For the better part of the past two years, we have read study over study detailing the manifold forms of violence inflicted on the population of this tiny strip of land – maybe to compensate for the screaming silence on or relativization of these horrors by so many colleagues and institutions. 

Yet most of these readings only reiterate to what we already know. We know the casualty counts, the satellite images, the story of Hind Rajab. We all know them and what they are symptoms of. At least, those of us who want to know. 

There is an exhaustion that is not only emotional but epistemic: the sense that Gaza’s archive of horrors has become so heavy, so routinised, that it no longer clarifies anything. It merely accumulates. And in that accumulation, the place and its people risk dissolving into function – into a screen for moral and political performances and a symbol for the erosion of rights-based global order that, let’s be honest, never truly served those now paying its highest price.

Abdalhadi Alijla’s Fearful in Gaza does not accept this economy. It does not offer Gaza as piecemeal material for a political lesson. It refuses the familiar rhetorical contract in which the reader is permitted to feel only if the text supplies the requisite volume of shock, and in which the writer is expected to translate lived reality into the idiom of an international audience. 

I finished Fearful in Gaza with the distinct feeling one sometimes has after reading a work that is neither “extraordinary” nor “representative”, and yet more unsettling than either category. In fact, the book stays with me to date precisely because it does not contain something shocking in the way the world expects writing on Gaza to shock. Instead, it trusts in being taken seriously in its own, very quiet way. 

Alijla insists, with remarkable discipline, in the irreducible seriousness of the ordinary. He writes about growing up in Gaza with an honesty that is strikingly frank and unsparing. “Ungeschönt” (unvarnished?) we say in Germany, where we seem to have a precise word for everything but for the brutal Israel occupation and the genocidal violence deployed in Gaza. 

Contrasting with the semantic acrobatics of German officials or media in trying to avoid certain terminologies, Fearful in Gaza comes with a sobering clarity. In fact, its language is almost plain and precisely for that reason it is deeply affecting. Everyday routines, small pleasures, and moments of intimacy and care are described with the same clarity and in the same breath as moments of shame, humiliation, and the slow sedimentation of fear into the biographies of every protagonist of the book. 

But most importantly they are presented without moral staging for a specific audience. Unlike so many recent publications, Gaza appears here not as a metaphor or a case study, but as a real place of home, with all the contradictions that implies.

Two Voices, One Childhood, No Setting

Formally, the book is written in two voices: “The Son” and “The Mother.” While the son, Ayk, carries the main line, his mother interrupts, mirrors, adds weight, and often presses down on the same memory from another angle. What results from this structure is a family memoir that does not seek harmony but remains fragmentary dissonant. 

The son’s narrative registers the world through the eyes of a child and without full comprehension, the mother’s narrative registers the same world as a horizon of responsibility and vigilance. However, the mother’s interventions do not function as explanatory commentary. Alijla does a great job portraying the mother as an authority in her own right, with her exhaustion, anger, tenderness, and practical intelligence. Through her testimony, he makes visible the labor of keeping a child alive in Gaza, without ever romanticizing or lionizing this task.

Violence enters into this relationship of mother and son not as a spectacular event that can be easily morally consumed, but as a persistent atmospheric condition that reorganizes the child’s and the mother’s cognitive and emotional architectures. 

As a pressure that seeps into the logic of childhood and quietly deforms it. There is the children’s fascination with military jeeps, and their instinct to domesticate them by giving them animal names, as if naming could tame the terror. The gesture is, on the surface, playful, a small act of imagination. But it is also a way how a child makes fear manageable by giving it a known shape. 

Effectively it is also a technique of survival in a context of constant uncertainty: In one moment, school is school. In the next, it is no longer just school – when the teacher distributes pieces of onion because its smell helps against tear gas or when children are marched across the schoolyard at gunpoint and with their hands up. 

