Life Suspended Between Sorrow and Loss:

 

“We were surprised by the other, the room, and me. I took a small space from it, just enough to open my laptop and resume the life I had left behind, hungry and afraid. The room, in turn, took two years of my life.” In this poetic portrait of life caught between war, displacement, and cyclical violence, Nesrine Akram Khoury’s “A Room Between Two Massacres”* dredges up painful memories that may resonate with many despite their intensely personal nature. 

 

Khoury expresses the difficulties of living through the Syrian civil war in a narrative that personifies her room as a character in her life story. In a sense, rooms are very much characters — like a fly on the wall, they might be the only other witnesses to the tragedies unfolding around us. Rooms offer a small aspect of safety and stability, even if only temporarily, to those living in displacement whose daily lives are in a state of uncertain flux as they dwell in impermanent shelters and await a return to their homes. How many histories have these walls recorded, and how many will they continue to record even after their current occupants have left? This unanswerable question and Khoury’s solemn and somber tone linger over the narration like a ghost.

 

During the Syrian civil war, Khoury and her family fled from a siege to a coastal village located between her city, Tartus, and Baniyas, taking refuge there for two years. She recalls arriving at the town during the Feast of the Annunciation. Being so close to the sea, fish frequently appear in her memories, with varying symbolic representations. Her first meal in the village was fried fish, a traditional dish eaten during the Annunciation festivities. The fish is also a Christian symbol used during persecution as a secret sign of welcoming and safety among people. In Khoury’s memories, however, this symbol of peace, joy, and celebration is overshadowed by pain and death. She remembers that during the same Easter week she arrived at the village, children in Bayda were massacred. Now, history has repeated itself a decade later, this time in the region she had stayed in the past. She writes, ‘“Visitors” came too — but instead of bearing glad tidings or sipping the coffee offered to them in gratitude for hospitality, they killed the children.”

 

The present mirrors the past; in some ways, it is even worse. Khoury explains, “Today, secrecy and symbols are no longer available to those under threat for their ethnic, religious, or political affiliations. Now, a name is a charge. A place of birth, a charge. Official documents — an entire indictment.”

 

A suffocating sense of anxiety and lurking danger underscores Khoury’s story of displacement. Homes should feel safe, yet Khoury’s memories of her room only evoke danger and fear, memories she admits she has “been attempting to erase for years.” She submerges herself in memories of a time when her phone number was in reach of a potential murderer who spent weeks sending her threats. “I’d wake up at night imagining him standing over me, knife in hand, just as he said he would be. I’d rush out of the house, trying to prevent him from killing me emotionally before he did so physically. I saw him in the features of every man who passed me on the street. I don’t remember how I banished my fear of him,” she writes.

 

The traumas of war have continued to haunt her even after her displacement ended and she left the room and the village. Khoury’s present is consumed by the past, leaving her life in a state of transience, trapped between cycles of violence as history repeats itself. Again, she conjures the symbol of fish; she describes a recurring dream about frying fish with her cousin, considering it a sign of good fortune because it foretold the end of her cousin’s displacement. Yet whatever positive associations, if any, are punctuated by an overwhelming sense of guilt, conveying her complicated feelings as a survivor, knowing that while she has escaped the siege, someone else dwells in that same room, experiencing the anxiety and fear she felt in the past. "I want to apologize to her for surviving — for burying my silly story, while she now lives a horror story," states Khoury, “Now I see the same dream again after I, too, have left. The sound of sizzling wakes me. I check my phone. There are no threats. I checked the news from the country: there is another new victim's name.”

 

Nesrine Akram Khoury may have physically left the room, but the memories of the war have taken residence within her, just as they have for all those who have lived through war, death, and loss and now witness the cycle repeat itself. Like Khoury says, “It's as if the people must carry the sorrows of all humanity time and time again.”