“I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past” — Virginia Woolf.
Samar Yazbek, a preeminent Syrian writer and journalist, has expressed complete and vivid emotions about her past in her writings. She was born in Jableh, Syria and has written extensively about the Syrian conflict. Her 2021 novel Planet of Clay, about the horrors of the Syrian Civil War, was a National Book Award finalist for translated literature. An outspoken critic of the Assad regime, she now lives in exile.
Her new novel, Where the Wind Calls Home, translated from the Arabic by Leri Price, is built on the memories of the 19-year old protagonist, Ali, who delivers them through streaming vignettes. After he barely survives a bombing at his patrol station in the Latakia mountains during the Syrian Civil War, he falls in and out of consciousness. This is the foundation for the book’s dream-like narrative.
We experience Ali’s deliria on the first few pages as he lies severely injured near a tree. Assessing his injuries, he knows that he must ascend to a high branch by nightfall to escape danger. During this time, Ali envisions a funeral, which may be his own. But when he pictures his mother pulling a flag off the coffin, he understands that it his brother’s funeral.
Through Ali’s memories, we meet his parents and other central characters. He had a contentious relationship with his father stemming from Ali’s aversion to school. When he stopped attending school, his father became irate and tied him to a tree until nightfall and beat him with a pomegranate cane. His mother, Nahla, whom his father also beat, rescued Ali from the beating. She is a survivor — she lost two children (one at childbirth) and did not speak or smile after her older son’s death, which also affected her physically:
“She was so thin that her back seemed like a bow arced into a semicircle, and [Ali] recalled that she was wearing a black woolen tunic … the incessant sinking and lifting movements of her spine were made by stifled gasps.”
Another maternal character is the eccentric centenarian Humayrouna, who nursed the feeble infant Ali back to life. Through Humayrouna, who dyed her hair to match it with the sun, we witness the interrelation between Ali and the natural world. She taught Ali about the ethereal personalities of trees, teaching him the ability to understand “the pain of trees, [he] knew it well in cold and heat.”
Through another flashback, we meet the cantankerous Slick, a shopkeeper, who ran through the village after learning President Hafez al-Assad died: “Yalla, go home, lock yourselves up and cry for a thousand years. Wallahi, may we be miserable after this!” Another creation is the high-ranking tyrannical army officer, Abu Zayn, who owns much of the land in the village. The villagers fear him because he was always surrounded by a cadre of intimidating guards who brandished large machine guns.
As the narrative zigzags through Ali’s life, we learn more about the bombing and his mortal injuries, which include blood emanating from his ears, a severe leg wound, and the loss of a portion of his left foot. Yazbek places us in the leaves with Ali who “smelled blood, which meant he was bleeding heavily. His body would fail him because he was skinny and weak.” Ali’s dwindling spirit continually floats through the pages like his shallow breaths.
We also learn about the Other, a spectral figure: “The silhouettes of the movement he kept repeating could be seen from the other side, and he thought he saw himself being mocked by the movement of the Other, or his shadow, or his hallucination, whatever it was” and that whatever, which could also be his soul, is Yazbek’s creation to keep the reader off balance, wondering how close Ali is to death.
Yazbek incorporates a mercurial political climate, stressed family relations, the horrors of the Syrian Civil War, the voice of a dying teenager, and the mysticism of the natural world in a tightly packed novel depicting the traditions of a Syrian Alawite village. Such customs include the exclusion of women at gravesites during funerals and animal sacrifice. Ultimately, Yazbek continues to channel her frustration with a country in crisis to create an illusionary and gut-wrenching narrative.
[Published by World Editions on February 6, 2024, 192 pages,$18.99 US paperback]