Helen Benedict’s The Good Deed is a heartrending and compelling novel about the modern refugee crisis.
Booklist wrote of the book:
“The novel comes to an emotional conclusion, reminding us that hope is still to be found in the most desolate of places and prompting the reader to consider why and how we ask a person to prove their own humanity. An insightful reminder of our responsibilities to one another, more important now than ever.”
In her own words, here is Helen Benedict’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel The Good Deed:
In the summer of 2018, two years before the Covid pandemic, I went to the stunning Greek island of Samos because I knew that, as well as tourists, hotels and beaches, it held one of the most cruel refugee camps in Europe.
I spent five weeks there that first time, talking to people who lived in the camp, most of whom were from Syria, Palestine or Afghanistan, taking walks with them and listening to their stories. During the next few years, I returned again and again, when Covid allowed. Out of these visits comes my new novel, The Good Deed.
The Good Deed follows the stories of four women living in the camp, and an American tourist who visits the island to escape her own tragic secret. When the tourist, Hilma, does a “good deed,” she triggers a crisis that brings her and the refugee women — Amina, Leila, Nafisa and Farah — into a conflict that escalates dramatically as the story goes on. Each woman in the novel, plus a local Greek named Kosmos, takes turns telling their version of events.
At heart, the novel is not only about the hardship of becoming a refugee, and the imbalance of power between the privileged and the destitute, it is about love. The love between parents and children, between friends, between lovers.
Foul-smelling, overcrowded and filthy as the camp was, holding between three-to-eight thousand people at various times in a space meant for fewer than seven hundred, it was also full of music. Syrians, Afghans, Congolese, Nigerians, Somalis… everyone played music from home. Imagine the contrast between the music playing in the camp up the mountain above the town, perhaps traditional Syrian music like this. And the Greek taverna music playing merrily in the cafés down the hill.
Then there was the music refugees would play on their phones as they sat gazing out to sea or in a park, dreaming of home, perhaps, or worrying about their futures — music like the songs on this record written by two refugee musicians who met in a camp and collaborated on an album called Sounds of Refuge.
In The Good Deed, Amina encounters her own heart-wrenching music:
“I’ve been climbing for some forty minutes when the sound of singing drifts over to me through the trees… I stop… to listen. And then I realize the voice is singing in Arabic, the words catching at my skin like thorns.”
I imagine this as sounding like the song “Shokran” (“Thank you”), by the powerfully-voiced Syrian singer, Assala Nasri.
In wild contrast, at least musically, Hilma, the American, also recalls various songs when she thinks of her son, Theo, as a boy.
“All the way through his childhood and teens, he would come with me to my Brooklyn studio, where we would work together in quiet companionship, his curly head and narrow back bent over the table, I standing at my easel, while the radio played Brahms or Miles, Mozart or Joni Mitchell—or, his preferences, Nirvana or Outkast.
While Hilma is on Samos, not in New York, her Airbnb host, Kosmos, insists on playing his own music for her whenever they are in his car.
“As soon as we’ve both finished breakfast, we… once more slide into his Peugeot. No ouzo this time, thank god, but before long I’m clutching the sides of my seat as he careens around corners and along the edges of cliffs, steering with one finger while leaning over to twiddle the radio dial with the other to find me Greek music.
“’It’s all right,’” I say in a strangled voice. “I don’t need music.”
“’Hilma, every human being she needs music.’”
Because Samos is so close to Turkey, much of the music Kosmos would be playing on the radio is in fact a mix of both Greek and Turkish traditions.
Now that I am home with my own family in New York, I have found a new anthem to the city by the local band, Spiral Heads. It’s called “New York Sorrow,” and it perfectly captures the cruelty and seduction of this ever-challenging city, where so many refugees and asylum seekers are arriving by the day now, many of them from the same countries as those I met in Greece. Welcome to New York, newcomers. May you find the kindness here that every human being deserves.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Helen Benedict and Eyad Awwadawnan’s playlist for their book Map of Hope and Sorrow
Helen Benedict, a professor at Columbia University, has been writing about refugees and war for many years, both in her nonfiction, Map of Hope & Sorrow: Stories of Refugees Trapped in Greece, published in 2022, and her two most recent novels, Wolf Season and Sand Queen. A recipient of the 2021 PEN Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History, the Ida B. Wells Award for Bravery in Journalism, and the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism for her exposure of sexual predation in the military, Benedict is also the author of The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women at War Serving in Iraq. Her writings inspired a class action suit against the Pentagon on behalf of those sexually assaulted in the military and the 2012 Oscar-nominated documentary, The Invisible War. Helen currently resides in New York, New York. For more information, visit www.helenbenedict.com.