Beyond Memory by Beyond Memory (retail) (epub)

Author:Beyond Memory (retail) (epub)
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781610756846
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press

Around 2000, I am busy creating a new course, a special topics seminar on Syrian literature. For research, I travel to Quebec in the dead of winter to attend the Musee de Civilisations’ special exhibit on Syria to see artifacts on loan from the National Museums in Damascus and Aleppo. I salivate over objects I will probably never get to see in their original settings: bas reliefs of Assyrians on a chariot and of an early Christian girl on a tomb, busts of Palmyra women in their jeweled headdresses. I come home from Quebec and write a children’s play on Palmyra’s Queen Zenobia, which my daughters and their friends perform in a local park that summer. I read Hanna Battatu’s thick tome on Syrian demographics and politics, and Lisa Wedeen’s book on the cult of the Baathist leader and what it did to warp Syrian culture. Nizar Kabbani’s poetry sets me on fire, as does Muhammad Maghut’s, and I devour Zakaria Tamer’s astonishing, surrealistic fiction, and Ghada Samman’s, which is so Syrian in its dark humor—Syrian exiles, Syrian exiles. All these are part of my research for the course but also profoundly part of my life, and that’s why I created the course: to understand why, and how, and what, Syria had been, and might be.

I build the course around a panel I have organized on Syrian literature at the Middle Eastern Studies Association conference in Washington, DC, in which I present a paper about how none of Syria’s great authors treat the 1982 Hama massacre directly, and how self-censorship for survival produces strange gaps in Syrian cultural production.

A woman stands up after the panelists finish presenting to the audience of forty people, and asserts, “There was no Hama massacre.”

“What?” I exclaim.

“There were some criminals assassinating people, and the regime protected the people. That’s all it was. No massacre.”

I almost think I’ve heard her wrong. Because I cannot go to Syria, it is my first encounter, in the flesh, with head-spinning Syrian regime doublespeak.

“What the—what—what?” I sputter. “How dare you deny the blood that was shed. People died. How dare you—?” An older Egyptian man glances up with shock—at me. What in hell is going on here?

My copanelist, a graduate student on Fulbright from Syria, whispers to me, “Do you know who she is?” She pushes a note toward me. She’s Bouthaina Shaaban—Assad’s translator at Camp David.

My other copanelist, a major scholar, knows exactly who Bouthaina is, having worked with her both during Bouthaina’s spell as a guest researcher at the scholar’s university, and when the scholar was doing her research in Syria.

Neither copanelist responds. Not a whisper. Which, for the vulnerable graduate student, is utterly understandable—the terms of her Fulbright scholarship require that she return and serve in a Syrian institution. If she speaks out, she will not be able to go to Syria without risking prison, torture. Even just by being on a panel with me where regime atrocities are mentioned, she is in jeopardy. And the major

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