59 pages • 1 hour read
Omar El AkkadA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Peter Pan is a character in a series of plays, stories, and novels created by early 20th-century Scottish writer J. M. Barrie and made most famous by a 1953 Disney animated film adaptation. The title of Barrie’s 1904 play, Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, evokes the character’s defining trait: He is a boy who would rather exist in a fantasy world of adventure. The play’s other major characters, the Darling siblings, hail from the “real world” of turn-of-the-century London but visit Peter Pan in the magical realm of Neverland. The tension between childhood innocence and societal expectation is thus central to the play, although Neverland itself is not without its darker side.
El Akkad has stated in interviews that many of the themes, characters, and other details of What Strange Paradise are allusions to Peter Pan. This literary connection situates El Akkad’s novel in the framework of an immensely popular and culturally significant piece of literature in Western culture and invites audiences to see the story of Peter Pan in a new light. By doing so, El Akkad carves space for silenced voices, such as those of immigrants, within Western literature, where they have traditionally been silenced or ignored.
One of the novel’s most significant allusions to Peter Pan involves flight imagery. In Barrie’s works, it is the job of the titular character to teach Wendy Darling to fly and fight. For Wendy, flight is achieved through magical elements such as positive thinking and fairy dust. In What Strange Paradise, it is Vänna, Wendy’s analog, who fights and flies for Amir in an act of desperation. When she jumps from the bridge at the narrowest part of the island, she realizes, “How beautiful in their simplicity are the constituent parts of flight […] It requires no trajectory, no destination, only a parcel of air and the willingness to never land” (327). The magic of her flight is grounded, literally, when she returns battered and bruised to rescue Amir from Kethros. This passage also reveals another connection between What Strange Paradise and Peter Pan. El Akkad’s word choice—“The willingness to never land”—is a direct reference to the island where Peter Pan dwells and where children never grow up.
What Strange Paradise is also indebted to Peter Pan for its principal antagonist. Colonel Kethros is an analogue to Captain Hook, Peter Pan’s nemesis. Like the antagonist of Barrie’s works, whose name is derived from the hook he wears to cover the amputation site where his hand used to be, Kethros is missing a limb. Kethros wears a prosthetic leg, a relic of an injury sustained in an unnamed foreign war. Captain Hook lost his hand in a duel with Peter Pan, causing the pirate to relentlessly pursue him. Kethros does not blame Amir specifically for the loss of his leg, but his xenophobic attitude toward immigrants stems in part from the PTSD he suffers from the injury.
Though many elements of What Strange Paradise have their origin in fantasy, such as Peter Pan or Greek mythology, the novel’s realism is derived from the tragic events stemming from the Syrian Civil War. On September 2, 2015, a small rubber raft carrying Syrian refugees capsized off the coast of the island of Kos. The peak of the refugee crisis brought on by the Syrian Civil War saw many such scenes, but it was the death of Alan Kurdi, a two-year-old boy, that captured the world’s attention. A famous photo of Kurdi’s body lying face down in the sand circulated in the press, drawing attention to the plight of refugees and migrants who brave adverse and even deadly conditions in the attempt to reach safety. Kurdi briefly became a symbol of the disproportionate impact such crises have on vulnerable people, particularly children.
El Akkad draws on the image of Alan Kurdi in the opening and closing scenes of What Strange Paradise. Though Amir is significantly older than Kurdi, the imagery El Akkad uses is almost a direct description of the photo of the two-year-old: “The child lies on the shore […]. Face down, with his arms outstretched, the child appears from a distance as though playing at flight” (3). This image comes full circle in Chapter 30, the only chapter titled “Now.” The effect of this title, combined with the image of a dead child, gives the narrative a sense of urgency: This scene could be, and likely is, playing out somewhere right now. Unlike Amir, who wakes up at the beginning of the novel, the child at the end of the novel “looks no different from the rest of the dead whose bodies litter the beach” (235). Though the description of this scene is (intentionally) vague, the boy can be identified as Amir by “the bell-shaped locket he wears” (235). What seems at first to be a subversion of Kurdi’s story therefore ends up reaffirming its tragic reality.
The novel also critiques the superficiality and transience of the public outrage that stories such as Kurdi’s inspire. Colonel Kethros tells Amir that he is “the temporary object of [the world’s] fraudulent outrage, their fraudulent grief […] you are to them in the end nothing but a hook on which to hang the best possible image of themselves” (230-31). Kethros implies that Amir will share the fate of Alan Kurdi: For a moment, he will be a source of humanitarian outrage and a symbol of the need for charity and humanity in the face of atrocity, but such outrage is (Kethros suggests) ultimately narcissistic, particularly in Western cultures. Mohamed, the human trafficker, previously expressed a similar sentiment. He tells the passengers of the Calypso to exaggerate the tales of their suffering to Western officials—not because it will make those officials feel uncomfortable but because “it makes them feel enlightened” (106).