Betsy Blakeslee

1) Story Statement for 3 Protagonists
FREYDUN escapes Iran and must make a documentary without jeopardizing his admission to French university or getting deported to Iran where his former interrogator threatens his life.

Syrian rebel SAMI survives war, detention, and a journey to Europe that leaves him lame. Before his French refugee camp is razed, he must find housing in order to qualify for a surgery to restore his mobility.

Sudanese pop singer ABDO must hide from Janjaweed militiaman Skinny J, escape brutal detention, and survive a shipwreck. In the French refugee camp, Calais Jungle, he must overcome PTSD in order to sing and to pursue a beautiful American volunteer.

2) Antagonists for each of 3 Protagonists
In detention, the LEFT-HANDED INTERROGATOR beats Freydun to scare him into following the strictures of the Islamic Republic of Iran. He needs to stop Freydun from blogging about corruption and misogyny. He will stop at nothing to prevent Freydun’s blasphemous words from soiling the name of Iran and spreading dissent in the theocratic autocracy he views as righteous.

As a rookie in Assad’s army, Sami unwittingly turns over a kid to the MUKHABARAT, the branch of the Syrian government that delivers rebels to torture centers. Sami joins the resistance and is himself captured by the mukhabarat. In prison, Assad’s strongmen try to beat a confession from him. They are zealots who believe that they are following a directive in the Koran to ‘make people do good.’ When Sami is smuggled into Europe, new enemies in the form of white nationalists beat him.

In Sudan, Abdo flees from SKINNY J, a Janjaweed soldier whose militia attacks Abdo's village. In the neighboring town and later in Khartoum, Abdo fears that Skinny J is chasing him. In Libya, just as Abdo embarks for Europe, he is imprisoned by armed renegades who remind him of Skinny J. In Calais Jungle, Abdo fears that a fellow refugee is Skinny J.

3) Titles
Calais Jungle
Yallah!
Behind the Berm

4) A debut autobiographical novel told through the alternating points of view of its American and Iranian authors, CALAIS JUNGLE is Dave Eggers’ WHAT IS THE WHAT meets Christy Lefteri’s THE BEEKEEPER OF ALEPPO.

5) A Sudanese pop singer, an Iranian blogger, and a Syrian rebel must reboot their lives in a storied refugee camp before the French government razes it. 

6) Conflict for each of 3 Protagonists

FREYDUN’s Inner Conflict:
To move his life forward, Freydun applies to a French university and struggles to complete his documentary. But screening a film that critiques France, a country he wants to call home, may again put him at risk of retaliation. 

FREYDUN’s Secondary Conflict:
Freydun fears that his immigration to France leaves his family in Tehran unprotected from a repressive regime. His return would place them in even more danger.

SAMI’s Inner Conflict: To work through the guilt of delivering a teen to the mukhabarat, Sami must admit what he has done. But he keeps quiet, fearing rejection by the community that sustains him in Calais Jungle.

SAMI’s Secondary Conflict:
To make a life in France, Sami must get surgery on a shattered ankle. During the demolition of Calais Jungle, he must choose between staying in Calais to get the operation and relocating to an unspecified town with the friends who buoy him.

ABDO’s Inner Conflict: 
To save his own life during a shipwreck in the Mediterranean, Abdo pries himself loose from a fellow passenger and lets the man drown. In Calais Jungle, Abdo wants to romance an American volunteer but his PTSD and guilt are triggered by her wet hair.

ABDO’s Secondary Conflict: 
Al Jezeera films Abdo singing, but Abdo fears that a broadcast will endanger the family he left behind in Sudan.

