What Strange Paradise

Vänna Hermes is a 15-year-old Greek girl who takes on the responsibility of helping Amir escape the grasp of Colonel Kethros. Vänna’s character is partially an analog to Peter Pan’s Wendy, a young girl who often takes on a maternal role for the title character in adaptations of the tale. Vänna’s protectiveness of Amir is in direct contrast to her mother’s xenophobic attitude toward migrants. Though Vänna looks exactly like her mother, she has never understood her, and the two do not get along. Vänna has a strained relationship with her father as well. He claims that Marianne wishes that Vänna’s deceased older brothers, who were stillborn, had survived instead. Her father attempts to get Vänna to side with him in his empty marriage, but Vänna is too intelligent and independent to indulge this behavior. She is a resourceful girl, and her intimate knowledge of the island allows her and Amir to stay one step ahead of Colonel Kethros. Vänna is shown to be very loyal, even risking her life for Amir, jumping off a bridge to escape the soldiers and rescue him.

Vänna helping Amir is an act of rebellion against both her mother and the xenophobia her fellow islanders show toward the vulnerable migrants who arrive on their shores. As a result of this xenophobia, Vänna feels alienated from her island and her country. When she is confronted by the ferryman at the end of What Strange Paradise, she tells him, “I’m not local […] I’m not anything” (232). Because of this, Vänna decides to sever ties with her old life at the end of the novel, choosing Amir and the unknown fate that awaits them on the other side of the ferry crossing. If the ending of the novel is interpreted as indicating Amir died in the shipwreck, then Vänna, like her namesake, the Greek god Hermes, serves as a psychopomp, a protective spirit who guides Amir’s spirit through the afterlife.

Colonel Kethros is the main antagonist of What Strange Paradise. The colonel is the leader of a military detachment on the island of Kos whose duty is to investigate and capture undocumented migrants who turn up on the island. Kethros is “well-built and solid” and appears “to have been built to excel at work that demands uniform and insignia” (77). Kethros is a long-time friend of Marianne Hermes, whom he met in college. The two of them share a nativist and isolationist political view. Kethros, who was born and raised on the island, is nauseated by the way his culture has been watered down by its chief industry, tourism. He sees his people as becoming indistinguishable from the rest of the globalized world, and he resents them for it. However, he projects his frustration with globalization onto the influx of refugees and migrants, viewing it as a type of colonization rather than a humanitarian crisis.

Kethros is suspicious of the group of soldiers directly under his command. They are all young and inexperienced, but he particularly distrusts Nicholas, who questions their mission as enforcers of immigration law. Kethros is obsessed with catching Amir, the sole survivor of the Calypso wreck. Kethros is the Captain Hook in El Akkad’s adaptation of Peter Pan. Just as Hook is obsessed with capturing Peter Pan, the colonel’s desire to catch Amir is all-encompassing: He ignores everything else, including calls from the national capital, implying that he ignores and even acts in defiance of his superior officers. Like Captain Hook, Kethros is also missing a limb. He wears a prosthetic leg due to his leg being amputated at the knee by an IED during his military service in an unnamed conflict. Kethros’s injury has caused him to become intensely bitter, exacerbating his xenophobia and misanthropy.

Younis Utu is Amir’s uncle on his father’s side. Compared to his brothers, Younis is a shrewd, even cowardly man, whom Amir views as “a man so meek, who [shrinks] back into himself so readily he seem[s] to wear his own skin like a too-big suit” (9). Younis marries Iman, Amir’s mother, after Amir’s father and Loud Uncle are taken away by the secret police during the Syrian Civil War when Amir is young. Iman and Quiet Uncle have a new child, Harun. Younis gives Amir the small, bell-shaped locket containing portraits of Iman and Harun that identifies Amir’s body when it washes ashore.

Younis is a complicated man, given to bouts of anger and depression in their new life. Amir views this as weakness, not understanding that Quiet Uncle is similarly struggling with the loss of his family and his home, as well as the difficulties of adapting to a new society, where he is a refugee and is treated like a second-class citizen. However, it is Quiet Uncle who decides that the family should move to Alexandria, Egypt, rather than the more diverse (and thus perhaps more welcoming) city of Cairo: He wishes to be close to the ocean.

Younis secretly books himself a ticket on the Calypso, a smuggling vessel that takes migrants from Egypt to mainland Europe. When he discovers that Amir has followed him and boarded the vessel as well, he shows a side of himself Amir has never seen: a flash of anger and nearly murderous rage. Despite his shortcomings, Quiet Uncle does show affection for Amir, doing what he can to make the voyage safer for the boy. He gives Amir his place on the top deck in exchange for a worse spot in the cargo hold. They communicate several times through the floorboards during the journey. When it is evident that the ship is not going to make it, Younis finally apologizes to Amir, expressing genuine remorse that he abandoned his family. He promises Amir that he was always going to return, though it is unclear whether this is true. Quiet Uncle dies with the rest of the migrant passengers when the Calypso capsizes in the storm.

Mohamed is an Egyptian human trafficker working to help smuggle migrants from Alexandria to Greece and the European mainland. He embeds himself amongst the migrants on the Calypso, but his cover is quickly blown by Walid, who saw him interacting with the other smugglers. Because he is low in the hierarchy, he is presumably expendable to his coconspirators and is thus given the dangerous job of overseeing the voyage of the rickety ship. Most of his authority is derived from the fact that he is the only passenger armed with a gun, though as conditions worsen during the storm, this authority wanes in the face of the passengers’ panic.

