Syria Speaks by Malu Halasa

Author:Malu Halasa [Malu Halasa, Zaher Omareen and Nawara Mahfoud]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780863567926
Publisher: Saqi
Published: 2014-08-05T16:00:00+00:00

Yazbek’s narrative brims with stark images. One, for example, describes security forces attacking a funeral, shooting and critically injuring three pallbearers, causing the mourners to flee, leaving the coffin alone on the ground in an empty but blood-spattered street. It would be a great image for a novelist to dream up, but reality got there first; reality in Syria outstrips imagination.

Death is again (in Khalifa’s words) ‘as commonplace as a crate of rotten peaches flung out onto the pavement’. The same massacres, tortures and battles unfold as in the 1980s, only on a larger scale. It’s as though Syria is locked in a recurrent curse. Violence and the regime’s manipulation of sectarianism have reopened deep and rarely examined wounds. Khalifa’s plea for ‘absurd compassion’ is more necessary than ever.

Yet this current uprising is a popular revolution of enormous reach. In the early months at least, the slogans on the streets focused exclusively on freedom, dignity and national unity. Crucially, a plurality of perspectives has broken out, expressed not only by novelists but by a million signmakers, songwriters and revolutionary journalists. In Syria today, it’s not only the Leader who roars.

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