Essay Questions

Why is Nuri afraid of his wife’s eyes?

The opening line of this novel is one of the most startling and unforgettable in recent fiction: “I am scared of my wife’s eyes.” He will reiterate this fear almost word for word just a page or two later. In the interim, Nuri’s first-person narration provides us with uncontestable visual imagery that explains this fear—at least to a degree. He has not always been possessed by such terror looking into the eyes of his wife, Aphra. That is because her blindness is a recent occurrence and the stimulation for it is not mere biological degeneration. At one point, Nuri confesses that their “blank emptiness” is what he finds so chilling. And that is the key to answering the question above: it is not the loss of her ability to peer out, but rather his ability to peer into them. She has become an inscrutable mystery to a man with whom she has shared so much of her life.

Is the island of Farmakonisi an actual location?

Nuri informs the reader at one point during their refugee long haul that they were left ashore on what he describes as a “tiny military island” called Farmakonisi. His description goes on to suggest that it suffers from a bitterly wet sort of cold. In addition, by the time they are dropped off there, a shipping container filled with people has already been waiting an indeterminate amount of time. In fact, Farmakonisi is an actual island located in the Aegean Sea, just of the coast of Greece. Nuri’s description of it as “tiny” is incredibly appropriate: is measures a mere 1.48 square miles. In 2001, it managed to boast a population of 74 according to census records, but just ten years later that figure had dwindled to just ten hardy souls. The island was chosen as a significant point on the refugee evacuation route in the novel not merely because of the colorful aspects of it diminutive state, however. In 2015, Farmakonisi was the site of a horrific tragedy in which thirty-four refugees—including eleven children and four infants—drowned after two boats capsized near the coastline of the island.

What is the significance of the bees?

Nuri’s narrative is not just one of the travails of refugee escape from a dangerous homeland. It is also about the terrors of witnessing war and the serenity of keeping bees. At one point when describing the later, he mingles philosophy with the utilitarian realities of being good at the work you do. Becoming a beekeeper is more than a simple job, it becomes a higher calling for Nuri; something that it could never become for Mustafa who intuitively understands that Nuri possesses the sensitivity necessary to do the job as more than a job. And then, ultimately, and even with a certain subtle insinuation, he reveals how the bees are significant to not just his story, but the entire story of humanity: “bees work together.” Even when it comes to personal sacrifice for the greater good of the hive, a drone is willing to be killed by the worker bees in order that there will be enough sustenance for the hive to continue.