Nowhere Boy

“‘What Muslims?’ Max asked. ‘The Syrians, the Iraqis, the Afghanis,’ Madame Pauline said, ticking off on her fingers. ‘Haven’t you seen the news? They’re flooding Europe. It’s worse than the Africans. They don’t want to fit in.’”

Madame Pauline articulates her view, which she holds throughout the novel, that Muslim immigrants and refugees are endangering the culture of Belgium and other European countries. She believes herself to be well-informed on the topic because she has seen it on “the news,” and her reference to African immigrants suggests a longstanding fear of those she perceives as outsiders.

“Even though Max knew they were talking about Muslims, he felt as if the warning also applied to him. He was from a different country. […] He hoped the interview was over, that Inspector Fontaine would leave. But Madame Pauline was just getting started. ‘Europe used to be safe before they arrived.’”

Although Madame Pauline’s worldview exempts white Americans like Max and his family from suspicion, Max instinctively identifies with the immigrants and refugees that she fears—an early instance of his growing understanding of The Importance of Empathy in Global Issues. Madame Pauline’s statement that Europe was safe “before” the current waves of immigration both ignores European history and foreshadows the terrorism panics later in the novel.

“But Ahmed remembered how carefully his grandfather had always checked the ailing orchids people brought to his nursery. ‘People give up on them too soon,’ he’d always say. ‘You just need a little help,’ Ahmed whispered to them in Arabic.”

Ahmed connects his status as a refugee to the abandoned orchids because he feels that the world has given up on him too quickly. Ahmed draws on his memories of his grandfather to take care of the orchids, signifying his desire to heal from his past trauma. Ahmed’s gentleness with the orchids reveals the way that he wishes the world would treat him.

“He didn’t want to go anywhere anymore. He felt safer being nowhere.”

Ahmed’s exhaustion over constantly moving toward a new destination and experiencing homelessness for months highlights the Challenges and Resilience of Refugees. Ahmed wants to be nowhere because he just wants to exist, rather than constantly fighting for survival and defending his humanity. His forged documents, moreover, make him officially a citizen of nowhere, a situation that the book’s title highlights.

“A stranger was living in his house, an illegal immigrant, almost certainly a Muslim. What if he was a terrorist? What if now that he’d been discovered, he decided to kill everyone in the house?”

Max’s initial thoughts when he finds Ahmed living in the cellar reflect the influence of Madame Pauline and Inspector Fontaine. Even though Max does not believe everything that Madame Pauline says, her beliefs have already started to affect him because he connects Ahmed’s religion with terrorism immediately.

“But then Max thought about the orchids. What kind of terrorist took care of the houseplants? There was something homey too about how he had arranged the camping mat and pictures. Ahmed—he had a name, Max reminded himself—was just a boy, a boy who liked soccer and comic book heroes. He had lost his parents, he was alone and he seemed far more frightened than dangerous.”

This passage contains the beginnings of Max and Ahmed’s Friendship Across Cultural Divides. Ahmed’s care for the orchids, the way he has arranged his living space, and his interest in soccer and comics all remind Max of how they are similar. Max goes out of his way to foreground Ahmed’s humanity and see the commonalities they possess.

“Over the past few years, Ahmed had learned the language of knocks—something-horrible-has-happened-to-someone-you-know knocks, get-out-before-I-throw-you-out knocks, it’s-time-to-go-now’s-your-only-chance knocks.”

This quote exemplifies the theme of the Challenges and Resilience of Refugees. Ahmed’s experiences have taught him to understand what different ways of knocking on the door mean, and he has learned that “language” is a matter of survival.

“Ahmed wondered if he knew anything—he probably thought Islam was just some violent religion that was all about attacking non-Muslims. He wished he could tell Max how his father used to take him along when he handed out rice and sugar to the poor, lecturing him on the importance of charity, how it was one of the pillars of their religion. But he didn’t think he could tell Max about his father—not yet.”

