Today, we opened our archives too.

In full honesty to you, our dear reader, this opening has its origin in a time when this over-consumed cloth was impossible to rip – the only reality we knew and inhabited. In this spirit of acceptance and defeat, however, we believed there was still something meaningful to say about a past, a revolutionary time, that felt closed and sealed forever as a political project.

You can retrace this origin of this collection in the acts of documenting and archiving that, since the revolution, had been powerful tools for recording the realities of war. They also became a form of resistance against oppression and the foundation for demands of justice and accountability in Syria and its diaspora. The preservation of stolen, smuggled, salvaged materials – be it videos, memoirs, images, testimonies, or stories – has been a powerful medium to keep the revolutionary ethos alive, proving to the world that this ‘event’ existed.

A living tapestry 

We envisioned the introduction of this collection on the act of archiving as both a continuation of this trajectory and a departure from it. Our endeavour sought to capture how archiving infiltrates the way we think, speak, and attempt to write about the revolution – what came before and after – as our own thoughts penetrate facts. The constitution of these archives waives the personal and the collective, the lived and the imagined, the past and the present. 

They are fragments that unfold as a living tapestry – a clock, a song, the sea’s infinite waves, a broken TV, the green buses and a bureaucratic site. Each fragment of our archive vibrates with its own resonance, defying the constraints of order and resisting unified narratives. Each word becomes a gesture of defiance, a refusal to let fleeting moments of hope and despair fade unread. 

Before December 8th, 2024, these fragments were all we had to comprehend a history shaped by loss and exile – to make a claim on time through what was archived and written. But when the unimaginable turns into reality, time returns to the present, carrying the possibility of hope and restoration which also infiltrated our own words. The clock of history ticks once more and time starts to flow again. It reminds us that history – and these archives – are not static repository of “what was”, but a living, creative force that shifts and breathes, bearing the weight of what was and the promise of what could be. New light illuminates spaces of grief and melancholia, fear and humiliation we thought we understood, but never fully grasped. What we once treated as eternal had to be reimagined as the cloth and its threads are now ripped apart.

Writing, archiving

This has been true prior to December 8th, 2024 and, even more, in its aftermath. As we wrote down these archival fragments, we noticed their becoming a conduit through which history is continually reimagined and reshaped. These fragmented archives weave together the disconnected threads of history and breathe life into memory. Time collapses and reforms, no longer linear, but circular, offering moments where endings become beginnings, where loss unfolds into the possibility of renewal. Our act of writing became a transformative vessel, a time machine that navigates the fragile boundaries between memory and the present, contributing to the formation of these archives and their constant reconfiguration.

Writing and archiving are not merely intellectual exercises but emotional and political acts – a refusal to surrender memory to silence. Even objects shed their passivity and become subjects—autonomous, breathing entities. The Citadel of Aleppo evokes childhood – a labyrinth of the past, reshaped by the revolution. A bridge is formed between these sites of memory, embodying both shelter and loss. The loss is palpable in the devastation of Aleppo, but also in the silence of the sea, which carries countless untold stories, dreams of survival, and death. A clock, once silent, begins to tick defiantly, reclaiming lost time from the abyss of forgetting. On the dance floor in Berlin, the echoes of Abdul Baset al-Sarout’s voice merge into a new rhythm, intertwining Syria 2011 with the neon-lit nights of 2019, where past revolutions dissolve into pulsating beats and scattered fragments of hope. 

In our attempt to write down our own archive and archiving our own fragments, we pursued meanings in the chaotic and fragmented expanses of memory. In a world where ruptures and losses shape the surface of history, we search for fragments whose stretching towards each other offer insights into the “how” and “why” amidst the “what.” This search for meanings becomes a vibrant and fluid, at times even fugacious, confrontation with the past. Rather than dwelling in simple explanations, we sought meanings in the ambiguity of experience.

In what follows, dear reader, we share the meanings carried by the echoes of lost voices, pieces of revolution, the bitterness of missed opportunities, the taste of unexpected renewals. Yet, meanings, like archives, remain ever elusive – a fleeting shimmer, a thought we believed we’ve grasped, only to see it slip away. In this pursuit, these archives become spaces of metamorphosis – an ongoing process that confronts us with questions we may never fully answer,  propelling us forward today, as they did yesterday.

This text was written prior to February 2025 and is part of the dossier “Eternity Unwoven,” curated by Veronica Ferreri and Inana Othman.

The dossier is a collaboration of Archivwar with Untoldmag and Arabpop. Its Italian version is available in Arabpop Vol. 8 “Cose” (Arabpop logo)

Graphic project: Greg Olla

The publisher remains available to rights holders regarding any images for which it was not possible to identify or contact the owners.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe Resarch and Innovation Programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101064513 “ARCHIVWAR – Archives in Times of War: Scattered Families and Vanishing Past in Contemporary Syria.” 

Funded by the European Union. Views and options expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Execute Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

The post Eternity Unwoven: Echoes of the Unwritten and Poetics of the Archive appeared first on Untold.

Do you think it will not come, my love?

I watch you with each tick of the clock,

Arriving from afar, my love

Fairouz’s words caught me off guard—her voice piercing the heavy shadows of memory like a sudden shaft of light, perfectly synchronized with a video of Homs’s Clock Tower Square in an Instagram reel. Those brief twenty-one seconds were enough to reshape an entire archive of the last 13 years. Years that began with a revolution shaking the walls of silence, restoring our ability to hope—before it was all veiled in the fog of eternity, and its heartbreaks exploded across every horizon.

