Revolutions Aesthetic by Max Weiss

Author:Max Weiss
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2022-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

THE SLOW WITNESS

No need to search out the origin of narrative in time—it is time that originates in narrative.

—Tzvetan Todorov, “Narrative-Men”1

It is impossible to live with the worst thing there is, so we have no choice but not to take it into account, and in a certain sense to forget it. But this does not mean that, at the same time, we do not know that hell exists. We do not even have to believe in hell, since the most terrible things happen to some people in reality. And the witness, who sees and cannot avoid the worst thing, he who is confronted with it, is horrified.

—Bart Verschaffel, “The Depiction of the Worst Thing”2

It is speed that supports the armies’ morale.

—Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics3

IN A WOMAN IN THE CROSSFIRE: DIARIES OF THE SYRIAN Revolution, journalist, activist, and novelist Samar Yazbek documents her experiences of crisscrossing Syria during the heyday of the Syrian uprising, March–July 2011, from Damascus to the northwest coast, caught between the regime and the coalescing forces of the uprising. “I was confused,” she writes on May 5, 2011, “as dry as a scarecrow. I couldn’t find the time to write in my diary and I started feeling there was no use in writing down what was happening to me anyway. But I soon discovered that these diaries were helping me to stay alive.”4 Like other Syrian writers, intellectuals, artists, and filmmakers, Yazbek discovered new voices, identities, and inspiration through writing, speaking, and acting—living on—in the time of the Syrian revolution and subsequent war. While she was recording her diaries Yazbek also managed to collect testimonies and recollections from dozens if not hundreds of ordinary Syrians living through those extraordinary events. In Chapter 4, we encountered Yazbek as a novelist who subjects the ideological and institutional manifestations of the Syrian security state to literary critique. If the prosaic, deceptively private act of keeping a personal diary could help Yazbek stay alive now, as she puts it, perhaps the collective act of witnessing, of speaking in more than one voice, mitsprechen, could help an entire community stay alive or at least keep alive the memories of those who had experienced the excitement, danger, and destruction looming over this moment in Syrian history, and those who were lost in the carnage. Some chronicled the stories of groups that ventured into the streets and squares of cities large and small across the country to raise their voices in protest; others smuggled video footage of collective action and regime atrocity; journalists tracking the situation on the ground completed a “first draft” of contemporary history; and an emergent mass of novelists and other writers generated an unprecedented deluge of prose during this period. This mixture of empirical documentation and creative expression had a profound impact on the Syria Warscape. Literary and cinematic stories of collective struggle and artistic experimentation in these unsettled times throw a different light on a broader cultural striving for life, liberty, and dignity, the keywords of the Syrian revolution.

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