Escape From Aleppo tells the story of the Syrian War through the eyes of a young girl as she makes her way across the city of Aleppo after getting separated from her family.Early on the morning of October 9, 2013, Nadia Jandali is awakened by her cousin Razan who tells her they must leave at once. Nadia is filled with fear and attempts to crawl back under her bed where she's been sleeping. She can hear the deep boom of bombs called barmeela in the distance. These are barrel bombs filled with shrapnel which are dropped onto rebel held areas by the Syrian army. Nadia is forced awake, grabs her backpack and a burlap bag to meet the rest of her family.
Nadia's cousin, Malik who is the eldest son of Khala Fatima (Nadia's maternal aunt), believes the helicopters are coming their way and that they need to leave. Nadia's family have formulated a plan that Nadia, her mother and grandmother, and her three aunts and their children will assemble downstairs in the apartment building. The building was built by her grandparents thirty-five years ago and has four apartments, each housing a son and his family. Nadia's mother orders them to go downstairs while she hunts for Nadia's younger brother Yusuf's shoes. Razan's job is to help Nadia leave the building.She's rarely been outside in the past year after she was hit by a barmeela and severely injured. The trauma from that event has made Nadia terrified to leave her home.
At the front door, Khala Fatima, Khala Lina, Khala Shakira, and Nana debate what to do next but Khala Lina is emphatic that they need to go to the dental clinic where they have arranged to meet their husbands and sons at noon. Suddenly Malik comes tearing down the stairs telling them they need to leave immediately because the government military helicopters are heading towards them. At the last minute Nadia's mother, Amani comes downstairs carrying Yusuf and the group exits the back door - all except Nadia. As Nadia is forcing herself out the door and Malik races back to help her, their building is rocked by a barmeela, throwing Nadia down the steps and against an abandoned Jeep. Stunned, Nadia lays there hearing Malik yell for her.
In the confusion of the bombing, Malik believes Nadia is beneath the rubble and dead and her family leaves, not knowing she is uninjured but dazed. As another bomb explodes, Nadia rolls under the jeep and falls unconscious. She awakens later that afternoon, her family gone, determined to travel to Dr. Asbahi's dental clinic. Nadia flees through the city encountering a group of children playing on a playground surrounded by the graves of rebels and government soldiers. In trying to find her way through the ruins of Aleppo, Nadia soon finds herself lost. Unable to find the mosque, a landmark on the way to the dental clinic, hungry and exhausted, she runs into a shop for shelter during a rainstorm. It is late in the evening and she is tired and defeated.
Nadia discovers she has taken shelter in a pharmacy. She soon falls asleep underneath a desk in the office and doesn't awaken until very early the next morning. But Nadia learns she's not alone; an elderly man "in loose woolen pantaloons and a navy vest, a taqiyah (skull cap) covering his cropped white hair...Past him, near the door, stood a sturdy, dun-colored donkey." are also in the pharmacy. Relieved he is not a soldier or worse, Nadia attempts to get out the door of the pharmacy but finds it blocked by the donkey. Terrified but responding to the old man's kindness, Nadia tells him all that has happened to her and asks him if he knows the way to the Asbahi clinic. He tells her he does and that he will take her there after he completes a short errand. However, one thing leads to another and Nadia discovers her journey with the elderly man named Ammo Mazen, is filled with unexpected revelations and leads her to discover the hidden inner strength she needs to reunite with her family.
Discussion
Escape From Aleppo tells of one girl's journey across war-torn Aleppo and Syria to the safety of Turkey where her father and family waits for her. The main story is set in 2013, and takes place over a period of five days. It is told through the eyes of fourteen-year-old Nadia who travels through the city of Aleppo with a mysterious elderly man, Ammo Mazen. During this time the reader is shown the impact of war on Nadia's life, the effect on her family and her community
Senazi makes use of flashbacks to demonstrate how much Nadia's life has changed from before the start of the Syrian war. In 2010 and 2011 life for Nadia and her family is filled with ease and comfort. Her tenth birthday party is a feast of Nadia's favourite food, "kabob karaz - grilled lamb meatballs prepared with cherries and pine nuts.", a "towering chocolate cake...adorned with pink sugar roses", and attended by "Her family and friends from school, along with her parents' friends and neighbors, gathered in her grandparents elegant dining room..." She's the center of attention in a "satin aquamarine dress", with nails painted a matching shade of blue and she has a "stack of presents". Nadia's life revolves around the finals of Arab Idol, auditioning for television commercials, the wedding preparations for her cousin Razan's marriage and her final exams. Life is full of possibilities.
In contrast is Nadia's life in the present, in 2013. After being injured in a barmeela attack, Nadia has a scar that runs from her knee to her hip and has a piece of shrapnel that remains in her leg. Once told she resembled the Arab Idol semifinalist, Carmen Suleiman, Nadia's appearance after escaping the bombing of her home in Salaheddine two years later is much altered. "Her eyes shifted, catching her reflection in the mirror. A stranger stared back at her: face covered in dust, hollowed cheeks marked with pale white scars. A cut, caked with dry blood, from where her head had hit the Jeep. Her hair, once thick and wavy, had been hacked off because of lice. Spiky and short, it now lay stuffed under an ugly olive-green woolen cap..."
