by MATTHEW MCNAUGHT
IMAGE/Kamaleddin Behzad via Wikimedia Commons
Part One
The Refugee
In a souq in the center of Damascus, a crowd has gathered. In the center of the crowd stands a man dressed in rags, a child huddling close to him. Word has spread he is a refugee from Aleppo. “Were you there?” asks a man in the crowd. The stranger nods. “What have you left behind?” asks the man. The stranger replies: “Starvation and horror.” Another voice in the crowd asks: “What has become of Aleppo?”
“Nothing remains standing but towers of skulls,” says the man.
I started my Arabic lessons with Mazen in early 2007. Twice a week, I would take the microbus from my home in the center of Damascus to Yarmouk Camp, five miles south of the center. I’d get off by the hospital, cross the busy main road, head down an alleyway, pass the corner store, and take a short and winding path to the high metal gate of Mazen’s house. If the weather was good, we would sit at a table in Mazen’s small courtyard, crowded in by climbing plants and hanging laundry. Other days we would sit inside his one-room flat, surrounded by his vast library: the hundreds of books, journals, plays, and multivolume dictionaries that covered his walls.
I had only visited Yarmouk Camp once before my lessons with Mazen. People had told me about this vast Palestinian refugee camp on the southern edge of Damascus, and I had expected a ramshackle, desperate place. I did not expect the bustling city streets that I found that evening, the modern buildings and plate glass facades, the carnival colors of the clothes shops and candy floss stands, the beauty salons and the restaurants. A couple walked hand in hand, two popcorn-munching kids trailing behind them. In the cafe where I sat down to drink, groups of teenage girls and boys had staked out their respective territories and were eyeing each other from a distance to a soundtrack of Egyptian pop music. Yarmouk Camp could not have been less camp-like.
Mazen explained that it had started life as a city of tents when Palestinian refugees first settled there in 1956, but generations of Syrian Palestinians had turned Yarmouk into a commercial and cultural hub. Unlike Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Syrian Palestinians had few restrictions placed on their property or professions, so a sizeable middle class had emerged, and many Syrians had also made Yarmouk their home. It was a place borne of exile and displacement, but it felt as vibrant as any city.
The Silkweaver
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