On Hiatus

That’s right, this blog is on hiatus at the moment. There is a bank of emotional and intellectual ammunition that has been spent and I don’t know if it will ever come back. What I do know is that I had the opportunity to write and comment upon what is likely to have been the formative political and social event of my life - the Syrian Revolution.

What the future will decide upon the events of early 2012 is yet to be known, and whilst the vicious battles on the streets and cities of that country have slowly quietened, the online ones between those who are fighting to preserve the memory of this revolution, and the blancmange apologists who fight the corner of tyranny, are only just beginning. That is a battle I will have to bow out of. I’m writing a lot of fiction these days, and it’s terrible stuff, yet immensely satisfying. 

You can continue to follow me on Twitter where I will be rabble rousing and causing mischief. Or you might, by happy chance, find one of my books in a bargain bin or charity shop one day. If you do, I hope you enjoy it 😊 

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"Beautiful Syria": Thoughts and Prayers

I'm so angry with the lies, with the confusion and deceit that surrounds everything about Syria. People who have no business talking about it, about my home city, Damascus, about the country of my parents and grandparents, Syria, pontificating and deciding that they know best. I'm tired of other Syrians, too, the ones who sit back and suddenly pray to Allah to "protect Syria", but only when it seems like the American bombs will come. Nobody I know of in Damascus cared one iota when the Ghouta gas attacks happened, nobody sent pictures on their Whatsapp, and their Viber, and their Tango, or talked about the dead children lying in the arms of their dead parents. They just sent each other smug texts saying that "it's over" in Douma. Like someone had just taken a can of Piff-Paff and killed a roach infestation. But now, suddenly, we're expected to "Pray for Damascus"

There's someone I know, or maybe that I thought I knew. She's never posted a thing about Syria in years. At least nothing that I can recall. But yesterday, of all days, she decided that beautiful Damascus was on her mind. I'm shocked and angry, but I've learned over the last seven years not to get into discussions about Syria because there is no point in trying to change the mind of someone who is pathologically incapable of moral outrage unless it's in acceptable, clearly delimited channels. Palestine. Iraq. These are nice and easy causes for the children of the old Arab bourgeoisie. A polite clap and salute for the athlete that refuses to wrestle an Israeli athlete, a quick boycott of Marks & Spencer or Wonderwoman, a status change on their Facebook for Land Day, and maybe the odd picture of Jerusalem are enough to fulfill the quota of daring political activism for these bright-eyed scions of the great Arab families abroad. Mention Iraq and a well-rehearsed litany of the many crimes of Bush and Blair can be reeled off, an honourable mention of Abu Ghreib, and of course the rise of ISIS. All of these tragedies that have befallen the Arab world, we are assured knowingly, can be traced back to shadowy basements in government buildings in Tel Aviv and Washington. And I don't doubt that some are. Yet mention the names of Saddam Hussein or Assad and you hear crickets and a polite silence.

When it comes to talking about Syria, people like me are told we are "too emotional", that we're not seeing some kind of big picture. Of course Assad is bad, they'd argue, but apparently, it would be far worse if he was removed. So the discussion moves comfortably back to how terrible the Americans are, how awful their invasion of Iraq is, and how morally outrageous the occupation of Palestine is. Gotta remember to buy that Palestinian olive oil. Very important. Never mind about nerve agents and barrel bombs, about Russian jets and Iranian martyr squads, about Shiite militias recruited from as far afield as Afghanistan and dragged all the way to Syria to fight and die for some guy they don't even know. Seven years. Seven years and not a peep out of these people. Well, that's not entirely true. Back when ISIS was the only thing being mentioned in the news there were prayers for Syria then, and tears for the old dead cities in the desert and the empty temples that ISIS decided to tear down. There were tears for civilization, for coexistence, but today there's no mention of coexistence. There's no mention of the green buses that are taking entire Syrian families and dumping them up north in Idlib, in a place they probably had never been to in their entire lives, uprooting them from the land that had nurtured them, from the places where their ancestors are buried, to live as strangers and refugees in somewhere that might as well be another planet for them.

