Contemporary Authors

• Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War One World (New York, NY), 2018

1. Brothers of the gun : a memoir of the Syrian War LCCN 2017058673 Type of material Book Personal name Hisham, Marwan, author. Main title Brothers of the gun : a memoir of the Syrian War / Marwan Hisham and Molly Crabapple ; illustrations by Molly Crabapple. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : One World, [2018] Description x, 300 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm ISBN 9780399590627 CALL NUMBER DS98.72.H57 A3 2018 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• Amazon -

  Marwan Hisham is a Syrian freelance journalist who since 2014 has covered Syria, Iraq, and Turkey. His work has been published in Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The Intercept, and Foreign Policy.

• The Intercept - https://theintercept.com/staff/marwan-hisham/

  Marwan Hisham is a Syrian freelance journalist who started his career in 2014 covering Syria, Iraq and Turkey. His works were published in Vanity Fair, The New York Times and Foreign Policy. He is currently co-writing a war memoir, BROTHERS OF THE GUN, with artist and journalist Molly Crabapple for One World/Random House.

• PEN America - https://pen.org/the-pen-ten-with-marwan-hisham/

  THE PEN TEN WITH MARWAN HISHAM
  By: Lily Philpott
  May 19, 2018
  The PEN Ten is PEN America’s weekly interview series. This week, Public Programs Coordinator Lily Philpott interviews Marwan Hisham, coauthor of Brothers of the Gun, published this month by One World. See Hisham’s coauthor and illustrator, Molly Crabapple, at PEN Out Loud: Writing War with Alexis Okeowo on May 24 at the Strand Book Store.

  1. How does your identity shape your writing? Is there such a thing as “the writer’s identity”?

  In my opinion, a writer’s identity comes from the environment they grew up in, that culminates in their ideas and way of conveying them. Attitude influences writers most. My identity made me skeptical and critical, especially of myself.

  2. In an era of “alternative facts” and “fake news,” how does your writing navigate truth? And what is the relationship between truth and fiction?

  Through skepticism. One has to question themselves every now and then to make sure they don’t get blinded by their own “reality.” In this book, I stick to my personal observations, and I don’t trust them For me, it’s a continuous struggle against my own prejudices. Truth lives longer in time.

  3. Writers are often influenced by the words of others, building up from the foundations others have laid. Where is the line between inspiration and appropriation?

  I think so much of it is about the method. People sometimes are more drawn to writers from other cultures because writers carry their own cultures in their words. I love this cultural melding and interchange because variety is an essential element to beauty. I love every form of fusion between different cultures. Apart from beauty, this fusion achieves the sublime goal of universality. Anything less than fusion is basically stealing that doesn’t add up to much.

  4.“Resistance” is a long-employed term that has come to mean anything from resisting tyranny, to resisting societal norms, to resisting negative urges and bad habits, and so much more. It there anything you are resisting right now? Is your writing involved in that act of resistance?

  Allow me to “think regionally” for now instead of globally. Due to the conflicts we see in the Middle East, and especially in the Arab World that I find myself immersed in, I now have a clearer vision of my fight: social change in our local communities. Seven years ago I was universalist; now I don’t have that luxury. I once believed change must come from top down. Now I think the opposite. We’re suffering the consequences of addressing our problems the wrong way. You must build the individual first then the society, not the other way around. I’m afraid in this regard, we have a long way to go, but it’s the only way.

  5. What do you consider to be the biggest threat to free expression today? Have there been times when your right to free expression has been challenged?

  I think misinformation, which we now see can lead to certain misconceptions and stereotypes, is the greatest threat to freedom of expression. People take many things for granted now and leave only a narrow margin for debate. I mean here a meaningful debate, as opposed to verbal fighting between two or more viewpoints, entrenched in their convictions with no desire to seek rationality or common ground. This is something we see a lot of, unfortunately. As for myself, I grew up in a community that, through a mix of religion and tradition, fights new ideas and opposes speaking freely.

  6. What’s the most daring thing you’ve ever put into words?

  This book: Brothers of the Gun.

  7. Have you ever written something you wish you could take back? What was your course of action?

  On social media, probably when I first started. I started with no depth and little knowledge about what I was trying to convey, but then this is the natural course: We mature with time.

  8. Post, stalk, or shun: What is your relationship to social media as a writer?

  I used to spend hours of my daily life on social media. Now I only keep myself updated with news for a few minutes then sign out. I avoid that toxic habit of arguing aimlessly about things I am not equipped properly to argue about (which is much of the discourse on social media now).

  9. Your memoir of the Syrian war, Brothers of the Gun, was cowritten and illustrated with Molly Crabapple. What was your process like? How did you and Molly communicate and settle on a single vision for the book?

  The idea of making it an illustrated memoir was based, in form and content, on our third collaborated piece from Aleppo that Vanity Fair published. I wrote an essay about a city I came back to see after three years of war and compared it to the city I’d known during university. What wars do to people and cities is a major theme in Brothers of the Gun. I moved to Turkey for it, and Molly gracefully flew maybe a dozen times to Istanbul to further work on it with me. Luckily, I’d already had notes I’d written back in Syria that she liked. These notes formed the backbone of the story.

