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.