A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea
Melissa Fleming
To Peter, Alessi, and Danny, my parents, and the over sixty-five million people who have been forced to flee from their homes.
ONE
A Childhood in Syria
The second time Doaa nearly drowned, she was adrift in the center of a hostile sea that had just swallowed the man she loved. She was so cold she couldn’t feel her feet, and so thirsty her tongue had swollen in her mouth. She was so overcome with grief that if not for the two tiny baby girls in her arms, barely alive, she would have let the sea consume her. No land was in sight. Just debris from the shipwreck, a few other survivors praying for rescue, and dozens of bloated, floating corpses.
Thirteen years earlier, a small lake, rather than the vast ocean, had almost taken her, and that time Doaa’s family was there to save her. She was six years old and the only one in her family who’d refused to learn to swim. She was terrified of the water; just the sight of it filled her with dread.
During outings to the lake near their home, Doaa would sit alone and watch as her sisters and cousins splashed and dove and somersaulted into the lake, cooling off from the sweltering Syrian summer heat. When they tried to coax Doaa into the water, she steadfastly refused, feeling a sense of power in her resistance. Even as a small child, she was stubborn. “No one can ever tell Doaa what to do,” her mother told everyone with a mix of pride and exasperation.
Then, one afternoon, Doaa’s teenage cousin decided that she was being silly and that it was past time for her to learn how to swim. As Doaa sat obliviously drawing shapes in the dirt with her fingers and watching the others splash around, he crept up behind her, grabbed her by the waist, and lifted her up as she kicked and screamed. Ignoring her cries, he swung her up over his shoulder and carried her to the lake. Her face was pressed into his upper back while her legs dangled just below his chest. She kicked hard against his rib cage and dug her fingernails into his head. The children laughed as Doaa’s cousin stretched out his arms and released her into the murky water. Doaa panicked as she smacked facedown into the lake. She was submerged only up to her chest, but she was paralyzed with fear and unable to position her legs to find footing. Rather than floating to the top, Doaa submerged, gasping for air but instead gulping water.
A pair of arms pulled her out of the lake just in time, lifting her to the shore and into the comforting lap of her frightened mother. Doaa coughed up all the liquid she’d ingested, sobbing, and vowed, then and there, to never go near the water again.
Back then, she had nothing else in her world to fear. Not when family was always around to protect her.
Six-year-old Doaa couldn’t remember any moment when she’d ever been alone. She lived with her parents and five sisters in a single room in her grandfather’s two-story house. Her father’s three brothers and their families occupied the other rooms, and each moment of Doaa’s life was filled with relatives: She slept side by side with her sisters, ate communal meals, and listened to spirited conversations.
The Al Zamel family lived in Daraa, the largest city in the southwest of Syria, located just a few kilometers from the Jordanian border and about a two-hour drive south of Damascus. Daraa sits on a volcanic plateau of rich, red soil. In 2001 when Doaa was six, it was famous for the bounty of fruits and vegetables the land yielded—pomegranates, figs, apples, olives, and tomatoes. It was said that the produce of Daraa could feed all of Syria.
Years later, in 2007, a devastating drought swept through the country, lasting for three years, and forcing many farmers to abandon their fields and move with their families to cities such as Daraa to seek employment. Some experts believe that this massive displacement gave rise to the ripple of discontent that in 2011 swelled into a tidal wave of protest, and then the armed uprising that would shatter Doaa’s life.
But back in 2001, when Doaa was just a little girl, Daraa was a peaceful place where people went about their lives, and newfound hope was held for the future of the country. Bashar al-Assad had just succeeded his repressive father, Hafez al-Assad, as president. The people of Syria were hopeful that better times lay ahead for their country, at first believing that the young president would break away from his father’s oppressive policies. Bashar al-Assad and his glamorous wife had been educated in England and their marriage was seen as a merger—he from the minority Alawite branch of Islam and his wife, Asma, like Doaa’s family, from the majority Sunni. His politics were secular, and hope was widespread, particularly among the Damascus-educated elite, that under his leadership the forty-eight-year-old emergency law his father had inherited and maintained to crush dissent would be revoked and restraints on freedom of expression would be lifted. Under the pretext of protecting national security from Islamic militants and outside rivals, the government had used its emergency powers to severely restrict individual rights and freedoms and to enable security forces to make preventive arrests with little legal recourse.
The more conservative, poorer populations, such as those in Daraa, mainly hoped for economic improvements, but for the most part they quietly accepted the way things operated in their country. This silent acquiescence was the result of a harsh lesson they had learned back in 1982 in the city of Hama, when then president Hafez al-Assad ordered the killing of thousands of citizens as a collective punishment for the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood movement that was challenging his rule. This brutal retaliation was still fresh in Syrians’ minds. But with the new generation in power, they hoped that Hafez al-Assad’s son would loosen some of the restrictions that hampered everyday life. To the disappointment of people throughout Syria, the new president merely paid lip service to reform, and nothing much changed, and after Hama, few dared to challenge the authoritarian regime.