Lefteri says in her author’s note that the book was inspired by her volunteer work in a refugee camp in Athens, and Nuri’s story rings with authenticity, from the vast, impersonal cruelties of war to the tiny kindnesses that help people survive it. Along the way, he also becomes the guardian of Mohammed, a lost boy about the same age as Sami. The war leaves Nuri and Afra no choice but to leave, but her blindness and emotional trauma mean that he must be her caretaker as well as grappling with the bewildering navigation to another country. In Aleppo, Afra was an artist Nuri was the titular beekeeper, a job he loved, in business with his cousin and dearest friend, Mustafa. Nuri narrates the book its chapters alternate gracefully among the golden prewar past, the struggle to gain legal refugee status in England in the present, and the journey in between, a long nightmare of chaotically crowded refugee camps, life-threatening sea crossings, and smugglers eager to exploit them. The novel follows Nuri and Afra Ibrahim as they escape from Aleppo and make the perilous journey to Britain after their son, Sami, dies. Politics are barely mentioned in the book, though-when war has destroyed your home and livelihood, blinded your wife and killed your young son, the reasons for that war lose their meaning. This novel’s characters are fleeing a different war, the current, devastating civil war in Syria. Lefteri ( A Watermelon, a Fish and a Bible, 2011) is the child of refugees, raised in London after her parents fled Cyprus in the 1970s. Accessed 28 January 2022.The human stories behind news images of Syrian war refugees emerge in a novel both touching and terrifying. “.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2020. This explains Lefteri’s motivation to create realistic depictions of exile to demonstrate its painful consequences for families then and now, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.Ĭite this: Nunziata, Daniele. There are important resonances between Lefteri’s sympathy for Syrian ‘children’ and ‘families’ and her own ‘growing up’ in a family in which the traumas of displacement have never gone away. The novel and ‘the stories of these children, these families’ (Afterword, The Beekeeper of Aleppo) were compelled by her desperation to represent the widespread suffering she encountered, and to overcome her own parents’ inability to talk about being refugees: ‘It was like a rumbling we could feel growing up… What stops people from talking about their traumas?’ When she returned to the UK from volunteering, Lefteri had ‘hoped that the horror of what I had seen and heard would fade, but it didn’t. Meanwhile, The Beekeeper of Aleppo conveys the story of a married couple who have been forced to leave Syria, based on real accounts the author heard as a UNICEF volunteer. Her novels present implicit links between the experiences of displacement in Syria today and in neighbouring Cyprus a mere four decades earlier, stressing that we need to learn the lessons of the past to improve the present.Ī Watermelon, a Fish and a Bible is very loosely inspired by the lives of Lefteri’s refugee parents. Lefteri uses captivating prose to provide necessary insights into the desperate lives of refugees in the Mediterranean. I’m recommending this book to everyone I care about. It’s intelligent, thoughtful, and relevant, and also accessible. This novel speaks to so much that is happening in the world today. Her active engagement with voluntary work, alongside the dedication of her first novel to her refugee mother and the second to her father, showcase the important ways in which personal, lived testimonies of trauma inform her fiction. She has previously taught English as a second language, and volunteered for UNICEF in Greece. Lefteri is currently a lecturer in Creative Writing at Brunel University. Her work has won praise from other writers who represent British diasporic experiences, including Daljit Nagra and Benjamin Zephaniah, who both view The Beekeeper of Aleppo as an urgent telling of the lives of refugees enduring the humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean. The latter became a Sunday Times bestseller and the winner of the 2020 Aspen Words Literary Prize. Raised in London, she released her first novel, A Watermelon, a Fish and a Bible, in 2010, and her second, The Beekeeper of Aleppo, in 2019. Christy Lefteri was born in 1980 to refugees who escaped Cyprus following the partition of 1974.
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