As Long As The Lemon Trees Grow (Zoulfa Katouh)- A coming of age love story in darkness and despair

As Long As The Lemon Trees Grow is part autobiographical, part journalistic, part fiction and part retelling of true events. But it is wholly heart and pain and desperation. It is about the will to live, the will to escape and the will to save those you love. It is a coming of age love story, but in a cruel world that has taken away everything from you, that threatens your existence every minute and that forces your mind to imagine things that don't exist, or else how would you get the will to live. The haunting title is what drew me to pick this up - it has a lyrical lilt to it that hints of a promise made to oneself in the dark and the desire to hold on to hope even when everything around you burns. 

Salama is just 18 and studying to be a Pharmacist in Syria, when the revolution breaks and her city Homs is the centre of the rebellion that has to be crushed by dictatorial forces in the most cruel and inhuman ways imaginable. She loses her entire family and is left alone, trying to fend for herself and her pregnant sister-in-law (who is also her best friend). From a mere teenager and a student of pharmacology trying to cram for exams, hang out with friends and pursue a hobby about medicinal plants, she is thrown into a life where she is working round the clock with patients, many of them children, who need amputations and operations sustained in bomb blasts and sniper attacks (many times without anesthesia). In all this, she meets Kenan and his young siblings and realizes that in a "might life" she would have been his betrothed. In the turmoil, young love blooms while Salama also tries to figure out ways of escaping the hell that her beloved country has become, and be alive in a strange and foreign land. The journey is treacherous and she may not even make it, but staying back is certain death or worse. And she has the promise made to her brother to fulfill which Khauf, part alter ego, part survival instinct, her Hyde to her Dr. Jekyll, never lets her forget. 

Katouh tells a story about the scars on the body, mind, conscience and soul that a war like the Syrian war leaves. The ways in which PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorders) manifests, the escape that the mind seeks and the tricks it can play, the choices one has to make between what one loves and yet has to leave behind just to stay alive, between duty and survival, between what is right and what is necessary......there is no relief. The choice is between possible death and sure death - and you aren't always sure which is which. The writing style is tender and fresh and tugs at the heart in many places. Sample this:

"Grief isn't constant. It wavers, tugging and letting go like the waves on the sea."  

 
"Time is the best medicine to turn our bleeding wounds to scars, and our bodies might forget the trauma, our eyes might learn to see colours as they should be seen, but that cure doesn't extend to our souls"

"I'm grieving a boy I never knew, but who I let down"

"His name seems familiar, like I heard it in a dream once"

"Every lemon will bring forth a child and the lemons will never die out."

On the flip side, some parts stretch out. The parts in Canada were not necessary to the story. Even the epilogue stretches it out a bit much. A love story set in times of grief and survival against odds should end where the reader still has a lump in the throat and not get into the zone of happily ever after.

All in all, for a first from a young writer, this  not have been better.