Syria's Lost Spring
by Robyn Creswell
NYR Daily, The New York Review of Books, February 16, 2016
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2015/02/16/syria-lost-spring/
The Syrian People Knows Its Way: This is civil disobedience. There’s no
excuse for silence anymore, circa 2012
What happened to the Arab Spring in Syria? Amid a terrible, grinding war now
in its fourth year, and a wave of jihadist violence extending from Aleppo
and Baghdad to Paris and Brussels, it is sometimes hard to remember that
many of the original participants in the uprisings of 2011 aspired to
something dramatically different. As with their counterparts in Tunisia and
Egypt, the Syrian protesters who took to the streets that spring were
neither armed fighters nor militant Islamists; they were university
students, civil society activists, and ordinary Syrians who demanded
democratic freedoms and an end to the Baathist regime of Bashar al-Assad.
And yet, from the outset, Syria--a security state with anti-Western
credentials run by the minority Alawite sect--was a complicated case, and
many Arab intellectuals, seemingly a natural constituency for the
revolutionaries, disagreed about which side to support.
Consider the Syrian-Lebanese poet Adonis, a leading public intellectual in
the Middle East and arguably the most influential Arab poet of the twentieth
century. Adonis (who was born in Syrian Lattakia but now lives primarily in
Paris) greeted the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt with enthusiasm. For him,
"the spark of Bouazizi"--the Tunisian fruit vendor whose self-immolation lit
the fuse of the revolts--cast a pitiless light on the region’s autocracies
and promised a new stage in Arab history, free of the violence and divisions
of the past. And yet, when the spark landed in Syria, Adonis’ enthusiasm
cooled.
Although his criticism of the regime in Damascus was unambiguous--the
Baathists were the latest in a long line of despots who had humiliated,
imprisoned, and massacred their subjects--he was notably stingy in his
support for the protesters. A central theme of Adonis’ political writings is
the need to separate politics from religion, and what concerned him most
about Syria was the opposition’s secular bona fides, or lack thereof. "I
will never agree to participate in a demonstration that comes out of the
mosque," he wrote. He worried that the protesters were not sufficiently
committed to these secular ideas, that "moderate Islam" was a contradiction
in terms, and that Syria’s minorities might find life after Assad worse than
it was under him.
To his critics, Adonis’ arguments were suspiciously similar to the rhetoric
coming from Damascus. As soon as the revolts erupted, the regime warned
Syria’s minorities that the only thing standing between them and Sunni
revanchism was the Baathist state. Other critics recalled that Adonis had
supported the Iranian revolution in 1979--a position he quickly
recanted--and accused him of harboring a sectarian agenda (like the ruling
family, Adonis hails from a Shia-Alawite background). Four years later,
however, Adonis’ guardedness toward the protesters may seem justifiable. The
civil war has long since divided on sectarian lines, and the most powerful
factions of the opposition have turned out to be Sunni extremists. Was
Adonis’ wariness toward the revolution a matter of evasion or was it prudent
realism?
One of the challenges to answering this question is our limited
understanding of what actually happened during the first months of the
uprising, before the opposition became explicitly sectarian and armed by
foreign powers. There is little doubt the insurrection arose chiefly in
Sunni neighborhoods and rural areas, and a few of the early demonstrators
adopted slogans like "Christians to Beirut and Alawis to the grave." But
this doesn’t mean the character and culture of the early opposition was
itself sectarian. It may simply reflect the resentment of popular Sunni
classes at their exclusion from the Baathist state’s largesse. (Eighty
percent of Syria’s Alawis worked for the state at the time of the uprising.)
The regime, hoping to solidify its domestic support as well as to convince
the West that it was fighting terrorists, certainly did its best to turn the
struggle into a sectarian one. It also did its best to force the opposition
to become violent--a sure prelude to internationalizing the conflict, since
guns cost money.
For an introduction to the ideas and culture of the original Syrian
protesters--about which Adonis has curiously little to say--one can scarcely
do better than Syria Speaks, an anthology of visual and literary work, most
of it from the early days of the uprising. Published by Saqi Books, an
independent London-based publishing house of Arab and English-language
books, Syria Speaks includes political posters, stencils, cartoons,
photography, rap lyrics, fiction and poetry, along with essays tracing the
cultural and political background of this work. Much of the material
gathered in the book was made in the ambit of Local Coordinating Committees,
a loose network of civil society groups at the forefront of the early
revolts (and now increasingly beleaguered), which have their roots in
leftist opposition groups of the 1970s and 80s. Insofar as the original
protests had any kind of organizational structure or political platform, it
was mainly provided by the LCCs.
It is striking how closely these works of art model the sort of civil
society that Adonis called for. The culture one finds here is pacifist,
anti-sectarian, and feminist. The artists do not shy from slogans (sometimes
that is the whole point) and so their political commitments are clear. Their
posters, for example, call for civil disobedience and deplore the regime’s
choice to confront peaceful protesters with guns. Other works depict the
results of this policy of repression a l’outrance: martyred children,
political prisoners stuffed into cells, a rosary made of human heads. But
this is to make the art sound more earnest and less pleasurable than it
often is. The best work is blackly humorous, profane, or bluntly
insulting--for instance, a stencil by Alaa Ghazal of Bashar al-Assad’s face
with the caption, "Step here."
The cheeky humor of Egyptian protesters in Tahrir, often in the form of
chanted couplets, was part of what made that revolt so appealing. In Syria,
the humor was just as evident, though it was often extremely dark--a kind of
mordant satire bordering on hysteria. (Given Syria’s history as a police
state, it is no surprise that the Western authors most prized by Syrian
readers and writers are those with a taste for the ironical and absurd:
Kafka, Orwell, Beckett, Ionesco.) Sulafa Hijazi’s image of a Ferris-wheel
with armed men pointing guns at each other, or another of someone pushing
his head through one wall of a cage only for it to reenter through another,
are terrible emblems of Syria’s predicament, and also undeniably witty.
Indeed, it is only the visual wit that makes them bearable to look at.
In other words, the sensibility of these Syrian artists is a mirror image of
regime culture. Rather than the slickly monumental imagery of the Baath, the
art of the revolutionaries is typically satirical, small-scale, and
improvisatorial. In the words of Chad Elias and Zaher Omareen, whose essay
on documentary filmmaking in Syria is one of the best in the book, these
artists are engaged in "a non-specialized and popular activity." Whereas
government slogans and propaganda fetishize the image of the leader, the
revolutionaries often deal with collective or anonymous subjects: women,
orphans, dissenters.
The artistic collective, Abounaddara, is a striking example of this
tendency. Founded in April 2011, and largely composed of self-taught
filmmakers, Abounaddara regularly posts short documentary films (with
exceptionally good English subtitles) on its website. The films feature
ordinary, usually unnamed Syrians--though there are armed militants as
well--talking about their lives before and during the civil war. In its
focus on the everyday, including the everyday of violent conflict, the
documentaries present a rich and detailed vision of the life that goes on
beyond the headlines.
Abounaddara is not the only such collective that emerged during the early
revolts. Al-sha‘ab al-suri ‘arif tariqahu (The Syrian People Knows Its
Way)--the name suggesting that Syria no longer needs a leader--is a group of
graphic designers, calligraphers, and students who put their work online for
protestors to print out and carry to demonstrations. The posters borrow from
several styles of leftist art, from early Soviet abstraction to the
iconography of Palestinian guerillas. Often, the written captions, in
elegant typography, play off the stark images. In one poster, a female
figure covers her face with a veil, announcing, "I’m going out to
demonstrate." The Arabic verb for "to demonstrate," atazahar, suggests the
process of "appearing" or "becoming visible" (as in the French manifester).
So the poster says something more complicated than it may seem to at first
blush, something like, "I, a woman, am hiding my private identity, so that I
may be seen (anonymously) in a public protest." One often assumes that
slogans have to be simple to be effective, but these posters argue
otherwise.
For understandable reasons, much of the work in Syria Speaks is testimonial,
blurring the boundary between aesthetics and journalism. Once the regime
closed the country to foreign reporters and restricted news to official
sources, citizen journalists filled the vacuum with mobile phones and
cameras. Much of the work done by the LCCs in the early days of the uprising
was to coordinate these informal efforts, in an attempt to keep fellow
citizens informed as well as to alert the outside world to what was
happening on the ground. Some of the images produced and distributed in this
way have more than documentary interest. Lens Young has separate Facebook
pages for several Syrian cities--Damascus, Aleppo, Hama, Homs, and
others--each one filled with somber and troublingly beautiful scenes of
urban destruction, much like photographs of Beirut before and after that
civil war. Amid images of entire city blocks of wreckage, are here and there
a poignant or horrifying human detail: a family photograph, a decapitated
doll. Looking at them, one often thinks of Goya’s Disasters of War and his
laconic caption to a scene of fleeing civilians, "Yo lo vi," "I saw it."
Many of the literary works in Syria Speaks are also eyewitness accounts of
the unfolding drama. The book begins with a diaristic piece by the novelist
Samar Yazbek, whose memoir, A Woman in the Crossfire, was one of the
earliest books about the revolution to be translated into English. The diary
records her meeting with a former regime soldier, who tells her of his
decision to defect after a friend is killed by his officer for refusing to
rape civilians. Another short piece is by Yara Badr, wife of the imprisoned
activist Mazen Darwish, about her own stint in the regime’s prisons:
You don’t need to think hard to remember the dictionary of torture
techniques you have been told about--the Flying Carpet, the German Chair,
the electric chair, solitary confinement...In the darkness of the cell I
could see names and words scribbled on the walls by those who had been
brought here before me.
The scholar Miriam Cooke speaks elsewhere in the anthology of "the
domination of the [prison] cell over the Syrian imagination," and indeed
Badr’s essay is one of many selections that evoke the claustrophobia of life
under the Baath--and, by contrast, the joys of going out into the street to
demonstrate. In his poem "Tashriqa: Prayer for Homs," Faraj Bayrakdar
imagines a time when
"You are safe from whatever you say or don’t say,
"believers and nonbelievers,
"all those who lit up the city’s promises
"with candles in their fingers."
If one views the essays and artistic statements collected in Syria Speaks as
representative of the early uprising, it is impossible not to feel an
enormous sense of disappointment about what has happened since, just as it
is impossible not to wonder why Adonis didn’t ally himself more
wholeheartedly with the artists and revolutionaries one finds here. Perusing
the contributor notes at the back of the book, one reads with dismay how
many of them are now living abroad (others, of course, do not have that
choice), and as of this writing, at least one of them, Mazen Darwish, is in
Damascus Central Prison. In their courage, humor, defiance, and occasional
moment of optimism, these works already seem to belong to another
era--before sectarian war and waves of refugees made the idea of revolution
seem quaint.
Syria Speaks: Art and Culture from the Frontline, edited by Malu Halasa,
Zaher Omareen, and Nawara Mahfoud, is published by Saqi Books in London.
February 16, 2015, 10:40 pm
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