I would have preferred not to write this story, but it wouldn’t leave me alone.
The idea came to me after I attended a benefit for a charity called Reprieve, which fights for the rights of prisoners around the world. When Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve’s founder, said that children have been abducted, abused and held without charge in Guantanamo Bay, I was so shocked and appalled that I felt driven to write this book. The title came to me immediately.
Many people have asked how I managed to spend months poring over such a harrowing subject. All I can say is: I felt the story had to be written. To be honest, I asked myself the same question several times but at no point did I want to give up. I like Khalid and his family and friends, and I rooted for him, and for justice—though the justice system has been ripped apart and abandoned to the four winds. I struggled daily with the issues I had to examine, and at night I was kept awake imagining the consequences if I didn’t hit the right note—the right combination of pressure and sensitivity—in telling this story. Above all, I was determined to enable you, the reader, to find—through the pages of one boy’s fictional experience—some way to understand the stories behind the news.
Once the character of Khalid formed in my brain, I needed to get him to Guantanamo. This turned out to be easier than anticipated: Through my daily research of newspapers and Internet articles I saw that the paranoia, hypocrisy, and fear that led to the creation and maintenance of this prison also provided endless opportunities for Khalid to become an innocent victim of the “War on Terror.”
Two books that I turned to while writing mine were Bad Men: Guantanamo Bay and the Secret Prisons by Clive Stafford Smith and Enemy Combatant: My Imprisonment at Guantanamo, Bagram, and Kandahar by Moazzam Begg. Both provided valuable facts and insights. The British film The Road To Guantanamo was useful in providing visual details, as were many news items. I purposely had no contact with anyone who had firsthand experience of the prison because I didn’t want to steal or be influenced by another’s ordeal.
Telling this story was an ordinary act of compassion. It is a plea for another vision in an increasingly war-torn world because, as we know, there really is no “them,” no “they”—there is only us—and more of us.
—Anna Perera