Following the ouster of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, novelist Ream Shukairy joins Fiction/Non/Fiction co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to discuss the country’s future. Shukairy, who grew up in California and spent summers in Syria, reflects on the long history of Syrian resistance to oppression, as well as how parts of her family emigrated. She also talks about how it feels to emerge from a culture of fear and surveillance, what it’s like to revisit what she previously wrote about Assad, and the places she wants to see when she returns to Syria for the first time in years. Shukairy reads from her young adult novel The Next New Syrian Girl.
Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.
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From the episode:
Whitney Terrell: In your novel The Next New Syrian Girl, a mother and daughter who are refugees from Syria come to live with a Syrian-American family in Michigan. There’s a passage from that book that mentions Assad; I wonder if you could read that for us.
Ream Shukairy: So this passage features Leene, one of the main characters, and the other main character’s brother, Zain. Zain has been living in Detroit most of his life and would visit Syria in the summers, and Leene is a Syrian refugee who recently moved to Detroit and is trying to find her way again.
“Then, shockingly, I hear Zain ask Leene a question: ‘Where are you from in Syria?’ He pronounces Syria with the heavy American R, and I cringe. But I have to give kudos to Leene for breaking through his caveman-sighs-and-grunts barrier.
‘I’m from Douma,’ she says. ‘Do you know it?’
Zain and I nod. Douma is the city where Bashar Al Assad dropped chemical weapons on his own citizens to stop them from protesting his oppressive regime.
Bashar Al-Assad—politician—ba-shaar al-as-sad—/bəˈʃaːr ɪlɛsɛd/: crooked man who inherited the Syrian presidency from his father in 2000.
Bashar Al Assad, aka the bane of my existence: Syrian dictator who uses any means of silencing opposition against his family’s reign of forty-seven years and counting.
Douma wasn’t the first city he attacked. Sarin gas spread over the city, infecting everyone without judgment. Men, women, old, young, grandparents, babies. No one came away from the attack untouched. I wonder how Leene made it out alive.
‘You guys are from the heart of Damascus, the Midan, aren’t you?’ she asks.
Zain nods, then mutters, ‘Do you think you’ll go back?’ I’m enraptured by the attention he bestows upon her, but then again, she did skillfully coax him out of his shell. I glance back at her.
Leene’s gaze is intense, unfocused on me, yet piercing through me. She’s eerily still. ‘There isn’t anything to go back to.’
I make the mistake of glancing over at Zane who broods with his shoulders arched and the collar of his shirt crushed between his fingers. Syria is a touchy subject in the Shaami household. It’s not about the Syrian customs or identity that we’re supposed to claim, it’s the times that we spent there that are sacred. We remember those times, but we never ever discuss them.”
V.V. Ganeshananthan: Thank you so much for reading that for us. When you wrote that passage, Assad was in power, and as you read it, he is not. I’m just curious what it’s like for you to revisit those sentences and how it feels to know that he’s gone.
RS: It’s actually surreal. I haven’t taken a look at my book yet since it all happened, and I feel like I should because when I was writing it, it was almost like my act of protest against him. Writing it I knew I was not going to go back. Potentially, if anybody knew that I wrote this book, or there were conversations, my last name could be blacklisted. I wrote it as my protest against him and the government. And I didn’t think that I was ever going to go back, or that there was ever a future where he wouldn’t be in power. So knowing now that I’ve written that, this is a historical piece of literature now because that is done, and we’re moving on from that family. So again, it’s so surreal, and it’s unbelievable, but at the same time, there’s so much joy. Syrians are really rejoicing that he’s gone, no matter what happens next. He was horrible and terrible and awful for the Syrian people, and I’m so happy now that I can go back without any fear, without checking if my name was on lists, or if anybody was going to interrogate me. I can’t even believe it, honestly.
VVG: I bet it’s hard to believe. Do you have a plan to go back?
RS: So we’re waiting for there to be more stability, and then I would like to go as soon as I can, yes.
VVG: That’s great. I’m really happy you can go.
WT: So the Syrian Civil War took many lives, as we’ve discussed, and millions of refugees sought safety elsewhere, as Leene and her mother do in the book and as you were saying your parents did in the 80s, which is before the Civil War, but still similar. Could you talk about the research and imaginative work you did to write about these characters?
RS: So the research that I did felt really natural because I was already a part of a group here, it’s called the Syrian American Council, which was doing a lot of lobbying with the American government for the Syrian people. And so they thankfully put up a lot of events where I could talk to refugees directly as well as people that were affected by the chemical attacks. There are a lot of great documentaries out about the Syrian revolution, so those were things that I was just naturally consuming at the time, and that was helping me to figure out how I wanted to write those characters and the events that would happen to them.
Also, it’s really sad because I will go back to Syria soon, but a majority of my cousins fled. So I’m sure a lot of them will be visiting, some of them might go back, but I just took from my own family as well; people who were refugees in various different ways. Some that went through boats on the Mediterranean, some who went through Egypt, and the way that they were treated both by soldiers in Syria and by people outside. So that’s mostly where I took my inspiration.
As for when they go to Jordan at the end of the book, there is a part where Khadijah, the main character, realizes how the world is shifting their gaze on Syrians, and that before it was like “Oh I’m just a Syrian. You know, I’m an Arab person in the world,” and now she realizes people are really looking down on them. And that was my personal experience of going to other countries as a Syrian after the Syrian revolution began, and realizing, oh, people aren’t viewing me just as a Syrian woman or Syrian person. They’re viewing me as a refugee and something not desired. So that also came from my life.
VVG: There are two conversations in the book where Leene asks that question, “Are you treating me this way because I’m a refugee,” and there’s also, as you’ve mentioned before, the massive number of disappearances. I don’t want to spoil the book for our listeners who have yet to pick it up, but a huge engine for the plot is the question of who has gone missing and how we wait for them and find them if that’s even possible at all. So those are also threads, just for our listeners who should pick up this book, that are really important to the emotional life of the book and also the plot.
WT: I was trying to imagine being away from America for a very long period of time, but visiting sometimes. So if you were to go back now and had freedom of movement, where is the first place you would go? Is there a certain restaurant you’d go to? Is there a certain spot you would go to? What would you do?
RS: I would go to my grandfather’s house that has been passed down to my aunt. I mentioned it in the book, it’s an old-style Syrian home. There’s a big courtyard with a fountain in the middle, and all the rooms are on the sides, covered, and it’s so beautiful. I cannot wait to go back and see it. And then also the Umayyad mosque—so beautiful. There’s a market that leads up to it, and I really want to go there. I’ve already seen videos on Arabic and Syrian social media—the amount of Syrian people that are going out into the streets and cleaning up is so inspiring. They’re so ready for their futures. I see that, and I’m like, “Oh, they’re cleaning it up. We’re all gonna go back. We’re all gonna create a future there, or at least have some parts of our future there. It’s really heartwarming. So I’m excited to go back.
Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Keillan Doyle.
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The Next New Syrian Girl • Six Truths and a Lie
Others:
Return to Homs • For Sama • The White Helmets (film) • The White Helmets (organization) • Last Men in Aleppo • Cries from Syria • Still Recording • The Cave • Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War by Leila Al-Shami and Robin Yassin-Kassab • Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy by Yassin al-Haj Saleh • Assad or We Burn the Country: How One Family’s Lust for Power Destroyed Syria by Sam Dagher
