LitArk » Books » Art

Waed Athamneh - Defiance in Exile: Syrian Refugee Women in Jordan

Here you can read online Waed Athamneh - Defiance in Exile: Syrian Refugee Women in Jordan full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. City: Notre-Dame, year: 2021, publisher: University of Notre Dame Press, genre: Art. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Book:
Defiance in Exile: Syrian Refugee Women in Jordan
Author:
Waed Athamneh / Muhammad Masud
Publisher:
University of Notre Dame Press
Genre:
Books / Art
Year:
2021
City:
Notre-Dame
Rating:
4 / 5
Favourites:
Add to favourites
Your mark:
- 80
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5

Description
Author's other books
Similar books

Defiance in Exile: Syrian Refugee Women in Jordan: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Defiance in Exile: Syrian Refugee Women in Jordan" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

This book offers a glimpse into Syrian refugee womens stories of defiance and triumph in the aftermath of the Syrian uprising.

The al-Zaatari Camp in northern Jordan is the largest Syrian refugee camp in the world, home to 80,000 inhabitants. While al-Zaatari has been described by the Western media as an ideal refugee camp, the Syrian women living within its confines offer a very different account of their daily reality. Defiance in Exile: Syrian Refugee Women in Jordan presents for the first time in a book-length format the opportunity to hear the refugee womens own words about torment, struggle, and persecutionand of an enduring spirit that defies a difficult reality. Their stories speak of nearly insurmountable social, economic, physical, and emotional challenges, and provide a distinct perspective of the Syrian conflict.

Waed Athamneh and Muhammad Musad began collecting the testimonies of Syrian refugee women in 2015. The authors chronicle the history of Syrias colonial legacy, the torture and cruelty of the Bashar al-Assad regime during which nearly half a million Syrians lost their lives, and the eventual displacement of more than 5.3 million Syrian refugees due to the crisis. The book contains nearly two dozen interviews, which give voice to single mothers, widows, women with disabilities, and those who are victims of physical and psychological abuse. Having lost husbands, children, relatives, and friends to the conflict, they struggle with what it means to be a Syrian refugeeand what it means to be a Syrian woman. Defiance in Exile follows their fight for survival during war and the sacrifices they had to make. It depicts their journey, their desperate, chaotic lives as refugees, and their hopes and aspirations for themselves and their children in the future. These oral histories register the womens political outcry against displacement, injustice, and abuse. The book will interest all readers who support refugees and displaced persons as well as students and scholars of Middle East studies, political science, womens studies, and peace studies.

Waed Athamneh: author's other books

Who wrote Defiance in Exile: Syrian Refugee Women in Jordan? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

Defiance in Exile: Syrian Refugee Women in Jordan — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Defiance in Exile: Syrian Refugee Women in Jordan" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

DEFIANCE
IN EXILE

Syrian Refugee Women in Jordan

WAED ATHAMNEH

with Muhammad Masud

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

Published by the University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021943083

ISBN: 978-0-268-20116-6 (hardback)

ISBN: 978-0-268-20117-3 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-0-268-20115-9 (WebPDF)

ISBN: 978-0-268-20118-0 (Epub)

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at

Ghassan,

The idea of this book came to your mother before you were born. The visits to al-Zaatari camp took place shortly after you were born. Your mother and father worked on this manuscript while you provided them with all the love and patience a child possesses, making our mission an enjoyable one. This book will eventually see the light, reaching the hands of those who seek knowledge and knock on its wide-open doors. It is our hope that you will grow up to be the man you want to be, never forgetting your duty to your fellow humans, wherever they may be.

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

Currently three of four political refugees in the world are Muslim. Compounded by environmental refugees, warns the writer Ziauddin Sardar, this ratio could change to four of five by 2035. The middle belt area of the world, from Morocco in the west to Indonesia in the east, is a zone of Muslim majorities. In addition, it is a zone vulnerable to both political and environmental precarity. Only a massive exercise of human will directed toward stemming political instability and effecting a change in human behavior in order to redress climate change can avert the dire forecast of catastrophes for this middle belt region and many other regions around the world. Needless to say, significant populations of Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Druze, Alawites, and other faith traditions, as well as people without faith traditions, are also located in this middle belt. Nature in its brutality does not discriminate and inflicts its rigors on friend and foe. But nature also rewards human behavior if the stewardship of the environment occurs in a timely manner. In conditions of precarity, as experiences from Rwanda to Bosnia show, the best of neighbors brutally turn on each other. Faith, class, and ethnicity often serve merely as a fig leaf to justify the worst in human conduct. We are bound by faith, common sense, and a concern for human dignity to avert these disasters at any cost. Hence, this task requires human solidarity and care as a minimum.

In Defiance in Exile, Waed Athamneh and Muhammad Masud offer us many moving portraits of the perilous situation of Syrian refugees in camps in Jordan. Simultaneously, we are inspired by the heroic acts and resilience of refugees clasping onto faith and dignity. This book rightly focuses on the plight of women and their families. Why so many women feel compelled to leave hearth and home to become refugees is surely obvious. Women fear not only for themselves; often womens most overwhelming concern is to protect their offspring from the dangers of certain death, especially if they are forced to fend for themselves in situations of war. Escaping death is one thing. To escape a life of debilitating poverty is another, despite the best charitable support available from time to time.

