Clerks of the Passage

The roots of this book are real and full of characters and heroic stories of the sort one might expect from migration tales, , evoking border crossings past and present.
In Abou Farman's hands the stories turn into a larger meditation on movement, conveyed with humour and a subtle irony. Clerks of the Passage takes us on a journey in the company of some strange and great migrants, from the 3.5 million year-old bipedal hominids of Laetoli, Tanzania, to an Iranian refugee who spent seventeen years in the transit lounge at Charles de Gaulle airport, from Xerxes to Milton to Revelations, from Columbus to Don Quixote to Godot.

Migration stories, says Abou Farman, are often told through the personal struggles and travails of the migrant, the great voyager figure of our most recent centuries, the harbinger of hybridity, the metaphor for risk, sacrifice, toil, abuse, inhumanity. And humanity. These are the stories (both horrific and redemptive) that we hear about in the news, in taxis and airports, in bars and corner coffee shops. They are both real and existential, shared, denied, argued about, internalized. Seldom are the threads of such narratives woven together and imbued with the originality of insight brought to the page by Farman. In some cases, money changes hands, fake ID cards are printed, military release papers are forged, and in secret meetings shivery with anxiety and excitement, a place and a time are whispered. On arrival, three magic words: "I am refugee." Telling modern tales of transit, Farman ranges far and wide on the migratory map of human history, focusing on such themes as border posts and paradise, surveillance and passports, Third World Border Hysteria and homeland.