Death in Syria

This is a story of four family members who take a trip by car from Damascus to Anibiya, a small town a few hundred kilometers away.

The car’s occupants are three sibling and their father. The father has recently died. His cadavre is wrapped in a makeshift shroud. The body is being taken to Anibya for burial next to his wife as was his dying wish.

Thirty year’s ago a fourth sibling, a talented, smart independent young woman who, when her father arranged for her to marry a man she did not love, decided to die. On the wedding day in Anibiya, she climbed to the roof a building, looked down at the wedding party and burned herself to death.

Possibly it was because of guilt that father’s dying wish was that his body be buried in Anibiya. It was an impractical wish as to drive there from Damascus was extremely dangerous. But the brothers decided to go. The sister was not consulted.

It’s hot. It’s Syria. There are many official and unofficial road-blocks with stops between Damascus and Anibiya. The trip which is only a four hour drive in normal times, takes three days. The father’s dead body putrefies in stages, graphically told. There’s no A/C. The siblings can’t open the windows as they are scared of regime and rebel soldiers, and gangs. They are frequently held up at checkpoints. At one the two brothers are told to leave the car. The sister waits in the closed-window car for five hours with her father’s putrefying body. When the brothers return she is mute and remains so, forever.

This is a disturbing book in a bad way. It is an unpleasant read. Although it illustrates the meaningless of war, the method used, the long passages describing the decaying of the body did not seem to be there for any reason other than to engender horror. It was also a little disingenuous as it’s common knowledge that Islam requires bodies to be buried cleanly as soon as possible after death. ( )

Khaled Khalifa’s, “Death is Hard Work,” narrates a journey from Damascus to Anibiya, a small town a few hundred kilometers away – a trip far longer in present and historical time than the few hundred kilometers distance. The dangerous road blocks serve as tense punctuations to the biographies of, not only the three siblings making the trip, but several others biographies including their father’s, his second wife, their aunt. Most notable of the biographies is their father’s sister. She was a talented, smart and independent young woman when her father arranges for her to marry a man she does not love. On the wedding day, she climbs to the roof a building, looks down at the wedding party and burns herself to death. Abdel Latif, her brother, the father of the siblings, never forgives himself for not supporting her resistance to this imposed marriage. Is this failure the reason Abdel left Anibiya for 40 years?
The novel does not stop its narration to explain the horror and injustice of Syria’s civil war. Khalifa narrates the checkpoints of corruption, courage, love, religious extremism as part of the landscape the siblings must traverse in getting to Anibiya where their father requested he be buried. The author uses Bolbol, who was with their father at death, as a fulcrum for the narration. From it the author branches off to narrate how Abdel finally, after 40 years, marries the love of his youth, Nevine, after he has been widowed. Nevine serves to inspire Abdel to courageous acts after the civil war begins. Hussein, Abdel’s other son, has squandered talent to become a low level gang member. Bolbol must use all his strength to keep Hussein – stronger and more talented – committed to the journey and burial. Fatima, the sister, becomes mute at the end of the novel – symbolic for the inexpressibility of Syria’s horrors. After they have managed to bury their father, and have returned to Damascus, Bolbol decides to insist on being called his proper name, Nabil. He returns to living the reclusive life he had been living up until his father’s death. ( )

After their father dies two brothers and their sister travel across Syria to bring their father to be buried next to their Aunt. We learn of the family members' stories.
The narrator has a dry flat tone. ( )

The social comment on a very personal book: Now, you have to understand me, I wouldn’t have waited three weeks and then invaded Ukraine from the west, playing Stalin to Putin’s Hitler, like Trump would have. There’s nothing wrong per se with supporting Ukraine against Putin’s weird, race-based war. “You’re part of our Russian family. So, I invite you to join our Russian family upon pain of death, and, since no Russian family is complete without a considerable amount of drunken abuse, the beatings will commence immediately.”