Wherever refugees go they have to begin a life of normality anew. But for every refugee, normal is never the same. It is always a new normal, one that is frequently shadowed by pain, grief, and loss. Yet sometimes there are flickers of hope, what the authors describe as a glimmer of light. Athamneh and Masud have given us one detailed portrait of the lives of Syrian refugees who were driven out of Syria by a pitiless civil war.

The Arab Spring of December 2011, which triggered peaceful protests for democracy in Syria and then quickly degenerated into violence, is now a distant memory. Momentarily, the Arab Spring brought hope to many for a better and humane future. In most places where the spark of political hope briefly shone, apart from Tunisia, the forces of political totalitarianism and immoral geopolitical machinations undermined the democratic ideals fostered by millions of people in the middle belt. Capricious alliances with the Syrian people by their neighbors brought them to the precipice of a country emptied of its people. Roughly 5.5 million Syrians live as refugees around the world, and some 6.1 million are internally displaced people.

Surely, the world should never forget the plight of the Jewish people as refugees over time but especially their devastating fate in modern Europe. Yet for the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian people who were violently displaced from their homeland by the establishment of the state of Israel, it was up to artists and writers to share the experiences of these refugees whose aspirations were repeatedly shattered. The Palestinian struggle serves as a sobering reminder to Syrians and all other refugees around the world of the challenges that lie ahead.

The plight of refugees in the middle belt can be gleaned from the writings of the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, whose oeuvre is marked by the endless status of Palestinians in exile and of homelessness. In his extended prose-poetry reflection, Memory for Forgetfulness, on the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the ensuing Lebanese civil war, he evocatively describes how the express purpose of the war was to dislodge Palestinians who had taken refuge in the surrounding areas of Beirut for decades. In compelling and imaginative prose, Darwish captures their predicament in the ordinary and everyday struggles for survival. Nothing can excel how Darwish mixes displacement, violence, and the hope of the everyday as fostered by refugees; he does not allow us to forget that he, too, was a refugee.

Describing the plight of Palestinian refugees during the Israeli bombing of Beirut in 1982, Darwish writes, They came in search of a place to sleep, on a square meter open to wind and patriotic songs. But what the primitive daggers forgot to do is being done by fighter planes, which havent stopped shelling this human continuity. Wheres all this leading? Where? From massacre to slaughter have my people been led, and still they bring forth offspring in debris-filled stopping places, flash victory signs, and prepare wedding feasts. Does a bomb have grandchildren? Us. Does a piece of shrapnel have grandparents? Us.

Imagine refugees and their offspring becoming more desperate in a bid to seek refuge elsewhere by escaping their first place of safety. Describing refugees twice over as the grandchildren of bombs and the grandparents of shrapnelan ironic and brutal twist of languageremains true to the painful and mournful reality. Darwish scripts the violence unleashed on Palestinian bodies as a genealogy of endless violence where bombs and shrapnel produce real descendants, like grandparents and grandchildren, a metaphor that takes your breath away.

Whenever refugees try to re-create normality, by hanging a painting on a wall, for example, almost instantaneously violence shatters it. In Darwishs words, But no sooner did we hang a painting than a car bomb exploded, destroying all the arrangements. And no sooner did I rest my head on my left elbow, waiting for my coffee, than I found myself outside. What a minute ago was a coffeehouse now stands transformed into an open-air space, with walls shattered by the blast and the poet as a witness, counting his blessings to have survived this one.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Defiance in Exile: Syrian Refugee Women in Jordan»

Look at similar books to Defiance in Exile: Syrian Refugee Women in Jordan. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Shawn Smucker

Once We Were Strangers: What Friendship with a Syrian Refugee Taught Me about Loving My Neighbor

Reuven Avi-Ran

The Syrian Involvement in Lebanon Since 1975

Michelle Pace

Syrian Refugee Children in the Middle East and Europe: Integrating the Young and Exiled

Don Brown

The Unwanted: Stories of the Syrian Refugees

Marcello Mollica

Syrian Armenians and the Turkish Factor: Kessab, Aleppo and Deir ez-Zor in the Syrian War

Mujais

The Syrian Social Nationalist Party

McIntosh Jamie

No refuge for women: the tragic fate of Syrian refugees

Littell

Syrian Notebooks

Fleming Melissa R.

A hope more powerful than the sea: one refugees incredible story of love, loss, and survival

Goodwin

Citizens of nowhere: from refugee camp to Canadian campus

Gregg Bucken-Knapp

Institutions and Organizations of Refugee Integration: Bosnian-Herzegovinian and Syrian Refugees in Sweden

Teresa Thornhill

Hara Hotel: a tale of Syrian refugees in Greece

Reviews about «Defiance in Exile: Syrian Refugee Women in Jordan»

Discussion, reviews of the book Defiance in Exile: Syrian Refugee Women in Jordan and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.