Suad Aldarra

Suad Aldarra is a Syrian-Irish writer and data scientist. She was selected as the Common Currency writer in residence for Cuirt International Festival and has been on panels at many different literary festivals throughout Ireland, including at the Dalkey Book Festival, and most recently in April 2024, at the Cork World Book Festival. Her debut memoir, I Don’t Want to Talk About Home was published by Penguin in 2022, and was shortlisted for the ‘An Post Irish Biography of the Year’ Award. 

‘So I wanted to bring Syria back to life, the Syria that I fell in love with before war. And that’s what I wanted to do. That’s what I did in the book. Like I talk about food, my grandma’s cooking, the music, scenery, the literature, the books, the love scenes, the love chapters where I fall in love with my husband. And I wanted to bring that to life. So in the book, the war is just a small chapter of it, but for me, the most important thing was life before war and after.’ 

‘We have more in common than the media tries to tell us that we are different, that we are too weird to fit in this country or any country, or like the refugees and migrants are this species that’s trying to take over. We have so much more in common than that.’

Follow Suad Aldarra here and here, and her website.

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Transcript – Suad Aldarra

Bairbre Flood:  Hi and welcome to Wander, with me Bairbre Flood, and with thanks to the Arts Council of Ireland for their support.

MUSIC 

Suad Aldarra: That’s what I wanted to put in the book, that this message that we have more in common than the media tries to tell us, that we are different. We are too weird to fit in this country or any country, or like the refugees and migrants are this species that’s trying to take over. We have so much more in common than that.

MUSIC 

Bairbre Flood: Suad Aldarra is a Syrian-Irish writer and data scientist.

She was selected as the Common Currency writer in residence for Cuirt International Festival and has been on panels at many different literary festivals throughout Ireland, including at the Dalkey Book Festival, and most recently in April 2024, at the Cork World Book Festival.

Her debut memoir, ‘I Don’t Want to Talk About Home’, was published by Penguin in 2022, and was shortlisted for the ‘An Post Irish Biography of the Year’ Award. 

It’s a beautifully written and utterly honest exploration of identity, family and migration. 

At times, it’s a difficult read, the war in Syria and her escape from there is heartbreaking, especially as we know there’s so many people who’ve experienced this.

But the book is much more than this – it’s an account of her childhood in Saudi Arabia, her family dynamics, especially how the men in the family dictated how things would be. 

It’s about the excitement and joy of her moving back to Syria, connecting with her homeland, meeting her husband. 

Of the confusion of war; her new life in Ireland, and it probably explains better than anything that particular mix of anger, sadness and loneliness –  and relief, hope and growth that many people who seek asylum experience.

This is Suad Aldarra:

I’d started off by asking her if she was sick of going over her story again and again in interviews:

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Suad Aldarra: It’s funny that like the title is called I don’t want to talk about home, but it’s like 300 pages of talking about home! But to be honest like no, because every time I’m doing an interview or a podcast – every time it’s from a different angle and everyone is asking something different. And every time there are questions that make me think again about how I think about a certain area that I wasn’t thinking about before.

So, so far, I’m still not sick of it. So feel free to ask.

Bairbre Flood: One of the things I’m really interested in is how writing in particular helped you process your experiences. And you know, as opposed to therapy, not saying that that’s not great too – therapy or talking to friends – but how writing in particular is such a good way, a good method?

Suad Aldarra: Oh yeah, definitely writing, like the whole idea was to get this off my chest. I was tired of all those stories being hidden inside me. And like, I was keeping busy, one tragedy after the other, but I was just not processing any of those feelings. And I was just keeping busy overworking myself, burning out, breaking small piece after the other until COVID hit.

And I was unemployed. I was a new mom. And I had all that time on my hands and I couldn’t just be busy. I had to face it. All those stories inside me and I tried therapy, but it didn’t help me much. After each session I would feel worse than before because I was just opening up, but I couldn’t get any help. Or the reactions or what to do with this now that I opened up about so yeah, I decided to write and I would put my kid to sleep every night around 7/8 and I would just stay all night.

Not all night, but like four or five hours straight I’d lock the door, sit in a room by myself. Face to face with everything that I was hiding from and if I need to cry or if I need to take a minute, but writing it out like seeing those feelings turn into words and words into sentences and then chapters really helped me process what I’ve been through.

And like I reached a point before writing the book where I just couldn’t communicate with people anymore, like as soon as someone would ask me, how are you doing? Or where are you from? I instantly had that wall in front of me and I couldn’t interact anymore because I was, I knew I was about to enter a very complicated conversation.

