What Strange Paradise

Amir Utu is the protagonist of What Strange Paradise. Amir is a nine-year-old Syrian boy who is forced to flee his home country with his family due to the Syrian Civil War. He is based on the fictional character Peter Pan and real-life boy Alan Kurdi, a two-year-old Syrian child. Kurdi, like Amir, was the victim of a shipwreck of a refugee boat. After he is able to finally wash after the shipwreck, Vänna notices “his hair is naturally curly,” and that “His skin is darker than hers; it matches the shade she subconsciously associates not with a country or an ethnicity […] He looks like an islander” (143).Throughout the latter half of the novel, he wears a stolen sports jersey, “white with an offensively cartoonish, red-faced caricature of a man on the chest,” which is much too big for him (141). The shipwreck scene and the concluding chapter of What Strange Paradise indicate that Amir actually died in the shipwreck, like Alan Kurdi. Unlike Peter Pan, he has no choice but to remain in “Neverland,” never truly growing up.

Prior to the events of the novel, Amir lost his father and an uncle (Loud Uncle) during a political demonstration.