Helen Stevenson

Vincent Delecroix

In November 2021, an inflatable dinghy carrying migrants from France to the United Kingdom capsized in the Channel causing the death of 27 people on board. Despite receiving numerous calls for help, the French authorities wrongly told the migrants they were in British waters and had to call the British authorities for help. By the time rescue vessels arrived on the scene, all but two of the migrants had died. The narrator of Delecroix's fictional account of the events is the woman who took the calls. Accused of failing in her duty, she refuses to be held more responsible than others for this disaster. Why should she be more responsible than the sea, than the war, than the crises behind these tragedies? A shocking, moral tale of our times, Small Boat reminds us of the power of fiction to illuminate our darkest crimes.

Small Boat

sofia mae

I’m not running an NGO. I’m not there to defend a cause and I don’t send help because it’s right; that’s what I needed to say to the police inspector, to get her to understand. It’s not my moral conscience or whatever, that throws life belts or survival blankets.

I had to smile because shed some light on seemed to me a particularly unfortunate expression, seeing as how it is precisely at night, in the deep dark of night, that everything happens. Shed some light, I murmured, is exactly what we need to do.

But the people watching from a distance demand that you tear up, as though you’ll see the trajectories more clearly with eyes full of tears, to give proof of humanity,…

“..we shouldn’t be taken in by the surface, which deludes us into thinking not only that we have everything under control, but also that the world itself is orderly."

“I felt as though I’d merely been talking to myself all this time, and I was the one looking at myself with an expression of weary exasperation, saying, Can you not see there’s something indecent about moaning and being so quick to feel sorry for yourself, finding every way possible to avoid your own responsibility? ”

“..and, really, I have no problem listening to the recordings of that night and hearing my own voice, because it’s not the voice of a monster or a criminal on the tape – it’s the voice of all of us.”

i'm accused of lacking a soul, but my soul is precisely what i leave in the cloakroom when i get to work, it simply can't fit into my uniform.

Small Boat quotes

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