Khalid Hosseini's "Sea Prayer" teachers' review

Brief description and distinctive features

Richard Glover, the respected and popular SMH journalist, describes literature as being a “gymnasium for empathy”. Extending this metaphor, our role as English teachers is to ensure our students have regular workouts in this gymnasium. We need to remind ourselves that if we can build empathy, develop compassion and understanding and help students advocate for a fairer word, we have made a special and important contribution to our world.

Sea Prayer should be part of your gymnasium. It is written by Khaled Hosseini (author of The Kite Runner) and illustrated by Dan Williams. It is beautifully crafted and tells a moving, powerful story.

Sea Prayer would appeal to Year 8 students but could equally succeed in Year 9 or 10.

Distinctive features of Sea Prayer

• The short story is 549 words in the form of a letter 
• The letter/prayer is spread across 44 pages which range from a single sentence to a short paragraph
• A Word version of the story is available 
• The story is told in the first person where the father directly addresses his son and recalls their life prior to their escape
• The language is accessible but is also moving and poignant
• Given it is based on a true and tragic real story the resonance of this short story is compellin.
• Every page contains an illustrated representation of the story’s background and journey
• The illustrations are a combination of ink and watercolour
• The animated version can be found on The Guardian's YouTube channel.

Ways to use Sea Prayer in the classroom

Sea Prayer would well suit a range of different focus areas with concepts such as Representation, Narrative, Connotation, Imagery and Symbol being valuable lens for exploration. 

Sea Prayer could be part of a collection of texts which explore ideas like:

• The Refugee Story
• Children in Crisis
• Adversity 

A starting point could be a collection of images from the internet which capture current world situations involving human displacement, refugees, conflict and specifically the plight of children.

Consider exploring 1-3 specific images to build visual literacy skills and understanding how representation is a deliberate and purposeful construct shaped by the intention of the photographer. 

In a class discussion explain the photographer’s purpose in representing this event or situation. Consider such features as framing, salience, colour, subject, gaze, vectors and their impact on the viewer.

Continue the discussion in small groups.

• Each group to explore an image of their own choice from the collection or the teacher allocates an image to each group.
• In about 5 dot points each group is to create a short informative piece on the context of the image
• Each group analyses their image in terms of the elements of the image which have been deliberately used to represent the event or situation
• Following the group representations students to choose 2 images and respond in about 500 words: Why did you choose these two images as effective and poignant representations of human heartbreak? 

Move to sharing images of Alan Kurdi. Be sure to provide the context of the refugees’ plight. Explain that the image of the soldier carrying the body of Alan was shared across the world media.

Time Magazine provides the background story. Here is an extract: 

In the summer of 2015, the three-year-old Syrian boy of Kurdish origins and his family fled the war engulfing their country, hoping to join relatives in the safety of Canada. They were part of a historic flow of refugees from the Middle East to Europe this year, and they followed the dangerous route taken by so many others.

In the early hours of Sept. 2, the family crowded onto a small inflatable boat on the beach of Bodrum, Turkey. A few minutes into the journey to Greece, the dinghy capsized. Alan, his older brother Ghalib and his mother Rihanna all drowned, joining the more than 3,600 other refugees who died in the eastern Mediterranean this year.

The Guardian also covered the story.

In what ways does this image from The Guardian engage the viewer in this tragedy?

Move then to discussion of how this event stirred others to represent Alan’s story, including the popular and successful author Khaled Hosseini, who subsequently wrote a short story in the form of a letter from a father to his son that was illustrated by Dan Williams. 

Share that this story has also been made into an animated film.

Distribute copies of Sea Prayer and give students the opportunity to read the story.

Close study of the written text:

1. My dear Marwan,

In the long summers of childhood, when I was a boy the age you are now, your uncles and I spread our mattress on the roof of your grandfather’s farmhouse, outside of Homs.

We woke in the mornings to the stirring of olive trees in the breeze, to the bleating of your grandmother’s goat, the clanking of her cooking pots, the air cool and the sun a pale rim of persimmon to the east.

In what ways does Hosseini draw us into Marwan’s world in these opening sentences?

2. First came the protests. Then the siege. The skies spitting bombs. Starvation. Burials.

Discuss Hosseini’s language choices in evoking the war in Syria.

3. All of us impatient for sunrise, all of us in dread of it. All of us in search of home. I have heard it said we are the uninvited. We are the unwelcome. We should take our misfortune elsewhere. But I hear your mother’s voice, over the tide, and she whispers in my ear, “Oh but if they saw, my darling. Even half of what you have. If only they saw. They would say kinder things, surely.”

How effective is this extract in building our understanding and empathy? In your response make close reference to the range of language choices. 

4. Because all I can think tonight is how deep the sea, and how vast, how indifferent. How powerless I am to protect you from it. All I can do is pray. Pray God steers the vessel true, when the shores slip out of eyeshot and we are a flyspeck in the heaving waters, keeling and titling, easily swallowed.

Because you, you are precious cargo, Marwan, the most precious there ever was.

I pray the sea knows this.

Inshallah.

How I pray the sea knows this.

In what ways does the ending draw together the key ideas of the story?

Students as Writers

Encourage students to research Syrian villages and the city of Homs. This could be an individual or small group task.

Using this research and following the style of Hosseini add two more sentences to the following extracts:

1. You wouldn’t have forgotten the farmhouse, the soot of its stone walls, the creek where your uncles and I built a thousand boyhood dams.
2. I wish you remembered Homs as I do, Marwan. 
   In its bustling Old City, a mosque for us Muslims, a church for our Christian neighbours, and a grand Souk for us all to haggle over gold pendants and fresh produce and bridal dresses. I wish you remembered the crowded lanes smelling of fried Kibbeh and the evening walks we took with your mother around Clock Tower Square.

