Asylum. It is, according to the Oxford Dictionary, either “the protection granted by a state to someone who has left their native country as a political refugee” or “an institution for the care of the mentally ill”. Both definitions play their part in the remarkable and original Tale of Ahmed, written in verse and illustrated by Henry Cockburn. Tale of Ahmed is a fictional account of how a 14-year-old Afghan boy sets out from Kabul, after his father has been killed by a warlord, aiming to seek asylum in Britain. By land and sea, through Iran, Turkey, Greece, Italy and France, Ahmed and an ever-changing crew of fellow refugees experience all the dangers and disappointments of the road, but also the highs of optimism and comradeship.
Cockburn has had his own very personal experience of being on the run, of being uncertain what might next befall him and where his journey would take him. His previous book – co-written with his father, the journalist Patrick Cockburn – was Henry’s Demons: Living With Schizophrenia. It catalogued what happened in the years after February 2002, when, as a 20-year-old “urged on by brambles, trees and wild animals”, Cockburn plunged fully clothed into a freezing estuary outside Brighton.
The book, published in 2011 and shortlisted for a Costa award, recounted the experiences of both father and son over the next few years, as Cockburn was sectioned and confined in a series of mental hospitals – the “asylums” of old – from which he would constantly flee. “I was about 20% successful in my attempts to run away and about 80% of the time they would catch me,” he writes in the introduction to Tale of Ahmed. “Harrowing though it was being locked up, my main reason for escaping was that the trees were calling me and I had to do it.”
Now 42, Cockburn lives in Canterbury in Kent and shares a small studio near the station with another artist. He went to King’s School Canterbury, then Wimbledon College of Art, and had just started studying fine art at Brighton University when he took that dangerous plunge into the sea. I had met him once before very briefly, at the previous book’s launch, and his father is a friend.
Kent, of course, is one of the main arrival points for those crossing the Channel in tiny boats and Cockburn has met and become friends with some of the young Afghans who have made that sometimes fatal journey. He had already been working on illustrations and paintings of refugees – in boats, in hiding, in camps around a fire – when he had the idea of a rap about someone making the journey from Afghanistan. He has previously recorded a rap CD, Verbal Impact, with other musicians and the new book is written in that style.
Sitting in the sun outside his studio, Cockburn explains that he was very much inspired by The Lightless Sky, by Gulwali Passarlay. Published in 2015, it’s an account of Passarlay’s remarkable flight from Afghanistan as a 12-year-old after his father was killed and he felt himself caught between the Taliban and the authorities. He was eventually granted asylum in Britain, graduated in politics at Manchester University, and campaigns on behalf of other refugees.
“When I started, it was just going to be a two-page rap,” says Cockburn. “I stayed up all night writing and it just got bigger and bigger.” He read it at a small gathering of refugees and their supporters in Canterbury, and was encouraged by their response to turn it into a book. While he was completing it – a process that has taken nearly four years – the then home secretary, Suella Braverman, flew in a Chinook over the Kent coast to inspect what she described as the “invasion” of, as Cockburn puts it, the “cold, wet, frightened refugees below”.
He adds: “The main premise of the book was that these people have an amazing story to tell and not enough people hear it.” The cast of characters includes Ahmed’s fellow-refugees Hazrat, Aisha, Mullah and a Syrian called Johan; a variety of wily traffickers of different nationalities; a very chatty documentary-maker, Emmanuel; and countless police and border officials, as his journey takes him through Istanbul and Lesbos, Patras and Athens, the Mont Blanc tunnel, Paris and eventually Calais. But he loses touch with some of his travelling companions as they get separated by traffickers or tragedies.
“When you are on the run, people come and go,” says Cockburn, who recalls dodging the police, hungry and homeless. “I would make very good friends in hospital and then never see them again. But I know that adrenaline of escaping, and that feeling of constantly looking over your shoulder. And there is a spiritual element to it – whether something is real or a vision. Ahmed has spiritual experiences and they define him in a way.”
One of Ahmed’s lines in the book is: “I remember my father once told me / One should treat fear as a friend and not an enemy!” Does Cockburn believe that himself? “Yes, I do. And I think there are many other different emotions – anger, envy, boredom – that can be friends, too. Ahmed is not thinking about what he’ll do when he gets to England. He’s thinking, ‘How do I get there?’ It consumes all his energy. I think that’s partly why he’s so determined. You’ve got a finishing line. You’ve got a goal and you’re not going to be happy until you complete that goal.”
Why does Ahmed head for Britain? “That’s a big question. I’ve asked Nelofer.” That’s Nelofer Pazira-Fisk, the Afghan-Canadian director and writer who wrote the book’s introduction. “She feels that if they reach the UK they’ve made it. It’s a kind of imperial thing. Also, many of them already know the English language, so that makes Britain more attractive than Berlin or France.”
He shows me the original artworks for the book. Artists he admires, he says, range from Basquiat to Lee Krasner, Matisse and Van Gogh. He also loves the illustrative work of Ronald Searle, Quentin Blake and Willie Rushton. And on the way back to the station, he takes me through the St Dunstan’s underpass where his earlier artworks about Canterbury are on display in “the Art Gallery in an Underpass”. The first and most striking painting is of a barefoot Henry II doing penance for the murder of Thomas Becket. Like his regal namesake, much of Cockburn’s time on the run was also barefoot. As we are looking at the painting, a young woman hurrying through the underpass is clearly surprised to see him. “Oh, Henry!” she exclaims. “I’ve just read your book – and it’s wonderful!” It’s the sort of moment a shy author might dream of.
The day after we met, one of the main news items was that flights for Rwanda were being readied to take those refugees who have not been granted asylum in Britain to an uncertain future in Africa. That may sound just like the opening of another book about Ahmed, but Cockburn’s next project will actually be to travel round different parts of Britain, in anticipation of the general election, to create illustrations for a state-of-the-nation series his father will be writing.
In the final chapter of Henry’s Demons, Cockburn wrote that “it has been a long road for me but I think I’m entering the final straight”. Apart from one month-long return to hospital a couple of years ago, that prediction has proved right. Like Ahmed, Cockburn managed to make it to the final straight.
