They have to keep swimming or they’ll die so they’re not allowed to sleep at all, not even for one second. Just as X-Fire reaches for his knife and is about to pounce on Dean and Harri, Lydia shouts, and the three of them escape to the library together. For young, vulnerable immigrants like Harri, assimilating into a given culture and understanding its language, customs, and social norms, is not just a courtesy, but can—under certain circumstances—be a matter of life and death.

Harri’s church at The Jubilee Center and the associated community stand as a sanctuary that is somehow simultaneously a part of and separate from this new urban life, acting like a moral tether to his Ghanaian roots. Já si představoval, že ty pomeranče, který se rozkutálely po zemi, jsou její šťastný vzpomínky a že hledají někoho jinýho, na koho by se mohly přilepit, aby nepřišly vniveč. No one comes forward to the police with any helpful information regarding the details of the murder.

While I admired the purity and ebullience of Harri’s narration, I was amazed on how Kelman handled the parts of the narrative by the pigeon especially those with open and close quotes. Harri, the eleven-year-old protagonist, is a (possibly illegal) immigrant from Ghana, living in the projects in London.

Young boys in Harri's neighborhood have to be like sharks, constantly moving and vigilant; otherwise, gangs can harm or even kill them. Harri tends to like everyone; even the pigeons who flock around the housing projects, occasionally getting inside. More often than not, it is Harri’s naiveté that lands him in compromising situations, as he places too much trust in the world around him. The pigeon remarks that the dead boy "wasn't mine," indicating that, by contrast, Harri's belief that he and the pigeon share a special connection is true. Like Harri, she faces pressures to assimilate into London culture, grow up quickly, and demonstrate loyalty to the Dell Farm Crew.He makes it to the end of the school year, full of love for his girlfriend Poppy Morgan and sheer childlike joy for the start of summer, only to be ambushed by the killer in the lobby of his apartment complex and left to bleed out and die, with his last thoughts those of his baby sister in Ghana. The title has a dual meaning - it refers to Harri's 'pidgin' English, peppered with schoolboy slang and misunderstood words, but also to the pigeon who visits Harri on his balcony, a creature he sees as his friend.

If the reader doesn’t understand these words at first, they likely will by the end of the novel due to seeing these words repeated and picking up on the context in which they are used. Eleven year old Harrison Opatu is filled with gusto-for life, for language, for experiences of all kinds. This quotation demonstrates that Harri and his peers feel helpless in the face of violence and oppression and dream of ways to fight for themselves. My mood usually affects my overall liking of the book I'm currently reading and I was in a pretty down mood when I was reading Pigeon English. Harri was such a little charmer, so innocent and unaware of the very violent surroundings he and his family were living in.Asweh, I spent hell of donkey hours reading this, got ants in my pant getting through the pigeon parts (hutious! In this quotation, Harri tries to justify his desire to join the Dell Farm Crew by speculating that he could serve as a missionary for them. Considering every time I turn the news on, there is a new report of a gang killing (not just in London), 'Pigeon English' was a frighteningly real portrayal of urban crime and the innocent people who get caught in the crossfire.

Ultimately, the book fits securely into that mode of storytelling that uses immigrant eyes and voices to reveal the flaws of their host society. A member of Dance Club, Lydia befriends Miquita and Chanelle and enjoys normal adolescent behaviors, like gossiping and watching television dramas. That inherent unreliability makes fictional children appealing vehicles for dramatic irony, protagonist-witnesses of a story of which they have only a partial understanding, whose gaps in knowledge and comprehension mirror their readers' experience and occasionally leave us terrified in the face of their ignorance. Sometimes I like to read books nobody is talking about so I can champion them and find them new readers. I was quite surprised to learn that Kelman is white and British, though not at all surprised that he apparently grew up poor.It's the lot of most children to see more than the adults in their lives but to struggle with how to decode it: observant, helplessly impressionable and hungry for incident, their interpretations of the environment and occurrences that surround them are hit and miss – sometimes uncannily spot-on and sometimes spectacularly amiss. His father, grandmother and baby sister Agnes stay behind until the family can afford to be reunited. This shows that language is created both through “official” methods, such as the instruction of English in schools and the dictionary, as well as unofficial processes, such as the development of slang. Although X-Fire forgives Harri’s ignorance in that instance, Harri is later punished for not showing enough respect and deference to the Dell Farm Crew.