Maram Al-Masri is a Syrian-born poet who resides in France and who writes in both French and Arabic. The title of her latest book, The Abduction, refers to the real-life abduction of her son by her ex-husband, who took the child from France back to Syria. The collection chronicles the time before the abduction, the thirteen years of separation, and the period after they were reunited.

The poems in this collection are powerful explorations of motherhood, longing, and separation. Still, the geopolitical context cannot be ignored. It looms large and begs to be reckoned with. Even though the civil war in Syria is never mentioned, the poet’s language surrounding abduction and violence, the yearning for freedom and sovereignty expressed in these pages invites the war in as a powerful subtext.

The collection begins pre-abduction. In these opening poems, the narrator depicts warm, everyday memories of a motherhood charged with a pantheistic, almost ecstatic, kind of love. The images are simple and elemental. In “Come on, sun” (27) she implores the sun to “Let your yellow hair float / over the shivering shoulders of the earth.” In “Dance, dance” (29) she implores her son to dance, so “that the restless heart of the world / may calm itself / to the rhythm of your steps.” The form of these early poems—motherly petitions for the solar cosmos and beloved child to calm the maladies of a chaotic, cold earth—carry a latent foreboding of the abduction to come. The poem “With these two hands” (31) depicts objects (a suitcase, a water bottle, and a stroller) which the unknowing mother has packed for her husband to take on an apparently brief trip with their son—“to this day / my little one’s stroller has not returned.” The father’s deception tortures the speaker throughout the rest of the book.

The poems of the second half of the collection, after the abduction, are plain and direct—there is no effort to veil or abstract the speaker’s emotions. The tone shifts from ecstatic to elegiac, and the narrator is unsparingly despondent. The poems are piercing in their unpretentious viscerality. They are addressed to a silenced subject—a child who cannot contact his mother—and the poem “I sent you” (36) expresses this most tragically: “I sent you my love / by mail… / Did you receive the package?” Now, the father begins to loom monstrously over the narrative, and the narrator’s language reflects this, inhabiting the spectral register of shadows, memories, silences, souls, and interrupted sleep. The speaker retreats into herself, into her shattered psychological routine: she returns home, sleeps, and wakes up, caught up in a single-minded obsession with her missing son: “every morning I wake… / having fragmented my sleep / to smithereens” (“Every morning,” 41). The narrator herself begins to deteriorate in this anxious desperation. She describes the feeling as an uncomfortable, chilling stasis: “I look out a window… / The world is cold” (“I no longer have the patience,” 48). Implicit in this lamentation is an acknowledgment of the failure of the sun to warm the cold earth of the collection’s first half. The world is no longer charged with light, or love, or much of anything. “Dusk no longer has your eyes” (51), one of the strongest poems of the collection, attests to this frigid reality: “My dusk no longer has trees / sway in its shadow / since you’ve been gone.” The poem carries the platonic immediacy and surreal longing of (fellow Syrian) Nizar Qabbani’s aphoristic, truncated love poems.

As a Syrian-American who studies the literary history of Near-Eastern civilizations, I see Al-Masri’s poetry as being situated seamlessly within the ancient tradition of Syrian poetics, which stretches back to the genesis of human literature. Most of the poems are just a handful of stichic lines, and many even resemble the tragic epigrams of antiquity—a form practiced by Syrians since the classical age. Meleager, a Greco-Syrian poet of the 1st century B.C., carries a fiery longing for his lost subjects similar to Al-Masri’s, writing in equally direct and evocative verse. He questions: “O briny wave of Love, and sleepless gales of Jealousy, and wintry sea of song and wine, where am I being carried?” (The Greek Anthology 5.190, trans. Paton). The strength of Al-Masri’s poems is that they often profess a timeless, universal, and perennial power—the maternal speaker could be a mother in any era: “I had a child… / I nourished him with my blood… / He was torn from my arms / I stopped singing” (“O human brothers,” 32). 

I consider these poems symbolic of the current crossroads Syria finds itself standing before. In my view, Syria has been abducted time and time again by geopolitical titans—powerful neighbors who reign for a few decades or centuries before being ousted in reactionary violence. It is hard for me to find hope for Syria in this post-revolutionary period, where elections have been suspended for four years, Alawites and Christians (the country’s besieged minorities) have been summarily executed by the thousands in coastal villages, and churches and mosques have been vandalized and damaged, but Al-Masri’s book gives me hope that Syria’s artists will continue to be dignified, direct, and unpretentious in their struggle for justice and peace—the peace of self-determination, the sovereign peace of a mother caring for her son. In the final poem of the collection, an ars poetica titled “The Bread of Letters” (66), Al-Masri perfectly summarizes the Syrian poet’s precarious, but resilient position: “To write / is to live on the cliff’s edge / clinging to a blade / of grass.”