Making Home in Exile: Stories from the New Syrian Diaspora w/ Wendy Pearlman and Leila Al Shami

For episode 183, Leila and Elia are joined by Wendy Pearlman to discuss her newest book, The Home I Worked to Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora as well as her previous book We Crossed a Bridge and Trembled.

Note that we recorded this episode on November 9, 2024 – just weeks prior to the ousting of the Assad regime. As such, a few small details of the conversation are now ‘outdated’, however the conversation we had and Wendy’s books still remain extremely relevant and important to understanding the Syrian revolution, war, and its present day.

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Transcription: You can help ⁠Antidote Zine⁠ transcribe TFTT episodes here.

Mentioned in this episode:

Wendy Pearlman’s bio
The Home I Worked to Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora by Wendy Pearlman
We Crossed a Bridge and Trembled by Wendy Pearlman
Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War by Leila Al-Shami and Robin Yassin-Kassab
Nostalgia by Svetlana Boym
Resilient: Broken by Elia Ayoub
Syrian Association for Citizens’ Dignity for reports on Syrian refugees, forced returns to Syria, and other stories and analyses of the Syrian political context
From the Periphery’s newly released Mutual Aid Podcast

For more:

Wendy is on Bluesky and has a website
Leila is on Mastodon and Bluesky, and check out her website ⁠

Credits:

Transcript via Antidote Zine:

There was a time when people were constantly seeing family, and now no Syrian family is whole. Every family has members on multiple continents, across different countries, so a time when everybody can be together in one place is really against the odds. It’s such an enormous shift in how people have to learn to be in the world.

Elia J. Ayoub: We recorded this not too long before the Assad regime in Syria collapsed; as such, there are a few things that are technically now outdated. For example, we say that Syrians are not going back—obviously this has changed since, although it’s important to note a couple of things.

It’s a small fraction of Syrians who have been displaced who have now returned; UN figures say that. One of the main obstacles to people going back is because they are worried they will lose their refugee or asylum status in Europe, especially as it is very uncertain, to this day, what the future holds in Syria. People are very uncertain about what they would be returning to in Syria, because of the devastation, and whether, if things don’t work out for various reasons, this could also mean they lose their status in Europe.

Turkey has issued a declaration that will allow Syrians to return to Syria without losing their status in Turkey, which seems to be a positive step, the kind of model that would be ideal to see in other places. But as of now, this is not the case. I just wanted to add this small detail; it is important to keep in mind with what you are about to listen to.

Leila Al-Shami: Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of The Fire These Times. I’m Leila Al-Shami, and I’m joined today by my co-host Elia Ayoub as well as our guest Wendy Pearlman, to talk about Wendy’s new book The Home I Worked to Make.

I’m very pleased, Wendy, to have you with us today. Wendy is the writer of one of my favorite books on the Syrian revolution, We Crossed the Bridge and it Trembled. I’m very excited about her new book, which we’re going to talk about today.

I’ll hand it over to you, Wendy, if you’d like to introduce yourself and tell us about what motivated this book. Why now?

Wendy Pearlman: Thank you for those very kind words. It means so much to me, especially since you’re the author of one of my favorite books on Syria, Burning Country.

I’m a professor of political science at Northwestern University, near Chicago, where I focus on the comparative politics of the Middle East. I worked for about ten years focusing on Palestinian politics before 2011, when I began working on Syria—so I am one of those who came to Syria without a tremendously long pre-revolution history working on Syria, but was captivated by the revolution and have been doing research on Syria ever since.

When the Arab uprisings first began, I was watching from afar, and was both exhilarated and amazed by the courage people mustered to go out and protest despite enormous risk, risk of their lives. When I began this project I was motivated by trying to understand that process, how people “broke the barrier of fear,” as was said.

I began doing interviews with Syrian refugees in 2012, and with Syrian refugees largely because I was too afraid to go inside Syria and do research on that topic. I began in Jordan, really not interested in refugees as refugees, and the refugee experience—I wanted to access Syrians to be able to collect stories of the revolution. And the people I interviewed were not particularly interested in talking about being refugees either; most of them didn’t see themselves as refugees. They had just crossed the border, moved a matter of kilometers to get out of the way of bombing, and expected to return any day.

I began that summer in 2012, and have basically been collecting interviews ever since: moving on from Jordan to Turkey and Lebanon, and then eventually to Germany and other countries in Europe; then in 2020 I started doing interviews over Zoom as well, which allowed me to reach people further afield, which I never expected would be the case. It opened up a lot of possibilities.

In 2017, I used the interviews I had collected to that date to write the book We Crossed the Bridge and it Trembled, which aims to be an oral history of the uprising and war. As you know, it moves name-story-name-story. Some of the excerpts are as short as a couple sentences, some are as long as a few pages. It begins with stories that set the scene of what life was like under Hafez al-Assad, then moves to the first ten years of Bashar’s presidency, and then the uprising, its escalation to war, the experience of repression, and so forth.

That book ends with the beginning of refugee flight, and the stories of people beginning to leave Syria. But the Syrian story did not end there; it still hasn’t ended. And I continued to do more interviews. This new book shares some of the interviews that I’ve done since 2017, and it’s something of a followup to that first book. My motivation in writing it was that there was still so much to say about Syria and about the Syrian experience.

Whereas the first book was really a book about the revolution—that’s the star of the show; it uses all the human stories to explain what the revolution was, how it began, why it began, what it means—this book is [about] people in a new diaspora who had to flee, and never expected, many of them, ever to live outside Syria but were forced to flee, some of them making lives in places they never imagined they would even visit, and now are learning the language, gaining work, raising children, building entirely new lives.

They’re making sense of displacement and making sense of their lives in new places, but they’re also making sense of the revolution and the war, and what it was all about. It captures an introspectiveness. When I first started doing interviews, most people were interested in chronicling events—there were so many events, it was so fast-paced, there were so many things happening. There was a demonstration, and There was a missile attack, and There was a massacre—people wanted to chronicle the events they lived and that were happening.

And with time I could see people talking about their lives—there was a slower pace. There aren’t as many events to try and document anymore, but there’s an entry to a space of asking, Oh, my gosh, what did that all mean? and Who am I now? and Who are we? and Where do we go from here? This book captures quieter, slower meaning-making, framed around the experience of exile and being a refugee and searching for belonging—but trying to make sense of 2011 and its aftermath as well.

LS: That definitely comes through in the book, that people are more reflective and thinking about the broader issues of what the revolution meant for them, where it places them now.

What you do in both of your books is very similar to what we tried to do in Burning Country, which was to give Syrians a platform to speak for themselves—although we approached it in slightly different ways. When you wrote your first book, it must have been around the same time as I was doing research for Burning Country, and people were desperate to tell their stories because they weren’t being heard. All of the media was about the conflict or Islamic extremism or military intervention; there was nothing actually asking Syrians what this means to them.

But I wonder if you saw a difference, coming back later, in people’s willingness to talk? Because you get to a point where so much has gone on, and people haven’t listened to Syrians. Did you feel people were less willing to share their stories? Or wasn’t there much difference?

WP: It’s such a great question. I agree. The interviews I did in 2012 or 2013, there was such an enthusiasm, almost a need for people to talk, and a sense that they were not being listened to at all. And there has set in a sense of: What’s the use of talking anymore? Nobody listened to us then; you think anyone’s going to listen to us now? Maybe the political urgency to talk and tell a story, as a political act advancing a political cause, has declined. It’s totally logical and rational for anyone to come to the feeling of, What political work does this do?

But for many people, the personal need to still make sense of things and reflect—the personal, psychological experience of articulating your own experiences in words as a way of making sense of them for yourself—for many people that still exists. But not for all. I definitely have come across people who have no interest in talking, for lots of reasons. Maybe they don’t think it does any good, or because it’s too painful, or because they don’t want to relive the past and they want to move forward. There are probably lots of other reasons too.

I always think of it as: there are millions and millions of Syrians, and some might want to talk, and some might not want to talk, and my job is to keep talking and keep being in places and asking people, Do you know anybody who might want to talk to me? I try to intersect with the people who do want to talk, for whatever reason, for whatever’s inside of them. We intersect and I’m meeting the right person at the right time, knowing that for many, there are too many reasons not to engage in that process anymore.

