breach by Olumide Popoola and Annie Holmes: Nuanced, empathetic stories from the Calais Jungle

breach is based on Olumide Popoola and Annie Holmes’ exchanges with refugees who have lived in the camp known as the Jungle and the people of Calais where it’s based. Meike Ziervogel of Peirene Press commissioned the book to, in her words, ‘distil [their] stories into a work of fiction about escape, hope and aspiration. On another level, however, these stories also take seriously the fears of people who want to close their borders. It’s that dialogue that isn’t happening in real life. A work of art can help to bridge the gap.’ The result is a collection that is both heartrending and enlightening. It’s the first in a series called Peirene Now! from a publisher who already has quite a reputation for fiction in translation.

In the first of the eight stories comprising the collection an unnamed Sudanese narrator ponders the fractured dynamics of his small group as they wait for the right conditions for the eleven-minute dash to the French border. The following six explore the world of the refugee camp from the many and varied points of view of those who live in and around it. In ‘The Terrier’ for instance, Eloise, happy to supplement her income by taking in a young Kurdish boy and his sister, struggles with suspicions fanned by her less tolerant friends but is won over after hearing their story and visiting the Jungle to see it for herself. From the young Ethiopian woman who wishes that volunteers would understand that she wants to dress fashionably, to the Afghan who has compromised his UK asylum application hoping to get home to see his sick mother; from the Kurd who when warned about walking on the motorway joyfully tells a British policeman that he’s illegal, too, to the young people smuggler keeping a close eye on the his boss’ weaknesses – everyone has an opinion and a story to tell. Set in the UK, the final story bookends the first, picking up Alghali who we last met counting down those eleven minutes, now learning English from a ninety-four-year-old convinced that ‘Europe is being overrun’ but who always offers Alghali a biscuit. It ends with news of the Paris attack.

Used as we’ve become to wrenching pictures of refugees rescued from appallingly flimsy crafts or walking through baking temperatures only to be turned back by soldiers and barbed wire or, in the heady days of the German welcome, greeted with teddy bears and welcome packages, it’s easy to see this crisis in easy shades of right and wrong. Popoola and Holmes offer a more nuanced view filtered thought the experiences of the people involved. The camp is a microcosm of society. There are places of worship, a school and a hospital in the making. There’s money to be made: shops and cafes prosper as do, on the dark side of the camp economy, prostitution and people smuggling. Refugees are good, bad and in between. Volunteers may be well-meaning but they can be irritating in their assumptions of what is best, or in the case of a white dreadlocked Muslim convert, unrealistic idealisation. Through their empathetic, vividly written stories Popoola and Holmes offer a multifaceted insight into the experience of refugees and our response to them. Part of the Jungle was bulldozed this year and there’s much talk of the rest of it being demolished by the end of 2016. It’s an intractable problem with no simple, obvious solution but a little more compassion would not go amiss.

If you’d like to know more about the background to breach, you might like to read Melissa’s interview with Holmes over at The Bookbinder’s Daughter.

The next Peirine Now! project is a Brexit novel by Anthony Cartwright, due to be published in June 2017. The funding for this one is to be crowd sourced. If you’d like to make a pledge, thereby securing yourself a copy, just click here.