100 pages • 3 hours read
Atia AbawiA Land of Permanent Goodbyes
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
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BetaPart 2, Chapters 15-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2, Chapter 15 Summary
Destiny introduces Alexia, a young American woman volunteering on the Greek island of Lesvos. One day, Alexia and Tareq will meet: “She’d been waiting for him in Europe, as she worked on the shores of Greece. Neither knew how much a stranger would change both of their lives once the universe brought them together” (109).
Alexia is there to help refugees as they come ashore from Turkey. Originally from Connecticut, she first came to Greece for a simple vacation. Once she saw some of the refugees there, however, she wanted to help. She asked her parents to help pay for her rented room in Greece, so she could defer a semester of university and stay to help refugees. Now, she spends her days helping to bring boats into shore and providing aid (food, clothing, first aid) to the refugees as they arrive.
Alexia is having her morning coffee before starting her shift. She talks to Annis, an older Greek woman who works at the coffee shop. Annis provides the perspective of the people of Lesvos, who are at the front lines of the refugee crisis. They have little to give themselves, as Greece is recovering from an economic crisis, but most try to help. Some families house refugees in their spare rooms, for example. Local fisherman take their boats out not to fish but to look for people swimming in the water—often finding dead bodies instead.
Annis does not mind the refugees—but she is critical of some of the aid organization and workers who have come to Greece. Some of the charitable organizations raise millions of dollars but do very little, she points out, labeling the sham a “money game” (115). She also criticizes volunteers who spend more time “taking selfies with refugees” than helping, calling this “war tourism” (115). She concludes that, “Where there is suffering, there are people who want to exploit it. In ways that have nothing to do with humanity and everything to do with money” (118).
Part 2, Chapter 16 Summary
Alexia goes to Saint Panteleimon cemetery, visiting the graves of refugees who died trying to make it to Greece. She speaks with the cemetery caretaker and asks him about a word she sees written on many of the tombstones, “Agnostos.” It means “unknown” (119). There are many such unknown graves. The caretaker tells Alexia that such graves have been created for decades. Before Syrians, Afghans were doing the same trip. He adds that the cemetery is running out of space.
Alexia then goes to start her volunteer shift. She is one of the people on the shore, helping to drag rafts in and providing aid to the newly arrived refugees. On this day, a raft arrives with a pregnant woman who is in labor. The woman delivers her baby right there on the beach, while Alexia and other volunteers hold up blankets around her to give her some privacy. Everyone is overjoyed at this unexpected miracle of life, which is a brief moment of happiness in an otherwise dark place.
Alexia notices a man nearby taking photos of the refugees arriving on the beach. He’s not a volunteer, and nobody seems to know him. She goes to approach him, but he rushes away without speaking to her.
Part 2, Chapters 15-16 Analysis
Although Part 2 focuses solely on Alexia, Destiny makes it clear that her path will cross with Tareq’s. This eliminates some of the suspense surrounding Tareq’s still-to-come narrative, as the reader can be confident that the young man will arrive in Greece. Alexia’s character gives a face to the figure of the “helper,” a motif that appears in various instances throughout the book—for example, in the rescuer Ahmed, who saves Tareq’s life after the bombing, or Rami, the coffee-shop owner in Istanbul who feeds Musa and Tareq even though they have no money to pay him.
Alexia’s character also uniquely shows how the roles of “refugee” and “helper” can intersect. She identifies with the Afghan and Syrian refugees who come to Lesvos on a personal level, as her own father, Ilia, was a Jewish refugee to the US from Russia, and her mother, Maria, is a descendent of immigrants from Greece. In this way, her character is a testament to an important theme: the universal nature of trauma.
The people of Lesvos also reflect this theme. Chapter 15 provides context surrounding the refugee crisis from the Greek perspective. Greece had an economic downturn shortly before the crisis began, so one might think the people there would be reluctant to welcome refugees, who would require aid and resources. The people are largely sympathetic, however, as their parents and grandparents were refugees due to the Asia Minor Catastrophe of the 1920s, when Anatolian Greeks were forced out of Turkey, and Muslims were forced out of Greece.
Anis’s character makes clear how the impact of a refugee crisis spreads, emphasizing another way in which trauma is universal—that is, it’s difficult to contain. Europeans might want to see the war in Syria as being limited to that region and not affecting them, hoping that the “invisible borders” (as described by Destiny in Chapter 10) will keep the conflict and its repercussions away from them. The fact is, the refugee crisis will impact them, too. Annis describes how a friend of hers, a fisherman, took his boat out to look for people in the water that he could help and instead found many babies—all dead—floating in the water. The man will clearly be traumatized by this event.
Anis also voices a fact that has been alluded to previously in the conversation between Tareq and Musa in Chapter 7: Namely, that traumatic events like war are usually in the hands of world leaders—but not the people who are actually impacted by these events. Anis says, “I’m disappointed in the ten people in the world who have control of the planet. They need to help fix this. But where are these leaders of the world?” (122). The use of hyperbole—exaggeration used for emphasis or effect—drives home the fact that “everyday” men and women, people like Alexia, Anis, or Tareq, may be subject to traumas they have no control over.
