When I first saw the Abounaddara Shorts Exhibit at BAMPFA early in the first semester, it was a couple of months before the downfall of the Assad Regime. I remember sitting in a darkened theater with a friend, Simah, watching a collection of shorts that various people had filmed during Syria’s civil war. I remember one particularly striking documentary called “Of Gods and Dogs.” It interviews a Free Syrian soldier recalling his experience of killing a man after watching his fellow soldiers torture him, blood gushing down his face from multiple blows from a pan. He killed the man to end his suffering, buried him in tears and recited a prayer even though he was an atheist. Weeping, the soldier cursed his fellow soldiers, for they couldn’t truly be men of God, couldn’t really believe in a God who would want this kind of suffering and violence and revenge, just like the regime they were fighting. 

“Fuck your God.” 

He didn’t believe in God, didn’t want to believe in a God like this. “God is a man who loves green orchards, not rivers of blood,” he said. 

Simah and I cried through this documentary. I cried because seeing all these videos of life in Syria made me long for somewhere I didn’t know much about, somewhere I hadn’t been since I was five years old, somewhere I didn’t think I would visit again in a very long time. I cried because I would never know the extent of this pain my people had experienced, and I cried because we had experienced it. I cried because this was the beauty my mother knew and had to leave behind and couldn’t go back to because she would be arrested if she ever set foot back in her country. I cried because this was why I, too, didn’t believe in God. I cried because if there was a God who was kind, all-knowing, all-powerful, then it wasn’t the God I wanted to believe in, because what God could let this happen? If God believed in green orchards, why did He let so many pursue rivers of blood in his name?

Because I had no faith in God, I had no faith in Syria, forced myself to have no faith in Syria or in a war ending by the time my grandparents could return. It’s easier sometimes, not to have faith. I wasn’t like my mother, who reassured me that the indescribable pain in Gaza was just God’s plan, and that the Palestinians would be free, that the Syrians would be free, that we would all be free someday. 

And yet, miraculously, Syria did become free of this torturous regime on December 8th, 2024. The possibility of returning to Syria, of rebuilding and visiting and grazing the jasmine and bougainvillea vines that grow over the gates every summer was real. The political prisoners were freed. My mom was so happy, and I loved seeing her that way. I had a circle of Syrian friends, and we were worried about Jolani and his new government, but overall we were hopeful. For the first time, I had faith in Syria’s future. It wasn’t a far-off “maybe someday things will be better,” but tangible, real. I could hold that faith near me, hold that future in my hands, almost smell the musk of the jasmine. That’s how close it felt. 

I revisited the BAMPFA exhibit this February, after the regime had fallen, and it was an entirely new experience for me. I went with this group of friends, and we watched a documentary of the last printmaker in Syria who printed cloth the traditional way. Painstakingly, he’d dye the cloth a cream with tea bags, use giant poles to hang them up on clotheslines, mix pigment a bright green and blue and red under the light of an oil lamp, his fingers stained. He washed the cloth in the river, let it dry on the riverbank. He cursed al-Assad as the TV buzzed in the background, as the radio droned on. In between these scenes were clips of the skyline in Damascus as the evening turned to night turned to dusk, as the lights of the city stayed bright. It was beautiful in ways I couldn’t describe.

Before, seeing images and documentaries of Syria had always been a bit painful, like revisiting memories of a childhood you could never get back. Now, I almost felt giddy with excitement. Maybe next summer I would find this man in the streets of Damascus, buy some cloth from him. Soon, I’d visit the city, walk those streets and smell the flowers and the coffee and the motor oil, hear the pigeons fluttering over bread at my feet and the sound of laughter of people smoking hookah from nearby cafes. Inshallah. I don’t know what I’d see, because I don’t remember the city very well, and all I had to go on was images and my own imagination. But nevertheless, I was excited, so excited. I couldn’t wait to go back, a feeling I couldn’t believe I was having.

Simah and I had warned the others of the documentary to come, “Of Gods and Dogs,” so Amani brought tissues in her purse. We waited outside the next movie theater, where they had some of the clips on loop, for “Of Gods and Dogs.” When we went inside, all sitting in the same row, Aamani handed out a tissue to each person. Together, we watched, and together we grieved, blotting our eyes with the tissues and soaking them through, squeezing our hands together. It was such a new experience for me, to have a group of Syrian friends, to grieve together. The only people I had to grieve with before were my family, my mother who would prefer to forget and ignore her past. I had never met people whose own experiences mirrored mine, others in diaspora and exile. There’s a collectiveness in crying together; sharing tissues strengthens relationships.

Looking back now, I realize I didn’t take in the weight of his words enough this time. They ring truer than ever; in the past week, hundreds of Alawites in Syria have been brutally massacred by soldiers harboring resentment from the genocidal Assad regime and Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite background, despite the Alawite communities on the coast having nothing to do with him. Revenge and hatred is still so real, and it feeds further into this river of blood. I don’t want to see a Syria ravaged by sectarianism, where we all live in fear of each other. My faith has wavered in my country’s future; I fear the fragile peace we cultivated may have been shattered. I’m worried it’s beyond repair. 

But I want, so, so badly, to have faith in my Syria. I want so badly to return home, to put to rest this pulling in my bones. I want to see God’s green orchards of olive trees. It would kill me to rip away that hope again. 

I think of my friends, and how after visiting the museum, we went to a Syrian cafe, insisted on sharing different flavors of mana’eesh with each other, made sure everyone had eaten, read each other’s futures in our coffee grounds and asked each other how we say different things in Arabic. We learned new things about each other, shared stories of our families and discussed Palestine and politics and Noah’s dismay of modern Arabic music. I think of how many of my ancestors before me had done this very thing, how often I had seen family and family friends gesture so fiercely as they talked for hours longer than they intended; the loudest ones in the cafe. It’s all so Arab, so Syrian of us. I love it enormously. Such beautiful, vibrant, such precious and loving and resilient people we are. We have to be; we have no choice. For my sake, we can’t have another choice. If there’s anything I choose to have faith in, it’s this; we have so much pride in loving each other. We’ve lost our country, lost family members, but we can’t ever lose the pride we have in loving each other. This is how we will rebuild our country. Inshallah, I say, although I don’t believe in God. But this is something I’ll believe in. This is my God. This is what I’ll worship.