<\/p>\n
\u201cNobody can treat a man like a dog
\nIf he doesn\u2019t first consider him a man\u201d
\n-Jean Paul Sartre<\/p><\/blockquote>\nI was once told of a little boy who expressed the desire \u2013 which was, of course, a natural desire \u2013 to be free. But in an effort to protect him his mother would silence him: \u201cBe quiet!\u201d The little boy would reply and question simultaneously: \u201cNo one is here?\u201d Trembling in her house, his mother would whisper: \u201cShhh, the walls have ears.\u201d<\/p>\n
On 8 September 2012, I had the privilege to speak with a Kurdish Syrian writer and, more importantly, a survivor of the ongoing war. His name is Miral Birorada. We met in a discrete neighbourhood that shelters numerous undocumented Syrian refugees in the Turkish town of Antakaya bordering on the Syrian city of Idib.\u00a0 From birth Miral, like many other Syrians, has been the target of a discourse of suspicion. According to him, the Baathist regime often fabricated State propaganda framing the Kurdish minority as a group of people who yearned to separate from Syria. However, as Miral ironically notes, \u201cIt was this propaganda, this generalised and false concept, which actually separated Syrians from Syria.\u201d\u00a0 Prohibited from taking part in the public self-expression, Miral took refuge in writing. He says: \u201cI began writing critical works that articulated the Kurdish struggle in Syria.\u201d He freely expressed his narrative of Kurdish politics, but not just in order to place a higher value on Kurdish suffering, but to open himself up to the multiple narratives of others. It was for this reason, this sole objective that he chose to write all of his works in Arabic. According to him, \u201cArt must operate as a connection, not disconnection, or else what\u2019s the point?\u201d It was not until he was able to trace his grief through the grief of others that Miral eventually learned to domesticate his anguish. He channelled his pain into literary works to relieve his pain. He used his anguish to combat despair.<\/p>\n
During our conversation, I addressed the international community\u2019s concern about divisions amongst the Syrian left, but before I could finish, he heatedly remarked: \u201cI encourage civic resistance. I encouraged Alawites to resist, Sunnis to resist, Christian\u2019s to resist, because for me, anyone who struggles is struggling for Syria.\u201d<\/p>\n
As far as the international ambivalence upon the rise of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) is concerned, Miral emphasised that he was not opposed to the initial emergence of an armed revolution because many people were left with no choice but to defend their lives. However, his faith in the integrity, in the homogeneity of the FSA is wavering. Factions within the FSA, in his opinion, as well as the multiple advocates for international \u201csupport\u201d have contributed to repressing the voice of unarmed revolutionaries in order to direct greater attention to armed resistance. This is at the root of \u2013 and has complicated \u2013 the national polarisation of the left. He further criticises the international press for abandoning the coverage of unarmed activists\u2019 work. Moreover, the few oppositional fighters that I have interviewed all believe that there are absolutely no Alawite revolutionaries fighting within any FSA group. However, as Miral and others point out, countless Alawites continue to be tormented inside state apparatuses for their participation in oppositional protests.<\/p>\n
This ignored reality has \u2018legitimised\u2019 a simplistic narrative, which portrays the Syrian conflict as a fight between \u201cSunni Islamists against tyrannical Alawites.\u201d A more\u00a0 complex picture and understanding of the evolving politics in Syria is forestalled. Not only does that reductionism abandon the fact that several Alawites are being tortured in Syrian prisons and hospitals for protesting against the regime, but as Miral\u2019s life demonstrates, those types of media\u00a0 chronicles also ignore the struggles of the multiple identities still struggling in Syria. Miral recollects his past:<\/p>\n
I remember the first protest I attended in Al-Hasakah, I was accompanied by a Christian writer. Everybody involved in that demonstration shared a feeling that I still have trouble expressing on paper; it was a free feeling. But then the army came and arrested us, they stripped us of this feeling. Freedom is everything and they stripped us of our freedom.<\/p>\n
After his arrest, Assad\u2019s authorities placed Miral in solitary confinement for twenty-six days. In this tight allocated space he was fed a piece of bread and a glass of water during inconsistently sparse periods. In this secluded cell he was reduced to a Sartrean \u201cnothingness.\u201d He was, as Hannah Arndt once remarked, prohibited from having the \u201cright to have rights.\u201d The method of Miral\u2019s torture indicated that his existence was reduced to that of the living dead:<\/p>\n
They tied my right hand to my left foot, my left hand to my right foot, and then wedged an iron rod under my arms and against my chest; the guards call this method of torture the chicken.<\/p>\n
While Miral was in this position, Assad\u2019s guards would begin to beat him until either their amusement seized or their growing fatigue prevented them from continuing. For twenty-five days he was forced into the \u201cchicken\u201d position and when he wasn\u2019t being persistently beaten, he was left to starve. His mobility was restricted, intolerable pain chocked the voices of his thoughts, and he knew what it meant to live in hellish conditions; hell, as \u00a0Miral\u2019s story shows is more than just a religious construct; hell is a man made.<\/p>\n
On the twenty-fifth day of his detention, Miral suffered a heart-attack due to constant\u00a0 torment, the strain on his wracked body and a radically deteriorated health. The security guards transported him to the emergency room where doctors attempted to resuscitate his life. Miral explains: \u201cYou have to die before the authorities stop torturing you; a prisoner\u2019s only saviour from torture is death.\u201d\u00a0 I asked him how he made sense of the world initially, after the numbing heart-attack which was responsible for his release. He humbly laughed: \u201cMy heart-attack was the best thing that ever happened to me.\u201d The \u00a0heart-attack not only saved his life it also returned him to his world of creative expression or as he puts it, \u201cAfter my heart-attack, I returned to myself.\u201d Miral has come to terms with his humanity,\u00a0 and the intensity of being interconnects with the intensity of becoming. It is this human form, a form all too human, which gives birth to a novel sensation.\u00a0 Armed with words of sorrow, Miral liberates himself from distress:<\/p>\n
I have no place other than pain
\nAnd some of the nostalgia
\nEyes deflected, closed slightly
\nWhat tours the incurable memory of Kurdish rivalry?
\nBirth defects…
\nMaybe sickness…<\/p>\nOn September 7th<\/sup> Miral and his wife received a letter from the Baathist regime stating that Miral has been found guilty of \u201ctreason.\u201d If Miral dares to re-enter Syria before the regime falls, assuming of course that the regime will fall, he will be forced to spend six years in jail. The couple now lives in a nebulous state and exists in a limbo where their \u2018status\u2019 is defined by their \u2018lack of status.\u2019 If caught by the Turkish authorities, Miral and his wife can choose either to be directly driven to the border of Syria, or placed inside the pauperised conditions of a Turkish refugee camp. I remember the marginalised walls of their residence commanding a momentary silence; after its passing I asked Miral, \u201cIs there a place for a displaced poet?\u201d He replied, \u201cOnly in my speech and in my writing.\u201d\u00a0 At an early age, he found liberty through his self-expression and his self-expression found release through his liberty. Precisely because of the bottled passion of people like Miral and millions of other displaced and angry Syrians, I would advise that tyranny better listen, if it is not yet deafened by its crumbling walls.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
An Exiled Poet \u201cNobody can treat a man like a dog If he doesn\u2019t first consider him a man\u201d -Jean Paul Sartre I was once told of a little boy who expressed the desire \u2013 which was, of course, a natural desire \u2013 to be free. But in an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":804,"parent":599,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-13","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/13","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/13\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":664,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/13\/revisions\/664"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/599"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/804"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}