Suddenly, the ticking of the clock returned, transcending both time and sound. It pulled us inward, into the depths where we had buried our disappointments, our hopes, and a deep sorrow tinted by the futility of all things—no matter how dazzling on the surface—when measured against our shattered faith in justice, and the specter of ruin clinging to our souls. The voices of our disappeared, silenced in Assad’s slaughterhouses, still echo. Those prisons appeared to us as impenetrable and everlasting, despite everything we had documented, shared, written, screamed, and shown the world. Then came the chimes, gathering the scattered fragments of our souls, flooding them with feeling. It wasn’t just a fleeting glimpse of the past but a rupture, piercing the core of the spirit, dragging it through every station of pain and heartbreak—only to return it to one single moment: the now. To the lingering doubt that perhaps tomorrow has not been completely stolen from us, that the dreams, however shattered and dispersed, might yet find a way to gather and be reborn!

In those few seconds, my heart trembled, and my soul gasped for breath, as if the dream we had nearly forgotten could still return, could once again be our guiding compass—a sudden, magical moment after a long and relentless darkness.

 December 7, 2024

How do I describe the taste of hope returning suddenly after years of forced absence—after we had taught ourselves to live without it, to accept its loss just to survive with what remained of us?

A few fleeting seconds in that reel were enough to stir a feeling I thought had vanished forever. It was more than hope—it was the return of tomorrow as a space for dreaming, for imagining, for waiting.

On this very day, the gates of Adra Prison opened. The same prison where, over years of captivity, my father wove me a beaded bag—bead by bead—as if stitching together a life in a time held captive.

In the realm of the unforeseen,
where prison carves its borders like a blind sculptor,
life takes shape through sound—
an eternal ritual defying time’s barrenness.

But what is time, when it knows no edges?
Our memory, mother, is a hidden prison,
a void that devours the past,
carving hollows of forgetting.

Yet in its wakefulness,
life is reborn—and with it, a quiet rage,
spilling into poems,
into voices that carry us forward.

Mama, you taught me to weave rhyme with my body,
to dance when words abandoned me,
because voice rises from the body—
a typewriter translating pain into motion.

But why do our bodies remain silent now,
when we are more parched than ever for meaning?
No, mother, this silence is not the salt that preserves, as you used to say,
but the silence of a room thick with shadows—
stories trapped in cellars,
a room without light,
where time loses its threads.

Fear, mother, is the shadow of a coiled poem,
spinning without end, searching for a lost horizon.
And yet, beneath it, the voice remains—
a monument of light,
a will that draws us back to the beginning,
again and again.

Yesterday

The opposition factions declared their control over Aleppo and their advance toward other Syrian cities: Hama, Homs. I did not yet realize that tomorrow would be the day when, after decades, the archive of oppression, fear, dreams, and exile would be unearthed. A day when the Assad regime’s legacy of horror and destruction, still too vast to fully reckon with, would be laid bare. It would be a day no Syrian would ever forget.

We didn’t sleep that night. At that moment, the archive of all those years came alive—just like us. We recalled who we had been, before disappointment and the needs of survival overtook us, before our lived reality drifted away from our inner selves—deprived, wounded, and haunted by sorrow.

I have always been drawn to archives. I imagined them as extraordinary time-traveling machines, capable of crossing eras and geographies, gathering infinite worlds where emotions and perceptions converge. But what captivated me most was their relationship to loss: the loss of what was once familiar, cherished, longed for, only to become exiled, deferred, erased, or forbidden. Like a homeland, like my father in prison, like the memory of revolution and the dream itself.

When Assad and the Baath Party seized power in the early 1970s, ushering in what came to be known as Assad’s Eternity, a new phase of political and spatial monopolization began. A culture of submission and repression took hold, as the regime built an ever-expanding archive of fear—etched into our bodies, embedded in our daily lives, woven into our language—recycled and passed down through generations. This archive took many forms: the memory of the Hama Massacre in the 1980s, the prisons and detention centers, the imposed language of obedience, the Baathist indoctrination in schools that sought to shape the Syrian individual in the image of the regime. Then, at the turn of the millennium, a fleeting specter of hope appeared in the form of the Damascus Spring—a moment that quickly revealed itself to be a carefully laid trap, witnessing yet another betrayal of hope.

 The Hour of Dreams and the Making of the Impossible

On March 15, 2011, the Syrian revolution erupted like a sudden flash of lightning, piercing the veil of silence and fear, forging the impossible. Despite the crushing weight of disappointment that later settled over the revolutionary dream, a new archive was born—one that was digital, spoken, and alive in ways unlike anything before it. It carried the faces and voices of the revolution, inscribing a memory that could never be erased. Homs’ Clock Tower Square bore witness to some of the most defining moments of this memory, in a city that carried titles like a mirror reflecting its people: Umm al-Faqir (Mother of the Poor), Umm al-Hijara al-Sawda (Mother of the Black Stones), the capital of humor and wit—until it earned yet another title: The Capital of the Revolution. That square held everything: a peaceful protest that turned into a massacre, then into a funeral and mass arrests, then into a sit-in, only to be followed by yet another massacre. The cycle of blood and siege rewrote tragedy into new scenes, replaying the same horror in different forms.

