My Fourth Time, We Drowned
Seeking Refuge on the World's Deadliest Migration Route
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Winner of The Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2022
Winner of The Michel Déon Prize 2022
Winner of the An Post Irish Book of the Year Award 2022
Winner of the An Post Irish Book Award for Nonfiction 2022
A Financial Times Best Political Book of 2022
A Kirkus Best Nonfiction Book of 2022
A New Yorker Best Book of 2022
A Guardian Best History and Politics Book of 2022
The Western world has turned its back on migrants, leaving them to cope with one of the most devastating humanitarian crises in history.
Reporter Sally Hayden was at home in London when she received a message on Facebook: “Hi sister Sally, we need your help.” The sender identified himself as an Eritrean refugee who had been held in a Libyan detention center for months, locked in one big hall with hundreds of others. Now, the city around them was crumbling in a scrimmage between warring factions, and they remained stuck, defenseless, with only one remaining hope: contacting her. Hayden had inadvertently stumbled onto a human rights disaster of epic proportions.
From this single message begins a staggering account of the migrant crisis across North Africa, in a groundbreaking work of investigative journalism. With unprecedented access to people currently inside Libyan detention centers, Hayden’s book is based on interviews with hundreds of refugees and migrants who tried to reach Europe and found themselves stuck in Libya once the EU started funding interceptions in 2017.
It is an intimate portrait of life for these detainees, as well as a condemnation of NGOs and the United Nations, whose abdication of international standards will echo throughout history. But most importantly, My Fourth Time, We Drowned shines a light on the resilience of humans: how refugees and migrants locked up for years fall in love, support each other through the hardest times, and carry out small acts of resistance in order to survive in a system that wants them to be silent and disappear.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Hayden debuts with a harrowing look at the refugee crisis in Africa. Contacted in 2018 by an Eritrean migrant confined to the Ain Zara camp in Tripoli, Libya, Hayden soon realized that she "had stumbled, inadvertently, on a human rights disaster of epic proportions." In 2017, she explains, the EU began funding the Libyan coast guard's efforts to intercept migrant vessels in the Mediterranean and detain the passengers. Those "locked up without charge or trial, indefinitely," include Kaleb, an Eritrean teenager who traveled from Ethiopia to Sudan, then across 1,400 kilometers of the Sahara Desert to Libya, where he was held captive by smugglers for more than a year before making two failed attempts to cross the Mediterranean. Elsewhere, Haydendocuments torture and sexual abuse, women giving birth without medical care, and suicide by immolation. She also widens the lens to explore the repercussions of the civil war in Sierra Leone in the 1990s and talks with refugees sent to camps in Rwanda, which still bears the scars of the 1994 genocide against ethnic Tutsis. A running thread is the inefficiency, and in some cases outright corruption, of international relief organizations including the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, whose staff members are alleged to have taken bribes in exchange for fast-tracking the resettlement process for asylum seekers. Intrepidly reported and vividly written, this sobering account shines a spotlight on an underreported tragedy.
