An individual’s life can change by the moment. Danielle Vella’s Dying to Live: Stories from Refugees on the Road to Freedom deconstructs what this means for people fleeing from their homelands. The stories, guided by the author’s commentary, awaken the audience to this distinct migrant population. The brave people sharing their stories strive to make sense of their uprooted lives, and the reader confronts the tough decisions they were compelled to make.
Vella chronicles the experiences voiced in this book in three sections: Flight, journey, and destination. Each section is composed of succinct chapters that detail the experiences of refugees from perhaps the most contentious regions of the world. Each chapter title references a theme connecting individualized memoirs and circumstances. The overall structure creates a reader-friendly flow as Vella intertwines various experiences throughout this work.
The book begins with what it is like to not just leave, but flee from one’s homeland. For people in flight, the quest for survival is described as vastly different from more typical understandings of just any “desire to live” (5). This seems comprehensible when it comes to seeking refuge from regions trodden with civilian deaths, decades of conflict, and human rights abuses often attributed to government corruption. In such parts of the world, “abiding by your principles can cost you dearly” (13). This is illustrated through the book’s details of the torching of schools allowing religious diversity, and the brutal killings of civil rights influencers. Sheer suspicions of more typical civilians by members of both rebel and government loyalist groups can be just as deadly. Memories involving mass displacement, forced childhood conscription, human trafficking, captivity, and sexual enslavement are difficult to read, but prove imperative to ingest. The reader may grasp the frustrations felt when Vella’s narrators express difficulty in finding the right words to illustrate their stories of flight; to have no way out- other than escape. At the same time, desires to stay loyal to national identities albeit severe upheavals, paralleled with ongoing nostalgia for both physical and less tangible experiences defining one’s sense of home, will resonate.
The next section’s narratives surround tribulations spewing harsh realities when enroute to destinations. This includes starving and watching people die when walking on foot across countries, being smuggled by people who torture while holding people ransom for money, and other details pertaining to the rancid world of human trafficking. Details behind refugee routes through countries such as Libya are poignant and may shock many. They parallel important politics the book notes of NGOs countering European Union attempts to send refugees back to such countries. According to Vella, “The European Union (EU) has no problem blocking refugees coming from Libya despite the meticulously documented exploitation and torture they suffer there, and the terror invoked by the mere mention of the country’s name” (62).
The reader will be made to further ponder on the known, unexpected, and often incomprehensible risks taken when human beings in flight are at their most vulnerable. While bringing attention to the stigmatization associated with such plights, the audience is reminded that “everyone has a story” (158). Refugees often end up making unbearable decisions because, as one narrator simply puts it, “we are afraid” (157). Referring to a particular refugee contributing to this book, Vella points to his emotions regarding people who cannot begin to relate:
Many stupid people want to put themselves in the shoes of a mother who put her children in a boat. They say, ‘How could a mother do that?’. But did you see what the mother saw and lived through? Do you know? (61).
These stories of refugees risking it all to survive cut across a prism of emotions. This also includes moments of being thankful for the occasional good Samaritan showing up amidst situations of desperation, or perhaps a strike of unexpected luck resulting in a lifesaving moment.
The last section of the book then contextualizes what it is like to arrive at and seek opportunities in safe-haven destinations such as Spain, France, Italy, and the USA. Thoughts of extreme gratitude are there, albeit clouded due to the repercussions of the trauma and dismay associated with having to accept one’s refugee situation. A narrator notes, while lamenting feelings of many who are in limbo trying to settle into their new worlds, “I am forced to follow this rhythm now. It was not my choice” (80). Yet, a former enslaved person tells of the unexpected peace he found through an opportunity to return to his country of origin as a UNHCR employee now “promoting education in his homeland as an antidote to war” (135). Another man, dealing with his ongoing struggle with coming to terms with his past, is inspired by his ambition to repay everyone he has hurt as a child conscript. A woman who suffered through the hands of sex traffickers throughout her journey finds peace in her new life in France, reunited with a child she bore from one of her rapists.
All these narratives underscore the challenges Vella expresses with writing this powerful, thought-provoking book. Inspired by the Book of Matthew 7:12 and other heartfelt Biblical references, the last chapter ends with an appeal to one narrator’s particular belief that “if people out there know about such stories, they will act to ensure they never happen again” (179). Vella ends with a stirring appeal to readers to not let him, and others like him, down.
Noreen Ohlrich is an independent scholar.
Noreen Ohlrich
Date Of Review:
August 24, 2023