February 5, 2024
As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow, by Zoulfa Katouh
It is impossible to read As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow—the debut by YA author Zoulfa Katouh, a 2023 CCBC book award-winner, an OLA White Pine nominee, and a finalist for the 2023 Governor’s General Awards—and not think about what’s happening right now in Gaza. Set over a decade ago in the city of Homs, during Syrian Civil War, the novel is about Salama, who—by virtue of having completed a year of pharmacy school—has stepped up to volunteer at a local hospital, removing shrapnel from people’s bodies, performing amputations without anaesthetic, saving whatever lives she can manage to save, which will never be enough, because she can’t save all of them.
Salama welcomes the distraction of her work at the hospital, which at least feels useful, and takes her mind away from not only the existential threat of death by bombs or snipers at any time, but also the figure of Khawf, an embodiment of her PTSD since the death of her mother and her father and brother’s capture by government forces. But she also feels responsible for her pregnant sister-in-law, who is also her oldest friend, and has not forgotten the promise she’d made to her brother to keep Layla safe, and she is trying to secure passage for her and Layla to make the journey across the Mediterranean Sea for asylum in Europe, though the journey is fraught with risk and Salama is ambivalent about leaving Syria behind, and abandoning the revolutionary cause that had inspired uprisings throughout her homeland.
Woven into this story—almost impossibly, and so gorgeously—is a beautiful love story, as well as a brilliant ode to the transportive powers of imagination in general and the works of Hayao Miyazaki specifically, works that have shown how love and magic are possible in the most unlikely places.
And I do not want to gloss over the book’s specificity, in terms of place and story—this novel is a powerful ode to Syrian culture, a love letter to the place itself, and to the possibility of Syrian emigrants one day returning to the freedom that so many have rallied, fought, and died for.
But it is also such an urgent call for the necessity of a ceasefire in Gaza right now, a testament to the suffering through which so many people are living…and dying. A few weeks ago, I read the words of a doctor in Gaza who’d amputated his own child’s leg on his kitchen table, and I just fell to pieces imagining being in such a situation myself: my child, my table. What’s the difference between him and me? What’s the difference between *this*—caring for children who are victims of chemical attacks, patients whose homes have been reduced to rubble, with babies left to die in their incubators because there are not arms enough to carry them all when the hospital has moments to evacuate before the building is bombed—and that one? This novel is a testament to the absurdity of there being any excuse for human beings to have to live this way, for any person to be so dehumanized that such depravity and barbarism is somehow justified. (Our current moment in which migrants are being vilified at border crossings around the world makes Salama’s story doubly, and even more tragically resonant.)
“If we weren’t in such a dire situation, this place would be beautiful. The blackness stretches out in front of us, with the moon casting his silvery glimmer, dimming the light of the stars nearby. It’s the same sky other people see in their countries. But while we watch it here, hiding, not knowing if our next breath is our last, others sleep safely in their beds, bidding the moon a peaceful good night.”