Mohamed is a cynical, bitter man. He takes every opportunity to dispel the migrants’ preconceived notions about the West and hopes for their new lives there. He warns them of the racial and religious discrimination they will face. Other passengers note his hypocrisy on this point, as Mohamed does not object to the African refugees being kept below deck; he claims that they paid less than the migrants aboveboard. Despite his hard exterior, Mohamed does show occasional compassion for Amir. He also demands a prayer be said for the old man who dies during the voyage before his body is thrown overboard. Mohamed dies with the other passengers during the shipwreck of the Calypso.

Marianne Hermes is Vänna’s mother. With her blond hair and sharp blue eyes, she looks just like an older version of Vänna. She is a complicated woman, described as “bitter, disappointed in something elusive, something missing from the bedrock of her life” (40). Marianne lost twin boys in utero before Vänna was born; her husband has an alcohol addiction and claims that Marianne wishes the boys had lived instead of Vänna. In many ways, Marianne is inscrutable to her daughter. Vänna is often “struck by the great distance between her and this woman with whom she shares blood” (41). Marianne’s parents emigrated to the island to start a resort; however, their plans were subverted by the worldwide economic recession of the late 2000s.

Marianne has a negative relationship with her daughter and her husband but not with Colonel Kethros, her friend from college. Marianne shares her friend’s xenophobic attitude toward migrants and foreigners. She takes vigilante action against a migrant couple, holding them at gunpoint until Kethros can arrest them, and gives Vänna a pair of rubber gloves to wear while handling their backpack, as though they were unclean. She is even mistrustful of Madame Nimra El Ward—like her, the daughter of immigrants. She tells Vänna, “[Y]ou [can] see it plainly on her face, the real origins of her, in her eyes and her hair, but also in the way she [is], in the marrow of her” (99). This demonstrates Marianne’s racist proclivity to profile people based on their ethnic background.

Nicholas is one of Colonel Kethros’s soldiers. He is the only one of the young soldiers to question their mission, indicating his growing crisis of conscience. This also causes Kethros to become suspicious of him. The colonel keeps a close eye on Nicholas throughout the novel, and his suspicions are confirmed when Nicholas allows Vänna and Amir to escape. However, cornered by the conflicting demands of his conscience and his duty to his job, Nicholas confesses to Kethros that he allowed their quarry to escape. Like Vänna, Nicholas is representative of the humanitarian impulses of the island’s younger generations. Kethros views this compassion as weakness; he believes men such as Nicholas do not know how to demand what they want from life. He views Nicholas as “much too soft, too bookish, clearly unsuited for military life” (154). Kethros strips Nicholas of his rank, and his ultimate fate is unknown.

Walid is a minor antagonist while Amir is aboard the Calypso. Walid is “a tired-looking man, dark circles under his eyes and a kind of shapelessness growing out from the sagging flesh of his jawline” (70). Walid is selfish and covetous. He resents Amir from early in the voyage, when Amir is issued a life jacket fitted for an adult man. Walid’s animosity toward Amir draws the ire of other passengers—particularly Umm Ibrahim, who is maternally protective of Amir, and Mohamed, who quickly tires of Walid’s complaints. Walid manages to disgust the human trafficker when he claims the socks of the old man who dies aboard the ship. When the ship begins to sink, Walid attacks Amir and steals the life jacket from the boy. This, ironically, is likely his undoing: The cheap foam life jacket quickly saturates with water. Walid does not survive the shipwreck, which indicates that the sodden life jacket may have contributed to his death.

Kamal is a refugee on the Calypso, described as “a slim, bald Egyptian who looked to be in his late twenties” (71). Along with Umm Ibrahim, Walid, Maher, and Mohamed, Kamal is part of the group of migrants that surrounds Amir aboard the Calypso. Kamal was an economics student who was jailed as a political prisoner due to his role as a dissident during the Egypt Uprising of 2011. Kamal dies with the other refugees when the Calypso sinks.

Maher is a Palestinian former English literature student. He is thin and clean-shaven and has bandages covering his fingertips, which he burned with acid to remove his fingerprints. Maher is studious, preferring to spend much of his time aboard the Calypso reading his favorite book. Maher claims he left Palestine not because of the threat posed by Israeli settlers but because he wishes to read books and be left alone. Walid and Mohamed deride him for not being realistic about his situation due to his interests and philosophical attitude. Maher is the most fluent English speaker among the refugees, which demonstrates the value of English as a type of international “currency.” He attempts to correct Umm Ibrahim’s pronunciation of her English mantra about her pregnancy. When the ship begins to falter in the storm, he attempts to contact the coast guard, his English lending him better credibility. Nevertheless, Maher dies when the Calypso sinks in the storm.

Umm (“mother” in Arabic) Ibrahim is a pregnant woman who boards the Calypso in hopes of providing a better life for her unborn child. She notably repeats an entreaty that becomes a sort of mantra for her: “Hello. I am pregnant. I will have baby on April twenty-eight. I need hospital and doctor to have safe baby. Please help” (53). Amir later picks up this mantra, mistakenly believing it to be the correct thing to say when he and Vänna are caught by the maid at the Hotel Xenios. Umm Ibrahim is protective of Amir, sympathizing with his plight as a child all alone in a hostile environment and defending him against hostile characters, especially Walid. Despite being pregnant and needing the nutrients herself, she shares the meager food she has with Amir.