It’s easy to become despondent about the ‘worst humanitarian crisis of our time’. You become numb to the brutality, to the various daily atrocities, to the enormous figures dead, internally displaced or made into refugees. And that’s just in Syria. In Yemen, Iraq, Sudan and Afghanistan, the trauma of millions continues, unrelenting, day in and day out. It often feels like some kind of Kafkaesque dream: our own government seemingly gleeful in constructing and reinforcing a twisted narrative of ‘death cults’ and ‘unlawful entry, championing the use of hard power as a way to bring peace and stability to countries in turmoil.

The language itself is a blanket, or a white sheet thrown over those bodies. It suffocates any debate or talk of alternatives. What does it even mean to distinguish between economic refugees and the regular kind, when those who flee poverty are driven to attempt such a dangerous crossing? ‘No one would put their children in boats unless the sea is safer than land,’ as the phrase attributed to Somali-British writer Warshan Shire goes.