Book Freak #171: North to Paradise
A Journey Along the World's Most Dangerous Migrant Trail
North to Paradise is Ousman Umar’s extraordinary account of his journey from a small Ghanaian village to Europe, a five-year odyssey he began as a thirteen-year-old boy. After a childhood spent building toy cars from scraps and watching planes cross the African sky, Umar set out for what his people called “the Land of the Whites,” believing it to be a paradise. His journey would take him across the Sahara Desert, through the dangerous underground world of human trafficking in Libya, and finally across the Mediterranean Sea in a crowded dinghy.
What makes this memoir exceptional is not just its unflinching look at the migrant experience, but Umar’s ability to maintain his humanity and find moments of grace even in the darkest circumstances.
Four quotes from the book:
On seeing an airplane for the first time in his village
“What is that?” I asked the elders. “Is it magic?”
“It’s an airplane,” I was told. “White men build them, and white men fly them.”
One of the most haunting quotes from the book about a fellow migrant giving up in the desert
“The next few days were unspeakably painful. We had no food or water. We had to drink our own urine, but we were so desperate we didn’t care. One man’s feet were badly swollen and his shoes were falling apart; he had to use strings to hold them together. The sand is burning hot during the day and walking barefoot isn’t an option. Survival seems impossible in these conditions, but when we encounter physical challenges, our bodies adapt in astonishing ways. The man with the swollen feet was the first to choose to die—he was the one who sat down in the sand, alone, waiting for the end. He couldn’t bring himself to walk any farther, and he gave up: his fatigue and despair had become so great that he preferred a slow, certain, agonizing death.
“We left him sitting there, and his figure receded behind us, as if the Sahara were swallowing him up, as if the desert were an enormous monster whose belly was full of the dead”
How even after reaching “Paradise” (Spain), Ousman and other migrants still faced mistreatment
“One of the guards at the detention center was always very rough with us. Maybe it was to make sure we respected her since she was a woman and most of us weren’t used to seeing women in positions of authority. Whenever she was the one to line us up, she hit us with her baton, even though almost everyone was cooperative and obedient. If you said anything, she hit you. There was no reason for her to be so brutal with us. We were scared whenever she was on duty.”
On his first night of safety with his adoptive family in Spain
“I started crying like a child. I lay there the whole night, wondering why I’d had to experience so much suffering… For the first time since leaving Ghana, I was safe. No more fighting to survive. My future wasn’t uncertain. I was safe.”
11/13/24