  10. If you could require the current administration to read any book, what would it be?

  That’s too hard a question. There’s certainly no one single book you can read to completely understand the Syrian tragedy. But there are a group of amazing journalists and writers—Syrians and non-Syrians—who tried successfully to diagnose and describe the situation. For example, Rania Abouzeid’s No Turning Back: Life, Loss, and Hope in Wartime Syria provides a good understanding of the dynamics of the war in Syria. (If you meant any book about any subject, I would say The Handmaid’s Tale!)

• BOMB - https://bombmagazine.org/articles/crabapple-hisham-brothersofthegun/

  There Are No Simple People: An interview with Marwan Hisham and Molly Crabapple by Alia Malek
  The writers on their latest collaboration, Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War.

  Jun 7, 2018
  Interview
  Literature

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  Mollyand Marwan
  Photo courtesy of Molly Crabapple and Marwan Hisham.

  The disaster in Syria has taken on many forms, and no singular experience can define it, except perhaps, heartbreak. Geography is one of the key factors that ultimately determines a Syrian’s experience during this war. Some towns were starved. Others were bombarded (by regime forces, as well as by– amongst others–Russian, American, and French fighter jets). Others yet were taken over by ISIS. The capital, Damascus, remained relatively tranquil while coastal cities like Latakia and Tartous enjoyed a wartime boom. In Brothers of the Gun (One World), Marwan Hisham and his co-author Molly Crabapple, textually and graphically recount Marwan’s experiences in the city of Raqqa, most likely known to Americans as the “capital” of the so-called Islamic State’s Caliphate. The book is a tightly told narrative that is relatively devoid of explication, focusing on the complexities of friendship and brotherhood in war, brought to life by Crabapple’s haunting illustrations. Brothers of the Gun convincingly demonstrates the importance of and the need for many more in-depth testimonials from Syrians, if we are ever to begin to piece together the magnitude and meaning of this calamity.

  Alia Malek How did the idea for this book come about?

  Marwan Hisham The idea came to us after we finished three collaborative projects for Vanity Fair in March 2015. Molly suggested we expand and make it a book. The first two pieces were just captions describing or giving context to the illustrations. But the third one was a bit about my personal experience in Aleppo.

  AM What made you decide to make it a memoir and put yourself in the story?

  MH I think it’s important to show the interested reader outside of Syria how wars affect people and what it means to live in a situation like that. We’re also in a kind of rhetoric war, and it’s important to shed light on things that are completely neglected, to fight stereotypes and try to show people the complicated reality. Because it’s not a normal situation, it’s an extraordinary experience and I’ve experienced many things in a very short time, I felt I was obligated to convey the story, and the written form is the best way for me. I wanted to portray people who had their own political views, their own understandings of life, and who changed over time. They were people just like other people in other countries. Their environment was probably different, but they’re still complicated people. There are no simple people.

  AM Marwan, did you consider writing it in Arabic?

  MH No, I never thought it would be directed to an Arab audience in the first place. I decided right from the beginning to do it in English. It’s not easy to get it published in the Arab world in Arabic because it’s more conservative and you cannot actually write what you really want to write without interference from editors. English was obviously a better choice and carried a wider audience. I also wanted to prove to myself that I could do it.

  AM I personally wish a lot of this were being said in Arabic to an Arab audience because there is this general misconception that there’s some kind of consensus on what is “authentic.” Voices of dissent, or voices like yours, would be great. In the book you talk about having loved English before you even knew what the language was. And Molly, I know you’re super attracted to Arabic. Was this something that drew you to each other? Did you even note it or am I noting it for you?

  Molly Crabapple Actually my friendship with Marwan got much closer because I was learning Arabic and he helped me so much. He gave me copies of Nizar Qabbani and an Arabic translation of the Kurdish epic Mem wa Zin by Ahmed Khani. He taught me so much in terms of poetry, music, novels, classical sayings. I really learned my Arabic at his hand. While we were writing the book, I would be sending pirated e-books to Marwan when he was in Raqqa, like Lolita, and Homage to Catalonia, and The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin. In return, Marwan would send me poems by Nizar Qabbani like “(Al deek), The Rooster.” He would correct all of my Arabic essays, and introduced me to different political figures and classical historians. We would argue about Ibn Khaldun and I would track specific lines down (laughter). Much of our friendship has really been based on loving each other’s literature.

  Brothers Of The Gun High Res
  AM Marwan, in the book you are obviously critical, and rightly so, of the west. How do reconcile that with your love of English?

  MH My love for English started as wonderment for the outside world. I love many things about the west, even if I have issues with certain government policies, it has nothing to do with the country. As I mention in the book, my father was interested in politics and naturally I became interested at a very young age. So of course at the beginning I would kind of mix them together, you know, the notion than America is evil, that the West is evil in general, and English is western… but that did not last long, simply because it does not make sense.

  AM Yes, even though it doesn’t make sense, do you think that, for whatever reason, it seems to be the consensus in many places? In the same way that people are so Islamophobic, they think there’s nothing beautiful to be learned from knowing Arabic?