EA: What impacts me with books like the two that you’ve written, in a different way than the one Leila co-wrote (with Robin Yassin-Kassab), is that Burning Country appeals to—if someone asks me, I don’t know where to start, I don’t know what’s happening, what should I do? instead of sending them to Wikipedia, which has a lot of issues, I send them this very well-crafted book about a certain part of the timeline, the first five years.

But then there’s an additional need: Now I know intellectually, I get the gist of it, but what does it mean? or How does it feel? Of course you do get this in Burning Country as well, but there’s something very powerful about having testimonies as they are. As the two of you just mentioned, it’s intense and difficult for Syrians, this need to always explain what’s happening, almost as a way of feeling validated, and maybe the other person doesn’t trust you or doesn’t believe your story; the world doesn’t believe your story. There’s this sense of, We constantly have to explain ourselves in order to be taken seriously as people with agency.

Having people just telling those stories without having that in the back of their mind all the time is powerful, because they have taken for granted that right now they are being listened to, and this is what they want to say. This is why the two styles, the two focuses, are so powerful together.

WP: I totally agree, the books are great complements. Go out and get them both! Read them in any order you want!

LS: One thing I find really amazing about your books, Wendy, is the way that you manage to tell a coherent story from start to finish, just through the testimony. At the beginning of each chapter there is a small introduction, but it really hangs together and you follow the story, you understand what’s happening, you understand the journey that people are going on. That’s quite remarkable, to get that.

WP: Thank you so much. That’s where we get to be authors. All of us are here as political people who are doing this work as part of a political commitment—but there’s also the authorship and the artistry, where you get to be creative, and think about how to weave a narrative together, and how a piece of writing can be moving and impactful and engaging. It’s nice to be able to engage that part.

As you know, that’s a lot of trial and error. This book has thirty-eight speakers, and it’s organized in seven chapters, beginning with a chapter called “Leaving,” which starts with stories of leaving Syria, and then leaving again—capturing the experience of a second or a third or fourth displacement—and then goes through stages of searching for home, losing home, finding home, re-thinking about home. It was difficult to think about how to make a coherent narrative out of something that’s so abstract, like home.

The first book was easier: there’s a very clear timeline and narrative to the uprising. Your book has the same narrative arc; mine does; every book about Syria, there are certain stages. As Elia said, anybody who wants to come and understand what it’s all about, these are the step-by-step stages that you go through. The second book is more abstract, more philosophical about the experience of home; it did not have an obvious arc, an obvious sequence. Where do you have a reader begin? Where do you take them along the way, and where do you want them to go?

I wanted to convey people’s stories and reflections on the meaning of home, both in the physical sense of people having to flee their homeland due to violence and persecution and now trying to build new lives in different places, but also home as a metaphor for finding peace in the world, finding meaning in the world, finding belonging, and what can anchor you in a world that has been so shattered by violence—so there’s “home” in the existential sense, too. How do you weave that together into a story? It took a lot of trial and error.

There were these thirty-eight speakers; some appear in multiple chapters, some appear only once. Writing it was a process of putting a story here, Doesn’t really fit, cutting it in half, putting part of the story in one chapter and part in another chapter, putting people in and out to see how it can hang together best. And you just hope a reader flips from one page to the next and wants to keep flipping—but also doesn’t feel confused by it all.

LS: One of the main themes that comes through from the book is resilience. People have gone through so much horror in their own country; then they’re faced with separation as they get forced from their home; and then they get to a new country and they’re faced with administrative procedures, learning a new language, racism. It just amazes me how people have the strength to continue.

What do you feel about that, Wendy, from talking to people?

WP: That’s a beautiful first theme to pull out. It is deeply troubling and frustrating that many people in host countries that are receiving refugees and migrants see only that latter state—and they’re not even appreciating how difficult all these incredible challenges are! Language, paperwork, reinventing oneself professionally, finding housing, navigating hostility in the local society, navigating a new economic/labor market—people don’t often see how difficult those challenges are, but even if they do, are they appreciating this is stage twenty in what a person has already developed resilience in?

