The Earth Started to Burn

NARRATIVE. LUMEN, 2019. 237 PAGES

In October 2010, the narrator travelled to Syria with her mother, who hadn’t been to her homeland in many years. On the journey they would be reunited with their family, which straddles two countries, constantly coming and going from one to the other. As the days pass, the narrator learns about the realities of living in a country suffering a political crisis.

A few months after their return to Argentina, the first demonstrations of the Arab Spring began. Some of her family moves to Buenos Aires, others stay, struggling to survive a vicious war that would give rise to one of the largest refugee movements seen in modern times.  

“The Syria you knew no longer exists,” the author’s aunt tells her. And the phrase is repeated throughout the book, a travel diary that is also a search for family identity and an urgent account of a war that has destroyed a country, a people and a unique culture.