Two of the most powerful stories that I recently encountered were stories about immigrants and refugees. One was in a film and the other was a novel, but both left a strong impression on me.
In the film, The Visitor, a widowed, burnt-out professor in Connecticut, Walter Vale, (played to perfection by Richard Jenkins, who garnered a Best Actor nomination for the role) travels to New York for a conference and finds two strangers in his Manhattan apartment. Someone rented his apartment to this young couple, and when Walter enters at night he is accosted by the young man, Tarek, (Haaz Sleiman) who believes Walter is breaking in. When Walter lets Tarek and his girlfriend Zainab stay until they find a new place, their lives become intertwined in ways they never would have expected. Walter forges an unlikely friendship with Tarek, and his secret love of music flourishes. Walter learns that Tarek, who fled Syria with his mother, and Zainab, who fled Sengal, are both illegal and fear deportation. The more he gets to know Tarek, the more he cares about his fate, and it is this growing compassion that grounds the film.
Directed by Tom McCarthy, who also directed The Station Agent, another understated, charming independent film, The Visitor feels like a short story. It is riveting, artful, restrained—and over too quickly. Its strengths are the subtlety in its storytelling, and its clean focus on the characters and their relationships. There is no happy ending here, but there is some hope.
Sometime after I saw The Visitor, I picked up Chris Cleave’s novel Little Bee (released in the UK under the title The Other Hand). It begins with a few amazing lines:
Most days I wish I was a British pound coin instead of an African girl. Everyone would be pleased to see me coming. Maybe I would visit you for the weekend and then suddenly, because I am fickle like that, I would visit with the man from the corner shop instead—but you would not be sad because you would be eating a cinnamon bun, or drinking a cold Coca-Cola from the can, and you would never think of me again.”
Those words are spoken from the voice of Little Bee, a Nigerian girl who has been in a British detention center for two years after fleeing the violence of her country. Little Bee wants nothing more than to find a new home and to lead a normal life free from the threats she left behind. The novel is also narrated by an Englishwoman, Sarah O’Rourke, who met Little Bee years before on a beach in Nigeria. The meeting between Little Bee and Sarah on that beach has bound them together, in all of its immense and secret tragedy.
The bookflap of the book begs reviewers not to say too much—and this is a book that readers should discover for themselves. It is powerful and both of these women’s voices sound so real, so multi-dimensional, that you will forget you are reading a novel. It is a perfect book group book. But more importantly, it will make you think differently about refugees seeking asylum all over the world and the treatment they receive. In a couple of interviews, Cleave mentions Steinbeck as an inspiration; he, too, wrote compelling stories that also had something to say about society.
The Visitor and Little Bee are stories that are powerful in their characterizations, deft in the framing of the stories they aim to tell and brave in their witness.
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