FICTIONALIZED: MEMOIR
“In the Sea There are Crocodiles” by Fabio Geda (Doubleday)
Last month, a group of people (news reports refer to them as militants, or insurgents), killed an 8-year-old boy outside Gereshk, Afghanistan. First they hanged him, then they dumped his body in a stream. They did it because they were angry that his father, a police officer in Gereshk, had refused to hand over his truck.
This news would no doubt sadden Enaiatollah Akbari, the hero of the fictionalized memoir “In the Sea There are Crocodiles” (Doubleday), but it likely wouldn’t shock him. Unbridled violence was routine during his childhood in Afghanistan.
Enaiatollah is one of the lucky ones, he reckons: He left Afghanistan when he was 10 — or somewhere near 10, he’s not really sure when he was born. He fled because he belongs to a minority ethnic group, the Hazara, that has been at odds with the majority Pashtuns for decades, particularly in the Taliban era of the past 20 years or so. (“At odds with” is putting it mildly. As Enaiatollah describes the tension: “There’s a saying among the (Pashtun) Taliban: Tajikistan for the Tajiks, Uzbekistan for the Uzbeks, and Goristan for the Hazara. That’s what they say. Gor means ‘grave.’ “)
So Enaiatollah’s mother smuggled him out, beneath her burka, and settled him (temporarily) in Quetta, a busy city in Pakistan.
Enaiatollah didn’t stay in Quetta long. Practical and determined, he soon headed west — trusting traffickers, strangers and his own precocious sense of bravado (and canny resourcefulness) to carry him on a journey through Iran, Turkey, Greece, and finally Italy, where he settled four years later. Along the way he cheats death, evades authorities, makes friends, and survives the kinds of adversities that American youngsters his age can only dream of — or more specifically, have nightmares about.
During a harrowing, 20-day trek across the mountains at the border of Iran and Turkey, Enaiatollah recalls: “We started yelling, Wait, someone’s dying here, we have to stop and help him, but the traffickers (there were five of them) fired in the air with their Kalashnikovs. Anyone who doesn’t start walking again immediately stays here forever, they said.”
Here’s the tricky part about this book: Although Enaiatollah Akbari is a real person (he recently graduated from high school in Italy), the credited author of “In the Sea There are Crocodiles,” is Fabio Geda, an Italian novelist who befriended Enaiatollah and wrote his story for him. The author’s introduction is very careful to explain this caveat, a necessity in the post-James Frey world: “This book must be considered a work of fiction, since it is the re-creation of Enaiatollah’s experience.”
Whatever it is, in Geda’s hands Enaiatollah’s story is a riveting and fast read, one that dips into emotional and physical violence but surfaces in a splash of redemption and humanity and hope. Adult readers will be gripped by the tale, as will young adult readers.
