The Garden

Written by Meghan Ferrari

Red Deer Press

978-0-88995-568-4

109 pp.

Ages 12+

October 2018

Often, he imagines his heart as a stereo, and his pain a volume knob that his memories control. The volume varies, depending on the day, the time, and the trigger. When the trigger is swift and unexpected, it feels as though the bass has been cranked, and a pain that almost blinds him reverberates throughout his entire body. (pg. 26)

While we might assume, incorrectly, that the path from war-torn Syria through refugee camp and immigration to Canada would be in a positive direction, that journey is rife with trauma, loss and changes that may shadow any positives and create stresses in the new experiences. Such is fifteen-year-old Elias's story, told in alternating chapters of pre- and post-immigration to Canada.

Elias lives with his little brother Moussa and his parents, one a doctor and the other a translator, in Syria. He goes to school, plays football and enjoys spending time with his little brother who loves to draw with his crayons. Then the civil war begins and schools are closed because of missile attacks, food is in short supply and humanitarian donations are being targeted. But Elias is most vigilant about keeping little Moussa and himself safe from rebels seeking to capture children for training and arming for war. In a hole dug in their mother's garden, beneath a piece of plywood, the two boys hide, with Elias making up games, like hide and seek or a role play of a jasmine seed planted in hope of growing, to avoid sharing the circumstances of their situation with his very young brother. The garden becomes a refuge for the boys as it has always been for their mother.

Alternating with Elias's reminiscences of life in Syria are his experiences as a new immigrant, wishful of returning to his homeland to help rebuild it while he is being bullied by boys who know nothing of his struggles. Though he is reluctant to make friends, soon two classmates, Sullivan, a small boy often victimized by bullies, and Liling, a girl whose own family sought asylum in Canada, come to support him without needing to know his back story.

But Elias is struggling with guilt, for choices he made and makes, and for circumstances he deems unfair after he and his family seek shelter in a refugee camp in Lebanon. Coupled with the trauma of things no young person should experience, Elias agonizes over how to look forward when it might mean forgetting those he left behind.

The Garden may be Meghan Ferrari's first book but she draws on her expertise in Social Justice Education to tell a convincing tale about one teen's experiences in the Syrian War, in a Lebanese refugee camp and as a new immigrant to Canada. Elias's disquieting realities, living in fear, with memories of the past and with his prospects for the future, are palpable, drenched in grief and trauma.

The people here might have fled the war, but they weren't free. They were imprisoned in this camp while they anxiously awaited verdicts on asylum claims, news of private sponsorships, or the end of the war. As with most prisons, there was solitary confinement. In this one, it existed in the mind–each inmate trapped in memories of loved ones: either dead, or left behind, or gone ahead on the harrowing journey across the Mediterranean Sea. (pg. 90)

Fortunately for Elias, a garden was and is his salvation, taking his story from one of war and loss, and culture shock and bullying, to the beginnings of healing, and Meghan Ferrari makes sure to let us observe Elias on his odyssey.

Sadia

Written by Colleen Nelson

Dundurn

978-1-45974-029-7

240 pp.

Ages 12+

February 2018

As I passed the classroom door, I caught sight of myself in the small pane of glass.  Was it the hijab that Mariam was running away from?  Seeing me must remind her of who she really was, who she'd always be.  I wished she'd realize that taking off her hijab wasn't going to change that. (pg. 82)

For Sadia's friend Mariam, de-jabbing i.e., removal of her hijab when at school and changing into more revealing clothes improper for a Muslim girl are the means to fit in and become recognized by athletic classmate Josh.  While Sadia would never contemplate doing the same, she tries to understand her friend's need to shed her headscarf and appreciate her perspective on being a Muslim girl in a Winnipeg high school.  And perspective is everything she and her classmates realize after their teacher—and also basketball coach—Mr. Letner gives them an assignment based on the premise of "If you give a kid a camera."  While Sadia and her classmates begin to take photos of their lives, they reveal much about what they experience at home and at school including family challenges, hidden passions and friendships lost and found.

