59 pages • 1 hour read
Omar El AkkadWhat Strange Paradise
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Differing Attitudes Toward the Stranger
Content Warning: This Themes section contains references to distressing scenes (including the death of children), xenophobia, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
As a book about refugees, What Strange Paradise explores the reception those fleeing their homelands find in other countries. Its scrutiny reveals that reception is often deeply lacking—not merely hostile but hypocritical. Aboard the Calypso, Mohamed warns the migrants of this xenophobia, telling them that they will be discriminated against based on their skin color and Muslim faith. The migrants largely dismiss these warnings, but subsequent events prove Mohamed correct. Nevertheless, El Akkad holds out the possibility that those seeking refuge may find it among those marginalized within their own societies.
El Akkad’s choice of setting—a Greek island—emphasizes the hypocrisy of nativist attitudes toward refugees and other migrants. The Hotel Xenios is the central, orienting point in the geography of Vänna’s island in What Strange Paradise. The Calypso capsizes just offshore, and Amir and the other victims of the shipwreck wash up on the beach of the hotel’s resort grounds. El Akkad’s choice to name the hotel Xenios is ironic: The word xenios is the ancient Greek word for “stranger,” as well as the root of the word “xenophobia,” the fear and mistrust of strangers and foreigners. However, xenios had different connotations for the islanders’ ancestors than it does for Kethros and his contemporaries. Zeus, the head god of the Greek pantheon, was sometimes called “Zeus Xenios” in celebration of his role as a protector and avenger of strangers. The ancient Greeks idealized hospitality, or “xenia;” to fail to be hospitable to guests and strangers was socially taboo and considered offensive. The hotel’s name therefore satirizes the exclusionary function of resorts. On the one hand, the hotel welcomes strangers in the form of foreign tourists who visit the island—but only if they can afford to be there. It excludes migrant strangers like Amir, who exist on the edge of society and are no longer accepted under the old rules of xenia due to their lack of financial security.
Colonel Kethros and Marianne Hermes best demonstrate the spectrum of xenophobic responses toward refugees, which manifests in suspicion and violence. As a military official, Kethros holds official power: His actions are sanctioned by the state. In contrast, Marianne’s attitude represents that of the ordinary citizens who perceive migrants as a threat. El Akkad suggests that this prejudice works in tandem with state-sponsored racism: Marianne’s reaction to the teenage refugee couple appearing near her property is to hold them at gunpoint, even firing over their heads, until Kethros and his men arrive.
It is telling that the islanders who best demonstrate xenia are those who have experienced discrimination themselves or otherwise hold diminished sociopolitical power. Madame El Ward, for example, is the daughter of immigrants. She knows discrimination firsthand and thus exerts great effort to help out the vulnerable refugees who come to Kos. The maid at the Hotel Xenios appears to be an island native, but she is working-class and one of the few characters who show compassion toward Amir. Finally, the greatest exhibit of xenia in the novel comes from Vänna, a young girl, who not only shows hospitality to Amir but also risks her life to deliver her friend from danger. Though El Akkad’s overall picture of refugees’ prospects is bleak, these counterexamples suggest that the old understanding of xenia has not died out completely.
How the Rise of the Precariat Class Generates Conflict
Though it generally represents the marginalized elements of society as immigrants’ best hope, What Strange Paradise sounds a note of caution in its depiction of the precariat class. This term, a combination of the terms “precarious” and “proletariat” describes those who live amid constant precarity: uncertainty in which one’s free will or autonomy is jeopardized due to conditions outside one’s control. Changes in geopolitics and the rise in neoliberal capitalism during the late 20th and early 21st centuries led the precariat class to expand as the middle class and skilled-labor-based working class shrank. Because the precariat class encompasses previously distinct socioeconomic and demographic groups, the groups that find themselves in positions of precarity are often at odds with one another rather than with the classes that have more influence over large-scale economic conditions, such as corporate employers and governments. This is the case in What Strange Paradise, where the central conflict is driven by the socioeconomic clash between the Kos locals, whose way of life is jeopardized by the decline in tourism, and the impoverished refugees who are forced to leave their home countries and rely on the resources of their destination countries.
