June 22, 2022

“O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave

O’er the land of the free

And the home of the brave?”

“The Star-Spangled Banner” – National Anthem of The United States

The United States of America is a country well-known as a champion of courage, freedom, peace, and prosperity. In particular, it is a country that has a reputation for global leadership, liberal international order, and advocacy for human rights. The U.S. “tends to be the first or most important country for identifying or framing international issues, taking action to address those issues,” and “setting an example for other countries to follow” (CRS).

The mission of the U.S. forces in Afghanistan was in accordance with its foreign policy to propagate the same values of freedom and human rights across the globe. The U.S. administration was determined to thwart the tyrannical Taliban regime in Afghanistan. The American soldiers spent 20 long years in warfare, risking their lives to uphold this noble dream. In August 2021, when the U.S. forces evacuated Afghanistan, giving way to the Taliban to regain control of the country, the U.S. government remained concerned for the welfare of Afghan civilians and promised its support for a peaceful establishment of a civilian government in Afghanistan. They also promised America as a safe haven for the Afghans who were targeted by the Taliban.

In the book Sparks like Stars, a shaggy-haired American man asks, “Don’t you think we’ve done enough to clean up these third world countries?… We took the Taliban out for them. They should be responsible for fixing their own problems now” (279). As I contemplated these statements, my mind raced to grasp the deep irony embedded in them. The questions rampant in my brain were: Isn’t it obvious that the U.S. is mostly at fault for the desperate state of affairs currently in Afghanistan? Shouldn’t the U.S. be held accountable for the loss of thousands of civilian lives with its invasion of Afghanistan? Their participation in the Afghanistan War should not be classified as a heroic act out of altruism, but rather as a show of military power and interference in the sovereignty of another country.

Afghanistan is a multi-ethnic country located along the trade routes bridging Asia to Europe and the Middle East. It has long been a clashing point of other empires that seek to win the country over for its geographical economic gains (“Afghanistan”). The country itself has never been able to unite against invasive forces; however, the independent resilience of each Afghan made up for it. In 1992, the Mujahideen differed on the future of Afghanistan. Eventually, the Taliban rose to power in 1995 with a promise to establish peace after decades of unrest (Desk). They claimed to uphold traditional Islamic values, but they propagated extreme interpretations of Islamic theology that suited their authority and executed them on the Afghan population, like barring women from their education rights (Ibrahim).  

In 2000, the U.S. demanded that Bin Laden be handed over for trial against terrorist acts, but the Taliban refused. Following the Taliban’s continued refusal to extradite Bin Laden after he was accused of initiating the 9/11 attack in 2001, the U.S. and British forces launched attacks against Afghanistan. In 2017, the U.S. military loosened its airstrike rules, resulting in an increase in civilian casualties. Over the four years of Trump’s administration, the number of innocent civilians killed by America’s airstrikes increased by 330%. As of April 2021, 71,000 of the 241,000 killed by all parties in Afghanistan were civilians (“Afghan Civilians”). Innocent Afghan civilians were caught in the crossfire as these forces claimed to bomb the military bases of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. Ironically, most of the Western leaders and public justified the civilian casualties in consideration of the noble intentions of American soldiers to erase terrorism. 

The propaganda that the West is a saviour to the East has been rather systematic in the global narrative, As Clay says on page 278, “History books are sanitized, abbreviated versions of the story. One guy assumes power, another loses it. But the soldiers and civilians are living this war and suffering the losses.” Western media portray the U.S. as a heroic country and a self-proclaimed leader to establish peace and prosperity in foreign countries. But how do we then reconcile this claim against the 90% of the 5000 Afghan refugees who were refused refugee status in America without apparent reason (“U.S. Is Rejecting over 90% of Afghans Seeking to Enter the Country on Humanitarian Grounds”)? What about the ‘justified’ American airstrike that killed 10 innocent people on August 29, 2021, seven of whom were young children (Savage)? 

