Je viens d’Alep, itinéraire d’un réfugié ordinaire by Joude Jassouma, Laurence de Cambronne (review)

Joude Jassouma’s Je viens d’Alep, itinéraire d’un réfugié ordinaire (I Come from Aleppo, Itinerary of an Ordinary Refugee), coauthored by Laurence de Cambronne, is the first narrative recounting the migration of an undocumented Syrian emigrating to France as a result of severe political crises in Syria during the regime of Bachar al-Assad, president and commander-in-chief of the Syrian Armed Forces. In 2016, owing to the civil war in Syria that had erupted five years earlier, Jassouma, his wife, and his daughter were among some twenty-five thousand undocumented Syrians who made irregular border crossings into the European Union following the eastern Mediterranean route, the most traveled sea route to mainland Greece. Jassouma’s flight from Syria began in June 2015, when he left Aleppo alone, entered Turkey illegally, and traveled by bus to Istanbul, where his wife and daughter joined him three months later. Because of a lack of professional opportunities in Istanbul, Jassouma, Aya, and Zaine began their migration to Western Europe. In February 2016, they reached the coastal town of Didim, Turkey, and traveled in an inflatable boat across the Aegean Sea to the Greek Isle of Farmakonisi. They were then transferred by Greek authorities to a refugee camp on the island of Leros, where they undertook initial migrant documenting, and arrived in Athens on March 7, 2016. After three months of additional refugee processing, in June 2016 the three members of the Jassouma family were placed in Martigné-Ferchaud, a rural village of twenty-five hundred inhabitants in Brittany, France, as part of the European Union’s new migrant relocation and resettlement program. There they applied for permanent asylum in that country.

Readers will discover that Je viens d’Alep is much more than the migrant itinerary announced in the title: it is a complex, multifaceted narrative encompassing manifold genres. Jassouma’s narrative, generally organized chronologically, is a sort of memoir in which he recounts important life events taking place from childhood, through adolescence, and into adulthood. He describes his work in the clothing manufacturing industry and electronics repair and explains that his middle school education included compulsory lessons in military history aimed at indoctrinating Syrian youth into an anti-Israeli—and anti-Western— ideology. Having earned baccalauréats in electronics and literature, he pursued university degree in literature at the University of Aleppo, where, during an exchange program at the University of Clermont–Ferrand, France, he noted the social and political freedoms among students there, which contrasted greatly with life in Syria. There he also met the woman he would later marry. His knowledge of French additionally allowed him to earn money by teaching French at public and private schools. Jassouma’s narrative thus also exhibits the characteristics of a Bildungsroman, as he reveals his intellectual, social, and professional development while gaining crucial life experiences that prepare him for a productive future in lands outside of Western Asia.

Jassouma’s references to some thirty works French literature portraying diverse dimensions of the human experience on both personal and general levels will be particularly stimulating to readers well versed in the field. Of particular note are Hugo’s Les Misérables (1762) and Zola’s Germinal (1894), which portray class struggles and social upheaval, and two French Bildungsromans whose heroes’ experiences parallel, in a certain sense, Jassouma’s development from adolescence to adulthood: Julien Sorel in Stendahl’s Le Rouge et le Noir (1830) and Frédéric Moreau in Flaubert’s L’Education sentimentale (1869). He cites the importance of Vercors’s Le Silence de la mer (1941–42), Éluard’s Liberté (1942/1945), and Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince (1943), works set in the atmosphere of Western Europe during World War II, which are more explicitly related to the contemporary political crisis in Syria. By referring to the works of Rousseau...