By Howard Lovy
Introduction
Cathy Sultan
Author Cathy Sultan says “truth is best told through fiction, and I really believe that when it comes to the Middle East, that’s the best way to tell the story.” But, with Sultan’s writing, it is fiction that is very well-informed by fact. So, when in her novel The Syrian and the upcoming sequel Damascus Street, she describes what it’s like to live in a Beirut war zone, readers can rest assured she knows what she’s talking about.
“I know all these places and I wouldn’t be writing about them if I hadn’t walked the streets in Beirut, if I didn’t know these neighborhoods pretty intimately,” Sultan says. The author turned to fiction in part because of her frustration with trying to communicate her experiences in the Middle East with people in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where she now lives.
“If I tell a story about what’s really going on in the Middle East through really good fiction, and I’m a pretty good storyteller, I’ll bet I could teach somebody something without having them scratch their heads,” Sultan says.
But to understand Sultan’s fiction, it’s best to first take a look at her real-life history, which in itself reads like a tale of danger and adventure.
Sultan grew up in Washington, DC, and in 1965 her life changed forever when she met a young Lebanese physician who was in town to do some training. They fell in love and she followed him to Boston, where he did his medical residency at the Lahey Clinic. They married and by 1969 they had two small children when they took off for Beirut to begin a new life.
Back then, Beirut was a thriving city, considered the “Paris of the Middle East,” and Sultan was a “rebellious young lady,” ripe for adventure. She fell in love with the city and life was wonderful for the young family.
Then, came 1975, when civil war shattered their dream life and ruined their beautiful city. In 1982, through 70 days of saturation bombing, “that summer almost did us in,” Sultan recalls. Still, they lived day to day, their kids doing homework by candlelight.
“The most incredible thing is that you can become acclimated to just about anything,” Sultan says. “So, the war soon became my norm. I was the barometer of my family. And it was up to me to set the mood. If Mom could take care of putting the dinner on the table and doing the groceries and getting up in the middle of the night when the water came on, because otherwise we didn’t have any water, we were set for the next day.”
But that kind of stressful life was not sustainable for long. In July 1983, Sultan and the kids left Beirut to visit family in Boston. They had intended to return, but in September of that year the war began again in earnest. The airport in Beirut was closed and Sultan’s husband called to say they cannot go home. Their kids were 15 and 16 at the time, and Sultan still gets choked up with tears when recalling that time.
“It’s very difficult to tell children that they can’t go home,” she says. “Not only can they not go home to see their father, they lost their friends, their family, their dog, everything.”
Her husband joined them in Boston in 1984 and a friend found him a job in Eau Claire, where the family settled. That’s when she decided to write her first book, A Beirut Heart, where she describes the city as “my very difficult lover because whenever I would threaten to leave it, and I did several times, he would always create a cease-fire in order to lure me back in.” But in Wisconsin, and through writing her first book, she found a way to cope with the trauma of war. What started out as a family diary turned into her treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.
In 2002, Sultan made her first trip to the Israel and the Palestinian territories in order to discover for herself the roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Her experiences there became the basis for her next book, Israeli and Palestinian Voices: A Dialogue with Both Sides.
Since then, she’s been back to the region five times, including Sinai, Gaza, the Golan, and practically every place on the West Bank and Israel. She says that while she doesn’t have a lot of credentials behind her name, “I’ve seen a lot. I’m an eyewitness expert.”
She became involed in an NGO, once called Interfaith Peace Builders and recently renamed Eyewitness Palestine. Beginning in 2008, she began to take groups to see the region and meet the people. “We do it all when we take the delegations there. We listen to all sides,” Sultan says.
Still, there was that frustration when she returned home to Wisconsin and tried to describe the situation. “I got kind of tired of people saying, ‘Oh, the Middle East. They’ve been at this for years.’“ And that’s when it clicked. Maybe the best way to drive reality home would be through works of fiction. It would be a challenge, but Sultan’s life has been a series of challenges. Besides, she says, the news media do a terrible job of accurately covering the Middle East.
So her first work of fiction, The Syrian, released in 2013, contains accurate information about what was happening on the ground in South Lebanon during the 2006 war. It is all seen through the eyes of one of the protagonists, a young American physician named Andrew Sullivan. “He’s essentially going from this idealistic, innocent, naive American” to somebody who learns what’s really going on.
And it worked. “One of my readers told me, ‘I wish every American would read The Syrian because it gives you a pretty good background on what we’re doing in Syria and what we’re about to do in Syria.”
Mission accomplished: education through political spy thriller.
Now, the second book in the planned trilogy has been released by Calumet Editions. Damascus Street follows Andrew Sullivan as he becomes an unknowing pawn in a deadly spy game. As he attempts to find and rescue his fiancée Nadia, who was kidnapped by Syria’s former intelligence chief, thriller takes a ton of surprising turns in what’s being billed as a “tale of lost innocence and survival.”
In 2008, Sultan released another work of nonfiction, Tragedy in South Lebanon, which combines history and personal interviews to illustrate the lives of civilians of southern Lebanon and northern Israel during the July war of 2006.
Sultan still visits her beloved city, Beirut, every year. Well, every year except this one, since the situation appears to be volatile once again. But, if she cannot physically be there, she can at least bring the reality, mixed with some political thrills and romance, to her readers. “Tell a good story. Have a really good plot,” Sultan says. “That’s my driving force.”
HOWARD LOVY writes book reviews and conducts author interviews for Calumet Editions, LLC. Previously he was executive editor at Foreword Reviews and directed news coverage and analysis on Foreword’s website and Foreword’s Clarion book review service. Howard is a veteran journalist, spending the past 30 years working for newspapers, magazines, wire services, and websites as a reporter and editor.
