A Toddler by Any Other Name Is Still a Toddler

Do you remember the photograph of the dead boy who washed up on a Turkish beach, the one that went viral and prompted international response, all the breast-beating and hair pulling around the world? Aylan Kurdi, remember? There were demonstrations in Germany, in Canada, in Cairo. People held signs mourning the losses of Aylan and humanity.

Rasheed saw the photo in the paper while having his morning coffee in Jerusalem, and by afternoon he had booked his first flight to Lesbos with three other nurses. He wasn’t sure what moved him to take such a quick and decisive action. He thought it had to do with the fact that he had seen numerous photos of dead Palestinian children in Gaza or the West Bank but wasn’t able to do much about those kids, never able to help.

In Gaza itself, an artist created a gigantic sand sculpture of the toddler on the beach. The sculptor left the natural color of sand for the three-year-old’s skin tones, but used red sand for his T-shirt, blue for his shorts, orange for the soles of his shoes, and so on. Gazan children played all around it. There were reenactments of the death on shores in Rabat, Morocco, and the South of France, where dozens of people wearing the same color clothes as Aylan laid their bodies on the sand.

Emma, too, saw the picture that same morning as Rasheed. With tons of makeup and fitted sweaters, she boarded her first flight to Athens less than three weeks later.

A month ago, you told me that you tried to research the events of New Year’s Eve 2016 in Cologne, the night that was used as an excuse to shut the doors to refugees worldwide. You sent out feelers through friends at Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. And yet you couldn’t figure out what exactly happened that night. Everyone had a different story; little was actually documented. You thought that was strange.

Well, here’s something just as weird.

The boy’s first name was not Aylan but rather Alan. It must have been misspelled early on, and no one corrected it until it was too late. His family name was Shenu, but once the family arrived in Turkey from Syria, they were called Kurdi because of their ethnic background.

Years later, it is the rare person who knows this.

Years later, there are still contradictory stories about what happened on that boat on the morning of September 2, 2015, before it flipped and the young Alan gained a y as his cuddly corpse floated to shore.

Do you know of the Turkish poet Cemal Süreya? The name Süreyya is spelled with a double y, but he lost one of them in a bet with another poet, or so the story goes and is still going. Cemal died sometime in the early nineties. Maybe his y remained behind for a while, waiting patiently for the right opportunity to come along, and suddenly, years later, a toddler’s body appears on the Turkish shore, calling for it:

Here I am.