'Defiance': A memoir of survival in a torn-apart Syria - review

Running like a black thread through the fabric of Mrie’s story is the portrait she paints of the father she loved, feared, and hated by turn.

Aged 38, Jawdat Mrie was 15 years older than Loubna’s mother when he wooed and won her while the family was in mourning for the head of the family. He was a mysterious figure in the community, rumored to have been employed to assassinate opponents of the government.

He proved to be an abusive and serially unfaithful husband. “According to my mother,” writes Loubna, “when I was born, my father brought me to his chest and kissed me. ‘You will be called Lena,’ he said. Lena was the name of his mistress. ‘Over my dead body!’ my mother shouted from her hospital bed.”

Falling foul of the authorities, Jawdat Mrie was banished from Syria. In 1994, he took his family to live in Sofia, Bulgaria, but after a while he sent them back. After years of separation, and despite one disastrous visit to him in Ukraine, he suddenly reappeared in their lives.

When Loubna gained a place at university to read English, her father paid her fees and made her a generous allowance. She went to live with him in his house in the Alawite mountain region, where he was heading a construction project designed to make the area a tourist attraction.

She soon became aware that a woman who appeared once a week with her 12-year-old daughter was her father’s current mistress. She was horrified one day to find her father having sex with the child, and with her mother’s connivance. Her disgust was compounded when he handed her a large cash bribe to keep silent. Given the nature of the patriarchy that was Syrian society at the time, Loubna was virtually powerless to take any action against her father. She simply left him and returned to her mother.

Later, in 1980, she discovered that he was a commissioned assassin, acting on behalf of the president, Hafez al-Assad.

Her political “awakening,” as she terms it, began in December 2010, triggered when a street vendor named Mohamed Bonazizi set fire to himself in Tunisia. That started what became known as the Arab Spring, a period marked by violence, upheaval, and rebellion across the Arab world.

She became fascinated as the uprising spread – first to Tunisia, then to Egypt, Libya, and other parts of the Arab world. When the revolt reached Syria, she joined the street protests against the regime of president Bashar al-Assad.

“My decision to attend,” she writes, “was motivated not by politics, which were still largely opaque to me, but by a desire to challenge [my] ingrained obedience and gain a better understanding of myself.”

This patriarchal “ingrained obedience” applied not only within the family dynamic, allowing the women to put up with her father’s humiliating behavior, but to the entire population, which over the decades of the Assad regime had been brainwashed and threatened into compliance.

“In return for total submission,” she writes, “we are led to believe that these authorities – fathers, husbands, dictators – will guarantee our safety.”

Mrie’s initial participation in street protests soon turned into a deeper involvement in the conflict. Eventually she took up photojournalism and portrayed the brutal realities behind the popular effort to challenge the deeply rooted autocracies of the Arab world.

She describes vividly how the civil conflict in Syria divided friends and family. Eventually she decided to leave but had to be smuggled out of the country. She made it to Turkey, but the pull of her native land was too strong. Soon she was back in a Syria disintegrating under the strain of the civil conflict, the people disillusioned.

She spent some time traveling between her country and Turkey, where she found a sort of normalcy. Every time she returned to Syria, she saw more foreign fighters, increasing signs of the rise of an Islamic State, and a surge in killings and kidnappings. Finally, seeing no immediate sign of an end to the Assad tyranny, she made her way to America, where the lot of the émigré presented a new set of challenges and opportunities.

Throughout her memoir, Mrie writes with complete honesty both about the events she lived through and her own reaction to them. She does not spare the reader in her account of her descent into alcoholism. She was in a rehab unit in New York City when she learned of the overthrow of the Assad regime.

“While many argue that the Arab Spring failed politically,” she writes, “with new dictators replacing the old ones, it succeeded in instilling in many of us a belief in the power of change… Today I know so many men and women whose lives have been transformed by this revelation… So many women I know rebelled against their fathers, as I did, firm in their belief in their own power and freedom.”