Summary of Matthieu Aikins's The Naked Don't Fear The Water

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 I had known Omar since I’d started working in Afghanistan, and he’d always dreamed of living in the West. His aspiration had grown urgent as the civil war intensified and his city was torn apart by bombings.
#2 I had been sleeping little since I returned from Sanaa, but my tiredness left me as the scene came into focus: the Hindu Kush snowcaps, the slums on the hillside, the Humvee with its turret pointed at the gate.
#3 Half the city was escaping that summer. Afghans were losing hope in their country’s future, and were preparing to emigrate to America through the Special Immigrant Visa program.
#4 I wanted to go with Omar and document the refugee underground, so I proposed the idea to him. He needed to get asylum in Europe first, then come back for Laila. But while he was gone, her father might try to marry her off to someone else.

Sujets

• Public policy
• Immigration

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 19 mars 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669354192
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Matthieu Aikins's The Naked Don't Fear the Water
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

I had known Omar since I’d started working in Afghanistan, and he’d always dreamed of living in the West. His aspiration had grown urgent as the civil war intensified and his city was torn apart by bombings.

#2

I had been sleeping little since I returned from Sanaa, but my tiredness left me as the scene came into focus: the Hindu Kush snowcaps, the slums on the hillside, the Humvee with its turret pointed at the gate.

#3

Half the city was escaping that summer. Afghans were losing hope in their country’s future, and were preparing to emigrate to America through the Special Immigrant Visa program.

#4

I wanted to go with Omar and document the refugee underground, so I proposed the idea to him. He needed to get asylum in Europe first, then come back for Laila. But while he was gone, her father might try to marry her off to someone else.

#5

I was starting to feel the effects of the jet lag. I sat down at a desk in the living room, and as I walked the dog, Omar told me he was going to leave and become a refugee. He was going to ask his father for Laila’s hand in marriage, on the assumption that Omar could get asylum.

#6

I walked with Omar up to the top of the hill, where there was an empty lot ringed by trees. Kabul was beautiful at night, but Omar was ready to leave. He had no future there.

#7

I had been working with Omar since my first magazine story in Afghanistan, more than six and a half years earlier. In 2009, I had gotten an assignment from Harper’s to write a profile of Colonel Abdul Raziq, a border police commander who was a key ally of the US military. I wanted to go to Raziq's frontline province of Kandahar, but the magazine couldn't afford any of Kabul's established fixers.

#8

Omar, like me, had grown up during the war on terror. He’d heard the foreign troops were paying good salaries to do dangerous work down in Kandahar, and in 2006 he took the bus to the base.

#9

The Taliban were on the rise in the farmlands surrounding the city. The Canadians were sent to hold some earthen berms in the middle of grape orchards. Out there in the night were an unknown number of Taliban, massing to overrun their isolated strongpoint. Omar fired his clip into the darkness.

#10

I had hitchhiked to the Balkans in 2008, and in the spring of 2009, I traveled overland to Afghanistan. I wanted to be a writer, and I thought I’d find in the world the material I lacked within myself.

#11

I was welcomed with open arms by the staff at the hotel, who were very amused by my appearance. I was treated as an equal by the boys, who took me to the bazaar and helped me buy a ready-made piran tombon, the traditional garb in Afghanistan.

#12

I was traveling to Iran, but I had to take a detour through Afghanistan because the main road was too dangerous. I was scared, but once I climbed into the van, there was no turning back from the lie. I spent days following dirt roads up through the snow line.

#13

I met with Omar, the Afghan intelligence officer, and explained that I wanted to meet with Raziq, the commander of the border patrol. They told me that Raziq was a scion of local Pashtun clans that were deeply enmeshed in smuggling, and that he was smuggling two metric tons of opium from Afghanistan to Iran each month.

#14

I had to spend ten days waiting in Spin Boldak until Raziq returned for his grandmother’s funeral. I had proof of Raziq’s connection with drug traffickers, but I wanted to do more reporting. I got an Afghan visa in Pakistan, flew to Kabul, and checked into the Mustafa.

#15

I listened to the gun battles raging in the suburbs, and tried to untangle the stories I heard that day, about tribes and blood feuds and business deals. But how to explain it to the people back home who were interested, belatedly, in this faraway country.

#16

In 2012, Omar began dating a Shia girl named Laila, who was 19 years old. He wanted to marry her, but her father refused, saying that she was still too young. He was Sunni and poor, so he wanted to marry a rich Shia girl.

#17

On November 14, 2012, I was living in Qala-e Fatullah with three Dutch friends. Obama had just been re-elected. We were in the third year of the American surge, which at its peak had 100,000 US troops in country.

#18

Omar lived ten minutes away from me, in a house that he and his family rented. He was too old for Laila, his landlord's daughter, who saw him come and go behind the wheel of his Corolla, a 1996 gold-colored, four-speed automatic.

#19

Omar was very fond of Kabul, and he knew its streets and shortcuts well. He loved to drive around the city with one hand on the steering wheel and the other holding a pine tree.

#20

Omar, the mystic, was in love with God. He believed that by debasing themselves in the eyes of the world, he could leave behind his false piety and know God.

#21

After I moved into my house in 2012, Omar invited me over to meet his mother, Maryam. His mother offered to cook the national dish, qabuli palao. In Afghanistan it was an unusual gesture of intimacy to invite an unrelated male into the domestic sphere.

#22

Maryam’s son, Omar, brought in the dishes: sliced cucumbers and onions with chilies, okra stewed with tomatoes, a stack of fresh naan, and the qabuli: a mound of rice laced with softened carrots and raisins.