An illustrated account of a refugee’s journey from Afghanistan to Kent powerfully presents imperialism’s impact and the experience of displacement, finds Hannah Cross

Tale of Ahmed is a fictional account of a teenage boy’s two-year journey from Afghanistan towards England. It is written as an epic poem with atmospheric illustrations by the author, Henry Cockburn. From the arrival of war on the farm and the execution of Ahmed’s father, through an escape with his grandmother and their parting in Kabul, the book’s eighteen chapters narrate life on the run through western Asia and Europe.

Funded by the sale of family treasure, Ahmed boards a lorry towards Iran. His journey to the West is overseen by a trafficker named Rebat, and he is left to navigate an informal economy based on trust. For the journey of thousands of miles to find safety and freedom, people must use their wits and make existential decisions under pressure, hunger and exhaustion. They are at the mercy of state violence, betrayal and deception from smugglers and associates, the elements, and the dangers of clandestine travel by land and sea.

It is also clear that completion of the journey needs many people to deliver their promises and requires small but impactful acts from those with more power and agency, while migrants’ last possessions are at times entrusted to or shared with fellow travellers. Ahmed’s life is changed, and he changes lives, though such acts and exchanges, not only for his own survival but also in the basic humanity which overcomes the divisions created by national boundaries and imperial war. In reality, the journey is indefinitely incomplete, as arrival on Kent’s shores brings new risks of detention and deportation.

Reading Ahmed’s perspective of life on the run in these vulnerable conditions does not inspire pity, but wonder. It reflects the experiences of people fleeing war who have crossed borders, invariably faced state detention or apprehension, grieved for the lives left behind and friends who are lost along the way, and faced hostility and exploitation in unfamiliar countries. In a mosque in Calais, Ahmed says to the imam, ‘My friend Mullah once said, for every one that gets there, a hundred others wind up dead!’ We know for sure that thousands of people lose their lives or get stuck for long periods in detention or in makeshift camps, where refugees in Calais as elsewhere face vicious vandalism and humiliation from state authorities. The trafficking networks that European leaders claim are responsible for the threat to migrants’ lives, and which are used to justify military responses, also bring danger and brutality, but they exist because regular livelihoods, free circulation and safe routes are destroyed by those same powers.

Agents of harm and humanity

On Ahmed’s journey, there are tense waits to see if agents will deliver what they promised and in one instance, he and companions are robbed and poisoned as they pay to be smuggled into a chemical truck that is not going in their direction. Yet agents also provide food, shelter and warmth, allow refugees respite in the journey, and are themselves evading forced conscription and cycles of revenge. The wonder at the resourcefulness and good fortunes of the few who can successfully navigate such a hostile world gives way to dismay that this barbaric migration system exists. As Ahmed is counselled in a dream: ‘When a life lacks justice it starts to understand freedom’, and yet, under the primitive racial ideology of imperialist capitalism, this freedom is not granted to the people whose societies have been invaded, exploited and destroyed.

It is not surprising to see in a former asylum seeker’s endorsement of the book that the poem ‘rings true to my own terrifying experience of escape’. In the introduction by Nelofer Pazira-Fisk, a journalist and filmmaker in Canada who considers herself a ‘refugee for life’, there is similar recognition of the author’s meticulous research and careful identification with the experience of forced displacement. Pazira-Fisk’s introduction sets a crucial context against the denigration and apolitical handwringing that is found in the West’s attitudes towards refugees, with its political classes failing to take responsibility for invading and profiteering from instability and corruption in Afghanistan. Cockburn honours Ahmed’s journey as a young refugee fleeing a divided country without creating a simple narrative. Yet the reader cannot evade how the story begins and ends with treasures lost and looted, at the hands of puppet warlords and British institutions that can swiftly procure the mineral wealth of a country while denying such mobility for its people.