Clock Tower Square was more than just a place; it became a living symbol of the revolution, a pulse that reached into every rebellious neighborhood in Homs, every town and village that raised the banner of freedom. As A., a friend and activist from Al-Qusayr, recalled:

“After the Clock Tower Massacre, the regime tried to erase its traces from our collective memory. They banned us from gathering there, from demonstrating in its space. So, we said: If we cannot reach the Clock Tower, then let the Clock Tower come to us. And so, symbolic replicas of the square’s clock appeared in every revolutionary neighborhood”, like shattered fragments of Homs’ beating heart, scattered everywhere.

The songs of the revolution—and yours, mother—
carried us like the waves of the Mediterranean once did every summer,
before we arrived in Germany.
Rhythms bore our dreams, and the weight of forty years of silence,
holding us—both within our homeland and in exile.
Hope was a phoenix, a key,
carving waves of meaning into words.
On March 15, thirteen years ago, the clock struck zero,
marking the beginning of a future without end.
The voices of freedom wove the fabric of our being,
and let the voice break through—
in the kingdom of silence.

The Temporality of Siege

Amid the darkness of the siege that engulfed Homs’s opposition neighborhoods between 2011 and 2014, suffering was not the only story. The siege was more than just walls tightening around lives—it became a stage of resilience, a space where human creativity emerged in survival, resistance, and the pursuit of life, even as death loomed from every side.

In the besieged neighborhoods of Baba Amr, Khalidiya, and al-Qusour, life pulsed with scenes of solidarity and innovation. The struggle for survival unfolded in stories that refused to be confined by suffering alone, revealing moments of everyday resistance: a mother teaching the neighborhood children, youth building networks of mutual support, and laughter echoing in defiance of the shellfire.  

 The siege was not merely a tool of destruction—it was a test of the will to endure. As one resident of Homs described: “I don’t want to speak only of our suffering, but of the life we lived. Of our laughter, our solidarity, our attempts to stay alive.” To exist under siege was an act of resistance in itself—one that refused surrender and inscribed a new memory of the revolution, a memory that did not speak only of oppression but of the human spirit’s relentless fight to live.

 The Green Buses… The End

One of the most searing scenes etched into memory was the evacuation of Homs’s residents from the besieged neighborhoods aboard the green buses—a moment pulsing with grief, betrayal, and despair.

As part of a 2014 agreement brokered under UN supervision, these buses carried the last opposition fighters out of Old Homs, sealing the regime’s full control. But the green buses became yet another symbol of a time when dreams were suffocated. Since 2011, the Syrian regime had used them to forcibly displace the people of Homs, after years of siege and relentless bombardment that had drained every last possibility of hope and survival.

The Tomorrow That Came After Eternity

On December 8, 2024, the Assad regime fell, ending 53 years of continuous repression. The impossible—the dream Syrians had carried for so long—had finally become reality. That day marked a turning point—a moment when Syrian history began to be rewritten. The people of Syria began to sketch a new image of hope, one that returned despite disappointment and deep fragility, pulsing once more in their hearts, no matter how far they had been scattered across the exiles of time, geography, and grief.

Today, the clock ticks again—this time as a symbol of freedom, of justice reclaimed, of a homeland being rebuilt. The revolution was never only against a dictatorship; it was also a struggle to reclaim stolen time. Its return was a rupture, a shock that reshaped both our existence and our memory. It was not just a moment in history—it was a bridge between past and future, a long-lost dream finally stepping into the present.

The Syrian Archive: A Guardian of Pain, Fragility, and a Window to the Future

The archive of the revolution is both a child of hope and its creator, brimming with urgency and awakening. Through documenting their revolution and preserving their lived experiences since March 15, 2011, Syrians have defied the temporal void that repression sought to impose. This archive—holding the stories of protests, political activism, detainees, massacre victims, and mothers who lost their children—is not just a record of the past. It was not just a reminder of the past, but a bet on another turn of the future.

The Death of Eternity and the Return of Time

I remember—
but my memory is not a bridge to the past.
It is a window opening onto a distant horizon.

The historian stands at a threshold,
not only to look back,
but to weave time into a tapestry—
a tapestry of hope entwined with sorrow,
fragments and shadows forming a space pulsing with meaning
for those who dare to dive into its depths.

Look at me—
yesterday, I was a prison for a tyrant,
a dusty mass of hollow words,
where the voices of the marginalized faded within my walls,
and their stories disappeared into my cells.

But today, I am the pulse rising from beneath the rubble,
a light tearing through the veil of darkness.
I am a video capturing a city breathing through ash,
an image distilling terror,
a voice gasping: “I am alive… I am here.”

I am a time machine no tyrant can possess,
open for all to see.
But is truth ever fixed,
when it is as fragile as those who speak it—
those who documented their revolution
to defy the abyss of forgetting?

“Why do you document?”
they asked the witnesses and the survivors.
And they answered:
A cry against oblivion.
A testimony before the world.
A mirror reflecting the unimaginable
in the face of the possible.

But documentation was more than a cry—
it was a quiet hope
that pain might one day bear justice,
that what was crushed today
would not vanish into the void of tomorrow.

I am the archive.
I do not merely preserve the past;
I carry a promise—
that the mothers who wrote farewell letters,
the children who painted the sky beneath falling bombs,
the elders who told the stories of Homs
will not disappear into the corners of oblivion.
They will not be swallowed by silence.

I am not a repository of yesterday’s remains—
I am the beginning of what is possible,
a space where the narrative is reclaimed,
where justice is reborn
from the wombs of pain.

