In 1992, Damascus was a world of corner stores and corner soldiers. Of kids drinking soda from straws stuck in plastic bags and of buying baby chicks from a little boy carrying them in a box on his head. It was a world of fresh vegetables and ripe apricots that gave way to ripe watermelons and then ripe cherries. A place to watch boys whose moms had sent them for bread at sunrise, cooling their purchases on the hoods of parked cars.
Damascus in 1992 was wakening to the Fajr adhan and falling asleep to the calls of the night’s last street vendors. If you were lucky.
Many times I wasn’t lucky enough to be able to sleep. After days of learning things like mstajleh means hurry (learned because my mother-in-law had to say it to me so much!) and trying to put together enough words to get even 15% of my thoughts across, I craved my own tongue. My own culture. For a while, this need was partially met by the twice-a-week English movie broadcast on one of the two Damascus television stations. If you ever thought you’d sooner sit in silence than old war movies on a black and white TV set, think again. Movies like The Dirty Dozen and Bridge Over the River Kwai kept us sane.
But what about the other five days of the week? Well, it was a miraculous blessing of Damascus that it boasted an American Women’s Library. Every time someone returned to Damascus after vacation, they would bring a couple of books, and in this way the library grew until in 1992, it was stuffed—and I do mean STUFFED—into a garage-like room attached to the embassy. Shelves and shelves of books just waiting for homesick eyeballs. Run by volunteers, the library was open a couple of days a week, and it served as my intellectual and cultural umbilical cord.
That summer I read Roots. Imagine the size of the book that launched eight 90-minute episodes as a miniseries. (And the emotional roller coaster of learning housekeeping and Arabic via my mother-in-law during the day and grappling with the stark reality of my own country’s vicious history at night!) I met Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins that summer, and was swept into the lives of Nora Roberts’s MacGregor brothers. Although they cost me precious sleep, these authors kept my mind engaged and my heart full.
Written by Anse Najiyah Maxfield, Head of Publishing