The Bone Sparrow

Content Warning: This section contains depictions of human suffering and violence toward and the murder of children, as well as discussions of self-harm, the death of a parent, and death by suicide. It depicts life in detention centers, the persecution of immigrants, and the persecution of Muslims, particularly the Rohingya. Refugee experiences, and associated depictions of displacement and trauma, are described. It also engages in negative stereotypes of people with missing eyes.

Subhi and his sister, Queenie, live in an immigration detention camp with their mother, or maá. They have lived there for nine years, and Subhi knows no other home. Though they sleep on a cot in a tent surrounded by a wire fence, Subhi imagines they are near an ocean he calls the “Night Sea,” which washes up each night and brings him gifts from his father, or ba. Queeny doesn’t believe in the Night Sea, but Subhi often draws pictures of the creatures he sees in the water on borrowed paper from Queeny. One day, he titles one of these drawings “The Night Sea With Creatures” (4). This same day, Subhi finds a shell left by the waves, and he adds it to a box where he keeps all his Night Sea treasures.