Nadia and Saeed buy water, food, a blanket, a backpack, a tent,
and local service for their cellphones. After doing this, they setup the new tent on the fringe of the camp, slightly elevated on the beach’s craggy hill, where it isn’t too windy or too rocky.”
While
setting up, Nadia feels like she’s playing house while
Saeed feels like he is a bad son Pausing in her preparations,
Nadia suddenly stoops below a bush and tells Saeed to the same. When he does, she kisses him under the open sky.”
Saeed whips his face away in frustration but then frantically apologies and puts his cheek to Nadia’s. And though she tries to relax with their faces pressed together, Nadia is taken aback by
Saeed’s bitterness since she’s never seen him act like this and thinks that a bitter Saeed would not be Saeed at all.”
Nadia and Saeed’s relationship suffers in this scene because of thestressors related to migration. Constantly having to face the threatof danger and the various uncertainties that come along withhaving escaped their country, Saeed shows a bitterness towardNadia, clearly misdirecting his anxieties by superimposing them ontheir relationship. Of course, part of this is due to the fact thatNadia kisses him under the open sky something they were neverable to do in their home country because intimacy of any kind wasprohibited in public by the radical militants. In doing so, shetransgresses against the rules that inadvertently shaped herrelationship with Saeed. As a result, Saeed feels as if his lover isactually acting against the very terms of their own bond, so heresponds bitterly. In turn, readers come to understand howsignificantly Saeed and Nadia’s romantic connection has beeninfluenced not only by the militant radicals in their own country, butby the process of having escaped, too.Meanwhile, a young woman comes home from work in Vienna.
Apparently, militants from Saeed and Nadia’s country entered
the city the previous week, shooting Austrians to provoke a reaction against migrants from their own part of the world.”
Unfortunately, they’ve succeeded, because angry Austrians are planning to attack a group of migrants living near the zoo.
Fortunately, another group is intending to form a human cordon to protect them Wanting to help, the young woman boards a train to the zoo while wearing a migration compassion badge but she finds herself trapped in a car with the xenophobic mob. These white faces look upon her, shouting and pushing until she feels a basic, animal fear and jumps off at the next stop. Despite this harrowing experience, though,
she resolves to
continue her trek to the zoo, walking there as the sun falls in the sky.
Yet another vignette showing the far-flung influence of globalmigration, the young woman’s story is an example of the ways inwhich fear motivates xenophobic mobs to advocate for borders anddivision. The militants from Saeed and Nadia’s country seem tounderstand how potent fear is, knowing they can use it to incitebigotry and, thus, discourage people from their own country fromescaping to other places. However, people like the young woman inVienna are capable of overcoming the threat of violence becauseShare with your friends: