Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} An Olympic Dream The Story of Samia Yusuf Omar by Reinhard Kleist An Olympic dream, shattered. The life of Somali sprinter Samia Yusuf Omar came to a tragic end on the perilous Mediterranean sea crossing from Libya to Europe. Samia Yusuf Omar at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. © EPA/Kerim Okten. By Omar Karmi | 11 April 2016. After competing for Somalia in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Samia Yusuf Omar was determined to return to the track at the 2012 London Games. Yet there is no happy ending to this remarkable young woman’s quest for Olympic glory. In his book, An Olympic Dream , published last month in English by SelfMadeHero, the award-winning German graphic artist Reinhard Kleist traces the last years of the Somali sprinter’s life, ending with her ill-fated attempt to reach safety in Europe. A graphic narrative – billed as a novel but also a work of graphic journalism – it begins with her participation in the Beijing Olympics and follows her ambitious, desperate and ultimately doomed attempts to compete in London in 2012. It is a story of ambition and drive, and the refusal to accept that poverty, repression, threats and violence cannot be overcome. It is also the story of millions of displaced by war and hunger – 59.5 million by the end of 2014, and even greater numbers forecast for 2015 – who opt for dangerous routes towards a better and safer life in the absence of other alternatives. UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, has pushed for an increase in safe, orderly ways for refugees to access protection in Europe under managed programmes – such as humanitarian admission programmes, private sponsorships, family reunion, student scholarships and labour mobility schemes – so that refugees do not resort to smugglers and traffickers to reach safety. The graphic narrative – billed as a novel but also a work of graphic journalism – follows Samia's ambitious, desperate and doomed attempts to compete in London in 2012. © Reinhard Kleist. It was Samia’s ambition and drive that inspired Kleist, who was in London last March to promote the English version of a book that came out in German in the spring of 2015, just as the refugee emergency began to have a major impact in Europe. “This is first an individual story,” he told an audience at the Goethe Institute in London. “I wanted to tell Samia’s story.” Samia, then 17, was one of just two athletes representing war-ravaged Somalia at the Beijing Games. She carried her country’s flag and competed in the 200-metre sprint. She ran a personal best in the first round heat but finished last, nearly ten seconds off the pace. Footage of that race is still available and shows a runner determined to finish, although even the camera had left her behind. She crossed the finish line to a huge roar from the crowd. “I wanted to tell Samia’s story, not write about refugees in general.” Kleist’s story starts with Samia’s family scrambling to find a television in Mogadishu to watch her run. She returns home determined to be a serious competitor in the 2012 Games in London. Somalia was no place for a young woman from a poor background with sporting ambitions. Wracked by fighting between government forces, clan warlords and Islamist rebels, the country had no proper sports facilities. The capital’s main stadium lay in ruins and Samia suffered harassment from militants. “She received threats from al-Shabab,” said Teresa Krug, an American journalist who spent years in Somaliland and got to know Samia and her family well. “Her family was targeted because of her role as an athlete. The national team were seen as connected to the government.” Hardline rebels are opposed to women wearing shorts, which they deem immodest. Samia competed in the 200-metre event at the Beijing Olympics in 2008. In 2010, Samia travelled to Addis Ababa, in neighbouring Ethiopia, where a relative lived and where there were good sports facilities. But she was unable to find a trainer or team to join and, according to Kleist, was unable to renew her visa. With Somali riven by conflict, she decided to make her way to Europe with her aunt. She followed a well-trodden but dangerous path through Sudan, the Sahara and Libya. “The trip she did was absolutely not special,” Kleist said in an interview with UNHCR earlier this month. “It’s something that’s happening again and again.” However, few seem to understand how fraught such journeys are. “Sometimes refugees are on this trip for years. It’s not like they go by bus and are dropped at the beach. No, these are horrible stories, going back and forth, sent back, kidnapped.” Samia took a well-trodden but dangerous path through Sudan, the Sahara and Libya. © Reinhard Kleist. Samia’s odyssey took in all these elements, although the trail went cold for a while. Kleist pieced together elements of the journey through Samia’s own Facebook posts as well as with help from Hodan, a sister who herself had found asylum in Finland. She made it through the Sahara and reached Libya while its civil war was in progress. There she was kidnapped, although it is not clear by whom. Samia’s family was contacted and asked for ransom. It is also not clear if any money changed hands, but she eventually got out to attempt the last, fateful, stretch of the journey across the Mediterranean, the culmination of months of hard travelling. Kleist found there were some gaps in the narrative and to fill them he interviewed other Somali refugees who travelled the same way. He used details from their stories to compile a composite of their experiences. “I think I got close to what could have happened… nobody can really know what happened,” Kleist said. Samia's story is not unusual. Millions of people, displaced by war and hunger are opting for dangerous routes towards a better and safer life. © Reinhard Kleist. Research allowed him to include such details as how highway robbers find money that refugees typically hide in their clothes, stripping them naked and threatening to burn the clothes, leaving them with a choice of keeping their dignity or losing their cash. “I tried to be as close as possible to what could have happened. I filled the gaps, but I didn’t just want to make them up so I used the experience of other refugees to make it more truthful.” The book revolves around Samia’s unbending determination to make it to the London Games, represented in almost every frame where she is drawn wearing a T-shirt bearing the word ‘run’. “I think it was a pretty accurate representation of her personality,” said Krug. “She wasn’t just an athlete. She wasn’t just a refugee. She was an extremely warm, caring person who also had a very big dream. I think that resonates.” “I tried to be as close as possible to what could have happened.” Kleist gives presentations in German schools talking to children about Samia and refugees generally. They are fascinated, he said. “First, they make a step from ‘This is a drawing so it must be fantasy’ to ‘No, this is a real person’. In the end, they ask really good questions. Sometimes you can erase prejudices.” And yet drawing a lesson from a life that ended so abruptly is hard. To stay or go, when both options are life-threatening? Some of her relatives say she should not have left in the first place, said Krug, but that might just be with the benefit of hindsight. If she had succeeded, it would not have been questioned. “I’ve spoken to so many refugees who made that journey and a lot of them say they wish they never set out… But you have people in Mogadishu saying ‘I can’t stay here, there’s no future.’ ” Samia’s story ends with the announcement of her death by fellow Somali athlete Abdi Bile, who competed twice in the Olympics and was the 1,500-metre world champion in 1987. Just after the 2012 Olympics, a tearful and angry Bile announced in a speech in Mogadishu that Samia had perished in the Mediterranean. “We are responsible,” he said, urging his audience to remember Samia. “If we don’t remember, we can’t correct.” An Olympic Dream: The Story of Samia Yusuf Omar by Reinhard Kleist. This book is outside of the five-year window for guaranteed assistance with English language translation. We suggest getting in touch with the relevant funding body for an informal conversation about the possibility of support. Please refer to to our recommendations page for books that are currently covered by our funding guarantee. review. Reinhard Kleist’s latest graphic novel relates a harrowing real-life story, drawing attention to one of the lives behind the all-too-familiar news headlines in which desperate fugitives risk everything to try and enter Europe. Samia Yusuf Omar is a young Somali woman, a sprinter who dreams of competing at the London 2012 Olympics. She has already participated in the 2008 Peking games, where she came last but still proved her considerable athletic potential. Samia grew up as the oldest of six children in Mogadishu, under the regime of militant Islamic group Al-Shabaab, and since her father’s brutal murder she has been unable to move around freely, let alone train professionally. She lives with her mother and nephews in a state of limbo until she hears of an opportunity to travel to Ethiopia, where conditions are better. Despite her mother’s protests she leaves, only to find that she cannot stay there and that she will have to embark on a much longer and more dangerous journey, via Sudan and Libya towards the coast of Italy. What follows is an endless test of her endurance. One crushing disappointment