2. The Lion of Jutland
This morning, I walked to the gas station to buy a water bottle. There is a man who works there, who reminds me of the resident who this essay will be about, but I am putting off writing about this resident, as I was when I went to buy the water bottle.
It was 10 a.m. I grabbed the bottle from the fridge and stood in line behind a seventy-four-year-old man. His white hair was unkempt and scraggly. It hung down to his shoulder blades. The gas station attendant, whom I’ll call A, scanned his two Bud Lights and asked, “You sure you are over twenty-one?”
“What.” the old man responded.
“You always come in. You never show ID,” A continued, placing the 40s in a plastic bag. “I could get in trouble.”
“I am seventy-four years old.”
“You look good for your age.” The man looked absolutely terrible. I leaned over to glimpse past his boney, blotchy arm as he grabbed the bag, so that I could see A’s face, which was dead serious. “You don’t look a day over twenty.”
“I am seventy-four and lucky God hasn’t decided to take me yet.” The man walked out. The door swung closed and jingled.
“Hello, friend,” A chuckled. “He was so mad.”
“Why did you do that?” I asked.
“I don’t know! He’s always so drunk.” A’s cheeks grew plump and shiny.
His laughter made my day, because like the old man, I had been in my own haze, until A used language to make fun, to shock us out of ourselves. I should use language for fun, I thought, walking back home. We take it all so seriously.
Why I find the resident difficult to render is because stories about detained migrants are meant to be depressing, or rage-inciting, or politically enlivening. Usually, when I read about these issues, I leave the page filled with potential energy, and I walk around my day searching for an outlet. Each day passes, outlet-less; small acts of political activism do not suffice, and I leave protests feeling nothing but hungry, so I wonder, what is there to do, in this cycle of: be informed—now care—now do something—now know that something is not enough—argue with immigration waffling leftists—start a book club—read—be informed—now care.
Now care.
When I walked into the gas station, I was wondering if A, my Friend, as he calls us, would be there, and I wondered if he’d feel the need to touch my hand as a hello. Sometimes he does this. It is like a handshake, sort of, but it is not a fist bump and it is not a dap, I do not know. I do not like it, personally. I do not like it when men touch my hands, and I notice that they are always managing to. When I work at my coffee shop, and the counter is full, sometimes I will hand them their coffees or pastry bags, and they will always, somehow, manage to touch my hand. Maybe their hands are larger, so they cannot help it. But with women, generally, there is a return in courtesy in how we pinch our objects in the transition between us, so that we don’t make unwanted contact.
I walked in with a mixture of guilt for not wanting to be touched and desire for verbal-social contact, a soft-desire to ask how his mother was doing (she recently had heart surgery) or also simply what’s been up. Within physical social webs, we take each other’s temperatures as localized feedback. If he is doing well, I am doing well: If he shows me that he’s overworked but in good enough spirits to make a joke, I too will relax for a second. If he models for me that despite having to visit his mother in the hospital in the hour between his job at these two gas stations, that he can still carry forward his good mood, because he’s in a corporally safe situation, I will stand there in the same building, recognizing that I am also in a safe situation, relative to the other countries and atrocities we are avoiding, due to our locale in this vastly empowered place.
In this social world, where we are constantly negotiating our levels of contact, creating ourselves in a material net, I want to care. I want to care if his mother is alive. I want to reach out. I want to forget my seat of empowered-nation-ness, and feel, for a moment, that my caring can possibly amount to me being something beyond my nationality.
I am afraid that that is not possible. That is why it is hard to talk about the real subject of this piece.
Saam.
[1.00:04:50]
I was born in 1997 in Afghanistan, it’s a city, it’s called Panjshir, the only city that was fighting the Taliban in Northern Afghanistan.
[1.00:05:06]
I met Saam outside of the center in a suburban neighborhood, where our electric car broke down on the way from Aarhus. At the time I was there in May, 2025, the residents were still allowed to keep the cars they owned. The legislation has since changes, and Saam no longer has a car or means of transport from the center. That day, he had been at the dentist, when the other American journalist called him asking for help.
[1.00:05:08]
When I was eight years old, I missed my mom… My mom died. And then I was with my father, and my sisters, and my brother. So then my father, ehh, he got married with a little woman, so after one year, we get in trouble, so then we should move, me, my brother and two sisters, we should move from one place to the other place, then we moved to another place and after a little bit of time, I start to work, my brother worked in government, as a police officer, so then I also, I was young, but I go to NDS, if you know, NDS it is a national defense of security of Afghanistan at that time, but because I was young, they didn’t write in my name, like you know it is security, if you can understand me, it is an organization, a secret organization. My work was that.
