51 pages • 1 hour read
The Beekeeper of Aleppo
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Bees
As the novel’s title implies, bees are central to the novel. They are symbols that represent many things, such as Nuri’s former peaceful life in pre-war Aleppo, and also provide a contrast to the actions of humans in war.
Nuri describes the bees as representing a kind of perfect society, in direct contrast to the war-torn country he has come to know: “The bees were an ideal society, a small paradise among chaos” (10). Nuri describes how he dedicated his efforts to them, and they in turn repaid him: “It was my job to protect the bees, to keep them healthy and strong, while they fulfilled their task of making honey and pollinating the land to keep us alive” (10). The bees are Mustafa’s reason for living, even after the war has started and his wife and daughter have left: “I can’t just abandon the bees, Nuri […] The bees are family to us’” (18). When the hives and bees are burnt down by vandals, Nuri is stunned by the silence. At various times in his journey, he will imagine the hum of the bees again.
After Sami’s death, when Nuri’s life is threatened by soldiers in Aleppo, he turns to thoughts of the bees, and how they lead each other to new flowers and nectar, in a show of cooperation and leadership unusual in humans: “I wished that there was someone to guide me, to tell me what to do and which way to go, but I felt completely alone” (48). Nuri’s memory turns to the bees as often as it turns to Sami. They represent the former, perfect life that he enjoyed before the war. Nuri understands the bees very well, better than he can understand human behavior after his trauma: “Bees become blind before humans” (192). Nuri takes painstaking care of the one, wingless bee he finds in the B&B garden, lavishing upon it more attention than he does on Afra during that period.
Mustafa, the Beekeeper, draws upon his love of bees in order to build a new life in England. His quest to reach England is a quest to reach another bee colony, another apiary, another meaningful life. Beekeeping is his identity: “I have some friends there, but I am a beekeeper without bees” (232). He soon finds some, and his purpose in life is restored. The bees, like Mustafa, are a beacon of light that beckons Nuri and Afra to safety.
Color, Light and Darkness
Color, light, and darkness are all recurring motifs throughout the novel, helping to define the characters’ emotional states and the contrast between their pre- and post-war lives.
Afra’s life before Sami’s death is full of color and light: her painting, her eyes, her spirit. After losing her son, her trauma blinds her and plunges her into darkness, where Nuri cannot find her. Light and color represent life and everything good, while darkness hides behind it tragedy, pain and fear. Afra’s eyes and her life become grey, drab and listless. Afra is able to paint through touch while she is blind, so the colors in her paintings are unrealistic. When she paints a picture of a city with the right side left without color, it represents the war to Nuri: “The way the color was washed out of everything. The way the flowers died” (210). Nuri himself dwells on color and light consistently: the change in Afra’s hair color, Bashar al-Assad’s blue eyes, the Greek worry beads. He is still able to appreciate color and tone, even in his suffering, as when he describes Afra’s skin as “the color of desert honey, darker in the creases, and the fine, fine silver lines on the skin of her breasts” (1). He uses color to emphasize how joyous her nature once was: “Her laughter was gold once; you would have seen as well as heard it” (1). Remembering his father and his textile shop, Nuri recalls “the colors of the world, of deserts and rivers and forests, printed on the silks and linens around him” (113). The most compelling detail of color is the red T-shirt Sami was wearing when he died. Nuri and Afra refer to it again and again. They seek it and imagine it; it is also the color of the marble which is their only memento of him.
Like color, light represents life. Darkness then is the sinister and the deadly. The clandestine boat crossings happen at night. The woods in the park in Athens are dark and the worst events occur there. When Nuri reaches the park, he expresses its dangerous nature through the lack of light: “Here it was as if we were all living in the darkest shadow of a solar eclipse” (228). Nuri dreams at night and finds Mohammed in the darkness, but this is more often a source of torment than solace. In Athens, working for the smuggler at night, Nuri notes: “Afra and I existed in darkness” (325). Significantly, Afra is raped at night.
The darkness is also that of the couple’s mutual grief and suffering, as well as the physical lack of light. It is not until they break through the long dark night of their grief that the light returns to their lives and they can see each other again: “The sun is rising and her face in the dawn light is beautiful” (354). Their long-awaited day arrives when they are reunited with Mustafa: “standing there, with the full light of the morning sun behind him, is Mustafa” (356). In the final sentence of the novel, the three look up at the sky, which is open, blue, and “unbroken” (360).
The Marble and the Key
The marble and the key are two important symbols, representing physical manifestations of connections to the past and Sami. The marble connects Afra to Sami, and she will not let it out of her sight. It is red, like Sami’s T-shirt. It is real, and solid, and Afra, though withdrawn and depressed, has a more realistic grip on what has happened to the couple than Nuri. Nuri also handles the marble, and when he hears it roll, he is taken to Mohammed, or Sami’s ghost. However, Nuri imagines that he is able to pick a key, or keys, from the tree in the garden in England, at Mohammed’s request. This is hallucinatory, because the next morning what he has actually picked is flowers. The key is for Nuri a symbol of his search for a way out of the trauma and depression he is suffering. In his dreams the key opens doors to Aleppo—at times destroyed by war, at times the Aleppo of his youth and happy days. The key also represents home, security and safety, which is what Nuri seeks and is denied until he is reunited with Mustafa.
Finally, there is a real key, the one that Nuri had given Sami when he was afraid of the bombs, “I had tucked it beneath his pillow so that he could feel that somewhere in all the ruins there was a place where he could be safe” (338). But the key does not keep Sami safe from the bombs, just as Nuri’s forgetfulness with a key leads to Afra’s rape. The key is therefore a symbol of Nuri’s inability to keep his loved ones safe, and thus he is tormented by it in his nightmares and delusions.
Unlock all 51 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 9,100+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features: