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Review by Thomas D'Evelyn, Al-Jadid Magazine
Review by Asmahan Sallah, Al-Jadid Magazine
Review by Mona Fayad
An Odyssey in Syria
By Thomas D'Evelyn
In his account of his travels to Syria in 1987, Scott C. Davis not only introduces us to contemporary Syria, which, at the time of his initial journey, had just been named a “terrorist state” by the US government, but also to the Syria of tradition, the cross-roads of Western culture. The book is a gold mine of history and colorful snapshots of people and places.
As a subject, Syria would stagger even the most intrepid reporter. Since colonial times, in the Arab world parochial nationalisms have been consolidated at the expense of more universal ones; in Davis’s narrative this tension is made palpable by the omnipresence of the secret police and the gut-wrenching effect their sudden appearance always has on him (and on a variety of Syrians, it seems). As an American lugging a huge backpack, Davis must respond often to their arbitrary and sometimes spooky demands. Though these scenes are rendered with the high-resolution of comedy, they only reinforce the feeling that contemporary Syrians live on a knife-edge of history.
Davis’s profound need to meet all manner of Syrians takes him where angels fear to tread. But
The Road from Damascus: A Journey Through Syria is more than travelogue, it is odyssey.
During the trip, all the author’s hard-won American know how and self-confidence—he is a building contractor in Seattle-comes apart at the seams. At the nadir of his trip, he spends a night in a dingy hotel in Dier ez-Zoir, “a city so dull that no one would protest if it were dropped off the earth tomorrow.” The bitterness is profound. He has almost reached his goal but has lost his vision. He spends the night vomiting into a basin filled with the remnants of his hopes and plans. Davis concludes: “I had come to Syria for many high-minded reasons yet in there somewhere was the hope that travel in Syria would prove to me that I was still young. Only now was I forced to accept the opposite conclusion. I was no longer young. I was not immortal.”
It seems a long way to go to discover a home truth. In fact, the simplicity and the sincerity of the style are something of a fabrication—in any event, part of the fabric of the book. We recall this is the book of a builder, a man of action; but what we see is a sort of fool, dimly aware that he is an actor in his own play, a play he is writing day by day. Indeed, this is not so much an account of Scott Davis in Syria as an account of Scott Davis trying to write a book about himself in Syria: himself as intrepid traveler, cultural connoisseur, hopeful American—and as nothing like that at all, a self stripped naked and howling at the moon.
Like most good travel writers, Davis reveals as much about his own culture as about Syrian life. Take, for example, an evening spent in Dreykish, “famous for its pure, sweet water,” where he met an Alawite woman, “dark-haired, fair-skinned, buxom,” with whom he has an awkward reunion in 2001. Fatima and her family—”I liked these gentle, lively people and allowed myself to think that I was one of them”—provide him a sort of epiphany, a revelation of what it is he has been seeking. The movement of the passage from sociology to the realm of cultural values and finally to personal style is compelling.
“This evening was possible because Syria in 1987 was a place where people held jobs that ended each day and allowed them to come home from work and talk to one another, a quiet place where conversation, wit, and repartee were celebrated, where present company did their best to represent the world instead of referring all questions to specialists, where electronic entertainment—canned music or video—were not allowed to diminish living voices and gestures, where all attention turned to insight, humor, and offhand eloquence.”
“Insight, humor, and offhand eloquence” are on every page of this book. The narrative is frequently broken by flash-backs and flash-forwards, often in the words of Syrian friends who comment on the inadequacies of his mind and art. Davis often plays the straight man and these interludes are sources of wisdom and humor.
Indeed, the prose style, generally plain and occasionally stiff (as if in parody of American ingenuousness), gains luminosity and flexibility from ironic self-representation. Textbook historical thumbnails yield to eye-witness reporting of charm and insight. The pace, at times as wavering as the traveler’s sense of purpose, gradually picks up as the pattern in the interwoven themes becomes clearer. What distinguishes the writing is the author’s double awareness of his own simplicity and his capacity for transcending himself through the writer’s skill at representing his own spiritual education. If Scott Davis’s trip is a kind of descent into the hell of the self-sufficient American self, his book is his Virgil, his true if limited guide.
The book not only records the journey, it makes the true journey possible. Moments of insight can be quietly devastating, as when he contemplates Shiites at a temple festival. Hanging from buttons on their shirt pockets are plastic-covered photographs of Khomeini. Davis compares these pictures to his Silva compass, his Lowe expedition pack, his Goretex cagoule: “I hoped, a little foolishly, that these pieces of matter would help me ascend a summit of soul and spirit.” Ascend it he does—but it seems more like a descent. Davis triumphs ironically as a writer of this curiously wrought and ultimately convincing voyage of the spirit down and out and eventually back to his own world where he will feel, and thankfully so, for ever after a little bit Syrian.
This review appeared in the Summer 2001 issue of Al-Jadid
Magazine.
Author's Bio
Thomas D’Evelyn has served as book editor of the Christian Science
Monitor and as an editor for Harvard University Press. He currently works as an editorial consultant in Providence, Rhode Island.
The Left Eye
By Asmahan Sallah
The Road from Damascus: A Journey Through Syria is a concise intellectual exploration of Syrian hearts and minds.
In Aleppo the author depicts the most refined class of intellectuals: the novelist and playwright Walid Ikhlassy, the painter Fateh Moudarres, the sculptor Zuhair Dabbagh. Davis meets with these men over coffee, he chats with them in their homes, and their remarks—which Davis takes literally—send him off on escapades which sometimes land him in unexpected difficulties.
One such adventure, comic and bizarre, occurs when Scott Davis accompanies the famed painter Fateh Moudarres on a mission to a small, northern village to “judge the artistic merit of a statue of President Hafez al-Assad.” One expects this tale to pit Art against Politics, the artist against the regime. But Davis surprises us. As the story unfolds we see a leading artist and the regime making common cause to thwart the ambitions of a small town mayor—and to save money which might be used to support more serious art.
Davis engages Syrian intellectuals in a way that is quirky and skewed. And yet he captures the essence of the dream which Arab intellectuals have been seeking since the modern Arab Renaissance, i.e. the search for a way to combine the beauties of the past with those of the present.
As Davis explains, this search can succeed, and when it does it enables us to contribute to the world cultural scene—and to shape world culture—as Arabs and Muslims.
The Road from Damascus is filled with paradoxes. It seems to talk about politics, but exalts ordinary people. It seems to ridicule and demean our security services, but reveals the humor and human vulnerability of individual secret police. It seems to be a book about the author, but ultimately it is a book about Syria and Syrians.
Part way through his journey Davis comments, “By now I thought of myself as Syrian even though I knew I was also American.”
Syria is a mosaic. Our citizens are drawn from dozens of different religious and ethnic groups. I am an Arab Muslim woman living in Aleppo in northern Syria, and I enjoy my everyday life with fellow Arab Christians, Armenians, Kurds and Circassians. Yet—due to life circumstances—I am not able to have a first-hand experience of other groups.
Davis helps me to view my fellow citizens. For non-Syrian readers, the book has its merits as a work of travel literature, but for me as a Syrian, it exceeds literary value: it enables me to see with both eyes.
This review appeared in the Summer 2001 issue of Al-Jadid
Magazine.
Author's Bio
Asmahan Sallah is a translator and scholar based in
Aleppo, Syria.
SEARCHING FOR DAMASCUS:
THE QUIXOTIC WAY HOME
By Mona Fayad
Scott Davis's travelogue is a wryly humorous, idiosyncratic and detailed description of the author's journey through Syria in 1987, a volatile moment in Syria's history. Davis zigzags across the country, armed with his notepads, blue backpack and anorak, determined to meet the widest variety of people, from peasants and Bedouins to the mosaic of minorities that make up the Syrian population. The result is an informative narrative that incorporates historical information, literary references, artwork, and close-up portraits of individuals he encounters. From the Armenians to the Kurds, the Syriac Christians to the Druze, Scott provides an image of Syria that embraces difference and breaks down stereotypes about the monolithic sameness of Arab culture.
Davis' travelogue departs from most travelogues on the Middle East in an important way. It is not an impersonal description of historic and archeological sites. He visits an impressive number of tourist attractions—ancient Phoenician settlements, Nabatean ruins, early Christian churches, Crusader castles, Islamic monuments—until he finally reaches his destination in the North of Syria: the second century Roman Bridge. The Bridge is far off the beaten track. Yet Davis makes it his destination precisely because it is difficult to reach and consequently enables him to see more unusual aspects of the Syrian life. All along, Davis's concern is not the stones and architectural structures that provide the backbone of Syrian history. He is interested in the living society that makes up the country, the people that make up the complex spectrum of modern day Syria. He does not worship a long lost past that has disappeared. Instead, he unfolds a present that is almost lost to Americans and those in the West who are unaware of Syria's richness and diversity.
Overall, The Road From Damascus gives the impression of a picaresque novel. The narrator goes through a series of adventures, full of mistaken assumptions, cultural misunderstandings, and sudden reversals. Like the picaresque hero, he emerges unscathed, but usually quite by accident. A comical figure, the narrator, like Don Quixote, battles imaginary windmills in the form of the secret police, anti-American Iranians, and ordinary Syrians that sometimes loom large and threatening. The author's determination to "tell the mistakes along with the good things" (p.360) produces a book that is endearing in its self-disparaging honesty and its raw directness.
Like most successful travelogues, Road From Damascus is a journey of self-discovery. Davis deliberately shies away from Orientalist narratives that assume knowledge about the Middle East. From the beginning he confesses his ignorance, and the story of his journey is about recognizing the limitations of his vision as a foreigner in an unknown country. His own cultural bias defines what he can see: "I am skating across the surface of the country," he says, "I'll never get inside." (p. 180) Like the narrow souks of Damascus, the narrative twists and turns, revealing something unexpected at every corner. Davis constantly revises his impressions, even quoting Syrians abroad as they comment on certain paragraphs he has written. He admits that he tried to shape the narrative into certain pre-conceived notions but it went its own way: "I was exhausted, and by now this land had turned me and was using me for its own purposes." (p. 324)
His impression of Damascus itself typifies the way Davis changes as his journey develops. At first Damascus appears "sinister" and hostile, the capital of a "terrorist" nation. Riding the bus in the darkness on his way into the city, he wonders if he will ever find his way home. "I felt in danger," says Davis, "and, as our ride progressed, the situation would grow worse." (p. 25) Davis allows free play to the paranoia he initially feels as an American traveling in a country represented in American media as distinctly anti-American. As time goes by and he begins to make friends, however, his point of view alters slowly but surely. He replaces his paranoia at first with a more prosaic vision. Damascus becomes simply a "modern city," just a "metropolis running low on water." (p. 83) By the end of his journey, however, returning from his visit to the northern part of Syria, al-Jazira, his perspective has changed completely: "Damascus had become an island of order and civilization, a safe harbor, a quiet moorage. I was glad to be home." (p. 337).
Ultimately what emerges from Road From Damascus is a profound sense of community, and understanding of how, as human beings, we need to belong to a group. It is a book that overcomes fear—fear of the unknown, fear of loneliness, fear of being foolish, fear of emptiness—to reinforce the need for openness, acceptance of difference, and the need for humility in order to understand others.
Author's Bio
Mona Fayad is a Professor of Comparative Literature at Salem State College in Massachusetts.
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