miriam cooke is a professor of Arabic literature and culture at Duke University. Her books include Women Claim Islam: Creating Islamic Feminism through Literature and Women and the War Story as well as the coedited collections Muslim Networks from Hajj to Hip Hop; Opening the Gates: An Anthology of Arab Feminist Writing; and Blood into Ink: South Asian and Middle Eastern Women Write War.

Dissident Syria

MAKING OPPOSITIONAL ARTS OFFICIALBy miriam cooke

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2007 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4016-4

Contents

Acknowledgments…………………………………………..viiINTRODUCTION……………………………………………..31. “CULTURE IS HUMANITY’S HIGHEST NEED”……………………..19As If …………………………………………………..20Slogans, Slogans Everywhere………………………………..26Freedom and Democracy……………………………………..302. OUR LITERATURE DOES NOT LEAVE THE COUNTRY…………………36Nadia al-Ghazzi…………………………………………..39Colette al-Khuri………………………………………….423. NO SUCH THING AS WOMEN’S LITERATURE………………………48Ulfat Idilbi……………………………………………..49Salons and Mallahat al-Khani……………………………….53Nadia Khust and the Nadwa………………………………….574. COMMISSIONED CRITICISM………………………………….65Culture after the Fall of the Wall………………………….68Commissioned Criticism…………………………………….72The Fantasy of Choice……………………………………..775. DISSIDENT PERFORMANCES………………………………….81Performing Dissidence……………………………………..84The Ghoul………………………………………………..87Historical Miniatures……………………………………..926. FILMING DREAMS…………………………………………100The Extras……………………………………………….102Dreaming Features…………………………………………106Documenting Dreams………………………………………..1167. LIGHTEN YOUR STEP………………………………………121Ibrahim Samu’il…………………………………………..124Waiting………………………………………………….127Ghassan al-Jaba’i…………………………………………130Lessons from a Rogue State…………………………………1428. LEAVING DAMASCUS……………………………………….145POSTSCRIPT……………………………………………….160Notes……………………………………………………167Bibliography……………………………………………..177Index……………………………………………………187

Chapter One

“CULTURE IS HUMANITY’S HIGHEST NEED”

At the end of May 1996, I was to give a talk at the French Institute in Damascus. I had chosen for my title a slogan I’d seen scrawled on walls all over the Syrian capital: “Culture Is Humanity’s Highest Need.” The talk would give me an opportunity to try out some preliminary ideas about 1990s fiction and film and to check audience reactions to what I had to say about intellectual dissidence in Hafiz Asad’s Syria.

The more I learned, however, the more puzzled I became. After living in Damascus for several months and talking with writers and filmmakers about their experiences in this police state, I was beginning to understand how complicated cultural production was. The contradiction between the official emphasis on culture and the stifling atmosphere in which intellectuals functioned seemed impossible to negotiate.

Struck by the popularity of the slogan “Culture Is Humanity’s Highest Need” I had at first thought it would be safe to use. With time, however, I started to worry. What did it actually mean? How did Syrians read these words? What would they think of an American woman using this title to talk about dissident culture inside Syria?

Culture was a major preoccupation of the state. The Ministry of Culture encouraged writing, painting, sculpting, and filmmaking; it sponsored art shows and exhibitions of all sorts. Every day, the newspapers carried articles about the various cultural events happening in Damascus and elsewhere. Yet artists and writers secretly complained that they could scarcely breathe. They never knew when they were breaking the rules, were never sure about the consequences of what they did. What had been allowed yesterday might not be tomorrow, and one intellectual might be punished for expressing mild dissent while another, more vocal, would get away with explicit criticism. Daily, they had to negotiate the permissible, assuming a responsibility that might cost them their freedom and even their lives. How were they able to survive inside the country while “living in truth”?

As If …

To live in truth, according to the Czech dissident playwright and later president Vaclav Havel, entails assuming “responsibility to and for the whole.” The attempt to live in truth often brings intellectuals and writers up against oppressive regimes. In their struggle against the status quo they hope to create conditions that will allow for the emergence “of the independent life of society (where) free thought, alternative values and ‘alternative behaviour’ can exist and exert pressure” (1987, 104-105). The voices of intellectuals living in truth, especially when such living is not easy, need to be magnified (Rushdie 2005).

Reading Havel’s influential “Power of the Powerless,” a 1978 manifesto against the official manipulation of public signs and symbols in socialist Czechoslovakia, struck a chord as I looked around Asad’s Syria. Like pre-1989 Eastern Europe, the technology of Syria’s Soviet-style socialist regime depended on a rhetoric that was “permeated with hypocrisy and lies…. The complete degradation of the individual is presented as his or her ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available … the repression of culture is called its development … the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom … military occupation becomes fraternal assistance…. Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything…. It pretends to pretend nothing” (1987, 44).

