DAVID ADAMS reads the powerful and tragic story of one refugee’s journey…
Melissa Fleming
A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea: The Journey of Doaa Al Zamel
Fleet (Hachette), London, UK, 2017
ISBN-13: 978-1408708446
“This is a book that demands a response – whether it’s prayer, financial support for agencies helping refugees or simply a determination to remember Doaa and stories like hers when have conversations with others about the refugee crisis around the world.”
There’s two things that you need to remind yourself of while reading Melissa Fleming’s biographical book about the life of Syrian refugee Doaa Al Zamel. The first is that this is not a novel – despite the horrors it speaks of, it’s a true story. The second is that this is not an historical text – the events speaks of only took place a couple of years ago and, for many people with similar stories, continues to unfold right now.
Fleming, the chief spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, decided to write this book after first meeting Doaa in January, 2015, while she was living with a host family in Greece, having survived – incredibly – a deadly journey over the Mediterranean Sea from Egypt.
“I was struck by her determination to tell her story, and I soon realised she was entrusting me with it for two reasons – to help her and her family resettle in another country and to warn other refugees who were tempted to make the same dangerous journey,” Fleming writes in an author’s note.
Doaa and some of her family now have a new life in Sweden – she is hoping to study law – but it was a long and tragically hard road to get there. An “ordinary” Muslim girl who grew up in the south-western Syrian city of Daraa, Doaa’s life was turned upside down when the Arab Spring broke out in 2011.
She and her family stuck it out initially but the hardships they faced – bombings, curfews, constant searches of their house and the ever present threat of rape and even death – eventually led her family to flee to Egypt.
Initially welcomed along with other Syrian refugees by Egyptians living under the new regime of then-President Mohamed Morsi, Doaa and her family struggled to make a new life. Another regime change, however, led to increased hardships for her family as public sentiment turned against refugees from Syria.
It was then that she and her new fiancée Bassem decided to head to Europe, joining the tens of thousands of refugees who braved unseaworthy vessels, unscrupulous people smugglers and dangerous waters to cross the Mediterranean. Needless to say, it was a descent into a hell she couldn’t have imagined.
If there are times when we in countries like Australia feel a long way from what’s been unfolding in the Middle East and Europe, this book helps to bridge that gap. Through the story of one woman, it brings the plight facing so many millions across the world right now into sharp focus.
No human being should have to endure what Doaa has. And yet hers is an all-too-common story. As she writes in an afterword: “It is only a small glimpse of the hardship and pain that refugees around the world endure. I represent just one voice among the millions who risk their lives every day in order to live a life of dignity…Our only wish is to live in peace. We are not terrorists. We are human beings just like you. We have hearts that feel, yearn, love and hurt.”
This is a book that demands a response – whether it’s prayer, financial support for agencies helping refugees or simply a determination to remember Doaa and stories like hers when have conversations with others about the refugee crisis around the world.
Despite its easy-to-access style, the story told in its pages makes A Hope More Powerful Than The Sea a tough book to read. But rather than shying away from stories like Doaa’s, it’s time we started listening. It’s the very least we can do.
