Book Review: Where the Wind Calls Home by Samar Yazbek

 Human beings are born free. Then society ties them up. Every one of us wants to ultimately be free of these shackles that limit us. While our subconscious is always in an endeavour to attain this independence from fetters, we ourselves love to embrace them harder due to our fear of walking against the wind. This tug of war between a subconscious that aspires to be free and the consciousness that pursues societal acceptance vigorously causes an eternal tension that is the basis of all the violence around us.

The theme of the novel Where the Wind Calls Home by Samar Yazbek is based on the friction between a man's aspiration to fly ahead and society's desperation to let him. Samar Yazbek is a prominent award-winning Syrian novelist and journalist. The novel is translated from Arabic to English by Leri Price. The novel explores the village life of Syria and shows us how powerful and corrupt politicians hold a society hostage and intrude into their livelihood and even private affairs like religion, while forcing their young men to needlessly shed lives for them. I received a review copy of the novel from the publisher, World Editions, through Netgalley in exchange for my honest feedback.

The novel begins with a lone flying eye that witnesses a funeral, which it suspects is that of its body. Then we realise that it is the hallucinations of a nineteen-year-old, injured soldier, Ali, who is the victim of a friendly fire, a bomb of his own side, that mistakenly exploded amongst his team. Soon, Ali comes to his senses and tries to assess his wounds. He starts remembering his past and takes us on a journey about how he ended up there. We find that, as a young kid, Ali never behaved like his peers and was more attracted to nature, the sun, wind, and trees. He was a deeply spiritual being who was forced by warlords into fighting a war that wasn't his. 

While telling the story of Ali, the author takes us on a spiritual journey about the human spirit, which wants to break the shackles that bind it to the ordinary and aspires to fly. Flying is a motif that repeatedly appears in the plot, as are images of height, like trees, mountains, and rooftops, which our protagonist loves to climb. An aunt of Ali, who is a servant of the sheikh, jumps from a cliff to death. Ali believes that she tried to fly away, and he always has visions of him sprouting wings and flying off from heights. Even while lying injured, he attempts to drag himself towards a nearby oak tree and climb on it as a last effort to be free.

The novel tries to portray a picture of Syrian villages where innocent villagers are terrorised by arms-wielding chieftains, grabbing their lands and forcing their sons to fight and needlessly become martyrs. Ali's brother joins the army and returns in a nailed box from the war. His mother is not allowed to see the body. Ali's attempts when he lies injured can be attributed to his fear of such a fate befalling him too. It is interesting to note that we never find out who his opponents are, and even his injuries are caused by his own side. While lying injured, he sees a mirror image of himself on his opposite side, whom he fears as an enemy. There is an interesting analogy between Ali's father, who hits him with a pomegranate stick, and the powerful sheikhs. As a kid, he believed that fathers never die, and the same irrational belief can be seen repeated in the refusal of villagers to believe that their president is dead.

Where the Wind Calls Home by Samar Yazbek is an intense reading experience that offers a lyrical, non-linear narrative that flits between past and present. It offers a spiritual journey of the human spirit that aspires to transcendence, even when suffering, to break the chains that bind it to the fears and tragedies of society.