My road from Damascus A memoir

A Syrian dissident author, now a refugee in Canada, interweaves details of his incarcerations and torture in Syria with a once-idyllic life in a small village. Raised by farmers in the rural town of Kfarieh, Saeed was first imprisoned in 1980, for more than a decade, for protesting the Syrian dictatorship of Hafez al-Assad. He spent most of those years in the notoriously brutal Tadmur military prison in Damascus, where he was routinely tortured. After his release, he was detained two more times. By the early 1990s, he had begun writing regularly and made a name for himself in literary circles. One critic told him, "You'll be to Syria what Maupassant was to France." Sadly, the repeated incarcerations interrupted his promising career. In a moving, novelistic narrative, Saeed beautifully, gently chronicles the appealing details of his early life in his village: first childhood crush, a painful reconciliation between science and piety, and the adulation of his cosmopolitan uncle, who encouraged him "to ask questions with absolutely no inhibitions." During this time, Saeed keenly followed global events on the radio. He revered Egyptian president Abdel Nasser and did not understand the subsequent military coup by Assad. During 10th grade, the author established a Marxist discussion group. In 1977, he transferred to a private school in Damascus, where he was enlightened much like the biblical Saul when he saw the Messiah on the road to the city. In the next few years, his political activity drove him underground until his arrest. In this multilayered text, the author ably captures the arbitrary brutality of the guards as well as the tender human interactions with his fellow prisoners that made his incarceration tolerable. "The world that turns in my heart is like a warm house, open to all, an amazingly beautiful world that keeps turning, and turns its back on passports and borders and bloodshed and famine and all the suffering that people endure." A lyrical, extremely rich narrative of loss, memory, and trauma. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Waiting to be executed, I remember as clearly as if I could see them, many of the other people I'd known in different Syrian towns: children, men, and women, old and young; relatives, friends, and those who'd shared in the painful experiences of prison; interrogators out of control in the interrogation branch in Latakia; doomsday in cellblock seven in the military's special investigation branch in Damascus; prisoners of conscience, murderers, thieves, drug dealers, cats, rats, and police in al-Qala'a prison; bodies exhausted by fear, faces distorted by terror, souls brutalized by humiliation in Tadmur prison. The faces of women I'd loved and cried over when they left, and those of the ones who loved me and who cried when I left. Informers for the intelligence services who visited me diligently after my release on the pretext of asking after my health. A great gathering of people, birds, beasts, with their features crystal clear; springs, rivers, different places by the sea, rough tracks, paved roads, and even familiar rocky outcrops. I am completely absorbed by this throng of images, smells, and the sounds my memory yields, sharper and more delicate than I would have believed possible, and in that moment I really forget where I am. I don't think about how my brazen answers to the officer had just slammed the door on my future. I am devouring life avidly as if it only existed in the past when the door of the interrogation room opens and footsteps approach. I brace myself for the end, but nothing. If only I could move my hand, I would pull the blindfold away from my eyes. Has the soldier who entered the room changed his mind and left again? Or is he standing close to me this very second? I picture the room full of instruments of torture: an old tire, electric cables, clubs, a German chair, water, and a packet of pins on the metal table where the interrogator usually sat. Big strong torturers no more than twenty-five years old will show up at any moment... The door opens again and I hear the sound of something being moved on a metal table. The door shuts again. Have they taken something out of the room? The sound of footsteps in the corridor. People hurrying, and then the sound of shouting. The desperate voice of a man begging his torturers to stop beating him, a wailing sound in which pain, hope, and impotence mingle. I know that wailing well. I'd heard it many times, sometimes coming out of my own mouth. Bassam once said to me that prison was the practice of grief, wailing, anticipation, and masturbation. Bassam killed himself after he came out of prison. Bassam's voice resembled that of the man who continues to cry out in the next room: "For the sake of Allah, stop!" Excerpted from My Road from Damascus: A Memoir by Jamal Saeed All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.