Belgium

Belgium is a brief transit point in Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s account, but Brussels airport becomes a place of suspended possibility. In January 2000, on his way back to Mauritania after twelve years abroad, he paused there between flights and considered whether the country might become a new home. The moment matters because he came close to changing course just before the journey that would lead into detention and interrogation.

Transit and Setting

Slahi travelled from Montreal to Brussels on a night flight and was due to continue to Dakar the following afternoon. He arrived in the morning tired and worn out, collected his luggage, and fell asleep on a bench in the international area, using his bag as a pillow. After sleeping for an hour or two, he looked for a toilet where he could wash and a place to pray.

He describes the airport as small, neat, and clean, with restaurants, duty-free shops, telephone booths, internet computers, a mosque, a church, a synagogue, and a consultation bureau for atheists. He visited the different houses of worship and was impressed by the range of spaces available there. The details make the airport more than a point on a travel itinerary: for a short time, it offered a calm, plural setting in which another future seemed imaginable.

A Considered Alternative

In Brussels, Slahi thought about asking for asylum. He believed he could manage in Belgium because he spoke the language and had adequate qualifications to find work in the heart of Europe. He had already visited Brussels and liked its multicultural life and the city’s many faces. His thought was tentative, but concrete: Belgium seemed like somewhere he might want to live.

The possibility remained close at hand. Slahi describes the border as only inches away and reflects that, had he crossed it, he would never have written his book. Instead, he performed the ritual washing in the airport mosque, prayed, read the Quran, and fell asleep there. His onward journey to Dakar—and then toward Mauritania—continued.

Narrative Significance

Belgium’s significance lies in this brief fork in the route, not in any detention there. The airport scene sets the ordinary circumstances of Slahi’s return against the far-reaching consequences that followed: a tired traveller, a place to pray, and a possible asylum destination all appear before the journey becomes an extended passage through detention and interrogation. The moment also gives the larger account a precise point of contingency. Slahi’s later ordeal had not yet begun, and another choice, made at an airport border, might have taken his life beyond the course recorded in the book.