Asylum

In July 1999 Yaguine Koita and Fodé Tounkara climbed into the wheel cavity of a jet flying from Conakry to Brussels. At just fourteen years old, they were so desperate to escape their lives in Guinea that they risked the freezing temperatures and oxygen deprivation that would kill them. Aeroplane stowaways are rare. Even if it were possible to bypass increasingly tight aviation security, the chances of surviving the flight are miniscule. But it wasn’t only their audacious act that brought the two boys to the attention of the world’s media. Koita and Tounkara carried with them a two-page letter addressed to ‘Excellence Messrs the members and leaders of Europe’. The letter asks for Europe’s help in securing the futures of the ‘children and young people of Africa’, describing the poverty and conflict that prevents children like them from getting an education. It appeals directly to Europeans’ ‘sense of solidarity and kindness to come to the rescue of Africa’ (Duval Smith 1999: 1). The boy’s words give voice to a generation of young people who, though not born under the sign of colonial sovereignty, continue to experience its legacy of uneven development and entrenched systems of global inequality. Arriving in the administrative heart of the European Union, the letter not only reflects the ongoing allure of ‘modern life in the European sense of the world’ (Gikandi 2001: 630), but is also a reminder that the right documentation can mean the difference between life and death for those crossing borders. With no visa or passport, the boys instead insist on providing the kind of information that official documentation cannot supply. It confronts its European readers with a detailed account of growing up without hope in Guinea, filling in the gaps of a story most often told in reductive or sensationalised media terms. This chapter reads the refugee experience through such alternative documentation in a century that has seen a sharp escalation of anti-immigration policy and rhetoric in Europe, Australia and North America. Contending with this hostile political climate, fictional representations of contemporary asylum and displacement eschew simplified legal and media forms, giving narrative shape to the complex dynamics evoked by Koita’s and Tounkara’s letter to Europe.