War produces its own canon of literature, much of it focusing, inevitably, on death and destruction. Samer, a 24-year-old Syrian – for safety’s sake he uses a pseudonym – adds to this with his calm chronicle of the turmoil his beloved country is going through.
The Raqqa Diaries is a collaborative effort involving Samer, a translator, an illustrator and a coeditor. The diaries were smuggled out, encrypted, sent to a third country and then forwarded, finally, to an editor at BBC Radio 4, so sometimes I seem to detect an editorial whisper in Samer's ear: write about your childhood, tell them about your family, your city. And so, in his quiet voice, he does.
His older brother, unable to find work, has left home, which means Samer is charged with the responsibilities of the oldest son. His father has two jobs, so that he can buy a present for his children, although it’s the only present he can ever buy them: a train set that has to be handed down from child to child. Not much happened while Samer was growing up, we learn, and you can hear the boredom of small-town life seep through.
He doesn’t tell us this, but Raqqa, where he lives, is a city of great cultural and historical importance. The eighth-century caliph Harun ar-Rashid moved his caliphate here during the summer months to escape the heat of Baghdad, making the city an important east-west trading centre, sustained by cotton and oil.
The blurb tells us that Raqqa is one of the most isolated cities on earth, but it’s not really. In 2009, when I hauled my bike off the desert bus there, to start cycling along the River Euphrates, I found a thriving, bustling city of colour. Desert men swept along the broken pavements in swirling black dust-laden cloaks trimmed with gold, followed by women dressed in colours that dazzled – red, purple, pink – their headscarves fringed with tiny metal discs that glittered in the sun. There was a new hotel specially built for the oil workers. I met a man who had returned from the United States and built himself a house. Things were looking up. Raqqa was a fairy-tale city as long as you didn’t live there.
Samer goes to university but soon loses interest in studying: the revolution is happening but elsewhere. And then, on March 6th, 2013, the city wakes to the sound of explosions. The Free Syrian Army has arrived with a promise of a better life: “We are your brothers,” they say. But they are supplanted by Daesh, also known as Islamic State, and at that point the honeymoon is over.
The diary is written in the present tense from which there is no escape. An elder gives him sound advice: he should imagine he’s walking along a tightrope. Ahead is the future. Concentrate on that, he’s told. Don’t look down, because that’s the present.
He learns the language of war. If an aeroplane is white it’s Russian. A pockmarked corpse indicates shrapnel. Samer’s father, reported by his boss for criticising Bashar al-Assad, disappears, leaving Samer and his mother to travel across the desert to Damascus to pay the regulation bribe.
He sees an eight-year-old boy given a firearm with which to shoot an elderly man. Joining a group of political activists, he leaves them, not sure if they can be trusted.
One small mistake
A shadowy background to the ongoing nightmare is the tortured screams of people who made one small mistake: a woman’s ungloved hand, perhaps, or a beard too short.
And with all this comes the life-saving wisdom to accept what can’t be undone. In his first year at university Samer falls hopelessly and helplessly in love. It’s a happy time. The couple talk, drink coffee, make plans. Then Daesh arrives, and the dream ends. Her brother is arrested, and Daesh comes to strike a deal: her brother will be freed on condition that she marries one of its men.
Samer is devastated but philosophical: “I was in pieces but I knew that her brother’s life was more important than our feelings.”
And all the time he tries to survive, to keep his head down, until, walking home one day, he comes upon another killing: a friend has been crucified; his severed head is lying on the pavement. Time to take action.
Quiet stoicism is the energy that drives this story, and shining through it is the valiant will of ordinary Syrians determined to survive against all the odds, not to allow themselves be corrupted by the ugly inhumanity of Daesh.
The friendliness and kindness of Syrian people mark the country, but it's Samer's bravery, highlighted in the final chapter, that makes The Raqqa Diaries a page-turner.
Mary Russell is the author of My Home is Your Home: A Journey Round Syria
