Refugee – LisaAnnReads

I received a digital ARC of Fruit of the Drunken Tree from Doubleday on NetGalley. I’m grateful to Doubleday for their generosity with this powerful and timely read. All opinions are my own.

Synopsis
Set in the 1990s, Fruit of the Drunken Tree follows the Santiago family, presented primarily through the eyes of the youngest daughter, Chula, and their new maid from the guerilla-controlled slums, Petrona. Chula is immediately fascinated with Petrona while Petrona finds herself pulled in too many directions at once—forced to leave her own family to care for another, all while falling in love for the first time. As the conflict in Columbia between the paramilitary and the guerillas escalates, with Pablo Escobar at the center, Chula and Petrona are forced headlong into a crisis that will permanently alter both their lives.

Narrator
Though Chula is older when the book opens, the majority of the book takes place in her early childhood. My knowledge of world history is woefully full of holes and there’s a giant one where Columbia is on the map. This created a bit of a problem for me since my understanding of what was happening was limited to Chula’s understanding and her understanding was limited by her age and her parents’ sheltering her as much as they could from what was going on. This is where I shamefully admit that Wikipedia aided in my reading. Are there better and more authoritative sources of information out there? Yes. Did I have them immediately available on my phone while I was reading? No. So Wikipedia it was. Chula discusses Pablo Escobar (heard of him), Galan (nope), and the fight between the military, paramilitary, and guerillas (nope x 3) as if the reader knows what is going on with these people—this is where Wikipedia was helpful, to give me a basic primer on who was aligned with whom and why. If you also don’t know the basics of Escobar, Galan, and the struggle between those three groups, a quick bit of research to familiarize yourself with Columbia in the 90s will probably be helpful.

Chula isn’t an unreliable narrator, or at least, not deliberately so. She is, however, naïve and, therefore, limited. For example, she stays within the gated compound guarded by security guards—and yet because she wasn’t preoccupied by how this limited her life, I wasn’t thinking about the reason for this set-up being to prevent kidnappings. Chula presents her life at face value and it is easy to be lulled into the false feeling of safety that she generally feels. The action and events as the book approached its climax seemed all the more shocking when they happened—as Chula didn’t see them coming, neither did I. It wasn’t until the end of the book when I had a firmer grasp on what was happening that earlier events and statements in the narrative took on a deeper meaning. In many ways, this naivety was welcome—experiencing the book as Chula experienced her life was a new experience for me as a reader. Because I didn’t know where the narrative was going, I was sucked in and everything felt fresh.

Class
Fruit of the Drunken Tree is steeped in class issues that are highlighted by Chula’s ignorance of her place within Columbian society and her mother’s low-stakes attempts at being the upper-class savior of Petrona. Chula lives a charmed life in Bogota behind the fences of her upper-class neighborhood, though like most young children doesn’t realize it. Indeed, there is a much richer woman who lives nearby whom Chula and her friends call “The Oligarch” without irony and without appreciation for their own deeply privileged place within Columbian society. When her family hires a new maid, Petrona, Chula comes to care deeply about her and sees her as a friend, in the way of children who think it is possible for the thirteen year-old maid to be the best friend of the seven year-old girl she waits upon.

Even Chula’s mother who grew up in the slums herself places herself in the role of savior, forcing a fancy First Communion upon Petrona, yet failing to act as savior when the stakes are higher. As Americans, we so often want to put ourselves into this role—we want to save the less fortunate by giving them the things that cost very little or nothing to us. Yet when we are in the position to do more, to actually put action behind what we say we believe, we don’t—these acts will cost us more than we are comfortable giving up. It is in the moments when our comfort outweighs our compassion that our privilege is perhaps most highlighted.

Flight Pick: Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions and the current refugee crisis at our southern border

The children who cross Mexico and arrive at the U.S. border are not “immigrants,” not “illegals,” not merely “undocumented minors.” Those children are refugees of a war, and, as such, they should all have the right to asylum. But not all of them have it.