Ahmed struggles with the stereotype he faces as a Muslim that suggests that Muslims are terrorists or, at the very least, violent people. However, Ahmed’s experience with his religion has been about helping and caring for those in need. He does not yet feel comfortable enough with Max to tell him about Baba, so Ahmed does not take this opportunity to tell the other boy more about Islam.

“Ahmed opened his eyes and looked at Max. ‘My father said they feel no pain. But how could he know?’ And then he collapsed against Max and sobbed. Like Jasmine would have.”

The deaths of his family members in Syria haunt Ahmed. Although he knows that there is no way of knowing, he fears that his father’s insistence that they did not feel pain was just a way to comfort him. Ahmed connects his outburst of emotions with his younger sister Jasmine but keeps that connection to himself.

“But what kind of sense did Ahmed’s life make? Most people would probably live and die without knowing one one-hundredth of the sorrow and tragedy Ahmed had already experienced. Where was the balance in that? Max knew one answer—he’d heard his father say it a thousand times: life isn’t fair. But thinking about this just made him angry. It seemed less a fact than an excuse, a way to let others be losers and victims and to not try to change anything.”

Max struggles to reconcile the pain Ahmed has experienced with the seemingly insignificant suffering he has experienced. The fact that there does not seem to be an answer for why Ahmed has suffered makes Max angry and makes him realize that some people use the unfairness of the world as an excuse for not getting involved and making real change for people in need.

“Max, do you understand how dangerous this is for me? As a Muslim, I must do twice as well in school as non-Muslim Belgian to get the same opportunities; my behavior must be twice as good.”

Although Farah was born in Belgium, she knows that she appears as an outsider to many people because of her religion. While she is sympathetic to Ahmed’s plight and Max’s ideas, she reminds Max that she doesn’t have the same leeway to challenge laws that he, a white American, does.

“‘You said his family fled Germany. So they were refugees too, like the Syrian kid.’ ‘That’s not the same,’ Madame Pauline said flatly. ‘There have been Jews in Europe for centuries. They’re Europeans.’ ‘Hitler didn’t think of them that way.’ ‘These people are different, Max.’ It annoyed Max that she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—see the connection. Maybe if she met Ahmed? But he was worried she’d be more likely to turn him in.”

Max tries to explain to Madame Pauline that the refugees she hates are no different than the Jewish refugees who escaped Germany, fleeing oppression. He tries to use the example of Ralph Mayer and Albert Jonnart to make her sympathize with Ahmed’s situation. However, she refuses to acknowledge this connection, which frustrates Max. Max wonders if she would change her mind if she could meet Ahmed and therefore humanize the struggles of the refugees, but he is unwilling to risk Ahmed’s safety.

“School was gone. Max was gone. His family mattered to no one but himself. They were losers of history, names that would vanish and become anonymous numbers—one of ten thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, a million. He had become a ghost of himself, wandering the night, trying not to frighten anyone. He no longer had the strength to build a new life for himself, especially here in Europe, where he wasn’t even wanted.”

This quote reveals Ahmed’s fear that his family died for nothing and that no one will remember them, besides them being added to a tally of how many people died in Syria. This thought causes Ahmed to fall into a state of depression because, without his family, he does not see the point of going on.

“‘You should have made the bomb fall at night, hitting us all!’ he shouted in Arabic. His voice echoed across the empty park. But he couldn’t even stand there, shaking his fist at Allah. He couldn’t even be that brave. His cowardly instinct to survive wouldn’t let him. At the sound of his own voice—the angry, young Muslim everyone feared—he took off down the gravestone path.”

The image of Ahmed shouting in Arabic and shaking his fist at the sky emblematizes his predicament as a young Muslim man in a potentially hostile European city. He cannot even express his anger and grief in an authentic way, lest he be mistaken for a terrorist.

“‘There are plenty of us who disagree with the government,’ she was saying. ‘Who are ashamed of the way they treat refugees, who want to help them.’ Ahmed smiled softly to himself. Max had been right not to give up. There were always people who cared.”

