“The Unwanted: Stories of Syrian Refugees,” by Don Brown
Houghton Mifflin, New York, 2018, 112 pages, grades 7 and higher.
Refugees usually flee or are driven from their countries because of violence and war. The Syrian Civil War caused the most recent mass exodus of refugees in the 21st century.
The causes of this tragedy are well known. Many citizens in Syria revolted against the Syrian government, led by the tyrannical Assad family. With the revolt came increasingly brutal retaliations by the Assad leadership.
Unlike the United States, where people can vote for leaders, Syrians have little ability to compromise with their leadership or change the direction of pubic policy. As a result, the Assad government began arresting and sometimes killing citizens viewed as political agitators. The tragic result of this will be a brutal civil war in which hundreds of thousands of Syrians will be forced to leave their beautiful homeland and seek safety elsewhere.
Don Brown captures this story in this heartbreaking and at times, hopeful book, “The Unwanted: Stories of Syrian Refugees.”
A political movement sweeps across the Mideast in 2010. It is a desire for a better life in which normal citizens have a say in government policy. This time is called the Arab Spring. In 2010, many Mideastern countries are ruled by dictators. These tyrants have a vested self-interest in seeing this pro-democratic movement squashed. This is what occurs throughout the Mideast after the Arab Spring.
In Syria, the protests start peaceably enough, but soon are repressed by the government. This in turn causes the protesters to turn to violence. Soon a full-scale civil war erupts with thousands of casualties. As the situation worsens, Syrians begin fleeing to the nearby countries of Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan.
For a short time, these countries have the resources to assist the desperate refugees.
But as the violence worsens in Syria, the tide of refugees turns into a flood. Soon, millions of Syrians are trying to escape the devastation of their homeland. Not having any choice, other than dying in Syria, the people walk across deserts and take rubber boats over the Mediterranean Sea to nearby Greece. They are temporarily safe, but soon Greece does not have enough money to take care of the frightened Syrians.
The people then try to travel to Austria, Germany and Sweden to find some better type of life. But their numbers increasingly overwhelm the resources of the host countries. Soon, they are told to move on. But where are they to go?
What happens to all these terrified people? Has the civil war ended in Syria? Can they return to the country they never wanted to leave in the first place? Who gets visas to live in countries like Sweden, Germany and the USA? There are no easy answers to this terrible situation, which has still not ended. Don Brown brings a light to these issues in this award-winning graphic novel, “The Unwanted: Stories of Syrian Refugees.”
A graphic novel uses drawings to tell most of the story. But graphic novels are much more sophisticated than comic books which also use drawings to describe events.
Brown’s graphic novel would make an excellent resource in social science classes from the seventh grade through high school. Brown is a gifted and talented illustrator/writer. He shows the magnitude of this painful refugee problem, and the fact that there are no simple answers. But the charity and selflessness of those helping the refugees is also told.
This is not a happy book, but it is a story that needs to be heard. When we Christians think about these desperate Syrians, it might be useful to remember that St. Joseph once took his family from Israel to Egypt as refugees to avoid Jesus being murdered. Food for thought.