Every now and then I recommend a second book that I think should be read alongside another—a “book flight” as Anne Bogel calls them. While it focuses on the children coming from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala rather than Columbia, Tell Me How It Ends is a book that is a must-read. It adds context to Fruit of the Drunken Tree—it turns Rojas Contreras’s tale of a single family’s immigration story ten-plus years ago into a microcosm of what these children are fleeing now. Reading increases empathy and Luiselli’s essay is the bridge that connects Fruit of the Drunken Tree to the refugee crisis on our southern border. If I were Chula or Petrona and my best chance at continuing to live were to risk life and limb crossing Mexico in the hands of a coyote and present myself at the United States border, I would take it. Rojas Contreras’s story leaves no doubt as to what waited Chula’s family or Petrona in Bogota. Chula was lucky to have a family with connections to an American company that could help her come the “right” way—but right and wrong ways be damned. When your choice is death or the American border, you chose the border.

Tell Me How It Ends makes clear that the flood of humanity presenting itself at our border (because let’s be clear—the vast majority are presenting themselves at the border as refugees, not sneaking over and trying not to get caught) are the fruit of the tree the United States planted in Central American countries many years ago. We funded the military groups to counter what was seen as a leftist/Communist threat. Our money fueled the wars between the military, guerillas, and paramilitaries. We remain the largest consumer of Columbia’s cocaine—American money that continues to send large sums of money to keep these conflicts going. This is the violence these children are fleeing. We planted this poisonous tree and we continue to water it. These children and the chaos they are feeling are the fruit of our tree.

Recommended
At a time when white men still tell most of our history, Fruit of the Drunken Tree (though fiction), is a highlight of female storytelling. Here are the girls and women forced to be brave in the chaos and conflict of 1990s Columbia. Fruit is a story of the many forms of female resilience. This book was a highlight of my reading so far this year and will likely earn a place on my Best of 2018 reading list at the end of the year.

Notes
Published: July 31, 2018 by Doubleday (@doubledaybooks)
Author: Ingrid Rojas Contreras (@i_rojascontreras)
Date read: August 12, 2018
Rating: 5 stars

Flight: Tell Me How It Ends
Published: April 4, 2017 by Coffee House Press (@coffeehousepress)
Author: Valeria Luiselli
Date read: August 15, 2018
Rating: 5 stars

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They only see us when we do something they don’t want us to do, Mahmoud realized. The thought hit him like a lightning bolt. When they stayed where they were supposed to be—in the ruins of Aleppo or behind the fences of a refugee camp—people could forget about them….

Mahmoud’s first instinct was to disappear below decks. To be invisible. Being invisible in Syria had kept him alive. But now Mahmoud began to wonder if being invisible in Europe might be the death of him and his family. If no one saw them, no one could help them. And maybe the world needed to see what was really happening here.

A calm came over Lito, as though he’d come to some sort of understanding, some decision. “I see it now, Chabela. All of it. The past, the present, the future. All my life, I kept waiting for things to get better. For the bright promise of mañana. But a funny thing happened while I was waiting for the world to change, Chabela: It didn’t. Because I didn’t change it. I’m not going to make the same mistake twice.

Synopsis
According to UNICEF, almost fifty million children are uprooted from their homes, with 28 million fleeing conflict in places like Syria, Yemen, and South Sudan. Refugee tells the story of one such child—Mahmoud, feeling Aleppo after his home is destroyed—interspersed with the story of a Jewish child, Josef, on the MS St. Louis in 1939 and Isabel, a Cuban child fleeing for Miami in 1994. Refugee puts faces on the millions of children who, throughout the modern era, have been forced to flee their homes and seek refuge in lands not their own.

Briefly, if you are unfamiliar—the MS St. Louis was a ship containing over six hundred mostly-German, mostly-Jewish passengers fleeing a fledgling Nazi Germany. Though the ticketholders held valid Cuban visas, by the time the ship arrived, the visas had been used as a political tool and were cancelled, through no fault of the ship’s occupants. Cuba and the United States ultimately turned them away. The ship’s passengers wound up unloading in Belgium, France, and the UK. Many of the Jews aboard the ship were later rounded up as Germany invaded France and Belgium, with many perishing in concentration camps. Josef was a fictional passenger on this ship.

