The Murmur of Bees: Magic, Morals, Fate and Free Will

🐝 Join us today for a discussion on Sofia Segovia's novel, The Murmur of Bees! Such a beautiful, heartwarming yet heartbreaking story, with so much to talk about! A boy, abandoned because of a birth defect, found under a bridge protected by a blanket to bees. These bees become his constant guide through life...magical realism hums through this story.

Something really interesting is the idea of moral entitlement, so well demonstrated by the antagonist, Anselmo Espiricueta. Never heard of moral entitlement? Join us to find out!  

Transcript

Hi, and welcome back to the literary Lamp post where we analyze books and see what we can learn from them. It's been a while since we've had a proper episode schedule. It's a while. Well, it's 

been while since we've had a Yeah. Schedule. It's been a while since. It's been a while since we've had an episode, but it's been a while since we've had a schedule as well.

Yeah, things have been a bit crazy. Um, we've been away. Yeah, we just keep going places. Yeah, it's doing things on weekends. It's the midyear break for uni, which Caitlyn's at uni and. I don't know. Well, the midyear break just finished, and so we're back on schedule. 

Yes. Anyway, I'm Caitlin. I'm a math grad student, but I love English and I love analyzing literature.

I'm Ashley, an assistant editor for a magazine and a writer. Today we are talking about the 

murmur of Bees, which is written by an author from Mexico, Sophia Segovia. It was published in Spanish in 2019, and then translated into English around the same time I believe. 

Yeah, it's set from around 1910 to 1930 around the time of the Spanish Flu Pandemic and the Mexican Revolution.

A couple 

other random world events that don't really play all that much in the story, and it's 

just both incredibly beautiful and absolutely heartbreaking. It's very bittersweet. Um, 

it's also just such a rich story, like there's that whole element of magical realism, which we'll get into, but there's also all these little.

Side quests. I feel like a lot of books these days have like, I don't know, a structure that they follow because of the publisher criteria, whereas this one kind of goes on on these little tangents and explores these little pockets of story that aren't really relevant, but they flesh it out. It's really cool and 

then it, it works in the end and you can see how it all comes together.

I feel like a lot of magical realism is like that. 

Yeah, in this style of storytelling, you just get this intergenerational stories and often long, not often non-linear. That is true. Um, I listened to it for the first time in. Yeah, I listened to the, I listened to the audio book. Audio books count. They do, they do.

Um, I listened to it first in 2019 when it first came out. Um, I was sobbing at 2:00 AM and I finished this book. 

I read it for the first time last week, and I also cried for like two hours. So you will need issues. I'm a heartbroken weight more. Bitter is sweet. Yes. Yeah. Bitter sweet way. Like it, it's good for your soul.

Yeah. So we're going to be talking a bit about the magical realism and Latin American literature. We are going to be discussing a little bit of disability and the judgment of those who are different. Um, the nature of villainy and this idea of moral entitlement and finally fate and 

dealing with regret.

But first, let's get into a bit of a book summary. Um, I'm assuming a lot of you have not read a murmur of bees. It doesn't really seem like very popular book. It's not. I don't see it in bookstores ever. No. So you are in for a treat. The novel opens with an elderly woman who's seen several generations of the Morales family.

They're a land owning family in early 20th century ES Mexico. She sits every day in an old rocker until one day she disappears. Returning with a newborn with a cleft palate found abandoned under a bridge, shrouded by a protective swarm of bees. The baby's named Simon. Is adopted by Francisco and Beatrice Morales.

So Simonia's arrival changes the family pretty drastically. Um, they raise him as their own son despite the community's suspicion and superstition. Simonon Lapier doesn't speak, but he communicates with a swarm of bees, which are always with him. As he grows up and he receives visions, he's able to sense danger and becomes a sort of guardian for his family, especially his little brother.

Francisco, Jr. 

Some villagers believe that Simon Lapier is cursed while others see him as gifted. Um, while he's still quite young, he has an encounter with a man who lives and works on the Morales land and he recognizes this man's hate learning to hide from it. And. Hate kind of becomes a central part of the story.