This scene that illustrates the carceral nature of a child’s life under occupation is described without theatrical punctuation, which is precisely why it becomes difficult to forget. One feels, reading it, the thinness of the wall that is supposed to separate childhood from coercion and harm, and how quickly that wall is pierced. In another passage, the mother describes waking her son at the first sound of military engines, because she is afraid his heart could stop during a nightly raid. 

There are passages that are even more difficult because they do not offer interpretive scaffolding. A scene of sexual violence against children is observed through the eyes of a six-year-old who cannot yet name what he sees but carries the fear from this incident for years, as if the body understood something that language could not yet organize. The description does not force emotion, though. Alijla refrains from converting the scene into a moral exhibit. He merely describes, and the description itself is what unsettles.

Home, Not Symbol

The comparison to other recent books produced under conditions of war and siege is unavoidable, not because they are the same, but because they share an ethic of focusing on the ordinary. That is what makes Fearful in Gaza feel closer, in spirit, to books like Tijan Sila’s Radio Sarajevo or Tony Doherty’s This Man’s Wee Boy than to much of what is marketed as “Middle East” conflict literature. 

This kinship that has less to do with geography than with scale. Sila’s Sarajevo is not presented as a grand theatre for questions of belonging amid ethnic conflict. It is a toilet where the family sleeps, crude jokes, and the brittle bonds of boyhood. Likewise, Doherty’s Derry at the onset of civil war in Northern Ireland is made intelligible by being rendered small and specific through the joys and tribulations of childhood and a son’s fragmentary recollections of his father, shot dead on Bloody Sunday. 

Alijla does something similar, but with his own temperature. Through his recollections of everyday kitchen situations, quarrels over schoolwork, neighbourhood routes, and the stubborn persistence of habits even when these habits become risky, he gives the domestic and the routine a dignity that public talk about Gaza rarely allows. That matters because so much writing and commentary in Europe and North America treats Gaza as a symbol first and as a lived world second. 

Since 7 October 2023, this symbolic reflex has only intensified. Gaza is increasingly made to carry debates that are, in practice, not about Gaza at all, and more about the moral self-positioning of distant audiences: about legitimacy, about the right vocabulary, about whose grief is permissible and what forms of violence are justifiable. 

In Germany, where public debate has largely concentrated on a self-referential struggle over the country’s historic responsibility, this dynamic has been particularly stark, with the effect that Palestinians appear, at best, as a footnote to someone else’s ethical drama. In this climate, Gaza functions like a floating signifier, a symbolic container filled with meaning ascriptions that harden moral frontiers, prevent empathy, and criminalise solidarity, policing what can be said and who is cast as decent or dangerous. 

Alijla’s refusal to write Gaza as allegory matters here. By returning again and again to the small things, to the mother’s vigilance, to the child’s strategies of coping, to routines disrupted and reassembled, Fearful in Gaza withdraws Gaza from the role of rhetorical object and gives it back its status as a place where people live, remember, disagree, and endure. 

Gaza is presented as home in the literal sense, that is, a place where your life happens, where you learn tenderness and cruelty in the same day, where you absorb contradictions because you have no choice. In the end, this is how the book becomes political: It trusts the reader to feel the humanness of its protagonists without being pushed to do so. 

This is, for me, the central reminder the book carries: Sometimes the most powerful political writing is precisely that which simply tells what it is like, without the implicit bargain that the reader will only pay attention if suffering is presented at maximum volume.

Exile as Aftersound

The frame of the book is also a story of later, of what comes after the spectacle. Towards the end of the book, Alijla describes his cumbersome relocation Sweden, where he lives and writes today. From this exile, he was forced to witness from afar Israel’s destruction of the very home he remembers so affectionately and the death of the people who populate his memories: Of the Shuja’iyya neighbourhood, located East of the so-called “Yellow Line” drawn by Israel straight across the Gaza Strip, where nothing but rubble remains. Abdalhadi’s mother, whose voice structures the book and anchors many of its most intimate passages, was killed in an Israeli drone strike in May 2025. 

