"The Good Deed"

Helen Benedict, a British-American professor at Columbia University, is the author of seven previous novels, six books of nonfiction, and a play. Her newest novel is The Good Deed.

The Good Deed, set in a refugee camp in Greece, comes out of the research Benedict conducted for her 2022 nonfiction book, Map of Hope and Sorrow, co-authored with Syrian writer and refugee, Eyad Awwadawnan and endorsed by Jessica Bruder (Nomadland), Dina Nayari (The Ungrateful Refugee) and Christy Lefteri (The Beekeeper of Aleppo), among others. That book earned PEN's Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History in 2021 and praise from The New York Times, The Guardian, Kirkus Reviews, and elsewhere.

Benedict applied the Page 69 Test to The Good Deed and reported the following:

What a fun idea this Page 69 Test is! And it works pretty well for my novel, The Good Deed, which is set in a refugee camp on the Greek island of Samos.

On this page, two of the main characters in the novel are talking: 19-year-old Amina, a refugee from Syria who badly misses the mother who refused to flee with her; and middle-aged Nafisa, a refugee from Sudan who lost her own children to war and has grown resigned and yet bitter about fate. Amina looks up to Nafisa, who has become something of a mother figure for her.

The two women are sitting on a mountainside above the refugee camp in which they live. The passage is told in Amina's voice and she is talking about when she first went home after being held and tortured in prison for no more reason than writing a poem that Bashar al-Assad, the president of Syria, did not like.

Amina says to Nafisa;

"Yet when I came home and said, "Look, Mama, I'm alive. I'm alive for you," she deserted me only a few days later. How could she have done that?"

Nafisa shifts against the tree and brushes off the ants and dust that have collected on her skirt. "She must have had her reasons. Mothers usually do."

"Even a reason to abandon me?"

Nafisa bows her head at this. But offers no reply.

Seeing that I have caused her pain, I change the subject.

"Auntie, do you remember that old woman tourist we saw the other day? The one who nodded at us?"

"The one with the ugly hat? Yes, she took me for coffee."

"She did? Why, what did she want?"

Nafisa shrugs. "I neither know nor care. But what about her?"

"I only wonder what it would be like to change places with her; for her to be me and me her."

"You wouldn't want to be that woman."

"That woman" is the one who does the "good deed" of the book's title, and causes a great deal of trouble after doing it.

Learn more about Helen Benedict and her work.

My Book, The Movie: Sand Queen.

The Page 69 Test: Sand Queen.

The Page 69 Test: Wolf Season.

Q&A with Helen Benedict.

--Marshal Zeringue