One of the most frequent motifs in the narrative is drowning. The book opens with two separate scenes in which Doaa is worried that she will drown, once as a child and once as an adult. This particular structural choice helps to reiterate one of the key difficulties in Doaa’s journey, that she must overcome one of her most primal fears, a fear which will crop up again tragically in later life. This fear of water informs Doaa’s journey, whether it is on the ferry crossing to Egypt or debating whether she can stomach the idea of taking a refugee boat to Europe. The opening of the book, which focuses so much on the motif of drowning, presses upon the audience the difficulty of Doaa’s decisions and sets the stakes for what is to come.

At first, however, it seems as though Doaa’s fear of drowning is unfounded. Life in Daraa does not present a particularly common threat of drowning. It is not until Doaa arrives at the ferry that she has to worry about crossing deep water. But even then, she imagines the ferry capsizing and drowning everyone that she loves.