Posts Tagged ‘Samar Yazbek’
Your Presence is a Danger to Your Life
My review of Samar Yazbek’s latest book – this one documenting horrors imposed on Palestinians rather than Syrians – was first published at The New Arab.
There are sentences in this remarkable, painful book that imply an entire universe of horror. Like this: “We brought my daughter’s leg and buried it next to her brother and sister.” Or this: “A boy was blowing air into a dismembered woman’s corpse, trying to bring her back to life – she was his mother.”
“Your Presence is a Danger to Your Life” – the title is taken from the flyers dropped by the Israelis minutes before they bombed civilian targets – documents the Gaza genocide, or at least the genocide as experienced by twenty-six men, women and children interviewed at length throughout 2024 while they were receiving medical treatment in Qatar. The interviewer, editor and shaper of these narratives is the Syrian novelist and non-fiction writer Samar Yazbek.
Yazbek has already produced three documentary texts from the Syrian Revolution and war – “Woman in the Crossfire” and others. In the introduction she explains how the destruction of Gaza reenacted for her the destruction of Syria. She hints at the continuum of experience between the two disasters, and describes her work as “testament to a dream of justice for those living beneath the grindstone of this violent era.” But there are key differences, terrifying “novel details” involving the technological sophistication of the Israeli genocidaires and their “algorithms of murder”.
Many of the witnesses are householders hit at home in the midst of family life. A child asks for a sandwich and then, in a flash, life is irretrievably broken. “My brain couldn’t interpret what had happened” is a phrase repeated by several. “It seemed as though we had entered hell” is another.
Some witnesses are doctors, nurses, or those who volunteered to help in hospitals. They recount Israeli soldiers bombing maternity wards, storming the intensive care department, methodically destroying the medical equipment. One doctor is forced into the role of human shield. Several witnesses remember Israeli soldiers torturing the maimed and dying in their beds.
There are descriptions of dismemberment, of heads spit open, of cats red-faced from human meals. Someone recalls “a grandmother as gentle as the breeze … innocent children, splendid as roses, evaporated in an instant;” others talk of children who bleed to death alone, or children who lose their entire families: parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles. For the survivors, or semi-survivors, there is endless pain, vomiting after drinking poisoned water, the stink of sewage, of infected, maggot-filled wounds, of corpses rotting under the rubble. There is the shame of being unable to stop screaming in a room full of strangers
Yazbek preserves the creative uses of Palestinian war idiom in the witness accounts. For instance, the popular word for a vacuum bomb is ‘shafat’ – meaning ‘suction’ – an idea which is then animated: “It took no more than two seconds to suck up twenty-five souls.”
One of the accounts ends with the words, “And then there are all the things that cannot be spoken.” This silence contains both general and specific meanings. In general, as Yazbek writes in her introduction, “humans are capable of brutalizing each other in ways that challenge language’s very capacity of expression.” More specifically, women witnesses would describe to Yazbek rapes and sexual abuse perpetrated on other women, but never on themselves.
None of this can be described as easy reading. The accounts provoke a visceral response, and sometimes the reader feels a near compulsion to put the book aside, go for a walk, and observe the emotional tumult it has unleashed. Horror, grief and rage are natural responses to the reality expressed here. And yet there is a contrary compulsion to keep reading, to know the worst of it, to bear witness alongside Yazbek. Each distinct Palestinian voice, full of character, leads us through the maelstrom.
Read the rest of this entry »Syrian Dust: An Overview of Books
This review of books on Syria, mainly of Francesca Borri’s ‘Syrian Dust’, was published at the National.
“…if you only talk about those who are fighting, any revolution becomes a war.” – Francesca Borri
For a long time very little was published on Syria in English. Patrick Seale’s useful but hagiographic “Assad: the Struggle for Syria” was the best known. Hanna Batatu’s classic “Syria’s Peasantry and their Politics” and Raymond Hinnebusch’s “Revolution from Above” were valuable academic studies of the Hafez-era state.
Over the last five years of revolution and war, several shelf loads of books have appeared. Many are sensationalist, cashing in on the latest terrorism scare. But several are of very high standard. Bente Scheller’s “The Wisdom of Syria’s Waiting Game”, for instance, is an excellent analysis of Assadist pre-revolution foreign policy. Thomas Pierret’s “Religion and State in Syria” is an indispensable resource on the social roles of the Islamic scholars in the same period.
Novelist Samar Yazbek’s “Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution” is the best account of the revolution’s early months, though “Revolt in Syria” by Stephen Starr, an Irish journalist then resident in Damascus, comes close. Jonathan Littell, author of the remarkable WW2 novel “The Kindly Ones” wrote “Syrian Notebooks” after spending two weeks of 2012 in besieged Homs. Marwa al-Sabouni’s well-received “The Battle for Home” gives a Syrian architect’s perspective on the destruction (and potential rebuilding) of the city.
The Crossing
This review of Samar Yazbek’s “The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria” was first published at the Daily Beast.
This shocking, searing and beautiful book is an account of three visits to Idlib province in northern Syria, an area liberated from the Assad dictatorship “on the ground but betrayed by the sky.”
In the face of regime repression, Syria’s non-violent protests of 2011 had transformed into an armed uprising in 2012. By August of that year, when the author – exiled Syrian novelist and journalist Samar Yazbek – made her first trip, Assad’s forces had been driven from the rural border zones. From a distance, however, via warplanes and long-range artillery, they implemented a policy of scorched earth and collective punishment. So Yazbek finds her homeland changed to a landscape of burnt fields and cratered market places, with boys picking through collapsed homes in search of things to sell and displaced families sheltering in tombs and caves. Death is ever-present. Gardens and courtyards have become cemeteries. Yazbek never shies away from the horror but builds something worthwhile from it, a record and a reflection, for death is ultimately “the impetus of writing and its source.”
Known today only for war, Syria is heir to an ancient civilisation. Idlib province houses the remains of Ebla, a five-thousand-year-old city, and is dotted with half-intact Byzantine towns and churches. The war’s “ruthless sabotage of history” has damaged these priceless sites. In Maarat al-Numan the statue of 9th Century poet Abu Alaa al-Maari, a native of the town highly respected in his own time despite his unusual atheism, has been decapitated by armed Islamists. And the wonderful mosaic museum at the same location has been bombed by the regime and looted by various militias.
But amid these ruins Yazbek encounters a people giving voice to their aspirations after half a century of enforced silence. In revolutionary towns the walls are “turned into open books and transient art exhibits”. Activists organise “graffiti workshops, cultural newspapers, magazines for children, training workshops, privately-run community schools.” In the context of state collapse these projects are born of necessity, but they also reflect the kind of society the revolutionaries hoped to build – inclusive, democratic, forward-looking – one which they are in fact trying to build, even as extremists fashion their own, much darker versions. Through self-organised committees and councils, Yazbek is told, “each region now has its own administration, and every village looks after itself.” This – Syrians’ willed self-determination, Syrian creativity amid destruction – is the positive story so often missed in the news cycle, and it represents a hope for the future, faint though it is. The activists know they are working against insurmountable odds, but continue anyway. They document atrocities and reach out to international media, an endeavour which has so far failed to bear tangible fruit. When they can, they laugh – it’s “as though they inhaled laughter like an antidote to death.”