This text was written prior to February 2025 and is part of the dossier “Eternity Unwoven,” curated by Veronica Ferreri and Inana Othman.

The dossier is a collaboration of Archivwar with Untoldmag and Arabpop. Its Italian version is available in Arabpop Vol. 8 “Cose” (Arabpop logo)

Graphic project: Greg Olla

The publisher remains available to rights holders regarding any images for which it was not possible to identify or contact the owners.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe Resarch and Innovation Programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101064513 “ARCHIVWAR – Archives in Times of War: Scattered Families and Vanishing Past in Contemporary Syria.” 

Funded by the European Union. Views and options expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Execute Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

The post Our time is tomorrow appeared first on Untold.

Frau Hoffmann was a tall woman. Short grey curls, bags puffy under her eyes – the nights grew shorter with age. She had a long, lined face and a slightly stooped back, though not because of the pressures of school routine or the attendant stress. Most of the students were small, arrayed before her on their chairs. It was not her habit to talk down to them. Aras must have thanked her a hundred times, and she had asked him to call her by her first name. But it was too soon, and in Aras’s head she was still his German teacher, someone owed respect. ‘Of course, I’m happy to!’ Frau Hoffmann said.

His mother stood next to them, clutching a folder stuffed with papers. Frau Hoffmann turned to Nadia: ‘I don’t know if Aras mentioned this to you, but I’ve actually been to Aleppo. I went on holiday there with my family. A remarkably beautiful city, a gorgeous city.’ Nadia inclined her head and asked, ‘Did you visit the castle?’
‘Citadel,’ corrected Aras.
‘Yes, of course. I heard it was destroyed.’
‘Just the back of it,’ Aras said.
‘Just the back of it,’ Nadia nodded.

As a boy, Aras used to go in and get lost there, the citadel, always on the hunt for a new stage. Once, with one of his cousins, he had gone looking for the hill where Abraham was said to have milked a cow – the reason why the city where they lived was called Halab: white, like the milk. Getting lost in the citadel was a kind of ritual. Inside, time was blurred. There was always something new to find. Once, with another cousin, he discovered the tomb of Salah al-Din’s third son. Another time they clambered down into the dungeons, where people had once poured acid. Their search led them eventually to the throne room, one of two spaces preserved in their original condition, although nobody really believed the interiors were original. Still, the patterns, the geometry – Aras had sat down and tried to count the squares, the triangles, the sequences, but they seemed to never end. The citadel was a vast labyrinth, an adventure playground. In it he would never go astray. Other visitors, used to seeing children without parents, would drop him off at the main entrance, where he would wait with the guards, picturing the battles in which the citadel had never been taken – the moat was simply too deep – until at last his family emerged and he re-joined them. Back then they didn’t know the citadel’s afflictions would persist, or that the increasing damage to the city would come to seem like an inverse prediction of the past, when Aleppo’s nickname al-Shaba’ – the white mingled with the black – had once referred to marble. Now, it meant ash and rubble.

The ground offered its solid, uneven foundation to other people who stood nearby, their eyes glued to wristwatches, to phones. Nervous glances. Cigarettes appeared in the corners of several mouths, while other people chatted with their companions. Only a very few had come alone, and those were the ones who looked around. It would take nerves of steel to be here by yourself, thought Aras, smiling at them. They hadn’t rolled out the appointments system yet, when phones would put each person in a queue, sorted alphabetically.

The doors opened. Anybody standing directly in front of them, the metal doors, was swallowed up. If you wanted to be first through the mill you were first to arrive, because the mill ground slowly. Frau Hoffmann, Aras and Nadia passed through the entryway. Their pace was slow, a pace not rushed, not hasty, not reluctant, not without purpose, but with confidence low. The floor reflected back their steps, tiled; a reception desk was directly opposite the entrance. A corridor on the right led to the Citizens’ Registration Office. Their path took them left, up the stairs. The silicone on the banister was red, worn. The door now facing them was mint green, silver-handled, ring-scuffed. Five people were gathered around it. No obvious order. Aras memorised the faces, hoping that they – and perhaps the door as well – would memorise his own, so that when the sixth face came they’d know whose turn it was.

The last time Aras had taken leave of the place was four years earlier, and he’d believed it really was the last time. A fond farewell. Not that he was a credulous person. But when, verdict by verdict, more dead were added to the chants each Friday; when cities were cut off from electricity, water and all forms of communication, when there followed more and more arrests, more and more disappearances; when the dictator, who described his own people as too ill-educated for reforms, decided to smother the revolution beneath a sky thick with hails of bullets – Assad or we’ll burn the country to the ground, said the walls, Assad for all eternity, they said and said again; when soldiers who didn’t want to fire on their brothers and sisters, on their girlfriends, neighbours and relatives, joined the Free Syrian Army; while Nadia alternately sat in front of the computer screen or stood out on the street, outside embassies, local government buildings or the Reichstag, hoping to hear the one piece of news that would end it all; Aras had realised then that it wouldn’t be long before he saw this building once again, and now, after two years, he had. Goodbyes aren’t forever.

So while the European Union debated on that very day, a day like today, whether to supply the Syrian rebels with weapons – Germany didn’t think it was a good idea, because it would just mean the opposing side would arm themselves still further – the banister opposite the mint-coloured door provided Aras with some small support. The tiles at his feet worried him. They captured his attention. Black, cracked in certain places, split. Somebody had fought against their power, perhaps, tried furiously to bring the place down with their feet, over and over, others following, a pathetic attempt. Were the cracks evidence that the police had made a pact with the floor, offering it different faces, and the floor, in return, had exercised the harshness of state power? Aras’s vision went red.

Nadia and Frau Hoffmann were chatting beside him.
‘Can you translate?’ his mother asked.
‘A man was on trial, and the three judges sentenced him to death,’ Aras translated. ‘He was offered a last wish, as is often the case. Normally, most people ask to see their mother again, or they ask for food, that sort of thing. But this man thought he was clever, so he asked to learn German.’ Nadia was building up towards the punchline. ‘The first judge said, “No, we can’t grant that wish.” The second judge agreed: “It would take far too long. We’ll never get round to carrying out the sentence.”’ Realising he knew the joke already, Aras braced himself for Frau Hoffmann’s reaction. ‘The third judge said, “We should grant him his wish. He’ll carry out the sentence himself.”’ The others by the door, whom Aras had almost forgotten were there, joined in with Frau Hoffmann’s laughter. ‘I’ll have to tell my students that one,’ she chuckled. ‘Priceless.’

[…]

There Were Days (original German title, “Da waren Tage”) is Luna Ali’s debut novel, written and published in German by S. Fischer in 2024. 

Aras, the protagonist, observes the Syrian revolution from a distance. Born in Aleppo but raised in Germany, he was in his first semester of law school in 2011 when the revolution began. As violence in Syria escalates, the conflict increasingly permeates his life in Germany. From lecture halls to immigration offices, during an internship in Jordan, or as a guest on a political talk show, Aras relives the anniversary of the revolution each year as a merging of reality and imagination. Thus, the novel There Were Days asks how the desire for freedom—and the repression of that desire—shapes the life, actions, and language of the protagonist in the diaspora. 

The excerpt is from the third chapter. It addresses the most direct impact of the Syrian revolution’s repression on Aras: his family’s desire to escape the war. The chapter is set in March 15th, 2013, at the Foreigners’ Office (Ausländerbehörde), where Aras, his mother Nadia, and his former German teacher attempt to submit a Verpflichtungserklärung (declaration of commitment) to secure family reunification—the only safe passage between Syria and Germany at the time. To achieve this, they depend on Frau Hoffmann, whose income qualifies her to provide a guarantee (Bürgschaft). The chapter explores the dehumanizing bureaucracy of the Foreigners’ Office, which reduces individuals to subordinates, while also unravelling the intricate web of politics, (post-)colonialism, and kinship, ultimately fostering solidarity.

This text was written prior to February 2025 and is part of the dossier “Eternity Unwoven,” curated by Veronica Ferreri and Inana Othman.

The dossier is a collaboration of Archivwar with Untoldmag and Arabpop. Its Italian version is available in Arabpop Vol. 8 “Cose” (Arabpop logo)

Graphic project: Greg Olla

The publisher remains available to rights holders regarding any images for which it was not possible to identify or contact the owners.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe Resarch and Innovation Programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101064513 “ARCHIVWAR – Archives in Times of War: Scattered Families and Vanishing Past in Contemporary Syria.” 

Funded by the European Union. Views and options expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Execute Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

The post 2013 – Getting the process going appeared first on Untold.

جنة جنة جنة يا وطنا [Paradise, Paradise, Our Country is Paradise] 

Words and the relentless music penetrate my body, inebriated and exhausted as it rests on a sofa of a semi-stranger, with the only bond we share being Syria. Night eventually descends in summery Berlin, while I am listening countless times to the song Janna Janna remixed by the Syrian-German band Shkoon.

Its beginning and end dissolve into a flow of sounds, words and beats. Darkness reaches the palm frond framing the window, its slow motion devouring every single object of that unfamiliar living room. The night is untamed, almost ruthless, in its carnivorous mission, ingesting my own body and mind, too, until now occupied by the crescendo of the synths and the pounding of the beat. The entire space and myself, the past and the present, dissipate profanely and profoundly.  

***

May 2021, Berlin, a desk

It was not the first time I listened to this song, even to this specific remixed version. As happened to a lot of the traditional musical repertoire, the piece was reinvented with new meanings in March 2011 and became the soundtrack of this historical period, the revolution, after protests sparked in Syria. The song, also, became tied to one of its uncontested icons, Abdul Baset al-Sarout, a young prominent football goalkeeper who had embraced the revolution and led the protests in Homs with his words and presence. He later turned into a Free Syrian Army fighter in the wake of the brutal repression and siege laid down by the al-Assad regime in his hometown, a transformation captured by the documentary Return to Homs by filmmaker Talal Derki. The song and its infinite re-interpretations also became the sonic landmark of my nightlife in the German capital, since my arrival in May 2018. I witnessed its innumerable metamorphosis–that did not scratch its sacred power–in the many Arab parties populating pre-pandemic Berlin. 

***

February 2019, Berlin, a nightclub

An unremarkable winter night. An electro dabke version of the song instigates a powerful energy reverberating on the dancefloor. Squeezed next to each other, partygoers are greeting each other, some others dancing and drinking, others simply chatting. The moment this song starts, this heterogeneous group becomes a single entity. My friend Azad, standing next to me, is also infected by the song and the atmosphere. He starts to shout, singing along. Holding my hand, he initiates a spontaneous dabke line where I follow his voice and body. We ignore the heat, the lack of space and oxygen; we dance, sneaking around single dancers, trying to find an empty spot for our next steps amongst the other chains of people whose hands clasp together. The song is replayed immediately, the energy still inhabiting the room with force as sweating bodies and loud voices continue to move and sing in unison. 