After the bombing, Nadia looks at their family's apartment building which is mostly destroyed. "She peered inside Khala Lina's apartment, cut in half, her embroidered silk curtains still hanging from the window, fluttering like a maroon flag. A leather sofa hung from the ledge, it's matching love seat lying on what remained for Khala Fatima's kitchen below, her stove flat as an atayaf, a sweet cheese-stuffed pancake. Nana's beautiful cream-and-gold china lay scattered across the ground like snowflakes, broken in a million pieces."
The devastation of the war is shown as Nadia's journey through Aleppo to catch up to her family. She travels "past houses where shells had punched great holes and others that had collapsed completely, blocking the surrounding alleys with rubble." She watches an ambulance pull up to "what had been a large apartment complex, now a stack of concrete pancakes with jagged metal rods protruding from all angles. Survivors huddled near the road, coated in dust, consoling the injured while parmedics bandaged a boy's leg. And old man knelt beside teh rubble, weeping, his bent figure shielding something. Nadia got a glimpse of golden bangles and a frail arm." The city is filled with broken down cars, uncollected trash, abandoned stores, salons and mosques, snipers hiding on roofs, and there are "hundreds of checkpoints that had sprung up around the city, each manned by a different group, either affiliated with the Syrian army or one of the hundreds of rebel groups."
Throughout the story, Senzai incorporates various facts about the war. For example, readers learn how the Syrian War was rooted in the uprising in other parts of the Middle East. During Nadia's birthday party, the adults in the family gather to watch the television broadcasts of the self-immolation of a young man, Mohamed Bouazizi in Sidi Bousid, Tunisia. The demonstrations in Tunisia spread to the surrounding countries of Jordan, Algeria and Oman while in Egypt, demonstrations in Tahrir Square in Cairo lead to the removal of dictator Hosni Mubarak. This was followed by unrest in Yemen, Bahrain, Morocco and Libya. These demonstrations come to be known as the Arab Spring. In Syria it begins with the arrest and torture of a group of boys from Deraa who had written anti-government slogans on their school. Through a flaskback, Nadia remembers the discussions at home between her grandfather and the rest of the family about how the U.S. wanted Assad to resign and how U.N. peacekeepers were sent in to monitor the situation. Later on as Nadia and Ammo Mazen are walking through the streets they encounter a woman who tells them about the sarin gas attack by the Assad government on rebels in Ghouta, near Damascus. An encounter with a group of rebels and an Egyptian-American journalist explains the rebel's view of the involvement of ISIS in the war. "The road you were on is blocked by those foreign bastards who call themselves ISIS. They've been fighting other rebel groups to usurp power...These foreign hypocrites use religion as an excuse to fight some glorified war, seeking power and fame. They are ruthless barbarians, posting videos on the Internet of their atrocities, like blowing up ancient sites or killing civilians for not following their brand of Islam."
Senzai uses the character of Ammo Mazen, to highlight the efforts of the Syrian academics to preserve their historical treasures from destruction in the war. Readers learn that "Most of the museums in the country, and all six of Syria's World Heritage sites, have been affected in one way or another..." Some of those treasures turn out to be rare books brought by Ammo Mazen and include "Kitab al-Tasrif by medieval Arab surgeon Abulcasis, Katib Cheleb's seventeenth-century Islamic atlas, and other rare books of poetry,history, science and mathematics."
Nadia's journey through the ruins of Aleppo to the safety of Turkey mirrors her own personal journey from a fearful traumatized girl to one who acts with courage and decisiveness when needed. Senzai has crafted a realistic protagonist in Nadia Jandali. She's a typical teenager - impulsive, self-absorbed but she is also courageous, intelligent and caring. At the beginning of the story, Nadia has been housebaound for almost a year, filled with fear. Spurred by the loss of her family, Nadia forces herself to try to find her way to the dental clinic in the hopes she will meet up with her family. "She realized that if she kept her eyes down and didn't look around too much, she could keep the fear at bay. Don't think. Just move." Her encounter with Ammo Mazen forces her to trust him despite the fact that he is a complete stranger. His kindness surprises her. "She realized that she had to trust him, at least a little, if she was going to find her family." Although she does get to the Asbahi clinic, a note from her family telling her where to meet them leaves her feeling abandoned and angry. It also means that she must continue to rely on Ammo Mazen who she suspects is not telling her the full truth of who he is. Nadia is impatient and dismissive of Ammo Mazen's decision to travel by donkey. "Nadia mutinously stared at the smelly donkey, snoring away with Mishmish curled up under her neck. All he has is a bunch of junk, she fumed. Why is that so important?..." Instead she discovers that the old books are rare treasures to be preserved. As Ammo Mazen's healthy begins to deteriorate and he collapses, Nadia wants to abandon him. "I should just ditch them and go find my familiy on my own.It would be easier and faster..." she thinks but she reconsiders. "He had helped her when she needed it the most. And now she would help him. For now, the questions she had didn't matter. she would trust him." And when Ammo Mazen is attacked and his donkey and cart stolen, it is Nadia who comes up with a plan that retrieves them and allows their journey to the border to continue. In the end, Nadia and Basel a little boy they have picked up along the way, leave Ammo Mazen in the care of an elderly woman. Nadia's questions are answered
Escape From Aleppo is a well-written, interesting novel that portrays the realities of war without being too graphic. It is informative, giving younger readers the basic background of the Syrian war which is still ongoing, while putting a face to the conflict through Nadia, Basel, Ammo Mazen and the many other characters.
Book Details:
Escape From Aleppo by Naheed Hasnat Senzai
New York: A Paula Wiesmen Book 2018
324 pp.
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