ESP becomes a symbol of evil. He's bitter about the class divide and the loss of his family and the Spanish influenza epidemic, and he becomes part of some pretty pivotal and heart wrenching plot points. A 

few other historical events featured in the story are the Mexican Revolution. This deeply affects the Mara's family and their workers and highlights the issues of class and privilege and also the pandemic.

And as a side note, it was really interesting for us to read about the Pandemic Post, our Own Pandemic. And this book was published in 2019. And what, so when I first read it, I didn't know what that would have been like. And now reading it again. I knew what it was like to have a three month isolation and quarantine and all these public safety measures.

There was definitely a lot more death with the Spanish flu, and they were so unaware of it, it came upon 'em so suddenly, um, that was the difference between them and. Us who had so much more access to information and what was going on at the time. So that was 

interesting. Anyway, so when S LAP is 12, his little brother Francisco Jr.

Is born, they formed this bond with Francisco Jr. Understanding S Lap P'S unique way of communicating and the years past, the Morales family endures. Some pretty heavy losses, illness, hardship, and the story ultimately becomes like this. Meditation on memory with Francisco Jr. Looking back from old age, telling the story of semen, LaPierre and his family's triumphs and losses, and giving us a glimpse into Mexican life of the early 20th century intertwined with magical elements.

So let's start with 

that. What 

is Magical 

realism? Magical realism is a genre that emerged from Latin American literature, 

Gabrielle Garcia Marquez, 

anyone. It blends real life. We're often highlighting key historical moments and societal changes. With fantastical and supernatural elements, which are just perceived as part of the normal world.

So it's not in a separate world. It's very much grounded in our world, but it has this sense of magic woven into it, and it's just accepted as normal by the characters in the book. 

For example, take 100 Years of Solitude. It's a book where Magical Realism is in its element written by Gabrielle Garcia Marquez, and my favorite quote from that book is.

He really had been through death, but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude. And it's just, you know, accepted. Oh, he died, but he, he came back 'cause he didn't like it. Everyone just kind of moves on with life. Something that Garcia Marquez says in 1973 in Mexico, surrealism runs through the streets.

Surrealism comes from the reality of Latin America. 

I really enjoyed getting to immerse myself in. This writing style that was so different from what I'm used to. I think that this is something I've been realizing because you know, we both speak Polish and I've read a few books or listened to a few books in Polish that don't exist in English.

So popup, for example, it's called the Deluge. I haven't actually been able to find an English version of it, and it's such an amazing historical novel, but I would not have access to it. Had I not been able to read Polish, and so that made me kind of think about how much literature we as English speakers miss, simply because we don't have the language.

And that's just a whole world of understanding that we 

just 

don't 

have. Yeah, and it's like this whole. It's this whole entire culture that's embedded in this genre of literature. We're so lucky that there's so many books from magical Realism that we can actually read and kind of get a glimpse into Latin American culture.

We are very lucky that this book was actually 

translated because we got to immerse ourselves in this very different way of. Engaging with stories. I actually first encountered magical realism when I was going through the show, Jane the Virgin, which is one of my all time favorites. I'm Team Michael, by the way, if anyone wants to know.

Really? Yeah. Are you not? I don't know. I'm on the fence. Really? How could you not be? Team Michael? I dunno, I just don't really like him at the end. Well, yeah. But obviously in the end, but that drastic personality change was actually required to make him not work with Jane. He was that good for her. Okay.

Yeah. Anyway, moving on. Uh, magical Realism kind of runs through that whole show and it's, it's just a really cool way of storytelling. So I learned about Magical Realism because Jane is a writer and she writes with magical realism. And so I had just finished watching the show when this book, the Murmur of Bees came out.

And it was suggested to me on Audible, and I was like, Hey, magical realism. Yeah, I'll give that a go. And I really enjoyed the magical realism aspect of it. It's very different to any kind of storytelling I've ever encountered 

before. The book shifts perspective, sometimes narrated by Francisco Jr.

Sometimes third person from Beatriz or Simon Lapierre's perspective, often going in circles, touching on future events, returning to the past. Very nonlinear, and the author actually references this type of storytelling. When Siemen Lapier has gone to listen to some traveling storytellers, the book says Siemen Lapier knew there were stories that one could read in books with black words on white pages.