So many conversations about refugees seem to begin when somebody’s life crosses the border—then they are this thing called a “refugee,” and they have all of these difficulties. But to situate that stage of a journey in these many-stage journeys that go back to what people experienced in their home country really makes one in awe that people can even find it within themselves to get out of bed each morning and climb another mountain—people just wanting some circumstances of life where they can live with dignity, the most basic freedom and dignity of just being humans, to be able to decide their own fate and be whoever they want to be—and how much struggle there is, how many barriers people have to overcome.

I’m in awe. I’m just in awe of what people do and continue to do, and how so much of that struggle is just not seen and appreciated.

LS: I wish the people who read your book were the people against immigration or anti-refugee—but I suppose it’s not the book they’re going to pick up to read. But to get that, to see what challenges people have overcome to get here…

EA: For me, the term “resilience” has always been a bit of a touchy subject. Not because of this conversation specifically, just the term itself. In 2020 just after the Port of Beirut explosion I wrote a piece for Mangal Media called “resilience:broken,” just to make the difference between the two. Just in the case of Lebanon, it is used to downplay the struggles that people go through on a daily basis: This is a resilient people! Like it’s in our DNA, we can take everything. And we can’t; we’re humans.

What I like about the stories that you collect is that you see that resilience is something that you struggle with often. It’s not like every single day you suddenly have an unlimited amount of energy because you’re a Greek god and you can do whatever you need to do that day; some days you struggle to get out of bed, some days you manage, and there is a back-and-forth, and you have to negotiate with it because for the most part you don’t have an option.

You have to go to that office to do some stupid paperwork, or you have to go to a German class in the evening—you have to do certain things, so sometimes the resilience follows: you have to, and then you find yourself “resilient” because you have to. It’s this back-and-forth, and I like that it comes across that way.

WP: That makes sense. In the book there are people who talk about depression; there are people who talk about drug use. These are the realities of all the hardships that people have been facing, and people cope however they can. And with frustration, being fed up and feeling like you just can’t take it anymore—people are human, and humans have limits.

EA: That’s well said. Someone who develops a drug problem, its a coping mechanism. Someone who says, Fuck this.

I know someone who changed their name even, to make it sound less Arab. I used to be more judgmental of that when I was younger and dumber. Now it’s like, I get it. It’s not even about how you want to personally identify, which is not my business anyway—what do you want on your paperwork? What do you want that legal identity [to be] in relationship to a state that you’re already not comfortable with, and maybe you feel not safe around that relationship? You want to redefine it.

Anyway, these things came up for me while thinking about these stories and the way you collect them.

LS: It works both ways. There’s many people who are trying to overcome and forget the horror of what they went through in Syria, but also what comes very clearly from the book is that many people also hold a very romanticized or idealized version of Syria. I definitely see that amongst my friends and family who are outside: home takes on a new meaning, and often all the good things are remembered and none of the negatives are.

Did you feel that, Wendy, from the book?

WP: A bit. There are people who expressed a tremendous amount of nostalgia. What I find is that some of that nostalgia is quite localized, in terms of people’s neighborhood, their home, their family, the people around them. I heard continually, often, nostalgia for childhood, for family, for foods, for landscapes, for a simpler time when things were good—better and simpler.

But there is still a lot of open-eyed realism about how much people suffered in this same place for which they have these strong emotional attachments and longing. What I found to be most interesting is this tension: all the tensions and complexities of having nostalgia on the one hand, and longing and yearning for the time when family was all together, for a place where no one was a stranger and you walked on the street and said hello and everybody knew your names, and you go into a shop and the shop owner knows you and knows your cousins, and knows who your father and grandfather was—a longing, and tremendous warm feelings towards that, as well as a sense of, This was a place in which I was not treated like a human being. This was a place in which a state did violence against its own citizens. This was a place in which we tried peacefully to make change and were met with bullets and missiles.

Many people I talked to hold both of these things at the same time: the nostalgia for Syria, and a resentment, anger, bitterness, and realism about the politics of Syria. Grappling with what “home” means is having that good along with that bad, or having that bad along with that good. It’s a much more complicated, difficult picture than if something were one hundred percent good or one hundred percent bad.

LS: I definitely see that in myself as well. I obviously have a lot of trauma related to Syria and what’s happened over the past decade and a half. But when I think of Syria and think of what I lost, it’s all about being with family, eating together, celebrating the festivals together—all of that which we’re never going to get back.

