“Every refugee’s story opens in horror, passes through betrayal, and ends in a question.”
This sentence, spoken by a protagonist in my new novel, The Good Deed, came to me on one of my visits to the overcrowded, fetid refugee camp on the Greek island of Samos. I began going there in 2018 when I learned that the island had become a major gateway to Europe for people fleeing war or persecution in the Middle East and Africa. I wanted to see for myself how people live from day to day in such inhumane conditions, and how they manage to cope with the trauma and tragedy they left behind.
The Good Deed follows four women living in the Samos camp, three of whom are Syrian and one Sudanese. When an American tourist comes to the island to escape her own dark secret and does a “good deed,” she triggers a crisis that brings her and the refugees into conflict. In essence, the book explores the criminal inhumanity of refugee camps today, while also confronting an essential dilemma for the privileged when faced with the destitute: how to negotiate the turbulent waters between altruism and selfishness, compassion and arrogance.
These days, refugees are so commonly demonized by populist governments as burdens, parasites and criminals that it’s easy to forget that nobody chooses to become a refugee for any reason but to survive. Life as a refugee is heartbreaking, not only because one has lost one’s home, culture, community, history, love, family and place in the world, but because refugee camps and shelters so often force the young to live without schools, adults to live without work, and everyone to live without autonomy or even a choice over what will happen to them. As Susan Abulhawa, one of the authors I discuss below, wrote, “The future cannot breathe in a refugee camp. The air is too dense.”
Yet, in all seven novels I’ve picked here, the overarching theme is not misery but love, whether for a romantic partner, a parent, sibling, friend, or child. This might seem surprising, given all that refugee camps represent: war, the mercilessness of the powerful, and the brutality of xenophobia. Perhaps the refugees in these novels love so fiercely because they have lost everything else. Or perhaps they cling to love because they have learned in the most cruel of ways what really matters in life and what doesn’t. Either way, the theme of love makes all of these novels about much more than suffering. They are also about hope.
Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa
Abulhawa is one of the most celebrated Palestinian authors of today, and this book was an international bestseller when it came out in English in 2010, but these days, as the war rages on between Israel and Hamas, and the death toll in Gaza climbs to over 30,000, the novel reads as if it were being written now, in real time. Spanning the years from 1941, when Palestine was still a free country, to 2022, the novel follows a woman named Amal (which means hope) from her childhood through most of her life, tracing the fates of her family members as they are forced from their homes by the newly formed Israel in 1948 to live in camp after camp, eventually ending up in Jenin. (Now in the occupied West Bank, Jenin is a camp-turned-city that is only one square mile, and was attacked by Israel just this past November.) Overall, however, the novel is a generational saga about love.
The story opens with Dalia, Amal’s mother, when she is a wild Bedouin girl defying the rules of her people. She is brutally punished for her independence, a foreshadowing of much of the novel’s story, which traces the passing of suffering and trauma from one generation to the next. As the story moves on from Dalia’s life to her daughter’s, however, triumph and happiness also arise. This is the great strength of this book: not only is it written in poetic, gorgeous prose, with wisdom and insight, but with balance. Nobody is an angel, including Amal. Nobody is all villain, even a murderous soldier. Abulhawa allows everyone their history, Arabs and Israeli Jews alike, and everyone their flaws and virtues. In the end, however, she is making a much larger point about Palestinians: “They had endured many masters—Romans, Byzantines, Crusaders, Ottomans, British—and nationalism was inconsequential. Attachment to God, land, and family was the core of their being and that is what they defended and sought to keep.”
Gate of the Sun by Elias Khoury, translated by Humphrey Davies
Like Abulhawa, Khoury is a Palestinian author telling the story of his people and lost land through a saga of love. In witty, self-mocking prose, he weaves the strands of many people’s stories together into a colorful tapestry. As he quips, “A story is a life that didn’t happen, and a life is a story that didn’t get told.”
The premise of the novel is simple: The narrator, Dr. Khalil, sits by the bedside of his friend, mentor and hero, Yunes, who is lying in a coma. Khalil talks out all the stories of the book to his friend, including the story of Yunes himself, in the hope that his voice will bring Yunes back to consciousness. The Galilee hospital where they sit is a mostly empty, shabby building meant to cater to the Palestinian refugees living in the nearby Lebanese camp of Shatila, which one of the characters describes as “a grouping of villages piled one on top of another.” The point is to show the poverty, death, loss, homelessness, and occasional madness forced upon Palestinians by their Israeli occupiers, and the fighting spirit of those determined to love, live, and carry on in spite of it all.
A Feather on the Water by Lindsay Jayne Ashford
To turn from the wandering fates of displaced Palestinians to the same fate of Jews, Poles and others persecuted by the Nazis, British writer Lindsay Ashford has set her novel, A Feather on the Water, in a displaced persons camp in Bavaria in 1945, right after the defeat of the Nazis, when millions of people were left homeless in Europe. The story centers around three women who volunteer to work in the camp, each of whom has her own tragedy behind her, and eventually her own love story. Martha, an American, is escaping a violent husband in Brooklyn and her past as an orphan. Kitty, an Austrian Jew passing as British, is searching for her parents who disappeared in the war. And Delphine is a Frenchwoman whose husband and son were sent to the nearby Dachau concentration camp as political prisoners. Soon these women find themselves in charge of some 3,000 displaced people, all of whom are traumatized by the Nazis and awaiting an uncertain future.