Good luck getting a visa or finding a job or renting a decent place for you and your family to live. Good luck. Get on that green bus, and leave your home under the watchful gaze of a scruffy looking grunt in a uniform who flicks you the bird as you're bused away from your entire life because you happened to live in an area that the Syrian government decided was enemy territory. Good luck and fuck you very much. You're not the kind of Syrian that elicits sympathy from these Arab patriots, sitting smugly in their living rooms praying for Syria. No prayers and tears for you. Unless you get killed by an American bomb accidentally. Then we'd get the sighs, and these condescending patriots would lament the state of the Arab world, and the unjustness of American tyranny and they'd say their prayers for "beautiful Syria" and remember the lovely summer holidays they spent there once.

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Memories of Home...

Dusk...
Red earth...
The sound of a water pump in the distance...
A dog barking...
A melodious call to prayer echoes across the valley...
The pool is still...
The last traces of the golden sun vanish behind a purple mountain...

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Vanished Worlds

I had a vivid memory come to mind the other day. It was of a winter night, with a stove in a house in Damascus covered in chestnuts and orange skin peels. It is winter, there are people visiting. The smell of coffee is in the air. The house is long gone, and so are the people in the memory. Some dead, while the others are scattered around the globe.

I sometimes wish I'd spent more time taking pictures of the street we lived in, of the neighbours, of the people we lived with and shared happy times with. It's all different now, all changed, and I accept in my heart that it can never come back. The thing about those times was that they felt so mundane, and so boring. A bit like the present moment as I sit typing this in an office and pretend to look busy with work. I heard a quote by an unattributed Russian writer once, "we fear the future, which quickly becomes the present that we hate, and then the past that we miss". That's so true, and it sums up the human condition so well.

When the revolution started I used to feel sad for that vanished world, and I do miss it, but there are other worlds for me, and different futures to create. We're not meant to live in the past. The future isn't written yet, and there is still so much more to live for.

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My Thoughts on the US Airstrike against Assad

There is something that is happening right now, something that most people aren't talking about, either because they haven't noticed it yet or, like the Syrian regime, they are ignoring and at the same time trying to kill it. Emerging from the cinders of a country, Syrians are developing a common sense of identity and a new way of looking at the world. They are, in effect, becoming a new country. Whether it is a new Syria is a different question. The old country, with its corrupt Baathist-socialist legacy and the politicisation of all aspects of life and the corresponding ideological baggage, is now giving way to a country where being an exile underpins your sense of national identity, and necessitates pragmatism.

These Syrians don't need expensive post-grad diplomas and degrees in journalism and international relations to understand that the US strike was in their interest, even if the motives behind it were not. These are the same Syrians who celebrated the election victories of the AKP and President Erdogan in Turkey, and who breathed a collective sigh of relief when the coup attempt against President Erdogan failed, or who cheer on when the Israeli Airforce attacks the Assad regime and its Hezbullah allies.

When Syrians take these positions, they are not interested in domestic Turkish or American entanglements and they are not interested in tying the Syrian revolution with the Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation. They are interested solely in dealing with the dictator whose family has had its boot on their necks for the past forty years. They are, in effect, expressing as Syrians a nascent national interest, their national interest. We should probably listen to what these people have to say, instead of ignoring them or trying to change their point of view.

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Mr "Fake News"

There are a lot of things that rile me about Bashar al Assad, but none more than his manner when speaking to members of the press. In a recent interview with Michael Isikoff, from Yahoo News, he sat like a well behaved school boy, ready to respond to all the questions he was given. In what could have been a curveball, Isikoff called Assad's bluff when he was asked, "Do you have a picture?" Isikoff did. When he saw the picture, he asked Isikoff if he knew who those people in the picture were, if he knew where it was taken, and whether it had been photoshopped. He had the temerity to chide the interviewer for not "verifying" a picture before presenting it in front of an audience, and that kind of sums up Assad's approach to all interviews. It's clear that he's coached, that he's been drilled endlessly on how to answer all the difficult questions, that he's done his 'homework'. And he does so with all the clinical precision of his supposed training as an ophthalmologist. He uses the latest buzzword, "fake news" in one of his answers, and sidesteps completely the fact that there, in his hand, he was holding a picture showing the handiwork of the regime his father bequeathed to him. In his hand he saw his own countrymen, other Syrians, innocent people, who had been rounded up and processed in the industrial torture and murder machine that works in the shadows, away from mobile footage and, unlike ISIS, doesn't need flashy production values. There is no audience for the handiwork done in Assad's prisons. There are only numbers and quotas, as we saw in the recent Amnesty report stating that over thirteen thousand Syrians had been murdered in the regime's prisons since 2011.