  MH One of the very negative things in the west is that these specific things make people ignorant about other countries and cultures. But you don’t need to read much about any other culture to see that there are many things, if not the summer or sand, you’re going to like too.

  AM Molly, have you been to Syria?

  Molly Crabapple I only went for one day. I was in Azaz in 2014. I’ve reported many times from the Middle East, including in Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, Abu Dhabi. I’ve been to Turkey at least 12 times to write this book. The first time I went to the Middle East I was 18, and I traveled all around Turkey alone. I went right to the Syrian border, and I really wanted to get a visa but I wasn’t smart enough because I was 18, and I got detained a lot by Turkish Gendarmie, who didn’t understand why a teenage girl was wandering around alone in the east at that time.

  AM What draws you there?

  MCPart of why I kept covering Syria is that I made friends who were from there. I met people of astounding courage and dignity who were profoundly misrepresented and erased. In 2013, when I was reporting for the Times, I went to Tripoli and I met a lot of Syrian refugees. The reason I originally went was because so many people around me had many different opinions about the Syrian War and I had no idea what to think, and I thought maybe if I could speak to some people who are living repercussions of it, I would have a clearer understanding. I met a woman from Baba Amr, who was living in an abandoned building with her husband who had no legs, because he was a diabetic, and he couldn’t get insulin, and they had a bunch of kids and grandkids. She had worked as a field nurse for a rebel group and was just this tough working class woman. This was right after the Obama red-line speech, and she was like, What the hell man? Is he saying it’s okay when they kill us with bombs? And I didn’t really know what to say to her. I just wrote down what she said. But because I didn’t know what to say to her, and I still don’t know what to say. I think that’s perhaps why I keep covering Syria.

  AM And what have you learned?

  MC (Laughter) I don’t think I could answer that in a succinct and snappy way.

  AM I know for me, I used to have a lot more hope, and I’ve changed a lot in the last seven years. Marwan, you were young seven years ago, but have you felt a change in yourself?

  MH Definitely. I grew up intellectually. I had to face very important questions in my life, and so many things I had to question, starting with the very basic thing I took for granted, like the political views of the whole world. Also “universal values.” I have different opinions about where they do or don’t exist.

  Molly Crabapple Promo418 009 4X6 Photo By Steve Prue
  Photo by Steve Prue.

  AM I noticed that you guys seldom digress from the narrative to give context. When I wrote my book, I remember feeling really burdened that I had to explain everything. How did you make that choice?

  MC That was something Marwan and I disagreed about a lot. I said Western readers don’t know anything. They barely know that Syria is in the Middle East. They are so uneducated. Marwan said, ‘this is a literary book. It’s not written for morons, and they can Google.’ And if we keep doing digressions like, ‘Syria is a country in the Middle East,’ this book will have no literary value. In the end I think Marwan was right, and that it is a burden on a lot of people who are writing about Syria that they have to deal with Western readers’ not only ignorance, but reluctance to use Google and discover and research basic facts to understand the context.

  AM I don’t trust the internet, especially with Syria. There are so many agents of misinformation. I remember thinking, ‘I want to control this.’ In my book, I would have liked to never have had to digress, but I also felt the need to do that. As I was reading your book, I was trying to decide where I landed on that. I obviously get all of the references, and I find the book very accessible, it’s very cinematic. Marwan’s personality comes through strongly and charismatically. I was trying to imagine having to Google Seferberlik or Hama or what other information another reader could find there that might not be correct. These are the risks. But I think you guys felt very unfettered by context.

  MH It wouldn’t be as understandable as it is if it wasn’t for Molly, simply because as an author living in this region and writing for an entirely different audience, I had no idea what is known and what isn’t known, and what needs more explanation and not. I was writing with respect to people who are really following the news, and there are many references I took for granted as known. As Molly said, we had a lot of discussions and then Molly started to point out the things that needed more explanation, and the editor helped us also a lot with this. I’m glad it’s now pretty readable for an American, especially.

  MC One of the funny things I remember was, before we wrote this, Marwan read Drawing Blood. And he was telling me there’s a certain passage where I was talking about the New York Burlesque scene, and he said, I had a hard time understanding this, because there are all of these words… What’s a Swarovski? What’s a dive bar? What’s go-go? And I thought, oh my god, this is all specialized jargon that if you aren’t a New York nightlife scenester, why the hell would you know what a Swarovski was, right? So I think when we were writing this we were trying to keep in mind what you didn’t need context for, and what was the technical jargon at the level of Swarovski. In terms of craft, I was also looking at novels that present totally new worlds, and we were reading The Handmaid’s Tale, and it presents so many new terms, like, an Aunt or a Commander, or a Ceremony. And it doesn’t define like, An Aunt is a woman who wears green, and she carries a taser, and she is chosen to control. That’s one choice you can make when you are writing about a foreign country, you can use a similar tool as a novelist does, except you’re doing it with facts.

  AM Marwan, at one point you write about arguing with people you loathe who represent the views of the majority, “As we spoke my thoughts circled back to the thing we all knew but would not say. We were an extreme minority within Raqqa,” the “we” referring to secular society. There are so many people who feel the need to defend the revolution uncritically. I don’t know if the secular part of the opposition is the extreme minority overall or if we’re 50-50, but it does feel like there are Syrians who feel like they can’t even afford to admit that a significant part of the uprising might not be secular or civil society-minded lest they delegitimize the revolution completely.

  MHI don’t think I was speaking for all Syrians here as much as I was for the people in my environment, and my experience in Raqqa. But still, there are so many principles that we activist and protestors started to call for. I think understanding, first of all, that there was no general outlook of what we want as protesters, and no one can basically represent this movement. So obviously people who were involved in these protests had conversations about these things. Things like, everyone has heard of democracy, but what’s democracy? There are so many explanations and understandings of this in our society, but so many of them are wrong. You can barely find two people who would agree on how our country should be governed or changed. And there were so many people who were just like photographers. Some had no interest in any of those words, and what they mean, and what should happen next, they just had their own reasons to join this movement.

  AM In one of the scenes with Tareq you wrote, “Regardless of our fierce disagreements over priorities and objectives, we liked to discuss everything. But the old Tareq with whom Nael and I discussed over a year earlier was another person now. I feared he was slipping into a Jihadi’s ideology…” Do you believe these conversations are possible, even among family and friends, and do you think there’s ever a transformation? Is there room for us to disagree?

  MHThe only reason Tareq and I had this relationship was because we were old friends. If we weren’t, we definitely would have separated a long time ago without having any of these conversations, without being so angry with each other. I sat with many people, either when I was in Syria, or here in Turkey, and as we talk about this war, I do not hear any conversation that it intended to resolve the situation. People express their political views, no one is flexible to adapt another idea, to say they were wrong or that they need to research something more, especially since many of the ideas are not correct. We do not have this culture of debating and having conversations that could reach us. Mostly it’s arguing for the sake of arguing.

  AM I would say we don’t have that culture now, I don’t know if that’s historically the case. Molly, does any of this feel similar to what’s going on in the U.S.?

  MC Oh man. In some ways I hesitate to draw parallels. I will say this about the Americans that congratulate themselves about [being different from] the Middle East. If you had to look at Christianist politicians and the influence of Christianist politicians on America, and Ben Carson talking about the secularists and how they’re tied to the devil, and how truly fundamentalist people have to be honored in our political discourse, it is worth noting that the will of the majority in America often isn’t a secular one either, and the only thing that keeps that back is that we have a constitution in addition to a democracy. We are increasingly unable to speak to each other, and there is an increasing isolation inside people’s ideological bubbles. This isn’t just because people are bad people and people can’t tolerate dissent, it’s very often for safety. Being a queer kid from an intolerant, rural area, there are a lot of reasons why you wouldn’t necessarily want to express yourself or try to gently convince people who hate your humanity. I also think that there’s a huge gulf in America between people who are able to get a certain type of elite university education and then join the media class, and then people who don’t have access to that.

  Class disparities have grown and part of why it’s been easy to demonize the press is because the press is much less working class than it was just a generation or two ago. One thing that always amazed me when I was looking at discourse on Syria was that a lot of “woke leftists” for lack of a better word, view looting during protests by disenfranchised or poor people in Western countries as the language of the “unlistened to,” and certainly not as something to be demonized. But when those same people saw, for instance, the way some people who lived in say, the slums of Aleppo, might have looted the factories they worked at, they suddenly had an entirely different view on it, in part because they’re viewing everything through Islam. One thing that I really thought was important in the book that was ignored in a lot of western discussions about Syria (I’m not sure about Arabic ones), was class. And I don’t know, please correct me if I’m wrong, if there have been any books written by a working class Syrian who lived through the war, in English at least.

  AM How much room do you think there is for more books about Syria? That’s the way publishing works here. They’re always looking for the one book on the insert-ethnic-experience that they can point to and that’s it.

  MH I think they can’t find any that tell the whole story because it’s not just one country. This war has been going on for seven years and so many countries are involved. It’s impossible to find just one book that will explain all these things to you. It started with people against the government but then it changed to a million other things. Now there are many parties, and within each party there are more parties fighting each other.

  MC Part of the reason I wanted to do this book with Marwan was because I got so sick of how books about war were either by an American soldier or an American journalist, or perhaps by someone whose family was from the same country that the war happened in but who had lived in America most of their lives. There’s a certain type of person that gets access to the New York publishing industry and that type of person isn’t necessarily the one who had the longest or truest experience with the war they’re writing about. I wanted to work with Marwan because he is brilliant, totally his own person, as opposed to someone who’s prescribed to any particular dogma, but also because he lived through the war, and he had seen things in Raqqa first hand and I really believe that voices like his need to have big books with access to those sort of platforms.

  AM To shift gears a bit, can you each tell me what your favorite image here is? I love the cover. Will you explain it?

  MH It’s a photo of Tareq. It was taken by his friend, and he posted it on Instagram. I don’t know exactly what he was thinking in that moment, but knowing him as someone who loved to write poetry, who had a different life in Beirut, and then spent time in the trenches, I can guess that he felt nostalgic, maybe. It’s tragic that he became fully militarized. This was my favorite image and we asked the publisher to use it as the cover for the same reason.

