Nichola Khan, Arc of the Journeyman: Afghan Migrants in England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020)

Despite representing one of the world’s largest refugee groups in the world, Afghan migrants remain an understudied population. Unfortunately, scholars of migration studies have paid little to zero attention to the everyday experiences of Afghan migrant communities. Therefore, much of the existing information about Afghan communities comes from the mass media and popular literature, which often associates Afghans with terrorism and religious extremism. However, Arc of the Journeyman by Nicola Khan attempts to fill this important gap in the literature.

The key aim of the book is to distance itself from the typical Orientalist stories of “Anglo-Afghan relations” that perpetuate the colonial myths of Afghan “traditionalism, obscurantism, and isolation.” (224) Instead, the book provides a humane depiction of Afghan refugees in England. It is based on extensive fieldwork and multiple qualitative methods such as life-history work, dream sharing, and historical, literacy, poetic, and imaginative research. It focuses on a group of Afghan male refugee taxi drivers whose families live as refugees in Pakistan. They come from the Pashtun ethnic group of Afghanistan who migrated to England as asylum seekers to seek economic mobility. According to the author, however, it can take up to ten years from the time they seek asylum and start their taxi-driving careers to finally settle their families in England. The book provides a multidimensional narrative of this journey across five chapters.

In Chapter 1, the author reports on one of the significant aspects of this journey: demands for remittances from migrant men’s families in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The author argues that one of the fundamental reasons these men migrate is not just to experience individual mobility but to build family capital through remittances. Sending remittances is a coping mechanism for Afghan families whose lives are impacted by decades of war and poverty and thus have no other option but to rely on the labour of their migrant taxi-driver sons. The migrant sons bear the responsibility of remitting hundreds to over a thousand pounds per month. They work weekdays and weekend nights to meet this responsibility. Some men succeed, while others fail. Some men negotiate the amount of remittance, while others end up borrowing. Most migrant taxi drivers mainly remit money to their father, who traditionally exercises special authority over their son for a lifetime in Afghan culture. If they fail to remit, their father can neglect their families (i.e., wife and children).

As producers of remittances who work on weekends and most weekdays, the migrant taxi drivers live an isolated social life. As former asylum seekers who did not have favourable encounters with state bureaucracies, they avoid interaction with the local government. Moreover, they are racially abused by their taxi customers. Their occupation has also been racialized by members of the host society who protest that taxi driving has become “an immigrant business.” (63). Hence, they rely on friendships exclusively involving fellow Afghan male taxi drivers who pray, rest, and eat at halal restaurants together. Some weekdays, after spending busy weekend nights at work, they get together to cook, relax, play cards, or watch cricket. As indicated by the author, these moments of exclusively Afghan male friendship allow them to [temporarily] escape from the problematic obligations in Pakistan and Afghanistan. It allows them to “endure life’s hardships and create easier relations of kinship than those with family back home.” (78)

The author devotes Chapter 2 to discussing the significance of all-male friendships in the lives of Afghan taxi drivers. In this chapter, however, the author reports data gathered in Pakistan, where migrant men travel to visit their families and engage in chakar, “a typically all-male phenomena between friends who take several cars for a day or longer to picnic in rural locations involving idyllic mountain landscapes, glacial water, greenery, and flower-filled meadows.” (90) The all-male social gatherings in the UK differ from chakar in Pakistan because the latter is an opportunity for these men to restore their masculinity by acting British and displaying wealth and status, whereas, in England, they are only taxi drivers and producers of remittances who must work tirelessly to make ends meet. “In the UK, the migrants must be thrifty… In Peshawar [of Pakistan], he must display his wealth, elevated British (‘Londoni’) status, and generosity.” (96) Despite the opportunity that chakar offers to migrant taxi drivers to create alternatives outside of England, they face harassment from the Pakistani police, which is not unusual among other Afghan refugees living in Pakistan. Hence, while the Afghan taxi drivers return to visit family and friends to pursue alternative social lives, they are not necessarily returning to somewhere they feel at home. The return to Pakistan, rather, “enfolds a nostalgic imaginary for the freedom before the massive transformations that produced the dilemmas of homeland and belongings for Afghans – and desires to create and protect memories and shred histories of untroubled times,” and their nostalgic imaginings “do not reflect desires to return to or be free from the past, but rather create alternative perspectives on the future.” (119)

The conflictual feelings of being stuck between two desires – the desire for economic mobility in England and the desire to construct a source of security for the future in Pakistan – coupled with the pressures of sending remittances and living in poverty and isolation in England, lead to considerable emotional and mental health deterioration among the Afghan taxi drivers. Chapter 3 illustrates the manifestation of these deteriorations (anger, depression, suicidal ideation, etc.) through a case study of one of the study’s informants (Zamarai). Similarly, the next chapter presents a series of storied fragments that reflect the phenomenology of three crossings among the research participants: the first set of fragmentss describe the tellings of Afghans from wartime who became refugees in Pakistan; the second set represents British asylum seekers of Pakistani refugees; and the third set is of Afghan repatriations from Pakistan. Exploring a slightly different topic from the earlier chapters, the last chapter is concerned with the intragroup dynamics of Afghan migrants in England. Here, the author reports on the ways in which Afghan Pashtun migrants engage in community-level competitions over the leadership of Afghan community organizations amongst themselves and with non-Pashtun Afghan migrants (i.e., those who do not belong to the Pashtun ethnic group) to preserve their traditional ethnoreligious values. What is also significant about this chapter is that it highlights how Afghan migrant communities are actively involved in building a sense of community amongst themselves, despite living in a context of emotional suffering and class-based vulnerability, as reported earlier.

Reading this book inspires several reflections. The book is highly rich in data, and it uses numerous interesting cultural idioms in the Pashtu language. As someone who grew up in Afghanistan, spent time in Pakistan, and became a migrant-citizen in North America under similar conditions, I could relate to the participants of this research, and I applaud Nicola Khan for offering such a thick description of the multilayered challenges associated with being an Afghan migrant. Considering the recent regime change that has led to the displacement of thousands of Afghans, a study of Afghan migrants has never been more urgent, and this book makes a timely contribution to the literature.

S. Hamid Akbary

University of Calgary

DOI: https://doi.org/10.52975/llt.2022v89.0039.