My Road from Damascus: A Memoir

by Jamal Saeed, Catherine Cobham (Translator)

Overview

“A lyrical, extremely rich narrative of loss, memory, and trauma.” — STARRED review, Kirkus Reviews

An extraordinary account of survival in Syria’s most notorious military prisons that is written with “brutal clarity — and yet, there is a poetic quality to the telling.” — Frances Itani, award-winning author of Deafening and Remembering the Bones

Jamal Saeed arrived as a refugee in Canada in 2016. In his native Syria, as a young man, his writing pushed both social and political norms. For this reason, as well as his opposition to the regimes of the al-Assads, he was imprisoned on three occasions for a total of 12 years. In each instance, he was held without formal charge and without judicial process.

My Road from Damascus not only tells the story of Saeed’s severe years in Syria’s most notorious military prisons but also his life during the country’s dramatic changes. Saeed chronicles modern Syria from the 1950s right up to his escape to Canada in 2016, recounting its descent from a country of potential to a pawn of cynical and corrupt powers. He paints a picture of village life, his youthful love affairs, his rebellion as a young Marxist, and his evolution into a free thinker, living in hiding as a teenager for 30 months while being hunted by the secret police. He recalls his brutal prison years, his final release, and his family’s harrowing escape to Canada.

While many prison memoirs focus on the cruelty of incarceration, My Road from Damascus offers a tapestry of Saeed’s whole life. It looks squarely at brutality but also at beauty and poetry, hope and love.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781778520020
Publisher:	ECW Press
Publication date:	10/04/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	440
File size:	21 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Jamal Saeed spent 12 years as a prisoner of conscience in Syria before being invited to Canada in 2016. He continues to raise awareness about Syria’s ongoing civil war and humanitarian crisis through his work as an activist, editor, visual artist, and author. He lives in Kingston, ON.

Read an Excerpt

Waiting to be executed, I remember as clearly as if I could see them, many of the other people I’d known in different Syrian towns: children, men, and women, old and young; relatives, friends, and those who’d shared in the painful experiences of prison; interrogators out of control in the interrogation branch in Latakia; doomsday in cellblock seven in the military’s special investigation branch in Damascus; prisoners of conscience, murderers, thieves, drug dealers, cats, rats, and police in al-Qala’a prison; bodies exhausted by fear, faces distorted by terror, souls brutalized by humiliation in Tadmur prison. The faces of women I’d loved and cried over when they left, and those of the ones who loved me and who cried when I left. Informers for the intelligence services who visited me diligently after my release on the pretext of asking after my health. A great gathering of people, birds, beasts, with their features crystal clear; springs, rivers, different places by the sea, rough tracks, paved roads, and even familiar rocky outcrops. I am completely absorbed by this throng of images, smells, and the sounds my memory yields, sharper and more delicate than I would have believed possible, and in that moment I really forget where I am. I don’t think about how my brazen answers to the officer had just slammed the door on my future.

I am devouring life avidly as if it only existed in the past when the door of the interrogation room opens and footsteps approach. I brace myself for the end, but nothing. If only I could move my hand, I would pull the blindfold away from my eyes. Has the soldier who entered the room changed his mind and left again? Or is he standing close to me this very second? I picture the room full of instruments of torture: an old tire, electric cables, clubs, a German chair, water, and a packet of pins on the metal table where the interrogator usually sat. Big strong torturers no more than twenty-five years old will show up at any moment…

The door opens again and I hear the sound of something being moved on a metal table. The door shuts again. Have they taken something out of the room? The sound of footsteps in the corridor. People hurrying, and then the sound of shouting. The desperate voice of a man begging his torturers to stop beating him, a wailing sound in which pain, hope, and impotence mingle. I know that wailing well. I’d heard it many times, sometimes coming out of my own mouth.

Bassam once said to me that prison was the practice of grief, wailing, anticipation, and masturbation. Bassam killed himself after he came out of prison. Bassam’s voice resembled that of the man who continues to cry out in the next room: “For the sake of Allah, stop!”

