Cait’s Comments (group member since Jan 31, 2017)

Cait’s comments from the Around the World in 80 Books group.

Just saw this in an article about book clubs - "... instead of all reading the same book, everyone reads whatever book they choose and then at the meeting each person gives a short summary of their book's content and what they most liked or disliked about it."

Maybe this would help? I think it's still important to read a book by a person from the country we're focused on (or a first gen immigrant), but everyone could choose their own book? Obviously we could still have a list of book suggestions to help everyone out.

I agree that it would be great if we could have more people in the discussion! Hopefully Persepolis will be easier for everybody to get through, but other suggestions would be great :)

I read this book crazy fast, I liked it so much. Two of the things that immediately jumped out at me: 1) Satrapi (and her parents, and grandma), are brave and *hilarious*. I don't think I would have as much snark in the same situation, but I admire them a lot for holding on to it. 2) It's really interesting reading this directly after A Woman In The Crossfire. So many events are parallels, and it really made me read between the lines about what was happening outside of Satrapi's child viewpoint. She certainly sees a lot of horrible things that no child (no human, really) should have to see, but there was a lot she was protected from as well, and that's something I couldn't have understood as well without reading last month's book.

What are you thinking as you read? Easy to get into or difficult?

Yes I also found it particularly heartbreaking that they would bulldoze villages, try to kill anyone escaping, and then kill people trying to return. Not that any of the regimes behavior makes "sense" to decent humans, but my god that was horrible.

Yeah I read her flat tone as trauma as well. Kind of a numb / not numb mood throughout, which as we've said is completely understandable. I honestly don't know how she could have written it all down without that flat tone, again as we all agree, she was amazing!

Does CAIR have a platform specifically for Syria right now? I donated to White Helmets during Aleppo and did just get an email from them a few days ago, but there wasn't an "ask" in it, it seemed to be just that people need to know what's happening on the ground (which is of course important, but for postcard/letter purposes I was thinking we would want a "do this" kind of direction.) Without that direction obviously we still have a "let refugees in" ask, which is super important.

Yes, I agree that the lack of sectarianism (especially, as I said, in the face of extreme and deliberate activity by the regime to stoke sectarian fires) was amazing.

Something else that I thought of, regarding sects, etc., was about how colonialism has created issues with arbitrary boundaries. I just finished The Inheritance of Loss, and the primary story there (I think) is colonialism and how it has affected all the characters of the book, their town and district, and India in general. At one point a character talks about how the different tribes/nationalities that are grouped together in their state when that's not how they were grouped historically, and another woman says something like "The British aren't very good at drawing borders" (and someone else says "They're an island, they have no practice"). That got me thinking about what Yazbek says here about the attempts of France to create an Alawite State, and how Yazbek's great-great-grandpa (or however many greats it is) was forcefully against that, because they were all Syrians. That was very cool of her ancestor to refuse to let them be divided by sect, but it seems pretty intentional, colonialism-wise, for France to have tried to create a separate state in the first place, just to divide the people the same way the regime wants to.

This did have surprises for me... I mean, obviously I knew that Aleppo had been destroyed, and I knew that people were being imprisoned, murdered, and others were fleeing for their lives. You know things have to be unimaginably bad for people to risk their own lives and their children's lives in the "rubber boats" crossing to Europe. But that's the thing - it is *unimaginably* bad. I have limits to my imagination on what people can do to one another - that's just my place of privilege, because I have been insulated from those dangers.

I think that's one of the ways literature "makes a damn bit of difference," because even someone like me who is willing to take at face value that someone has run for their life, who has seen pictures of destroyed cities - the things in this book were literally beyond my capacity to imagine. Couldn't have thought about the physical and mental torture of forcing prisoners to walk over people's bodies. Couldn't imagine, as my brother and I both read this book, the part where one woman Yazbek interviews says "As we waited for a while in the dock at the Palace de Justice, I noticed my brother was locked up there as well. He shouted my name and I shouted back his. We saw each other before we were both taken away. I don't know anything more about him." Couldn't imagine the parts where they were *stealing the martyrs organs*.

And yes, I feel like it's worth repeating again and again (in every thread!) that Yazbek is so brave and strong for being able to write this all down. I know she mentions at one point in the book that she wishes she hadn't written articles, so she could have been on the street and not put other organizers in danger, but she was so brave to do what she did. I wish that us knowing all this changed history though.

Cool! I was thinking I should research a good Syrian American group that might have some particular issue or platform points that we could use for letters and/or anything else they might need... I'm not super familiar with any... although I follow Linda Sarsour on Facebook and I think she posted some links the other day. Anyone else know of a good group?

Also, now that we've read a couple of books - does anyone have any suggestions about the club, anything they would like to see happen or that they want to change? Does everyone have enough time to read the books? Do you want discussions to run longer, or shorter? All suggestions are welcome!

