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A Study Guide for Benjamin Zephaniah 's "Refugee Boy"
A Study Guide for Benjamin Zephaniah 's "Refugee Boy"
A Study Guide for Benjamin Zephaniah 's "Refugee Boy"
Ebook49 pages35 minutes

A Study Guide for Benjamin Zephaniah 's "Refugee Boy"

By Gale and Cengage

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A Study Guide for Benjamin Zephaniah 's "Refugee Boy", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Studentsfor all of your research needs.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateMar 22, 2018
ISBN9781535845649
A Study Guide for Benjamin Zephaniah 's "Refugee Boy"

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    A Study Guide for Benjamin Zephaniah 's "Refugee Boy" - Gale

    17

    Refugee Boy

    Benjamin Zephaniah

    2001

    Introduction

    Benjamin Zephaniah is an internationally renowned performance poet whose verbal talents have led him in diverse directions, including the writing of novels. Zephaniah was born in England, but his parents moved there from Jamaica, and he associates himself not with the British Empire but with the peoples and nations who were subjugated and victimized by the empire's colonial efforts, such as through the slave trade and the militarized occupation of indigenous homelands. Much of Zephaniah's work is overtly political, reflecting his aim of reaching out through words not just to those privileged enough to appreciate elite literature—or any literature—but to all who might witness his live readings.

    Refugee Boy (2001), Zephaniah's second novel, tracks the turbulent adolescence of Alem Kelo, a fourteen-year-old with an Ethiopian father and an Eritrean mother. The book begins when his family's lives are upended during the late-twentieth-century war between the neighboring countries. He ends up a refugee in England, where he must deal with his parents' absences, the drastic change in cultural surroundings, and a legal system that seems intent on forcing him back to Africa—even if his life will be in imminent danger there. Written for adolescents, Refugee Boy presents an emotionally challenging but sympathetic and inspirational look at what life can be like for those unfortunate enough to have to flee their homes and seek refuge in foreign lands.

    Author Biography

    Benjamin Obadiah Iqbal Zephaniah was born on April 15, 1958, in Birmingham, England, to a Jamaican nurse and a post-office manager born in Barbados. Zephaniah's parents immigrated to Great Britain when the government explicitly invited people from the dissolving empire's past and present colonies to supplement the diminishing British workforce. The family's original Handsworth neighborhood was a largely Jamaican enclave, with food and music from the Caribbean permeating Zephaniah's earliest childhood.

    A move to an almost exclusively whiteworkingclass neighborhood led to his first major experiences of racism, including from the headmaster of the otherwise all-white school he attended. On Zephaniah's first day, the headmaster announced at assembly that the school's gaining, in a term cited by Jasper Cross in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, an Afro-Caribbean student meant that the school would be adding a cricket team—the presumption being that Zephaniah would be athletically inclined.

    In such an environment, Zephaniah grew rapidly indifferent to what the system would make of him. At the age of twelve, he got himself expelled from his secondary institution and sent to an approved school—a reformatory for prospective or proven delinquents. As quoted by Cross, Zephaniah was once described by a teacher as a born failure. Zephaniah would almost immediately start disproving this dismissal of his capacities, which carried racial undertones whether or not it was racially motivated. Writing poetry and contributing it to local media outlets and events, he had gained a reputation as an already-important political voice by the age of fifteen. His parents

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