  AM Molly, do you have a favorite?

  Smaller050 Hisham Crabapple 9780399590627 Art R1
  MC I have a few that I love. I want to talk about the picture of the Yazidi women because it’s a good example of how Marwan and I work together. Marwan obviously did not take photos of enslaved Yazidi women, and we were very frustrated, both of us, at the way the Yazidi women were sensationalized in the press, and very often not given the same protection that a western rape survivor would have been given. We wanted to do something that would be real, that would get beyond cliché. We did so many sketches. Marwan would say, “Make her hands careless.” And I’d say, “What does that mean, careless? What does that mean?”

  We were hard on each other, we were parsing words, not because of a problem with English, but because art direction is always like this. You have an art director say, “I want something cheerful,” and you’re like “what does cheerful mean?” That conversion between words and visuals, is one of the hardest translations I think. Initially I had this really stupid way of doing it actually, it looked very Madonna and Childish, and Marwan’s looking at it like, “It’s so cliche, don’t do it like this, this is wrong.” I did sketch after sketch, and Marwan was like, “she’s too old, she’s too young.” It was also very important to us not to use photos of real women because we didn’t want to violate anyone’s privacy.

  AM I also love this picture.

  Smaller053 Hisham Crabapple 9780399590627 Art R1
  MC That’s of the first civilian killed in Raqqa by American bombs and it’s from a video Marwan shot and they were digging him out —

  AM And he was this white?

  MC Yes, from dust. And his clothes were torn off. It was hard to tell because the video was blurry and it was at night, but I was inspired stylistically by traditional Pietas.

  AM I thought so. Which are often carved from white marble.

  MC Exactly. What I would do with something like this is I would take lots and lots of screenshots and because they’re so blurry and you can’t draw directly from them, I would repose people to get the anatomy right, and try to get the light and the shadow to make a certain emotional point. Because, you know, no one in America is going to know that name of the first Raqqan civilian that American bombs killed. He’s never going to have a name in America. And now he does. His name’s Ismail. Now he has a face.

  AM Marwan, in the epilogue you referred to yourself and said that an air of detachment set you free and you were destined to be centerless. Do you still feel like that?

  MHI do, because even if I find people with the same views of life as my own, they’re not going to be Syrian. It’s unlikely. So I’m alone and I have this type of identity I can’t get rid of.

  Alia Malek is a former civil rights lawyer, journalist, and the author of The Home That Was Our Country: A Memoir of Syria (Nation Books 2017), A Country Called Amreeka: US History Re-Told Through Arab American Lives (Simon & Schuster 2009) and editor of Patriot Acts: Narratives of Post 9/11 Injustices (McSweeney’s 2011) and EUROPA أوروپا : An Illustrated Introduction to Europe for Migrants and Refugees (2016). Her reportage has appeared in the New York Times, Foreign Policy, the New Yorker online, McSweeney’s, Guernica and other publications. She is a recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the New York Foundation for the Arts. In November 2016, she was honored with the 12th annual Hiett Prize in the Humanities.

Hisham, Marwan: BROTHERS OF THE GUN
Kirkus Reviews. (Mar. 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Hisham, Marwan BROTHERS OF THE GUN One World/Random House (Adult Nonfiction) $28.00 5, 15 ISBN: 978-0-399-59062-7

A richly detailed, sometimes horrifying account of the Syrian civil war.

Here's one thing to note about getting tear-gassed: Writes Hisham, soda pop in the eyes is a good remedy, and "along with the tear gas, the Coca-Cola washes away any lingering traces of shame," even if it leaves an awful mess. But this is a book of awful messes, of city blocks and families torn apart and friendships broken by events. The brothers of the title are Hisham's friends Nael and Tareq, citizens of the ancient city of Raqqa, "a superstitious, conservative community, where many people insisted that before one undertook any important task or made a difficult choice, one needed to go to the tomb of some pious wali and ask for his blessings." The choices each of the boys made led to government school for one, death for another, and a life on the run as an Islamist revolutionary for the third. As he recounts the events leading to the increasing repression on the part of the Assad regime and the eventual descent of Syria into civil conflict, Hisham writes with a wryly observant eye for telling remarks. If the customary cry of faithful warriors was that God is great, then the quietly subversive retort of a Raqqawi graffiti artist makes for a fine rejoinder: "Tomorrow is better." Tomorrow is a rare commodity in Hisham's fast-moving account, which is enhanced by Crabapple's powerful ink drawings. Having abandoned the religiosity of his youth--what Syria needs is science, reason, and economists instead of mullahs--Hisham comes to a hard conclusion: Too many Syrians will pick up the gun in the name of Islam even though, "when you are a programmed machine with a gun, all that is left in you that is human is the feeling that you are invincible; when you are not, you know exactly how weak you are."

A sharp, searing view of war from the front lines and an important contribution to understanding how a nation can disintegrate before one's eyes.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Hisham, Marwan: BROTHERS OF THE GUN." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A530650814/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a109defd. Accessed 20 Sept. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A530650814

Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War
Colleen Mondor
Booklist. 114.15 (Apr. 1, 2018): p48.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
* Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War. By Marwan Hisham. May 2018.320p. illus. Oneworld, $28 (9780399590627). 956.9.