And it comes through very strongly in the book, that idea of home as a place where you love are. One of the most amazing stories in the book is the story of this guy who’s in Australia: he’s very settled there, he has work, he’s there with his wife, but he decides to go back to Turkey where his mother and sister are because he can’t bear to be separated from them, and then ends up in the earthquake in Turkey, which actually turns out to be positive for his family because it enables him to take his sister and mother back to Australia.

That was quite a remarkable story, but there’s many stories in the book like that, about home being where people you love are.

WP: Absolutely. And for this young man, home for him was wherever his mother and sister and his Australian wife and his Australian-born baby, and he, could all be together—and it didn’t matter if it was in Turkey or Australia or somewhere else. And there was this completely unexpected series of events that led him first to Turkey and then to Australia.

This is also so much the pain of this mass displacement that you’re hinting at, Leila: there was a time when people met with their families quite regularly; maybe it was daily, maybe it was weekly, for sure for holidays, but you were constantly seeing family, and now no Syrian family is whole. Every family has members on multiple continents, across different countries, so the time when everybody could be together in one place—that was so constitutive of what family means, what your own sense of self is, what home was all about—is hopefully, for many people, not completely impossible to achieve any time in the future, but is really against the odds, and is such an enormous shift of how people have to learn to be in the world.

EA: Nostalgia was such a big part of my own dissertation I feel like I can talk about it forever, but a couple things are related to this fascinating conversation. Nostalgia was initially seen as a disease, in the seventeenth century. It was coined in Switzerland by a student who messed up the Greek; it technically means nostos, which is “return home,” and algos is “longing.” It’s those two roots—I don’t speak Greek, but this is something I remember reading.

In his context, Switzerland would send these mercenaries, and they would have this longing for home, and it was seen as a problem, probably for their bosses especially. They kept on romanticizing home, how they missed the homeland, they missed the mountains, all of that—it was literally seen as a curable disease; you’d have to take opium, or leeches or whatever, maybe journey back to Switzerland for a bit to breathe in the air of the mountains.

With time it became more sophisticated. There’s a scholar called Svetlana Boym, and she has two definitions or explanations of nostalgia, with different consequences: one is restorative and one is reflective. “Restorative” is: you think the past was actually better and you want to recreate it. We can see this feeding into forms of nationalism, for example; there’s a certain date, usually in your childhood, when things were “better,” and then it got ruined because all of those foreigners came or whatever.

“Reflective” is as it sounds: it allows you to reflect on the present by having an element of the past that you are nostalgic for, but you recognize that it’s nostalgia, so it’s not about being realistic or unrealistic, but it’s about, Why do I miss this? Why do I miss this specific thing? For me, I miss Lebanon from when I was a kid, but I know objectively that this was a period, between 1991 and 2015-16 when I first left, that wasn’t exactly peaceful. There was a war, there was a mini civil war, there were different assassinations, car bombs (including one I wasn’t far from when I was fifteen); different things happened that were clearly not good and yet there’s a part of my mind that’s romanticizing it, nostalgic for it.

That’s the familiarity, the good things about it—I’m able to discern; I like specific bits about my early years, and I don’t like these other things. I’m nostalgic for the good stuff. I’m nostalgic for the landscape, maybe, or coffee in the morning. Even if it’s a bit romanticized, it’s something good; it’s not necessarily something to get rid of.

LS: There are so many interviews from very different places. You interview people in Europe, in the US, in the neighboring countries to Syria, even in India, South Africa. Do you see a difference, geographically, with people’s experience? Do you think there’s a big difference between people’s experience in Europe, for example, and the people who are in Turkey or Lebanon?

WP: There are big differences that relate both to the kinds of opportunities and the kinds of challenges that are different across these different states. In the neighboring countries, whereas they could be perceived as [having] the benefit of closer cultural similarity (maybe the same language, in the case of Lebanon and Jordan; being closer to home culturally, socially, religiously; perhaps seeming a lot more like the place where people left), as we know these are countries in which Syrian refugees are treated as guests: they don’t have legal rights to permanent residence; often [there are] barriers to working in the formal job market so they’re working in the informal job market for lower wages, bad conditions, no legal protections (you have a bad boss and he decides to take all of your wages and kick you out, and you don’t have recourse going to the police or judicial system because you’re working illegally); people are often in very difficult housing situations, kids aren’t in school; and are lacking the legal frameworks of rights and often economic opportunities.