[1.00:06:37]
The rented Nissan leaf’s charging cable wouldn’t work. Saam came to pick us up. We were four: the American whom I’ll call from here on, Ellen; Ellen was driving; next to her, in the passenger seat, was her closest friend in the journalism program (which I learned was made specifically for international students, an incentive program to bring in people from countries deemed acceptable by Denmark); he was from India, but didn’t mention what part (I didn’t talk to him much, as he and Ellen were chatting rapidly in inside jokes up front); during the hour drive, I mostly chatted in the backseat with the third student, who was from Rome and had a quiet disposition. I recall he recommended I read Calvino.
Finding us sort of stranded, or simply inept, beside an electric charging station, Saam exited his car and stood up tall, his stomach protruding from posture. His introduction was warm. I was the only one he hadn’t met. I thanked him, shook his hand and hopped in his car.
He whirred through the country roads. I backseat drove in my head, peeping ahead to see if there was any oncoming traffic. There wasn’t. There were only trees and grass.
[1.00:06:35]
In Ghazni, it’s a city called Ghazni, in 2014, 13, 14, that there was a lot of Taliban in this place, so I go and make myself like these religious guys, and I look like them, and then I research where they’re going, what they’re doing. These kind of people, they were out like normal, but in the evening, they were Taliban […] I only transported. […] because they should not see […] After a little bit of time, they caught my brother, so then, what I did was, I took my sisters and brought them to Ghazni city, so then my sisters go to my father, and I go to rescue my brother, and then they also catch me up. I remember it was like three months that I was inside these places, and they wanted to attain as much information from me as possible.{sighs) So what happened, so then they tortured me. They hit me. They tried to do a lot of things, so then I didn’t give the information, so one day, there was a war. I don’t know if it was two Taliban groups of if it was the government also involved in this way, so there was a possibility for me to run away, so then I run away with a lot of these guys, because some guys wanted to make us soldiers, when they capture you at a young age, they make you a soldier […]. Brainwashing. They taught me how to shoot. Different gangs. So then I ran away from them. So then I ran away to Pakistan.
[1.00:09:57]
When we arrived at the center, he signed us in as his guests. I gave the front desk guard my ID and waited. There were turnstiles for the residents. They scan their cards and enter. As guests, we had doors. The guard gave me a visitor badge. We pushed through the doors and entered the center.
There wasn’t much. Very few people were outside. It was Spring, so the emptiness was surprising. I wandered around and quickly realized that I was alone. I wasn’t sure which of the little buildings the students disappeared into. There were several buildings: a cafeteria, a gymnasium, red ones for housing, the two story white-gray ones farther off into the land plot, another fence around another white building, the housing for the sick, both physical and mental, and across a dirt path there was the Red Cross . I was unsure of what to do, so I wandered between benches by the cafeteria. Four men came out and approached me, forming a circle.
[1.00:09:58]
So then grom Pakistan, I find one of my father’s friends, and he said, You should not go back to Afganistan, because they will come after you, because you have seen a lot now. You know, because they had also at that time, some people in parliament. Some worked at the Taliban, but were also in our government. So then my father’s friend, he to me, I will send you to another country, so then he sent me to Iran, from Iran to Turkey, to Turkey to Greece, I came to Denmark. And then in 2017, I got confirmation, I got work here. I did everything, everything, as I should do. So then something happened. I was in my car. I was a taxi driver. I had to do self-defence, but they got it wrong, so they put me in jail, one year, and I did six or maybe eight months in prison, […] So then when I was released, they sent me to Kærshovedgård.
[1.00:11:31]
Whenever Saam talks about his life, he runs through it rapidly. I’m sure we all do, to an extent, because the stuff of our own lives is obvious to us. Major events, or seasons, turn into chapter headings, and from chapter headings, if someone asks, they turn to listed clauses.
I am choosing to not remedy Saam’s language in my transcription of the recording, because I think his words expose something in how we talk about ourselves. He often mentions people catching him. Catch me up is the phrase he uses most. To be caught, in the past tense would imply some sort of culpability, e.g. They caught me doing something. But the present, which is what he prefers, catch, calls to mind a ball in flight, or a game of tag, an object being stolen out from its trajectory.
