The Human Library pops up in libraries all over the world to give you the opportunity to borrow and ‘read’ an actual, living person. The goal of the initiative is to combat prejudice by allowing readers a peek into someone else’s life story.

‘Have you read any other books today?’ Aygan asks. By books he means the volunteer speakers that visitors can borrow for a ‘read’. Aygan is a book as well, and he refers to himself as such. His cover reads: Syrian Refugee.

I picked his title from a big whiteboard covered with notes reading ‘HIV Man,’ ‘Gay African Refugee,’ ‘OCD,’ ‘HIV Woman,’ ‘Visually Impaired,’ ‘Tattoo’d,’ and so on. The whiteboard is divided into two segments: ‘available’ and ‘checked-out’. All day long visitors crowd the board, eager for their book of choice to become available again.

Spurred by the ongoing media coverage of the Syrian refugees in my country, I pick Aygan from the board as soon as he becomes avaible for check-out. While I wait for one of the volunteer hosts to bring me to him, I am asked to fill in a questionaire concerning my prejudices.

‘I feel uncomfortable around refugees: 1. not at all; 2. not especially; 3. a little; 4. very much so.’

I answer around twenty of such questions, giving thought to wether I would ‘feel awkward having a refugee as a neigbor,’ or ‘having a refugee as a partner,’ and so on.

Every book has a corresponding questionaire, and after ‘reading’ the book, the visitor is asked to answer the same questions again, in the hopes that their prejudices — if any — have changed for the better.

After filling in the questionaire, I am brought to my book. He sits at a little table amid shelves lined with that old schoold type of books, more paper in nature, but he does not look as if he feels in any way out of place. His wide smile welcomes me like a freshly cracked hardback-cover.

‘I hope you’ll enjoy reading me,’ he says. It is the first time I shake a book’s hand.

Readers choose an available book from the board

Aygan proves a fascinating read. He came to Europe three years ago, after the threat of violence in his native Aleppo became too immediate for him to stick around any longer. He left a double major in English literature and business among the rubble of the war, along with family and friends about whom he worries every day.

‘But never mind that,’ he says, ‘I am here today to combat prejudice.’

Because prejudice, Aygan finds, makes it impossible for Syrians in Europe to integrate and pick up their lives and cover the wounds of war with some semblence of normality. They are refused jobs and have trouble socializing in their adoptive countries.

‘After all the terror attacks, people fear us.’ Aygan says, ‘I even cut off my beard to look less like what a common European may imagine an extremist looks like.’

By becoming a book for a day, Aygan hopes that his story will inspire Europeans to at least become aware of their prejudices.

‘What most people know about Syrian refugees they learn from the media. But the media is only concerned with wars, riots in camps and terrorist plots — the negative things. When that’s all you see on the television, you may believe normal Syrians don’t exist.’

And so Aygan likes to talk about normal things. The sugar-fueled feasts they used to have in Syria; his enrollment in a college in the Netherlands; his dreams and aspirations.

‘I want people to know we are humans first and foremost. ‘Syrian refugee’ is just a label attached to us, and it’s the label that carries the prejudice, not the individual.’

Aygan readily encapsulates what the Human Library is all about. Founded in Copenhagen in the spring of 2000, by Ronni Abergel and his brother Dany and colleagues Asma Mouna and Christoffer Erichsen, the aim of the experiment was to see if people were willing to confront their own prejudices and delve beyond the ‘cover’ of a stereotype, getting to know the individual underneath.

The pioneers of the Human Library — just idealistic youths at the time — worried people may not get the idea; and even if they did, would they actually want their prejudices confronted? Those worries were soon dispelled however, according to the website of the Human Library.

Given that there was a total of 75 books available, the conclusion was that with so many different people together in a rather small space for a long time, then they are bound to start reading each other if no readers come. And so it was to become. Before the first reader could take out a book, the talks where already going on extensively and the feeling of something very special was in the air. The policeman sitting there speaking with the graffiti writer. The politician in discussions with the youth activist and the football fan in a deep chat with the feminist. It was a win-win situation and has been ever since.

Being here today makes it clear how popular the concept really is. People crowd the ground-floor of the library, where the event is being held. Some stand tentatively to the side, watching the spectacle unfold, while others line up in front of the white-board, eager for their chance to pick a book and take part in this curious experience.

It is just the ‘confront your prejudice part’ that I find myself skeptical of at first.

The idea of the Human Library is of course for the reader to pick out a ‘book’ they know very little about and gain some insight into a life experience that is very much unlike their own, giving thought to people outside their own circle and ideally dispelling some prejudices they may have held. But interviewing some visitors leads me to believe that even during an event like this people have little interest in transcending the comfort of their own social sphere.

