Refugees In Suzanne Fisher Staples Under The Persimmon

Fictional novels can greatly depict what is going on in the world in a way that makes it very easy to understand. The book reveals the lives of a family, mainly focusing on the daughter, Najmah, as the Taliban take over the village where they live. It later goes on explaining Najmah’s life after her brother and father got kidnapped by the Taliban and her mother and newly born brother got killed by American bombs. Refugees in the book, Under The Persimmon Tree, by Suzanne Fisher Staples, and in real life, face many difficulties, such as the constant fear of terrorist attacks around every corner, and their lives are greatly affected over what their lives would normally have been. In Under The Persimmon Tree, we can see how being a refugee

After the Taliban has taken all of the men from the village, “the rest of them are going to cross the border into Torkham” (Staples 32), after they get there, they have nowhere to go since they left behind their entire lives and need to “wait in the refugee camps in Peshawar” (31). The struggles they faced to get to the refugee camps are unimaginable. They had to walk days on end with the fear of terrorists around every corner. Through mountains and across deserts, nothing stops them from getting across the border into Pakistan. Even after they get to the camps, their lives there may or may not be better than the lives they left behind. “Most refugee children wear clothes that that have been handed down several times” (190). In refugee camps, people can get whatever they are given. Very small amounts of food and the few clothes they have, “have more holes in it than fabric” (190) For Najmah, the camp was just a stop to her final destination of Peshawar. Sometimes, traveling as a refugee can be very dangerous. When she decides to leave, she observes that many trucks come from Peshawar every day. One day she gets in one of the trucks and plans to stowaway to Peshawar. As soon as she got in, her “breath comes in panicked gasps, but [she]

For Najmah, it was after her mother had died and she had to get to Peshawar and she had to go through refugee camps and very rough, dangerous roads a path to get there. For Nur, it happened after his father was killed and he had escaped from the Taliban. Because Najmah and Nur had to travel all over the Middle East by themselves, their lives were greatly impacted as refugees rather than living their own lives on their farm in Golestan, their home village. When Nur first showed up at Nusrat’s house, the place where Najmah was staying, he “showed up with nothing,” as he had been traveling alone by foot and getting a ride wherever he could. “he had no money, no clothes, other than the ones that he wears, no blanket, and no weapons”(Staples, 157). If he had not been a, he wouldn’t have had nothing, he would have had the clothes that he could carry, and food, he may also have had a weapon for protection. Najmah and Nur come to the realization that they are the “only family they have left”(255), and that they need to help each other out. Their parents were killed by two separate acts of terror, along with their newly born brother Habib, and they need to take care of each other. If they had not been forced to leave their homes and go so far away from their village of Golestan, they wouldn’t be put in such a difficult and unsettling situation. Many refugees