follows another as the people who arrange the transport ask for more money and it becomes clear that those who deal in promises of freedom are not to be trusted. Samia’s story ends when she drowns off the coast of Malta in April 2012, aged just twenty-one. Kleist tells this simple, tragic life story in an unflinching, straightforward style, taking advantage of his medium by letting anguished expressions and world-weary gestures as well as renewed bursts of youthful optimism and enthusiasm speak for themselves. His pared-down graphic style, with classic page composition, echoes that of legendary artist Mazzucchelli who created Batman: Year One . Kleist also includes social media elements in his drawings, reflecting the way a young person would naturally relate to the world. He gives a good sense of the resilience of this young woman who tries to bounce back after every disheartening setback, both because she is following her personal dream and because she knows there is no life for her back at home. Kleist brings Samia’s chilling experiences to a wider audience, concluding with an appeal to honour her as Somalia’s hero – something that she would never have dreamed of calling herself. press quotes. ‘With Samia’s story he has proved once again his talent as a master of graphic storytelling.’– spiegel.de ‘A breathless adventure.’– Stern ‘Touching and appropriate’– Stuttgarter Zeitung. about the author. Reinhard Kleist was born in 1970 and studied Graphic Arts and Design. He has lived in Berlin since 1996, where he shares his studio with other comic book artists. Kleist’s graphic novel Cash won the prestigious Max und Moritz award and in 2013 he received the German Youth Literature Award for Der Boxer . Previous works include: Berlinoir (2013); Der Boxer (2012); Castro (2010); Havanna (2008); Cash – I see a Darkness (2006) rights information. Reinhard Kleist was born in 1970 and studied Graphic Arts and Design. He has lived in Berlin since 1996, where he shares his studio with other comic book artists. Kleist’s graphic novel Cash won the prestigious Max und Moritz award and in 2013 he received the German Youth Literature Award for Der Boxer . Previous works include: Berlinoir (2013); Der Boxer (2012); Castro (2010); Havanna (2008); Cash – I see a Darkness (2006) translation assistance. This book is outside of the five-year window for guaranteed assistance with English language translation. We suggest getting in touch with the relevant funding body for an informal conversation about the possibility of support. Please refer to to our recommendations page for books that are currently covered by our funding guarantee. An Olympic Dream: The Story of Samia Yusuf Omar by Reinhard Kleist. The image of Samia Yusuf Omar running for last place at the 2008 Beijing Olympics will forever be imprinted in the minds of all who saw it: The lean Somalian, wearing knee-length leggings and a baggy T-shirt, came in seconds behind her competitors. What the cheering crowd couldn’t know then was what it took to get there. An Olympic Dream follows Omar’s second attempt to represent her country at the Olympics, this time in London. Reinhard Kleist pictures the athlete training in one of the most dangerous cities in the world; her passage through Sudan and into Libya; and her fateful attempt to reach Europe. By telling the story of one remarkable woman, Kleist gives voice to the thousands of migrants who risk their lives daily for a better future. About the author. Reinhard Kleist is a renowned artist and graphic novelist. The Boxer , his depiction of Holocaust survivor Harry Haft, was nominated for an Ignatz Award and made the Young Adult Library Services Association’s 2014 Great Graphic Novels for Teens list. His acclaimed biography Johnny Cash: I See a Darkness was nominated for an Eisner Award. Kleist lives in Germany. Kleist, R: The Olympic Dream. In 2008, 17-year-old Samia Yusuf Omar stood alongside some of the fastest women in the world on the start line of the Olympic 200m. Four years later, she boarded a refugee boat to Europe, risking her life on the waters of the Mediterranean. An Olympic Dream tells the remarkable story of Samia’s attempt to compete at the London Games in 2012. Picturing her life in Mogadishu, a city ravaged by conflict where the female athlete encountered discrimination and abuse, Reinhard Kleist reveals the challenges she faced both as a sportsperson and as a woman. In doing so, he shows why Samia, like so many others, would choose to flee. Following Samia’s journey through Ethiopia, Sudan and Libya to its tragic conclusion, An Olympic Dream is a forceful statement on Europe‘s response to the refugee crisis. But it is also a moving account of a remarkable life, best remembered for a single moment: when an unlikely Olympian, dressed in