Cry Out with a Woman’s Voice: Love, Resistance, and the Erotic Verse of Syria’s National Poet

When my grandmother’s sister was killed, my grandmother inherited her sister’s identity.

Born in Saidnaya, Syria, in 1926, my grandmother entered the world three years after the French Mandate—the period of French rule after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire with World War I—went into effect. A mountain town roughly 20 miles north of Damascus, Saidnaya is one of the Christian-majority areas of the country (many biblical scholars consider it to be the site where Cain killed Abel). At the beginning of the 20th century, it was one of the many sites where Ottoman forces were killing Christians en masse. At the time, my grandmother’s parents had been on a waiting list to get out of the country with their two daughters, Mary and Ossin. If there were any changes to the names on the list, they would need to start the process over.

And then my great-grandmother became pregnant for a third time. This could have meant disaster for the family, but by coincidence Mary died in an attack on their farm shortly before my grandmother was born. So they gave my grandmother the name Mary, and kept their place on the