The human cost | Tabish Khair's 'Drown All the Refugees'

The Denmark-based Indian novelist and poet Tabish Khair’s latest book Drown All the Refugees derives its name from a line in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, where the unhinged Colonel Kurtz orders his men to kill without judgement, to “exterminate all the brutes”. In Khair’s novel, the narrator exclaims, “Drown all the refugees!” during a conversation at a literary festival, before explaining his nihilism to us, the readers. He says that for too long, brown people in the West had been pitied and tolerated but never accepted, and that “it is better to kill a human being than to pity him”. Talking about this scene and the inception of the novel, Khair says, “It’s very easy to focus on people who are genocidal in the literal sense. Most people are not like that. Most people at literary festivals are very good at offering a coin of sympathy, at making a symbolic gesture, and feeling that their job is done. I wanted to negotiate that situation.”