Matthieu Aikins on The Naked Don't Fear the Water

An Evenings with an Author event at the American Library in Paris featuring journalist Matthieu Aikins. Filmed on 06/04/2022 with a live audience both in person and on Zoom.
Matthieu Aikins had been covering the war in Afghanistan for seven years when his friend and translator Omar, denied a Special Immigrant Visa for the U.S., decided to flee the country as a refugee. Aikins chooses to leave his own passport behind and go with him. What results is The Naked Don’t Fear the Water, a volatile odyssey across the refugee trail.
From a stay in Turkey, to an internment camp in Lesbos, to a “squat” in Athens, Aikins forces readers to confront the experience of migration and its dangers. The work turns on psychological realism and therefore depth. Omar is a nuanced figure who, while attempting one of the most courageous journeys one can undertake, is indecisive, sometimes loses his nerve, and spends hours in bed looking at Facebook. Alongside scenes of vivid action, the book is punctuated by waiting, contributing to the thread of uncertainty and suspense that runs through it. Written with clarity and skill, this is a story of precarity, desperation, and human connection. And Aikins, practicing empathy, demands it in return. He has presented us with a portrait of those at the heart of the refugee crisis: What must we do now in order to not look away?
About the speakers:
Matthieu Aikins is an author and journalist best known for his reporting on the war in Afghanistan. He is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a contributing editor at Rolling Stone. A winner of the Polk and Livingston Awards, Aikins is also a two-time finalist for the National Magazine Award in the Reporting category. He was a 2020-21 Visiting Fellow at the American Library, which was generously supported by The de Groot Foundation.
Currently pursuing a master’s degree in environmental studies at Sciences Po and participating in a podcast about James Joyce’s Ulysses at Shakespeare and Company, Alice McCrum became the head of cultural programming at the American Library in Paris in March of 2021.
Evenings with an Author is sponsored by GRoW @ Annenberg.