[These are] countries that are often also struggling with their own economic crises and high unemployment for citizens. But the most crucial thing is the lack of legal permanent residence: people don’t know if they will be allowed to stay or not, or how you build some sense of home, when literally the state is telling you, You only have temporary protection at best, and it’s just a matter of time before you have to leave, and you have no papers to guarantee your residence there or the ability to travel elsewhere—that can create a profound sense of instability, insecurity, precarity. Some are able to develop social, personal, emotional attachments and a feeling of home where they are despite that, but the odds are really against it.

There are people I talk to who really felt a sense of home and connection in Turkey several years ago, who don’t at all feel that way now. People I talked to said, Yeah, I really have made a life in Turkey—and now, given the rise of anti-Syrian and anti-refugee sentiment in Turkey, especially after the last elections and these cases of violence against Syrian refugees, nearly everyone I know in Turkey would leave in a second if they could, and would like to leave, but can’t. And we hear similar stories in Lebanon, even before the latest escalation.

Compare that to Europe, where there’s all of the difficulties of navigating the administrative state, and paperwork, and all the difficulties that people talk about especially in Germany; and having to learn a new language; and perhaps having to get your professional certificates recognized (if you really defy the odds and are able to work in your chosen profession—many have to find other types of work); and it being socially, religiously, culturally very different, especially the individual-centered, weaker social life that many find in European countries as opposed to what they had in Syria or might still have in the border countries—at the same time, for many at least, [there’s] a pathway to asylum that can lead to legal permanent residency and then perhaps even to citizenship.

[These] places [might] also have more robust social welfare states, states that invest large sums into language classes, integration classes, job retraining, and maybe even a monthly unemployment stipend so people can get themselves back on their feet, as opposed to the border countries where the states are not able to offer anything of that, and international humanitarian aid tries to fill in some of the gaps but are so woefully underfunded that so many people are just simply below the poverty line and struggling in total precarity.

Each place has different types of opportunities and benefits, but also disadvantages, and those in Europe had many stories of encountering racism (although there’s plenty of racism and anti-Syrian sentiment in the countries on Syria’s borders as well), and difficulties of navigating states in different societies and languages. But ultimately, being able to have some sort of paperwork—it’s hard to express the kind of relief that I found people have when they finally have papers, not only to stay where they are, but eventually, hopefully, also to be able to travel, especially to see their family who are in other countries.

LS: I met so many people in Lebanon, Syrian refugees, and I think you have a testimony on this in the book: of people, young men especially, who were terrified to leave their home; they couldn’t travel anywhere, because they weren’t registered. They were worried about getting picked up and sent back to Syria, so they didn’t have even basic freedom of movement, never mind job opportunities and abilities to provide for their family.

WP: Absolutely. My understanding is that a huge majority of Syrian refugees in Lebanon are on expired residency permits; they may have had a valid residency permit at one point, but it is so expensive to renew it and to find a sponsor and so forth, that most people are on expired papers. And there’s lots of military, army checkpoints, or police, or not knowing who you might cross paths with who could report you, so there’s a living in terror of crossing paths with somebody that might lead to your arrest and deportation.

And in places, in Europe and so forth, where people don’t have that kind of fear, you can at least have some space to begin to live—and then confront all the other types of challenges that come with being a newcomer in a new society.

LS: Even in Europe now, some of the rhetoric is moving towards normalization with Assad and that Syria is safe for people to go home, so there’s a lot of fear also in many places in Europe; What’s going to happen next? Because Syria certainly is not safe for Syrian refugees to return to. We know that just during the current conflict in Lebanon, so many Syrians have gone back to Syria to avoid being bombed by Israel in Lebanon, and a large number of people have already been arrested of conscripted to fight. It’s not safe for them there.

WP: A hundred percent. I agree, and this rising rhetoric in Europe is extremely alarming and out of touch with the reality of a place where anyone can still be arbitrarily disappeared or conscripted, or thrown into prison, or killed on the spot.

