Review: Where the Wind Calls Home by Samar Yazbek

Hindustan Times

3 days ago

Ali from Where The Wind Calls Home is the strangest character I have encountered in a while. What accounts for this peculiarity is the magical world in Ali's head which constitutes of his spiritual relationship with the elements of nature. Even after the chaos of war takes over his poor family — his older brother is killed and he is forcibly enlisted in the army — his private world sustains him right to the end. It is the death of that world that the reader has to grieve alongside the brutalities wrecked by the civil war in Syria.
The novel translated by Leri Price opens with the 19-year-old Ali gravely injured in a misfire on a remote Latakia mountain. Covered in debris and disoriented, he zones in and out of consciousness. Memories of his childhood in a remote Syrian village, of the eccentric Humayrouna who taught him to read the language of trees and the wind, of his mother Nahla and his emotionally distant father, flash before his eyes. Ali cares only for a few things -- the tree in the maqam, his arzal (the small tree house he had built on the highest mountain point in his village), and the wind. He is far removed from the trapping of the world around him.
In rich imaginative language, Yazbek shows us how Ali talks to the wind, plays with light, and even sees the world around him in his own unique colour. The book makes the reader do a fair bit of work: the abstract images that Ali makes have to be conjured. A child's playtime is described vividly and it is as important as the siege of Turks or the death of the president, who is not named.
One of the most important Syrian writers of our time, Yazbek has documented the revolution despite stringent censorship. This doesn't mean she has to take on the burden of explaining the politics in her novels. Deeply aware of these expectations, she spoke against them in an interview with the Pen Transmissions Magazine: 'This is how the West sees us: as political topics, even in our literature.'
In Where the Wind Calls Home, she is focused on creating rich imagery and experimenting with form and content. In the same interview she further stated: 'My focus is the power of the imagination, and the words' power in giving the text its uniqueness. This is my primary concern, and the themes, how to convey fact, all the other things, come afterwards.'
Likewise, in the novel, the trees frame the narrative; the leaves are literally like a kaleidoscope, and the light filtering through them make Ali's world break out into strange colours and patterns that find little reference in our daily lives. To the human eye, snow is white, but to Ali, snow has no colour.
In Yazbek's writing, the aesthetic and political impulse give rise to two very different kinds of genres. Her nonfiction, like A Woman in the Crossfire, for which she won the coveted Pen Pinter Prize, clearly follows the journalistic impulse to document the Assad regime's harrowing war crimes. In her novels, she is completely devoted to birthing a unique linguistic experience.
Even with the form of the novel, she is daringly experimental. The plot may not have a lot of movement, but it is replete with action. This action rises and falls with each chapter. Since Ali's senses are impaired by the blast, the destruction and bloodshed around him is revealed in stages. This is quite ingenious; the author has not given us a complete set to imagine: a wounded soldier lying motionless surrounded by bodies. Rather than letting the blood and gore overwhelm the reader and having it all pass in a blur, she reveals the tragedy around him in stages.
Ali is lying in a pile of leaves, covered in dirt, parts of his body missing. Suddenly the haze clears itself a little bit, and like a gut punch, another solider's mutilated hand is waiting to startle both Ali and the reader. The story might take place in one day, but it has multiple crescendos, and the senseless war is not dealt with as one large descriptive paragraph about mangled body parts. It reveals itself gradually. The tension reaches boiling point right at the end of each chapter, making this small novel a tightly crafted masterclass in sustaining mystery.
Yazbek methodically layers each element of mystery on top of the previous one. In his delirium, Ali, surrounded by carnage, sees a phantasmal image, a body that is mirroring his movements. This body behind the nearby oak tree — is it a fellow soldier or an enemy, or is Ali hallucinating? -- infuses the narrative with heightened paranoia and suspicion. Amidst this fear, there is another urgent concern pressing for his attention, his safety. Night is about to fall and he needs to climb the nearby tree and huddle safely on its branches before animals catch a sniff of his injured body. But this small distance turns into a long, arduous journey that takes us back and forth into Ali's past.
As he moves, pain shoots up his body, with each burst an entryway into his past. Yazbek juxtaposes pain and memory in such an intricate way that one instinctively responds to another, as if the neural pathways of both are inextricably connected. The sharp sensation in his legs reminds him of the time his father beat him with a pomegranate cane; the blinding headache reminds him of the death of the first president. This dance of memory and pain continues — here he moves his torso a little bit and sees something horrific in his surroundings, and there the pain throttles him back to his past — as he drifts in and out of consciousness.
The combination of shock, pain, and memory keeps the readers distracted and barely noticing that Ali has not moved at all. The tree just keeps getting farther and farther away. Will he ever reach the tree? More importantly, will it even matter if he does? The Waiting-for-Godot-like situation playing out in the background, pitched on to the wanton destruction caused by the war underlines the banality of it all.
Yazbek gives ample space to the women in Ali's life and their complex positions. Just like in her previous novel, Planet of Clay, where she shows us how the nexus of violence and patriarchy puts women in a disproportionately vulnerable position, here too, the war brutalises women in a unique way. When Ali's brother dies, his mother Nahla is not allowed to see the shredded remains of her eldest son; tradition dictates that she stay away from the funeral. The unprocessed grief lays a shroud of silence over her, just like it does to Rima in Planet of Clay.
Ali, too, like Nahla, takes the path of silence, not just as a protest but also because human language and its treacheries remain indescribable to him. But he remains free-spirited, an abstruse character even after the reader has finished with the novel. Ali is a soldier in the brutal dictator's army and not in the rebel militia but that doesn't deny him Yazbek's empathy. His fighting on the wrong side against his will remains a strong symbol of the unconsented participation of the common masses in wars in which they have no stake.
Rutba Iqbal is an independent journalist.