A New Beginning!

My first few days back at the Brookings Institution brought back familiar sensations of accomplishment.

Yes, I am slowly reemerging from that necessary transitional cocoon. Things are slowly but surely settling down on the home front. I can now afford to tackle work-related items. New proposals need to be drafted, new reports beg to be made, new conferences yearn to be attended, and I long to be left in peace. But Satan has better chances for entering Paradise, as the old saying goes.

How can a married with children heretical dissident from a place like Syria at times like these ever find peace anyway?

War it is then. Invade my soul, why don’t you? I shan’t lift a finger, and will plod on guided not by this illusion known as ideals, but by my basic impulses whose contradictory nature will serve as the only checking mechanism in this ongoing battle for supremacy over my shredded soul.

Caught in that infernal zone of desperation and longing that lies in between my continuing search for genial accomplishment, and the mediocre reality of my actual achievements is punishment enough for this seeming amorality. Believe me. Believe me.

Day Seventeen!

On the Seventeenth Day of Exile my True Love brought to me ingredients for a traditional Syrian dish. Oh I absolutely adore my One True Love.

Indeed, this is our seventeenth day in Washington DC and exile couldn’t smell or taste any sweeter. But this is only “me” talking – I who logs my exile around like a cross, a simultaneously cherished and reviled possession. Continue reading “Day Seventeen!” →

Syria Squeezed: Are We Free Yet?

Dispatches by Elisabeth Eaves

… What is going on now is a lot of testing of “red lines,” as everyone in Damascus seems to call them. People are saying things and publishing things. But many of them, like al-Bounni and Ammar Abdulhamid, who heads the minority-rights Tharwa Project, are engaged in a harrowing pas de deux with the government. Al-Bounni and Abdulhamid are both barred from leaving the country. Intelligence officials have interrogated Abdulhamid three times since January. Al-Bounni has seen his siblings and friends thrown in jail for peaceful political speech. No one testing the limits knows when the next crackdown might come or what will provoke it. Continue reading “Syria Squeezed: Are We Free Yet?” →

Anxious Moments!

My Khawla is in Lebanon these days scouting for a new home. Lebanon remains our best bet for a potential refuge at this stage, for all the angst it is going through. Yet, better share in the angst of birth, than in that of death.

Meanwhile, our local friends continue that delicate dance where each graceful move puts that much more distance between them and us, at least emotionally. For in times like these, when doom is in the air, no one really owes anyone enough to stay close, to share the same fate.