He was not interested in those because once printed, they were indelible, unchanging. Each reader had to follow the order of words indicated in those pages exactly until they each arrived inexorably at the same outcome. Simonson Lap P had learned that just as the words of a story told, verbally had the freedom to change its characters, the challenges they faced, and the ending.

Were also free to change 

Simonson lap P's. Bees are the most significant element of the magical realism. He communicates with them and understands things from them that others don't. It's just accepted by his family that he has this gift, but he has these visions also. On top of being able to talk to the bees about things that are going on.

For example, just before the Spanish flu hits their town, he comes down with a fake illness where he genuinely has a fever, but he's not actually sick, which keeps the family secluded until they realize that the pandemic is spreading and then they're able to pack up and move to the country, avoiding the worst of the pandemic.

He also played a very important part as a child in helping his adopted father make a key decision. In how they would farm their land with orange orchards. A decision very heavily influenced by the bees, but which ended up helping his family significantly. There's this quote, it 

says he would have liked to discuss his bees and ask everyone why they didn't hear them, given that they spoke to others too, as they did to him.

Had he been able, he would've talked about the song The Bees sang into his willing ear about flowers on the mountain far away. Encounters and friends that had not made it on their long journey home about the sun that would beat down hard one day, but be covered in storm clouds the next. It's so beautiful.

So we briefly mentioned about Simon Lap P. He was found abandoned under the bridge covered in bees. The reason that he was abandoned is because he had a cleft lip and cleft palate, and a cleft lip together with a cleft palate is a birth defect where the. Top of the lip and soft palate don't close correctly, and it causes this hole and gap in your mouth.

And the two things happen together about one in 1,563 births. It can be fixed by surgery, but it is really expensive. And throughout the book, there's this idea. By a lot of people in the town that the disability is due to the parents' sin punishment by God. That's kind of an idea that goes back in religion pretty far.

But because of this, Simon Lappe can't speak. And as a result of that, people think that he's stupid. And so they say all of these things to him or around him. Oh, like, oh, poor boy. Oh, like all of these. Sometimes nice and sympathetic, sometimes downright mean and cruel things in his presence because they think that he can't understand them, so that shapes the way that he interacts with people significantly.

I think that it's human nature to react to people who are different from us. I think that it's really important that that itself doesn't make us bad people and that we all have these tendencies, but we need to learn to fight 

against them. Especially because a lack of understanding can lead to hatred.

We see that 

really clearly in the character of Anta, who is a sharecropper on the land belonging to Francisco Morales. And Ata absolutely hates Sson LaPierre from the time that they bring him home, calls him a devil because of his face, and Simon Lappe for his family's suffering, even though it's clear to us that it's actually his own fault 

that his family is suffering.

In SI's mind and in his stories that he tells to Francisco Jr. He portrays ESP Cueta as a coyote and him and his family as being Lions. The entire book kind of foreshadows this eventual meeting of the coyote and the lion. So we get a number of chapters 

throughout the book from ESP PTA's perspective, and he refers to Simon Lap as the devil.

Yet the Morales family seems completely clueless to the amount of hatred that he has towards their godson. 

Now, ESP PTA's very poor. He came to the Morales family with his. Own large family. Shortly before Simon Napier's own arrival. He's very bitter, very angry, and filled with hatred for people like Francisco esp.

Cueta is indigenous, as the book mentions that Spanish is not his native language, and it's often mentioned that Francisco and his family have white skin and blonde hair. So we have these two sides. We have a wealthy family who. Is incredibly kind and good to their sharecroppers. However, their wealth rests on the backs of people like edta, who work yet will never be at the same level as the Morales family.

So when ESP Cueta first 

arrives in the area, he has this vision where he's free from his past and he can now start over and become a landowner himself. Yet his family nearly starves. And so when San Francisco rescues them, he lowers his head and says, yes, boss. 

Yeah, I found that really sad. I feel like that was the moment where his bitterness and hate really started to rule his life because he realized that he didn't have a choice but to bow his head to someone.

Part of the ruling class, he has this song that he sings to himself later in the book. Now the Golden Eagle has flown and the finch is chased away at last, the day must come when the mule takes the reigns. And he's obviously talking 

about himself as the mule, the worker. And this song gives some pretty heavy foreshadowing to the reader, making us ask how, how is he going to take the reins?

