Literature "Night in Damascus" shows the Syrian capital under constant stress

When civil war broke out in Syria in 2011, author Shukri Al Rayyan fled to Switzerland. His novel "Night in Damascus" is now being published in German. It tells an exemplary story of the decline of the old cultural city under the Assad regime.

Shukri Al Rayyan and his wife Joumana often played the homesickness game when they first arrived in Switzerland. They walked through Langenthal in the canton of Bern, near where they lived in a transit home, and pretended they were in Damascus.

"Our sons overheard us talking about new shoes we had seen in a store on Al-Shalaan-Strasse, or about an ongoing argument that had started barely half an hour after we had left our regular café on Aarnoos-Eck," writes Al Rayyan in an essay entitled "Being a Burgdorfer". "For us, it was a way to break through the emptiness we had been facing since we fled our home on the cusp of our fifties."

Two years later, the family moved a few kilometers away to Burgdorf, where the game could not be repeated. "It was the castle that thwarted the tricks of the past," says Shukri Al Rayyan, now 62 years old. "We may have our own castle in Damascus, but it doesn't sit on a hill and stare at you from the remotest corners of the city."

The task now was to arrive in a foreign country, find friends and take up writing again. Since then, Al Rayyan has been supported by the "Weiterschreiben Schweiz" project, which connects authors in exile with the local literary scene and makes them visible. "Night in Damascus" is his first novel to be published in German. Shukri Al Rayyan will be presenting it himself in Burgdorf on Thursday (today).

No oriental romance

Damascus! One of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. One of those much-praised "pearls of the Orient", like Baghdad in Iraq or Beirut in Lebanon. Not much is left of these and other cultural metropolises in the Middle East today. In Syria, decades of dictatorship and the resulting civil war have not only destroyed the city's heritage, but also broken the upright walk of its citizens.

In his novel, Shukri al Rayyan tells of the latter in an unspectacular yet impressive way. Anyone who loves Rafik Schami, the Syrian-German storyteller who described Damascus in his novel "Sophia" in an intoxicatingly sensual way, will not find what they are looking for in Al Rayyan's work. His characters hardly have the opportunity to enjoy the beauty of their city. They are constantly preoccupied with avoiding being targeted by Assad's henchmen and somehow managing to slip under the radar.

At first glance, the protagonists Jawad and Lamis are modern young people who want to be free and have fun. She is self-confident and takes the first step. He hesitates a little, but then embarks on a happiness he never dared to dream of. As a lowly employee, he has no money to marry, let alone a daughter from a good family. The fact that he finds a bag containing a large sum of money in his sadistic boss's office after his death seems like a miraculous coincidence from the Arabian Nights. But Jawan immediately loses the bag again. The author then uses the hunt by various people for the "treasure" as a common thread through a story that is not at all like a fairy tale.

An unusual reading experience

The actual main role in the novel "Night in Damascus" is played by "the circumstances", as Shukri Al Rayyan himself writes in the foreword, circumstances under which "the Syrians were either turned into criminals or victims". Either way, it is difficult to identify with such characters in the novel. Although the anti-hero Jawan initially appears sympathetic, his awkwardness and indirect, somehow insincere manner soon causes this sympathy to dwindle again. Al Rayyan uses his main character in particular to show the character deformations that decades of oppression can lead to.

The author's sense of humor shines through time and again. After long digressions on the nature of fear, mistrust or shock, funny little twists and turns lead back to the plot. For example, the moment when Dschwan is caught in the crosshairs of a secret service agent: "(...) the shock is accompanied by pain that cannot be felt even with the greatest compassion. This is all the more true when the poor victim falls from a dizzying height, has the misfortune to survive and now has to continue his journey home. This is exactly what happened to Jawad after the call from Lieutenant Colonel Muwaffaq. His brain worked at lightning speed and almost ran away from him on the way home. "*

*This text by Tina Uhlmann, Keystone-SDA, was realized with the help of the Gottlieb and Hans Vogt Foundation.