The face of the refugee

My Country

A Syrian Memoir

Kassam Eid

Bloomsbury

195 pages

Rs 499

At a time when the world attention is focused on refugees and war zones, a powerful autobiography, My Country: A Syrian Memoir by Kassem Eid, tells us what it is really like to live in a war zone in the 21st century. Mr Eid, under the pseudonym Qusai Zakarya, had brought his home town Moadamiya to the world’s attention when the Syrian government under the regime of President Bashar Assad blockaded the town in late 2012. The elderly, women, children and a scattering of rebel forces there found themselves on the slow road to starvation, eating foraged roots and leaves when their nightly dustbin raids came to a naught. Being one of the few in the town who could speak English, Mr Eid took it upon himself to broadcast Moadamiya’s troubles to the world every night and give his testimony to as many members of the international press as possible. While outside, soldiers scrawled “starve or submit” at checkpoints, Mr Eid’s computer opened up a schizophrenic view of the world outside Moadamiya, a world in which many said they cared, but few did anything to help.

This account, written after Mr Eid became a refugee and started a new life in Germany, is significant on several counts. First, it puts a human face to the plight of the refugee, which is sadly so often reduced to a sterile statistic or a quickly forgotten image once the the page is turned or channel is switched. Second, it disabuses the popular trope that refugees have a choice in where to go once driven out of their homeland. Third, it provides a rare eye-witness account of some of the worst government-sponsored violence that modern world has seen, enabling readers a better understanding of the Syrian refugee.

Most of all, as the reader follows Mr Eid’s childhood and youth, spent eating burgers, playing video games and surfing the net, there’s a growing realisation that in many fundamental ways, he’s just like us — and not an alien, troublesome statistic that we’re told we must care about, but don’t.

The memoir begins with an account of the author’s childhood and youth in Syria, before and during the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. As the young son of Palestinian refugees to Syria, then a peaceful olive-growing nation, Mr Eid had a happy childhood in a community that loved good food, football, music and family life. Everything changed when Mr Assad took over as the Syrian President in 2000.

For a while, Mr Eid’s family and neighbours ignored the warning signs — rising prices, stagnant economy and growing militarisation. Soon, many boys he’d once played football with, morphed into men who were willing to kill any and all who opposed the Assad government. The author’s home town Moadamiya, was labeled a rebel stronghold and placed under siege. The government stopped the passage of food and medicines to it in the hope that this would flush “rebels” out. Repeated shelling made matters worse. Mr Eid writes that it was after he somehow survived the chemical attack (government forces bombed the town with Sarin gas on August 21, 2013 killing over 1,500 Syrians) that he felt impelled to take up arms.

As he picks up a gun he’d previously only played with in a video game, all hope for normalcy returning into his life flies out the window. Somehow, in the memoir, this transition is no less brutal than the actual Sarin attack. Readers and fellow users of social media will identify and empathise with many incidents this memoir describes, such as two starving friends who surf food websites and fantasise about what it would be like to eat again. The images he paints are often vivid, and hit scarily close home. For example, he describes sitting silently with a group of friends listening to pop music to drown out the songs of war outside, each, “drowning privately in his own pain...”.

The question to which Mr Eid repeatedly returns to is simple but hard to answer: What makes people hate each other? When he eventually escapes his country and goes to the US, many say he is suffering from post-traumatic stress. But the memoir suggests that perhaps the trauma in his life simply changed form as he grappled with the pain of having left his country behind and guilt because he was finally getting to eat all he’d ever dreamed of, while his countrymen back home were starving to death. There are valuable insights here about the refugee psyche and how the memories of conflict torment long after s/he has found safe haven.

My Country is an essential, though disturbing read for a diverse readership today, since we live in a time when the blurring of international boundaries online is only matched by the building of walls and fences between countries in the offline world. This book actually enables readers to walk briefly in the shoes of a conflict zone survivor. And indeed, the most important aspect of Mr Eid’s memoir is that as he conjures up the face of a refugee, the reader realises that it isn’t unlike the face he sees in the mirror every morning.