Syria

Alia Malek's The Home That Was Our Country is a must read for anyone interested in Syria's geopolitical history, the rise of the Al-Assad family dictatorship, the sectarianism that has come to identify Middle Eastern politics, and the ongoing Syrian Civil War waged by the regime versus anyone who dares oppose it. But more importantly, Malek's memoir offers a domestic narrative of Syrian identity told through the feminine lens of her matriarchal grandmother whose home Malek restores and in which she eventually lives. Malek captures the nostalgia for a Syria of orange trees, food vendors on the streets of Damascus, shopping souks that offer a dizzying array of handmade and artisanal goods, and peoples who for centuries have lived together in close quarters despite their ethnic and religious differences. This book is a definitive text for an introduction to Syrian modern history and politics told through the personal perspective of a Syrian family attempting to live beautiful lives amidst so much upheaval, violence, and ongoing uncertainty...

A Country Between

I just finished reading Stephanie Saldana's memoir, A Country Between: Making a Home Where Both Sides of Jerusalem Collide---the follow-up to her 2010 memoir, The Bread of Angels. Beautiful. Poetic. Gentle. Life-affirming. Honest. Introspective. Poignant. Stephanie and I were students at Harvard Divinity School together. When she left for Damascus on a Fulbright, she thought that she was documenting Syria's proximity as a bordering country to the Iraq war. Never did she realize that she was actually documenting a Damascus on the cusp of war within its own city walls, a Syria that no longer exists after the tragic death and diaspora of so many people she met while studying, praying, and falling in love in this ancient country.

A Country Between has stuck with me in many of the same ways that her first memoir has remained in my memory. Stephanie's descriptions of motherhood; of the liminal spaces between peoples, cultures, religions, and nations; of life in Jerusalem; of generational inheritances; of memories of people and places now vanished and destroyed; of love and marriage and children and violence and war and peace and pianos...all beautiful and profound in the domestic reality of life. As a follow-up, Stephanie now hosts Mosaic Stories, a project dedicated to preserving the cultural artifacts of a Syria in refuge, tragically dispersed around the globe.

The Bread of Angels

When I graduated from Harvard, I took my theology degree, moved to South Carolina, and got married. Although I felt I ought to do something more expansive with all of the knowledge (KNOWLEDGE! [reverent choir]) I learned at Harvard, God led me to more domestic vocations. I instead have lived vicariously through the more ambitious of my HDS compatriots. Stephanie Saldana, upon graduation, moved to Damascus on a Fulbright and wrote a beautiful memoir about love and war, Christianity and Islam, and the position of Syria in a volatile world. Her memoir seemed poignant then amidst the Iraq War, but it seems almost prophetic now amidst the Syrian crisis and diaspora...