Plenty of heart, but body?

The Doodler of Dimashq is narrated in the first person by Ameenah, a Syrian teenager. Married off at 14 as a measure of protection from the civil war that is enveloping Damascus, Ameenah leaves her family behind for Aleppo, her husband’s home. Since she had pleaded with her older brother to negotiate her education into the marriage arrangement, Ameenah can also resume school. Ameenah’s husband is kind and it makes the move away from home a little easier. But the conflict does not stay confined to Damascus and it finds its way into Aleppo. The ravages of war do not spare Ameenah but through the course of the book, this teenaged doodler maintains her sanity and keeps alive the memories of the people and places she loves through her art, also becoming a chronicler of the devastation of war.

This is a unique idea — a young woman dealing with war and finding catharsis through her doodles. However, I must confess, I was not fully engaged with the story. I think part of my alienation came from the language.

I was rather confused with the writing style. In places, the sentences were weighted down with awkwardly employed clichés (“jawline dripping with determination”), adjectives (“His eloquent smile met my eyes with a fragment of his poignant thoughts.”) and metaphors. After digesting them, it’s difficult to experience the emotion: “The recalcitrant nonchalance with which explosions dotted the skyline of Aleppo until the frugal cadaver was all that remained, really rendered every second of self-coaching I indulged in, otiose.”

And yet, the descriptions of the doodles that are a prelude to each chapter are a delight. The author, Kirthi Jayakumar, is a doodler herself and her intimate association with the art is evident because in these descriptions, her words are fluid and the image conjured up is clear. Occasionally, when Kirthi sheds the awkward and stilted prose, there are lovely gems: “Nomads, in the heart of a land filled with our own homes.”

I particularly loved the scene where young husband, Fathi, finds a weeping Ameenah who is feeling homesick:

Fathi sat down beside me, letting out a deep sigh. ‘I don’t like that word, homesick. It’s like saying you are sick of home, eh, habibti? There is another language, Welsh, that has a beautiful word. Hiraeth.’

‘Hi-ra-eth…’ I repeated, trying the word on for size.

‘That’s right. It means the bond you share with your home. That one word, Ameenah, it has everything—the nostalgia, the memories, the dreams, the sights, the smells, the sounds… Everything that made home what it was, for you.’

I smiled at him. The word rolled off his tongue and sounded like pearls tinkling in my ears. It was beautiful, somehow cloaking me with the warmth of a random day from the past.

‘You see, Ameenah, I cannot give you home. I cannot be that home, and I cannot replace memories of home, either. But I can certainly strive to give you memories that will add to them.’

 

It is only towards the end that the story became believable for me. The passage above, for instance, is narrated in flashback towards the end of the book. A little tighter editing, I believe, would have definitely evoked a more emotional investment in this tale, at least for me.

While I was reading The Doodler of Dimashq, I was also following the controversy over Invisible Men, a book about transmen in India, which was found to be transphobic. There are conversations about appropriation happening all around us. In this environment, I wondered about the 20-something Kirthi deciding to voice a teenaged Muslim Syrian girl who gets married at 14. Kirthi herself acknowledges this in her foreword, noting that she is not Syrian but the death of Syrian friends and her subsequent realisation that people needed to hear the stories from Syria compelled her to write.

I think Kirthi’s effort does bring the Syrian situation (gender-based violence in war zones, the emotional cost of war especially for women) to a wider audience, one that might not peruse non-fiction, for instance. I know it made me look up other works on the Syria conflict that I am considering for further reading. But I cannot stop wondering, was the first-person narrative the best choice? Especially when this first-person voice is the one commentating on the status of married women in Syria and on being married as a child, etcetera? 

Also, could lived experience have made the depiction of life in conflict-ridden Syria more nuanced and the characters more deeply etched? I don’t know, but I do wonder. To me, the notion of cultural appropriation is fairly new, probably because I have ignored history and current affairs and buried my head, like the proverbial ostrich, in escapist fiction. It’s only in the past couple of years that I have started reading non-fiction and paying attention to Twitter conversations. So, I am still trying to understand the scope of cultural appropriation.

Having said this, I want to acknowledge that it takes a special person to read about the horrifying situation in Syria and respond by penning a story like this, one that imagines what prolonged conflict does to the people trapped inescapably within it. If this hadn’t been the book selected for the Sanskaari Girls Book Club read, I am likely to have missed it. 

Having read the book, I looked up the author and I must confess that she made more of an impact on me than the book itself. I heard her TED talk on peace education and immediately wondered if there was a seminar I could sign up for, because I believe even adults need to temper their communication to avoid hurting others inadvertently. She is also co-founder of Red Elephant, a peace-building initiative that uses storytelling to get the message across. Another commendable initiative is Femcyclopedia, an Instagram account where Kirthi doodles women achievers in an attempt to give them the spotlight that history has often denied them. She is also responsible for an app that aims to help victims of gender-based violence. All told, this law student from Chennai is a phenomenal young woman and should serve as an inspiration to us all.