“Your homeland is not a hotel you can check out of if the service is bad”
The Girl from Aleppo is a memoir about a teenager with a disability, and her journey from Syria to Germany. It follows Nujeen and her sister as they journey across Europe as refugees.
As a person with disability who uses a wheelchair, when I read about the story of Nujeen Mustafa, it was the kind of thing that put fear in the pit of my stomach. I have always considered the hypothetical situation of if my home was no longer safe to live, how would I ever be able to leave safely with everything a disability brings? I have never known how I’d even begin to survive.
I think this fear is born from not seeing disabled people represented in war or refugee situations positively – showing that people do in fact encounter these situations and they find a way. I have to confess, apart from Nujeen Mustafa’s story, I can only think of a handful of other instances of refugees with disability shown in mainstream media over the course of my life.
Nujeen Mustafa was a teenager with Cerebal Palsy living with her family in an apartment complex in Aleppo, Syria before the war started. She was home-schooled and only left home as needed, as she could only leave by being carried up and down the stairs of her family’s apartment. She learnt English by watching American TV shows, in particular Days of Our Lives, which Nujeen refers to throughout the book.
When the fighting and bombing comes, Nujeen and her family are forced to flee to nearby Turkey. Splitting from their parents there, Nujeen and her sister make the difficult decision to continue the journey to Germany where their brother is already waiting. Not having enough money for smugglers, the sisters travel together journeying toward Germany bit by bit.
Reading this memoir as a disabled person, I didn’t see a lot of the “this is an inspiration”, but rather “yep, this is how people live and they need to keep on living somehow”. I really related to a lot of the decisions Nujeen made throughout her journey and her feelings as she traveled. There were also a lot of great moments where you got a taste of her humour and personality, such as in her love of American soap operas.
Through the memoir we get to listen to issues of accessibility, inclusion and attitudes toward disability from Nujeen’s perspective. This was one aspect of the book I loved the most, as hearing about these experiences from her perspective enabled me to think about how things are similar and different from my own experiences.
For me, this was not an inspirational memoir, but a story of survival and determination. It is also story that many people with disability have had to face before in one way or another, we just rarely hear their stories in mainstream media. I’m glad we’ve gotten to hear Nujeen’s voice here, and we need to hear more from people like her.
