Before the novels, before the poems, before the folktales and the horror, there was a notebook, and a road.
The Desert Has No Sky was my first book. It is not a story I invented. It is a diary, the record of the day I left The Gambia and set out, the way so many of my friends were setting out, across the Sahara toward Libya, and whatever lay beyond it.
People ask why a young man with a diploma, a business, and a family that loved him would walk into a desert. In the book, I answer honestly, because the honest answer is not the one the news gives you. My game shop had been shut down. My best friend had gone to India to study. Everyone I knew was either building something or leaving, and the life I had built had started to feel irrelevant, like a room with the air let out of it. I did not leave because I was starving. I left because I was young, and the world was larger than the small square of it I had been given.
That is the thing the word migrant flattens. When they count us at a border, they see a problem. They do not see the boredom, the courage, the ambition, the ordinary human hunger to become more than your village allows. When we cross three deserts and a sea, they call it a crisis. It is the same courage they praise in their own explorers. It is more.
The desert itself is the book’s teacher. I called it The Desert Has No Sky because that is what it does to you: it takes the sky away. There is so much sand, and so much sameness, and so much sun, that you stop looking up, and the horizon closes over you like a lid. In that closed place, stripped of everything, you learn what a person actually is when there is nothing left to perform for. I wrote it as it happened, because I did not want to remember it later and make it neater than it was.
This is not a book that asks for your pity. It asks for your attention. It is testimony, mine, and by extension that of a whole generation of young Africans whose journeys are reduced to a number on a screen. I wanted at least one of those journeys to have a face, a name, and a voice.
The Desert Has No Sky is my original English. It found its first readers in Italian, as Il Deserto Non Ha Cielo, translated and published by a house that believed in it before I had published anything else. If you read Italian, the book is available there right now, and I would be honoured if you picked it up.
Everything I have written since then started on that road. This was the first. If you want to know where the voice came from, this is where it came from: a notebook, a desert, and a young man who wanted to see the world, and did.
Il Deserto Non Ha Cielo is available now in Italian from Kanaga Edizioni.
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