The Home I Worked to Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
War forced millions of Syrians from their homes. It also forced them to rethink the meaning of home itself.
In 2011, Syrians took to the streets demanding freedom. Brutal government repression transformed peaceful protests into one of the most devastating conflicts of our times, killing hundreds of thousands and displacing millions. The Home I Worked to Make takes Syria’s refugee outflow as its point of departure. Based on hundreds of interviews conducted across more than a decade, it probes a question as intimate as it is universal: What is home? With gripping immediacy, Syrians now on five continents share stories of leaving, losing, searching, and finding (or not finding) home. Across this tapestry of voices, a new understanding emerges: home, for those without the privilege of taking it for granted, is both struggle and achievement. Recasting “refugee crises” as acts of diaspora-making, The Home I Worked to Make challenges readers to grapple with the hard-won wisdom of those who survive war and to see, with fresh eyes, what home means in their own lives.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This extremely personal, heartfelt political analysis reveals that home has more to do with what’s in your heart than what’s beneath your feet. The Syrian revolution that began in 2011—part of the uprisings that became known as the Arab Spring—displaced countless Syrians, sending refugees all over the globe. Political scientist Wendy Pearlman interviewed hundreds of these people, who landed everywhere from Germany to Japan, Turkey to Brazil. In interviews so nakedly emotional they’ll rip your heart out, Syrians share what exile feels like. There are as many answers as there are interviewees, whether it’s a young gay man who found acceptance in India or a woman who fled to Jordan at 18, attended university, and built her adult life there. The book’s a rough emotional ride—the traumas outnumber the triumphs—but Pearlman captures every facet of these human experiences with the precision of a scientist and the depth of someone who recognizes universal truths when she encounters them. Don’t be surprised if you come away reexamining your own ideas about belonging.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Syrian refugees grapple with feelings of alienation as they try to make new homes around the globe in this moving account from political scientist Pearlman (We Crossed a Bridge and it Trembled). Drawing on a decade's worth of interviews with hundreds of displaced Syrians, Pearlman traces their movement through several life stages (e.g., "leaving," "seeking," "belonging," and, if they eventually manage to feel at home somewhere new, simply "living"). Tracking her subjects' evolving emotions, Pearlman uses their experiences to shed light on the idea of home; she contends that, because most Syrian refugees had planned to spend their lives in the same towns in which their families had dwelled for generations, they possess uniquely poignant views on the topic. The accumulated weight of their often harrowing narratives reveals that those who succeeded in reaching the "living" stage had to labor hard at the task of nurturing a sense of home within themselves. Their accounts, relayed in first person, have a poetic quality ("Syrians my age in Germany learned to hate Syria. I understood them completely. Erase anything called Syria from your thoughts and look forward"; "Once I was... in Khartoum and saw a funeral gathering... and started to cry. Not because it was a funeral, but because everybody there knew each other"). The result is a haunting rumination on what it means to belong somewhere.