And also highlights his constant desire to be in control of his own land, well seeming to at least bow 

his head to authority. When the Morales family sequesters themselves away in the country during the pandemic, esp, Quetta and his family are left behind due to him disobeying Francisco and sending his wife to town for tobacco, exposing her to the flu as a result of them staying behind his wife and all his children, except.

Two die lending him more fuel for his hate, 

and he blames Sima for his family's death, even though it's completely irrational, it was his own fault for sending his wife to town, even though he was told not to, and he then hates the Morales family for leaving them behind. This raises the question, how much allowance do you give someone who has this background, who's incredibly poor and disadvantaged, yet experiences these consequences, which in many ways are part of.

His own choices. He blames the Devils Simon lap and Francisco's riches for this, but he's actually making matters worse for himself. Through all of this, 

the book says Sweta knew what the land he trod every day was worth. It was his. He worked it and deserved it. 

ASTA's violence stems from a feeling that unfortunately is still pretty common today, that feeling that if you've been hurt or disadvantaged in any way, it gives you a right to do it to others.

So while I was reading this book, I came across this fantastic video by Stephanie Harrison on Instagram with the handle at Stephanie h Son, and this is what she says. Moral entitlement is the belief that because you have suffered, you have the right to do whatever it takes to protect yourself, even if it harms other people first, you're harmed.

Then you have the very natural instinct to protect yourself. But sometimes people start to ruminate on how they have been wronged, which studies show leads to increasing sense of entitlement and selfish behavior. Over time, your identity can start to fuse around this idea of perpetual entitlement, which provides you with a benefit because you never have to think about how your actions affect other people.

Eventually it results in a profound egotism where not only do you struggle to feel empathy for other people, but you don't recognize their pain as real or how you've contributed to it. This becomes even more dangerous at the group level because the harm doesn't have to directly happen to you. If it happens to someone in your group, you can become morally entitled.

Groups that suffer tremendously may adopt a blank moral license that argues that one, the world allowed our suffering to happen. Therefore, have no right to judge us. Two. Our suffering proves that moral standards no longer apply, so why should we participate? Three. In order to protect ourselves, we will do whatever is needed to keep ourselves safe.

Four. Whatever we do that we deem needed will never compare to the suffering we experienced. But of course, adopting these beliefs leads to more suffering, which leads to more people adopting these beliefs, which leads to a complete breakdown of the moral framework that is needed to keep us all safe. I know it can feel really hard if you have suffered.

Or you are a part of a group that has suffered. I'm not dismissing your pain. It's real. It matters and it deserves compassion, and no pain gives us the right to hurt other people. This is the recognition that is required in order for us to break the cycle of violence that we see happening all around us.

Being a victim does not prevent them from doing harm. 

That's a really good video. It breaks it down really well. A modern day example of what she's talking about, moral entitlement would be what's happening right now in Gaza. Israel is aiming to destroy an entire people group. So far over 60,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel.

18,000 of them children, yet many in the west either are turning a blind eye. Or feel like they can't be critical because this is Israel and the Jewish people suffered immeasurably during the Holocaust and the diaspora. As a result, Israel 

feels morally entitled to hurt a group of people standing in the way of what they feel like they deserve.

And there's this sense of, oh, you can't judge them or speak out against them because that's antisemitism, because the world allowed their previous suffering. Just because Israel has suffered so much in the past, it doesn't now give them license to turn around. And so badly hurt other people, 

bringing it back tota.

He has this background of suffering. He's been displaced through colonialism. He's dirt poor. He has suffered, he's been subjugated. His family has died. But then he turns around and beats his wife, beats his daughter for accepting the kindness of Beatriz, who made her a ragdoll in new clothes, and he also murders a woman that he wants to marry because she rejected him.

Also, spoiler alert, for the sake of analysis, though it's foreshadowed pretty heavily from the very beginning of the Bookta, ultimately kills Francisco because he believes that he's owed the land that he's on. Francisco took in. Okay, 

sorry, because I've listened to this Hispanic accent. Francisco took in ATA and his family, and I think it's because it was ata, right?

