FLIGHT FROM HATE TO HOPE: STORY OF WAR, RESILIENCE
Just after his 13th birthday in Homs, Syria, Abu Bakr al Rabeeah found a human jaw in his yard.
Now 17 and living in Edmonton, he explains, “It was a normal Friday afternoon, friends got together outside and said Salaam-Alaikum to each other. The car bomb happened behind my house — we never imagined it would be that close. Around 50 people got killed. “The second day we got back, cleaned the street — did what we had to do. While I was cleaning I found this human part. I had no idea what to do with it.” He eventually buried the anonymous jaw beside a tree.
This and other stories of an increasingly disrupted life during the multi-sided Syrian Civil War and subsequent displacement crisis flow through Homes: A Refugee Story, written by Edmonton teacher Winnie Yeung, based on interviews with al Rabeeah and his family — including his five sisters and two brothers. Besides the terrific prose and its more harrowing details, what really makes the 220-page book special is its fully realized portrait of normal, everyday Syria slowly being chipped away by numerous interests wrestling for power. One of the book’s great strengths is the on-the-streets feeling in Syria — kids playing soccer one moment, then sneaking through familiar alleys to avoid dangerous checkpoints the next.
Al Rabeeah and his friends are well aware of what’s going on around them — yet still innocent enough to make a game of collecting the most bullet casings. “We didn’t know what the bullets meant — it was fun, running around. But after that I got in trouble.” When the boy’s baker father Hafedh finds out about the game, he’s both stern and heartbroken. He says to his son, “That bullet might have hurt someone, or killed someone. This is not who we are.” The student, now in high school, notes, “It was good for me. It taught me a lot.”
Asked if he feels his childhood was cut short, he nods without hesitation. “It was the style of the life. I can’t go out in the street because there are bombs. I can’t play soccer because of the war. As a child, first you get angry, but you understand.”
Of the Sunni branch of Islam and originally from Iraq, al Rabeeah notes the trouble started with a single, growing emotion: “Hate. Hate just came up very fast. “Suddenly there were two kinds of people — people with the government and people who were against the government. We were just starting our life in Syria, make a business, go to school. We had no idea what was going on in Syria.” “It came really fast, the war and the shooting.” Lucky enough to escape with help from the UN as so many others were turned away, the al Rabeeah family arrived in Edmonton on Christmas Eve 2014 — a moment of absolute culture shock, but also gratitude.
“Most of my family, including me, we gave up — no way will we get to go anywhere else. My dad was the one who held on to hope that we will end up in a better place.” At first only being able to say “yes,” “no” and “thank you,” the book germinated with Abu Bakr writing a one-page autobiography at the beginning of Grade 9 in Highlands Junior High — his whole life in a couple hundred words.
Days later, Winnie Yeung was hired as an ESL teacher at the innovative school, which filters its curriculum through the arts. “Abu Bakr was brought up in my interview — I don’t think you even know this story,” Yeung says to al Rabeeah with a smile. “(Principal Brad Burns) said, ‘Listen, Winnie — we have this student who is an absolute gift to the school. The warmth and the light is so apparent from this amazing young man.”
Yeung asked her new ESL student what his secret wish was. He wanted to play soccer. She sensed something more.
“I told her I wanted to share my story,” he says.
This started with speeches and presentations, but Yeung admits, “I had my own secret wish where hearing his stories I was so inspired by his strength, his resiliency, his family’s love for each other, that I thought I’m going to turn this speech into a short story.” Yeung began interviewing al Rabeeah, and with his father’s approval and help, they began writing titles of important events in their journey from Iraq to Syria to Canada.
The short story evolved into a novel self-published by Yeung in 2016, which she then reworked with an editor at Freehand Books into its present, captivating form. “There’s a lot more of his family ’s perspective in this book,” she explains. “There was a grandmother who suddenly appeared. His sisters remembered a lot of fine details,” she says with a laugh. Indeed, this is one of the most touching parts of the story — the effect the war had on his grandmother, and how she helped al Rabeeah in one of his darkest moments. Yeung stresses the book is creative non-fiction — not journalism. But she would search news events — an attack on a mosque, a car bomb exploding — to confirm dates and details. Looking back can be painful, al Rabeeah says. “It brings a lot of memories, of course. But I don’t feel bad because I’m helping people know what’s going on over there, helping my people, Syrian and Iraqi.”
One of the great ironies, of course, is that living in Alberta, al Rabeeah is no stranger to prejudice. But, “We’re used to hearing it a lot. Not just here, but even back home. People would ask you what’s your name. If your name is a different religion, they would ask you, ‘Are you a terrorist?’ “We’re used to it.”
His childhood friends are now spread around the world: Germany, Turkey, the U.S. “I’m trying my best to not lose connection, but after three or four years … We all say we hope someday we will meet. Every time we talk.”
A few people are still back in Homs, on the other side of a text after recent bombing raids on the western Syrian city. “They said things are getting harder, but they’re still surviving and living. I can’t tell exactly … because they can’t really talk about it.” Yeung notes, “Even though this is home, he wants to go home to Syria. I’ve noticed the refugees, no matter where they come from, they didn’t leave because they wanted to leave. It really wasn’t a choice.” She hopes this message gets through: “It’s not about the trauma we got through, it’s more about the love that binds us, what moves us forward.”
Over the years, al Rabeeah’s wish has evolved. “I hope people help each other more. No one can help them there in Syria — but for the refugees who are here, I hope people help them and communicate with them.
“Don’t take me so seriously because I am a refugee and a Muslim — joke with me, laugh with me.” Yeung says this is what she learned most from him. “Just this idea that we don’t let horrible things that happen in our lives define who we are. We don’t carry these things with us, we just carry on.” Once, on the other side of the world, amid cities being mortared to rubble, al Rabeeah wanted to be a famous soccer player. Now? “I have a lot of things I’m thinking about. Business, international law. I really just want a job where I’m helping people.”
It’s not about the trauma we got through, it’s more about the love that binds us, what moves us forward.