I did not reflect much in that moment about what was happening –as similar to other such moments punctuating my nocturnal life. I just danced, I let myself be carried away by the sound and the vibe. There was no time, space and, even, willingness to dissect the power of the song as it was all about living in the moment, savouring its addictive and hedonistic flavour like an animal starving in the middle of a dying forest. Maybe those moments on the dancefloor were just so cathartic because they were about holding onto something beautiful that was about to end or it had already ended but we were not ready to let go. 

Revolutions never last for an eternity, nor should they. Yet, those moments of pure magic can survive, or we want (we need) them to survive, not to fall down, collapse forever–and us–with them. They always remind me of Eugenio Montale’s poem, I Limoni [The Lemon Trees], his wandering in a noisy city made of cement punctuated by a moment of pure beauty as he suddenly glimpses a lemon tree hidden in the courtyard of a building. Maybe the revolution had the smell of the lemons Montale was desperately seeking, that ultimate treasure that life, the world, and nature can offer to ordinary people. Maybe the paradise–Janna Janna–was Montale’s lemon trees. 

***

October 2022, Berlin, an old kneipe

For Azad, –the friend who held my hand in captivity dancing dabke that night– the song is an allegory of his revolutionary past. Three years after that night; a lifetime after the revolution, we talk about my ideas behind this text. He smiles at me and his partner, with a hint of bitterness, saying that he forgot about that night, but he remembers the song as part of his young self reaching the square to protest, dance, listen to Janna Janna and to fulfill the promise of a different future for Syria. His enduring attempts always failed as the regime’s snipers and their bullets were always faster in dropping the curtains at these rebellious gatherings and claiming some people’s lives in the process. 

***

August 2015, Lebanon, a school courtyard

For me, that dabke reminds me of those evenings spent in the courtyard of the school in the midst of agricultural fields. Created by the Syrian community displaced from rural Homs, the school and its courtyard–situated not far from its informal settlement – became the stage for any sort of event that required a sahra [party]: celebration of an engagement, a wedding or just ordinary life. The singer with his voice and the musician with his electric piano animate those dark nights and their summer breeze amusing the usual crowd while guests arrive from far and not so far away. 

Sometimes, we just listen to his singing, making up impromptu celebratory or ironic lyrics about one of us. Other times, the electro dabke pushes us in the middle of the courtyard/dancefloor as circles of men and women, sometimes mixed, dance not far from children playing around. The atmosphere is not always joyful, nostalgia and melancholia arise amongst a tensed silent audience as his voice recalls the past and what has been lost. 

There was no revolutionary fervor in those summer evenings. Janna Janna and all the other revolutionary songs never made it to the courtyard –to be honest, the revolution seemed to have become a chimera by the time of my arrival in August 2014. Sarout was never mentioned there either. Yet, those moments also were revolutionary in their own essence: they were celebrating the ‘minor struggles’ to be alive and continue to live despite displacement and the devastation of the war. 

***

Berlin, October 2024, a bed

The dancefloor was neither the street nor the courtyard. Yet, Berlin 2019 managed to bring Syria 2011 and Lebanon 2015 back as if we were inside a half-broken TV from the nineties, in which, from time to time, one channel blended with another one –as if time and space collapse making it impossible to distinguish what we were doing, with whom, where and when. The dancefloor, after all, was just a vacuum that helped everyone postpone a sense of an ending and a future repeating an eternal past. After all, this was Berlin, it was not Sarout singing, it was only a remix. Like my friend, I also danced the night away. But that waning dusk on the sofa was different. It was not a time of reckoning the end, but a time of remembering its beginning.  

***

August 2012, London, a crowd, the Syrian embassy

Another Saturday afternoon in front of the Syrian embassy in the most imperial looking parts of Central London. ‘Janna Janna’ is filling the air of those revolutionary protests: we are not Syria, but Syria and the revolution are here. For the young and older generations of Syrians protesting from a distance, this is a moment of hope, euphoria, togetherness until then unimaginable, as fear and silence brought from Syria were carefully cultivated and generationally transmitted even in the diaspora.

I was happy to touch again those moments that were, so far, buried by the passing of time. Yet, they felt more distant than ever, belonging to a parallel universe that crashed in front of the violent reality. 

***

June 2019, Berlin, a computer screen

A week after me lying on that sofa,Sarout died after being wounded in battle between Hama and Idlib. My Facebook newsfeed becomes a reel of mourning for this man and his legacy: the video of him singing during the protests, his interviews and pictures of the funeral attended by thousands of people in Idlib. In Lebanon, members of the Syrian community I lived with commemorated his death, abandoning their usual carefulness in posting anything political and revolutionary at their own very real risk. In Berlin too, the news feels devastating––he was a symbol of the revolution, but almost an embodiment of the Syrian predicament and its contradictions. His death feels like a kitchen knife cutting deeply through the skin and flesh of a finger.

***

November 2024, Berlin

We are no longer on a dancefloor, its darkness and the darkness of the night did not protect us from the reckoning of this bitter end; there weren’t any lemon trees to uncover in any hidden corner. Like the TV of my childhood where white, black and grey lines dominated the screen, eating up one channel and the intrusive other, the feelings, people, years and places belonging to the revolution became mixed up with neither beginning nor end. A dream I did not live but watched in front of a broken TV showcasing fragments of my diaries, fieldnotes and memories. Maybe I can only archive these fragments, making some order and clarity in between these monochromatic lines as a final act of mourning, or as a way to deal with the lingering melancholia. I put a date, a place, I unpack and deconstruct the secret beauty of a lemon tree, the captivating lyrics of Janna Janna, reminding myself that even revolutionary icons like Sarout are human.

