After being forced to leave Lebanon as the Israeli army intensely bombed Beirut where we had settled a year earlier; after yet another forced displacement, my husband started to long even more for going back home to Syria. It was October 2024 and when he told me about his dream to buy a house in his hometown of Daraa, I wondered aloud who would ever live in this house since we might not be able to access the country until our late fifties! Yet, a couple of months after this conversation, on December 8, 2024, the Assad regime fell and it all changed.
What does it mean to return home after a defeated revolution and a decade of war? What does it mean to regain hope in a (revolutionary) future and to end a forced exile one did not think might end before one’s lifetime? But also, what does it mean to do ethnographic work in the context of extreme political violence?
Going back home