The Bone Sparrow

Australian author Zana Fraillon’s young adult fiction novel The Bone Sparrow (2016) exposes the plight of the Rohingya people from Burma, specifically those being held in immigration detention centers in Australia. Nine-year-old Subhi was born in the detention camp and has little knowledge of the outside world. He spends his days roaming the dusty confines of the camp and, at night, escapes to his imagination for comfort. Everything changes for Subhi when a girl named Jimmie from outside the camp sneaks past the fence and Subhi’s eyes are opened to the larger world and the depths of his and the other detainees’ suffering. In 2017, the novel was awarded an Amnesty CILIP honor for its attention to the Rohingya people and their displacement. The book was also named ABIA Book of the Year in 2017 and awarded the Readings Young Adult Book Prize. Fraillon began her career as a teacher and began writing books only after her children were born. She is the author of 11 other books ranging from children’s picture books to young adult fiction. In 2022, the York Theater adapted The Bone Sparrow into a stage production.

The source material comes from the 2016 Hodder and Stoughton Edition.

Content Warning: The source material 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.

Plot Summary

Nine-year-old Subhi lives with his maá and older sister, Queeny, in an immigration detention center in Australia. Though his family is Rohingya and originally from Burma, Subhi was born inside the center and has never been outside the confines of the razor-wire topped fences. The book follows days in Subhi’s life. Though conditions inside the camp are difficult, as refugees often do not have adequate food, water, medical care, and personal care items, Subhi survives by maintaining a rich inner life through his imagination. At night while everyone else in his tent sleeps, he envisions that an ocean, which he calls the Night Sea, washes up in the camp, allowing him to, in the mornings, find treasures left behind. Subhi’s ba is still in Burma, and he waits for him to return. He sees the treasures left by the Night Sea as gifts from his ba or promises that he will return to them.

Subhi’s maá suffers from depression due to her prolonged incarceration. Whereas she once entertained Subhi and Queeny by telling stories from their culture in their language, she has stopped telling stories and refuses to eat, spending most of her days in bed. Since he doesn’t know Rohingya culture, Subhi depends on the stories for his identity, and when his maá refuses to tell them, he feels lost and untethered. Subhi spends most of his days trudging through the tedium of camp life as refugees must wait in long lines to eat and use the restroom, but he searches for the joy in simple tasks, and nothing makes him happier than spending time with his best friend, Eli.

Eli is older than Subhi, and because Eli lost his entire family when they immigrated, he and Subhi are like brothers. Eli listens to Subhi’s Night Sea stories and adds his flair by telling the tale of a great whale. Eli makes Subhi feel safe and loved; however, one day, when the camp administration, called the Jackets, forces Eli to move to a tent reserved for single males, Subhi becomes lonely and sad. Harvey, a Jacket who is kind to the refugees, often helps Subhi. However, a Jacket named Beaver is a cruel and barbarous man who one day attacks Subhi when he finds him delivering extra supplies to people in the camp.

At the same time, outside the camp, a young girl named Jimmie lives with her father and brother, Jonah, but mourns the untimely loss of her mother. Jimmie’s family is poor, and her father works to support them but often leaves her alone for long periods, and she cannot attend school regularly. Jimmie also struggles with reading, a secret she keeps from everyone, and she longs to become literate so she can read the journals her mum left behind. Her mum also gifted her a necklace made from bone in the shape of a sparrow, which she wears but hides from her father because it makes him sad. Jimmie hears stories from her classmates about the center down the hill, and because she loves exploring, she decides to venture to the center and see it for herself. Having learned how to find a weak spot in the fence from Jonah, Jimmie enters the camp to investigate.

When she does this, Subhi emerges from his tent to see a girl standing in front of him holding a notebook. At first, he thinks he is imagining her, but when she speaks and asks if he can read, he knows she is real. Jimmie leaves after that first visit without even telling Subhi her name. She begins visiting him regularly, however, and the two become friends, as Subhi tells Jimmie about life inside the camp and he reads to her from her mum’s notebook a story she wrote about Oto and Anka, a girl who was born from an egg and has blindness. Seeing how much Subhi doesn’t know about the outside world, Jimmie begins bringing him hot chocolate, food, and photos of what he calls “the Outside.” As their relationship grows, Jimmie becomes more empathetic to Subhi’s plight and Subhi comes to understand how bad the conditions are inside the camp.

Eli lives in Alpha camp, where the men decide to protest the conditions by going on a hunger strike. Queeny procures a camera, and she and Eli work together to capture the deplorable conditions inside the camp and post them on the internet in the hopes of capturing the world’s attention and bringing awareness to their situation. Some of the men in Alpha sew their mouths shut in protest, and Queeny captures the scene with her camera. Tensions run high in the camp, and Subhi senses something ominous approaching. He finds a knife buried in the ground and, fearful of what it might cause, hides it near the latrines.

Jimmie searches her attic for more items that will remind her of her mother, but she scratches her arm on a metal bracket, and it becomes dangerously infected. She visits Subhi but is too sick to even sit upright. She collapses on her walk home and can barely summon the energy to use her flashlight to signal Subhi for help. He finds the weak spot in the fence and escapes the camp for the first time. He finds Jimmie and uses the cell phone to call for help. An ambulance takes Jimmie to the hospital, and Subhi views the camp from a tree in her yard. He sees smoke and rushes back to find erupting chaos, with the Jackets trying to squelch the riot. Beaver chases Eli to a spot near the fence where he begins to dig, and Subhi realizes Eli is trying to find the knife. Beaver beats Eli with a club and then kills him with a rock. Harvey is nearby but doesn’t do anything to stop Beaver, and Subhi feels guilty for being unable to help his friend.

The Jackets restore order and repair the fences, but Subhi languishes in the trauma of what he saw, though he can’t vocalize it to anyone. People from the Outside come to investigate the riot, and a woman named Sarah convinces Subhi to share the truth of what happened to Eli. Jimmie recovers from her infection and comes to visit Subhi in his tent. He decides to complete her mum’s story by including the story of his own people. Subhi’s maá begins speaking to him in Rohingya again, though he realizes he must now be the one to pass on the stories. In the end, Maá, Queeny, and Subhi stand atop a shipping container and watch the Northern Lights, which look like a sea, and Subhi hears singing, which reminds him of Eli and the stories of all people.