Defiance: A Memoir of Awakening, Rebellion and Survival in Syria

The large-scale tragedies of the Syrian civil war are rendered on an intimate scale in Mrie’s plaintive debut. The author grew up in a Syrian family that supported the Baathist dictatorship of Hafez al-Assad and his son Bashar. Her father, Jawdat, was an intelligence official, and her clan was part of the Alawite religious minority that was the regime’s base. But when anti-government protests erupted in 2011, a 20-year-old Mrie joined the opposition, documenting the demonstrations as a journalist and ferrying medical supplies to the resistance. She fled to Turkey in 2012 shortly before her mother died under mysterious circumstances, then returned for several reporting trips back to rebel-held areas of Syria, which grew dangerous as Islamic State militants began to dominate these regions. Mrie’s narrative charts a struggle with many kinds of oppression: Assad’s tyranny, the enmity with which Alawites were treated by the Sunni majority that dominated the rebel movement, and Arab society’s pervasive sexism. She captures the chaos of Syria’s upheaval with raw immediacy (“I gasp for air, struggling to breathe through the fine, chalklike dust kicked up from the stampede,” she writes of soldiers attacking a demonstration), and offers a heartbreaking excavation of the psychic wounds that left her struggling with alcoholism and failed relationships. This haunting account illuminates the human cost of Syria’s collapse. (Feb.)