June 13, 2016
In this novel based on real events, 21-year-old Olympic runner Samia Yusuf Omar set off to reach freedom in Italy via the Mediterranean Sea in 2012. It is the final leg of a nearly year-and-a-half-long journey from her home in the war-torn city of Mogadishu, the last five months of which she spent at the mercy of human traffickers. In Catozzella’s novel, Samia hopes she could make it to her older sister’s home in Helsinki with enough time to train and qualify for the 2012 London Olympics and “lead Somali women to liberation from the bondage in which men have placed them.” The novel begins in 1999, when Samia is eight years old, and the simply drawn yet moving text explores each milestone in the aspiring runner’s life, from her childhood friendship with Ali, whose family is from a rival clan, to her father’s murder by a member of the militant Islamist group al-Shabaab, to Samia’s thrilling voyage to China to compete in the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The most intense and hard-to-stomach sections cover her grueling experiences as a tahrib, or exiled refuge, stranded first in Addis Ababa, then in villages and cities throughout Sudan and Libya, including the Sahara desert, before landing in Tripoli. Translated from Catozzella’s Italian, the book serves as a sobering reminder of the life-threatening challenges many modern migrants face in the pursuit of freedom.
