A Stranger In My Own Country Bangla Pdf Download

[Amelie Robertos]

Withthree TV channels and no internet, we were raised by Puffins. For long stretches of our lives reading was the best (and, sometimes, the only) way to pass the time. In X Libris we return to the books that made us and analyse what makes them great.

The books usually focus on the history of the house and the Oldknow family who have lived in it down the centuries, often in a fantastical or magical realist way, with timeslips and ghosts and occasionally an intrusion by older and more sinister English magicks.

A Stranger at Green Knowe is different in that it deals with the present only, and a protagonist who is not of the Oldknow family (although the archetypal grandmother, Mrs Oldknow, treats him as one, of course).

One might, at first, feel a little queasy at the obvious equation of a Chinese refugee and an escaped gorilla, both lost in comfortable old England. Boston is using that alienation, of course. Ping first sees Hanno on a trip to a zoo, and is alive to the parallels with his own condition as Boston and the readers are:

A Stranger at Green Knowe depicts almost no antagonistic racism aimed at Ping. There is an awful lot of patronising, beginning with a simpering middle class lady who thrusts a peach into his hand in a display of magnanimity. Ping immediately gives the peach to Hanno, sealing their friendship.

Green Knowe was built by a stranger - a Norman invader - and through its history has welcomed strangers of every kind. It is an image of an England that is comfortable in its motley history but also its global Imperial reach, which has brought both Ping and Hanno into the folding bosom of the Home Counties.

Children of any provenance are essentially out-of-place great apes: they find themselves in unfamiliar surroundings, trying to understand a foreign country with strange traditions. Their senses are rawer and less scrutable, their desires fiercer and less conditional, their world more constrained and vivid. The parallel that Boston wants us to draw is not between refugees and gorillas, but between ourselves - young readers - and gorillas. A child is an immigrant, a wild thing in captivity, a stranger.

Chinese refugee Ping has been invited by Mrs Oldknow to stay at her mediaeval manor house Green Knowe, where he discovers that Hanno, a gorilla who has escaped from Regent\u2019s Park Zoo, is living in a bamboo thicket in the grounds. Ping tries to hide Hanno, but with the whole country searching for him, it is only a matter of time before the gorilla is discovered and tragedy comes to Green Knowe.

\u201CBefore he had been displaced he had watched monkeys in his own forest\u2026 speckled with sun and shade, their bright eyes inquisitive and carefree. Certainly it had never occurred to him that an animal could be stripped of everything that went with it, of which its instincts were an inseparable part, and that you could have just its little body in a space of nothingness. As if looking at that told you anything but the nature of sorrow, which you knew anyway.\u201D

What draws him to Hanno is the gorilla\u2019s strength: his physical resistance and his insistent individuality. Boston is a terrific writer and both Ping and Hanno are drawn purposefully, as distinct personalities, never reduced to stereotypes. Ping\u2019s background as the child of a Chinese timber merchant in Burma is given in careful detail, although from a small child\u2019s view, so that we never quite know who kills his parents or the full bureaucratic apparatus that has landed him in the \u2018International Relief Society\u2019s Intermediate Hostel for Displaced Children\u2019.

Hanno the gorilla is characterised just as determinedly. Indeed, the first part of the book is entirely an account of the life of a gorilla troupe in the African jungle and the events leading up to Hanno\u2019s capture, all told from the gorilla\u2019s point of view.

Boston gives a vivid picture of the environment but also of the complex social structures and behaviour of gorillas, all the more extraordinary not just for being extremely well written but because the study of gorillas was still very much a work in progress when this book was written. The first proper studies had been published in the \u201820s and \u201830s; Dian Fossey\u2019s groundbreaking work was still to come.

There\u2019s a disparity between the popular image of gorillas as rampaging, savage brutes and the reality of secretive, highly social great apes. Boston isn\u2019t above using this disparity to make a point about xenophobia and bigotry, but she\u2019s careful enough to place that all on Hanno and none of it on Ping.

The book is vague about whether the \u2018stranger\u2019 of the title is Ping or Hanno (or perhaps someone or something else). What matters is that they are at Green Knowe. They are welcome there, because everyone is.

It is also an England that hasn\u2019t quite yet felt the full impact of Empire\u2019s collapse. It was written a decade after the Windrush generation arrived and a decade before the expulsion of Asians from Uganda and the war in Bangladesh. This is not yet a country of large scale immigration, and tolerance for refugees comes easy.

But Green Knowe is a safe space, and not just for refugees and gorillas. Just as Mrs Oldknow is the archetypal grandmother, Green Knowe is the archetypal grandparent\u2019s house. My grandmother was fairly archetypal herself and lived in a rambling sixteenth century cottage, all low ceilings and odd nooks. Part of what I loved about Stranger at Green Knowe as a child was not just the promise of a gorilla among the raspberry canes, but the idea of the house itself as an adventure.

A grandparent\u2019s house is a magical space to a child. It is not home, where there are chores and school runs and inscrutable adult rituals; but it is not entirely unfamiliar either. It is full of wonder, but is family; it is full of adventure, but is safe.

Like so many other wondrous houses in children\u2019s literature - the Professor\u2019s house in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe or Tove Jansson\u2019s Moominhouse, or even Arthur\u2019s Camelot - Green Knowe is the site of both the welcome home and the siege perilous, where adventures begin and end. It is a space of and for imagination, of escape and escapism. It is, in a way, a book.

NRC works to protect the rights of displaced people during crisis. We specialise in six areas: food security, education, shelter, legal assistance, protection from violence, and water, sanitation and hygiene.

Between January and March 2023, one person was killed every five days on average in the camps, while in 2022, one person was killed every 50 days. Incidents of shooting in some camps have increased and tarpaulins offer no protection from bullets. NRC notes that armed violence in the refugee camps is worsening.

The security of refugees in camps is threatened by theft, assault, domestic violence, child abuse, rape and other forms of sexual and gender-based violence, robbery, kidnapping or extortion. Unfortunately, these crimes have also been committed inside shelters. We need to ensure that, even if temporary, the homes of refugees offer protection and privacy for individuals and families.

Tarpaulins have holes deliberately made by strangers to harass women and girls inside their temporary homes, violating their privacy. Because of the lack of solid doors, women are also concerned about risks including sexual exploitation, assault and robbery. But everybody deserves better shelters.

When floods or fires hit the camps, people from the community try their best to contain the damage. However, after every incident, there is significant destruction of houses and belongings. After the massive fire in March 2023, nearly 16,000 refugees were affected, and 2,800 shelters were damaged or destroyed.

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