Tears in Nazar's Journey
Updated: Apr 15
Now that the Middle East is suffering from yet another war, impacting the powerless and innocent who inevitably become the "collateral damage" of the conflict, I thought it would be timely to share with you some reflections on Nazar's tears.
The historical setting of my book is the summer of 2014, when about a million villagers of the Nineveh Plains-- both Christians and moderate Muslims- fled from the ISIS terrorists. Fearing for their lives, they abruptly left their homeland and escaped east to the relative safety of Erbil, Iraq.
Nazar's Journey not only describes this intensely chaotic war setting, but tells the story about a boy abandoning his home without knowing if it will ever be possible to return again. The reader will encounter several scenes when Nazar, the courageous young man who searches for his father, exhibits tears of trauma. There are other moments when he finds it impossible to cry because he is so overwhelmed by the horrors he has witnessed. But when he is comforted by genuinely loving people, such as Amira and her father, Yousif, who are facing the same ordeal that he faces, his tears are released like a torrent.
As an author creating a fictional character, I wanted Nazar to be young enough to be vulnerable-- so he could cry in Amira's arms. But I wanted him to be old enough so the reader would notice his selfless virtue -- that he is rapidly becoming a man. So that is why I gave him a birthday very close to age fourteen. By the end of the story, he is no longer a boy--he is a young man.
Besides tears of trauma, I have also woven into the narrative- what I will term for the purposes of this essay- tears of exaltation. As the book reaches its conclusion, there is a happy ending, what Joseph Pearce, in his beautiful introduction, calls a eucatastrophe --a word coined by Tolkien. I won't say what happens, so as not to spoil the experience for the reader, but I can at least disclose this one detail. Joseph Pearce advises the reader that the story, for all the suffering depicted, has the opposite of a catastrophic conclusion-- a eucatastrophe. This is the event that triggers Nazar's abundant tears of exaltation.
People have told me that reading this story is an emotional experience. It is difficult to distance oneself from Nazar's -- and the other villagers'--very real ordeals. This is what I was hoping for, so that those of us who are routinely shielded from these kinds of tragedies caused by war and terrorism, would have our hearts and minds awakened with a new compassion.
Which brings me to a somewhat scholarly essay -- one of the more carefully written papers I ever worked on as a student--about the gift of tears. It was written in 1981- 43 years before Nazar's Journey came to be. I was taking a graduate class at Fordham University in NY about the eastern Christian mystics. George Maloney, SJ, the professor, liked the paper so much he decided to have it published in Diakonia magazine. The title of the article is relevant here: The Gift of Tears in Isaac of Nineveh: A Transition to Pure Prayer and the Virtue of Mercy. To read the article, there is a download provided here, or you will find the essay posted at the very top of my Articles along with the others in this website.
If you have the time and patience to get through this essay, what you may find interesting, perhaps coincidental, is the location of where the mystic Isaac is from, whose writings are the source of my essay. It is Nineveh, the same region in Iraq where Nazar grew up, and from where he must abruptly escape. Admittedly, the tears that Isaac of Nineveh describes are not the same tears of trauma that Nazar experiences. Still, you may find a profound connection between Nazar and the mystic in the passages where Isaac of Nineveh talks about tears of exaltation and consolation, tears born from a direct and personal encounter with the love of God the Father.
The art image I have included with this blog is The Pieta of Mosul by Qais Al-Sindy. You will find this compelling painting along with the other artworks by Qais in the Art Section of my website here. This "reverse pieta" refers to one of the early scenes in the story when Nazar weeps profusely over the blasphemous beheading of the statue of Mary in his village church. I have included a write-up about the symbols and meaning of the artwork in pages 22-29 of my book. The statue has great emotional significance for Nazar, since it reminds him of his own mother, whom he greatly loved, and who died tragically at a young age due to a medical issue.
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