“To be or not to be”- Maryam Alabbass

                                                                                                                             

                                                                                        Priyanshi

 

 

Maryam Alabbass embodies spirit of two different women. One works in a restaurant, performs duties of a manager with due diligence and caters to her customers and staff with a smile that can thaw coldest of hearts. Whereas, the other sits on a plush Persian carpet, sipping traditional sweet Syrian tea out of a dainty, tiny cup, Smothering her children, nieces and nephews with love.

The grace and fortitude that resides within the core of Alabbass is radiated through her aura. She walks briskly from her restaurant to her home to release every worry clouding her head before she meets her children. She’s a warrior-mother. Women are believed to be emotional, vulnerable and delicate but when that women becomes a mother her fragility transforms into ferocity to protect her children. That’s the closest description of fierce love Alabbass carry for her children and family.

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Alabbass household booms with beautiful chaos of giggles, chatter, banter and unsurmountable love. Maryam lives with her mother and 2 children in a quaint house in Gosforth but her living room is always filled with family members that often visit them. When asked about her life Maryam recounts various anecdotes of her two children, her brothers, her sisters and mother, even her life in Syria from the back of her hand. Her own life and purpose are so beautifully intertwined with that of her family that it is difficult to tell the two apart. Alabbass is a dreamer. She dreams of a beautiful future for her children. She wants to provide them with the best education, comfort and opportunities life has to offer. She proudly says that, “Both my children are learning Karate”. He son and daughter study in an English school and they attend Arabic classes on the weekend because Alabbass doesn’t want them to forget their roots. She was a teacher in a school in Syria and she dreams to become a professor here.

Her family chatters boisterously in Arabic. Her children fill her with what they studied at school and she listen to them with undivided attention. Alabbass is a single parent but with support of her entire family she has managed to raise her kids without the feeling of loss for a father figure.

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“To be or not to be”, Alabbass makes this statement with the conviction a Shakespearean artist could not muster. This statement resonates the dilemma of her life. The dilemma of accepting a life lost in Syria. The dilemma of the unknown future. The dilemma of calling the UK her home. Her home still lies in the heart of Daraa, Syria, within the fragrance of Jasmine and roses in her garden, the faint beauty and greenery of the city and the neighbours helping each other like a cordial family. “I thought I could never live here”, says Alabbass recounting her initial days in the UK when she was feeling excruciatingly homesick. She candidly adds that, “I thought I was from the earth and people here were from the mars. I was normal, but they were abnormal for me”. The city seemed like a foreign land to her but now her confident strides in the streets of Newcastle marks the transformation of a woman who saw destruction and like a phoenix rose from the ashes.

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Her eyes closes, like withholding the deepest of pain when she talks about the war and corruption that ruined Syria. She traveled with her children and rest of the family to escape and salvage their lives on a dingy ship manned by smugglers. Every breath she took felt like it could be the last she would ever take. So, she is grateful for the second chance at life God has bestowed upon her and her family. She voices her insecurities about being the “other” by saying, “I wore a hijab. I thought people will look at me differently and they will never accept me”. But the North of England known for its people with cold hands and warm hearts accepted her and her family with open arms. She never faced any racism. The people around her helped her a lot. Newcastle gave her everything she could ask for, but her heart still resides in her two-storey house in Daraa. When asked “If Newcastle is home now?”, She dejectedly answers, “Yes… It is”. As if saying it is where I live now. Some say home is where the heart is but how does a heart reach for a home that now lies in the of ruins Syria.