Qunfuz

This review was published at the New Arab.

One of the functions of literature is to capture historical moments from the inside, to describe their social and experiential reality rather than merely listing the external facts. That function is admirably performed by The Book of Damascus – the latest in Comma Press’s excellent Reading the City series.

Khaled Khalifa, the greatest Syrian novelist of his generation, and a fixture of Damascus literary life, wrote the Preface: “It is true we live in a forsaken land, afraid of the future and the past, afraid of being arrested and ‘disappeared’, afraid of all forms of annihilation.”

Khaled wrote those words – and the contributors wrote their stories – before the collapse of the Assad regime after 14 years of war and more than half a century of tyranny. His point about annihilation and disappearance still holds, given that sectarian massacres and detentions without due process continue to characterize Syrian political life, albeit on a smaller scale than before. It’s also still true that Damascus is “a city that lives on invisible layers of endless sorrow.” But it’s no longer true that “What exists today is merely a remnant of a country waiting to breathe its last so it can be buried.” That country no longer exists. It was buried on 8 December 2024 when Islamist militiamen trained in Idlib arrived in the capital, when the prison gates opened, and statues of Assad were toppled.

Khaled Khalifa also no longer exists. He died, aged only 59, on 30 September 2023, in the city he loved and refused to leave, whatever horrors it produced. He missed the liberation, the death of the old and the birth of a violently contested new world, with new winners and new victims, a new type of identity politics and a new authoritarianism, and new enthusiasms and possibilities too.

The stories here study that strange extended period when the Assad regime had already died but – its corpse propped up by foreign powers – refused to lie down. They record the city during that long limbo, expressing how it felt to walk its streets and to suffocate in its crushing fear. Damascus in this battered but not quite defeated state is seen through a range of perspectives and filtered through a variety of genres.