7) Settings 
Primary Setting: CALAIS JUNGLE

It is the summer of 2016 and following the evening call to prayer, Abdo hosts rollicking music parties in his tent at Calais Jungle. The vibrant refugee camp on the north coast of France houses nearly 8,000 asylum seekers from the Middle East, Africa and Southwest Asia. European volunteers and refugees, co-creators of the storied tent city, befriend, romance, and learn from one another at wood and tarp kiosks, schools, restaurants, a barber shop, mosque, and church. French police surveil graveled High Street from a sand dune, storm the camp to bully refugees, and finally bulldoze the camp, evicting everyone. During demolition, Afghans in long tunics set their tents ablaze in the tradition of burning their homes to prevent an enemy from destroying them.

Secondary Settings: 

In Tehran, FREYDUN shares his cell with Jackal who cracks jokes from their smelly toilet behind a pony wall. He then hides in a pristine villa with no internet, phone or television. Behind its iron gate, his isolation is tempered by butterflies and birds.

SAMI flees his jasmine-scented courtyard near Bab al Salam, the gate to the old city in Damascus. He leaves behind the sound of the oud, the domes and arches, the fountains and minarets, endures prison where he learns survival skills from fellow political prisoners. At the border with Turkey, he sleeps in an olive grove between friends who remove stones from the dirt so he can sleep comfortably between them.

A teeming pickup takes ABDO through the Sahara Desert, cruising past corpses half buried in drifting sand. He crosses into Libya hidden under a blanket in a van with no seats. There, he is imprisoned in a crowded room with a cold floor and loud abusive guards.
 

CALAIS JUNGLE
July 1, 2016

     Stolen Soap    

 

Far from the tents and stalls of Calais Jungle, a water spigot stands in a field of flowers. Freydun makes his way past refugees from hot troubled lands toward a language school near the faucet. He is eager to learn the French words he’ll need to make a life in this country with its damp air and people with pale hairless arms. 

Freydun lopes and slows, afraid to misread what’s before him. He thought he knew his motherland until it turned on him; now he is in France, ceding one fate for another, straddling East and West, swapping privilege for privation. He had no choice.

Next to him is his friend Abdo. Freydun thinks Abdo is also headed to language class. But Abdo is walking with more determination than the slow strides of his usual slog when Freydun persuades him to come. Like other Sudanese in the camp, Abdo keeps a curious proximity. Freydun’s people, Persians, set a small distance between their bodies and those of their friends. To Freydun, everything in the camp seems to encroach––the tents next to his, the men queuing for meals, the ramshackle chairs at the school. 

Near École’s wire and wood gate, Abdo touches Freydun’s arm and steers him away from the school into the field of yellow flowers.

‘Where are we going?’ Freydun asks.

‘You will see.’

Abdo threads among the mustard stalks that wave in the wind blowing hard off the English Channel. He starts singing ‘Al Ketar’, softly crimping his voice into the fiery quavers that make him the best singer in Calais Jungle. His narrow nose scrunches in longing for Sudan and the mama he left behind. 

Freydun frowns. He knows that when Abdo sings, time loses hold of him. The day will be half over before it begins.

Freydun follows Abdo to the spigot. 

Abdo stops singing and screws up his face with a look that means mischief. From his pocket, he pulls a bar of soap. A stolen bar of soap. 

The men undress to their boxer shorts. Abdo twists the handle and water sprays from a hose. They laugh and lather and pass the soap, taking their time, a luxury missing at the government-run showers where they queue for an hour to be shunted into a stall for six minutes flat, all the while feeling the crush of the queue closing in from behind. Yesterday the bar of soap was so small that Abdo felt no guilt when he slipped it into his sweats.

Abdo scrubs Freydun’s back, then lifts the hose and aims it at his friend, wanting the jet to blast off the pressing constancy of life in Calais Jungle. It is too much sometimes, this shantytown of 7,129 people who don’t know what to call themselves. Refugees. Migrants. Citizens of nowhere with no country that will call them its own. Freydun, Abdo and the 7,127 others are tent-dwellers in purple, blue, or orange homes of nylon, five or six feet apart and low to the ground.
Now a moment of bliss. In the flowers. No sight of other thin men with extravagant hopes trudging every which way through the dunes. 

