by Tara E. Friedman
July 27, 2021
Tara E. Friedman currently resides in Eastern Pennsylvania with her husband and family. When not writing or teaching, she is happily immersed in a variety of outdoor activities. She proudly serves as English faculty at Widener University in Chester, Pennsylvania. While she presented and published on critical thinking and writing center theory and pedagogy, her current research focuses on resilience in children and young adults, literature and the environment, and American humor.
Songbirds by Christy Lefteri; Ballantine Books; 336 pages; $27.00
As the world we live in splits open to reveal what many painstakingly experience, Christy Lefteri’s new novel Songbirds uncovers the deep wounds hasty judgment, unfounded prejudice, and sweeping generalization can create. This breathtaking novel acts both as salve and tourniquet, meant to treat and stop the bloodshed, or, at the very least, demands pause on one’s ‘righteous’ path toward punishment of difference. This brilliant and beautiful story invites readers into deep explorations of our Earth’s creatures, colors, landscapes, grounding them in the harsh realities of systemic racism, entrapment, and violence against women. This novel comes at a time ripe for reckoning: with ourselves, our relationships with others, and the ideological frameworks of which we are a part.
While Lefteri skillfully utilizes multiple points-of-view as narrative technique in Songbirds, the story belongs to Nisha, a woman forced to leave her home and two-year-old daughter in Sri Lanka in search of financial stability after the death of her husband. Nisha becomes a migrant domestic worker in Nicosia, Cyprus, responsible for the care of her employer Petra’s home, as well as her newborn daughter. Nisha’s infusion in their family and Cypriot life over ten years stands in stark contrast to that of her life in Sri Lanka, but the parallels of plight between Nisha and Petra, both dynamic women and mothers, are palpable. Additionally, the perspective of Yiannis, Petra’s tenant who resides upstairs, is honest and heartbreaking. As a songbird poacher, Yiannis’s illegal work is at odds with the man devoted to Nisha. Upon Nisha’s sudden disappearance, it is Petra and Yiannis’s interwoven journeys to discover truth that capture the essence of the novel. Lefteri’s emotional perspectivism gently forces readers to question their own ignorance, their unknowing, for themselves and their relationships. Petra and Yiannis’s continual and unapologetic questioning of self and system is monumental, a reminder of the courage necessary for change.
In the tradition of her debut novel, The Beekeeper of Aleppo, Songbirds further demonstrates Lefteri’s ability to humanize complexity in relationships, both with others and ourselves. It is Nisha’s disappearance that initiates introspection, as readers must explore, alongside the characters Petra and Yiannis, the realities for migrant workers, the racism, entrapment, and even fetishism. Stripped of their previous identities, migrants work for others and for the future, for release from generational poverty, and for the very people they leave behind. However, it is Petra’s line of questioning, both of her own previously held assumptions and the systems of which she is a part, where her complexity is revealed. Upon further investigation, Petra admits she had not really seen these working women and had never asked the tough questions of herself prior to Nisha’s disappearance. Once Petra decides to report Nisha as a missing person, the detective’s harsh commentary highlights the plight of international migrant workers: “‘I can’t concern myself with these foreign women. I have more important matters to attend to . . . These women are animals, they follow their instincts. Or the money, more likely . . . If she’s not back by the end of the week, call up the agency to find another maid.’” It is here Lefteri complicates Petra, as she quickly learns that her quiet resignation of social milieu causes women and mothers like Nisha to become invisible and replaceable within communities, hidden from view by assumptions and inequities within deeply corrupt systems.
Through her revered depictions of nature, Lefteri pays homage to our own daily migration into the sacred lands, airs, and waterways of our ancestral homes. Specifically, color imagery stands out – golden eyes, red sunsets, black skies – and helps to paint the majestic yet harsh landscape of Nisha’s adopted Cyprus. Lefteri’s critique of human interference with natural processes can border on didactic, although her consternation is lessened by the dire impetus for action. Petra’s recollection of her father’s teachings, brought to life through memory, illustrates a commonality we must desperately acknowledge:
...I could almost hear my father’s voice: Since it came to Earth, the water has been cycling through air, rocks, animals and plants. Each molecule has been on an incredible journey. When you feel alone, try to remember that at some point the water inside you would have been inside dinosaurs, or the ocean, or a polar ice cap, or maybe a storm cloud over a faraway sea at a time when that sea was still nameless. Water crosses millennia and boundaries and borders . . . Remember we all have something in common, and that is the water that runs through us.
Songbirds reminds us that through sight and sound, watching and listening, we can learn much with nature as our guide. If we’d only scrutinize our own border crossings into the natural world as intensively as we do those of others migrating onto ‘our’ lands for a multitude of reasons, we might be able to better grasp the shared humanity that embraces us all.
Despite the fast pacing and abrupt ending, the denouement shines. The conclusion of Songbirds will break hearts; chests may heave; at some moments readers may find it necessary to exhale, unaware we were holding our breaths. Wherever our visceral reactions may lead, this novel’s conclusion challenges our own beliefs and splits wide open our ugly, flawed systems for all to see. This brave work roots out apathy and encourages us to take part, to march on, and to move the needle. The power of the people is in our humanity, a shared understanding for the betterment of all. In the words of the migrant women standing together: “Here we are," they were saying. "We do not simply appear from nowhere in a taxi with a suitcase and disappear once more to nowhere. We are human. We love. We hate. We have pasts. We have futures. We are citizens of countries, in our own right. We have voices. We have families. Here we are.” Lefteri’s Songbirds reminds us it’s best to look inward and start the work there. It will never work to silence those in the margins. Our anthem: Here. We. Are.
©2021 West Trade Review
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Ripe for Reckoning: An Anthem of Change in Christy Lefteri’s Songbirds
FICTION REVIEW
Image by Marina Loucaides on Unsplash
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