ATA took him, Francisco took in Ata and his family and kept him on, despite the fact that he didn't pay his rent, didn't work, the land well, didn't produce much from the land, ultimately was not a very good member of the community. Um, but he kept him on because he didn't wanna kick him out and just wanted to be kind to a man who had, you know, been beaten down.

And I guess you could say that it was this kindness that killed him in the end. 

Yet there's that counterpoint of the colonialism being wrong to begin with. So the generosity wasn't actually generosity, I mean, from Francisco's perspective it was, but from our perspective, knowing how it affected so many people, it was the absolute bare minimum he could do.

I think this is one of those cases where two things can be true at once. The suffering that a speed Cueta experienced was very clearly wrong. The pain and the poverty and the loss he's been through, all of that is wrong. But at the same time, he is wrong for hurting others and for feeling like the world owes him because he suffered.

There was this really great blog article that we came across when researching this book. It's called La Blogger Do 

vlog spot.com and. An anonymous person posted a comment in the whole discussion about this, and they said he has a backstory that makes you want to root for him, but he's unrepentant evil.

You know, I think sometimes it's true that people are bad because of their background and their background drives them into villainy. So I think maybe instead of just passing judgment on them as individuals, we can look at the things that led up to it and work to prevent it. And though at the same time.

It doesn't excuse them. Everyone has the choice of how to respond to the circumstances that they're dealt, even though some people's choices may be harder, but background plays a really big part 

in the direction that people's lives Take for example, in the book Utopia by Sir Thomas Moore, which you know, I have not read, but I have watched ever after in which the main character has read it.

Such a good movie. She quotes this to the prince who's, you know, up there living his rich life and not caring at all about the peasants in his country. She says, quoting more for if you suffer your people to be ill educated, and then manners to be corrupted from their infancy and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them.

What else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them? 

Damn. That is a really powerful quote and really well summarizes what I was trying to say there. Um, there is though this aspect of we have choices about where our lives go, and we are all responsible for making those choices.

And so it's not right to say that we are fated to be villains just because we 

have a bad background. But fate does play a part, and that's explored in this book. The idea of fate is thrown around quite easily in conversation. Oh, it was meant to be, it was FD in the Stars, you know, whatever. Yet it's really a thing to consider.

Um, do we believe that what is meant to happen will happen no matter what. Simon Lap grows up with this knowledge that one day the coyote and the lion are going to meet that the hate Kuta Harbors is going to boil over, and it does. His adopted Father Francisco dies and he has this overwhelming feeling.

He's, he's 19 at the time. Um, that if he had been there, he could have stopped it. 

So Francisco dies at the hand of ATA out on the land when it was just Francisco and Francisco Jr. Who was seven, who nearly died himself but was rescued just in time by Simon Lap Peel and. Simon Lap Appeal's reflecting and he's thinking life had changed because of his carelessness.

So Simon Lappe blames himself because he had promised that he would never leave Francisco 

Jr. And Francisco's wife, Beatrice also has to deal with, um, an enormous amount of regret. She didn't say goodbye that morning when her husband left, she was dealing with a household issue, didn't see them off. She wished that she had gone out and said goodbye, that she had just stopped them from going, and she has this, none of this 

would've happened.

She has this sense of if she had gone to say goodbye, she would've known that something bad was going to happen and been able to stop it. Um, this whole idea, I'm sure that we've all experienced at one point or another. If we had just done something so slightly differently, it would've all been so different.

We have no 

answers for how to deal with that. You know, all you can do is make the best decisions you can with the knowledge that you have. Be kind for the sake of being kind, because that is what it truly means to be human and somehow deal with potential consequences later. I find that idea of 

you.

Looking back and saying, you made the best decision you could with the information you had. Really, really helpful when thinking back to some of the decisions I've made and feeling regret, um, Beatriz goes through quite a bit of a journey after Francisco dies dealing with this, and the book says eventually.

That she would not seed a single part of her life or free will to anyone anymore. She would make her decisions freely and with free will. She would banish the fear. She remembered the promise that she had once made to no one but herself, not even in her old age, would she allow herself to become anyone's shadow.

So she makes this decision that despite these things that have happened to her, she's going to continue living life and using her agency to make decisions about her life. 

Ah, yes. Agency. Sorry. So Beatrice mentions free will, right? And we're talking about fate and free will. 