Syrian journalist Hisham unleashes a searing broadside against a complacent world in this deeply personal memoir about the war that is destroying his country. With the added power of illustrations by Molly Crabapple (Drawing Blood, 2015), Hisham demands that at least for the duration of this narrative readers pay attention to the unbridled violence within Syria. Beginning with the Arab Spring, in 2010, he painstakingly recounts the protests that brought brutal responses from the Syrian government while simultaneously sharing his own, sometimes harsh, family story. With the possibility of a "normal" life made impossible, Hisham witnessed the painful choices made by friends as all of their dreams were ripped away. The country is bombed by its own military plus America, Russia, and France, while a litany of Islamic groups, including ISIS, take and retake cities in battles that bring nothing but a relentless march of death. The government is the worst enemy of all, and Hisham shares his decision to finally leave with heartbreaking sincerity. Along with Crabapple's haunting images, the author's words offer both an elegy for what has been lost and an angry plea for all that remains. This is memoir at its most powerful, ensuring that we cannot forget lives we never knew.--Colleen Mondor

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Mondor, Colleen. "Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War." Booklist, 1 Apr. 2018, p. 48. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A534956845/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=85cf3460. Accessed 20 Sept. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A534956845

"Hisham, Marwan: BROTHERS OF THE GUN." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A530650814/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a109defd. Accessed 20 Sept. 2018. Mondor, Colleen. "Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War." Booklist, 1 Apr. 2018, p. 48. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A534956845/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=85cf3460. Accessed 20 Sept. 2018.

• Qantara.de
  https://en.qantara.de/content/book-review-marwan-hisham-and-molly-crabapples-brothers-of-the-gun-immortal-art-and-immortal
  Word count: 1314

  Book review: Marwan Hisham and Molly Crabappleʹs "Brothers of the Gun"
  Immortal art and immortal words
  Tracing his own coming-of-age and the fateful changes that take place in Raqqa between 2011 and 2016, Syrian journalist Marwan Hisham’s memoir – deftly complimented by Molly Crabappleʹs moody illustrations – explores timeless issues: growing up, teenage rebellion and the inevitable moral quandaries. Marcia Lynx Qualey read the book
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  Waves of post-2011 Syrian literature have been washing up on English-language shores, both written in English and in translation. The books range from works like Samar Yazbek’s in-the-trenches memoirs (Woman in the Crossfire, The Crossing) to Hamid Suleiman’s more light-hearted graphic novel, Freedom Hospital. Most of these are not merely for our aesthetic pleasure, but are attempts to intervene directly in world events. Yet, because the Syrian war is ongoing, many already feel dated.

  Syrian journalist Marwan Hisham’s Brothers of the Gun, which also features illustrations by U.S. author-artist Molly Crabapple, is a different sort of read. The Raqqa of 2010, through the narrator’s gaze, is a cultural backwater lucky to have one decent cafe. It changes from a city that vents its anger on protesters in 2011 to one that embraces them. For a moment, Raqqa enjoys "that brief daylight between the regime and the Islamic State," and then it’s taken over by IS and made into the capital of its short-lived, repressive rule. The author himself goes from being a teenager who scorns his hometown to a young man unable to leave it.

  The book makes a vivid companion to Dunya Mikhail’s The Beekeeper (2018), translated by Mikhail and Max Weiss, which tells the story of women kidnapped by IS. These women were bought and sold as sex slaves, sometimes taken from Iraq to the markets in Raqqa, Syria. Mikhail’s book tells the stories of the women. In Hisham’s book, the women largely disappear after IS takes over and we hear the stories of the men. However, when the sex slaves of IS do make an appearance, the author, who has been through years of war, has trouble grasping the situation.

  Adolescence and protest

  For the most part, Brothers of the Gun unfolds chronologically. It begins when Hisham is a young boy: "When I was nine years old, I thought Hafez al-Assad was the president of the entire world."

  Cover of Marwan Hisham and Molly Crabapple's "Brothers of the Gun" (published by One World)
  Cultural backwater to IS stronghold: in 2010, Raqqa, according to Hisham, was lucky to have one decent cafe. Then for a moment in 2011, writes Hisham, Raqqa enjoyed "that brief daylight between the regime and the Islamic State", only to be taken over by IS. Hisham went from being a teenager who scorned his hometown to a young man unable to leave
  Although the Raqqa of Hisham’s childhood was hardly idyllic, it looks heavenly compared to the mouldy religious boarding school where he is sent by his observant father.

  The food is terrible, the teachers are bored and student enthusiasm seems to make them suspicious.

  At one point, Hisham asks his Arabic teacher why they can’t read the translation of Merchant of Venice in class and his teacher responds by having the play pulled from the school library.

  Between the school’s dry and programmatic religious instruction to the angry violence of nationalism class, the author was grateful to escape back home in the summers.

  After high school, the author’s childhood best friend Nael becomes a fine-arts student in Damascus while Hisham goes to Syria’s second city, Aleppo, to study English literature.

  Hisham does a beautiful job of depicting the barriers that grow up between them as Nael starts to run with a hip arts crowd and the author feels left behind.