Share the additions and vote on the two best examples which are most effective at both capturing Hosseini’s style and adding authentic details to the descriptions. 

Combining written text and visuals

In small groups students choose a double page to explore the interaction of words and visuals. Groups could take a photo of their double page and share on a screen. In their sharing with the class, the group could focus on how the interplay between the illustration and the written text builds understanding and empathy.

Written response

Discuss how Hosseini’s words and Williams’s illustrations combine to create a moving and effective representation of this tragic human experience. In your response make close reference to at least three double pages. 

Taking the text further

Sea Prayer would be a wonderful central text; then students move to other representations of their focus area.

Consider introducing the idea of displacement, home, refugees through the compelling video of various actors performing a Readers’ Theatre presentation of the poem What They Took With Them (YouTube link).

The poem was written by Jenifer Toksvig and was inspired by stories and first-hand testimonies from refugees forced to flee their homes and items they took with them One of the sources for the poem was Brian Sokol’s photography project, ‘The Most Important Thing,’ The words and the visuals will position students to a powerful understanding of this confronting life experience, which unfortunately, is still happening around our world. 

Another powerful text is the animated film: Sea Prayer Khalid Hosseini, The Guardian and Liz Edwards (2017) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/01/sea-prayer-a-360-story-inspired-by-refugee-alan-kurdi-khaled-hosseini

Writing task:

In what ways do the composers of these three texts move us to consider the horrors of conflict and its impact on people especially children? In your response make close reference to Sea Prayer, Oh Canada and What They Took With Them.

Sea Prayer could also be an excellent addition to a Stage 5 unit of work which focuses on the Representation of Migrant Lives and Experiences. It could be a text for close study and other texts could be explored in class with a selection then offered for wide reading.

For example: Walking in other peoples’ shoes: Choose at least three texts from the collection below. Discuss how these texts use narrative to represent the experiences of other people to build our empathy and understanding. 

• The Happiest Refugee Ahn Do
• England: Poems from a School ed. Kate Clancy 
• Between Us Claire Atkins
• Sea Prayer Khaled Hosseini
• The Surprising Power of a Good Dumpling Wai Chim
• Tiger Daughter Rebecca Lim
• Growing Up Asian in Australia ed. Alice Pung
• Growing Up Muslim in Australia ed. Amra Psajalic and Demet Divaroren
• Growing Up African in Australia ed. Maxine Beneba Clarke 
• Growing Up Indian in Australia ed. Aarti Betigeri 
• Headstrong Daughters Nadia Jamil 
• Burning Rice Eileen Chong 
• The Coconut Children Vivian Pham 

Relevant details in relation to the new NSW English 7-10 syllabus

Text requirements: Sea Prayer is a short prose, multimodal text from around the world which includes intercultural and diverse experiences and a range of cultural, social and gender perspectives

Concepts could include Representation • Narrative • Connotation, imagery and symbol.

Relevant NSW English 7-10 Syllabus content

Reading, viewing and listening to texts

A student uses a range of personal, creative and critical strategies to read texts that are complex in their ideas and construction EN4-RVL-01

Reading, viewing and listening for meaning

• Explore the main ideas and thematic concerns posed by a text for meaning
• Explain personal responses to characters, situations and issues in texts, recognising the role of written, oral or visual language in influencing these personal responses 

Reading for challenge, interest and enjoyment

• Read texts selected to challenge thinking, develop interest and promote enjoyment, to prompt a personal response
• Understand the ways reading helps us understand ourselves and make connections to others and to the world

Reflecting

• Reflect on how reading promotes a broad and balanced understanding of the world and enables students to explore universal issues

Understanding and responding to texts A

A student analyses how meaning is created through the use of and response to language forms, features and structures EN4-URA-01

Connotation, imagery and symbol

• Analyse how figurative language and devices can represent ideas, thoughts and feelings to communicate meaning

Understanding and responding to texts B

A student examines and explains how texts represent ideas, experiences and values EN4-URB-01

Theme

• Understand how repetition, patterning and language features used within a text communicate ideas about social, personal, ethical and philosophical issues and experiences, and demonstrate this understanding through written, spoken, visual and multimodal responses

Perspective and context

• Understand how perspectives are shaped by language and text
• Explore how the perspectives of audiences shape engagement with, and response to, texts
• Examine how elements of personal and social contexts can inform the perspective and purpose of texts and influence creative decisions
• Consider the influence of cultural context on language

Argument and authority

• Analyse how engaging personal voice is constructed in texts through linguistic and stylistic choices, and experiment with these choices in own texts

Style

• Describe the distinctive rhetorical and aesthetic qualities of a text that contribute to its textual style, and reflect on these qualities in own texts
• Identify elements of an author’s work that represent their distinct style

Expressing ideas and composing texts A

A student creates personal, creative and critical texts for a range of audiences by using linguistic and stylistic conventions of language to express ideas EN4-ECA-01

Writing

• Apply understanding of the structural and grammatical codes and conventions of writing to shape meaning when composing imaginative, informative and analytical, and persuasive written texts

Representing

• Compose visual and multimodal texts to represent ideas, experiences and values
• Select modal elements to work together to support meaning or shape reader response

Speaking

• Deliver spoken, signed or communicated texts with effective control of intonation, emphasis, volume, pace and timing

Text features: imaginative

• Create imaginative texts for creative effect and that reflect a broadening world and relationships within it
• Intentionally select and use poetic forms and features to imaginatively express ideas and personal perspectives

(English K-10 Syllabus 2022 © NSW Education Standards Authority for and on behalf of the Crown in right of the State of New South Wales, 2023)

Connecting texts