So much about life in this 1945 camp is similar to refugee camps today, full of people the world doesn’t want, dehumanized by the officials who guard them, and treated as prisoners, even though they have broken no laws and been charged with no crimes. And yet, like the people I met on Samos and who populate my own novel, they are enterprising, resilient and determined, despite hunger, deprivation and unfathomable loss. Whether a Pole or a Jew in 1945 or a Syrian, Afghan or Palestinian today, loss and displacement feels much the same, as does the drive to love and survive.
The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri
Leaving the Holocaust and the founding of Israel that inform the novels above, this one takes us to Syria and the flight of nearly seven million citizens as a result of President Bashar al Assad’s brutal suppression of his people and the civil war that erupted in reaction to it in 2011. British writer Lefteri tells the tale of two such Syrians: a beekeeper named Nori and his painter wife Afra who live in Aleppo, the storied and beautiful city destroyed by Assad and Russian bombs.
After losing their house and their little son to one such bomb, the couple flees, throwing themselves on the mercy of one ruthless smuggler after another. Eventually, they end up in Moria, the notorious refugee camp on the island of Lesbos, just north of Samos. There, they struggle to adjust to the camp and the new distance between them, for Afra is now blind because of trauma and grief, while Nori is locked into himself for the same reasons, unable to express the love he feels for Afra or even the pain he feels over the loss of his son. Eventually, they travel to refugee housing in England, where they await the long, slow, irrational machinations of the asylum system to work before they can even begin to heal. The result is a tender portrait of what displacement does to two people in love as they try to cope with their new lives as strangers and regain a place in each other’s hearts.
The Wrong End of the Telescope by Rabih Alameddine
This novel, too, is set in Lesbos, but in contrast to Lefteri’s approach, Alameddine, a Lebanese American author, tells the story of the refugee camp from the point of view of a volunteer who goes there to help, rather than that of the refugees themselves.
The novel’s narrator is Mina Simpson, a Lebanese doctor who is lesbian and trans, a fact that informs much of the novel. Mina arrives on the island more absorbed in her own story—her alienation from her family because of her sexual identity, her love story with her wife, her love for her brother—than in those of the refugees. Yet, even as she keeps spinning into her own memories in a jokey, somewhat cynical voice, oddly unaffected by the suffering around her, she is soon drawn into the drama of a Syrian family just off a boat, the brave matriarch secretly ill with cancer. In the course of trying to help the woman, Mina learns how much the refugees are suffering, and how inadequate and even clueless most volunteer help is. As many a do-gooder has said, no matter what you do, it is never enough.
Silence is My Mother Tongue by Sulaiman Addonia
Turning from Syrian to African refugees, this novel, unlike those above, was written by a man who is a refugee himself. Addonia is an Eritrean, a poetic writer of extraordinary sensitivity who set this stunning novel in a Sudanese refugee camp much like the one he spent time in as a boy, which is no doubt why everyday life in the camp is told with such authentic detail. (By coincidence, one of the protagonists in The Good Deed is a Sudanese refugee who fled to an Ethiopian camp—thus borders are crossed and recrossed.) In this beautiful story, which is told mainly through the eyes of a man named Jamal, the principal character is a young woman of courage, sensuality and bravado named Saba, who, with her mute brother Hagos, struggles to adjust to the camp and find substitutes for the schooling, future and hope that were stolen from her.
Saba and Hugas are very much young people of today, gender-bending, sexually fluid and ready to flout convention. Yet they must deal with the suffocating and often oppressive culture of the camp, with its lack of privacy, virulent gossip and punishments. Indeed, when the novel opens, Jamal, who is both smitten by and yet afraid of Saba, watches as she is put on trial for a crime that isn’t revealed for some time. Later, when he sees her waiting to marry in a hand-me-down wedding dress, he says, “Everything is recycled in our camp, happiness as well as despair.” In the end, however, this is not a story of defeat, but of triumph and love, reminding us that as bleak as life can be for a refugee, it does not always have to end in tragedy.
Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck
This novel, too, centers on African refugees, but in this case, their settlement is not a camp but first a shanty town on the streets of Berlin, which is set up as a protest, and then an anthill-like building in the city that was once an old people’s home. There, refugees from all over Africa—Niger, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nigeria and more—live in stark, dorm-like conditions while awaiting either asylum or deportation.
Erpenbeck, a German author of some acclaim, writes feelingly from the point of view of a retired and widowed professor named Richard, who is at a loss over what to do with himself until he falls into a fascination with the refugees in his city and begins to visit them in their anthill of a building to give lessons in German. The story weaves between Richard’s perspective and that of the refugees themselves, bringing out Erpenbeck’s compassion and respect for her characters. Soon enough, as Richard gets to know certain men in the building, they emerge from the word “refugee” into fully realized human beings, each with his own story, needs, and claim on Richard’s conscience.
In essence, this thoughtful and elegantly-written novel is about how the privileged can actually help after all, if only with their money, shelter and sympathy; almost the opposite message to the much more cynical one in The Wrong End of the Telescope. And yet, Go, Went, Gone remains a condemnation of how the Western world, Europe in particular, pushes refugees around like so many sacks of refuse. As Erpenbeck has a character say near the end of the novel, “Where can a person go when he doesn’t know where to go?”