The Smartest Guy on Facebook. Status Updates from Syria by Aboud Saeed

Author:Aboud Saeed [Saeed, Aboud]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: social media, literature, poetry, Syrian Bukowski, Arab, revolution, Facebook, Syria, war, conflict
ISBN: 9783944543093
Publisher: mikrotext
Published: 2013-12-02T23:00:00+00:00

Afterword

“When the MiG jets begin again their daily work and the bombs fall again around me … I put on my headphones and listen to a song I like at full volume … and then I read your posts … and smile.” Rami Traboulsi on Aboud Saeed’s Facebook wall, October 1, 2012

As I write this text, I still have not encountered Aboud Saeed in flesh and blood. Although it’s true that his digital life is an important element of his analog universe, I’d prefer not to say that I know him personally—and he would certainly be hurt. We talk on the phone now and then, Skype, and chat on Facebook.

Although neither of the two would ever claim to be honest, there is a lot that the Aboud Saeed who is an author on Facebook and the 30-year-old man who works as a blacksmith in Manbij, a town near Aleppo, have in common. Aboud Saeed’s life (sharing a roof with his mother, with his metalwork, with irritating bus rides, war, virtual flirtation, TV, and power outages) serves as inspiration for his writing. He actually works almost every day in the workshop and also posts multiple times daily on Facebook, which has become his small window into the wide world. He plays with this contrast. Time and again he points it out, reminding himself and his readers that, despite all of his Facebook popularity, he is still just a metalworker from Manbij: a foolish guy with delusions of grandeur and lots of dreams from which his mother is always hauling him back into harsh reality. And sometimes he exaggerates this contrast, says he’ll sleep with seven siblings in one room (probably true at one point, but today, at least, there are fewer siblings). Neither do I quite believe him when he writes that he hides his love letters in the chicken coop, if he even has one.

He says of himself, “When I started on Facebook, I was a marginalized user with a forlorn wall. No one ’liked’ me, and the friend requests I sent were mostly ignored. But then I decided to start a revolution and I began to read…” He wanted to confront this cyberworld that stood in such stark contrast to his own impoverished, provincial reality. At some point he wrote on his wall, as a provocation to everyone: “I am the smartest guy on Facebook.” He meant this sentence, not as irony, not as a joke, but rather as the declaration of his personal uprising on Facebook. After this first post he started writing daily. Later, when he repeated this sentence, he was referencing the beginning of his personal revolution. Since that day he has not sent a single friend request. When I asked him if his personal revolution coincided with the uprising in Syria, he said, vaguely, that it must have indeed happened around the time that the Syrian revolution began.

His Facebook status updates consist of a mixture of literary documentation of his reality (but surely not for

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