Backpacks

At several points in the narrative, backpacks become points of near-obsessive attention for certain refugees, including the author. They represent core connections to identity, since they essentially contain the only things that refugees have been able to keep with them from their previous lives. They are, in many ways, aspects of who they are that connect them to who they were.

Food

As the author describes the experience of being a refugee, food functions as a means of different forms of survival. On one level, food represents simple physical survival, the ability to eat and continue to function. On another level, food represents connections to home and identity. This level of meaning becomes particularly vivid when the author describes the food prepared for her when she visits the Greek refugee camps, encounters described in Chapters 4 through 6 of Part 2. Finally, food comes to represent the author's failure to...