Stories of Migration and Refuge: Seeking to Understand the Syrian Civil War through YAL

Julianna Lopez Kershen is an Assistant Professor at the Jeannine Rainbolt College of Education at the University of Oklahoma in the Instructional Leadership and Academic Curriculum department. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on the topics of English language arts and literacy education, instructional improvement, and curriculum studies. Julianna has the privilege of working with amazing students and higher ed and P-12 colleagues who inspire her to stand resolute as an advocate for the best educational opportunities for all children, everyday, everywhere.

Stories of Migration and Refuge: Seeking to Understand the Syrian Civil War through YAL by Julianna Kershen

In early January 2025, the Syrian capital city of Damascus started to feel like it might once again become a city where residents could live freely. Since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011, the world has watched the horrors enacted by then President Bashar al-Assad against his own people. Utilizing corruption, secret police, unlawful detentions, chemical weapons, torture, murder, and disappearances, al-Assad cultivated a culture of terror amongst Syrians, many of whom fled their country in subsequent years. Syrians sought refuge in Jordan and Lebanon. They fled to Iraq, Egypt, and Germany. They crossed the border to Turkey, which still hosts the largest number of Syrian refugees, more than 3 million.

​Writing in an 01/26/25 New York Times opinion essay, author Alia Malek reflected on the Syrian revolution of 2011 and the events of the last 14 years, giving witness to Syrians displaced, persecuted, and yet bravely, constantly seeking to tell the story of their lives, homes, and country. Malek calls us to action: “Was it worth it? What were we supposed to have learned from all that had happened, from all that had transpired between us?” Malek puts her questions forward to fellow Syrians, but I suggest we might all do well to consider her inquiry, especially as we stand at the precipice of 2025 and look out on an evolving landscape, the humanity, beauty, riches, and potential of which depends, to some extent, on the eye of the beholder.

As ELA teachers we are charged to attend to the stories people tell. As collectors, curators, and resource centers of stories we must not shy away from teaching controversial topics, of sharing stories of making war and seeking peace. Where can we look for stories of Syrian experience?

Jasmine Warga’s verse novel Other Words for Home was celebrated as a Newberry Honor book in 2020. This gorgeous book is lush with sensory language that places the reader directly in Jude’s life. Jude’s narration tells of her brother’s disappearance during the revolution, of fleeing her home in Syria, and seeking asylum and refuge in the United States with her pregnant mother. Warga’s choice to tell Jude’s story in verse facilitates embodied reading. We hear the songs Jude sings with her best friend Fatima before the civil war. We smell the Syrian coffee in the Middle Eastern restaurant she discovers near her new home in the U.S. We feel the softness of the bed as she lays next to her mother. Just as poetry directly connects readers to embodiment through figurative language and rhetorical devices, so too, does Warga’s verse novel reconfigure storytelling to forward the sensory as conduit for the story. ​

From Part II. Arriving, Chapter III, p. 66

We are lucky.
            I know this because Mama tells me over
            and over again
            as we walk down the narrow hall
            toward baggage claim.
​

            Mazzozenn, Mama whispers under her                        breath.
            And I know she is referring to the fact
            that our papers worked,
            that we are not stuck in that line,
            that we were not sent back.


            It is strange to feel so lucky
           for something that is making my heart                           feel so sad.    

Zoulfa Katouh’s beautiful novel As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow tells the story of Salama Kassab a seventeen-year-old pharmacy student in Homs, Syria when, “the Arab Spring sparked across the region, Syria grabbed the hope awakening in the masses and called for freedom. The dictatorship responded by unleashing hell.” (p. 3). Now, during the civil war, Salama volunteers at a hospital. Salama shares the day-to-day horrors of living in a war-torn community, while at the same time reminding readers of youthful optimism in the loyalty of sisters, the sweetness of first love, and the beauty one can find in the strength and bravery of the people around them. Salama plans to flee with her remaining family yet is conflicted. She tells us, “My voice breaks and tears drip on the floor beside my feet as a horrible realization dawns on me. I may escape from Syria. My feet could touch European shores, the waves of the sea lapping against my shivering legs and the salt they are coating my lips. I would be safer. But I won't have survived.”

Katouh captures the complexity of how one might decide to stay even when they have the opportunity to go in the decisions of the character Kenan. When Salama and Keenan discuss that he could leave with his younger siblings, but he chooses to stay, he tells her: “This is my country. If I run away--if I don't defend it, then who will?” Salama turns to him and implores: “We're talking about your siblings lives” “He swallows hard. ‘And I'm talking about my country. About the freedom I'm so rightly owed. I'm talking about burying Mama and Baba and telling Lama they'll never come back home. How—'  His voice breaks. ‘How do I leave that? When for the first time in my whole life I'm breathing free Syrian air?’” And thus, Katouh redefines bravery and belief, she challenges the reader to witness fighting for the potential of democracy and for fighting against tyranny.