But when I opened all those stories out and wrote everything out. I’m not afraid of that question anymore. Like I have the whole, my whole story in a book. Go read it. I’m fine with who I am now. I don’t feel I’m like that complicated. That question, is that too complicated to answer? I’m more comfortable in my own skin, I’m comfortable with my story, because I just let it all out.

I don’t have anything more to hide.

Bairbre Flood: Yeah, yeah. And do you have any advice for other people that are in a similar kind of circumstance, because I know a lot of people who listen to this podcast, particularly coming from different backgrounds and different struggles and a lot of people still within the asylum process.

So I just, do you have anything that you, you know, you’d like to pass on to people?

Suad Aldarra: Definitely, like, I remember at some point I was very angry with the whole process and the politics of being a migrant. Like, I didn’t go through the asylum route. I was, you know, I was lucky to get a visa, a job visa in Ireland, but the experience of being a migrant, being a foreigner, not being able to fit in, not being able to see your family well, the word is displaced, I guess, like that’s what I, I realized at some point that I was called displaced or forced to be displaced.

So this experience left me with a lot of anger. I couldn’t believe that a piece of paper or a passport could stop between me and my family or between like I’ve been missing out on a lot of things whether weddings or funerals or big events because of visas and passports. But I took, like, I remember I, at some point thought, like, what can I do with all that anger that was piling inside of me?

And I read something that said, like, take this anger and see what you are good at and do something with it. So I think that’s what I did with that anger. I put it into words and I was vulnerable and I used this vulnerability and that anger and all that mixed emotions into words because I knew I was good with words.

And I know other people who were in the same place where they used music, for example, to express those feelings and they created such beautiful music around displacement and around home and that feeling of belonging. I know artists as well. I have a friend in Ireland, a Syrian friend who is still in the asylum process and she uses art to draw images.

Beautiful paintings about pictures and images from home and in Ireland, so that mixed world. So use that energy, use, look at what you’re good at, whether it’s music or painting or words or any other kind of hobbies or skills that you have to, I don’t know, to express yourself. It helps. You need to express yourself.

Bairbre Flood: Like the work you did with the tech the, I can’t remember the name of it. The coding place. 

Suad Aldarra: Tech Refugees. 

Bairbre Flood: Yeah. Tech Refugees,yes. 

Suad Aldarra: Yeah. So my project was refugees info. And that was I was trying to analyze the news headlines around migrants and refugees. And I wanted to highlight the issue of xenophobia and hate speech in the news.

I was sick of the stereotypes. It’s around Syria, and every time I say I’m from Syria, I get all kinds of reactions, so I decided to do that project. It’s helped me for a while, like, to feel that I’m doing something, but still, like, I felt the book was the thing that helped me the most. I feel like it reached more people . I feel like art is different than any other form of expression, so I believe in the book more than the tech world.

MUSIC

Suad Aldarra: I have ADHD. So I work on several projects at the same time. And once I get bored with one, I jump to the other. That’s how I function. But I, yeah, I’ve been working on several projects. So I was trying to write about the freedom of movement after I got my Irish citizenship and how that changed my life.

And how that feeling of belonging changed when I got the Irish passport. I’m also trying to dig more into Irish history and the Irish literature world as well and find. Kind of mirroring, mirroring the Irish Civil War with the, with the Syrian Civil War and trying to contrast and compare those two in a book.

So yeah, I have several ideas there. So yeah, we’ll see which book will win.

Bairbre Flood: I look forward to that because you have a beautiful style of writing.

It’s really beautiful. I mean you talk about Syrian poets in the book and I interviewed a guy I think for two podcasts back Amir Darwish was his name, from Aleppo, and one of the poems he read for me was ‘I have to speak of the city’, I think.

Oh, I wrote it down somewhere. I get this right. ‘I feel I should speak of the city’. So it was a poem. A love poem to Aleppo. And it’s a really beautiful poem. And I, I think, yeah, it’s when something traumatic happens a country and everyone just kind of forgets about all the beauty in the culture.

I think that’s another aspect of your book that’s really beautiful that it brings out all the heritage of Syria.

Suad Aldarra: Yeah, so to be honest, that’s one of the things that I wanted to change when I wrote this book. I think the word Syria was in people’s mind, whenever they hear the word Syria, it was connected to war and destruction and camps and boats and all those negative black images.

So I wanted to bring Syria back to life, the Syria that I fell in love with before war. And that’s what I wanted to do. That’s what I did in the book. Like I talk about food, my grandma’s cooking, the music scenery, the, the literature, the books, the and like even the, the love scenes, the love chapters where I, where I fall in love with my husband.

