MY ROAD FROM DAMASCUS

A Syrian dissident author, now a refugee in Canada, interweaves details of his incarcerations and torture in Syria with a once-idyllic life in a small village.

Raised by farmers in the rural town of Kfarieh, Saeed was first imprisoned in 1980, for more than a decade, for protesting the Syrian dictatorship of Hafez al-Assad. He spent most of those years in the notoriously brutal Tadmur military prison in Damascus, where he was routinely tortured. After his release, he was detained two more times. By the early 1990s, he had begun writing regularly and made a name for himself in literary circles. One critic told him, “You’ll be to Syria what Maupassant was to France.” Sadly, the repeated incarcerations interrupted his promising career. In a moving, novelistic narrative, Saeed beautifully, gently chronicles the appealing details of his early life in his village: first childhood crush, a painful reconciliation between science and piety, and the adulation of his cosmopolitan uncle, who encouraged him “to ask questions with absolutely no inhibitions.” During this time, Saeed keenly followed global events on the radio. He revered Egyptian president Abdel Nasser and did not understand the subsequent military coup by Assad. During 10th grade, the author established a Marxist discussion group. In 1977, he transferred to a private school in Damascus, where he was enlightened much like the biblical Saul when he saw the Messiah on the road to the city. In the next few years, his political activity drove him underground until his arrest. In this multilayered text, the author ably captures the arbitrary brutality of the guards as well as the tender human interactions with his fellow prisoners that made his incarceration tolerable. “The world that turns in my heart is like a warm house, open to all, an amazingly beautiful world that keeps turning, and turns its back on passports and borders and bloodshed and famine and all the suffering that people endure.”

A lyrical, extremely rich narrative of loss, memory, and trauma.