The air thrums with whistles and drums as people pour around corners, spill down streets. It’s March 2011 in Damascus, Syria, and revolution has arrived in the form of the Arab spring.
Palestinian teen Ghassan, stopping to watch the crowd of protesters, recalls a recent warning from a friend: “What the people want out there, they will never allow.” But among other onlookers, he claps along. Then he is grabbed, bound and forced underground into Syria’s most notorious prison – Sednaya, or Slaughterhouse.
This scene reflects the unsparing nature of The Hair of the Pigeon, the second novel by Egyptian-Danish-Australian journalist Mohammed Massoud Morsi, a story both epic and raw, following a young man’s journey across continents after he is torn from his home and forced into exile.
The novel opens a decade earlier in Yarmouk, a refugee camp in Damascus that became home to thousands of Palestinians expelled by Israel during the 1948 Nakba, then again in 1967. Seven-year-old Ghassan lives in the camp with his emotionally detached mother, Salsabeel, and his kind father, Shokri. It’s a place where children pass footballs beneath laundry strung up to dry in Syria’s summer wind. Vividly drawn characters populate the alleyways, such as the sharp-eyed shopkeeper Abu Fouad; single mother Mariam, who men call upon in the night, and her son Badawi, Ghassan’s best friend; doctor Ahmed, whose patients slip in and out unannounced; the gentle mechanic Ismaeil; and Ghassan’s beloved friend Sama, who lives with her cotes of pigeons.
We follow Ghassan as he comes of age during the Arab spring and the ensuing Syrian civil war. On the cusp of these events, personal tragedy strikes: a betrayal and a brutal act of violence that severs him from Badawi and Sama. Ghassan must carry the trauma of this event as he grapples with what is happening in the world around him, as people disappear and often turn up dead.
After his arrest at the protest, we trace Ghassan’s imprisonment and torture, and then his treacherous escape across the Mediterranean, seeking asylum in Copenhagen. We watch as secrets held close by those around him unfurl in moments of cathartic revelation, and his most fraught relationships find various forms of closure.
There’s an almost spiritual undertone to Morsi’s prose, in the attention paid to the behaviour of the sky and the earth, the sea and the birds. Dreams feel closer to prophetic visions. Prayers of pure intention are sometimes answered. On the day Ghassan is released from Sednaya, more than two years after his arrest, he turns his face to the sky: “The voices of the dead still keened to me, my stricken cellmates trying to cross the sea of time. In the end, they heard me. I was on the shore, and they heard me.”
Morsi writes with the precision of a war photographer. His evocation of place is vivid – wonderfully vibrant at times, foreboding at others. And while lyrical, his novel is also a work of documentation, capturing distinct characters in tableaux that feel all too real. At every point in Ghassan’s journey, we are shown with devastating intimacy the ruin brought upon others around him who are also seeking asylum: the return to one’s childhood bedroom to find gaping ruins, the death of an infant from starvation or a parent lost at sea.
The reading experience is at times eerie, almost claustrophobic, as one senses cycles of history repeating.
But Morsi also has Ghassan find solace all around him – in remembering Sama, with unbreakable devotion; forging new bonds (including with an orphaned girl, Laila) in the course of his journey; finding community at a pizza-kebab shop in the suburbs of Copenhagen; and reuniting with dear friends he had thought gone.
And so Morsi balances brutality and hope, cruelty and love. He reveals the deep, multigenerational consequences of displacements forced by wars, despotic governments, apartheid occupations, foreign interventions and genocide. And he leaves us with a profound sense that, through it all, humanity will persist.
The Hair of the Pigeon by Mohammed Massoud Morsi is published by UWA Press ($34.99)
