Farewell, Damascus

by Ghada Samman

  A fire ablaze in my heart, I prayed for inner calm.

  I envisioned myself outside the invisible walls encircling Damascus. It began to rain. I got out of my car and knocked on the gates. “Open the door, Mama!” I screamed in desperation. But there was no answer. “Let me in! Open sesame!” As I stood there in despair before a windowless, doorless wall, I heard a thunderous voice, as if Nahi had installed a loudspeaker in his throat. It said, “If you want to see Damascus, Ziqaq Al Yasmin and Al Bab Al Saghir Cemetery where your father will be buried, get down on your knees and come crawling in!”

  “Never!” I shrieked defiantly, up to my knees in mud that felt like quicksand. “I’d sooner die of homesickness than grovel! If I ever come back, I’ll do it with my head held high. Never in a million years would I bend the knee for the likes of you and your minions. You’re the ones who should get down on your knees and beg my forgiveness!”

  Let it be known to Latakia, beloved of my mother, and Damascus, beloved of my father, that I’ll never let anybody demean me again. I’d sooner live the rest of my life homeless and alone than suffer a fate like that. And when I die and they take me home to be buried, I want my coffin to be carried upright, with my eyes fixed on Mt. Qasioun. Of course, I’d rather go home before I have to be carried there in a coffin. But there’s slim hope of that for a rebel like me who doesn’t know how to keep her mouth shut when there’s truth to be told, or how to spew hypocritical praise for her captors instead of belting out proud anthems to freedom.

  “Quit crying, you stupid idiot!” I scolded myself. “Quit banging on gates you know nobody will open for you. Go find other paths, other countries.”

  Back in my car, I sobbed for my father, for myself, and for whoever might come after us while Nahi and his clones multiply by the day without anybody daring to call them out.

  A voice inside me asked, “Don’t you want to go back to Damascus and Latakia and… ?”

  “Of course I do!” I said. “There’s nothing I want more on this crazy planet. But I want to do it without having to pass through border crossings that strike terror in people’s hearts with their ‘wanted’ lists. A homeland should have enough room for everybody, even for people who have the audacity to criticize Nahi and his ilk, whether in the press, in the workplace, or wherever else. As it is, our coffee shops and restaurants have ears planted in their walls. They’re even planted in the walls of our lungs, our arteries, and our fear-sickened souls.”

  The villain might only exist in our imaginations. But people who’ve been burned over and over have the right to their paranoia. Is it wise to be paranoid, or is it just a foolish waste of time? I don’t know. All I know is that I’m a writer who has question marks running in her veins and who, if she had all the answers, would probably stop putting pen to paper.

  I pound on the invisible gates of Damascus in the pouring rain. Sobbing, I cry, “Throughout your history you’ve stood up proudly to invaders. You’ve taught me to be proud, too, and not to let myself be degraded by anyone. So why do you want to degrade me now? I should be able to come and go as I please, but instead you want to drag me along by the neck like a little dog. Treat me with love and respect, like the adult that I am, not like a child, or like a criminal who’s expected to prove her innocence!

  “Hold me up, Damascus. I’m about to fall into the abyss! Hold me up, Ziqaq Al Yasmin, Umayyad Mosque, Church of St. Paul, Souq Al Sarouja… Hold me up, Mi’dhanat Al Shahm and Ziqaq Al Jinn, Hariqah and Lady Zainab, Qabratkeh, Souq Al Hamidiya, Al Salihiyah Road, Sheikh Muhyi Al Din, Sahat Al Muhajirin, Mt. Qasioun… remember that I’m a boulder that came from you, that’s part of you!

  “Hold me up, little owl of mine, and we’ll go flying together over Qubbat Al Sayyar. The people who’ve oppressed me, rejected me and crushed me will pass away in the end. But my aunt’s house in Al Halabouni and her cat Fulla will still be there.

  “True, I’m a crazy woman with a cheery owl flying beside her, and I’ll keep on soaring above all my troubles just the way my father taught me to before he died. O God… My father’s dead, and here I am ranting deliriously in the rain. It’s the middle of the night, but when I look toward Damascus, I can see in the dark.”

  I climb Mt. Qasioun from Al Rabweh at its base, and I reach the towering boulder where some crazy scribbled way back, “Remember me always!” The day I left Damascus I wrote, “I’ll never forget you!” And now I write, “I’ll be back.” No matter how many continents I fly over, I’ll be back! Until then, I’ll go flying, orbitless, through space.

  I’m no boulder. I’m just a speck of dirt that’s been blown away by dark winds. I’m fragile, wretched, lonely, out of my mind.

  I’m sobbing, and I hate the way I sound.

  Long after the hearse had crossed the border into Syria, Zain sat in her car near the Masnaa checkpoint. She could feel the hearse’s huge black tires rolling back and forth over her head, crushing it over and over. How could it be? How could her father be dead?

  I kept repeating over and over to myself, my father’s dead. My father’s dead. My God. My one and only friend is dead. The one real friend I had on this barbaric planet. The one and only creature that knew me through and through but loved me anyway is gone. Gone, just like my mother, who might have loved me once upon a time. I don’t remember her face, or her voice. I just remember people telling me she’d been less than thirty years old when she died and that she’d adored me and doted on me. I could tell by looking at my bedroom with all its pink furniture and decorations.

  There was no indication in any of her writings that I even existed. That doesn’t mean anything, though. After all, the people we love tend to appear in the shadowy spaces between our words, not on billboards lit up with neon.

  My father—practically the only person in Damascus who didn’t hate me—is dead. Revolutionaries see me as some sort of petty, spoiled girl who, even though she might be a rebel, is still loyal to her bourgeois class, and publishes books as a kind of decorative façade. The bourgeois see me as a dirty radical who needs to be straightened out with a blow to the head. The so-called Muslims want to have me flogged and hanged from their long beards. And as for my family in Ziqaq Al Yasmin, they think I’m a bad example to other girls in the clan. On that point, the folks in Ziqaq Al Yasmin and my mother’s aristocratic family in Latakia are actually in agreement. That’s a first! They agree that I’ve got no business flaunting my literary talents. So when I went to that seminar in Latakia, I did it in defiance of everybody who’d tried to crush my mother by depriving her of the chance to write under her own name. They forced her to don a mantle of falsehood, so she donned the mantle of death and left us all behind.

  Nobody in Damascus likes me, and rarely was anybody willing to give me a job when I was there. Some of them tried to be polite about it, but the end result was the same. They rejected my applications with a tact and subtlety as sharp as a knife’s blade. A half-rebel like my mother was bad enough, and the last thing they wanted was a full-blown insurgent like me.

  I’m not even popular with other writers, since I refuse to be tamed, and I’m not interested in playing the “literary call girl.”

  Some of the people I worked with in my first literary seminars turned against me. Their implicit, male-chauvinist message to me was: You don’t write what you want to write… you write what we want you to write. Fall in line, girl, or we’ll destroy you. They didn’t manage to destroy me, but they did their best to incapacitate me with their hostile venom. Melancholy woman that I am, all I wanted was a hand to hold in these choppy seas—not to rescue me and draw me safely to shore, but just to keep me company as I battle the waves.

  The storm casts me onto a mountain top, and I find myself standing on a precipice overlooking a deep gorge. As I stand there, I decide that, now that I’ve lost the one person on earth who knew me inside and out and still loved me, I want to die. I want everything to end. I want to jump into the abyss and leave everything behind. So I hurl myself down.
But before I reach the bottom of the gorge and shatter into a million pieces, I feel regretful. I feel genuine, profound, excruciating regret. No. I don’t want to die! So instead of hurtling to the bottom of the abyss, I decide to fly. I suddenly realize I have wings, and that I’ve just got to find them and use them. So, the way I do in my dreams, I move my arms wishing I could fly, and it works! Ecstatic, I see that I can actually fly, and it isn’t a dream. I regret the jump I attempted. I don’t want to die. I have wings, and I’m soaring.

  Zain woke to the sound of someone tapping on her car window. She’d dozed off. She opened the window.

  “Are you all right?” a soldier asked her, his accent revealing his Lebanese mountain origins.

  “Yeah,” she answered groggily. “Thanks.”

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  No longer flying in her sleep, she said simply, “I was on my way to Damascus, but some things are preventing me from getting there.”

  “Yeah!” he laughed. “Like being too sleepy to drive!” Then, suddenly serious, he said, “May I see your identification?”

  The first thing she came to as she rummaged through her purse was her AUB photo ID. She started getting out her other identification papers but, satisfied with her student ID, he stopped her, saying, “That’s enough. Go find a hotel in Chtaura, get a good night’s sleep, and early tomorrow morning you can drive back home.”

  She didn’t say: Tomorrow is my dad’s funeral in Damascus, and when they lower him into the ground, I won’t be there. But he’ll run in my blood forever.

  Drive back home? Where is home? At the Intelligence Bureau, where Nahi wants to cut out my tongue? In Ziqaq Al Yasmin, where people are demanding my head?

  She was exhausted. Half-asleep, half-awake. Weighed down by defeat, her senses were sounding warning sirens. She nearly told the kind Lebanese soldier, “I want to sleep right on the border!” Of course, borders aren’t drawn with white lines on the ground the way they are on tennis courts.

  She thanked the soldier and closed her window again. As he walked away, she noticed in her rear-view mirror that he was part of a military patrol.

  As she drove away in the thick darkness, she thought back on the moment when she regretted wanting to fling herself into the abyss and decided to fly instead. And that’s what she intended to do. She’d find her wings and fly… and fly.

  1 A line from a poem by Bisharat al-Khuri (1885-1968).

  2 The reception was a monthly women’s gathering held in a neighbor’s or relative’s house.

  3 According to Islamic law among Sunni Muslims, a husband who divorces his wife is required to pay a sum of money which is agreed upon at the time of marriage and written into the marriage contract. The minimum divorce dowry is four silver dirhams. If the wife initiates the divorce, however, no divorce dowry has to be paid.

  4 Every house in old Damascus had a small, harmless snake that the people of the household took care of. They would leave food for it in the kitchen, as it was believed to wardoff evil.

  5 The English poet Samuel Coleridge (1772-1834) wrote frankly about taking opium in his poem, “The Lotus Eaters.”

  6 The recitation of the Fatihah, the first sura or chapter of the Qur’an, is done when two families agree that their daughter and son will become engaged to be married. Another occasion on which the Fatihah is recited is when people go to visit the grave of a relative or loved one.

  7 A hairstyle modeled on that of Farah Diba Pahlavi, Empress of Iran and wife of Shah Reza Pahlavi, became widely popular in the early 1960’s.

  8 Damascus has been referred to as “the City of the Seven Rivers” because, as it flows through the city, the Barada River divides into six additional branches: Yazid, Thawra, Al Mazawi, Al Dirani, Qanawat, and Banyas.

  9 Abdul Hamid II, who ruled the Ottoman Empire from 1876 until he was deposed shortly after the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, was referred to abroad as “the Red Sultan” because of the widespread pogroms and government-sanctioned massacres of Armenians and Bulgarians over which he presided.

  10 May Ziade (1886-1941) is remembered as a prominent Lebanese-Palestinian poet, essayist, translator and feminist. During a period of deep depression over the loss of her parents and other loved ones, Ziade was placed by relatives in a mental institution, apparently in hopes of taking over her estate. She was eventually released with a medical report affirming her sound mental state.

  11 Zhdanovism, also referred to as the Zhdanov Doctrine, was a Soviet cultural doctrine developed in 1946 by Andrei Zhdanov. Zhdanov was expected to be the successor to Joseph Stalin, but he died prematurely in 1948. According to Zhdanovism, the world was divided into two camps: the “imperialistic,” headed by the United States; and the “democratic,” headed by the Soviet Union. Despite its democratic claims, however, Zhdanovism was used to suppress independent thinking among Soviet artists, writers and thinkers, who were required to conform to the party line or risk persecution. The policy remained in effect until Stalin’s death in 1953.

  12 Yousef Al Azmah (1883-1920) was the Minister of War under King Faisal, and is remembered with reverence for leading the Syrian forces into battle against a French invasion at the Battle of Maysaloun, in which he was killed.