******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ********************
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*****************************************************************
NY Times Sunday Book Review, July 23 2017
Two Testimonials Shed Light on Syrian Life and Death
By ELIZA GRISWOLD
THE HOME THAT WAS OUR COUNTRY
A Memoir of Syria
By Alia Malek
Illustrated. 334 pp. Nation Books. $27.99.
WE CROSSED A BRIDGE AND IT TREMBLED
Voices From Syria
By Wendy Pearlman
290 pp. Custom House/HarperCollins Publishers. $24.99.
“I lived in a country where dying was taught to us from childhood,” the
writer Svetlana Alexievich said in her 2015 Nobel Prize acceptance
speech. “We were taught death.” Alexievich was speaking of Belarus,
where she grew up and where, during World War II, 2.2 million people
died — nearly one person in four. The scale of this suffering seems
impossible to fathom, numbers so large that the mind snaps shut. Yet one
needn’t cast back in history for such figures. Since the war in Syria
began six years ago, 6.5 million people — more than one in three Syrians
— have been internally displaced, and another 470,000 are dead. Now, as
the war grinds into its seventh horrifying year, literature written in
English and borne out of the conflict is finally beginning to reach the
rest of the world.
Alia Malek’s memoir, “The Home That Was Our Country,” is one of the
finest examples of this new testimonial writing. Born in Baltimore to
Syrian-American parents, Malek is a journalist and attorney who landed a
job in the civil rights division of the Justice Department less than a
year before 9/11. Unable to endure the political climate under President
George W. Bush, she quit the United States for the Middle East, where
she traveled and taught human rights for the better part of a decade.
Her political and cultural fluency, as well as her deep familiarity with
the landscape, allow her to become “a human ear” as Svetlana Alexievich
calls it, recording the tragic absurdities of daily life that give way
to dark humor. On an earlier trip, she had visited southern Lebanon and
toured a prison that was recently closed. Her guide, a former inmate,
instructed the group’s members to cover their noses and mouths, “so as
not to inhale the germs of diseases that he was convinced still
lingered.” The disease that lingered, of course, was despair. She
spotted a sign for the “suffering yard” — suffering, she writes, “was
their translation for torture.”
In April 2011, Malek moved to the Syrian capital of Damascus to report
in secret for The Nation and The New York Times. The country was in the
initial throes of what many hoped would become a democratic uprising
born out of the Arab Spring. Yet there were already terrible signs that
the regime of Bashar al-Assad wasn’t going to give up without bloody
reprisals. In February, his security forces had rounded up and tortured
at least 15 children for anti-Assad graffiti in their town of Dara’a.
Ordinary Syrians, long oppressed by two generations of the Assad
family’s brutality, were taking to the streets in protest. In an attempt
to quell reports of dissent, the regime banned many foreign journalists.
Malek went to work anyway. As a cover story, she tells her Syrian
cousins that she’s writing a book about her maternal grandmother, Salma,
the daughter of a Christian businessman, Sheikh Abdeljawwad al-Mir, born
in the Ottoman Empire in 1889.
Her cover story wasn’t entirely false, as that book becomes this one,
and Malek grounds her narrative throughout in her grandmother’s story.
Salma, a charismatic and embittered matriarch, grew up as the
chain-smoking daughter in a family that prized only men, and after
suffering a stroke, spends the last seven years of her life in her
Damascus apartment, “locked in” her body, paralyzed yet alert, able to
communicate only with her eyes. When Salma dies, she leaves behind a
chic flat for Malek’s family, which, after decades of feuding with a
hostile tenant, they succeed in reclaiming.
As Syria burns, it falls to Malek to renovate the flat — haggling for
light fixtures from the Electricity Souk during a blackout, and keeping
an eye on a corrupt contractor while the Assad regime gasses its own
people, drops barrel bombs — oil drums loaded with shrapnel — from
helicopters, and disappears thousands to be tortured in underground prisons.
Malek observes almost none of this firsthand. Instead, her war is
largely made up of what she can’t see. She lives day to day under the
cloud of claustrophobia and menace that dominates the Syrian capital,
where her presence poses a significant risk both to herself and to her
Syrian family. Attempting, at one point, to communicate to Malek the
kind of danger she’s putting her family in, a beloved cousin grabs her
own hair, imitating the treatment the security forces mete out upon
women, which can include gang rape. “That’s what they will do,” she
tells Malek. “They will take all of us if you do something.”