LS: We’ve seen with Syrian refugees, everywhere they’ve gone—whether in the neighboring countries or Europe—it’s really changed the politics in those countries: we’ve seen a big rise in racism, a big rise in the far right, the scapegoating of refugees for the bad economic situation. But do you see positive impacts that refugees have had on the communities or the countries where they’ve gone?

WP: Well, the quality of food is increasing around the world thanks to Syrian refugees. Do you guys agree with me there?

LS: Certainly, yeah.

EA: I think as a Lebanese I am not allowed to agree.

WP: Right.

That’s one. But there’s a beautiful story in the book of a man who makes it to Germany, and he’s trying to make friends and finds only grumpy faces and no welcoming people in the small town in Bavaria where he winds up, and then he eventually meets this German woman and she becomes a grandmother to him. They develop an incredibly close relationship; this elderly woman’s husband had just died, and she apparently says at some point: When my husband died, god sent me these two Syrian young men to become my family.

When people are able to open their hearts and minds to relationships, these can be incredibly enriching friendships and relationships to be able to have with somebody who’s coming from such a different place and a different experience. So on the personal, individual level, for many people who’ve developed relationships, I hope it’s quite positive.

Economically as well: as we know, it seems like one of the motivations, in the German case, of allowing more Syrians into Germany was understanding that this would be good for the German economy. And I think that Germany took a gamble, and so many Syrians now speak the language, are working, are taxpayers, and raising children who can be also “productive” members of German society. If states want to open doors for that reason, it’s a wager that could pay off. If states are only thinking in their most self-interested economic material interests, refugees don’t necessarily need to be contrary to that interest, if people are given the minimum of tools to start life again, like learning the language and getting training as needed.

There’ve got to be other sorts of benefits too, I would hope. Culturally, it’s enriching to have different norms, different ideas, different mores. If we think of culture as something that’s always changing, that’s dynamic, that evolves, that benefits from diversity—hopefully people don’t have to be afraid and resistant, and cling to some mythical vision of national purity, or ethnic or racial purity, and embrace the variety that can come by people mixing with each other and learning from each other and sharing.

LS: I often think, should the regime fall in Syria, many Syrians would go home. How that would change things, their experiences of being in the diaspora and mixing with different cultures, being exposed to new ideas—that would have quite a big impact on the country and what it’s future would look like, in very interesting ways.

EA: It has to do with what culture is, even—not to get too philosophical, but it is often described as what can fit in a “top ten” of things to do on [an online travel guide], what fits in some ministry of tourism’s annual report. That’s often how culture is described: a museum-ification of culture. There’s a lot of critiques of the role of big institutions, UNESCO. But in terms of who you are as a German (I’m mentioning Germany because a lot of Syrians are there), it’s part of a complicated series of events in your own past that is sometimes recognized, and sometimes is not. It can lead to folks, when in contact with people who have been recently displaced and are newcomers in your town, to reflect on their own inherent status as a migrant—because fundamentally everyone is one.

It can lead to an enriching in that sense. It also has to do with how willing you are as an individual, or how mentally or emotionally ready, to have that kind of vulnerability. It goes back to nostalgia having this reflective and restorative element, and the nationalist side is often, Things were good before X amount of people came—however that is even defined! It’s a moving goalpost; it depends how far back you want to go, or how far back politically, and what is politically feasible for you to do in terms of being a nationalist.

All of this is to say that there is a power to these stories. We know with the ongoing genocide in Gaza, most people, when they think of just the numbers, they aren’t able to do much with that information. It’s not that a hundred thousand isn’t worse than ninety thousand; obviously it is—ten thousand more people have been killed. But you cannot necessarily visualize this. What you can do is when you have names—Hind Rajab and Refaat Alareer—you are able to put names and go into their stories and what happened in their lives before those last days or minutes, before they were murdered.

That allows you to have a relationship or a growing sense of empathy. This is not just something happening in a faraway land, this is something that affects me as a human because those are humans going through a human experience, obviously the worst one.

LS: Another theme that comes up quite a bit in the book is the idea of survivor’s guilt. When I moved to Scotland from the Middle East, at a time when everything was very bad, I felt that disconnect between being physically located in one place [while] my heart and my spirit was connected with all the people I’d left behind elsewhere, who were living such traumatic, devastating times.