***

 7th December 2024, Berlin, Sonneallee/Arab Street,

I am walking towards Sonneallee to catch the bus to go home and watch the speech of Bashar al-Assad that never happened. My friend Nawal and I are stopped by a young boy standing in front of one of the many Syrian patisseries that found their homes in this long avenue. Wearing the Syrian revolutionary flag like the mantle of a superhero, he stands next to an old stereo singing Janna Janna, offering sweets to people passing by to celebrate the imminent fall of Bashar al-Assad. The revolutionary flag reappears in a blink of an eye, worn like an accessory by men walking in the street or attached to the Keffiyeh and the Palestinian flag at the entrance of many shops. 

The day after, even Sarout reappears in flags and posters brought by the jubilant crowd celebrating the collapse of the regime and its eternal aura. I smell again the lemon tree as Janna Janna is blasted in the middle of Kreuzberg, almost symbolizing this surreal moment of touching paradise with the point of that finger, effortlessly, at least for the here and now.

I do not know what to do with this text now that it tells a different ending written only in November from the one we witnessed more recently. I want to delete that part, but I can’t. I am tempted to rewind the tape, letting the interferences in the screen just be what they have been, without any order or logic, to preserve that revolutionary momentum as it was, as it is now, and with it, those who are not here with us, celebrating the many ways in which they also contributed to make the unimaginable and unforeseeable become history. 

This text was written prior to February 2025 and is part of the dossier “Eternity Unwoven,” curated by Veronica Ferreri and Inana Othman.

The dossier is a collaboration of Archivwar with Untoldmag and Arabpop. Its Italian version is available in Arabpop Vol. 8 “Cose” (Arabpop logo)

Graphic project: Greg Olla

The publisher remains available to rights holders regarding any images for which it was not possible to identify or contact the owners.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe Resarch and Innovation Programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101064513 “ARCHIVWAR – Archives in Times of War: Scattered Families and Vanishing Past in Contemporary Syria.” 

Funded by the European Union. Views and options expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Execute Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

The post Paradise, interrupted. The archive may not end appeared first on Untold.

The sea was there when we cried,
The first cry
Out loud,
And left our moms
With memories floating in the air,
Separating us from our destiny.

In silence,
Silenced we spoke
By the sea because it took us by word, and here we are.

The sea is there as we cry,
With memories floating in the air,
Memories of the now.
This sea is now nothing but home
For the years of emptiness,
Choking our words.

Now these words are optional,
Yet we choose to say them
And hope is our way

To remember
And be remembered.

– 08.12.24, for my hometown Jableh

In times when we are expected to envision utopias and heavens, can we take a moment to rewrite a Syria of the past? What if we think beyond trauma? What if we call it a process of marginalization of both memory and the self to the extent that we embody what has passed, yet force ourselves to forget we lived it? 

Coming from Syria, we find ourselves misplaced in a story with no clear beginning, starting mid-narration—easier to label as tragedy or misery than to fully comprehend. Our memory, shaped by fear, mistrust, and control, has become a battleground, caught between “trauma porn” and modern tactics of erasure and forgetting. A rainy cloud dominates our minds. It feels vivid to us, yet incomprehensible to those around us. We know what we know, but how do we truly remember?

Memory

The collective memory of Syrian society has undergone various phases of distortion from the onset of the era of Hafez al-Assad – the Assad father – in 1970 until the first moments of the 2011 revolution and continues to this day. During my childhood and adolescence in Syria, I was not accustomed to hearing comprehensive answers to my questions. The responses were constrained by the policies of collective memory, which were shaped by conspiracy theories targeting the Syrian Arab nation and its cause.

The concept of collective memory is attributed to the French philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945). He relied on it to interpret how individuals understand the past and its connections to the present within their social environment. Consequently, the formation of individual memory and history becomes a product of factors provided by the surrounding environment, such as interactions with others, language, place, and time in their political dimensions. 

Collective memory, in turn, represents a system that includes selected elements from the sum of individual memories, arranged to narrate a past that aligns with its current reality. When I look at Syria now, I have a question that is not new: How can we resist the present in the presence of the constant struggle with forgetting, oblivion and distortion, not only at the level of Syrian society at home and abroad, but also on international and Arab levels? 

Are we allowed to call things by their true names?

My impressions of living inside Syria are profoundly shaped by the overwhelming support I witnessed among many people on the Syrian coast for Bashar al-Assad. Some are neighbors, relatives, friends of friends and schoolmates. Amid their criticism and complaints about the ever-worsening living conditions, expressions of loyalty and resignation emerged all the time. 

What is particularly interesting, is the generalization of convictions: “We are the poorest, we are the weakest, we are the oppressed in this equation.” Among them are those who have been brutalized by the Assad regime and others who hesitantly formulate meaningless ideas and incantations such as: “May God help us all.” 

Everyone remembers what pleases them and eases their conscience to avoid the discomforts of reality or taking responsibility for themselves and those around them. Political passivity is not the primary trait in Syria; rather, it is fear. Fear and the desire to be free from this fear are the underlying drivers of people’s movements and attitudes. 

