Defiance
A Memoir of Awakening, Rebellion, and Survival in Syria
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- 109,00 kr
Publisher Description
“Defiance takes my breath away. A nail-biting tale of astonishing courage.” —Jeannette Walls #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Glass Castle
“A heartbreaking account of a young woman’s struggle for freedom against the rampaging forces of fanaticism and tyranny . . . Unforgettable.” —Lawrence Wright, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower and The Human Scale
A stunning memoir of personal rebellion and political awakening from a young woman raised to be loyal to a brutal regime—and the unimaginable cost of choosing freedom
Like any good Alawite girl, every day at school, Loubna Mrie pledged allegiance to Hafez al-Assad. When she complained about memorizing his speeches for class, she was told to shorten her tongue—without the president, her family believed, the Alawites would be persecuted by the Sunni majority, as they had been for centuries before the Assads came to power. A girl’s role was to obey, not to question. Loubna’s father, a mercurial businessman with close ties to the Assad regime, ruled over his wife and daughters with absolute authority. In their world, loyalty was sur-vival. Curiosity was blasphemy. Dissent was betrayal.
But everything changed in 2011, when the pro-democracy uprisings of the Arab Spring reached Syria. Unable to suppress her curiosity, Loubna attended an anti-government protest. What she witnessed—the courage, the brutality, and the lies that followed—ignited something in her that would not be extinguished. She joined the resistance, risking her life by fearlessly proclaiming her Alawite heritage and, later, as a photojournalist documenting the war for Reuters and other outlets. Her defiance would come at a devastating cost: the loss of loved ones, her community, and ultimately her country. Leaving behind everything she knew, she would have to find a new home within herself.
Defiance is the unforgettable account of one woman’s fight for freedom—against a father, a dictator, and the weight of inherited belief. From the streets of Aleppo to exile in New York City, it offers an electrifying portrait of moral courage in the face of authoritarianism and violence. Told with clarity, fury, and grace, Defiance offers a rare ground-level portrait of what it means to wake up, to resist, and to become.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The large-scale tragedies of the Syrian civil war are rendered on an intimate scale in Mrie's plaintive debut. The author grew up in a Syrian family that supported the Baathist dictatorship of Hafez al-Assad and his son Bashar. Her father, Jawdat, was an intelligence official, and her clan was part of the Alawite religious minority that was the regime's base. But when anti-government protests erupted in 2011, a 20-year-old Mrie joined the opposition, documenting the demonstrations as a journalist and ferrying medical supplies to the resistance. She fled to Turkey in 2012 shortly before her mother died under mysterious circumstances, then returned for several reporting trips back to rebel-held areas of Syria, which grew dangerous as Islamic State militants began to dominate these regions. Mrie's narrative charts a struggle with many kinds of oppression: Assad's tyranny, the enmity with which Alawites were treated by the Sunni majority that dominated the rebel movement, and Arab society's pervasive sexism. She captures the chaos of Syria's upheaval with raw immediacy ("I gasp for air, struggling to breathe through the fine, chalklike dust kicked up from the stampede," she writes of soldiers attacking a demonstration), and offers a heartbreaking excavation of the psychic wounds that left her struggling with alcoholism and failed relationships. This haunting account illuminates the human cost of Syria's collapse.
