As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow

Salama Kassab is the 18-year-old protagonist of As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow. As the sole voice of the novel, her characterization deepens with raw emotions, thoughts, and actions that make her feel authentic and propel the plot. She is empathetic, shy, and smart, but also prone to fear and guilt; before the war, she strived to become a pharmacist and writer. Salama starts out fearful and guilt-ridden, but becomes more courageous through her experiences. She learns to defy her circumstances, have faith in her survival, pursue joy, and accept she’s done all in her power to help others. Her greatest challenge is overcoming fear, which surrounds her daily to the point of manifesting Khawf, a mental embodiment of fear. Salama’s mental health is affected by her head injury and PTSD, as she creates hallucinations to cope with her grief. As a medical student, she deduces the hallucinations are a means of survival.

When her sister-in-law and best friend Layla (who is married to her brother Hamza) is revealed as another hallucination, Salama’s mind is revealed to be powerful enough to conceal Layla’s death with happy memories: “For five months my mind has been spinning a fiction to keep my agony sealed away” (295). Losing a loved one would have broken most people, but Salama stays determined and tries to make a positive difference at the hospital. Like her repetition of medicinal uses for herbs and plants, her mind finds ways to cope with tragedy and give her strength—creating realistic illusions of Layla and Khawf.

A brave girl, Salama refuses to give up on Syria and her people. Her survivor’s guilt and sense of responsibility push her to work tirelessly at the hospital, suppressing her own fears to save others. She feels crippling survivor’s guilt, especially over her mother and Layla (and later, her father), to the point of forgetting self-care (despite her father figure Dr. Ziad’s warnings): “For every life I can’t save during my shift, one more drop of blood becomes a part of me. No matter how many times I wash my hands, our martyrs’ blood seeps beneath my skin, into my cells” (2). Through tragedies, Salama often stays calm, using her medical knowledge even through tears. Still, she sometimes runs from the hospital when her grief is too much to bear. She is believable in her complex emotions and mistakes. Salama resents herself for bargaining with Samar’s life, to push her smuggler father, Am, to provide her and Layla safe passage. This act leads to her becoming more callous, but her remorse and inability to eat after using Samar show she’s still empathetic. Later, she grows into a defiant young woman who overcomes her terror to save a young girl from enemy soldiers; she sacrifices herself and is nearly sexually assaulted. Salama’s arc completes when she learns she must fight back, only accepting death if it is her fate rather than shying away from the realities of war or feeling she’s unworthy of happiness. She finds this happiness in Kenan, a young rebel who was once her marriage candidate. She ends the novel putting herself first, leaving Syria despite her heartbreak and building a new life with Kenan in Toronto.