Nowhere at ease: Listening to Syrian refugee trauma in Christy Lefteri’s The Beekeeper of Aleppo (2019)

Abstract

The ongoing Syrian civil war has inflicted wounds on the minds and bodies of countless Syrians, and it continues to influence the contemporary global agenda. The purpose of this article is to examine how refugee trauma is depicted at the individual level, and how Syrian refugees attempt to survive it, in Christy Lefteri’s The Beekeeper of Aleppo (2019). This best-selling novel tells a story of the effects of war by following the lives of a bereaved Syrian couple as they make their way through Turkey and Greece to the United Kingdom. We show how Lefteri’s fictionalised portraits of traumatised refugees coincide with the academic literature on trauma. At the same time, we question the applicability of Eurocentric trauma theory to their cases. We argue that refugee trauma presents itself in distinctive ways and embodies a dynamic texture as a result of refugees’ vulnerability and marginalisation in broader society, which in turn prompts them to employ various coping mechanisms in their struggle for survival.