Freydun watches the water refract sunlight into colored bands. He inhales the smell of the earth, tosses wet coils of hair off his face. He turns the hose on Abdo and wonders if the caress of water on his friend’s chest reminds the singer of savannah rains. Here, as there, Abdo lacks the means to warm or cool his body, a lean form that brought him from Sudan all the way to the north of Europe. 

Freydun is lost in the wet sunlight when he sees them. Three French policemen from the riot unit, Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité, pick up their pace. The officers are tall and well-fed, their uniforms black from their boots to the shark-finned caps on their heads. The emblem on their sleeves sports a torch and a pair of olive branches. They trample weeds as they bound toward Freydun and Abdo, gripping their batons, more torch than olive branch.
The friends stand in dripping briefs, mud between their toes. Their laughter gutters. Freydun aims the hose at the mud and turns to shut off the water. 

The way the officers’ boots claim the ground reminds Freydun that he’s an outcast squatting on polluted landfill outside their city of Calais. This nation is theirs, and no way will they let him forget it. Of all the dark-eyed, hopeful exiles in Calais Jungle, Freydun stands out for his steady discerning gaze. Now he doesn’t know where to look. 

He calls, ‘Bonjour, messieurs’ and braces for the blow of a nightstick.

 

Across the path at École, a choral director named Betsy is packing up from a music class she has taught in the courtyard. Betsy is quick to smile, curly-headed, olive-skinned, and older than other volunteers. She has arrived ahead of her team to start a music program in the camp. The American’s eyebrows lift in excitement at the chance to learn songs from lands far from North America. One of her reasons for coming to Calais Jungle is to gather songs to teach her chorus in California. How much of her background in psychology she’ll use remains to be seen. At other refugee camps, she found some of it useful and some not. She’ll puzzle out cultural differences, one mistake at a time.

One of her students, a Syrian called Sami, limps on the gravel, gesturing with an arm shaped like an upside-down L. Smooth camel-colored skin, glossy black hair, and cheekbones that set off glinting eyes hint at the handsome boy who left Syria on the verge of manhood. 

‘I carry your bag,’ he offers. 

Betsy gives the boy her purple tote containing passport, euros, dry-erase markers, song sheets, and a small whiteboard sticking out the top. 

As they fling open the school’s gate, they make out Freydun and Abdo, half-hidden in the weeds, laughing a harmless private laughter that releases tension. Then the pumped-up chests of the riot police as they move in on Abdo and Freydun.

Betsy wonders whether Abdo or Freydun said something offensive to the CRS officers, perhaps unintentionally. She remembers singing with them in Abdo’s tent last night and can’t imagine the shy Sudanese singer or the studious Persian provoking the police. What seems to have incensed the officers is the capacity of the men to refresh themselves at a hose. Penniless intruders. Non-contributors to the economy. Laughing while stretching the resources of France, stealing French girls from real Frenchmen like themselves.

Sami limp-lops into the field, Betsy’s bag swinging against his leg. He slows to pull himself upright like a gazelle, chest high, shoulders square, disguising his limp by locking his knee and blurring his cane in the weeds.

Betsy grabs her purple bag from the boy and plunges through the field, the single gray streak in her hair springing against her forehead. 

‘What are the police yelling?’ she calls over her shoulder.

‘Bad words. Insults.’ 

The officers are less than twenty feet from the spigot when they spot Betsy and Sami. 

Sami freezes. 

Without slowing, Betsy rummages through the bag for her iPhone, weighing the benefit of shaming the officers into civility against the humiliation of capturing Freydun and Abdo half-naked, jeered by police. 

She taps the camera and calls, ‘Bonjour! Hi!’ 

The officers glance at the iPhone aimed at them. 

She adds, ‘Freydun, I’d like you to translate something for me.’

The officers back away. 

She has used her small allotment of power.