In the summer of 2021, 76,000 Afghan refugees fleeing from the Taliban’s control were accepted by the U.S., only to be living in poverty (NBCNews). For months, these refugees stood in long lines for food and clothing, and they had little privacy in the camps. They were provided with minimal assistance; local resettlement agencies offered assistance for housing and basic necessities that lasted for barely three months. This support included an insufficient amount of $1,200 per person as federal ‘welcome money’ which was only able to cover limited daily essentials while the jobless evacuees were left to find ways to pay for rent (Mansoor). It also took at least six months for the Afghan refugees to benefit from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, a federal program once known as “food stamps”. Due to the lack of education, the resettled Afghans are also deprived of a clear path toward U.S. citizenship, a status that would solve many of their financial issues (NBCNews). 

The U.S. has a long list of countries it has corrupted for its own political favour: Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq are just a few examples in recent history. The U.S. gets involved in such countries for political power and other gains; it’s never been entirely about justice or welfare. It is time that powerful countries like the U.S. be held responsible for the blood they have continued to shed in third-world countries. “People say ‘third world’ and think it just means countries without the internet and paved roads. But ‘third world’ is Cold War terminology. NATO countries are the first world and the Communist bloc is the second world. The third world was where those two clashed. So the mess in Afghanistan is actually a first and second world problem” (278). The U.S. has to take accountability for the losses they inflicted upon the Afghans and stop pulling the ‘heroic’ card each time of war. The U.S. has to provide more Afghan refugees with the safe haven they were promised; the American administration has to truly live up to the anthem they very proudly sing by granting the brave Afghan civilians a free life in the country of that star-spangled banner.

Trauma is defined as the never-ending emotional response to a distressing event (“Trauma”). They are wounds “that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds” (Hamilton). However, trauma is a term now used in casual conversation to describe minuscule inconveniences one experiences, devaluing the pain real victims of trauma, such as refugees, undergo constantly. “We all have pain. And we all look for ways to make the pain go away” (Alexie), but the pain refugees face as a result of trauma manifests itself in various similar ways, affecting their daily lives. The authors of the novels The Beekeeper of Aleppo and Sparks Like Stars explore these effects of trauma on refugees using similar literary elements.

In her book The Beekeeper of Aleppo, Christy Lefteri uses a non-linear timeline to show how trauma causes Nuri to live through his past repeatedly as if a part of him is still stuck there. Every chapter that occurs in Nuri’s present links to an incident in his past; for instance, Nuri is imagining Mohammed singing a lullaby in England when he is suddenly pulled to an occasion in Greece where he also hears Mohammed calling him (Lefteri 183-184). The constant revisiting of his past is a result of traumatic events overwhelming his body and mind, leaving a lasting mark on his mood, relationships, and sense of self (Juby et al.). The back-and-forth timeline demonstrates how Nuri develops PTSD, as he ruminates happier times as well as the things he lost. This rumination drags him deeper into his depression and leads him to almost commit suicide. Furthermore, victims of trauma also feel stuck in their past because they feel a sentimental attachment to someone or something from their past. Nuri holds on to his wife Afra, who he feels he lost when he failed to protect her in Greece. He blames himself for Afra’s rape, recognizing that “something of [him] would always be left behind, trapped within the dank walls of this apartment” (292) because he made the mistake of misplacing the key to his room and chose not to atone to it for the greater good. Additionally, ruminating serves as a form of avoidance, a major defence mechanism developed alongside PTSD. Nuri chooses to think about his past because he wants to avoid the helplessness he feels in his present hopeless conditions. The author’s objective behind the non-linear timeline is to show how PTSD develops in Nuri, as it explains how trauma causes refugees to constantly revisit their past because they feel guilty about their unamended mistakes and to avoid the helplessness of the present.