knee-length leggings and a baggy t-shirt, finished in last place – and the Bird’s Nest stadium erupted. An Olympic Dream. Biography, memoir, and autobiography are possibly the trendiest genres of book-format comics; one cannot even list the titles that have been published since the recent boom in the early 2000s. Some say that there are too many graphic biographies and memoirs already, and that they repeat the same tropes – but I like them. I like feeling connected to the story, even if its characters feel remote at first. It seems to me that connection is the ultimate aim of nonfiction biographical comics: to use the comics repertoire in a way that conveys immediacy and relevance to the reader. By connection I do not mean that a certain historical period is evoked accurately or that a certain milieu is represented faithfully. All that is necessary, but not enough. By connection I mean the authenticity of a personality that appears through the pages. Connection is achieved by making me ask the same questions and contemplate the same choices which the characters do. As is well known, comics does not only show a story, but also involves and immerses the reader: the narrative thread is constructed by us, readers, in our heads. And for this narrative thread to be a powerful one the artist and writer have to edit it in clever ways. This is true in the case of a graphic biographies as well: for the personality of the character to be conveyed, for the narrative to be authentic, the writer, artist, and editor have to organize bits of truth and bits of fantasy creatively. Their aim is to make up and construct situations where the hero of their biography can show himself or herself as an actual person. Sometimes it is hard to make the character of an actual person show herself as there is very limited information available. I mean, who really knows what happened to Samia Yusuf Omar in Sudan or in war-torn Libya? We have very limited information about Samia the actual person – this is why the readers of her graphic biography need cleverly thought-out situations where there is enough space for the made-up persona of a comic character to breathe. If the creators of graphic biographies do not construct a flexible enough space and do not let their heroes breathe, the reader will keep distant and eventually lose interest. Distance is the worst thing that can happen in a medium that is made up of visual sequences and tableaus waiting for the reader to come closer and investigate the tiniest shadow or line. It is connection or involvement that I miss in the pages of Reinhard Kleists’s biography of Samia Yusuf Omar, the young Somali girl who ran at the Beijing Olympics and died tragically in the Mediterranean Sea. The story is poignantly up-to-date, and is a very important one to tell: hundreds of thousands of people have left or have been forced to leave their homes in countries that are historically connected to Europe, yet the new life they were hoping to find is not waiting for them there. My country, Hungary, for example, is surrounded by a fence. People like Samia are full of hope at the beginning of the expensive and dangerous journey, but in the end they waste away their days at transit zones and refugee camps, often without the sign of hope that their situation will ever improve. The European public and the political leaders are deeply divided by the problem of migration, and Kleist’s graphic biography, originally published in German (and translated into English by Ivanka Hahnenberger), has the potential to contribute to these discussions. It is a very needed biography. By choosing an Olympic icon to represent many, Kleist has a relevant, moving, and politically loaded story in his hands. From the book we learn that Samia Yusuf Omar left for Europe hoping that she would have a chance to train for the London Olympics in Italy. In her native Mogadishu it has been increasingly difficult for her to train: she gets insulted by militant groups more and more often, and is even threatened to be killed. At the same time, she does not have any facilities to train at. She starts the journey with the 2012 London Olympics in mind, but has to learn that traveling illegally is always slower than one’s dreams, and the goal is never certain. Samia is portrayed as an isolated traveler among various groups of refugees and migrants. Her motivation to train grows more and more scattered as she is getting weaker and weaker physically and mentally. She arrives to the Mediterranean through Ethiopia, Sudan, and Libya. She is kidnapped, and then released for ransom. She goes to jail. She endures miserable conditions with other refugees in Tripoli, and has to wait long to find the boat that promised to take her to Italy. She never arrived. In An Olympic Dream , Samia’s story