Against this backdrop, Fearful in Gaza has become something it never meant to be: A record of places and voices that have been violently disappeared. The book’s closing movement thus performs a subtle shift. What started as memory becomes preservation. In this sense, the memoir holds a powerful truth. Namely that neither geographical nor temporal distance, neither occupation nor physical destruction can erase what we hold dear. They only alter the modalities. 

Sleeplessness, sensory echoes, the sea as an unexpected trigger may puncture the author’s everyday life in exile. But these punctuations are not just reverberations of trauma. They testify to the continued presence of a world that did not end simply because the narrator left it. In Fearful in Gaza, the mother’s voice offers the vocabulary of Ghourba, longing and estrangement, and with that the sense that “after” is not a clean temporal category but a different kind of living with the same thing.

When I closed the book, I did not feel better informed. Nor did I feel morally validated in my political position. Instead, there was a quieter recognition, bordering on embarrassment, of how often we mistake information for understanding. And so the introductory question returns, but changed slightly in tone: Why do I still read books like this?

Because every now and then a book refuses the roles assigned to it and, by doing so, leaves an even deeper mark.

The post Gaza, Not a Metaphor: Childhood, Memory, and the Refusal of Spectacle appeared first on Untold.

Developed as part of the European Research Council–funded PalREAD project, the platform brings together archival material, podcasts, network visualizations, and thematic narratives to document a literature created under conditions of exile, occupation, and censorship. It offers a critical intervention against erasure—especially vital in a moment of genocidal violence against Palestinians and the systematic suppression of their voices.

In this interview, Refqa Abu‑Remaileh reflects on the origins and goals of the project, the challenges of building a literary history from fragments, and the urgency of documenting Palestinian cultural production in the face of historical and ongoing destruction. Through her work, she not only tells the story of Palestinian literature but also how we can learn from this rich creative history of defiance, resistance, and survival.

Walid El Houri: How would you describe this massive project? What made you decide to do it, and who do you believe it is for?

Refqa Abu‑Remaileh: One of the main reasons I started this project was to answer my own questions. I was struggling to understand how to read, write about, and make sense of Palestinian literature. There are many anomalies in this field—disconnections, gaps, scattered histories—and I kept hitting a ceiling. Even though the existing work was incredibly important, it felt like we couldn’t see the bigger picture: how everything connects, how the diaspora relates to the homeland, and how we make sense of a history shaped by fragmentation.

At some point, I became disillusioned with the limits of traditional literary analysis. It no longer felt sufficient to analyze texts in isolation. I felt the need for unconventional approaches to make sense of what is, in many ways, an unconventional literature.

I’m also a visual learner, so I wanted to create something that was visual and interactive. Simple facts, like whether Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Kanafani ever met were unclear. The canon of Palestinian literature has been reduced to a few major names, but even those figures lived in entirely different cities, cultural spheres, and political realities. We often treat them as though they belonged to a single, unified literary scene—which they didn’t. So, I wanted to build something that would allow us to explore these disconnections and interconnections more clearly.

This is how the idea of an atlas emerged—something that could show the motion of literature across geographies, a “literature in motion.” I realized that the best way to represent that was through a digital platform that allowed for textual, visual, and audio components. It had to be non-linear and participatory—something more democratic, that could reflect the fragmented and scattered nature of Palestinian literary history. I didn’t want to write a conventional, linear literary history.

The digital realm became essential not only for hosting the project but as a conceptual space—a virtual meeting ground for dispersed data and fragmented narratives. It helped me see Palestinian literature as a story of movement, elasticity, and rupture. I didn’t know all of this when I began, but the drive to answer these questions and see the bigger picture is what propelled the project forward.

WH: What defines Palestinian literature and what makes it special or particular? How is it different from other national literatures?

RA: This was one of the biggest challenges I faced—trying to define what is and isn’t part of Palestinian literature. Early on, I decided to adopt an inclusive approach inspired by the spirit of the Palestinian revolution, particularly the Beirut years. Many people I spoke to, including in our podcast interviews, emphasized that Palestinian identity—at least in the context of literature and culture—wasn’t strictly about nationality or ethnicity, but about belonging to a cause.