Atia Abawi’s inspiring novel A Land of Permanent Goodbyes centers the stories of Tareq and his family as they Syria, first to Turkey, then to Greece. Complementing the novels of Warga and Katouh, Abawi’s book widens our perspective to that of a coming-of-age Syrian boy, as the challenges he faces are in many ways gendered, just as Jude and Salama face situations marked as unique to girls. Abawi’s novel soars stylistically as well, as they craft a novel narrated by Destiny to bring the reader close to the global refugee crisis. Early in the novel Tareq flees Raqqa to arrive legally in Turkey, the rest then accounting the journeys of seeking refuge from place to place.

Abawi’s Destiny begins the novel:
​
“One things I ask--please stop condemning me or giving me credit for how, when or where we meet. That is not up to me; it has never been up to me. I just show up when it is time--and that moment will always arrive.

 So yes, you were born to die. But in between, you are meant to live. If we run into each other prematurely, it's not because of my negligence. And often not because of yours.
​
Your world controls me; I do not control you.
​
I am Destiny.” (p. 3)

At the time of the Arab Spring movement I was finishing doctoral studies and in a heady state of big ideas and techno-optimism. Watching Syrians and take to the streets to advocate and agitate for democratic change was inspiring. Seeing everyday people take up social media platforms as civic tools felt hopeful. But the horrors occurring in Syria compounded. Civic tools were no match for a tyrannous state, one willing to fire on protestors, burn homes, and execute children. Religious divisions sharpened. Assad’s regime overpowered any resistance. Jihadists from many places came to Syria to fight Assad. From the safety of the United States, I watched events unfolding over years, trying to understand, yet confused by a complicated geo-political history unknown to me.

​My country’s complicated involvement in military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq made disentangling the Syrian civil war difficult. What I did understand was the hurt of the people. What I could do was educate myself and the people around me about the plight of Syrians. And, more broadly, I knew I needed a deeper understanding of international and American systems of asylum, refuge, and immigration. In 2016 I wrote a short article on bringing the questions of migration and refuge into the secondary ELA classroom. Nine years later, I watched in late December as an armed rebel alliance entered Damascus, overthrowing the Assad regime, and thus far, seeking an orderly transition to power. 

Almost fifteen years have passed since the Syrian civil war began. Three American Presidents have stood watch over the Middle East’s shifting alliances, continued conflicts, and growth of human migration resulting from wars, climate disasters, and an innate human desire to want something better for your children. In this time, too, American troops left Afghanistan, a tumultuous close to the twenty-year conflict (2001-2021). Conflict in Yemen escalated, violence between Israel and HAMAS exploded into war. Russia invaded Ukraine, and war continues there each day.

​Many other zones of conflict continue to coalesce and erupt. Violence and suppression in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in Sudan, and China’s repression of the Uyghur peoples – all these people, all these children calling out for us to look, to learn their stories, to witness their lives. And yet, I think we are looking away. We are weary. United States policy appears to be leaning more nationalistic and isolationist. In my country I fear a diminishment of the potential to use our civic tools, our rights to speak, to worship, to organize, petition, seek redress, vote, and legislate. The feelings of 2011, that social media could be a force for good has gone by the wayside, as wealth dominates corporate policy and practice, as what might be civic tools are corrupted by continuing onslaughts of mis/disinformation, distortion, corruption, and now the use of generative AI to unleash exponential reproduction and reification of false and disingenuous ideas that echo in the chambers of our media feeds.

Let us go back to books. I am rereading Jude’s story again, the lilting verse of Jasmine Warga helping me to understand the human experience of journey, when families seek safety from war. Jude, Tareq, and Salama remind me that home is always with/in us. These books teach me that homes can be made; homes can be built from the people we care about and those who care about us. We can go to books to seek multiple ways of living and knowing, to develop our abilities to engage in empathetic perspective-taking, to begin to know what we don’t know so that we can open our eyes, to listen, and witness. 

Children’s and YA literature to explore about Syrian experiences

Abawi, A. (2018). A land of permanent goodbyes. Penguin Books/Penguin Teen.
Brown, D. (2018). The unwanted. Stories of the Syrian refugees. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Katouh, Z. (2022). As long as the lemon trees grow. Little, Brown.
Latham, I., & Shamsi-Basha, K. (2020). The cat man of Aleppo. (Y. Shimizu, Illus.). G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
Nayeri, D. (2022). The waiting place. (A. B. Miralpeix, Illus.). Candlewick Press.
Warga, J. (2019). Other words for home. Balzer & Bray/HarperCollings Childrens.