For many years in the modern era, particularly in the nineties, many Cubans fled their home countries in search of a better life—a life with enough food and education for their children. The “Wet Foot, Dry Foot” rule, in place until very recently, essentially held that if a Cuban was picked up at sea (with wet feet), he or she would be returned to Cuba via Guantanamo Bay. If the refugee made it to the coast of Miami—had “dry feet” when caught, he or should would be granted amnesty. Thousands upon thousands fled, with an untold (large) number drowning on the way. Isabel is one such child, fleeing Cuba in a ramshackle boat held together with string and chewing gum.

The current Syrian refugee crisis is one of the largest refugee crises of the modern era, with over thirteen million Syrians displaced, including five million outside of the country. Mahmoud tells the story of one such boy whose family chose to take the risk and leave, walking, swimming, and nearly drowning their way through Turkey, Macedonia, Hungary, Austria, and Germany.

Everything is Connected
As is common with a book like this, you begin to realize that the stories are connected—both in theme as well as with tangential characters. I won’t say more about the characters because I don’t want to spoil that part. From reading, however, I kept having a line from Ecclesiastes come back to me—“There is nothing new under the sun.” The current Syrian refugee crisis is nothing the world has not seen before. The question is whether we will behave better this time—when the modern MS St. Louis comes to our shorts, teeming with Syrian refugees, will we do better this time? Or will we send them back to almost certain death? I am afraid, with the current political climate and the most recent iteration of the travel ban, that we are headed to a repeat of history. History does not look kindly upon those who turned away the MS St. Louis, and I do not see how it will look kindly upon us for these failures.

Middle Grade Books
I typically struggle a bit with middle-grade books since they don’t tend to hold my attention. Thematically, I usually enjoy books with a bit more struggle than is appropriate for the typical middle-grade book. Language and writing are also vital for a book to hold my interest. Middle grade can thus rarely fully capture me—which is fine; these books aren’t really made for me.

With that said, I had no such struggles with Refugee. Though the language stayed on-grade for middle-grade readers, it held my attention and I fairly well devoured this one. The day after I finished, I recommended it to a coworker as a book he could read with his son, since it would capture both of their interests. This is considered a young YA or mature Middle-Grade book and would thematically be a bit much for the younger end of the YA spectrum.

Accuracy
Gratz includes a lengthy author’s note with his sources and explanations of how he developed certain characters (For example, Josef’s father is an amalgam of two actual passengers on the MS St. Louis). While I am not usually a fan of white authors telling the stories of people of color (as Mahmoud and Isabel are), Gratz seems to have taken pains to ensure accuracy and to be culturally respectful.

Additional Recommended Reading
I read this book for the Diverse Books Club books this month. Other books in the “flight” of books included Inside Out & Back Again and Music of the Ghosts. I loved the first and the review is here. I’m starting the second this week and can’t wait to dive in—it is set in Cambodia when people were fleeing the Khmer Rouge. I don’t know enough about the time in history and reading accurate historical fiction is one of my favorite ways to begin to learn more.

I also highly recommend Exit West—It is still my favorite book of the year so far and would have received a glowing, five-star review on this blog if I hadn’t read it several months before actually starting to write these reviews. Though the country is unnamed, the crisis so closely mirrors Syria as to essentially clearly be about the current crisis. Exit West raises interesting scenarios—in Refugee and in history, the US was able to turn away the MS St. Louis. Countries like the US are still able to turn away current Syrian refugees, while countries within the contiguous EU are currently trying to control the flood. In Exit West, doors appear to take refugees across borders. By going through a door, they are suddenly in London, San Francisco, etc. Exit West imagines a world were we have to live with and address refugees who cannot be kept out.

Notes
Published July 25, 2017 by Scholastic Press (@scholasticinc)
Author: Alan Gratz
Date read: October 12, 2017
Rating: 5 Stars, in the running for top five books of the year

Tag: Refugee

Review: Fruit of the Drunken Tree with Flight Pick: Tell Me How It Ends

Review: Refugee by Alan Gratz