This is the 'new' type of politics that is being unleashed on the world. It's the same old politics we saw in the dirtiest days and nights of the Cold War, but with an additional twist. It is packaged slickly for a consumerist society that can have everything it wants except freedom. This is the technocratic, dictatorial nightmare world of the Putins, of the "Chinese Way" that Assad once admired, the tech-savvy world of the Iranian Ayatollah's who can ruthlessly crush a protest movement and match it point for point on internet savvy and tech know-how. In this cowardly new world, politics is theatre, even more so than anything the most corrupt and inept Western democracy could ever come up with. There are play-actors for every role, from President to opposition figure or intellectual. Everybody can act their role perfectly. The only thing wrong with all of this is that none of it is real. Assad is not a real president. Syria does not have real elections. There is no real army, no real police, not even a real education system. It is a country of cardboard cut-outs that set the background scenery for an even bigger national myth of greatness and resistance to anti-imperialism. In this backwards, clumsy and childish impersonation of a functioning country, a tall lanky man sits atop a pyramid of violence, murder and lies, and tells the world that everything is fine, and that the problem isn't with him, but with it.

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Just want to "Be"

The world is so big, and yet these days it seems so small. Everywhere you go you need papers. Little bits of information that say where you have to be, who you are, what you do. We're supposed to be defined into little easy boxes that can be checked off. Some of the boxes are OK, acceptable. Others, not so much. But the worst thing to be, I think, is nothing. To not have a box that can be checked. Then the man behind the counter at the airport, or the checkpoint, or the harbour office, or whatever else kind of barrier is out there, scratches his chin and hums and haws. He makes some calls, asks some questions. A superior is needed. Someone to think for him. Someone who will take the responsibility because the uniform he wears isn't supposed to represent competence, only authority. You're an irregular, an abnormality, an undesirable, and so you're a problem. Not the stinking world, not the man in the uniform, not the clueless person typing up your life into a form on a computer and then telling you that you're not good enough, no, none of that. You are the problem.

Papers, papers, everywhere. Today they're electronic. We just fill out little forms, wait for the hour glass to stop spinning, and then we get a decision that's going to shape our lives forever. You can't click back, you can't undo anything. That's it. Your name has gotten on the wrong list. No explanation, no answers, no reason. You're done for, Mister. I'm sick, sick, sick of it. It's dehumanising. It's impersonal. It screams against every instinct inside of me. I feel like a gorilla rattling the bars of a prison he can't understand.

All my life, growing up as someone who doesn't "fit" any of the boxes, who doesn't have an easy answer to simple questions like "where are you from?", I've felt like I need to worry about what people will think about me, about how they see me. Every action I do feels like something I need to think about and be able to explain. Would it give off the wrong meaning? Would the fact that the one time I decide to grow a beard again, simply for the hell of it, mark me in the wrong circles as an Islamist? Or would the fact that I want to go out with my friends and have a good time, that I kiss a woman I'm not married to passionately mean I'm not Muslim enough? Or maybe that I'm an acceptable type of Muslim?

I don't want to go to a mosque on Friday and listen to a shit sermon. I don't want to go to prayers with anyone. I don't want to stand with anyone. I'll read the Quran when I want, if I want. If I pray, I'll pray alone. If I drink alcohol or don't eat halal meat, then I'm not interested in your raised eyebrows. I don't want your judgments or approval. I don't want your questions. I'm not here to satisfy anybody's curiosity. Fuck you. It's my business. Can I not just exist without being judged and having my every move watched? Is it too much to ask to just be left alone? To be able to get on a plane without a worry and be with the people I care about? Or travel and see the world when I want to? To be part of humanity? To be able to say what I want without fear of - something? To think what I want to think? Feel how I want to feel? Make my own mistakes? Is that too much to ask? Do I have to constantly be expected to pick sides? Do I need people to constantly be speaking for me? Deciding what's best for me? Deciding how it is that things will be? Can I not just be a human being? Is it too much to ask to just Be?

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