(Recently I wandered through the New Non-Fiction section of our local library, and happened on this new book by Northwestern University political science professor Wendy Pearlman. I thought it would be a scholarly treatise about Syrian refugees and the concept of home. Instead, the book has both troubled and encouraged me about what some of us might face in the coming political landscape. I’m claiming that this entry is a book review, but maybe it’s more like a confession?)
The core questions in The Home I Worked to Make: Voices From the New Syrian Diaspora revolve around the complex understandings of “home” that come from Pearlman’s personal interviews with over five hundred expatriate Syrians in over twenty countries. Their recollections are riveting, the kind of story-telling that can’t be ignored or easily set aside—these are people similar to us in so many ways.
Her introductory chapter includes haunting observations about how any of us—including refugees from Syria’s protracted civil war—might need to reconsider what “home” means. How we can find or reconstruct “home” in a new place. How “refugee” and “immigrant” might also describe a future state of homelessness that may be forced on some of us.
The book is organized around seven dimensions of “home”—leaving, leaving again, searching, losing, building, belonging and living. Each section features the first-person narratives of Syrians trying to describe “the home I worked to make.” Their stories are unimaginably horrifying—how the now-former Assad regime imprisoned, tortured and killed hundreds of thousands of Syrians over seventeen years of civil war.
Other tales show the ways in which displaced and dispossessed persons regain their core human qualities—e.g., dignity, determination, resilience, courage, adaptability, spirituality, purpose, self-respect, intimacy—after long years of tyranny. Even though it’s caked with the grime and grit of difficult circumstances, hope is alive, too.
Pearlman’s work led me to these connected thoughts: As I consider the possible future directions of our country, I can learn from home-seeking Syrians around the world. They might help answer a question that some of us secretly harbor: Should tyranny, corruption and cruelty increasingly describe our nation, where and how could we work to make home elsewhere? Reviewing Syrians’ history and future may help us consider our own decisions…!
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