While she undertakes her project, which evolves to include a passion project to help newly-arrived refugees, Sadia grapples with Mariam's de-jabbing and drive to fit in which becomes more complicated after Sadia is chosen for the school's All City Pre-Season Co-ed Basketball Team on which Josh plays.  Sadia is thrilled to be playing the game that her brother taught her and accepts the accommodations she must make to play–changing in private, covering up far more than her teammates, and wearing her hijab–but being on the team causes more friction with Mariam, especially after Josh's attentions are directed towards Sadia.  It all comes to a climax at the tournament when Sadia's hijab becomes a mobilizing force for family, friends, teammates and strangers.

Sadia addresses Sadia's honest acceptance of her Muslim culture but also how she finds the means to meld it with her love for basketball, rather than abandon one passion for another.  Sadia's self-acceptance is mature and extraordinary and she would be an impressive role model for Muslim girls trying to find their own way.  Without being deceptive or disingenuous, Sadia helps new Muslim girl Amira prepare for her new life in Canada and show Mariam that it is possible to be a practising Muslim and have fun.  Just like the photography assignment Mr. Letner gives his class, it is all about point of view.

Author Colleen Nelson continues to ramp up her writing, developing characters with whom all readers can identify.  From those dealing with bullying, guilt and grief (The Fall, 2013), or abandonment and discrimination (250 Hours, 2015), or with sexual abuse and drug addiction (Finding Hope, 2016) and poverty and violence (Blood Brothers, 2017), Colleen Nelson pens real characters whose decisions propel them into life-changing situations.  For the first time, Colleen Nelson has given Muslim girls a role model, a girl who recognizes that she has been accorded much attention and discrimination because of how others perceive her hijab, often incorrectly, but who appreciates what being a Muslim means and accepts those cultural traditions as the basis for whom she is.  Sadia does not struggle with wearing the hijab, as does her friend Mariam, but when thrust into the limelight where wearing the hijab might prevent her from playing basketball, she considers with great thought and insight what it means to continue wearing it.  Still she stays true to herself, empowered, not restricted, by her hijab or being Muslim.  For her, de-jabbing would be negating her true self, just as not playing basketball would.  In Sadia, being yourself is better than having it all and being Muslim is in itself empowering.

🏀🏀🏀🏀🏀🏀

Check back tomorrow for Colleen Nelson's guest blog post titled "5 Things You Didn't Know about Sadia" and upcoming blog tour stops at Lost in a Great Book, MG Book Village and Dundurn Press.

My Beautiful Birds

Written and illustrated by Suzanne Del Rizzo

Pajama Press

978-1-77278-012-3

32 pp.

Ages 6-10

March 2017

In My Beautiful Birds, author-illustrator Suzanne Del Rizzo offers a poignant story of a Syrian child refugee traumatized by leaving his cherished pigeons behind.  It is a tale of sorrow and suffering and promise, and beautifully rendered in Suzanne Del Rizzo’s distinctive art.

From My Beautiful Birds 

by Suzanne Del Rizzo

Sami is a little boy who delights in caring for his pet pigeons.  When the family must escape their war-torn home and trek endless days to the Za'atari refugee camp, Sami worries for his birds’ safety, though he filled their bowls with food and saw them escape into the skies above. As life unfolds tenuously at the camp, first with shelter and then with the restoration of household routines and school, Sami worries and longs for his birds.

I wish it were like it used to be, just me and my pigeons up on our rooftop with the wind and the boundless sky.   Happy.  Free. (pg. 13)

Even a painting activity that starts out well enough, with Sami painting his “beautiful birds, knowing each wispy feather by heart” (pg. 15)

From My Beautiful Birds

by Suzanne Del Rizzo

becomes a disaster of blackened paint, not unlike the darkness in the sky and worries in the little boy’s heart.

Now, when the smoky nightmares boom, I watch the clouds. Sometimes, fluffy cloud-pigeons take shape.
Spiraling.
Soaring.
Sharing the sky. (pg. 19)

From My Beautiful Birds

by Suzanne Del Rizzo

Everything changes when four birds–a canary, a dove, a rose finch and a pigeon–reach out to Sami, painting “the sky with promise, and the hope of peace.” (pg. 22) The boy in the blue hoodie and yellow boots reaches right back, and finds a way to look to a tomorrow where he can help others.