That’s something very difficult to navigate, and that comes through quite clearly in a lot of the testimonies, Wendy, that you collect for the book.

WP: Absolutely. One of the interviewees puts it best when he talks about Building home is also about reconciling with the past. For him, survivor’s guilt comes in the form of him literally asking himself continually: What could I have done differently? What should I have done? Could I have helped this one person? Could I have helped this other person? Did me making one decision or another, or me leaving—was it in any way a part of someone else becoming hurt?

There’s that real, direct, micro survivor’s guilt of thinking about particular people or particular circumstances or times, and wondering, Did I do the right thing? Did anyone suffer because of me? Could I have helped somebody but didn’t? And there’s the more macro sense of people asking, I’m living okay, I have food, I have shelter, I have life; what do I have that other people don’t have, that they are being denied right now? And why am I alive when so many other people aren’t? Why did I make it out when so many people didn’t?

There are people in the book who say anybody who got out and survived lives with those questions. I can’t judge; I haven’t had that experience. But there are people I’ve talked to who say these are questions that they all carry with them. Sometimes they’re more prominent, and sometimes they’re less so, and maybe sometimes you find a way to cope with it, and sometimes it rears its head up again. But that is a part of having survived. Having survived carries survivor’s guilt.

That’s another thing that when people think and talk about refugees, they often miss: the enormity, the heaviness of what so many people carry in their hearts and their minds, and their souls—even as they are also trying to navigate all these barriers and difficulties and obstacles to just starting life again and going forward with life.

EA: It can be reflective as well, I guess. Survivor’s guilt can be something that is ultimately used—you recognize why you’re feeling it, and it’s an understandable emotion; it can of course be all-consuming; I’ve experienced that as well, most recently because I’m not in Beirut, and just witnessing the bombing of Beirut live on Al Jazeera on YouTube. It’s such a bizarre experience, because the feed will cut off for a minute to show ads, so you’ll have at some point this weird disconnect, like, Am I watching a movie? It can be profoundly disorienting.

But there’s the other side where you can use that to channel a certain rage, a certain anger. Why do I get to be comfortable today and that person whose house just got bombed doesn’t? You start with yourself, because we relate to the world through our own experiences. But because you recognize where you come from and the privileges that you have, or the misfortunes of this or that person, you’re able to think about it in more political terms. It’s just profoundly fucked up that they don’t get to sleep tonight, that they have to have fear because of X, Y, and Z—which you can name and it becomes less abstract, more concrete. You know why this is happening, and there is something empowering about that; you can do something with that.

WP: For many of the people I talked to, there’s this bewildering sense of the arbitrariness of it all. Why did one person survive and another person not? Why did I survive and another person not? Why did one person get out and another person not? Why did one person wind up in Sweden and another person wind up in Jordan?

That’s also a lot to grapple with for anybody who survived: how close they were to not having survived. I wonder if that adds to the sense of guilt, because there’s not always some logical reason; it’s not about deserving or anything—there’s so much randomness and luck of who survived and how people survived.

Thank you both for reading the book and engaging with it. I hope people are able to resonate with it in some way, because it’s a book about Syria and the Syrian experience and the new Syrian diaspora, but I also hope it’s a book that people who maybe are not interested in Syria can read and learn from and ask themselves: What does home mean to me?

That was an ulterior motive, of how to bring people into Syria. Oh, home! This is a universal human experience; every human has some story, can relate to home in some way—it’s not always positive; it could be negative. It could be easy, could be simple, could be complicated. But if you ask someone, What does home mean to you? most human beings can connect to that question in some way.

That being the question of the book is a way to hopefully bring people in who maybe don’t know much about Syria or haven’t thought much about it, but hopefully through that shared common ground of this universal human concern can find a way in to listening to Syrians.

LS: Definitely. For the reasons you said, it’s very accessible for people to read, and I do hope that it gets widely read.

It was such a pleasure to have you here with us, Wendy, and to talk to you and go more in-depth into these issues that are raised in the book.

WP: Thank you so much for having me.

EA: Thank you both for doing this.