A severely injured nineteen-year-old soldier caught at the frontlines of the Syrian Civil War tries to piece together his life as he waits for aid that may never arrive. As he inches toward death, he recalls the minor and major events of his life and his country that led him so close to death. Told in vignettes that jump across time and place, Samar Yazbek’s newest novel Where The Wind Calls Home is a heart-wrenching story that questions the value of life in a combat zone with equal parts compassion and anger to craft a brilliant war novel. Translated from Arabic by Leri Price, Yazbek’s story introduces English readers to a moment in Syrian history that is equally haunting and beautiful.
The novel begins with Ali, the protagonist, questioning his reality: “Was he still alive? Did he have a body? … Was this his funeral? Was this his head?” Ali, who feels as if he were a bodiless, lone eye drifting through the sky, watching a funeral procession, knows a few things to be true: he was drafted, his brother died in battle recently, his mother misses him, and he is in extreme pain. As he and his comrades were stationed on a mountainside, their battalion made a fatal mistake and dropped a bomb on their own soldiers. Alone, with just his thoughts, Ali cannot understand the meaning behind the event that has left him close to death,
Ali didn’t understand why the plane had dropped that bomb. How could the plane drop a bomb when it was supposed to be protecting them? How had they made such a mistake?
As he waits for anyone to arrive and help him, his mind begins to drift, recalling events from his childhood and characters from his village haphazardly.
Although his memories are scattered, blown to bits with parts of his body on the mountainside, the effort of remembering keeps him awake through one day and night, a twenty-four-hour span that encompasses the entire novel. Each touch—whether it’s his hand to the blood-soaked soil below him or the feel of the breeze in his hair—brings a new memory to the surface. His recollections eclipse his reality as he dips in and out of consciousness, snapped awake by a new sharp pain, or lulled into sleep with the comforting memories of his “arzal”, the undefined private space close to his home. But the memories get harder to understand, and Ali struggles to find a narrative meaning of his life as his wounds worsen through the night.
Eventually, Ali notices a fellow companion on the mountainside, a shadow figure that he calls the “Other” behind the tree closest to him. This figure becomes both a source of comfort and terror for Ali; there’s a relief to be found in the company, but in his experience, strangers usually signal danger. As the night drags on, the true nature of the other obscures. Perhaps it’s another soldier, wounded and motionless like Ali. Or perhaps the other is a mirror of Ali, his flipside image as he lies, “stuck somewhere between life and death, or between death and life.”
For a novel so slim—it barely reaches two hundred pages—Where the Wind Calls Home packs a lot in: the dense history of Ali’s Syrian Alawite culture, the on-the-ground feeling of a change in Syrian presidentship, and the steady decline in the quality of life of the Syrian working class as the civil war stretches on. The horror in each page is bodily and metaphorical. At one point, Ali even sees the severed hand of his comrade a few feet away from where he lies. Later, he feels maggots in his open wounds, sensing “a sort of tickle, like flies crawling, or tiny creatures grazing on his chest hair.” These scenes are described so vividly that they made me step away from the novel for a few days.
Yet the ethereal dreaminess of his visions softens the physical horror; soft sunlight on his favorite tree at home mixes with moonlight on the battlefield, and these memories push Ali to live a minute longer. Through contrasts between the physical and ephemeral, and between soft and brutal, Where The Wind Calls Home is timeless in its cry for humanity in the face of ceaseless violence. Yazbek’s Ali stained my skin with a color that will linger.