The sadness and trauma in this little boy’s life is so palpable, from the family’s departure to their adjustment to the refugee camp and to the despondency that permeates Sami’s new life.  Through use of colour and the texture of her art–here polymer clay with acrylics–Suzanne Del Rizzo balances the shadows of war and trauma with the bright colours of youthful exuberance and pastels of hope for a future.  There’s the tumultuous skies and the ordinary days, and the anger of loss with the chirpiness of birds and children at play.  I know the excellence of her art, complex in the depth of detail and its ability to evoke emotions.  But Suzanne Del Rizzo has demonstrated a new depth to her writing.  Perhaps it’s the tragic circumstances of the story but Suzanne Del Rizzo has put heart and hope into her words, giving breath to a staggering situation, suffusing it with some degree of optimism where there is so little.  My Beautiful Birds provides a promise that all the the darkness from that Syrian skyline of smoke is behind Sami and remains open to a bright sky of birds and lightness, the landscape of his future.

From My Beautiful Birds 

by Suzanne Del Rizzo

Stepping Stones: A Refugee Family’s Journey

by Margriet Ruurs

Artwork by Nizar Ali Badr

Orca Book Publishers

978-1-459814905

28 pp.

All ages

October 2016

Stepping Stones: A Refugee Family’s Journey is a very important book on so many fronts.  At face value, it recounts in memorable artwork and text the plight of refugees from Syria, Nizar Ali Badr’s home, or elsewhere, now and forever.  But beyond bringing understanding to the refugee crisis, Stepping Stones is a book of encouragement to those arriving in Canada –the book is a dual-language edition in both English and Arabic–and to those who can contribute to the cause.

This is the story told from the perspective of a young girl, Rama, who recounts life in Syria, from the rooster crowing her family (Mama, Papa, grandfather Jedo and brother Sami) awake, and a breakfast of bread, yogurt and tomatoes, and memories of play and work, school and freedom.

But that was then.And this is now. (pg. 10)

From Stepping Stones: A Refugee Family's Journey 

by Margriet Ruurs, art by Nizar Ali Badr

But their freedom is an illusion, and after war comes, there is insufficient food and the bombings, and people begin to leave.

People began to leave our village.
First a trickle, then a stream,
across dusty fields under a burning sun,
a stream driven by hope. (pg. 14)

So too begins Rama’s family exodus, walking until reaching the sea, whereupon they “set sail on the waves of hope and prayer” (pg. 20), arriving on land where the gruelling trek begins again, until they arrive at their future, welcomed by neighbours who communicate with smiles and the sharing of clothes and food and more.

The lucky ones, they call us.
New memories, new hopes,
     new dreams.
Not of war,
but of peace. (pg. 25)

All told in the artistry of Nizar Ali Badr’s stunning arrangements of oddly-shaped and widely-coloured stones, Stepping Stones could be the story of any refugee family: a good life bombarded by war, a demanding and emotional flight from danger, and the arrival to a new life.  Though for each family the path is a unique arrangement of steps, its bearing is always the same: safety and opportunity.  Stepping Stones: A Refugee Family’s Journey reveals this route with empathy and assurance.

Margriet Ruurs provides an extensive foreward that explains the background of Stepping Stones coming to publication.  She accounts her herculean efforts to contact artist Nizar Ali Badr after viewing his wondrous artwork of stones, about convincing him and Orca Book Publishers to take on the project, and arranging for a portion of the proceeds from the sale of the books to be donated to resettlement agencies.  The task may have been as arduous as that of Sisyphus but the ultimate story of Stepping Stones: A Refugee Family’s Journey, both within and externally, culminates with promise and purpose, the hallmarks of a good life.

From Stepping Stones: A Refugee Family's Journey 

by Margriet Ruurs, art by Nizar Ali Badr