The Power of Telling—and Listening- to Stories Stephanie Saldaña

In What We Remember Will Be Saved (September 12), journalist and scholar Stephanie Saldaña finds hope and beauty in the stories of six extraordinary women and men from Syria and Iraqi who were displaced by war—and what they carried with them.

The Power of Telling—and Listening- to Stories

Stephanie Saldaña

It is easy to look back on a book and to find a clear pattern, a reason why the work came to be and why the subject matters to me. Yet in my experience it is never, in reality, so straightforward. I often write against something, trying to make sense of a certain, uncomfortable feeling that has come up inside of me. I write because of something that keeps me up at night. Writing won’t help me to sleep, but it will, on occasion, help me to do something with the restlessness.

By 2014, Syria had been at war for three years. Millions of Syrians had become displaced, hundreds of thousands killed. 2014 was also the year that ISIS took Mosul and the Nineveh Plains in Iraq. It was a human tragedy of unimaginable proportions, with millions of innocents caught up in the fray. I had lived in the Middle East for nearly my entire adult life, and Syria held a special place in my heart as the country in which I learned Arabic, made many friends, and began what would become a life-long engagement with the religious pluralism of the region.

It was the country in which I met my husband, the country about which I wrote my very first book. It was, and is, inextricably bound up in who I am as a person. I knew people in Syria who were kidnapped and killed. Friends became refugees. I worried about my former neighbors and students. This was not a story about strangers.

The wars in Syria and in Iraq were inextricably connected, and I could not write about one without writing about the other. I knew that the massive displacement of communities meant that the social fabric of the region would be deeply changed. Neighbors who had lived side by side for generations would no longer be neighbors, and I knew that this in and of itself was an important story.

It was the news, in the end, that infuriated me enough to pull me out of my sense of paralysis to write something about the war. I woke up to read article after article about ISIS destroying sections of Palmyra, the ancient city in Syria. Article upon article about ISIS destroying statues in the Mosul museum. Articles about the damage to the Crusader castle of Krak de Chevalier in Syria. Of course these things mattered, and they mattered deeply. Yet I sensed that this focus on tangible heritage overlooked many of the things that people cared about that they were losing: their languages, their neighbors, their music, their food, their festivals, their gardens, their homes, their friendships. I was furious that stones seemed more important than actual human lives. I sensed that if I spoke to people escaping war, that they would tell me an entirely different story about loss, but also about what they had rescued. 

In the beginning, What We Remember Will Be Saved was only a book about women and men who were saving their intangible cultural heritage. I thought that I would travel throughout the Middle East and Europe to speak to those people fleeing the conflict in Iraq and Syria, and that they might narrate the stories of the things they carried with them. Yet very quickly, I learned that objects are not objects, dresses are not just dresses, and songs are not just songs. Or, rather, that they are themselves and yet more than themselves. They became the vehicles through which people began to tell me larger stories—about their families, their homes, their friends, their languages, their particularities. It became a book, in a sense, about what matters to people the most, and how they manage to hold onto it.

What I witnessed, more than anything, is the extraordinary strength of people who escape from war. They are historians, and the stories that they narrate—about seasons and languages, friendships and festivals– are not marginal for the historical record. They are central accounts, of lives lived and places lost. They have something to tell us, about the human beings whose lives have been tragically taken, about the villages that will never be the same, about the deeper meanings of seasons and gardens. They taught me about the power of memory. Memory is a decision, an act against forgetting, against erasure. It is both an individual act and one done on behalf of others, an act of necessity and one of hope. 

What We Remember Will Be Saved may be seen as a story about refugees. But for me, it is first and foremost an homage to the ones who remember, in a moment so painful that so many of us want to turn away. They are the storytellers. They are the quiet lights, creating a path forward. They are carrying entire villages in their words, in their images, in their songs and stitches. And as long as the past is remembered, then nothing—not even violence, not even war-has achieved the final word. 

And we- by reading and listening, also become part of the story. We have the responsibility to live with what we now know, to act. It is not, I believe, something to be taken lightly. But for those who are willing to take that on, I hope that they will open the first page.

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Stephanie Saldaña has spent most of the last twenty years living in the Middle East. Saldaña studied religion at Harvard Divinity School and is the author of A Country Between and The Bread of Angels, hailed by Geraldine Brooks as “a remarkable, wise, and lovely book.” Her work has been published in The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, America Magazine, and Plough, and she has been featured on National Public Radio. Saldaña and her family split their time between Bethlehem and France. Twitter:  @stephcsaldana

What We Remember Will Be Saved: A Story of Refugees and the Things They Carry 

Eggplant seeds, a lullaby in a vanishing language, an embroidered dress. When people flee their homes, the things they save speak of beauty and suffering and the indomitable human spirit.

In an era of mass migration in which more than 100 million people are displaced comes this lyrical portrait of Syrian and Iraqi refugees and the belongings they carry. What We Remember Will Be Saved is a book of hope, home, and the stories we hold within us when everything else has been lost.

Journalist and scholar Stephanie Saldaña, who lived in Syria before the war, sets out on a journey across nine countries to meet refugees and learn what they salvaged from the ruins when they escaped. Now, in the narratives of six extraordinary women and men, from Mt. Sinjar to Aleppo to Lesvos to Amsterdam, we discover that the little things matter a great deal. Saldaña introduces us to a woman who saved her city in a dress, a musician who saved his stories in songs, and a couple who rebuilt their destroyed pharmacy even as the city around them fell apart. Together they provide a window into a religiously diverse corner of the Middle East on the edge of unraveling, and the people keeping it alive with their stories.

Born of years of friendship and reporting, What We Remember Will Be Saved is a breathtaking, elegiac odyssey into the heart of the largest refugee crisis in modern history. It reminds us that refugees are storytellers and speakers of vanishing languages, and of how much history can be distilled into a piece of fabric, or eggplant seeds. What we salvage tells our story. What we remember will be saved.

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Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing