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Chapter 12
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Beekeeper of Aleppo, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Home, Displacement, and the Refugee Experience
Grief, Memory, and Coping Mechanisms
Hope vs. Delusion
The Trauma of War
Dehumanization vs. Connection
Summary
Analysis
Nuri wakes on the beach, half-submerged in water, to someone checking his pulse. The people who found him call an ambulance, and he is taken to a hospital. It is three days before he is well enough to talk; he was suffering from hypothermia when they found him. The doctors ask if he was trying to kill himself or if he experiences lapses in his memory. They order a brain scan. Nuri has a lullaby stuck in his head that his mother used to sing. He hums it and thinks he hears other patients picking it up too.
Nuri’s visions—seemingly a symptom of the trauma he is repressing—have finally put him in real physical danger in the present. Nuri no longer has the option of ignoring the ways his trauma is affecting his life, exemplifying the need for psychological care of refugees in addition to physical care. That his mother’s lullaby seems to travel among the other patients suggest that he is closer to connection than he realizes, itself a form of healing and comfort.
Themes
The next day, the Moroccan man comes to visit Nuri in the hospital. He tells Nuri to rest now and that Afra thought he was dead. The man stays with Nuri until visiting hours are over, which annoys him at first but then brings him peace. The next day, the Moroccan man picks him up and brings clothes. Before he is released, the doctor tells Nuri his scan was clear, but she believes he is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Nuri promises to take her advice and see a general practitioner.
Something about Hazim’s kindness seems to finally break through Nuri’s shell, as he allows himself to be comforted by the man’s presence. The doctor confirms what the reader has long suspected—Nuri has PTSD—and while the official diagnosis does not remove the weight from his shoulders, it pushes him closer toward acknowledging his pain and beginning to heal.
Themes
Nuri and the Moroccan man take the bus to the bed and breakfast. Afra is waiting in the courtyard. When Nuri arrives, she tells him she can see shadows and light and a bit of color now. Afra rolls the marble between her fingers as she tells Nuri how scared she was, how he seems to have forgotten Mustafa and the bees, as if he is lost or a different person. She tells him to close his eyes and picture the bees. Nuri obeys, imagining the fields in Aleppo and those Mustafa described, but he says nothing.
The return of Afra’s sight represents the progress she has been making with her own trauma and grief; by acknowledging it, she begins to overcome and heal from it. Just as Nuri worried at the beginning that Afra was disappearing, now she worries that he is so lost in grief that he has changed beyond all recognition. She invokes Mustafa and the bees as a way to call him back to himself and revive his hope. Though Nuri can visualize this hope, it leaves him empty and speechless, indicating that there will not be an easy fix.
Themes
Afra pleads with Nuri to tell her what is wrong. He asks why she has Mohammed’s marble. Afra sighs and tells him the marble belonged to Sami; she does not know who Mohammed is. For a while, Nuri tries to jog her memory by describing how Mohammed fell off the boat; according to Afra, that was a little girl. Nuri gradually realizes Mohammed was never real. Afra said nothing because she thought Nuri needed the boy. She asks if Nuri remembers her taking Sami’s marble from their house the day the men came and broke everything. Nuri leaves her in the courtyard, unsure of what he remembers anymore.
Though Nuri sidesteps Afra’s question, he still ends up answering it, as if some part of him knew all along that Mohammed was at the heart of his trauma. This reveal has been heavily foreshadowed, but it still devastates Nuri to face Mohammed’s nonexistence and all that it implies. Though Afra is literally blind and sometimes forgets that her home has been destroyed, Nuri’s figurative blindness to his own trauma has similarly conjured an alternate reality by hallucinating a young boy in place of the son he lost. Feeling that he can no longer trust his memory, Nuri retreats one last time into himself to reckon with what is left.
Themes
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Nuri wakes in the bedroom and sees a gold key on the floor. Once again, he uses it in the door at the end of the corridor and finds himself on the hill overlooking Aleppo. The city is made of glass. He sees a child running and chases after him. It is Mohammed, but when Nuri catches up to him the boy transforms into Sami. Nuri realizes he has always been Sami, dressed in the outfit he was wearing the day he died. Sami holds the marble in his hand and gives Nuri another key. Sami tells Nuri this is the key he gave him to the secret house that wouldn’t break.
The recurrence of the key indicates that these hallucinations have become Nuri’s safe place, even though they allowed him to avoid his trauma. Reentering them now, he confronts that trauma by at last acknowledging that Sami is the one he has been obliquely searching for all this time. Knowing he would never find him in time to save him, Nuri created Mohammed as a coping mechanism and began chasing him instead. That the city is made of glass feels significant; it is a fragile mirage Nuri has created to protect himself from pain.
Themes
Nuri remembers how afraid Sami was of the bombs, how he comforted his son by giving him an old key from the apiaries so that he could believe in a safe place. Sami asks if they will fall in the water or if Allah will help them cross the sea, the same conversation Nuri imagined having with Mohammed in Istanbul. Sami wonders if Nuri remembers the boys by the river too, how Sami wasn’t with them because he was wearing black and was safe. Finally, Sami asks if he can play with his friends in the garden one more time before they leave. Nuri assures him that he can.
The key that Nuri gives to Sami is an example of a necessary delusion, an imaginary story designed to give Sami hope in the existence of a safe place. The novel has made frequent references to the ways hope and delusion can overlap, and this moment of fatherly protection seems to be that idea’s point of origin. Nuri flashes through his most painful memories of Sami in this scene, finally facing them and feeling all the grief he has been repressing. In this way, he begins to accept what has happened to him and imagine a life beyond it.
Themes
In a flashback, Nuri and Afra prepare to leave Greece. Afra is unrecognizable in her disguise. Despite all he has sacrificed, Nuri feels sick at the thought of leaving Sami further behind. Mr. Fotakis has hired a driver to take them to the airport. He makes them coffee while Nuri imagines killing him slowly, knowing that he cannot do so without jeopardizing their escape. They leave Mr. Fotakis behind and receive instructions from their driver on how to procure their tickets and dump their passports when they arrive in England. The driver tells them they are lucky. Nuri wants to contradict him, to tell him their journey has stolen Afra’s soul.
Afra’s disguise signifies how much she has changed internally because of the trauma she has endured. Even now, on the cusp of escape, Nuri longs for home, showing how grief can linger. His resentment of his own dependence on Mr. Fotakis highlights again the way refugees are dehumanized by those who would take advantage of them. The driver’s assertion that Nuri and Afra are lucky is almost comical; for Nuri, the cost of escape suddenly seems too dear.
Themes
At the airport, the driver leads Nuri to the men’s bathroom. He waits until the room is empty before knocking on the door three times. A man emerges and hands him tickets and passports. Nuri and Afra silently make their way through security and to their gate. While waiting, five police officers escort another family out of the gate area, presumably other refugees who have been discovered. Nuri and Afra board the plane and it takes off, bound for England, Mustafa, and—Afra hopes aloud—safety.
The narrative intentionally highlights the sad reality that not all refugees are able to make it to places where they feel safe. In trying to reach safety, the family in the airport become criminals in the eyes of the authorities, who undoubtedly refuse to acknowledge what desperate circumstances led them to break the law. In this moment, Nuri and Afra are, indeed, the lucky ones; knowing the extent of their trauma, this is a very sobering realization.
Themes