I’m also welcoming my own accidents: When I pasted the following transcription of another interview with Saam, which I had typed into a tablet while he spoke, the words pasted tabulated, because I’d saved the doc on my tablet as a pdf, and something about the tabs communicated an auxiliary message:
somehow i think that in the democratic land like denmark, we should not
make the rules different, for danishpeople's different and for foreign people
it's different. for a danish guy if he goes to jail, when he gets out they help him;
if a foreign guy does something wrong, they will destroy all his lifebecause he
was not born in denmark; so that is racist and inhumane. so this i will fight as
much as i can and i will try to share; i told this thing in danish to danish people
from university, and i talk a lot, and i say the system should be for people, not
against them, when we make a system we should make it for people;
There are such clear, obvious ideas, and whenever I talked about immigration with people, the phrase that comes up is: it’s complicated. Sure, the systems and history that has created the world is it is, is complicated. But when it comes down to values, I believe that they are extremely simple. We make a system we should make it for people. This system is racist and inhumane. Reiterating these values may seem pedantic, but should be kept in mind.
The following quote is from Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen during an EU debate in July 2025, when Denmark was seated in Europe’s six-month presidency role:
“The current asylum system is broken. Right now, cynical smugglers have the power to decide who can enter Europe and who cannot. And meanwhile, we see the consequences of uncontrolled migration in our societies. We, of course, need to be in control of our own borders. Who can enter and stay in our countries, that needs to be a democratic decision. I will be very frank, people coming from outside, who committed serious crimes and do not respect our values, and way of life, I don’t believe they have a place in Europe, and they should be expelled. So we need new solutions that will lower the influx of migrants to Europe. […] We now have concrete proposals on the table. Proposals that could also pave the way for return hubs and asylum proceeding outside EU.” [i]
Cynical smugglers, what an alliteration. The softly cruel aesthetic is growing in popularity in center-left Europe, parallel to outright cruelty in the US far right. In the US/Western Europe, we have and continue to justify invading and interfering in other countries with our claims of progressiveness. Denmark maintains its ethical shroud. The US does not. As hypocritical as the shroud is, what is the stance without it, the stance of the citizen who forgoes the claim, “We are humane,” and still supports meddling/conquest? Conquest in the name of what?
I was at the beach, about a month ago, reading a book by Cesare Pavese during sunset. I had just surfed. My board was next to me. A man with ice blonde hair set his board in alignment with mine about five feet away, which was close given how few people there were at the time. He opened up a book and started reading as well. This lasted three minutes until he started speaking to me. He asked what I was reading.
“Pavese, an Italian novelist. What about you?”
“How to get rich and be happy.” He said. He has the surfer sunscreen on that made him look like a clown-ghost-murderer. “But I’m skipping to the be happy part.”
We chatted for a few minutes about our books until the topic moved onto ourselves. He worked in tech. I said I was a writer. He assumed I write novels. People always assume I write novels. I do not. “I write about detention centers,” I said.
“Immigration is tricky, because I was just living in London, and it’s getting so bad there.”
“Immigration?”
“Yeah, there were some neighborhoods where I genuinely felt unsafe.” He stressed the word unsafe to perform his surprise by the fact that he could be made to feel unsafe, being a tall white man, emphasizing his awareness of his position.
“What made you feel unsafe?”
“I mean just some of the neighborhoods are all Muslim. Like I couldn’t imagine you walking around there,” he appealed to my sense of women’s lack of safety, trying to confuse it with my affinity for women’s rights, a rhetorical move I’m familiar with. Funny enough, where I first learned about it was in an article in The Baffler about SOS Racisme’s work in France[ii], and that article brought me to SOS Racisme’s site that announced the Close the Camps event in Copenhagen, which began my whole reporting project. The article was about how the murder of a nineteen-year-old college student sparked this same propaganda in France: “Her death fit squarely into the far right’s well-trod strategy of using the language of women’s rights to demonize immigrants and bolster its case for nationalism and authoritarianism—a phenomenon that sociologist Sara R. Farris has dubbed femonationalism.”
I responded, “I’m sure I would feel the same as walking in any neighborhood with a high crime rate, if that neighborhood had high crime.”
