Taking a migrant boat from Egypt to Europe was “the only option” open to Syrian-Irish writer Suad Aldarra and her Palestinian husband, until she received a job offer from Ireland, she revealed at the weekend.
The Dublin-based data scientist, who is an Irish citizen, told an audience at the Iron Mountain Literature Festival in Co Leitrim that although “it’s expensive, it’s inhuman, it’s risky”, the couple thought they had no alternative.
Explaining that she had resisted leaving Syria for two years after war broke out, she said she and her husband eventually moved to Egypt, but following a military coup there, Syrians were no longer welcome.
The couple, both software engineers, kept applying for visas but received multiple rejections.
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In conversation with festival director Vincent Woods who asked how, given that thousands drown in the Mediterranean every year, she could even consider the terrible risk of taking such a journey, she said it was the only option.
Ms Aldarra whose 2022 memoir I Don’t Want to Talk about Home was shortlisted for the An Post Irish Book Awards, said some people seemed to think that people from Syria or other war-torn countries “are willingly doing this for, I don’t know, to get benefits or jobs or whatever the stereotypes are around refugees”.
She said while it was considered illegal, “there is no legal way to come to Europe”.
“We can’t stay in Egypt, we cannot go back to Syria. The only way out was the boat,” she said, stressing that the job offer was “something really rare that happened” and was a privilege which saved her from taking a boat.
Ms Aldarra was joined by Zak Moradi, the Kurdish hurling All-Ireland medallist, whose memoir Life begins in Leitrim documents his family’s journey from a refugee camp in Iraq to Carrick-on-Shannon, as well as French-based Irish writer Mary Byrne, for a discussion on immigration policy and the complexities surrounding displacement.
Having herself been born in Saudi Arabia, Ms Aldarra said her husband was born in Syria but was always a refugee in that country, having a Palestinian passport, as his grandparents had to leave Palestine in 1948. Her memoir documents how her father rejected her husband because he was Palestinian.
“It is ironic now how Syrians are the hugest population of refugees but back then they were treating others as refugees, as second-class citizens,” she said.
She said that before arriving in Ireland, the only thing she knew about the country was through Cecelia Ahern’s novels. “I used to read a lot of Cecilia Ahern. That was the only thing I knew about Ireland through her books,” she said.
She agreed that after she moved to Ireland and away from her family, she found it hard to break away from the typical Muslim dress code and to stop wearing a headscarf but she did.
“I wanted to find my own identity.” She said the headscarf “becomes like a skin. Without it there is this feeling of being naked.”
Mr Moradi who said his own mother wears a headscarf, believes it should be banned at primary and secondary schools and at college campuses.
He said in Ireland he sees five-year-old girls wearing headscarves going to school because their parents are forcing them to wear it. “But that girl stands out.
“The problem is people are saying you cannot criticise religion. In Ireland everybody criticises the Catholic Church because of freedom and democracy.”