Havel’s depiction of life in socialist Czechoslovakia may overstate the case for turn-of-the-century Syria, yet he does provide a useful framework for the examination of the Asad cult. The regime’s manipulation of meanings to buttress the cult of the president established the ground rules for behavior in a political culture where the rhetoric was manifestly unbelievable. But real belief was not the issue in Syria, just as it had not been in Eastern Europe. For Havel individuals “need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system” (1987, 45; my emphasis).

State sloganeering and the public response to it in pre-1989 Eastern Europe illuminates the situation in mid-1990s Syria: arbitrary abuse of power; the repression of culture dubbed its development; and proscribed speech and writing translated into the highest form of freedom. Havel’s offhand “military occupation becomes fraternal assistance” described Syria’s 1976 military occupation of Lebanon during its civil war, an occupation that was coded assistance for “our brothers.” The regime was captive to its own lies.

“Don’t trust any politicians,” said the former minister of defense Mustafa Tlas in a disarmingly frank interview, “they all lie. They have to lie otherwise they would not stay in power” (Koelbl 2005, 114). And those who behave as if they believe such lies are themselves living within a lie.

Havel’s urban landscape draped with party banners painted the panorama of Syrian cities hung with huge posters of President Asad, some with his two sons, Basil (the car crash martyr) and Bashar (the current president). To endure the public displays of personal power, the people seemed oblivious to the banners bearing the ideology of the Corrective Movement. It was as if the messages pressing in on them did not get through, as if, like pre-1989 Czechs, they “do what is done, what is to be done, what must be done, but at the same time-by that very token-they confirm that it must be done in fact. They conform to a particular requirement and, in so doing, they themselves perpetuate that requirement” (Havel 1987, 51).

Ibrahim Samuil’s “People … People” illustrates this performative complicity with a terrible system that the people resented but refused to confront. In this short story, passengers are angry with a bus driver who once again is deliberately reckless, and they mutter complaints under their breath. Finally someone plucks up the courage to protest aloud, assuming that he is speaking the mind of the people. To his dismay, the passengers turn on him, yelling that the last thing they need is a philosopher or a lawyer. They kick him off the bus, which rages into the distance wilder than ever. Standing in the cold, he watches them hold on to each other in terror, anxiously awaiting “the moment of liberation when they reach their stop” (1990, 13). The moral of the story is clear: those who courageously expose the tyranny of the system should not expect thanks. Not only the regime but also the people will punish such dissidence. It is so much easier, after all, to act as if nothing’s wrong.

Even when they know they could rebel most prefer not to. It is easier to submit to the system, however painful. In “A Spot of Light,” ‘Abd al-Salam al-‘Ujayli, a medical doctor and writer from Raqqa, writes about a prisoner in solitary confinement in pitch darkness who must keep his hands held above his head. With time he realizes that he need not always hold his hands aloft. All he has to do is keep an eye on the tiny spot of light that comes through the door when the guard is not blocking it; only then must he raise his arms. With time, however, staring at the spot becomes so intolerable that he prefers “to bear whatever befalls me so long as I am free of this torture” (1987, 93-94). It is easier to be absolutely obedient than to remain constantly alert and vigilant and terrified.

In her analysis of the political climate of Asad’s Syria in the 1980s and 1990s Wedeen asserts convincingly that Syrians probably recognized the disparity between their experiences and the empty claims and promises attendant upon the cult. Yet they continued to act as if they believed, and in so doing they perpetuated the system. Power did not depend on people’s belief in this discourse but only on their performance of belief and their resulting entanglement in “self-enforcing relations of domination” (1999, 84; see also 6, 68, 76-77, 131, 145).

It is this numbed tolerance of mystifications that Havel denounced because it creates a coercive norm (1987, 52). Writing twenty-five years after the publication of “Power of the Powerless,” the Slovenian cultural critic Slavoj Zizek explains that Havel’s notion of living in truth “involves no metaphysics of truth or authenticity; it simply designates the act of suspending one’s participation in the game…. Havel mercilessly cuts off and denounces all false modes of distance towards the ruling ideology…. Such acts of indifference, of making fun of official rituals in private circles, are the very mode of reproduction of the official ideology…. The greatest catastrophe for the regime would have been for its own ideology to be taken seriously” (2001, 91-92). It is not enough not to believe in the lies to live in truth; to act as if the ruling ideology can be distanced through disbelief serves the regime: it reproduces the ideology through its performance. Havel’s notion of living in truth entails paying attention to the power discourse and rejecting its falsifications. It was only when intellectuals suspended their participation in the power game that they could address the world and show “everyone that it is possible to live within the truth” (Havel 1987, 56).

