I was no longer afraid. Go ahead. Follow me around. Arrest me. I realized I could accept many things. I could accept not fulfilling whatever ambitions had landed me here in the first place. I could accept the knowledge that nothing I wrote or would ever write would change a thing and that the world would continue to create and destroy and create and destroy as it always did. I could accept living without a relationship. I would still be okay. What I could not accept was Ahlam being gone. It was unthinkable that she had been missing for almost seven weeks. Unthinkable that she could be lost and never heard from again. Unthinkable that I could do nothing.From the title and my vague knowledge that A Disappearance in Damascus involved refugees, I somehow thought that this book was about the Syrians who have been desperately fleeing their war-ravaged country for the past several years; but that's not what it's about at all. From the early pages, I thought it had something to do with the conditions that led to Syria's current meltdown; but it's not really about that either. Here's what it is about: In 2007, Canadian investigative journalist Deborah Campbell went undercover into Damascus in order to interview the Iraqi refugees that the Syrian government had accepted; as the only country in the Middle East that had been willing to accept those Iraqis who were trying to flee the chaos left in the aftermath of Saddam Hussein's ouster, Syria's resources were strained to breaking, and Campbell was interested to learn how the refugees were faring there. As is the regular practise for foreign journalists, Campbell discreetly hired a local fixer (Ahlam, who happened to be an Iraqi refugee herself) and the relationship between the two women transcended the professional into mutual admiration and true friendship. When Campbell eventually witnessed Ahlam being arrested by the secret police (on a return trip when Campbell was starting a followup piece), the reporter feared that she was responsible for Ahlam's situation, began to worry that her own cover had been blown, and resolved to follow Ahlam's own example of disregarding her own safety in the pursuit of justice. This wasn't the book that I thought I was going to read, but I wasn't entirely disappointed by what I found here.
The best part of this book is getting to know Ahlam: as the daughter of a wealthy village leader growing up on the outskirts of Baghdad, Ahlam might have been expected to toil on the family fields until her marriage as a young teenager; like all the other local girls. Although they were from a conservative Muslim family, Ahlam's father encouraged her to attend village meetings against the protests of the other men present, and when she made it her wish, he allowed her to attend high school (the first girl from the area to do so) and then university (the first girl or boy to do so). When Ahlam found herself – a wife and mother by now – back at the family home during the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, she used both her education and her father's diplomatic example in order to liase with the Americans and get information from them about dead and missing locals. After the Americans left and Ahlam had been branded a traitor for her dealings with them, she was forced to flee Iraq, and ended up in the Little Baghdad neighbourhood of Damascus. Here she used her organisation skills to coordinate emergency supplies for her fellow refugees, started a school out of her apartment, and to earn the cash to support her family, she surreptitiously acted as a fixer for foreign journalists. That's the best part, but the weakest part were the infrequent snippets of biographical information from Campbell's own life (I imagine an editor somewhere saying that if the real heart of this book is the friendship between two women, then both women must be characters in it), and she's so guarded with her own biography that it was plain awkward to read a brief unhappy childhood story of her own plunked down amid the rich detail of Ahlam's childhood, and the continuing sketchy details of her dying relationship with her longtime boyfriend back home felt like none of my business (which it's not anyway).
Campbell was in a unique place in history at the time of this narrative, but although this book could well have been about the factors that led to Syria's present day chaos, she chose instead to limit herself to the story of meeting Ahlam, working with her, and after Ahlam's disappearance, what Campbell did to get information about her friend's whereabouts; hopefully, effecting her release. I know better than to complain about an author not writing the book I wanted, but this has the feel of an opportunity lost ; unique knowledge squandered. Aside from some dismissive descriptions of the American mercenaries and hotshot journos with whom she crossed paths, Campbell shared but a few historical nuggets:
It was at Camp Bucca, through which a hundred thousand prisoners passed, that the future leaders of Islamic State met. Thrown together in numbers too large to supervise, their incarceration provided an ideal opportunity to forge bonds and spend time conspiring under the oblivious gaze of the Americans who had inadvertently brought them together. Indeed, without the American prisons in Iraq, Islamic State would not exist.Although it wasn't obvious from A Disappearance in Damascus, in an interview with the CBC Campbell said that after the events of the book she had an existential crisis about her career: what was the point of writing these articles if the world continues on its destructive path? From the interview:
Shortly after I decided to start writing again, I ran into a writer. I told him about my despair, about the inability of writing to change the world. He said that the point of writing isn't to change the world. It's to keep the truth alive.And it's this quote that made me reconsider the whole reading experience and bump my estimation of the work from three to four stars: I can't shake the feeling that this isn't the book it might have been, but it certainly represents a valuable piece of the entire truth, and in that sense, it's important. Written in an informal tone, this isn't a hard or dense book to read, and as the story of two extraordinary women who work for truth and justice, the story itself is intriguing.
