Songbirds

When a novelist finds the power of written words, according to short story writer Joseph Conrad, that's going to make you hear, to make you feel, and, above all, to make you see.

That is all, and it is everything.

My recent reading of Songbirds by Christy Lefteri is a good example. The story appeals to all the senses. I hear the cacophony of birdsongs. I feel the arduous way birds making migration to cross borders, to search for better life, to find themselves trapped. I see hundreds of grey herons, blue rock thrushes, crossbills, coal tits and tree creepers. One by one, they fall prey to the lime stick on poachers' mist net. They crash into the massive net, flapping and screeching, struggling and crying. 

Up and down and up and down and up and down they go, moment by moment, one by one, from migration routes to the grave. 

Songbirds, at first glance, is a story about migratory birds crossing the Mediterranean Sea. But then I realised that the story is more about the migrant workers leaving hometowns to find new life abroad, and the tragic way they find themselves more trapped than they had been before. That's a disheartening and true story of worker leaving home. 

Like the birds caught by poachers, the domestic worker never returned.