Alternatively, in her novel Sparks Like Stars, Nadia Hashimi also explores the long-lasting effects of childhood trauma on Sitara by fast-forwarding 30 years in her life. Firstly, the author narrates the major events that occurred in Sitara’s life between 1978 and 2008 through her present to keep readers informed of her complete refugee story while also highlighting how she struggles with rumination. The trauma of witnessing her family get murdered by soldiers they trusted to protect them develops into trust issues within Sitara, making her hypervigilant and doubtful despite three decades passing since the traumatic incident. For instance, when she books a hotel room in one of the safe areas in Afghanistan, Sitara is grateful that her adoptive mother, Antonia, does not notice her “rituals—[her] careful study of the hotel floor map on the back of the door, [her] testing of the windows to be sure they open, and [her] evaluation of the space beneath the beds to see how many people it will accommodate” (Hashimi 368). The 30-year time skip emphasizes how Sitara’s childhood trauma develops into PTSD, stretching into her adulthood. Sitara wants to “move forward… but [she] keep[s] looking back” (324), refusing therapy to avoid sensitive topics, treating the “L word” —love— like “a nuclear bomb” (273) because of the betrayals she faced, leaving places “to stop [her]self from sliding headlong into the past” (291), and stopping “[her]self from thinking about [her] family because [she is] afraid of spiralling into grief that has no bottom” (405-406). Even as an adult, she represses her emotions because she is still afraid of “taking a chance that might break [her] all over again” (285). The betrayals of her past cause her to struggle with maintaining a strong relationship with her boyfriend Adam and mother Antonia, for she recognizes that if she wants “any relationship to work, [she is] going to have to figure out how to be more open” (281). Even after three decades of living with her childhood trauma, Sitara still struggles to cope with it healthily as an adult, as shown through Hashimi’s deliberate 30-year fast-forward in the book. The author’s unique manipulation of the timeline setting stirs empathy for refugees within the readers, as they understand how trauma from when Sitara was ten years old manifests into mental disorders and affects her daily life as a 40-year-old. 

To further explore how refugees cope, both authors use motifs to demonstrate how refugees become fixated on a certain object that marks their trauma. In The Beekeeper of Aleppo, Nuri holds on to a key that signifies his hopes for a new life with his loved ones, for the key Mr. Fotakis gives him finally grants him and Afra with the hopes of leaving Greece for England. In his hallucinations, the key opens the door to a safe haven—“a secret house that didn’t break” (Lefteri 289). Nuri misplacing the key causes Mr. Fotakis to rape Afra, filling Nuri with crushing guilt until he asks Afra to forgive him for losing it. Until then, Nuri unconsciously conditions himself to associate his trauma of living through war, his son’s death, and his wife’s rape with the key as it symbolizes his hope in a happy life that he feels he lost when he misplaced the key. 

Similarly, Sitara holds on to the ring she found from the Ai-Khanoum treasures buried under the rubble because it symbolizes the betrayals her family faced that left her orphaned. The story behind her unearthing the ring the day her family was killed is the one tale that she “never wholly told, not to the woman who helped [her] flee a country on fire, not to the woman who raised [her] as an American, and not to the man [she] almost loved” (Hashimi 1). Sitara is often found with the ring in her hand when she is alone, thinking about the lies and mistruths she had been fed throughout her life. She had “worn this ring like a shipwrecked person wears a life preserver” (306) because it allows her to feel her dead family’s presence without grieving for them. Over the years, Sitara feels the ring’s “weight grow in [her] hands… so heavy now that [she] wonder[s] how [she] managed to lift [her] hand with it on as a child” (306). After thirty years of being fixated on the ring, Sitara wishes to turn the ring over to a museum so she can properly move on from the betrayal that killed her family. Once the ring is out of her possession, Sitara “feels like [she] can have so much more back” (446), explaining that she “used to only think of those last moments” (446) of her family’s lives when she wore the ring but can now express grief for them without losing herself in a dark abyss. Similar to how Nuri holds on to the key signifying the loss of his hopes, Sitara conditions herself to associate her trauma of witnessing her family be murdered, being threatened by a trusted soldier, and being abused by her temporary caretakers Janet and Everett with a ring because it reminds her of the betrayal of the soldiers that lead to her lifelong suffering.

In a nutshell, both pieces of refugee literature use the literary elements of setting and motif to portray the many ways trauma impacts refugees. As Blythe Baird writes in her book If My Body Could Speak, “To live in the body of a survivor is to never be able to leave the scene of the crime,” for trauma continues to haunt refugees throughout their lives. The authors Nadia Hashimi and Christy Lefteri seek to evoke empathy within their readers for refugees by changing the chronology of events and using motifs to explore the development of PTSD in refugees, its consequences on their daily lives, and the healing required to overcome obstacles presented by their past. The common population fails to understand the pain refugees experience fleeing their homeplace, so Lefteri and Hashimi’s unique implementation of literary elements in their novels serves to open their readers’ eyes to a world of suffering that lies just kilometres away.