Book Excerpt from Damascus amid the War (Muna Imady): About the Author
Muna Imady: February 18, 1962- April 23, 2016
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
My daughter, Muna Imady, was born in Damascus and grew up in an American-Syrian bi-lingual family. She began writing at a very young age. As a little girl, Muna would say, “I am Muna Imady, a writer and a poet." When she first uttered these words, she was perhaps seven years old, and we would laugh. But as soon as she could write, a pen and pad were seldom out of her hand, and she filled page after page with her poems and stories.
After graduation from Damascus University, Muna worked for several years for an oil company, then married Nizar Zikar who was studying for a PhD in France. The first years of her marriage were spent in France, in which time she got a Master’s from the Paris Sorbonne and her daughter Nour and her son Sammy were born. When Muna and Nizar came back to Damascus, Muna began writing Arabic stories for several popular children's magazines, and dozens of these stories were published.
Around this time, someone suggested to Muna that she consider teaching English. It was a reasonable suggestion since she comes from a family of teachers. She began teaching English to Syrian children at the American Embassy-sponsored Amideast, and taught there for ten years until it closed. She then taught another five years at a private language center. She was a gifted teacher who designed her own curricula and textbooks. Her classes became renown for teaching young Syrian children English in an enjoyable and successful way. As busy as she was teaching and raising her three children—her son Kareem was born in 1998—she never stopped writing.
When the war closed down the language center where Muna taught, she suddenly had time to devote to writing. In 2011, her first book, Syrian Folktales, was published by MSI Press. This book includes folktales and recipes Muna had collected and translated into English.
As the war dragged on, she saw her beloved country spiral into sectarianism. She began to look back to a time when, as she believed, Syria had welcomed refugees from different countries and had appreciated the rich diversity they added to the country; a time when Syrians of different backgrounds could be friends. Her second book was intended to celebrate this happier time and to make sure it was remembered. Unfortunately, Muna did not live to see this book finished although she had done most of the research for it. Her sister and I finished the book which is called Kan Ya Ma Kan: Folktales and Recipes of Syria and its Ethnic Groups. It should be released for publication soon.
Nizar Zarka, Muna’s husband now thought we should also collect Muna’s recent stories and poems and publish them. Thus, the idea for this book was born. The majority of these stories and poems were written during four years of the civil war in Syria, from 2012 to 2016. Muna was greatly affected by the war and, since she had an undiagnosed heart condition, I am sure the war shortened her life.
Muna died twelve days after an open-heart operation that has a low fatality of 3 percent. We fully expected she would recover from this operation, but it seems she foresaw her own death. She was writing some of the poems in this book up to three weeks before she died, and I only hope the book will be a fitting tribute to her, our beloved Muna Imady, our writer and poet.
Elaine Imady
Muna’s mother and co-editor
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