Editorial Reviews

A lyrical, extremely rich narrative of loss, memory, and trauma.” — Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“Jamal writes with brutal clarity — and yet, there is a poetic quality to the telling. He manages to hold in balance the idyllic memories of growing up in a land he loves, alongside his experiences inside Syrian prisons, where he peels back the dark walls and allows us to witness and pay heed to the unthinkable.” — Frances Itani

“This memoir tells not only of his time in Syria’s most brutal military prisons but of village life, youth, love, poetry, and a country and society warped from its potential.” — Quill & Quire

“Written in poetic prose in which the reader can trace the cadence of Saeed’s native Arabic — and which illustrates why Syrian philosopher Antun Maqdisi once likened Saeed to Maupassant — My Road from Damascus explains that love and loss are intertwined and shows how the former can help us withstand the latter.” —Quill & Quire

“This riveting memoir of a Syrian dissident, featuring an outstanding, often musical performance, deserves comparisons to Viktor Frank's Man's Search for Meaning in its ability to find the beauty of human connection in utterly inhumane conditions.” — Library Journal Audio Book Review

From the Publisher

06/10/2024

With achingly beautiful prose, this memoir by a Syrian dissident activist and author now living in Canada powerfully interlaces brutal descriptions of imprisonment with nostalgic stories of a happy childhood in rural Syria. In college, Saeed's antigovernment writing and participation in political meetings led to three jailings for a total of 12 years, with no due process or formal charges from the oppressive Syrian regime. His matter-of-fact, sometimes detached, accounting of the torture he and other political prisoners endured is nearly unbearable to hear, but his descriptions of how the prisoners (and sometimes the guards) helped one another provide welcome moments of grace. The memoir is not without humor, either, especially in Saeed's childhood reminiscences, which include climbing under a fence to play doctor with the girl next door and smearing coffee grounds on his upper lip because God ignored his prayers for a mustache. Narrator Pasha Ebrahimi expertly navigates the shifting tones of the very short chapters and delivers the harrowing and heartwarming details with equal care. VERDICT This riveting memoir of a Syrian dissident, featuring an outstanding, often musical performance, deserves comparisons to Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning in its ability to find the beauty of human connection in utterly inhumane conditions.—Beth Farrell

Library Journal - Audio

Pasha Ebrahimi does an outstanding job narrating this deeply felt memoir of the author and former Syrian political prisoner Jamal Saeed. Ebrahimi's baritone pitch flexibly captures Saeed as both a boy and as the patriarch of his family. Listeners will need to be aware that this title includes graphic descriptions of violence endured by Saeed during his imprisonment for speaking out against the al-Assad regimes. Ebrahimi compellingly conveys both the mundane details of Saeed's upbringing in a small village and his family's dramatic escape from the Syrian secret police. For those seeking understanding of the development of modern Syria, this is a well-performed title with plenty of insights. M.R. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

MARCH 2023 - AudioFile

Pasha Ebrahimi does an outstanding job narrating this deeply felt memoir of the author and former Syrian political prisoner Jamal Saeed. Ebrahimi's baritone pitch flexibly captures Saeed as both a boy and as the patriarch of his family. Listeners will need to be aware that this title includes graphic descriptions of violence endured by Saeed during his imprisonment for speaking out against the al-Assad regimes. Ebrahimi compellingly conveys both the mundane details of Saeed's upbringing in a small village and his family's dramatic escape from the Syrian secret police. For those seeking understanding of the development of modern Syria, this is a well-performed title with plenty of insights. M.R. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

MARCH 2023 - AudioFile

★ 2022-08-16
A Syrian dissident author, now a refugee in Canada, interweaves details of his incarcerations and torture in Syria with a once-idyllic life in a small village.

Raised by farmers in the rural town of Kfarieh, Saeed was first imprisoned in 1980, for more than a decade, for protesting the Syrian dictatorship of Hafez al-Assad. He spent most of those years in the notoriously brutal Tadmur military prison in Damascus, where he was routinely tortured. After his release, he was detained two more times. By the early 1990s, he had begun writing regularly and made a name for himself in literary circles. One critic told him, “You’ll be to Syria what Maupassant was to France.” Sadly, the repeated incarcerations interrupted his promising career. In a moving, novelistic narrative, Saeed beautifully, gently chronicles the appealing details of his early life in his village: first childhood crush, a painful reconciliation between science and piety, and the adulation of his cosmopolitan uncle, who encouraged him “to ask questions with absolutely no inhibitions.” During this time, Saeed keenly followed global events on the radio. He revered Egyptian president Abdel Nasser and did not understand the subsequent military coup by Assad. During 10th grade, the author established a Marxist discussion group. In 1977, he transferred to a private school in Damascus, where he was enlightened much like the biblical Saul when he saw the Messiah on the road to the city. In the next few years, his political activity drove him underground until his arrest. In this multilayered text, the author ably captures the arbitrary brutality of the guards as well as the tender human interactions with his fellow prisoners that made his incarceration tolerable. “The world that turns in my heart is like a warm house, open to all, an amazingly beautiful world that keeps turning, and turns its back on passports and borders and bloodshed and famine and all the suffering that people endure.”

A lyrical, extremely rich narrative of loss, memory, and trauma.

Kirkus Reviews