And so I wanted to bring that to life. So in the book, the war is just a small chapter of it, but for me, the most important thing was life before war and after. 

Bairbre Flood: So yeah, actually your husband, he’s such a beautiful character. I know he’s not just a character. He’s a real person, but you know, in my head, he’s a character and he’s such a beautiful character.

And I think as well, I know this is just, This is reality. So you didn’t create this, but it is such a nice antidote to a lot of the stereotypes we get about Middle Eastern men, particularly. And particularly in the last few years, this whole thing about ‘where are the women and, oh, why are they leaving their country,’ you know, just this really horrible.

I mean, if you ask any of them, you know, what would they would do in similar situation? They just have no idea what it’s like.

Suad Aldarra: Thanks for mentioning that. So yeah, I get a lot of messages about my husband. He has a fan base now. I think there was even one review that said they liked his character more than me.

And I like him more than I like myself. So I understand that. But so yeah, I wanted to mention his story because the irony of falling in love with someone who was called refugee in Syria and how that sparked a lot of issues with my father, because that’s how far Syrians were from the word refugee and from being a refugee that they couldn’t accept being married to a refugee.

So my husband for those who didn’t read the book, he’s a Palestinian refugee in Syria. He was like he was a free spirit, open minded since I met him. I was like the closed minded one at first but yeah, I wanted to mention his stories and his sides of the story because yeah, to break those stereotypes that we have.

Bairbre Flood: Particularly how the Palestinian areas were completely destroyed and how Palestinian refugees within Syria were treated even before the war and then when the war broke out, there was an extra layer of prejudice against them.

Suad Aldarra: Yeah. So before the war, they were treated as second level citizens.

Being refugees. And then when the war broke, at some point, like, I think Palestinians got in a complicated situation. whatever side they choose, whether it’s the regime side or the rebellion side, they were always in trouble. So at some point the Palestinian neighborhood in Syria, which is in Damascus, which is called Yarmouk camp was besieged and it suffered a lot.

And many countries will open their doors to Syrians did not open it to Palestinian refugees in Syria. And that was what made our journey out Syria pretty complicated. And that’s why we had to leave at some point because, well, yeah, I remember now when you said the question about where are the women, and why are men coming as refugees.

So to seek asylum, the situation was more dangerous on men. than on women in Syria. He would be stopped at many checkpoints whenever he’s going from work or to home. And at some point, one checkpoint wouldn’t allow him to go to work. He said, like, go back to Palestine. And many men would be dragged to fight and to do this war.

And you at some point, like the war got too complicated that you weren’t sure who you are fighting anymore. It didn’t make sense like it people blame Syrians that they should have stayed and fight the war instead of running away But then like who are you fighting people were fighting their brothers or their like if one family There’s rebellions Like, families were fighting against each other.

The war didn’t make sense, especially after it got more and more complicated with many countries intervening and the war was too complicated to fight. And the small soldiers were the losers. Those were the ones on the ground that were dying for nothing.

So, yeah. He suffered double, I would say, like Palestinians in general in Syria suffered double the misery that Syrian suffered to find a safe place.

Bairbre Flood: Yeah, Palestinians – they’re just, I don’t know, just treated badly everywhere. Like the whole stateless thing that’s still going on. What, 60, 70 years later, it’s just, it’s beyond ridiculous at this stage. 

MUSIC

NARRATION: Just a side note here, sometimes when I’m talking I don’t use the right words and it’s only later when I listen back that I realise I minimised something or didn’t give it the weight it needed. When I say it’s ‘beyond ridiculous’ that Palestinian people are still treated as ‘stateless’, I don’t think it really covers how bad the situation is for Palestinians. And it doesn’t even start to go into why and how their homeland was stolen from them in 1948 by the Zionists. Especially in light of the current genocide in Gaza, I just wanted to make it clear that yes it is ‘beyond ridiculous’, but it’s also cruel and intentional, and part of the entire catastrophe that is the Nakba and everything that has come in the wake of that.

But back to the conversation…

MUSIC

Suad Aldarra: As I said at the beginning, writing about this book and bringing out all those complicated stories inside me made me more comfortable with who I am. And I know that now that is like it will never be. uncomplicated to answer this question.

Where are you from? Or who are you? Not even where I am from. But like, even if I talk about my career, it’s complicated when I say I’m a software engineer, data scientist, but I’m a writer. And at some point I was an intervenor with this refugees are project that I was trying to turn it into a start up. So I wore several hats.

And it matches, actually, when I realize that I have ADHD that I always jump from one thing to the other. I belong to many countries, I belong to many careers and many jobs, so I never stayed in a job more than two years, I think two years and a half. It’s, Yeah, that’s, that’s me and I’m comfortable with that.

