To Be Syrian and Write a Coherent Story
By: Reem Bailony
Tags: Diaspora, Storytelling, Pandemic, War, Syria

December 27, 2020

At 22 years old, I chose to pursue a Ph.D. in Middle East history. I didn’t know what that meant at the time, nor how a career in academia might change my life. I only knew that I loved to daydream about the past. In some strange way, nostalgia — even for experiences not my own — was my past-time. And, I didn’t really choose history for all the meaningful reasons ascribed to the discipline — that it bears meaningful context over the present (for example) — I chose history because I love a good story.

During my research leave, I’ve been thinking a lot about the stories we tell. I’ve been told that what separates a dissertation project from a book is a coherent story. To be honest, though, I’ve been struggling to write the one I’m working on now. Much of it has to do with the weight of the pandemic and the inordinate role it has played in displacing my creative routines. But it’s also in the ways that the pandemic has complicated my mobility, and in doing so, disoriented my sense of home and basic human connection. And beyond the singular moment when the pandemic erupted here in March, I’ve also been pondering over the catastrophe of the pandemic — the years of reckless leadership that has culminated in the tragedy of loss we experience today. The pandemic is just a crescendo.

Academia hasn’t been easy for me. I often questioned my place in graduate school. Unlike a lot of my brilliant colleagues, I didn’t really feel the desire to carry our discussions outside of the seminar room. I spent more weekends than I probably should have driving down to San Diego to be with my family. Like Edward Said, but in a different context, I always felt like I was in between two places. The world of academia, and the very real life I lived outside of UCLA. That life, the one entangled in a Muslim, Syrian, American family, in return complicated my academic pursuit.

I chose to write about the history of Syrian migrants because I saw a little bit of myself in the project. But for those reasons, I’ve also found it difficult to fully invest in a topic that is so meaningful to me, to research and write with professional detachment. Just as I found it difficult to detach myself from meaning-making in the archives 7 years ago, I also find it difficult now to detach myself from the reality of being a diaspora Syrian.

I started my project with a Syrian revolution and now attempt to finish it with news of a Syrian refugee camp set ablaze in Lebanon. And what a decade it has been to be a Syrian — to oscillate between hope and despair; love and loss; home and exile. Or to be the center of a refugee crisis; both villain and victim of a Muslim ban; to be other, in Lebanon, in Turkey, in Europe, in the United States, and beyond. To never experience a coherent story.

To be Syrian in the past decade is to experience interruption. To be Syrian is a reminder that we’ve all too often taken stasis and linearity and temporality and progress for granted. To be Syrian is to be besieged by nostalgia, to experience past and present simultaneously, the future a floating, chimeric question mark.

And for me — a diaspora Syrian, researching and writing about past rebellion and possibility — to be Syrian is a distraction, but a very small price to pay in comparison. In the lessons of the archives, in the silences and gaps in the paper trails, in those disjointed spaces between foreign document, word processor, and news headline, Syrian past and present meet to complicate my story.