilling’s shortest interviews. In late Autumn 2012, whilst reporting on the political crisis in Greece, Trilling is introduced to Hakima from Afghanistan. Her husband, Sakhi, had been beaten by racists and sacked from his construction job whilst in hospital. After that he received a further beating, this time from the police and in front of his children. Without work the family were utterly dependent on the kindness and support of other migrant friends and their local church. To provide for the family Hakima rummages through bins for food and other useful items at night, when the racist thugs aren’t around to offer up their beatings. With baby in hand she expresses to Trilling her disappointment in the complete absence of safety her family have found in Europe. ‘The people here don’t treat us like human beings . . . They all hate us’.
Eventually, as Trilling questions her, Hakima snaps completely, yelling at him about the inability of all the journalists who come to speak to her to actually change anything about her situation. It’s a powerful moment, one that prompts Trilling to reflect on ‘the luxury of distance’ that allows writers to remove themselves from the circumstances of their interviewees. He suggests that it is a requirement for good journalism to ‘step back from a situation, try to untangle the web of cause and effect that surrounds it, and retell it in a way that makes sense.’
By and large Trilling accomplishes exactly this. Lights in the Distance is an exceptional exploration of the individual lives of those caught up in Europe’s border crisis. Its call to refocus the issue as being a crisis of borders, rather than of migrants, is an essential corrective. The politicians of Europe are involved in a massive exercise of denial, trying to mask the urgent need to reform and humanise their border policies from their populations out of fear that they will become the target of anti-migrant nationalists. But it is the very failure to take on the issue of migration, to explain to people the great value it has and to highlight its inevitability, that has allowed the issue to fester at the heart of European politics. A racist core has cohered at the centre of the continent, with the violent street-fighting racists that beat Sakhi only its most blatant expression. It needs to be called out and confronted, and not just by politicians.
Trilling suggests that ‘often, journalists like to think that what they’re doing is going to provoke a change . . . to uncover a shocking new piece of information that makes a government or a society change its course’. But of course, this is not at all what many of Europe’s media wants when it comes to the border crisis. Instead, all too many journalists shill for a system that systematically dehumanises already vulnerable people and exposes them to great violence. In an era of climate breakdown, when the number of people forced to move around the world will only increase in years to come, there can no longer be any justification for such an approach. Trilling’s book is a model example of how to rethink the border crisis, one that confronts us with the realisation of how violently malformed Europe’s border regime has become. In the face of such a realisation, it behoves us all to recognise that the only way to solve Europe’s border crisis is to transform the border regime into a more open and humane system, one whose first priority is the well-being of those arriving at our borders.