The Syrian conflict one every short story at a time
Writer Osama Alomar looks for peace of mind in America.
When the writer Osama Alomar emigrated from Syria to Chicago in 2008, he and many other Syrians could already foresee some of the troubles that were coming. The country was in the middle of a severe drought, and tensions were high between the Alawite government and the Sunni opposition. But no one anticipated the brutality of the civil war that broke out in March 2011, and Alomar expected he’d come back to visit every two years or so. He felt so secure he left behind most of his possessions in his apartment in Damascus, including ten manuscripts ready for publication and a novel in progress. But the political situation was worse than he’d imagined, and the war was more violent. His apartment was destroyed by a bomb.
He lost everything. “I was very stupid,” he says. He shrugs. “But I’m still alive.”
Alomar tells his life story with the same sort of irony and mordant humor that fills his fiction. His stories are filled with characters who unwittingly find themselves the butt of the joke that is life.
Alomar is familiar with those kinds of situations. In Syria he grew up under a regime so repressive that gatherings of five people or more had to be registered with the police, but he found freedom in writing and eventually made it his career. After he came to America, he was able to enjoy complete liberty, at least in theory— but as an immigrant with a limited understanding of English who arrived in the middle of a recession, the only paying work he could find was as a taxi driver.
Now, after seven years of driving and working on his stories between fares, Alomar, who’s 48, has begun to find recognition for his writing in America. The Teeth of the Comb, his first full- length story collection to be published in English, comes out later this month. And thanks to City of Asylum, a literary community in Pittsburgh that supports refugee writers, he has a fellowship for the next 14 months that requires him to do nothing besides live and write. But this is all happening at a time when the United States is starting to become less welcoming to its immigrants, particularly immigrants from Syria. Although Alomar became a U. S. citizen in Febru- ary 2016, these developments have made him start to worry about his future here.
One of his skills as a writer is devising aphorisms, and he has many about freedom. The one that applies particularly well to his current circumstances is “Freedom is dignity.”
Just before he left for Pittsburgh at the end of February, Alomar read some of his stories at an event sponsored by Chicago City of Refuge, a new project that was established to help writers who have, like him, been exiled from their home countries. A collaboration between the Guild Literary Complex, PEN International, and the International Cities of Refuge Network, Chicago City of Refuge hopes to someday provide a similar community for refugee writers here that City of Asylum has in Pittsburgh. ( Similar programs also exist in Las Vegas and Ithaca, New York.) Though it doesn’t yet have the resources of City of Asylum— it has no money at all— its founders hope they can offer some help to writers like Alomar who found that, in coming to America, they sacrificed one form of freedom for another. It can give them a bit of dignity.
Alomar began writing when he was 13. His first piece was a description of spring. He showed it to his father, a professor of philosophy. “He was a really intellectual person,” Alomar remembers, laughing. “And he asked me, ‘ Who wrote this?’ I said, ‘ Me.’ He said, ‘ Don’t lie to me, son.’”
The praise from his father and his teachers at school encouraged Alomar. “I felt that I have something inside me,” he says. “I need to express it in a material way. So I started to write more and more texts. When I turned 15 or 16, I felt that my destiny or my future was going be as a writer. Nothing else but a writer.”
He was already aware that the Syrian government, led by President Hafez al- Assad,
When the owner of the house picked up the bag of garbage and headed out to the street to throw it in the dumpster, the bag was overwhelmed with the fear that she would be put side by side with her companions. But when the man placed her on top of all the others, she became intoxicated with her greatness and looked down on them with disdain. father of Bashar, the current president, placed severe limits on personal self- expression. “You could say nothing at all,” Alomar says. “You cannot even think.” But even as a teenager, Alomar had begun to notice that most people didn’t seem bothered by this lack of freedom, or at least not enough to stand up for their basic rights. “I’m not talking about human rights, these big issues,” he explains. “I’m talking about the simple issues, of our ordinary lives, of our daily life. Many people say ‘ yes, yes, yes,’ but nobody dared to say no.”
Alomar knew he’d move to America eventually. He has a knack for making predictions about his life that have come true, and he knew that temperamentally, with his preoccupation with freedom, he wouldn’t be able to survive in Syria. He also believed he’d have a better chance of establishing his name as a writer if he did it in the United States.
In the meantime, he studied Arabic literature at the University of Damascus and began publishing short stories in Syrian newspapers. He was particularly drawn to al- qissa al- qasira jid
dan, which translates as “very short story.” It’s an old form of Arabic literature that goes back to the Middle Ages, but it found new life in the 1990s as writers discovered that it was a useful way to cope with the repression of the Assad regime. These stories don’t take up much space— some of Alomar’s are just a sentence long— and they read like fables, relying on characters that are more like archetypes and are often personified animals or objects. It’s obvious that the stories have some sort of allegorical meaning, but the meaning itself isn’t always obvious. This made it an ideal form for commenting on a dictatorial state. ( Americans often tell Alomar that his stories remind them of Kafka, whom he greatly admires.)
For example, Alomar’s story “The Pride of Garbage,” which reads in its entirety as follows:
“It takes more than one interpretation,” Alomar explains. “You can take this story, you can make a projection on dictatorship. You can make a projection on people, ordinary people, the people who think— or any person who thinks— he is the best, he has an overblown ego. And really he’s just a garbage.”
The Syrian authorities, however, didn’t bother with the subtleties of literary criticism or interpretation. They simply regarded “The Pride of Garbage” as a very short story about a bag of garbage. And so Alomar could publish without repercussions.
By the time he reached his 30s, Alomar had established himself as a serious writer in Syria. He published three books of stories ( O Man in 1999, Tongue Tie in 2003, and All Rights Not Reserved in 2008) and one of poetry ( Man Said
the Modern Word in 2000). He was able to quit his day job as a trader at a garment company and write full- time. He became part of a circle of artists and thinkers who gathered monthly in the Damascus apartment of Sahar Abu Harb, a writer and a feminist. This was one of many similar get- togethers, known as muntadayat in Arabic, that emerged during the Damascus Spring, a brief period of political liberation and reform after Bashar al- Assad succeeded his father as president in 2000. That era ended after a little more than a year when Assad began cracking down hard on the intellectuals who opposed him, but Abu Harb’s group continued to meet in secret.
“It was a really vibrant group of people using their art to rethink some aspects of their society,” says Alomar’s friend and translator C. J. Collins, who attended several of the gatherings during his year as a Fulbright scholar in 2007. “In retrospect,” he continues, “I was naive at the time, I didn’t see it, but they were foreseeing the things that happened afterward, the advent of sectarianism and civil war. They were using their work to call that stuff into question.”
Alomar was always an active participant in the discussions, Collins recalls, often using his stories as a way to ground the conversation or bring it to another level. He has a way of condensing big ideas into pithy phrases. He describes the origins of the Syrian civil war in his story “Love Letter” this way: “But little by little the revolution against tyranny and oppression became something else . . . the tyrant who had been sleeping in the depths of the ordinary citizens began to wake up, baring his fangs.”