The Home That Was Our Country

by Alia Malek

Sadly, the Syrian conflict and the cruel war, also my memories of Iraq, where I lived for 2 years,

 in a similar regime,made me curious to know more about Syria’s history. 

Alia Malek left her home in the U.S. to study what she calls her ‘grandmother’s home’ in Damascus. Her memoir, about the two years she spent in Damascus, from 2011 until she left in 2013, give some information about the country’s history.

The first chapters of her book deal with the origins of her family near Hama, a town between Aleppo and Homs, more than a hundred fifty years ago. Greater Syria became an area with ever moving frontiers not only during the fall of the Ottoman Empire but also after WWI during the French and English mandates when territory was redistributed and borders kept on moving.

The chapters about the daily life of middle-class Syrians in the nineteenth and early twentieth century are very interesting and provide plenty of historical details, interesting stories and descriptions based on thorough research. Malek has woven a century of family-history around the social, political and cultural situation in those days.

The focus is on the human factor which is exactly what keeps the story alive and gives it a wider dimension thanks to the interactions of her ancestors with various ethnic and religious groups living together in the same towns, a particularity of ‘levantine’ societies, an aspect which is also brilliantly described by Amin Maalouf in ‘Origins’ and in his later works. 

The author supports the idea that a multitude of divisions and factions in Syria originated during the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, during and after WWI.

 It is through her family records that we get a glimpse of how minority communities of Christians, Ottoman Jews, Shiïtes, Druzes and Alawites and a Sunni majority all lived together in the same country.

 Her ancestors who belonged to the Christian Antiochian Orthodox group lived among other communities of Armenians, Assyrians and Aramean Christians. 

There were also various Muslim Sunni communities of Syrian Arab, Turkmen, or Circassian origin, next to the Shia minorities of Druzes and more especially the Alawites, the latter being the community to which the Al- Assad family belonged, who would include many in their governments. 

 In the following chapters we read how those different factions will eventually succeed in destabilising Syria.

In the second part of her book Malek settles in Damascus in the house of her grandmother who died years before Alia left the U.S. for Damascus. This is unfortunately the time when the country starts falling apart and the author will witness how life is changing because of the oppression by the dictatorship. 

It is in the ‘Tahaan’ building, an apartment block that belonged to her grandmother Salma, that Alia settles.

Officially she wants to restore the building and write a book on Salma’s life.

As a new journalist, she also wants to observe the political situation, maybe not the best idea in a dictatorship.

In the apartment block lives a small microcosm of middle-class families, Christians, Muslims, Armenians, many of them immigrated from other parts of the country.  She reports narratives about them, their lives and their views on the Assad’s regime, Bashar’s and his father’s. The Ba’ath Party was from the beginning Assad’s Party, first Afez’s, later Bashar’s.

At first, it was announcing a certain stability with a kind of socialist reform which over the years became a state capitalism. Any business would need a partner in Assad’s circles and this generated discontent and revolt under Bashar al Assad’s dictatorship.

Alia  visits the neighbourhoods of the Ta’haan building, smells the bitter orange trees in the patios and walks around the local shopkeepers, the spice market of Old Damascus and the bird seller around the corner. 

However, as the conflict and the civil war continue to get worse during those years and cause great unrest, the situation becomes dangerous for Alia as a foreigner and her presence endangers her relatives as well.

They want her to leave.

At first reading the book may seem complicated. The stories of family ancestors and their lives as well as the ones around the Ta’haan building, make it livelier and the reading becomes more compelling and colourful thanks to the neighbours she met in the house and on the street.

As a historical document, however, the history of contemporary Syria is a bit weak and biased. In fact, she never even mentions the threat of the Islamist terrorists who were already there to cause harm and disaster all over Syria. 

Irene