Although it becomes increasingly clear that her family would prefer that
Malek leave Syria immediately, she stays on for two years, conducting
clandestine interviews with ordinary Syrians undertaking extreme acts of
courage — from those shuttling medical supplies to besieged areas to
others launching ingenious and nonviolent protests against the regime.
Some have survived unspeakable horrors in the basement of the nearby
office of the security forces. Malek often walks past “with a shudder.”
Its cells, she learns from torture survivors, are smeared with blood.
This office dominates her waking life, as Malek, both insider and
outsider, is forced to pass it most days, thinking about much that
others would rather ignore. In her neighborhood, as elsewhere, she
realizes, the proximity of the mukhabarat, as the security forces are
called, has a double purpose. Their nearness terrifies local civilians
into submission. “But most insidiously, no matter how much we averted
our gaze, the fact that we knew what was happening inside and yet went
about our lives made us complicit.” This quotidian collusion takes a
moral toll. By the time she leaves for good in May 2013, she realizes
that, whether she likes it or not, she too has become an unwilling
collaborator: “By going about our lives, we had become bit players in
the regime’s effort to maintain that everything was normal.”
By contrast, “We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled” chronicles Syrian
lives that are anything but normal. In it, Wendy Pearlman, a professor
of politics at Northwestern University, collects the accounts of
refugees, most of whom have fled the brutality of the Assad regime.
Pearlman speaks fluent Arabic, and between 2012 and 2016, she travels to
Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon and Europe to record their stories.
Many of these voices render themselves unforgettable. A doctor named
Annas tells Pearlman during an interview in Turkey how he and others
found unconventional ways to treat protesters gassed by the regime:
“People were choking on tear gas and we’d pour cola on their faces,
which counters the effect of gas. Their faces were sticky and
glistening.” Another, Adam, a media organizer interviewed by Pearlman in
Denmark, debunks facile Western talk about ancient religious divisions
in Syria: “Our children are in prison ... and you’re talking about Shia
and Sunnis?”
Amin, a physical therapist, shares an ingenious bit of activist
tradecraft on how to elude security forces, who often dial the contacts
in the phone of someone they capture in order to ensnare others. “If
someone dies, don’t delete his number. Just change his name to ‘Martyr.’
That way, if you get a text from him, you know that someone else has
gotten a hold of the phone.” He adds, “So I’d open my contact list, and
it was all Martyr, Martyr, Martyr.”
These oral histories aren’t dutiful case studies. Instead, Pearlman
shapes her subjects’ narratives, winnowing interviews down to stirring
illustrations of human adaptation. In a tent in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley,
Pearlman finds a woman named Bushra, a mother who has, five years into
the war, raised her children largely on the move and out of doors by
necessity. One day, she took her young daughter to a woman’s center,
which was in an actual building. “After living in a tent, she was amazed
by the real walls and real floors,” Bushra tells Pearlman. Astonished,
her daughter exclaimed, “Take a photo of me next to the wall!”
One slight issue, however, with these accounts: The more compelling they
become, the more questions they raise about how exactly they were
fashioned. Pearlman could tell us more about the process of deposition
and translation. In the introduction, she describes working with more
than 20 researchers to transcribe the interviews, which she then edited,
she says, for “readability,” a word that calls for more explication. The
stories would benefit from being framed by a detailed accounting of this
process. In some places, their seamless beauty grows distracting, as we
become unsure of where the speaker ends and where Pearlman’s editorial
hand begins.
Nevertheless, Pearlman’s oral histories, like Malek’s memoir, will
remain essential reading in the emerging body of literary reportage from
Syria in English. (Two other memoirs that will be published here this
fall include the journalist Deborah Campbell’s “A Disappearance in
Damascus,” and the photojournalist Jonathan Alpeyrie’s account of his
captivity, “The Shattered Lens.”) What makes Pearlman’s and Malek’s
books particularly necessary is their insistence on foregrounding the
extraordinary heroism of ordinary Syrians — both those who remain
trapped in the yoke of an oppressive regime, and those struggling to
make new lives in unwelcoming places. Such stories couldn’t be more
urgent. “I was writing history through the stories of its unnoticed
witnesses and participants,” Svetlana Alexievich tells us. “They had
never been asked anything.”
Eliza Griswold is the author of “The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the
Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam.” Her new book, “Amity and
Prosperity: A Story of Energy in America,” will be published next year.
_________________________________________________________
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at:
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com