Leaving Home, the Search for a Better Life

Every year thousands of migrants and refugees flee their home countries, risking their lives to find safe haven. Many do not make it. The myriad difficulties migrants face is reflective of the deep inequalities and violence that persist across borders. In this extended Q&A from The Fifth Draft — the National Fellows Program newsletter — New America National Fellow Matthieu Aikins previews his new book, The Naked Don’t Fear the Water, detailing Afghan driver and translator Omar’s harrowing journey from war-torn Kabul to Europe. Sign up for The Fifth Draft to hear how the world's best storytellers find ideas that change the world.

Your Fellows project and forthcoming book chronicles your experiences following your friend Omar, an Afghan refugee, as he leaves his home country in search of a better life. How did you first meet Omar? Why did you find it best for you to report his story undercover, and how did you pull it off?

Omar was one of the first friends I made in Afghanistan, not long after I arrived there in late 2008. We worked on my first magazine story there, a piece about a drug-smuggling U.S. ally that ran in Harper’s Magazine. Over the years, I became close to him and his family, and when they decided to escape their country, it was our relationship that drew me along.

Going undercover was the only way to travel on the smuggler’s road with him, given the danger of arrest or kidnapping. I was able to pull it off because I learned Dari while living in Afghanistan, and because I was able to pass for Afghan — my mother is of Japanese descent.

Omar’s story is only one out of millions of refugees, what impact do you hope your book will have on changing policies and sentiments about refugees?

I hope the book will help readers realize how much violence our deeply unequal world’s borders inflict on the people forced to cross them — and that radical change is necessary if we want to end that violence.

As the Taliban reclaimed Afghanistan in 2021, you remained in Kabul reporting on the situation and you utilized Twitter to share live updates. (That reporting was recently published in the New York Times Magazine.) How did you come to the decision to stay in the country with your photographer, Jim Huylebroek? And can you share how you think social media benefits, or hinders, journalists in times of crisis?

Jim and I were housemates and when the New York Times, along with most Western media organizations, decided to evacuate their staff in August, we had to decide whether to stay, since we were freelancers. It was a choice that we very much made together. We were at each other’s side throughout the chaos that followed, reporting for the newspaper since we were the only ones the New York Times had on the ground, along with photojournalist Victor Blue, another friend. This magazine story is the culmination of our time together.

There was a remarkable amount of rumors and disinformation on social media during the crisis in Afghanistan this summer, so I was trying to share first-hand reporting that people could trust. Twitter and social media can offer an incredible amount of useful information, but it needs to be verified, and I think that because most journalists reporting on Afghanistan were stuck outside the country when it was hot news, they were more vulnerable to reporting on false information.

After many years of reporting and writing long form articles, this is your first book. What advice do you have for others who are setting out on their first book project?

Pick a project that you truly want to do for its own sake. There will be long, lonely stretches where only love for the writing itself will sustain you.

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