'The Home That Was Our Country' recalls Syria as it once was

A Syrian attorney asks: 'What has happened to our country?'

The Home That Was Our Country: A Memory of Syria By Alia Malek Nation Books 304 pp.

At several points in the epic journey of her escape from Syria’s war-shaken city of Aleppo, chronicled in her eponymous memoir, author Nujeen Mustafa looks at the disruption all around her, seeing despairing graffiti, hordes of refugees, and a confused reaction from the foreign press, and asks, “What has happened to our country?”

It’s a painfully simple sentiment, one no doubt echoed by the many thousands of refugees who’ve fled from the chaos and violence that erupted in 2011 in the wake of the Arab Spring protests and soon grew into wide-scale military rebellion against the government forces of dictator Bashar al-Assad. The Syrian civil war has gotten complicated in the past six years, turning into a nightmarish quagmire of splinter groups vying for key cities and resources. And as is always the case, while the guns are firing, the innocent are suffering: Reports of massacres and other human rights abuses abound.

Civil rights lawyer and journalist Alia Malek (some of whose work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor) captures the multifaceted nature of this cataclysm very effectively in her gripping new book, The Home That Was Our Country; her vivid picture-painting and scathing intelligence turn and turn on that same unspoken question, “What has happened to our country?”

Under the long rule of Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad, Malek’s family had been deprived of their apartment in the grand old Tahaan building in Damascus, and “The Home That Was Our Country” is richly textured with the family histories invested in the place and its neighborhood.

It’s a world from which she herself was an expatriate for many years, having attended law school in the United States and taken a job in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice in the George W. Bush administration – where she was working when the 9/11 terrorist attacks happened.

“Like other Arab Americans,” she writes, “I found myself simultaneously grieving for the innocent, wondering what backlash might befall Arab and Muslim Americans, and processing that the kind of violence I usually associated with the Middle East had just happened right here on American soil.”

Shortly after a rigged national referendum solidified the presidency of Hafez’s son Bashar, Malek returned to Damascus hoping to reclaim her family’s apartment and some sense of home. She was not the only member of her family to feel a fearful scorn at the fact that the country’s presidents were treating their office like a kingship. “Like me, some in my family ... were troubled by how power had been passed on like an inheritance, but they responded to my prodding with raised eyebrows, a roll of their eyes, or a sheepish smile,” she writes. “The walls still had ears, after all.”

The heart of “The Home That Was Our Country” is Malek’s often wrenching account of learning the ways of a country now in the grip of a dictatorship after the short-lived promise of the so-called Damascus Spring. This is a country in which the state intelligence forces, the mukhabarat, are always watchful, in which the internet goes dark late every Thursday night to keep people from organizing Friday events, and in which the Assad government works hard to create the impression of a serene and livable Damascus, a city cut off from the troubles afflicting the rest of Syria, a city in which, Malek caustically notes, the populace is being both deceived and used: “By going about our lives, we had become bit players in the regime’s efforts to maintain the fiction that everything was normal.”

Malek relates both her anger with outright supporters of Assad’s regime and the “skin-crawling embarrassment” she feels at the many Syrians who see through the regime, hate it, and yet still vocally support it in order to save their own skins. Against these everyday cowards who choose “survival over solidarity,” she places the example of the “brave, ordinary Syrians” who don’t believe in taking up arms but are willing to pit their quiet, secular faith in the rule of law against the seemingly unbeatable forces aligned against it. She bitterly and accurately points out to her readers that both the Assad regime and its jihadist enemies would want these brave, ordinary Syrians dead.

If “The Home That Was Our Country” has even the slimmest glint of hope anywhere in its more than 300 pages, that hope lies with those brave, ordinary Syrians, people like Malek and her family and friends, who once knew a better Damascus and who collectively dream of one better still. She leaves open the question of whether or not anybody who ever lived in the Tahaan building will live to see that better time, but at least she still dreams it’s possible.

Steve Donoghue regularly reviews books for The Christian Science Monitor.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to 'The Home That Was Our Country' recalls Syria as it once was
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Book-Reviews/2017/0214/The-Home-That-Was-Our-Country-recalls-Syria-as-it-once-was
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe