Refugee recalls Syrian torture

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This article was published 03/12/2022 (1426 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

This isn’t a memoir for the faint of heart.

Author Jamal Saeed arrived in Canada as a refugee in 2016, after spending 12 years as a political prisoner in Syria. He currently lives in Kingston, Ont., where he works as a writer and visual artist.

Saeed was a communist, opposed to the regime of dictator Hafez al-Assad, father of Syria’s current dictator president, Bashar al-Assad.

Imprisoned three different times, on each occasion he was neither formally charged with a crime nor ever brought before any judicial process.

Unspeakable tortures and deprivations were visited on him in Syria’s prisons. But what makes his prison experiences so supremely horrific is how casually daily and routine were his guards’ and interrogators’ cruelties.

At base, this is a story about the attempted breaking of a man, and the successful making of a writer.

The use of torture by the Syrian state is long-standing and pervasive. Thousands of people — most of them political opponents of the Bashar al-Assad regime, and before him that of his father — have died in custody in government detention centres over the last several decades.

In what amounts to a cruel joke, this year the Syrian government passed an anti-torture law. It’s widely seen as a transparent attempt to deflect efforts to hold the Syrian government accountable for its brutal treatment of prisoners, contrary to the United Nations Convention Against Torture.

Being an imprisoned communist in Syria put Saeed in double jeopardy. Not only did the Assad regime torture him, but he was jailed with members of the other principal opponent of the Assad regime, the Muslim Brotherhood, many of whom regarded him as an apostate or infidel, and wanted him dead.

The book’s title is an allusion to the biblical apostle Paul who, struck by a supernatural revelation, converted from Judaism to Christianity while travelling on the road to Damascus. More generally, a “road to Damascus” moment is a metaphor for any life-altering experience or epiphany.

Saeed’s moment occurred in 2014 when, despairing of the future of his country, he realized he, his wife and his two young children would never be safe in his homeland. That year they fled Syria, initially for Dubai.

Interspersed among his prison-diary stories are portraits of his family, school and schoolmates, and his village life as a child and adolescent.

There are even several romantic/erotic episodes from his years spent underground, hiding from state-security police goons. Saeed was by his own admission a bit of a rake, albeit a charming one. He seems to have equally worshipped Marx and the ladies.

This a graphic recounting of life as a “detainee” of the Syrian state.

But it’s also a confessional and candid one. Saeed doesn’t hesitate to portray himself, warts and all.

His memoir is the keenly rendered story of a life of astonishing courage and perseverance. And he does justice to that life with writing so fine it’s novelistic in its attention to description and mood.

Douglas J. Johnston is a Winnipeg lawyer and writer.