In June last year, I was in an interview on Zoom for an entry role in a marketing company here in Newcastle. At the start of the interview, I and the other interviewees were asked to introduce ourselves — where we are from, what we’ve done in the past, what we’re doing at the moment… you know, the routine question that kick-starts every interview.
Like me, most of the interviewees that day were immigrants and foreigners. There were two Indian girls, students at Northumbria University. A guy said he was from Romania, I think. Then there was this British mom who needed a job to occupy herself with now that all her children are in university. And there was a Ukrainian lady whose story, or rather, how she ended her introduction, struck me. She had worked in one company her whole life and had risen to the post of head of a department in the company. ‘I am here to start over in England,’ she said when ending her introduction ‘And I think this job will be a perfect way to start.’
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Her story got to me. I am starting a new life here in England, too, but my story is different. I had left home by choice in search of pastures green because I thought England promises a better future. She, on the other hand, was uprooted from where she called home by force. And apart from her job, what else has she left behind, I wondered. I don’t know her story. Like all immigrants forced away from their homes because of war, I wonder how they are embracing new beginnings in a place where the language is strange to their ears and the food is new to their tongue. In the Beekeeper of Aleppo, Christy Lefteri might have given me a glimpse of what her story, and that of others like her, might be.
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The Beekeeper of Aleppo follows the story of Nuri and Afra, two couples who were fleeing the civil war in Syria to England. Before the war, their life was not perfect, but they were happy. They loved each other. Afra, a painter, has a way of seeing truths in landscapes. She makes them come alive as in a dream, scenic and beautiful. Nuri had refused to take over his family’s business to become a beekeeper with his cousin, Mustafa. He loved his job. They had a son. But the war swallowed him, just like it did Mustafa’s son.
The writer draws us into the story from the first paragraph. I am scared of my wife’s eyes. She can’t see out and no one can see in. Look, they are like stones, grey stones, sea stones. I imagine that what scares the narrator isn’t just his wife’s loss of vision, but how he is unable to penetrate her inner world. They had lost their son, and she had refused to cry. Instead, she shut her eyes from the world. Is she trying to unsee what she’s seen? Or is the act of shutting her eyes a form of rebellion, a decision to stop relating to a world that’s taken her son from her?
One thing that makes The Beekeeper of Aleppo such a delicate read is how the writer avoided embroiling the story with the politics behind the Syrian civil war. She instead narrowed her gaze on the human story of those affected by the war. Through her intricately woven characters and unsentimental narrative style, Lefteri takes us on a journey with the couple. Narrated by Nuri, we saw the joy and beauty of what their life was like before the war when they were untouched by the unspeakable sorrow of so great a loss. Then we follow them on their dangerous journey through different refugee camps in Turkey and Greece.
The refugee camps are a world of their own. They are a place of trauma and despair. There, we see how stripped of the dignity that home accords people, they could become something less than human. Afra discovered we are less than human in our times of greatest love and greatest fear. We would find that to be true. For how, then, can we explain a loving husband and a caring father helping to kill a man? Yet in these camps, we can make friends; We can find healing. We can find the best of our humanity in this place where all hope and all journeys end. And the worse of humanity, too. Afra began to draw again, but because she shut her eyes to the world, her paintings had uneven lines.
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When a bomb dropped in their backyard where their son, Sami, was playing, Afra had gone blind as she cradled his corpse. But although she was locked in this darkness, Nuri found that she wasn't lost and wandering in the world of her mind. Instead, it was he. Trauma takes on different forms. It makes us do different things to hold on to a life that once was. Sometimes, as Nuri came to know, it makes us create powerful illusions so that we won’t get lost in the darkness.
We can rebuild the demolished walls after the war has ended. How do we preach hope to people whose future died in their hands? How do you make whole, minds made sick by the horrors of war?
In The Beekeeper of Aleppo, we see the resilience of the human spirit. After they have scaled through their perilous journey and arrived in England where they are waiting to know if they will be granted asylum, Nuri once saw a wingless bee while wandering in the garden. It won’t make it long without his wings, he told a Moroccan man, another refugee. But months later, he would come to find the wingless be making a life for itself in the garden, surviving against the odds stacked against it.
Like the bee, Nuri and Afra will find the will to live again. Illusions gave way. Eyes that were once shut began to open, granting the artist the ability to see the beauty of the world, drawing even lines again. And lost friends found each other again, as they all embraced hope and the promise of a new life
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Copacetic.