I think even in secular conversations, most people are familiar with this idea of free will, that we as human beings have the ability to make decisions about our life.

And we are not compelled to make certain decisions by any external forces, but. There is this idea of causal determinism in philosophy. 

It's the idea that all events are determined by something external to human action. It's often used in the argument to say that we don't have free will. Basically, it means that 

all the little.

Marbles of life, I guess you could say, are rolling in a certain direction, and they all impact each other and bump each other in certain ways to where the outcome is pretty much guaranteed given the setup. And there's no way for things to have happened in any way other than they happened. And there's a pretty big problem with this idea because it absolves us of any sort of responsibility for.

Our choices because if it's gonna happen anyway, it doesn't really matter what we do because we're essentially, essentially, essentially it's an overarching idea that fake controls everything about your life. But it's the fancy philosophy version of that. It's a bit 

mind bendy. Um, it is. I do struggle to wrap my head around that, so if you did to That's okay.

Let's just move on. But it's, you know, it's an interesting concept in this book. Siemen Lapier has this knowledge of the future, like the weather will be cold tomorrow, or his adopted mother is pregnant. Um, does his knowledge of the future make it fixed and unchangeable? Um, or are there multiple futures, multiple paths, let yet.

Yet spi or just knew certain people would walk down certain paths, like he knew that one day the coyote Asta was going to hurt his family. 

It's an interesting exploration of the whole, does knowing the future mean that the future is determined? And you know, we have said a few times on this show that we are believers in Jesus, we believe in God, and that intersects with this whole idea of, can we believe that?

God knows the future, and yet we still have the ability to make decisions freely of our own. And then there's this other idea of if we believe in a good God, then how can there be so much evil in the world? How can he allow the bad to happen if he is good? This is a really longstanding question that pretty much everyone who believes in God wrestles with at some point.

Um, I'm reading a book at the moment called The Odyssey of Love by John Peckham, and I used to think that it was quite simple. If God was all powerful and all good, yet he stands by then, he actually can't be all powerful and all good if he could do something about it. Right? And I think that's a pretty common.

Conclusion to come to. But after reading this book, I realized that it's a lot more complicated than I initially thought, and what seems like an obvious conclusion, just thinking about it in those simple terms. Doesn't actually work the way I expected it to anyway. Um, it's a really, really, really good book.

If that's something that you want to know more about, highly recommend. 

It kind of all goes back to how God interacts with human choice. And there's this really interesting quote from the beginning of the book where Beatrice asks herself, war was, wait, where Beatrice says War was waged by men. What could God do against their free will?

Like I said, this is a pretty massive area of philosophy. There's no way we can cover it, all of it, but if you're up for it, go read The Odyssey of Love by John Peckham and. Have fun in the philosophical weeds, so to speak. 

Or you could just pick up a murmur of bees and see how Sophia S explores it and in an end to the murmur of bees that will probably have you reaching for the tissues.

Oh, I was definitely reaching 

for the tissues 

both times. Finance cord Jr. As an old man is remembering and coming to several realizations. He's been separated from Sima NPI for decades. For reasons you'll have to read the book to find out. And he tells his taxi driver to pass down his stories to his children and to pass down what he realizes in his old age that he has finally learned from Opio.

He says, tell them to walk in the shade, to listen with their eyes, to see with their skin, and to feel with their ears. Because life speaks to us all and we just need to know and wait to listen to it, see it, feel  📍 it. 

And on that note, thank you so much for joining us for this episode of The Literary Lamppost.

Uh, join us on Instagram and share your thoughts with us. We will hopefully be posting a few community things this week. We've been so busy. We have neglected that recently. But keep an eye on both our posts and our stories because we are hoping to be back this week. Uh, we'd love to hear what you think, uh, especially some of these really complex ideas that don't have easy answers.

Also, we would love it if you shared this podcast with somebody who you think would enjoy it. And stay tuned for our next episode in which we will be talking about the secret life of bees. 

Got a bit of a bee theme going. 

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time. This podcast includes brief excerpts from literary works for the purpose of commentary, criticism, and analysis, which we believe constitutes fair use under copyright law. Our theme music was created by Joshua Ibit for exclusive use by the literary Lamppost podcast.