A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea is the story of Doaa, a Syrian young woman, and her fiance, Bassem. We learn about Doaa's early happy life in Dara,Syria and her family's fleeing for safety and a better life in Egypt after the start of the war in Syria. Life in Egypt was fine until there was regime change. And that's when the life of Syrian refugees became increasingly hard.
Doaa met Bassam during their time in Egypt. He had been a former Free Syrian Army fighter. It takes time for Bassam to win Doaa's love. And the more time for him to convince her that their happiness lies outside of Egypt. That they need to start a new life in Europe.
This story, written at a pretty basic reading level, is heartbreaking and it really brings to light the thought process of how migrants make the decision to leave home - or leave where they are - to search for a new life somewhere with more hope. In Doaa and Bassem's case, it was Sweden. But I would imagine that the migrants that are coming to our Southern border on a daily basis have gone through much of the same decision making. In a nutshell, no one will take the risks of becoming a migrant if they weren't running away from something pretty terrible. (I think I made a similar observation when I read the novel American Dirt in 2021.)
I didn't realize until I went to add this book to my reading log that it was published in 2017. I read an article the other day about the sinking of a migrant ship off the coast of Greece that took place last week that was rarely in the news. I wish I had bookmarked the article that I read. It compared that tragedy to the tragedy of the imploding Titan submarine that ended the lives of 5 billionaires. That story got nonstop coverage for days over the weekend. Nonstop! The particular article that I read gave little bios of some of the migrants who were lost on this sinking ship. Their stories are so similar to Doaa's. In all these years, nothing has changed. The immigrant situation around the world needs to change. Or the inequalities and horrible situations that so many people find themselves in need to change. Our global society is a mess. This biographical book put those issues into the front of my mind.
P.S. Part of the book club discussion got a little heated as it veered from the plight of Syrian migrants to immigration in general. But as a group we remained civil and walked away from the book club still speaking and looking forward to next month.
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