DEFIANCE

A Syrian journalist struggles to free herself from a dictator—and her father.

When Mrie’s grandfather, a diplomat, died of a heart attack, the president of Syria came to pay his respects. The event marks the beginning of her mother’s infelicitous union with another consequential visitor: a businessman who became wealthy assassinating fellow Alawites who opposed the government. During a childhood marked by violence, beauty proves redeeming. “Silvery scales of large fish shimmer[ing] in the sunlight” catch Mrie’s eye after her mother’s move to the coastal city of Jableh. A former photojournalist for Reuters, Mrie writes with a photographer’s eye for detail: sounds, scents (a “terrible odor” wafting from a shrine her grandmother took her to visit), and, of course, light, which can enliven any scene, or drown it. Growing up mesmerized by the sea, the author writes that she was determined not to “‘shorten her tongue’—a polite way of saying ‘shut up’ in Arabic”—as she was asked to do from a young age. When the 2011 uprising begins, she breaks free from her father. Cut off from her allowance, she takes up a job and befriends a group of artists who introduce her to video journalism, providing the world with images of “the most social-mediated conflict” in history. Mrie’s stunning account is about war, but it is also about love—for her mother, who was killed by her father’s men in retaliation for her daughter’s activism; for Peter Kassig, an American medic who was killed by ISIS; and for her fellow activists, her sister Alia, and her new life and partner in the U.S. Ultimately, Mrie’s story is about freedom, about imparting others with the greatest gift: an understanding of what it means to give up everything you’ve ever known in the name of something bigger than yourself. Like Federico García Lorca, who protesters quoted on their signs, she asks, “Can I give you my heart if it is not mine?”

A fierce ode to a fight for freedom that helped a generation of Syrian artists find its voice.