The Naked Don't Fear the Water: A Journey Through the Refugee Underground

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DAVIES: So you decided you would go ahead. You could travel easily on your own, and you would meet Omar in Turkey. He could not easily travel (laughter) on his own. He managed to get into Iran and then make a very difficult crossing over - through some smugglers over the Zagros Mountains. You weren't with him then, but you were hoping he would make it. He eventually - you connect with him in Turkey where his mother and sister and, I think, a friend are there, right? What is your goal there? Now you're in Turkey, where do you have to go? How are you going to make it? Highly readable, empathetic and revealing, Aikins’s book is brutally honest and often deeply moving – a work of great sympathy and understanding.’

Afghan youth from Kunduz bathe while waiting with other recently arrived migrants to board a ferry to Athens from Mytilene, Greece on October 16, 2015. Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

The Naked Don’t Fear The Water

Some reporters can’t help telling you their latest tale of derring-do: “I was there. And it was hell!” I’d infrequently run into Aikins somewhere, but the Canadian journalist would never say much about what he had just done or where he was headed. Then my next issue of Harper’s would arrive, and I’d see “ On the Front Lines in the World’s Deadliest Megacity” above his name.

DAVIES: And you had a lot of conversations with other refugees because everybody was trying to accomplish this same thing. Did you know people who tried that and they succeed?DAVIES: And that is journalist Matthew Aikins reading from his new book, "The Naked Don't Fear The Water: An Underground Journey Of Afghan Refugees." Yeah, putting yourself in the hands of criminals many times over the course of this journey. The man that you took this journey with, whom you call Omar - just tell us a bit about him and your relationship. DAVIES: Yeah, you said a million people reached Europe by sea during this movement, the largest movement of refugees across waters in history. By the time Omar decided he was going to go, he had some personal considerations that delayed him. Things had changed. How did they change? DAVIES: Right. And he certainly would have qualified. I mean, he had done translating for coalition forces. He'd seen combat. He - but they wanted a lot of documentation that people, when they're in action, don't think to collect. So you decided you would go together and report on this, which meant you would be traveling as an Afghan. But, of course, you are, in fact, a Westerner. You're Canadian-born. What advantages or risks did that pose to the two of you, that you were there kind of looking like an Afghan refugee, but really a Western journalist?

DAVIES: Right. And we've heard a lot about Afghan refugees in recent months. This was, you know, five years before the American withdrawal - 2016. Why did he want to leave? No one knew how long the miracle would last. Thousands of people were landing each day now in the little boats. A million would pass into Europe. DAVIES: And, of course, where there's a need, there are people to meet that need. So there were smugglers on Lesbos, as there are at any other point along this journey. You - I guess you decided you could go to Italy on your own, where your passport was there with a friend, but not Omar. He had to find a way off. How did he finally get off of Lesbos? There is much to admire about this book, its first-hand perspective being the most obvious. When Aikins writes of the ‘sense of vertigo in handing yourself over to criminals’ it’s because he himself has been in their clutches. This isn’t a reconstructed account, pasted together from secondhand sources; it is embedded journalism in the raw, a personal dispatch from behind the lines of Europe’s intractable migrant crisis.’In this extraordinary book, an acclaimed young war reporter chronicles a dangerous journey on the smuggler’s road to Europe, accompanying his friend, an Afghan refugee, in search of a better future. AIKINS: I thought maybe we'd all go in the water, and if we did, people are going to die. You know, I'm a strong swimmer. I've grown up on the ocean. Many of the people there, they had never seen the ocean before; this is Omar's first time in a boat. So I just knew that things were going to get really bad if we capsized. A riveting and heartrending look at the hidden world of refugees that challenged everything I thought I knew about the consequences of war and globalization. It’s the most important work on the global refugee crisis to date, and a crucial document of these tumultuous times. It will go down as one of the great works of nonfiction literature of our generation.’ AIKINS: No. A lot of times they're counterfeit, and they'll actually absorb water. And after an hour or so, they will take you down. You know, a lot of people drowned making that crossing. DAVIES: So you made it clear to the smuggler that you didn't want to go there, and the smuggler that you connected with said, no, you're not going there. But as you say in the book, you put yourself in the hands of criminals. What actually happened then when you paid the smuggler and went down to the shoreline of Turkey to try and get to Greece?

AIKINS: Well, we were about 40 people. We were taken to the beach at night. Omar's forced to get down at gunpoint because he was angry we were going the wrong island. And then... But I didn’t really know how brave Aikins was until, a third of the way through his debut book, he admits: “I was in danger of losing the plot.” I felt the same. It seemed as if “The Naked Don’t Fear the Water” (a title borrowed from a Dari proverb) might be going off the rails. AIKINS: I was the only reporter on the ground for a while, along with two photographers, Jim Huylebroek and Victor Blue. But because we were freelancers, we were able to choose to stay behind, whereas all the staff had to evacuate. DAVIES: One of the remarkable things about this book is that there's - it's a very detailed account of a pretty remarkable experience. And I know in my own reporting experiences, when you're out at something where there's a lot of action, like a demonstration, or when you're on the road, it's hard to take good notes, hard to preserve them. You had to keep your identity as a journalist secret. How did you keep records and notes of what you were experiencing? DAVIES: So this Norwegian vessel encounters you. You do make it to Lesbos. You were arrested, as you expected to be; people will get arrested and apply for asylum and hope to continue their journey. And so you end up in this camp called Moria. Tell us what the conditions were like, what the experience was.

This book is Aikins’s profound act of love…A meticulously told story the world needs to hear now more than ever.” AIKINS: Yeah. Well, it was the only way that I could do it because, you know, if I had my passport on me and we were caught by thieves or, you know, could be kidnapped or the police would separate us. So there was no other way to do it. I think that it probably added some risks, but it also meant that we were traveling together. We could, you know, take care of each other. And, of course, if something really serious did happen, you know, I was going to do everything I could to help him.