Musings on a New Memoir: Saldana, S. (2010). The bread of angels: A journey to love and faith. NY: Doubleday.

I am starting out this blog with thoughts on a new memoir!

I try to read as many memoirs as I can consume and ponder ways to incorporate them or excerpts from them into courses.  I finished the memoir: The Bread of Angels: A Journey to Love and Faith by Stephanie Saldana. I am not an expert on Western Asia, but I like reading memoirs, knowing they often include emotion and lived experience filtered through the author and/or the author's family and society (with no exception in this memoir, family members and history are important).  I was captivated by a comment on the back book jacket, and that comment guided my entire reading of the text: that Naomi Shihab Nye called the book "a love letter to the Middle East." I noticed that Azadeh Moaveni also wrote supportive words for the book and that attracted me to this memoir as well.

This book could work as a paradigm shifter for many readers. A common approach of mainstream media is NOT to write "love letters to the Middle East" so this memoir provides insightful (but complex) alternative imagery. As in person-to-person love letters (maybe only some), the book gets at complicated intricacies, in this case, the intricacies of life in Syria, Iraq, and the United States.  For example, she really expressed how a person comes to identify with so many perspectives when she discusses on page 57: "Yet whenever I saw an image of the war in Iraq, I saw something familiar on both sides.  I saw on the Arab side those who let me sleep in their homes.  Behind the face of the American soldier, I saw the young man who once slow-danced with me...."

To give a little background and summary, Saldana lived for a year in Syria as a Fulbright scholar to learn Arabic and study about Jesus (Issa) in Islam. The memoir presented a person who lives in a dialogue across spiritualities (Christianity, Islam, and Judaism and finding so many connections); geographic spaces; intercultural worlds; and personal violence and sociopolitical violence. These topics were covered with complexity in both her open critique of the caricature of “the Middle East” (p. 483) and by her entire book as a whole.   

Returning to the “love letter” theme, woven into the larger love letter of the book is her own personal love story and her own experiences with mysticism (I hesitate to call this "mysticism"… that may not be the correct term) within the book.  Those sections describing spiritual experiences remind me of Qanta A. Ahmed’s memoir, In the Land of Invisible Women: A Female Doctor’s Journey to the Saudi Kingdom. Saldana covers many topics and questions, but the reader does not feel overwhelmed. One of my favorite parts were descriptions of the beauty and poetry of the Arabic language (used by all the faiths) in Syria (such as on pages  174-175) and the many interfaith conversations and interactions within the text (for example, she teaches English at an all girls school in Syria and encounters interesting back and forth exchanges).  Many teachers shaped her interfaith experiences from an Iraqi refugee shopkeeper-painter to members of a Syrian monastic community to a Sheikha (a woman who teaches Arabic and the Quran to Saldana).  

This memoir read in tandem with other memoirs and scholarly sources on Western Asia and the United States provides multi-dimensional insights, voices, and experiences not easily found elsewhere in media and publications.