Christy Lefteri
Christy Lefteri’s Songbirds is based on a real-life tragedy in which five female migrant domestic workers and two of their children disappeared in Cyprus and were later found murdered. Lefteri incorporates the tragedy into her story of Nisha, a migrant worker from Sri Lanka. Nisha’s mysterious disappearance sets Yiannis, her lover; and Petra, her employer; on a quest to discover her whereabouts. The novel alternates between the first-person voices of Yiannis and Petra.
Nisha has been employed by Petra for nine years as a housekeeper and nanny to Petra’s daughter. Petra had taken Nisha for granted. Although she never abused her, she never made a serious attempt to know her. Only later does she recognize the sacrifice Nisha made by leaving her own daughter with relatives in Sri Lanka to earn enough money to support her daughter’s education. Through her search for Nisha and through learning of the experiences of other migrant domestic workers, Petra comes to recognize the injustice and insidious racism of a system which treats these women as disposable commodities.
Yiannis earns an income by poaching precious songbirds and selling them on the black market. Lefteri describes in graphic and disturbing detail the indiscriminate capture and killing of thousands of birds. In love with Nisha, Yiannis proposes marriage to her the day before her disappearance. He thinks his marriage proposal or his confession to Nisha about his illegal activities may have caused her to run away. But when he teams up with Petra to search for Nisha, he realizes something terrible has happened to her.
In the Author’s Note at the end of the novel, Lefteri describes learning about the plight of migrant domestic workers in Cyprus. They have few friends and many enemies. Police indifference to the disappearance of these women and their failure to investigate their complaints of abuse exacerbates their desperate plight.
Lefteri is to be commended for using her novel as a vehicle to highlight the abuse, exploitation, and physical and sexual violence these women experience. But the novel’s execution is awkward, its message too blatantly obvious and heavy-handed. Yiannis and Nisha are flat, dull characters who fail to generate sympathy or interest. They serve merely as vehicles to expose the inhumane treatment of migrant workers. Their backstories feel like unnecessary fillers and do little to advance the plot. Because Nisha is seen through their remorse-filled eyes, she is depicted as faultless and not fully human.
The novel is very slow to start and only begins to pick up pace as the mystery of Nisha’s disappearance unravels. Between some of the chapters are baffling, italicized interludes about the mangled, decomposing corpse of a hare ravaged by insects and birds. Although the purpose of these inserts becomes somewhat evident at the end, their intermittent presence throughout the narrative is jarring and bewildering.
Lefteri’s heart is in the right place, but this is not up to the same standard as her very compelling novel, The Beekeeper of Aleppo.