So, I made a conscious decision to include non-Palestinians in the project—writers, editors, thinkers—anyone who made a major contribution to Palestinian literature, regardless of their background. This wasn’t about gatekeeping based on origin but about contribution and connection. That inclusiveness felt essential to reflecting the spirit of the literature itself.

At the same time, I had to confront a recurring question: Is Palestinian literature really that different from other Arabic literatures? I remember meeting Salma Khadra Jayyusi, an incredibly important but underrecognized Palestinian poet and literary critic, who was already in her 90s when I interviewed her. She looked at me skeptically and said, “Why do you need a separate project for Palestinian literature? It’s no different from Arabic literature. It has the same genres, styles, movements.”

And she was right—on the level of the literary texts themselves, Palestinian literature is very much part of modern Arabic literature. It shares its genres—novels, short stories, poetry, plays—and it’s shaped by the same regional trends and intellectual currents. These writers were writing in, and part of, the broader Arab world.

But what makes Palestinian literature different is the context of its production and circulation. It’s a national literature without a nation-state—a literature that is unhoused, fragmented, scattered across geographies. Its writers, critics, readers, publishers, and archives are not located within a centralized, territorial state. This affects everything: how the literature is written, read, archived, and remembered.

Most national literatures emerge from relatively stable territorial entities. Palestinian literature doesn’t. Its very conditions of existence are shaped by displacement, exile, censorship, imprisonment, and erasure. These are not just background facts; they define the literature. There’s also a kind of latent transnationalism that has always been there, but we’ve tended to overlook it—perhaps because of a desire to normalize Palestinian literature within national literary frameworks.

So, we end up analyzing the canonical figures—Kanafani in Beirut, Emile Habibi in Haifa, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra in Baghdad—as though they were part of a unified literary tradition. But they were living in completely different political and cultural environments, and rarely, if ever, interacting directly. Ignoring that reality means ignoring what actually makes Palestinian literature distinct.

It’s also a literature that has been systematically targeted—through censorship, imprisonment, exile, and erasure—in ways that go beyond what’s typical in other Arab literatures. All of this contributes to its particularity: a decentralized, transnational, and constantly disrupted literary tradition that still manages to cohere around a sense of collective memory and struggle.

WH: Does Palestinian literature need to be in Arabic, or do you consider it a multilingual literature? Which other languages have you encountered and documented?

RA: Yes, Palestinian literature is multilingual. During the research, I encountered material in many languages—Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, German, English, French, among others. However, for the purposes of this project, I made the decision to focus primarily on Arabic-language sources. That wasn’t because the other languages aren’t important—they are—but because the vast majority of literary production, especially in the 20th century, has been in Arabic.

This sometimes frustrates people, but we can’t deny that Arabic is the dominant language of Palestinian literary expression. And the Arabic corpus is enormous—much of it still unexplored. I realized we’ve barely scratched the surface. When people think of literature, they often focus only on the major literary texts, but there’s so much more: criticism, editorials, letters, essays, manifestos, cultural commentary. All of this exists in Arabic, scattered across newspapers, magazines, private archives, and oral histories.

That said, the multilingual dimension is real, especially when we look at the diaspora—Latin America in particular. One of the surprises in my research was discovering just how much Arabic-language publishing was taking place there, starting in the early 20th century. Many of these publications eventually became bilingual—Arabic-Spanish or Arabic-Portuguese—and then fully Spanish or Portuguese. This history is often overshadowed by the emphasis on Arab migration to the United States, but in fact, Latin America has a rich and largely untapped archive of Palestinian and broader Arab cultural production.

I think we’ll see more work emerge around this in the coming years, and I hope others take up that research. My project doesn’t deny the multilingual nature of Palestinian literature—it simply focuses on Arabic because that’s where the core of the historical production is, and because it remains a massive field requiring further excavation.