I am weird or unique or whatever word is it and I’m fine with it. I think it’s a superpower more than something to be ashamed of or a feeling I’m, I don’t fit in. I try to be around people who have the same feeling that I have, that they also don’t fit the stereotypical career wise or country wise or belonging wise.

So those people help me kind of feel that I’m surrounded by people who feel like me. So I’m not alone in that sense. So yeah, I definitely own it and I enjoy it.

Bairbre Flood: I think that is it. Yeah, being around other people really helps. I think everyone goes through a phase of, or maybe a long phase of trying to fit in to spaces that they’re just never going to fit into and just trying to like, Squeeze themselves into a certain shape to fit in.

And it’s nice when you can find your tribe or at least, you know.

Suad Aldarra: Yes, my tribe, that’s the word. Yeah, yeah.

Bairbre Flood: It’s really good. And you never know who they’re going to be either. Cause it can, people can have connections across all kinds of.

Suad Aldarra: True.

Bairbre Flood: Religious, skin color, the whole…

Suad Aldarra: Yeah. It’s good. I meet people who like live the straightforward life. They always lived like born and raised in Ireland, for example, or they live, they never traveled or they have a, like they, their answer should be easy to say, I like, I’m, I’m Irish. And yeah. full stop. But they still feel somehow they don’t fit in for many other reasons. So we connect whenever I meet someone who feels they don’t fit.

And I think that’s a universal feeling, regardless of your background or your ethnicity feeling you don’t fit and can have many layers. And it’s something that connects people, I guess.

Bairbre Flood: Yeah. Like our identity is not our like, it’s not just our citizenship or our state and our skin color and all these, there’s other things like our, our brains, how our brains work is a huge factor and disabilities and, and all kinds of unseen things that go on, it’s huge.

Like, yeah, I think it now it’s, we’re very aware of the color and the religion and this, the state thing, those are quite well defined in terms of identities. And they’re probably the things we notice first about people, so the most obvious things, but they’re not always. Yeah, like you said, people feel like outsiders their whole life as Irish people going up in a normal little town or whatever.

Suad Aldarra: Yes, yes, definitely. And I get lots of messages from people also from different backgrounds. I love how my book managed to resonate with other people. messages from women in Iran, for example, or Ukrainian women and even like Irish Catholic or ex Catholic previously religious woman.

And I find it fascinating how much we have in common. And that’s what I wanted to put in the book, that this message that we have more in common than the media tries to tell us, that we are different. We are, too weird to fit in this country or any country, or like the refugees and migrants are this species that’s trying to take over.

We have so much more in common than that.

MUSIC

Bairbre Flood: I had a question here actually about, sorry I’m kind of skipping to something, but the humanitarian dinner and I thought that was kind of it was like, I’m not sure what it was for exactly which charity, but it was something in America or maybe in Ireland… 

Suad Aldarra: It was in Ireland actually. 

Bairbre Flood: Ah ok, and there was like a dinner and they showed a film and it was just like, Oh, I don’t know why – there’s lots of things in the book that stick out – but that sticks out really a lot as well… I just wanted to know a bit more about that, how we approach like, because on the one hand, we need to show people the reality to raise funds or to do that kind of thing.

But at the same time, it dehumanizes people. And it’s hard if people like you are in the audience, or even people who aren’t Syrian, but know a lot of Syrian people, and they see this and it’s just very triggering and very upsetting. And then people are just like, watching it and eating their dinner.

It’s like, it’s normalizing human suffering and it’s like, people are not actually connecting with what they’re seeing in front of them. And I find that quite disturbing.

Suad Aldarra: Yeah, I guess the setting was. was weird. Like I understand the need to fundraise and to show those clips with famous people visiting destructive destroyed areas and all of that marketing campaigns.

But yeah, the setting was weird for me and upsetting. It was over dinner and Christmas kind of party. So, you know, the Christmas parties, how it goes with everything Christmasy and like all those celebrations on the side and. Yeah, it was just weird to put that video of my people, or any people if that matters who are suffering, going through anything, any war, to put it in that.

And let’s take a few minutes to change the mood of the party, to feel sad and donate and then go back to drinking and having fun. that was very dystopian, I would say. I just couldn’t stay there for longer. And, yeah, I guess, I think most of the organizations run this way, unfortunately. It’s just a job maybe that they have to do.

But being, yeah, being in the audience was hard to watch. I think they need to have people from those demographics that they are trying to raise money for. Like if they have a couple of Syrian volunteers with them, they would have probably do it differently. So that’s something to take in mind, I guess.

