34 The New York Review
mirrored in the distrust and antago-
nisms within one family.
Wannous’s characters also travel
within Syria, and across its different
worlds. Suleima’s family flees from
Hama, in the north, south to Damas-
cus, the capital, after the 1982 massacre
in which the government brutally sup-
pressed the Muslim Brotherhood, kill-
ing up to 20,000 civilians in the process.
Naseem’s narrator straddles a fault line
with an Alawite father, from the coast of
the Mediterranean, and a Sunni, Dam-
ascene mother. (The Assad family that
rules the Sunni- majority country is from
the minority Alawite sect.) Naseem
himself is from Homs, a city besieged
and destroyed early in the revolution.
Elements of Wannous’s life also
make their way into those of her char-
acters. She was raised in Damascus
and her father worked in the Higher
Institute of Dramatic Arts, as does Su-
leima’s brother, Fouad. Then there is
Wannous’s father’s death when she was
a teenager, and her own exile in Beirut.
In interviews, Wannous has denied the
autobiographical element of the novel,
but the work may explain the parallels
more accurately. Afraid that her story is
being stolen by Naseem, Suleima imag-
ines him rebutting her accusations with
an appeal to shared experience: that as
Syrians, “we all have the same story...
one aching version of humankind.”
Naseem’s narrator has family in Tar-
tus, on the coast; during her trips there
with her father, she appreciates the grad-
ual greening from interior desert to the
strip of fertile land before the sea. She
is met by the love of a grandmother and
the constant scolding of a grandfather
and aunt: “Their chastisement was born
of a complex relationship between the
countryside, where they lived, and the
capital, Damascus, where we did.” But
the splits between her Tartus family and
her family at home in Damascus are
about more than rural and urban life;
they also concern “my father and his
Sunni Damascene wife, the woman who
had stolen him and stolen me too!” This
sectarianism is not about belief but about
community, place, origin. The narra-
tor is relentlessly teased for her brown
skin and eyes and gets cruelly taunted
as “darkie.” Her coastal cousins are fair
with blue eyes, and they work hard to
retain this complexion; they are “mad
about staying white,” keeping out of the
sun and buying whitening creams laced
with mercury. These relatives emphasize
her difference, and also their claim on
her: “I was given freedom from every
rule...in unspoken defiance of my
mother.”
With Naseem’s na r rator’s retu r n to the
capital each autumn, we observe the di-
visions in Syria more sharply. Every sum-
mer she acquires the Alawite accent, a
difference explained over a few pages
in an extraordinary feat of translation.
(The comments on society and class
that are self- evident to an Arab, espe-
cially Syrian, audience, are made com-
prehensible to Western readers through
Jaquette’s considerable ingenuity in the
choice of examples of speech patterns.)
It begins with an incident when the nar-
rator is six or seven and, dressed prettily,
is taken to a jeweler’s shop, the shop-
keeper calling her a “princess.” Then
she asks for some water and the shop-
keeper is stunned, looking around for
the source of the request, unable to pro-
cess that this “princess” might speak like
an unsophisticated Alawite, a “coun-
try bumpkin”: “The accent signalleda history’s worth of stereotypes and
the suffering of millions; dialect alone
was enough to unleash its savagery.”
Memories like these pile up to under-
line what we already know: this wom-
an’s Alawite family turns on her when
the revolution begins. The uprising it-
self is introduced with a shocking letter
from a cousin she had spent childhood
vacations with: “‘I don’t hope they kill
your mother, oh no,’ she wrote. ‘I hope
they rape you in front of her, and then
slaughter you like an animal, so she
spends the rest of her days in agony.’”
Naseem’s narrator wonders about the
rift: “Was it possible for someone to
go to sleep as a human being one night
and wake up a vicious beast? Or had
the beast simply been hiding, lurking in
the body of a woman so educated, lov-
ing and refined?”
This, then, is how Naseem tackles
the revolution: the stories of how un-
derlying tensions surfaced as hatred;
the snide comments about his narra-
tor’s Damascene mother in childhood
transformed into vile threats (the hope
that “the Sunni womb that bore you
rots with cancer”); families falling
apart, relationships destroyed.The revolution erupted in an in-
stant. And in that instant, mon-
sters appeared. They filled our
city, our homes, our living rooms.
They hit and slapped and insulted
and killed and destroyed a whole
history of human relationships.Hidden monsters are also present in
Suleima’s portion of the novel, though
not within the family structure. The
Higher Institute of Dramatic Arts had
hitherto been a refuge for Fouad: “He
loved the atmosphere, his students and
the geographic and sectarian diversity
that had somewhat escaped the re-
gime and security services’ grip.” But
the nonsectarian atmosphere did not
survive: “After the revolution began,
that elegant white building coughed up
its soul and was possessed by another
one.” Security services arrived; people,
including Fouad, disappeared. “Divi-
sions emerged”—emerged, not formed.
Wannous shows that the structures and
methods of the Assad regime laid the
groundwork for both the revolution
and its undoing.
Naseem’s manuscript has the most
succinct description of this ground-
work, using his narrator’s school as
a microcosm of society. School was
where “students experimented with
ways of life they might later lead in As-
sad’s Syria. A place to train, to learn
to cast silent insults and be drilled on
obeying the powerful and respecting
the authoritative.” At each level of the
hierarchy there is mistrust and hatred
of those under it: “The headmistress
hated the teachers, the teachers hated
each other and the students, and the
students hated each other in turn.”
There is a school in Suleima’s story,
too. When she is in year ten (fifteen
to sixteen years old), Suleima is called
into a teacher’s office and asked about
Hama: “Has your father told you what
happened there?” The fear is total; she
not only feels it on behalf of her father,
but transforms into him: “Immediately
my stomach cramped, the way yours
would have done if you had been there. I
won’t forget how weak my knees became,
how fragile I felt, oh Baba.” Suleima re-
plies as any well- drilled child of Assadwould have: “Our Father the Leader has
bloodied his hands for the entire Syrian
people.” A perfect, learned response.
But all she gets in return is a smile, no
resolution of punishment or praise, thus
prolonging the terror. “Here, I’m speak-
ing again about fear of fear,” the adult
Suleima reflects. A universal state for
Syrians, a threat unmistakable even to a
schoolchild. “Anticipating fear is harder
than feeling it,” she says. “Prison is eas-
ier than fearing it. Fear on its own is less
cruel than fearing fear.”
Suleima writes to Naseem in diary
entries and unsent letters, and to her
late father, both men equally unreach-
able. She has stayed in Damascus,
unable to leave her mother and the
chance of recovering her brother, dead
or alive, from Assad’s prisons. She tells
Naseem what the revolution feels like,
again slantwise, describing neither the
violence of battles and torture nor the
politics nor foreign intervention, but her
account is just as revealing. “The revo-
lution ended the day you and everyone
else left,” she tells him, in another letter
added to the pile unsent. “Revolutions
don’t come from books, Naseem, they
don’t spring from words on the page.
Revolution means begging my mother
not to fall ill, every morning and night.”
She goes into the third person to explain
why she cannot tell him about such
daily exhaustions, before going back to
direct address: “He would have found
it difficult to handle life in this terrible
city.... You have to choose when your
health will fail you, Naseem.” The
constant shifting between first- person
memories, second- person addresses,
and the imagined experiences of others
demonstrates the intense loneliness of
this intensely loving person.
Suleima’s own unraveling, with si-
lence from Naseem the only response to
her text messages, is partially fueled by
jealousy, a suspicion that Naseem wasn’t
stealing from her life, but that of an-
other lover. In searching his abandoned
apartment, she finds a stack of photos of
women, and in an echo of the novel it-
self, she cuts them up to make a collage
of watchful, silent, disembodied eyes.
Kamil’s office prompts the novel’s
final slip between individual and collec-
tive experience. Suleima sees his waiting
room fill with Assad’s thugs, the shabiha,
and addresses Naseem directly again: “I
wonder how Kamil can treat shabiha
and murderers,” she writes. “Men with
inflated muscles and broad shoulders,
their expressions tinged with evil and
fear. Have you ever seen evil coexist with
fear?” She wonders whether any of them
have Fouad’s scent on their hands.
In a therapy session, Suleima notices
Kamil’s own exhaustion; it dawns on
her that Kamil, too, “was experiencing
the same thing we were: we the crushed,
unnerved and frightened ones.” There
had once been a clear delineation be-
tween patient and doctor, but “the revo-
lution had snapped that line,” she writes.
Now Kamil, supposedly the source of
strength and perspective in a therapist’s
chair, has joined the frightened ones.
The book ends without resolution.
In the final pages, Suleima finds her-
self thinking not of her father, or of
Naseem, but of her mother, the only
person who is present with her, who
can offer comfort and “absorb the emp-
tiness I felt when these men to whom
I had belonged were gone.” Suleima’s
nightmares continue, but when she
wakes her mother asks, with a smile,
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