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This slim novella of only 180 pages seems like a kind of miracle to me.  It’s not the first book from Syria that I’ve read: that was Shatila Stories sent to me by Kim from Reading Matters and it was special because it was a collaborative writing project set up to give voice to Syrian refugees in the sprawling Shatila refugee camp in Beirut.  But Death is Hard Work is by an author living in Damascus, a city which has been a war zone since 2012.  It is Khalifa’s fifth novel, and the second to be written since the civil war.  And somehow, despite having his books banned by the Syrian government, he has been able to keep writing them, even though No Knives in the Kitchen of this City (2013, translated into English 2016) was openly critical of the Syrian regime.  And if you didn’t know already how the regime deals with dissidents, you will by the end of this short book.

The plot is deceptively simple.  It’s about an event which is an everyday occurrence in the everyday cities of the west.  An eldest son undertakes to fulfil the last wish of his dying father, that is, to be buried beside his sister in the family plot in his hometown near Aleppo.  It’s only a couple of hours away from Damascus. But it is not a simple wish because his hometown is one where protests erupted against the regime, and anyone and everyone who comes from there is regarded as a troublemaker whether they are activists or not.  It has taken Bolbol years to overcome this stigma and he has been living in a kind of paralysis to stay under the radar.  To travel across a landscape dotted with checkpoints where he must produce his identity card which names his origin is fraught with peril.  Because, as we see, there are no rules.  Combatants on both sides can detain, imprison, torture or execute anyone at any time. And his father Abdel Latif is a troublemaker even in death.  In Syria, even helping the rebel wounded can get you summarily executed by the regime.  And father has been doing just that in another rebel town…

Bolbol makes the journey with his siblings, Hussein and Fatima.  Khalifa has constructed his plot around an event which usually brings a family together, but the death of their parent does nothing to bring these three together.  They are metaphors for the intractable hatreds in Syria, and vivid incarnations of how civil wars tear families apart.

It was Wikipedia which alerted me to the significance of Hussein mindlessly quoting dogma.  Khalifa uses this character to exemplify the theme of his 2006 novel In Praise of Hatred (Madih al-karahiya, translated into English 2013), which was a protest against the suffering [the Syrian people] have endured as a result of the religious and political dogmas that have tried to negate their ten-thousand-year civilisation. (Wikipedia, viewed 25/3/19).

Since childhood, Hussein had been in the habit of memorising entire pages of cheap almanacs published by Islamic philanthropic organisations, containing famous sayings, aphorisms, verses from the Qu’ran, and prophetic Hadith, and he used them in everyday speech to give his audience the impression of his being well read. (p.11)

Because he can’t think for himself, Hussein flounders in situations where this dogma doesn’t apply.  Bolbol, who doesn’t believe in anything anymore, is stuck in his fatalistic stasis, deferring to his younger brother’s misdirected energy.  And Fatima, who spends most of her time crying and being ordered about, represents the way women have been unable to achieve any autonomy.  While the rest of the world is moving on and women have become independent contributors to the societies they live in, the Syrian women of Khalifa’s novel still have nothing to do but cook for their menfolk and lay them out when they die.  And Fatima fails even at that.  The journey with the putrefying corpse takes days and there is nothing she can do to mask the smell, so nobody wants to eat the sandwiches she has made.

It probably sounds like depressing reading, but there is an absurdist flair in the plot and characterisation which mitigates it.  Like many a road movie, Death is Hard Work becomes an epic quest which is simultaneously heartbreaking and funny, and each checkpoint brings tension to the narrative.  As they leave Damascus the checkpoints are manned by regime soldiers who are agents for a vast bureaucracy of surveillance.  They are well-armed, officious, and confident about the extent of their power.  In the no-man’s land between Damascus and Aleppo the checkpoints are an alarmingly unknown quantity, but as they come closer to their ancestral town, they are met by people who regard them as brothers in adversity.  But their welcome is deceptive, because if Bolbol wants to return to his stagnant life in Damascus, then his contact with these rebels is perilous – even though it has been for the ultimate innocent purpose, burying a parent in his family plot.

And even Bolbol’s children will bear the burden:

In this country, people like to say, “The page doesn’t turn after death”; the dead pass on their actions and attributes to their children and through them to their grandchildren.  Everything you do is closely observed, and your official records may as well be locked behind an iron wall: impossible for any civilian to read or alter. (p. 130)

Highly recommended.

Author: Khaled Khalifa
Title: Death is Hard Work (Al-mawt ‘amal shaq, first published 2016) 
Translated from the Arabic by Leri Price
Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2019, 180 pages
ISBN: 9780571346042
Review copy courtesy of Allen & Unwin

Available from all good bookshops (RRP $27.99AUD) and from Fishpond where it is much less than that: Death Is Hard Work.