  Both the author and Nael are in Raqqa for protests in the summer of 2011, but there is a distance between them. Nael, the author snarks, went to "buy a pair of sneakers that he said would help him run away from the cops but whose true purpose was to make him look like a dangerously cool protester."

  In keeping with his dangerous coolness, Nael joins one of the early, independent rebel groups. In the early days of the Syrian uprising, Brothers of the Gun portrays a shifting mix of groups, noting that the moniker "Free Syrian Army" was "more of a brand name" than a centralised command structure.

  The author doesn’t join. But he doesn’t flee with his family, either. For a while, he works as a subsistence farmer. After the takeover of IS, when Internet access is limited, he manages an Internet cafe that’s swarmed by IS fighters. In the end, he becomes an accidental journalist because, as he says, he’s the only person tweeting from Raqqa in English.

  From backwater to capital and back again

  Once the capital of the Abbasid caliphate, the Raqqa of the twenty-first century is – in Brothers of the Gun – a hopeless conservative backwater. The author’s family is largely conservative and working-class, although his uncle was an artist. And in 2010, his uncle began work on a cafe that would bring together traditional and contemporary Syrian arts.

  The cafe, Hisham writes, was finally ready in 2012. Here, Crabapple’s illustrations are particularly effective. We turn a page and come across this cafe of dreams, with swooping domes and fountains, flowering plants and beautiful outdoor seating.

  Yet, the author writes, "the timing could hardly have been worse." It’s not long before the cafe’s stained-glass windows are shattered by falling bombs. In January 2013, the leader of a local rebel group demands a bribe and Hisham’s uncle flees to Turkey, then Greece.

  During the first protests, Hisham says, people cursed the protesters as rebellious children. For Hisham’s part, this wasn’t entirely off the mark. His anger at the state and his anger at his conservative community were intertwined. When describing his participation in early protests, he writes: "In the name of ʹfuck itʹ, I was unleashed."

  Things changed for the city of Raqqa after the killing of young Ali al-Babinsi. Suddenly, the whole city gathered to protest. When the regime strikes back, a host of different groups assemble to fight them. While the city is being bombed, the author cocoons inside his home, where he "knew as little as a Western analyst." He woke up and the city belonged to IS.

  As more countries became involved in the war, Hisham writes, "Syrians were excluded from speaking parts." Although Hisham’s nephew and a neighbour both join IS camps for a while, he portrays the Islamic State as a mostly foreign force: "These guys were born in Europe from European families and none of them, I could safely say, had ever heard of Raqqa before 2013."

  Because of his English-language tweets, Hisham first makes a connection with Crabapple and then begins reporting for Western media outlets. At one point, while reporting in Aleppo, a man scorns what the author is doing. "Do you think your photos are going to make a difference?" the man asks.

  For a moment, Hisham seems taken aback. But then he says no, he doesn’t know if his works and images will make any difference. Whatʹs important in the end, he writes, is "immortal art and immortal words." While immortal may be a stretch, Brothers of the Gun certainly rises above the particular and will be worth reading for years to come.

  Marcia Lynx Qualey

  © Qantara.de 2018

• The Hindu
  https://www.thehindu.com/books/books-reviews/brothers-of-the-gun-a-memoir-of-the-syrian-war-review-death-of-a-city/article24602229.ece
  Word count: 553

  'Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War' review: Death of a city
  Stanly Johny AUGUST 04, 2018 19:30 IST
  UPDATED: AUGUST 05, 2018 17:47 IST
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  'Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War' review: Death of a city
  How Raqqa was brought to ruin by fighters of all hues
  There’s no dearth of literature on the Syrian tragedy. But most of them, especially those published in English, are written from an outsider’s point of view. But Marwan Hisham’s book, Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War, with beautiful illustrations by American writer-artist Molly Crabapple, is the autobiography of the city which had been the de facto capital of the Islamic State for almost four years. Hisham, a native of Raqqa, witnessed the descent of the city into the hands of, first rebels and then jihadists.

  When protests against the Ba’athist regime of Bashar al-Assad broke out in 2011 in Syria, Hisham and his friends, like thousands of others, were thrilled and ready to join the ‘revolution’. They took part in protests in Raqqa, shouted slogans against President Assad and hoped for his fall, like dictators in Tunisia and Egypt in the previous months. But he soon was disappointed as the protests turned violent. One of his friends joined a rebel group and got killed by regime forces, while another joined an Islamist group. Hisham stayed away from the armed rebellion, first working in a cafe in IS-controlled Raqqa and then reporting as a freelance journalist from the city.

  Hisham writes, the rebels who captured the city from regime forces were directionless. The Free Syrian Army was a loose coalition of different groups and they were incapable of defending the land against Islamist attacks. “Islamists didn’t have to exert much effort to hijack the revolution — it was easily given up by the politically uneducated crowds who had started it.” The revolution which he believed in had now become “an arena of jihad, divided into halves, with believers versus unbelievers on one side, and nationalist believers versus takfiri mercenaries on the other.”

