![]() One of the most moving sections of the novel is when Nuri obtains ‘paper and colouring pencils’ from a volunteer at a Greek refugee facility. They cannot freely express their histories they must simply produce a dispassionate, methodical ‘story’ which is ‘clear and coherent’ in its administrative use to justify remaining in the UK, without revealing emotion or personality. Fundamentally, the characters are encouraged to represent themselves by lying. (Compare this language with the title of Leonie Jackson’s 2018 book, Islamophobia in Britain: The Making of a Muslim Enemy, in which she analyses how Muslims in the UK face Islamophobic discrimination from non-Muslims who depict them as enemies of the nation). The two are pressured into performing an identity for the government which actively presents them as the opposite of prevalent stereotypes of Middle Eastern refugees as enemies of the state on the grounds of nationality or religion. This is, in her words, to prove they are not the ‘enemy’. Make sure it’s all clear and coherent and as straightforward as possible’. Think about what you are going to say to the immigration officer. Giving these to the pair, the social worker advises them to ‘get your story straight. Subsequently, when the protagonists reach the UK, oppressive paper reappears in the form of court documents, ‘a bunch of papers’ with legal jargon, provided by a social worker. At the same time, they are not permitted to use these forms of communication to express their own suffering, which remains unheard and ignored. That is, they attempt to exchange methods of communication – writing ‘pens’ and ‘SIM cards’ for electronic messages – for a different kind of paper: cash. ![]() ![]() Even though this graffiti is not written in a language either can understand (Arabic or English), it has an insidious impact on the lives of the people it vilifies.Įlsewhere in the novel, impoverished refugees passing through Greece are depicted desperately ‘trying to sell tissues or pens or SIM cards’. These walls never form the basis of a home into which the couple feel welcomed. This symbolises the ways in which anti-immigrant language is written on the very structures of European societies. On their journey through the Balkans, Afra and Nuri encounter ‘graffiti on the walls, angry slogans that couldn’t understand’. This essay will demonstrate how Lefteri’s narrative illustrates this important relationship between writing and discrimination. A current of metatextuality runs through this, in that one textual form (the novel) is used to present issues with other kinds of textuality elsewhere in its pages. The Beekeeper of Aleppo rejects these stereotypes through depictions showing how words and paper, and not just physical violence, are culpable in spreading xenophobia. They are often responsible for the dangerous dispersal of negative stereotypes based on intolerance. As the essay collection, Images of Immigrants and Refugees in Western Europe (also published in 2019) shows, the tabloid press has a major role in shaping how the general British public visualise the categories of ‘migrant’, ‘asylum seeker’, and ‘refugee’. It challenges preconceptions about these experiences by presenting an intimate vision of characters who are members of a specific, loving family before becoming simply ‘refugees’. ![]() The novel is timely in its questioning of readers’ assumptions about the lives of refugees in the modern world. Her novel, The Beekeeper of Aleppo (2019), narrates the harrowing story of a Syrian couple, Afra and Nuri, as they travel to the UK. The prose of Christy Lefteri is committed to recognising the lives of people made homeless by conflicts in the Middle East, including Cyprus and Syria. Yet, the opposite is just as true, as postcolonial theory must always acknowledge the ways in which it has been shaped by modern refugee writing. As Claire Gallien reminds us, scholarship should ‘reiterate the specific contribution of postcolonial theory to the study of refugee literature’ (721). Postcolonial studies and refugee writing are two fields with significant points of mutual influence. ![]()
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