Ultimately, both the island residents and the refugees occupy a precarious socioeconomic status in a changing world. However, What Strange Paradise also shows that there are different levels of precarity and that the class and interpersonal dynamics that precarity creates are not simple. The Kos locals feel the refugees are taking up already limited resources and driving away tourists. For small business owners who depend on a steady stream of customers, this decrease in tourism jeopardizes their ability to support themselves and their families. Moreover, employers may take advantage of a job seeker’s immigrant status or lack of access to the local language to pay them lower wages, further antagonizing long-time residents who depend on higher wages to survive. Nevertheless, El Akkad highlights that this is only half the story. For example, far from enjoying any edge in the job market, migrants who had education and careers in their home countries may be barred from using those credentials in their destination countries. Even more to the point, the refugees the novel depicts must risk their lives—the ultimate and most dangerous form of precarity—to find safety and basic resources, such as food, water, and shelter.
What Strange Paradise does not offer an easy answer to this impasse. When an individual in a socioeconomically stable position, like Vänna, goes out of their way to help someone in a precarious situation, like Amir, it simply places both individuals in danger. Nevertheless, in risking her stability to help Amir, Vänna offers the only real path forward.
The Limits and Possibilities of Escapism
One of the epigraphs of What Strange Paradise comes from Peter Pan: “I taught you to fight and to fly. What more could there be?” The epigraph signals not only the novel’s debt to the play but also its principal interest in it: Like Peter Pan, What Strange Paradise is concerned with flight, particularly in its metaphorical sense. Escape—from one’s homeland, from antagonistic forces, and from the world’s hard realities—is central to the novel, even as El Akkad suggests that such flight is not always possible or prudent.
Many elements of Vänna’s island are evocative of this theme of escapism. For one, the island’s main industry is tourism: Visitors “come here for what is tranquil, what is undisturbed […] They come to see time autopsied, to marvel at the safety of the present at the endlessly dying past” (235). These qualities give Kos an artificially unchanging feeling. However, Amir’s presence marks a fundamental change for the island’s inhabitants. Noticed and feared by characters like Colonel Kethros and Marianne Hermes, migrants and refugees disrupt the “Neverland” timelessness associated with both the island’s ancient history and the tourist industry. El Akkad critiques this form of escapism, as the refuge the tourists seek not only erases the suffering of people like Amir but also threatens the very thing it ostensibly celebrates: Tourism functions as a kind of imperialism that exploits, commercializes, and ultimately undermines Greek cultural identity.
Like the island’s wealthy tourists, the refugees are also seeking escape. Though their reasons for fleeing their homelands are much more compelling than the tourists’ motivations, El Akkad suggests that they are unlikely to succeed. The novel’s twist ending underscores the futility of their flight with its play on Peter Pan. Peter Pan’s refusal to age is ultimately his own choice; he could return to London with Wendy and grow up like a normal boy, but he chooses to remain in Neverland. Amir, however, does not have a choice. The closing passage of What Strange Paradise indicates that Amir did not survive the sinking of the Calypso. The “Neverland” of What Strange Paradise ultimately proves to be the Western world that Mohammed, the human trafficker, denounces as fantasy. Amir is separated from this world by his status as a refugee and undocumented migrant. Unlike Peter Pan, he has no choice in his fate: He is the boy who cannot grow up.
However, if Kos and its inhabitants “belong to a different world, a different ordering of the world. A fantasy” (236), it is a world that the novel spends considerable time imagining Amir interacting with. The novel is in this sense itself an exercise in escapism, allowing Amir a kinder fate than children in his situation typically receive. This form of escapism does serve a purpose, El Akkad suggests; by granting Amir a happy ending, the novel invites readers to make such an ending possible in real life.
