Colin Sheridan: A homecoming like no other for Syrians

It being an ad for the ESB, it took artistic licence by depicting an Irish home with every electrical appliance on full blast all at once, immersion, tumble dryer, electric blankets. 

For those of us who lived through that decade, we can appreciate this was a wild fiction. 

No house ever had a dryer and an electric blanket on simultaneously, but even in its fantasy it nailed the essence of something so many long for, and that longing only amplifies at Christmas. 

The longing for home.

The strange thing is, I remember that ad affecting me as a kid even though I’d never left home. 

I was experiencing a kind of dyslexic nostalgia for something that was years away from happening for me. 

I was an eight-year-old, what did I know about coming home from college? 

Nothing, obviously, but I guess I understood the significance of the ritual of a father and son in a car together driving home in a content silence. Of bread being baked and broken together. Of the warm embrace of a happy home.

I think of that ad every Christmas, but its memory arrived earlier this year when I spoke to a friend of mine, I knew in Beirut who suddenly and unexpectedly is experiencing his own sort of homecoming this Christmas, albeit one far more profound.

Asser Khattab was one of over a million Syrians in Lebanon, displaced by a brutality of a civil war and the despotic Basher Al Assad regime. 

Asser would sit at his perch in Aaliya’s Books two floors below my apartment in Gemayzee and diligently work as a journalist every day. 

We had mutual friends and interests. 

Supremely calm and quietly spoken, he spoke little of his personal circumstances, only he doubted he would ever see his home again.

I spent two Christmas in Beirut and loved every minute of both. 

The difference between Asser and I was, my exile was by choice. His was not.

The other side of the bar from where he worked was Ali and Jihad, brothers who worked in Aaliya’s for years. 

Like Asser, they too were from Syria, and like Asser, home to them was someplace they doubted they’d ever see again. 

Their good nature belied the cruelness of their circumstances. 

They were invested in the business and were proudly Syrian in a city — Beirut — that was often unwelcoming to its guests.

Asser moved to France before I left Lebanon as an asylum seeker. 

Last week, he wrote poignantly in the Financial Times about breaking up with Syria in his heart since he reached Paris, leaving social media, drifting from old friends to such an extent that they started to see him as — as he put it — “someone, having achieved a luxurious European life, forgot who I am and where I came from.”

Knowing him, I understand he forgot neither, but it was clear from the words he wrote that there was much guilt woven into the relief the distance from his Aleppo home afforded him.

That all changed two weeks ago, as Assad fled, and Damascus was freed. 

Whatever scepticism I ignorantly felt about the immediate future of Syria evaporated with hearing Asser’s voice. 

Pure joy. A kind my privileged ears had not heard before.

Eight years in exile, he can go home again. So can Jihad and Ali. So can millions more.

The eight years of Asser’s exile coincided with the eight years of life for the aforementioned Aaliya’s books in Beirut. 

For every single day of its existence, it gave cultural refuge to thousands of Lebanese, Syrians, Irish, Americans. Everybody. 

The most unpretentious establishment I ever set foot in, and a second home to so many of us who were lucky enough live in that beautiful, broken city.

Great books, better wine, terrible jazz, it was a place unlike any other. It has closed its doors for the very last time, and with typical magnanimity, it chose not to wallow in the self-pity of its demise, but rather celebrate the sudden potential of so many of the Syrian people like Asser, Ali and Jihad, who had sat either side of its beautiful bar, and dreamt of returning home.

This Christmas, they can. 

Like the college kid in the ESB ad, it will be a homecoming unlike any other.