But can you imagine American towns flying Syrian flags in support of the democracy faction in that country’s ongoing civil war? I think that would probably promote hate crimes. (“Soft on crime. Soft on communism.”) The groupthink loves Ukraine because it sees Ukrainians as the new Irish—the down on their luck pink-fleshed whites that we’re eager to assimilate. (It’s not like we’re going to start offering our kids Ukrainian lessons or take them to Ukrainian Orthodox churches, but they’re welcome to become northern Italian. They sure look pretty.) We have the nerve to tell Syrians that we think they’re white, but many people do mark them as being separate from us. They’re not honored for their democracy fight. They’re branded as crazy people we need to keep out, because they don’t have our folk faith (which is…. marriage?); they’re just not welcome.

But it is a very personal book; it’s a personal story about the Syrian civil war. I’m a crazy person so I talk politics, but don’t buy the book if you expect Khaled to talk about parties and fronts. It’s a relatively simple story, about burying a father’s body—almost unusually he dies of natural causes, and the one son agrees as he’s dying to bury him in their village instead of the city, so the other brother and the sister have to cart the body in their vehicle across miles of near-impassable roads in war conditions…. Obviously there’s suffering specific to powerless civilians in war time, but it’s not a complicated series of events. It’s not a plot book, anymore than it’s a political book. But there are all these character-forming flashbacks about the father and the children, about women and men in Syria, people chasing happiness and living their lives, that’s worth reading. It’s both culturally specific and the same sort of unclassifiable detail you find in any country.

I didn’t like it as much as the (fellow Arab author) book The Queue, since the Q had this almost sci-fi political satire charm. But it’s like a (non-US, non-Black) “Beloved”, in that it’s a personal take on suffering and catastrophe.

…. Pure and undefiled religion before God is this: being able to speak well in public like a real hombre, and it’s also, we hope, the necessary prereq to speaking in public at all.

…. After-note: I used to read a lot of ‘good’/‘political’ books (some of which were bad: The Grapes of Wrath stands out as a meandering tale of exclusivity, a very particular kind of exclusivity lol), and I read this kinda as that, and as an international book; despite the obvious personal layers (the codependent man/the woman/the unsympathetic man) I kinda picked it up as that political/subtle/Learn About the World thing. I didn’t think subtle vs negative back then (it’s obviously not fun) but I had assumptions about subtleness and ‘learning’ things. But I’ve been renaming serious fiction again (I don’t know what I meant by personal drama: it’s either romantic or it isn’t, right, and some books like that clump with social commentary books and others don’t, and then there are also crime books which can kinda clump together and form a trio, a continuum), and now I look at it and it’s like: what’s subtle about it? They’re oppressed; they’re sexist; they’re traumatized; they’re dysfunctional; they’re riding through checkpoints with a corpse. Not everything clumps with our schoolboy notions of ‘learning’. It’s fault-conscious; it’s compassion, a little dose of compassion for the people of the lost world of war-land, you know. It’s not Joseph Conrad. The point of the book is not to learn about alliteration, you know. Well, anyway, that’s what I think. A little fault-conscious isn’t to drown in shit, you know—it isn’t to throw your own corpse on the pile. But to practice compassion, non-repression of the negative—those can be good things.

This book is a powerful and disturbing look at the absurdity of life in modern Syria. Its simple, blunt language and matter-of-fact tone really drove home the desperation and resignation of people in Syria. You realize how polarized a country can become (sounds familiar), and how the constant fear of death robs one of everything that makes life worth living -- love, companionship, family, sex, financial reward, enjoying a meal, freedom of thought/movement, all these things are taken away. The only characters who can achieve any of those "normal" elements of life are those who accept death and are no longer governed by fear. It's depressing, but I highly recommend this novel, both for the insight and empathy it creates for the Syrian crisis and its refugees, and the warning it represents when a society and its leaders entirely lose their moral compass. Quick read too -- only 180 pages. ( )