Right, here that unity vs. sectarianism is being very visibly and deliberately used to silence different groups - whereas Yazbek's emphasis on how the revolution wasn't sectarian isn't that people were shouting down concerns from different sects, it was just that the people were truly actually united in a cause that crossed so many different distinctions. I just came out of a little meeting emphasizing that kind of unity, versus the "stop being divisive and bringing up race" kind of unity, so this is striking home more at this particular time for me.

I'm not sure how far you are in the book yet, but there are parts where it's *very* clear how deliberately the regime is trying to destabilize the revolution and stir up sectarianism - parts where they try to get sheyks to speak "for" the movement to make it seem as though it's fundamentalist movement, parts where someone spreads a rumor saying that one sect has attacked a girl's school of the other sect, parts where the security is inciting neighborhoods to track down "moles" (and using the same "mole" more than once, which led to the neighborhood people basically saying "how stupid do you think we are, and how lazy are you?"). It was amazing to me that tactics like that weren't *more* successful - the only news is coming from the state, the regime was totally willing to murder soldiers to make it seem as though protestors had done it, etc. And then I think to myself at the same time - one, I still can't imagine this actually happening, and two - with these real divides, people still managed to think critically and stay united during these months of chaos, and democrats are worried about destruction because of critiquing one another?

Yeah that thought occurred to me as well... also I found myself continuously holding two thoughts about this: Yazbek was so brave throughout, when she was being targeted. But also, the "ordinary" people on the street were SO brave as well. The stuff that Yazbek went through was in no way ok, but there is a difference between her power as an Alawite and as an academic that caused them to keep trying to convince and intimidate her into silence, versus the people who, as you said, piled into the street even though there was a very real chance that they would be murdered - not intimidated, but just killed outright.

Another thing that sort of stood out to me, I guess, was how I had to continuously remind myself that everything about this was real - not because I thought she was lying or anything like that, but because the sheer horribleness, and the repetition, could get overwhelming like my brain literally refused to understand that this happened. That was part of the reason I was so slow at reading the book, not just because it was emotionally difficult to read, but because my mind couldn't comprehend too much of it at once.

So I got back from a talk called Can Literature Make a Damn Bit of Difference? with Lisa Lucas (Executive Director of National Book Foundation) and Marlon James (author of A Brief History of Seven Killings, which I highly recommend...and so does the Man Booker prize committee if that has more impact :) ). Surprise surprise, everyone there thought literature did make a difference, through opening us to new experiences and the lives of others, increasing empathy, etc. But in the Q&A I also asked about how we can engage readers, with our developing empathy, in actions. As always with actions, the answer was 'just do it,' but Lisa Lucas also suggested book clubs (our book club!) do actions with every book as well. Especially with the new attack on the Syrian people by its regime and just now on the regime by the US, I feel there is a lot for us to take action about.

What does everyone think about this? We could do something simple like commit to write letters regarding the current situation or the refugee ban, or if anyone has any other ideas? I'm a big fan of *not* reinventing the wheel when other groups have been doing this work longer and are doing great jobs, is there a particular group or groups we could work with? Is this something people would be interested in doing?

This didn't change my feelings about refugees, but it did add to my understanding. For me, I was/still am very ignorant about Syria and the regime. This book wasn't meant to be an academic book, but rather a boots on the ground as things occur view, but I still know way more than I did before about the horrors that Syrians experienced - about the events after Arab spring and the events leading up to it. I couldn't have imagined the things Yazbek described. And even though I've heard many times about the additional heartbreak of just leaving your home, hearing that theme of sadness and fear and anger from Yazbek added another layer to the necessity of running from a regime that is murdering people all around you.

Obviously there is an ongoing Syrian refugee crisis, and Yazbek witnesses the very beginnings of it in this book. Did this change your feelings about refugees, or add to your understanding / make you more alert to the issue?

I was struck by a lot of things in the book... a hard read, but I'm glad I did it. The one that continuously struck me was how Yazbek wrote about her horror at the fact that Syrians are killing Syrians - "I am going to cry as soon as I get out of here, as I return to the taxi all alone I will cry for all the Syrian boys being killed by Syrian men", and that the regime has turned ordinary people into monsters and murderers - "I pity those starving men stuffed into the buses, a tiny monster lurking inside each one of them." It obviously made me think about how that is still happening in Syria, but it made me think about how it happens everywhere... obviously nobody bombed Standing Rock, but the U.S. did use war tactics against it - gas, fire hoses, rubber bullets, and that short-lived attempt to fine people for bringing in supplies. There is something totally abnormal and yet simultaneously totally normal (as in it happens all the time) about governments turning on the people they are supposed to protect. What stuck out to everyone else?

Was there a particular story, event, or location that stood out to you more than others?

(Unsurprisingly) it keeps getting more and more depressing... all the events are pretty hard to deal with, but I'm finding it the saddest when she's hopeful in that we-will-succeed-because-we-must way. Because we know that five years later the horrors continue.

Having a collection of books in foreign languages is a lifegoal of mine!