Either you are part of the apparatus of fear or among those rebelling against fear and the fearful! A duality that aligns with the regime’s propaganda and the mindset of its followers: “Assad or we burn the country”. In this statement, the initial threats –despite their seriousness– were later concealed or downplayed in the regime’s official narrative of combating terrorism were hidden: a medieval fantasy about burning evil souls that disturb the serene kingdom. Well, Assad has eventually run away, and Syria remains wounded. However, we haven’t yet been defeated. 

Marginalized memory

Before or after prison? My cousin answered his kindergarten teacher’s question about what he wanted to become in the future. A few years later, I noticed that this family memory no longer existed for him, as if it had been replaced by absolute silence. The collective memory enforced by the Assad era was governed by fearing the unknown and filled with narratives resembling those of superhero movies., The main character was the regime itself: the only force capable of confronting imperialism. At the same time, Assad was practicing other sorts of imperialism, reinforcing the idea that any change could only have been part and parcel of that imperialism –the one threatening Syria– and  inevitably leading towards the destruction of the nation.

This memory transformed the loud cries for freedom in the country’s streets into indicators of Western dominance and the unquestioning support for Assad into signals of resistance. This distortion transcended the system’s ideology and its media’s conspiracy theories, becoming a life philosophy deeply ingrained in Syria’s DNA. Even our youngest lived within this memory, fighting enemies they only knew from the tales of their teachers of socialist national education at school—or whatever it was agreed to be called. 

Our mothers, fathers, and their comrades referred to their prison time and friends with code words and among their adopted names hid the narrative of marginalized memory.

One of the habits of Syrian society, adhering to Assad’s memory policies, is mocking pain and ignoring it if necessary, especially if its nature is politically inevitable. During my first years of exile, I noticed that most of those I met from my generation responded only with incomprehensible jokes or sarcasm when discussing the experience of imprisonment within our families. 

Many looks followed me and others, disbelieving as I continued talking about the societal stigma I endured long before the revolution with my family. We are the children of these times and places, yet we are unable to remember or believe, I thought to myself. An internal rejection prevails among us, as if our memory has forgotten the existence of what came before us.

In my adolescence, I was searching for justifications for our fear and silence, where fear was, and still is, greater than memory and recollection. But what is the reason now? Are these just mere reactions?

Forever No More

In March 2011, the voices of neighbors echoed phrases like: “We have always lived together without any problems.” I have often asked myself, who are those who lived in peace? And how was their life so problem-free? I can only recall stories of prisons, constant policing and words of assault. 

I asked and ask myself about the thousands killed in the Hama massacre of 1982, the constant oppression of Kurds in Syrian narratives, about those displaced all over the world and in refugee camps, about those who left us forever, about those who have been forcibly disappeared until now or those who have been absent from participating in the details of daily life even after their formal release, and about everyone who committed to the policy of self-isolation and rejection, silently or loudly. 

All these stories were censored by the Assad collective memory. Those influenced by it recount tales of the leader as the builder of dams and the defender of frontiers, and his soldiers as victims of saboteurs and terrorism. Or they fabricate stories of a revolution with no known past. Even the term “terrorism” has lost a clear meaning in the Syrian context—not because it is inaccurate, but because of its multiple sources and causes. To be frank, the regime has not hesitated to claim the top ranks in terrorism, killing, and destruction, utilizing state organs, supporting militias, and even assistance from Russia and Iran.

Counter-memory

Memory policies within Syria erupt sporadically and cannot be confined to narrow narratives that exclude others. The diversity of the Syrian landscape—politically, religiously, and ethnically—reflects a variety of oppressive scenes and their accompanying narratives. Yet, none of this alters the regime’s oppressive narrative, which has been consistently excluded from the memory of the present. A memory that forgets violent episodes and even justifies the oppressive mechanisms of the regime itself.

This marginalization extends beyond Syria, affecting many outside the country and across the political spectrum, where political memory and its revolutionary agents have been overshadowed by various propagandas. Counter-memory is, therefore, a necessity—one that has always been hidden in children’s questions and the cries of demonstrations. Essayism, what, for me, is reflective, exploratory mode of writing that blends personal, sociopolitical, and analytical perspectives, offers a tool to build a foundation for this counter-memory.

There exists a living, non-static memory that the regime’s ideology has intermittently suppressed, only for it to resurface in vain. With the fall of the Assad regime today, we cannot deny that there is a complete rebellion against various narratives and the expectations of the multitude of political parties in Syria.

Meanwhile, we face the added challenge of asserting agency against intervening imperial powers. Not blinded by the moment, we cannot place trust in parties that have played brutal roles in the war, waged over the bodies of the revolution. Yet, maintaining hope remains our moral obligation—to mobilize, organise, and ensure political change for all.

This text was written prior to February 2025 and is part of the dossier “Eternity Unwoven,” curated by Veronica Ferreri and Inana Othman.

The dossier is a collaboration of Archivwar with Untoldmag and Arabpop. Its Italian version is available in Arabpop Vol. 8 “Cose” (Arabpop logo)

Graphic project: Greg Olla

The publisher remains available to rights holders regarding any images for which it was not possible to identify or contact the owners.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe Resarch and Innovation Programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101064513 “ARCHIVWAR – Archives in Times of War: Scattered Families and Vanishing Past in Contemporary Syria.” 

Funded by the European Union. Views and options expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Execute Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

The post A life lived without memory, yet together appeared first on Untold.