For instance, I ask a girl why she chose to ‘read’ the African refugee.

‘Because my parents were African refugees as well,’ she says, ‘and I wanted to talk about any mutual experiences.’

And two girls with heavy book-totes, courtesy of the university around the corner, have been waiting for half an hour for the ‘anxiety’ book to become available again. Why?

‘It’s exam period, and we’re both dealing with some serious anxiety,’ one of the girls tells me, plucking at her tote with restless fingers.

Two rather gay-looking young men giggle and eye the book labeled ‘Gay African Refugee’ and I cannot help but wonder if they expect to crack open an exotic romance novel instead of a likely gritty piece of non-fiction, but that may be my own prejudice kicking in.

Is this instance of the Human Library in danger of becoming an echo-chamber of familiar minds instead of the bubble-bursting event it is meant to be?

Then, with a symbolic quality that is so heavy-handed I would not dare make it up, a blind lady walks up to the whiteboard, swiping her stick as she goes.

‘No, I don’t want the ‘Visually Impared,’ she says to a volunteer before he can open his mouth, ‘Just choose anyone that’s available right now, I don’t care. I’m blind, you see? I’m happy to read any book at all.’

During the following hours I see her line up again and again. Walking of with an African refugee; a tattoo’d biker; a transgender; a leather clad lesbian SM aficionada; and so on, until she has checked out almost every book in the library. The voracious blind reader.

Out of all the people here, I realize she cannot possibly be the only on with such an indiscrimante apetite for a taste of the lives of others. And I become aware of my own prejudice concerning today’s visitors, formed assumptively after just a handful of interviews.

When I see Aygan again in the coffee corner, I sneak in another ‘read’ and he further disspells my skepticism.

‘I’ve been read six more times so far,’ he says, ‘Of course, three of those people didn’t hold much negative prejudices towards Syrian refugees at all, and just wanted to express their sympathy, their goodwill, I think. And one girl was Syrian-born herself; wanted to talk about the state of the country some of her family still lives in. While I appreciate these readers very much, they’re not the reason I’m here today. It’s the last two readers who I’ll remember most. They admitted to their prejudice, had never met a refugee — or a muslim for that matter — and asked the questions they couldn’t or didn’t dare to ask elsewhere. Like, why did I not stay and fight for my country? Do I think unveiled women are whores? Would I like to see Sharia law installed in Europe? Do I intend to live on government hand-outs? I recognized these questions as fears that exist often among people whose only source of information is sensationalist media. Of course they are going to feel threatened! But that is why an initiative like the Human Library is so important. They met me, an actual flesh and blood Syrian refugee, and when their ‘reading’ was through, both of them just laughed at their old preconceptions. One of them actually invited me over to his village to come and try a ‘real Dutch’ dinner. I have never been out in the countryside before!

Aygan’s story underlines how powerful a tool the Human Library is in the fight against prejudice. And the insistent, almost silly analog to books becomes suddenly clear in its function:

A book is non-threatening. It does not judge or confront your opinion. The content of a book lies dorment between the covers until the reader chooses to activate it by stringing together the words, giving meaning to the otherwise arbitrary symbols.

And that is why they say the pen is mightier than the sword, why a book can topple any construct, because it gives the reader the illusion of having all the power.

Other people, television speakers, they come at you and your beliefs from the outside like an army at the gates, wailing at your defenses. But a book is like a Trojan horse that you willingly cart inside your walls.

Because a book’s content relies on you reading it for it to even exist, you imagine it to be utterly harmless, until an emotional story or a profound notion changes you and your beliefs from the inside — and you likely do not even notice it happening.

This silent quality of books is cunningly applied to the lingo of the Human Library. Think about it, would the event be even half as popular if the books were called ‘confronters,’ and the visitors were expected to ‘discuss’ instead of read? Would people dare to ask the same difficult and awkward questions they do now that they are encouraged to view the person sitting across them as a harmless book?

If anything, the Human Library is a testament to the power of words.

At the end of the day, the readers more than doubled the expected turn-out, and the books are exhausted. Many of them had more than a dozen twenty-minute conversations today. Some of which had without a doubt been emotionally taxing.

As the books and the readers mingle in the library’s cafeteria it becomes impossible to tell who played what role today. Two men are talking over lattes, does one of them have HIV or anxiety? Is the Arab guy chatting up the girl near the coffee-machine a student or a refugee? Is she a lesbian?

Only their conversational partners can tell. Talking, laughing, they cracked open the cover and are enjoying the story inside.

(If you want to know more about the Human Library or even set one up yourself, visit their website.)