The social worker says she is here to help us. Her name is Lucy Fisher and she seems impressed that I can speak English so well. I tell her about my job in Syria, about the bees and the colonies, but she doesn’t really hear me, I can tell. She is preoccupied with the papers in front of her.
For anyone not already familiar, this is a novel about refugees. The main characters are Syrians forced to feel their homeland and the only life they’ve ever known because of the seemingly never-ending violence and warfare wreaking havoc on the region. That havoc, of course, is not limited to the Middle East. Those who constantly complain and live trapped in a bubble of worry and fright over the prospect of Muslim refugees should perhaps reconsider supporting every decision by western powers to start a new conflict in that part of the world. Refugees don’t generally flee from happy places. Maybe the conditions which the narrator and his wife considered happy do not jibe with western views of such an existence, but perhaps it is time to start considering that this is a not a state of affairs worth going to war over. This story of refugees is also a story of what it would be like for anyone ripped from their happy life due to the decision-making policies of those people with no tangible stake in the outcome.
Dear Nuri,
Last week I attended a dinner held for refugees and there I met a man and a woman. The woman works with refugees in a nearby district, helping new arrivals to fit in. The man is a local beekeeper. I told them both that I had an idea to teach beekeeping to refugees and jobseekers. They were both very impressed! They are helping me to set it up with some local funding. I hope that soon I will be giving workshops to volunteers.
Mustafa is Nuri’s cousin who has resettled in Yorkshire. He writes this letter to his cousin and the possibilities inherent within become the engine driving the refugee dream of Nuri and his wife. Their Syrian life has been destroyed and there is certainly no end in sight to the civil strife tearing their homeland to pieces. It is surely not coincidence that beekeeping is essential to this story in which the countryside of England is positioned as a dreamworld away from the horrific violence. Remember that the canonical biography of Sherlock Holmes has him retiring from the world of urban violence to the countryside to live out his remaining years raising bees. Of course, Sherlock heads south while Yorkshire is to the north. But there is something very British and not-so-much Middle Eastern Islam about bees. It brings the story home.
“I was an artist.”
The other half of this refugee partnership is Nuri’s wife, Afra. She is the story of the war refugee made palpable in a way that is not as easy to deny and ignore. The framework of her verb tense here is a reference to the fact that the war back in Syrian has not just taken her home, but also her vision. And since she made her living and found her contentment in being an artist, the war has taken everything from her that is not necessarily true of her husband. The narrative commences upon an image of his wife’s eyes as described by Nuri and becomes an instantaneous portrait of their bond together. The loss of sight and the disruption of vision will also serve to situate Afra as the metaphorical centerpiece of the story.