is narrated and shown chronologically. Kleist focuses on turning points in Samia’s life, and the narrative is organized around Samia’s irregular Facebook updates (which the preface reveals to be fictional). Imagine the drama in the most often recurring situation in Kleist’s narrative: Samia is trying to answer Facebook’s standard “What’s on your mind?” query when she has just returned from the Beijing Olympics, when she realizes she cannot train anymore, or when she is further from home than from her destination, and being short of money, has no chance of reaching either. Unfortunately the book rarely asks the reader to imagine these situations; everything is portrayed from a decent distance. There are few scenes where the reader could feel that a character, a personality is immersed in an actual situation. Rather, way too often we simply get the results. During reading I could not help but feel the character of Samia hasn’t been given enough space between the pillars of the narrative. It is as if most of the time Kleist is afraid to go closer, to reveal the scenes where the drama actually happened. Or it is as if a series of snapshots was taken of the most important turning points, the most easily recognized, but how they are lived through is never shown. The narrative bears close resemblance to the genre of the picaresque novel: it is characterized by an episodic plot, which one could add or take away episodes from at any time. The heroine remains essentially uninfluenced by what is happening, and there is hardly any character development. We do not learn much about her during the book. The pillars of her character, namely that she likes running, loves her family, and wants to run at the London Olympics, have been clear to us from the very beginning, but are unfortunately never deepened. Samia remains distant, we remain onlookers. My favorite scene, where I feel Samia the closest, comes when Samia and her relative Mariam—with whom she started the journey, but later was separated from—reunite in Tripoli, and they find smugglers who will take them to Italy by boat. In the three-page sequence the two women are shown into a wooden cabin that is already crowded with refugees, and Samia is shown reading telephone numbers and messages carved into planks by previous groups. She gets really scared, and asks the guard to let her out to send a message to her family. At this point we see a chain, and it turns out that Samia has been locked in the cabin, and the last panel at the bottom of page 117 shows Samia begging. Kleist manages to show brilliantly the actual trap that Samia finds herself in and the metaphorical, greater, and more tragic trap that her life has ended up becoming. We breathe and feel with Samia here, and we contemplate the fates of the many before her. Another scene where the reader is involved, and where we see the process of life, not just the pillars, is the wonderful depiction of the first scene: Samia is running in the distant Beijing, and the people in Mogadishu gather to watch the big race on what seems to be a rare working television in the neighborhood. We see how the community is cheering for the girl, and we also see that she is hopelessly different from the other athletes: she is smaller, thinner, and does not have the running clothes the others are wearing. The scene is long for the book, lasting eight pages, and it successfully immerses us in the story. We feel that there is a lot at stake, and the atmosphere is strong. It is a pity that in the coming pages few scenes manage to invite this level of engagement. I have been wondering a lot about the reasons for this, and I have come up with two: the first is the dialogue technique. A dialogue has to be lifelike; the reader cannot feel that it is scripted. A dialogue needs space, and cannot be too condensed. A cartoonist friend of mine says that writing the text is the most difficult part of making comics. The second element that I think is essential for a graphic biography to work is the ability to convey life as a process. The way I see it, biography portrays life as a series of choices: nothing is decided in advance. Biography also shows the situations in which those choices are made (or are not made). I often felt that Kleist’s narrative is hesitant to show Samia from the inside: her thoughts and feelings are narrated by works (by the fictionalized Facebook posts), but are rarely shown or dramatized with the tools of comics. Without this, the connection is harder to establish, and life no longer seems to be a random process. Although throughout the story the reader knows that the character of Samia will die, Samia herself does not know it. For her, life is a flow, it is open-ended – I miss more scenes like the above described ones, which convey this experience.