ABSTRACT
During the first year of the revolution, Syrians captured and circulated scenes of crimes against humanity. They believed that the world would come to their aid if only word could get out about the atrocities the regime was committing against its own people. They posted mangled bodies in extremis to YouTube and Facebook sites. Even though their atrocity images did not mobilize the international community, artists continued to work. Their picture and word stories began to deliver the intensity of raw emotion rather than the brute physical reality that had left the world numb or, worse, indifferent. It was not only the world that artist-activists were trying to move; it was also other Syrians. Numbness inside is dangerous: “The worst thing possible is to get used to terrible stories and not to react as I should because I had decided not to get sick” (Nasif 2015: 136). If it is not to fester, trauma must be communicated. But the question with time was how to communicate the event effectively? In a country like Syria where, for forty years, individual trauma was the unacknowledged norm, almost no-one spoke or wrote against the regime. The only exceptions to the rule of silence were a few who had spent time in the Asads’ prisons. Ghassan al-Jabai, Faraj Bairaqdar, Ibrahim Samuil, and Hasiba ‘Abd al-Rahman had found ways to turn their ordeals into words that evoked pain in the reader. When Bashar Asad ascended the throne in 2000, those prison classics began to circulate more widely than had ever before been possible. These writings inspired others to record their punishment for standing up to unjust power. They also provided testimonials of impossible survival and evidence of the state’s crimes against humanity. Sharing trauma
empowered many to write, paint, and make moving images that demonstrated how trauma was being transformed into resistance. After the eruption of the revolution, the experience of regime cruelty and its denunciation were no longer individual, but collective. Mass arrests during the 2011 demonstrations inspired new carceral narratives. Journalist Hanadi Zahlut’s 2014 book Ila ibnati [To My Daughter] recounts her weeks in solitary confinement at a security center and then months in the Adra and Mezze prisons. The country was on fire, but the women she met at Adra had no idea what was happening outside the prison walls. When they heard that the new arrival had been arrested for participating in a demonstration, they were astonished. They could not believe that “dozens of women are detained, tortured behind bars and suffering for supporting the revolution, for cooking its power, for feeding it, for writing its diary and for binding its wounds” (Zahlut 2014: 50; my emphasis). Zahlut maintains that, even after over three years of generalized armed violence, the turmoil in the country is not a civil war, but is at its heart a revolution. Moreover, she insists on the key part that women have played, emphasizing the gender of their participation in her use of culinary and nursing figures of speech. After release, her brother pleads with her to return home to safety. Safety, however, is not her priority: Syrians have abandoned safety to “confront their fear and to revolt and I have to be with them. I shall long for my mother’s breast, I know . . . But I will not be me, I will be no more than my fear and my weakness” (Zahlut 2014: 99). What matters is the revolution and everyone’s commitment to keep it going and not the safe silence of the past. On the last page, we learn that Zahlut fled to Paris, but even from that distance she continues to believe in the revolution: “I am convinced that the torture will cease when you read our revolution carefully and you will learn from it” (Zahlut 2014: 109). The Syrian revolutionaries will have taught the world how to confront tyranny, sustain hope, and begin the long-delayed process of building a just society.