This is what the Damascus University philosopher Ahmad Barqawi did in a talk he gave at the Asad Library during the Asad Book Fair in September 1995. I had gone with some friends to listen to him lecture on the “Consciousness of Freedom.” Freedom, Barqawi boldly announced, “only exists when we become conscious of slavery. This consciousness demands change in a society that deprives individuals of their right to fight for freedom.” He did not mention the president directly, but who else was he designating in his criticism of a society that deprives individuals of their right to fight for freedom? Again and again, he threw out to his audience Albert Camus’s challenge: “Ana atamarrad idhan ana mawjud” (I rebel therefore I am). The people should not be duped into believing that they are free when they are not. I heard his words as a call to action, to suspend participation in the as-if game lest they continue to be slaves. They should beware the “false consciousness” of freedom, because “freedom is never total. It is an on-going, evolving and sometimes painful process. Democracies defend individuals’ right to engage in the process.” Was this “false consciousness of freedom” not a reference to the as-if behavior that Havel condemned? Barqawi seemed to be pointing to the complicity of Syrians who know they are not free but who act as if they believe the power discourse that tells them they are. Thus understood, his reference to “individuals’ right to engage in the process” meant suspending their participation in the power game in order to liberate the real meaning of freedom and thus make the regime accountable for its rhetoric. He ended his talk by warning, “Time takes revenge on systems that deprive individuals of their freedom.” Barqawi published a version of this speech four years later in the Lebanese journal Al-Adab, where he elaborated on his argument for freedom, writing, “The people can only produce representative authority if they are free and enjoy their rights and perform their duties. Freedom can only be expressed through political parties. And the free citizen can only come into being with the shattering of the old systems” (1999, 52). During six months in Damascus I heard other intellectuals utter that very threat.

Listening to Barqawi’s fiery speech only a month after my arrival in Damascus, I was amazed. But friends who had taken me to the book fair and to the lecture were nonplussed by my reaction. Didn’t I know that freedom is enshrined in the state constitution, along with unity and socialism? Had I not read the Arab Writers Union statement that promises writers freedom? I hadn’t, but when I did I was struck by the way it referred to censorship: “Their only censor will be their conscience and their commitment to the principles undergirding the nation. [Individual commitment] cannot be separated from commitment to one’s country and society…. The writers and artists who produce the greatest works are those who realize this link in its highest form. They are at once free and committed” (Arab Writers Union 1978, 31, 35-37). In other words, their conscience and their commitment to the principles undergirding the nation were their only censors.

Not quite! In a 1990 interview, a Syrian censor who defected and used the pseudonym Adib Sadiq, or Truthful Writer, asserted that Asad had transformed the whole state structure into “one large intelligence and censorship apparatus” (Index on Censorship June 1987, 26). The media, he explained, had to be controlled because it shaped public opinion: “The philosophy directed at the media supposes that the people have no demands and no interests aside from the demands and interests of the regime…. The practical goal of the media’s activity is to prevent any consensus on a popular level, even a consensus that suits the regime, because the system is based on limiting politics to the highest decision-making body centre and on removing it as far as possible from the people” (Sadiq 1990, 20-21). Censorship was calibrated in such a way that it maintained tension and suspicion. Its goal was atomism. Promotion in journalism depended on writing secret reports about acquaintances, friends, and even family. So dire was the situation in the early 1990s that a lawyer, who refused to identify himself, claimed that he had “witnessed trials where the only crime was reading the newspaper of an opposition political party and the sentence was fifteen years” (15).

Above all, censorship was arbitrary. Even if writers internalized the unwritten rules and what they wrote had been officially approved, they might find themselves retroactively censored (Sadiq 1990, 21). Consequently, not only writers but also censors lived in constant dread because if they allowed what was no longer permissible they, too, were liable to punishment (HRW 1991, 124). Stringent control extended to the international press. While I was in Damascus the International Herald Tribune was often late; sometimes a week passed before the newspaper reached the stalls with sections inked out (see HRW 1991, 109, 123).

Slogans, Slogans Everywhere

A couple of weeks before giving the scheduled talk at the French Institute, I met with a teacher at the Institute and a leading intellectual who, I later was told, had the power to make or break upcoming talent. He was to “animate” my seminar; in other words, he would introduce me and then lead the discussion. He was quite gruff.

“Are you still going to use that title: ‘Culture Is Humanity’s Highest Need’?”

“Yes, it’s a bit late to change it, isn’t it? Hasn’t it been advertised?”

The slogan was everywhere, so why shouldn’t I use it? During the September 1995 Asad annual book fair, where Ahmad Barqawi had spoken so passionately about freedom and the price to be paid for its denial, the slogan was all over the Stalinesque library that looms over the Umayyad Square. Again in November, during the twenty-five-year celebrations of the Corrective Movement, the streets outside the Ministry of Culture were draped with cloth banners bearing the slogan. All cultural events were held under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture, and during that festive period Minister Najah al-‘Attar would send huge bouquets of gladioli or whatever large flowers happened to be in season with the slogan laced through the leaves.

(Continues…)

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