“They have crime, but they don’t have any police enforcement, because, did you know,” he sat up more, ready to spell his intel which sounded like he was mimicking an Instagram reel, “did you know in the UK right now there are neighborhoods that practice Sharia law.”
“What do you mean law?”
“Like, if a woman is raped, the rapist is not tried, they just get away with it.”
“That happens here constantly,” I said.
“True,” he ascended ground there. We went back and forth, about legality and historical culpability, for about fifteen more minutes until maybe I won the argument or maybe he wanted me to feel that I had. He did admit that he had never thought about the issue from the vantage I offered, and I think he meant that. I do not think he had an information source outside of social media. Magazines like The Baffler, The Drift, or even The New Yorker are not readily available. Print media must be sought out. Electronic media is where he works and recreates, aside from surf, which is possibly his only activity where there is a chance of running into someone who will argue his cookie-chamber positions. I had a similar conversation in LA the other day. An older Uruguayan man approached me on the Culver Steps. I was eating a scoop of ice cream, looking at the full moon, mentally preparing for my late drive back to San Diego. I am learning that upon meeting someone, it takes me all of four minutes to end up in an immigration debate. His complaint was about Sweden. He said Sweden and all the Nordic countries are being ruined by immigrants. The man, standing above me, blocking my moon, said that in Denmark, there are neighborhoods where only practicing Muslims are allowed to enter. He acted appalled. Maybe he was appalled. I told him that that simply was not true, and that Denmark measures the percentage of non-Western ethnicity inside of neighborhoods, along with socioeconomic status, and if a neighborhood falls into a high percentage of non-Western origin and low socioeconomic status, they are subject to lease termination, building demolition, and the repurposing of its buildings.
In our discussion, I didn’t go into the minutia, but I will here. These neighborhoods were first legally named ghetto areas, then parallel societies, and now transformation areas[iii]. In February 2025, the EU considered this to be at odds with their equal treatment council directive. The EU press release about the case stated: “the ethnic criterion used by Danish legislation stigmatises the ethnic group whose structural disadvantage in their ability to integrate into Danish society was recognised, thus curtailing rather than enhancing their chances to integrate into that society.”[iv] If the Culver Steps man was right about there being Muslim-only neighborhoods, I would love to be given the address so that I can visit on my next reporting trip.
When I have interviewed Saam, he flies through his personal story, and lands on the stories of others. That is another reason why he is difficult to write about. In many follow ups, I have finally been able to get a clearer scope of his life story.
His mother was a political activist and had been fighting against the legality of child marriages and pedophilia in Panjshir. She was murdered. Someone poisoned her food. After she was murdered, Saam’s father remarried, so he and his siblings left to live in the city Ghazni. It was there that he started fighting the Taliban, only to be caught, tortured, until needing to flee in order to survive. His fleeing led him to Denmark, where he was attacked by a passenger in his taxi, and this case has landed him inside of the Danish prison-to-detention system, and he is currently waiting for his lawyer to reopen his case.
In January 2026, he asked me if I could write a short letter for his lawyer to include. I asked him if I could also include it here. He agreed so long as I change his name, which I have.
To whom it may concern,
I met Saam in May 2025, when I was visiting the Kærshovedgård detention center with a couple of international students. The electric car we’d rented had a faulty battery that died on the way there. We needed someone to pick us up. In 2025, residents at the center were permitted to drive cars, so Saam drove over without hesitation. When he introduced himself, his disposition surprised me. His warmth, his soft smile, and his gentle composure seemed antithetical to his situation. This was my first time going to a detention center, so I was thankful for his hospitality and his chattiness on the way there. He made me feel safe enough to pass through the center’s metal turnstiles. On the other side of the vertical bars, I could not help but wonder, looking into the sullen faces of guards, how Saam maintained his light.
Recently, a fire was started by the person living next door to Saam, filling Saam’s room with smoke, making the air unbreathable for weeks. From that room, when Saam speaks to me over the phone, he still radiates goodness. He speaks of women’s freedom, of children’s freedom, of freedom for all. No matter how dreary the topic at hand may be, such as possible persecution he may face, despite even that, he always returns to the idea of freedom for all.
The last time I was in Copenhagen, someone asked me if I felt like I represented my country when traveling abroad. I said no, because I am from the United States, and I am at odds with my country’s current administration. But aside from democratic dissent, I wondered, how could one individual represent an entire population? The math seemed preposterous, one person equating to an entire people’s morals, norms, and values.