  Brothers of the Gun doesn’t offer any analysis of the geopolitical complexities of the Syrian war. It doesn’t say much on how the anti-regime protests turned violent, where do money and weapons come from for the rebels. But the book is a helpless Syrian’s story to the world. He describes with pain how the country was destroyed, neglected and abandoned. Hisham doesn’t make a moral distinction between various actors of the war. The regime comes and bombs the city. The Americans, the French and the Russians all come and bomb the city. The IS, which he says “committed a historic blasphemy against our future,” occupies the city. Raqqans, he says, are at the receiving end. Hisham is not angry. Rather he’s anguished at his own plight and that of his fellow Syrians. “We became believers just when we most needed scepticism. We squabbled when we needed solidarity. In the words of the hadith, “As we were, we were governed,” he writes.

  Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War; Marwan Hisham and Molly Crabapple, One World/ PRH, ₹699.

• Global News
  https://globalnews.ca/news/4360717/syria-war-brothers-of-the-gun-book/
  Word count: 905

  July 30, 2018 2:25 pm Updated: August 3, 2018 3:02 pm
  ‘Brothers of the Gun’: Illustrating Syria’s civil war and life under ISIS
  By Nick Logan
  National Online Journalist/Global National Web Producer Global News

  more

  Syrian journalist Marwan Hisham secretly took photos of life under the so-called Islamic State. He shared the images, and his stories, with American journalist and illustrator Molly Crabapple, who turned them into striking sketches.

  - A A +
  Marwan Hisham, like so many other young Syrians, joined in the early protests against the authoritarian rule of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. It was part of a wave of uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa in 2011 that saw iron-fisted leaders lose their clutch on power. But not in Syria.

  More than seven years on, the country is still in the throes of a horrific civil war. Cities have been obliterated. An estimated 400,000 people have lost their lives. And Assad remains in power, unlikely to go anywhere, anytime soon.

  READ MORE: Syria’s Assad says White Helmets are terrorists, will be killed if they don’t surrender

  And if that wasn’t a tragic enough outcome, Syria became the staging ground for an atrocious group of militants that would become known as the so-called Islamic State (or ISIS).

  Hisham, who lived in Raqqa, the capital of ISIS’s self-styled caliphate until it fell last fall, survived all of this. And he risked his life to document it, covertly taking photos on his cell phone.

  WATCH BELOW: Islamic State kills dozens of people in southwest Syria

  “Well, at that time, I was working in a café when most of my customers were ISIS fighters,” Hisham told Global News in an interview from Ankara, Turkey, where he now lives in exile. “So the risk was every day and the city was suffering aerial bombing and [there] were ISIS fighters in every street arresting people.”

  Hisham’s stories and images are the basis for a new book, Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War, that he co-authored with American journalist and artist Molly Crabapple.

  The cover of the book Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War, co-authored by Syrian journalist Marwan Hisham and American journalist and illustrator Molly Crabapple.
  The cover of the book Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War, co-authored by Syrian journalist Marwan Hisham and American journalist and illustrator Molly Crabapple.

  Handout/Penguin Random House
  The pair met over Twitter, which Hisham used to give the rest of the world a line into a place foreign journalists couldn’t travel to, for fear of being captured and beheaded by ISIS. Hisham became Crabapple’s eyes and ears on the ground in Raqqa as she was reporting on Syria’s civil war, which she had been covering since 2013, and the rise of ISIS.

  What makes their collaboration unique, is that Crabapple turned Hisham’s memories and photographs into striking and beautiful ink illustrations.

  One of artist Molly Crabapple’s illustrations from Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War.
  One of artist Molly Crabapple’s illustrations from Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War.

  Molly Crabapple/Penguin Random House
  “Marwan took [the photos] surreptitiously. He would hide his camera behind a falafel sandwich and sneak them. So he wasn’t necessarily thinking about things like framing and composition,” Crabapple explained of her decision to create the drawings, in a Skype interview from her home in New York. “We both wanted to instill these images with all of the craft and the detail that a photojournalist would.”

  Molly Crabapple’s illustration of the ISIS-controlled city of Raqqa, Syria, based on the photos and stories of journalist Marwan Hisham.
  Molly Crabapple’s illustration of the ISIS-controlled city of Raqqa, Syria, based on the photos and stories of journalist Marwan Hisham.

  Molly Crabapple/Penguin Random House
  They both feel that something very important has been lost in the coverage of the Syrian war and the rise and fall of ISIS.

  “It’s been completely erased from history that the Syrian war, the worst conflict of our time, started as a popular revolution against a dictator, and a revolution that was originally peaceful and that was accompanied by profound acts of bravery, and creativity and hope,” Crabapple added. “This is something that’s been erased by all sides of the conflict, and we hope that this book might do some small part to remind people of that.”

  READ MORE: Islamic State group kills scores in multiple Syria attacks, at least 38 dead in Sweida suicide bombing

  “After the rise of ISIS, the whole conflict was reduced into a war between a vicious dictator versus Islamist fundamentalist group that is chopping off heads, and people were out of the picture,” Hisham said. “I thought it was really important to keep always focusing on the main subject and how the whole thing started, and how there are millions of people aspiring for a better life and now they are completely out of the picture.”

  *Marwan Hisham is an alias the author uses to protect his security.

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