ekes reviewed My Fourth Time, We Drowned by Sally Hayden
Impressive journalism written into a book that needs to be read.
5 stars
I’d consider myself as relatively well informed about the problems of borders, and the southern European one in particular. However, this book lays it bare, and it’s even worse than I understood.
The book is written from the journalistic first person. I’d like to call it ‘classic journalism’, maintaining ‘impartiality’. But not impartial as in not caring about those with absolutely no power. It cares, about people individually and as a group, but it’s only campaigning because doing so lights a fire under power. The book starts with the online contact being made from someone trapped in a Libyan prison. It then broadly follows Sally Hayden’s own experience of becoming one of the few, maybe only, journalists truly keeping in touch with migrants and their families, investigating the camps, NGOs and UN and reporting about the horrific situation that the EU is complicit in making. By writing it from this …
I’d consider myself as relatively well informed about the problems of borders, and the southern European one in particular. However, this book lays it bare, and it’s even worse than I understood.
The book is written from the journalistic first person. I’d like to call it ‘classic journalism’, maintaining ‘impartiality’. But not impartial as in not caring about those with absolutely no power. It cares, about people individually and as a group, but it’s only campaigning because doing so lights a fire under power. The book starts with the online contact being made from someone trapped in a Libyan prison. It then broadly follows Sally Hayden’s own experience of becoming one of the few, maybe only, journalists truly keeping in touch with migrants and their families, investigating the camps, NGOs and UN and reporting about the horrific situation that the EU is complicit in making. By writing it from this perspective it does run the risk of making us care because there is another white saviour, the journalist. Hayden is critical of the view through the saviours perspective in the book. A tough balance, but I’ll admit the approach does make the book accessible to me, the white north European reader, and the voices of the migrants themselves are highlighted throughout.
A large part of the book is spent with the situation in Libya. I’m not even going to try and describe the stories, it wouldn’t do them justice. The people Hayden is most in contact with are Christian Eritreans which at times, Christians having a particularly hard time in Libya, feels a little out of balance in their prominence in the stories over those Muslim migrants. That’s as it is there clearly is an effort to bring in details of other migration routes, and other migrants. Including a fair section that gives a voice to West African so called ‘economic migrants’. It does do a good job of dispelling a lot of the constructed separation of types of migrants.
By weaving her own journalistic journey, with the personal stories of individual migrants and the politics and actions of traffickers, Nation States, the EU, NGOs and the UN, Sally Hayden makes the book a compelling read. Even if you think you know what’s going on it’ll probably be a revelation.