When I think of Denmark, I think of Saam. I think of an equitable democracy, one concerned with the betterment of society via the betterment of the individual. I think of care and safety for women and children. I think of freedom for all. I think of freedom for Saam.
I hope you will take my testimony into consideration when examining his case, and I hope that you will consider the great service this would do for any whole of which Saam is made part.
There is something about Denmark that I simply like. There is something in the air, in the freshness, in the system that (up until Mette Frederiksen’s current platform) has maintained an aesthetic of goodness, which we seem to be losing. In our self-reflections, as we recognize hypocrisy and vice, we are opting for a complacent self-acceptance instead of a desire to change. Our values are flipping, such that we think realness is the best we have, that cruel is what we are, so we are being real/good by openly being cruel, by crushing all that is in the way of us and our gorgeous surf sunsets. We think that is how we will maximize a good life. I do not find such a life good. I find it the exact opposite.
When I was in the center and those four men approached me, for a moment, I felt unsafe. Yes, for all of two seconds, I saw myself as alone, in a woman-body. The discomfort subsided after we got through the following interaction:
One of the residents asked where I was from. I said the U.S. He responded, slowly, like he was correcting me, “U. S. A.”
I nodded. He continued, “You fucked my country.”
I have no recollection of what country he said he was from, but I do know that I said, “Yeah.” I felt guilty, and in the same moment, I felt absolved as I recognized the guilt. That’s the tumble. The hypocrisy-to-realness jolt: I must proceed knowing that I am an arbiter of evil. At least I care? Use that justification to move on. There was a pen and notebook in my hands. I started asking questions, jotting down phrases as they spoke:
Killing people in a different way
Tired of life 2 ppl just died
Red cross (sauntering)
Someone had a heart attack
Corrupt state
8rys no hope, no thing
2 years for sign in
Nobody in Europe made these rules,
not democratic
I do not know how I want anyone to feel at the end of these essays, but I’ll leave us with some words from Saam.
[2.00:02:46]
We are a nation, old, from thousands of years ago. We have a story before Christ. If I go up and come down, so this city, or this province, or valley [Panjshir Valley]. There are a lot of stories that are different, but we always fight for freedom, because of humanity, because of women’s freedom, because of children’s freedom, because of all’s freedom.
And then, of course, the Soviet Union, they put the other, the Pashtun people in power. So then, we also fought because of that, and also because the Soviet Union was not for us. It was just, they came to our country, they didn’t help us—they didn’t treat us like human beings. So our leader, that was Ahmed Shah Massoud [also referred to as The Lion of Panjshir], decided to go to war with them [Soviet-Afghan War (1979-1989)]. They fought for a long time, more than ten years. They pushed the Soviet Union out, and of course, there was help from the CIA and MI6, you know, from these countries also, from France. At that time, they called our people jihadis, but our intention was just to out the Russians from our country, and then we did it, so then, at that time, the Americans wanted to enter our country, but our leader didn’t accept that. So then September 11th happened, and our leader, they killed our leader. A journalist from northern Afghanistan. They put a bomb in his camera, and they killed our leader, then came a lot of different countries into our country. So they say, You fight, and we fight together for freedom. So they fought as long as possible, for twenty years, from 2001 to 2021. Then, what they did, is they gave the power back to the Taliban. Too many people died and too many things happened for nothing.
[2.00:05:46]
[i] EU Debates, “If We Don’t Act Now, Who Are We as Europeans? Danish PM Urgent Calls for a Stronger Europe,” uploaded by EU Debates eudebates.tv, July 2, 2025, Youtube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYR5IHh5lr0
[ii] Nathanson, Rebecca. "Sans Merci." The Baffler 78 (2025). https://thebaffler.com/salvos/sans-merci-nathanson.
[iii] Slagelse Almennyttige Boligselskab, Afdeling Schackenborgvænge, C-417/23, [2025] EU:C:2025:1017
[iv] Court of Justice of the European Union. 2025. “AG Ćapeta: The Danish legislation on public housing in transformation areas constitutes direct discrimination based on an ethnic criterion.” Press release. February 13, 2025. https://infocuria.curia.europa.eu/tabs/redirect/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&docid=295329&pageIndex=0&doclang=EN&mode=req&dir=&occ=first&part=1&cid=7865273
#2 of Camp in Jutland Column: “The Lion of Jutland,” by Sophia Acuña ©
