In This World: Review of Tabish Khair's 'Drown All the Refugees'

Tabish Khair’s new novel, Drown All the Refugees, is an anguished cry from the heart. Khair has explored the themes of displacement, alienation and the toll of leaving home in his works before. In Drown All the Refugees, he uses elements of Gothic horror to paint a haunting picture of the times we live in. Ours is a world in which refugees and immigrants are either forgotten or left to fend for themselves in the most brutal circumstances. Spectres haunt the landscape of Khair’s novel. Those who leave dream of home; those who are left behind mourn the ones who fled, the ones they lost.

“Drown all the refugees,” bursts out the novel’s narrator while attending a literary event on the island of St. Martin. He is addressing a famous writer, a self-professed liberal who is a regular at soirees around the globe. The narrator’s heartfelt outburst causes offence. The celebrated writer misreads it as a callous, classist stance and stalks off to his hotel, “silent and implacable as a shadow”.

The narrator feels compelled to explain himself. After he leaves the island, he writes down the stories of displacement he has witnessed, the suffering he has seen people close to him endure, the horrors visited on those who are forced to leave home and seek refuge elsewhere, the impact of their departures on the places they left behind. These stories form the heart and soul of the novel.

For the narrator, displacement is not a distant reality or a topical issue to be discussed at lectures and seminars. It is a deeply personal reality. His boyfriend Abdul who passed away was Palestinian. His dear friend Pedro—the son of his childhood nurse Maria—migrates from India to a foreign country illegally hoping to build a better life. When Pedro goes missing, a desperate Maria turns to the occult for help. Though she manages to bring him back, Pedro is a shadow of his former self. The turns their lives take break the narrator’s heart. But he makes it clear that his decision to share their experiences with the writer he met at St. Martin, and by extension with readers, is not motivated by the need to evoke their pity. Just empathy is not enough and it is not a political solution by any means.

“Do you think pity absolves you?” he asks. “No, pity is something to be offered to a dog lamed by a car, a bird with broken wings… It is better to kill a human being than to pity him.” The narrator wants his novel to make readers question the systems that create the refugee crisis, to demand radical change, to dismantle the skewed world order that made Somali-British poet Warsan Shire lament: No one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land.

One of the preoccupations of the novel is the question of language. If language is refuge, what happens to a person when their language is snatched away from them? Immigrants who struggle to communicate in the language of the countries they migrate to are looked down upon. Cut off from their own language, they are rendered homeless.

On the global stage, English occupies a special spot. The hierarchy is set; the spotlight still shines on the English-speaking world. The narrator who comes from a privileged background (his family owns a tea estate) is acutely aware of this fact. He is a well-educated man. He earned a second Master’s degree from a university in the United States and worked as an academic for a while after his return to India. His decision to not write a book in English disappoints his father. He knows that his father may have found it easier to stomach his decision to become a writer had he chosen to write in English. The literary universe is an unequal one, too. During his brief encounter with the celebrated writer at St. Martin, the narrator muses, “I write in a language that is not important in your world… But my language, unlike so many others, has not disappeared in a quick or prolonged genocide; it has survived in the crevices of the earth, potent in its invisibility, occult to your knowledge of it.”