Meet-the-Author Recording with A.M. Dassu
Boy, Everywhere |
A.M. Dassu introduces and shares some of the backstory for creating Boy, Everywhere.
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A.M. Dassu: Hi, I'm Ann, also known as A.M. Dassu and I am the author of the middle-grade novel Boy, Everywhere, and I am so happy to be here with you today to talk about it. Boy, Everywhere is a story of privilege, and it looks at the refugee crisis from a completely new perspective and through thirteen-year-old Sami's eyes, it shows that we are all one cruel twist of fate away from becoming refugees ourselves. It can happen to anyone.
Sami is an ordinary boy who lives a happy, normal life in Damascus in Syria. He loves gaming. He makes plans with friends, has the potential to play for the school football team. He has an iPad, a PlayStation, weekends at the mall to look forward to, and in an instant he loses it all. And you will follow him across countries and continents before he gets to the UK, which isn't quite what he imagined it to be.
Sami is like any boy you might meet, and through him we see how similar life in Syria is, and was, to ours. He shows us the deep longing for home and the skills and attitude to start again, whatever the upheaval. For years, we've only seen gray rubble on the news or refugees in rubber dinghies, and it's so easy to forget that Syria is one of the oldest civilizations. Like us, they had beautiful hotels, KFC's, Adidas shops, Costa Coffee shops before the war began, and this is what I wanted everyone to know, too. I wanted readers to know that Syrians had lives just like ours, and the media's focus on refugees wasn't the full story.
So why did I write it? Boy, Everywhere was born from my desire to challenge stereotypes. That's the labels that people give others. I wanted to write a book that was different to those already published about the refugee crisis. In 2015, the war in Syria had been raging for almost five years and the description in the news was really unkind and hateful of refugees. The world struggled to help Syrians and I sat in my comfortable living room watching countless news broadcasts about the arrival of refugees to Europe.
It was one particular interview that inspired me. It showed refugees in a muddy camp wearing Nike trainers, holding smartphones, and they were talking about what they'd left behind, and I realized that it could easily be me. I looked around my living room and I realized that if a bomb were to drop on my street, I would be that person with an iPhone and Nike trainers but with no home to go back to. I would be that refugee on my screen.
I wanted to challenge the narrative that refugees are needy and desperate and instead show the reality of their lives and the choices that they're forced to make. I wanted readers to experience how it feels to have it all and then lose it. And through Boy, Everywhere, I wanted to focus not only on the journey a refugee takes to get to safety, but also what and who they leave behind, and how difficult it is to start again.
Now, I'm going to read a short scene from Boy, Everywhere which is a little later on in the story where Sami has now left Syria. He's been forced to leave home. He's in Turkey where a smuggler has tricked his family and taken them to an apartment:
We trudged through the muddy front yard and through a wooden side gate into the back. I could just make out some iron railings. Behind them was a stone staircase, which the driver led us down. Baba reached out for my hand and I took it, surprised to find Baba's was trembling. I held my hand out to Mama as she carried Sara, and we all moved down carefully, making sure we didn't miss a step and tumble.
We walked through a creaky door and into a room full of people.
The driver went to speak to a tall, thin man in a language I guessed was Turkish and then nodded to Baba as he walked back out. He locked the door behind him and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Why had he locked the door? What if there was a fire -- how do we get out?
I looked around. Were we going to stay in this one room with all of these people? There were no windows, just the locked door behind us, and the only light from candles dotted about on the floor.
This Meet-the-Author Recording with A.M. Dassu was exclusively created in April 2021 by TeachingBooks with thanks to Lee & Low.