Breach

By Annie Holmes and Olumide Popoola

breach - noun: An act of breaking or failing to observe a law, agreement, or code of conduct. A gap in a wall, barrier, or defence, especially one made by an attacking army.

breach - verb: Make a gap in and break through (a wall, barrier, or defence). (Of a whale) rise and break through the surface of the water.

‘The Jungle is like a laboratory.’

In the refugee camp known as 'The Jungle' an illusion is being disrupted: that of a neatly ordered world, with those deserving safety and comfort separated from those who need to be kept out.

Calais is a border town. Between France and Britain. Between us and them. The eight short stories in this collection explore the refugee crisis through fiction. They give voice to the hopes and fears of both sides. Dlo and Jan break into refrigerated trucks bound for the UK. Marjorie, a volunteer, is happy to mingle in the camps until her niece goes a step too far. Mariam lies to her mother back home. With humour, insight and empathy breach tackles an issue that we can no longer ignore.

breach is the first title in the Peirene Now! series. This exciting new series will be made up of commissioned works of new fiction, which engage with the political issues of the day. In breach, the authors beautifully capture a multiplicity of voices - refugees, volunteers, angry citizens – whilst deftly charting a clear narrative path through it all. Each story is different in tone, and yet they complement one another perfectly. Taken as a whole, this stands as an empathetic and probing collage, where the words ‘home’, ‘displacement’ and ‘integration’ come to mean many things as the collection progresses to a moving finale.

Why Peirene chose to commission this book: ‘I have commissioned Olumide Popoola and Annie Holmes to go to the Calais refugee camps to distil stories into a work of fiction about escape, hope and aspiration. On another level, however, this work will also take seriously the fears of people in this country who want to close their borders. It’s that dialogue that isn’t happening in real life. A work of art can help to bridge the gap.’ Meike Ziervogel, publisher
‘This is what fiction is for. These stories refresh difficult territory in ways that other writing cannot reach. Tender, tragic, funny (sometimes), persuasive.’ Sara Maitland, writer

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peirene Press
• Release date: Aug 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781908670335

Annie Holmes

Born in Zambia and raised in Zimbabwe, Annie Holmes left southern Africa and filmmaking to enrol in a writing programme in California. Her short fiction has been published in Zimbabwe and the United States, and she has co-edited two collections of oral narratives in McSweeney’s Voice of Witness series: Hope Deferred and Underground America. She lives in the UK.

Reviews for Breach

[kidzdoc_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Calais is an important port city in the north of France, as it is the closest point between France and England, with only 21 miles of the English Channel separating the two countries via the Strait of Dover. Hundreds of ferries traverse the strait between Calais and Dover daily, and the nearby Channel Tunnel transports thousands of people via passenger rail, private vehicles and lorries. The city of Calais is home to over 125,000 residents, and 10 million people visit it annually. However, it has recently become infamous for the collection of refugee camps, known as The Jungle, which provided a temporary stoppage point for up to 8,000 emigrants from Africa and the Middle East who wished to travel to the United Kingdom to seek greater opportunities, freedom and safety from their war torn lands, particularly in Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan and Iran.Peirene Press, an independent publisher of European literature, commissioned two Black British writers, Olumide Popoola and Annie Holmes, to visit the refugee camps and write short stories about the lives of those who reside in the camps, the volunteers that assist them, and the people who live in the city legally. Each author wrote four largely disconnected stories for this book. Popoola and Holmes provide fleeting glimpses into the lives of the camps' inhabitants, who generally live amongst their fellow countrymen and come from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds. They include several young impatient Sudanese teenage boys who seek to reunite with close relatives; a North African woman whose mother is seriously ill and in desperate need of money to pay for hospital care, who decides to earn money the only way she knows how; a young Englishwoman who volunteers in the camp, to the disapproval of her father, and falls in love with one of the refugees; a camp strongman, who arranges for those who can pay to be carried in lorries by smugglers through the Channel Tunnel; and a local woman who agrees to house two young Iranian immigrants for reimbursement by the government, as the refugee crisis has led to a decline in guests wishing to stay in her B&B."Breach" was an interesting look into the refugee camps in Calais, from a variety of vantage points. The subjects of the stories were not fully portrayed, though, which may have been a difficult if not impossible task for the authors, given the short amount of time they presumably stayed in the camps and the large number of people they encountered there. The camps were disbanded by French authorities in late October of this year, and its residents were sent to other accommodation centers throughout the country. However, an article this week in The Independent indicated that many of the children were not receiving psychological counseling or adequate social support, and as a result many of them wish to return to Calais in order to emigrate to the United Kingdom.