MUSIC

And I know that I, like just by having the option not to go on a boat and getting a job offer to work in Ireland and not going through the asylum route and being able to be economic migrants, all those terms – that’s a privilege. But also at the same time, it dehumanized the people who went on boats or who stayed in camps.

There are a lot of stereotypes around refugees that they are not educated or that they don’t have any skills, which is not completely true, because many of them, they have the money, they have the education, but there was no legal way for people to reach safety. So that’s why they ended up with this, because of all those unfair laws against them.

So they had to go through that route of asylum and being refugees. Many of them are educated. Many of them can’t help, but also because of labor rules and policies and work permits, they can’t work. They can’t do anything. Just to sit and wait. And that of course also triggers all the hate about that they’re not working, they’re just taking our money, that they’re just here for the benefits, which is like not the true story.

They want to work. Nobody wants to sit and not do anything. It kills the people who just have nothing to do. They need to work. And I know that feeling because when COVID hit and I was unemployed I was going crazy because I used work to keep busy and distract me and they need that to feel that they are providing.

Everyone has a different story. And I mentioned in the book, like, it’s not about boats and camps. It’s about that feeling that looking for belonging, that search for belonging and how to build your world after it’s shattered with war.

Bairbre Flood: I also think that there’s an issue with not empowering refugee communities themselves.

So there’s a lot of money and resources that go towards keeping people seeking refuge in a disempowered state. 

Suad Aldarra: They stay on hold. 

Bairbre Flood: Yeah, yeah, on hold. 

Suad Aldarra: Even when my husband joined, he didn’t apply for asylum. Like, he joined on a dependent visa later. And he wasn’t allowed to work.

As a dependent because there was this crazy rule in Ireland. It was stamp three the dependent visa They were not allowed to work. Luckily this changed now. But back then he wasn’t allowed to work and he was like doing a freelancing job as a web developer. He wasn’t allowed to bring money or like to open bank accounts.

So he had to stop all his projects and he just couldn’t get any money. So that was really complicated like they are complicating the situation. Nobody wants to take anyone’s money. Let us work and Yeah, just empower empower them as you said that especially like Syrians they work, like most of them, they would work two or three jobs and they are skilled and they know how to navigate, but they just need the right setting or environment or the tools, just give them the tools and the setting and they would know how to figure things out.

Yeah. But yeah, fortunately all those rules and policies work. stop them from doing that.

Bairbre Flood: Yeah. And I feel that those rules and policies that are coming, it’s coming from a mindset of, a Eurocentric and a feeling that we’re better than and that our way is better than and, and that not understanding the countries that people are coming from as well.

Like there’s, there’s just a lot of ignorance

Suad Aldarra: Definitely, definitely those rules need to be looked at again. Definitely.

Bairbre Flood: Yeah. Hopefully. I do feel like books like yours do change hearts and do change minds and do contribute so much to the conversation. You know, it’s, it’s really important that people read your, like stories like yours and, and really, you know, really engage with us in an emotional and an intellectual way and to put themselves in your shoes.

Suad Aldarra: Yeah, I hope, I hope it reaches those policy makers because I tried, I tried other ways. I tried talking, I tried talking to politicians, but I always ended up with a dead end. So hopefully the book, as you said, when it’s a human story, when it’s a literature story, maybe it reaches different people in different ways.

I think movies as well. Art in general, like, it’s easier to reach people’s hearts. Yeah. So, hopefully, policy makers are listening and reading.

Bairbre Flood: Yeah. I hope so. Come here, was there anything that I didn’t ask you about that you really wanted to say or anything? Was there anything, I don’t know?

Suad Aldarra: No, nothing really.

I think we covered quite a lot. Yeah. And like important aspects. So thanks for having me. I guess. No, I can’t think of anything else.

Bairbre Flood: It was lovely to chat to you Suad. 

Suad Aldarra: Yeah. Likewise. 

Bairbre Flood: Thank you Suad. Thanks so much. 

Suad Aldarra: Bye bye. See ya. 

Bairbre Flood: See ya. Bye.

MUSIC

Bairbre Flood: A massive thanks to Suad Aldarra for such  a great conversation. It was a real pleasure to talk to her.

Her book, ‘I Don’t Want To Talk About Home’ is published by Penguin.  Go and get it if you haven’t already, I really can’t recommend it enough.

Next week my guest is the wonderful Ukrainian poet and performer Olha Matso – so stay tuned for that.

Thank you all for listening.

Thanks to the Arts Council of Ireland for the continued funding and support.

From me Bairbre Flood, bye for now.