Although Ahmed starts to think that the only person who will help him is Max, Reka reminds him that there are other good people in the world. Reka’s words remind Ahmed that a group of people should not be judged based on their government because the government often does not represent the people’s true wishes. Ahmed realizes that even when it seems like an entire government stands against his existence, there are always people who will stand up for what is right.

“‘Migrants are threatening this unity. Do you realize that more than a million of them came to Europe last year? Our union is young, Mex, fragile; if it breaks down, Europe could fall again into chaos.’ ‘But chaos and war is exactly what Ahmed was escaping! If you know how horrible this is from your own history, you shouldn’t turn your back on people like him. You should have compassion, like Albert Jonnart!’”

Inspector Fontaine outlines his fear that refugees threaten the unity that Europe built after WWII. However, Max does not understand how Inspector Fontaine fails to connect his own fear of chaos to compassion for people experiencing that chaos in their own country, such as Syria.

“Fontaine waved his finger. ‘I don’t think you understand. Ahmed broke the law by staying in Belgium, and you did too by registering him in school. The law is important, Mex. Society cannot function without it.’ ‘What if the law is wrong?’”

Inspector Fontaine’s black-and-white thinking does not allow for any nuance. He cannot hear Max’s reasoning because in his mind, the law is the most important thing to uphold. Max, on the other hand, cannot accept the idea that the law cannot be changed.

“What if the heart is wrong? What if you let all these people into your country, your home, and they turn out to be bad people who want to harm you and change your way of life? What if they are not worth your sacrifice?”

Inspector Fontaine’s rebuttal for Max’s idea that the law can be wrong directly contrasts with The Importance of Empathy in Global Issues. Inspector Fontaine does not see the point in helping people because he believes that some people in the world are not worth the effort.

“‘You can’t know what anyone’s worth unless you give them a chance.’ ‘Ah, to be young,’ Fontaine said.”

Although Max does not agree with Inspector Fontaine’s belief that some people are not worth saving, he still meets Fontaine’s line of reasoning by pointing out that you must give people a chance before you decide things about them. Inspector Fontaine dismisses Max’s words as something you believe when you are young, insinuating that he will change his mind when he gets older.

“He was a small boy and an ancient traveler. He was four and fourteen. He had scraped his knee. He had pricked his finger on a rose. He had heard a noise in the night. Nothing more. He was safe now.”

When Ahmed reunites with his father, he experiences flashbacks to the feeling of safety he had as a child. Ahmed’s experiences without his family have aged him to the point where he has lost some of his childhood innocence. However, he regains some of the feeling of being a child when he hugs his father because he knows that he is no longer completely alone in the world.

“The lines of the ancient Sufi poet echoed in Ahmed’s mind: Why did you teach me to love / Then leave me when my heart became attached to you? Now he knew the answer: So I could know how much I love you.”

Ahmed thinks of these lines when he reunites with his father. He realizes that now that he is with his father again, he feels more grateful than ever before, and he appreciates his father and their love more than he did before he thought he lost him.

“He had included what Madame Pauline had told him about Jonnart’s life, then added the details he’d found in his French Google searches of newspapers and archives […] How every year until Madame Jonnart’s death in 1985, [Ralph] sent her flowers on the anniversary of Albert’s death. How after Ralph’s death in 1998, at the age of seventy-four, the Jonnart family had received a card: ‘To all those who softened my existence with their feelings, I address an ultimate thank-you and goodbye.’”

Max researches the life of Ralph Mayer after the war and learns that Mayer never stopped being grateful for the sacrifice the Jonnart family made for him. Mayer’s statement that many people “softened [his] existence” through empathy touches Max because he knows that Mayer touched Jonnart’s life too.

“Then Max had written Ahmed’s story—the story of a boy who lived in a wine cellar, who saved orchids, who just wanted to go to school. ‘I tried to soften Ahmed’s existence, but it was really he who softened mine. I’ve said thank you. But neither of us are ready to say goodbye.’”

In his letter to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Max echoes the words of Ralph Mayer, stating that Ahmed touched his life even more than he helped Ahmed. Max’s introspection highlights the significance of helping those in need because Max learned that by helping others, he can also help himself.