WH: What is the importance of this type of documentation amid the genocidal destruction of all things Palestinian—communities, history, heritage, places, and more?

RA: This project was actually completed before the current genocide began—it just happened to be published a few days after October 7. At first, I couldn’t make sense of that timing. But slowly, everything started to click into place. The patterns I had traced over nearly a century of literary history—the erasures, the silences, the censorship, the imprisonments, the massacres—they all pointed toward what we’re witnessing now. This eruption of violence didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s a culmination.

Through the project, it became clear to me that there have been two forms of genocide at play: a slow, grinding genocide that has unfolded over decades, and a fast, spectacular one we are now witnessing. But both follow the same logic: erasure of Palestinian presence on the land, culture, memory, and people.

I didn’t expect to find what I found. When you write literary history, you don’t usually think you’ll be documenting prisons, massacres, and mass censorship. But these elements kept appearing in the sources—so often and so forcefully that I couldn’t ignore them. So I began highlighting them as themes in the project. These include imprisonment, censorship, and massacres—tools of suppression that have shaped the conditions of Palestinian literary production for over a century.

The sheer number of writers who were imprisoned, exiled, banned, or silenced is staggering—and unprecedented. These weren’t isolated incidents. They formed a pattern, and this pattern maps directly onto the political project of erasing Palestinian identity and culture.

And yet, even in times of catastrophe, people wrote. One example I highlight is a magazine published in East Jerusalem after 1948, where the editor, Amin Shunnar, proposed a new literary genre: “Adab al-Nakba”—the literature of catastrophe, or the literature of the Nakba. He believed Palestinians could contribute something unique to the Arab literary tradition by reflecting on how to write from the ruins—not just about destruction, but also about survival, hope, and the future.

This kind of resilience is threaded through the entire history of Palestinian literature. Despite the attempts to destroy and silence, people kept writing, thinking, and imagining. There are precedents to draw on. There is a legacy of resistance—creative, intellectual, cultural—that didn’t emerge out of nowhere in the present moment. It’s been built over generations. This project is one attempt to document and preserve that legacy—not only for memory, but also as a resource for the present and future.

WH: At a time when there is violent erasure and suppression of Palestinian voices, what can the history of Palestinian literature and literary figures teach us about the present moment?

RA: One of the central themes I traced in this project is censorship—not just of Palestinians, but of anyone speaking about Palestine. What surprised me was how early this began. For example, I found Arabic newspapers published in Santiago, Chile, as early as 1920 reporting on events in Palestine, like the Nabi Musa uprising. These papers received Palestinian newspapers from the homeland, but they arrived heavily censored—entire sections blacked out. And the editors in Chile understood this as a systematic attempt to silence Palestinian voices and to decimate their political and cultural leadership.

That was under British colonial rule. What’s striking is how seamlessly the Israeli state inherited these tools—prison, censorship, bans—and expanded them. Palestinians themselves understood this continuity. The poet Tawfiq Zayyad, for example, explicitly said that his struggle inside Israel after 1948 was a direct continuation of the struggle of poets like Ibrahim Touqan under British colonialism. The colonial conditions hadn’t changed—only the rulers had.

This suppression wasn’t limited to literary production. The writers I researched weren’t just writers—they were also teachers, journalists, organizers, activists. Their work spanned cultural and political spheres, and because of that, they were seen as threats. One powerful example is the Al-Ard movement, an anti-Zionist political group inside Israel after 1948. It was quickly banned, and when its members tried to publish a bulletin, they had to use a legal loophole from the British Mandate period that allowed for one-off publications without a license. They issued a series of underground bulletins, each under a different name, editor, and location—but always with “Al-Ard” in the title. It was a brilliant act of resistance using colonial legal mechanisms against the colonial state.

That example reminds me of what we see today with social media. Palestinian journalists and activists create multiple Instagram or Twitter accounts because once one gets taken down, they open another. This pattern of silencing and persistence goes all the way back to the early 20th century. Palestinians have had to fight media blackouts, censorship, and suppression for generations.

What this history teaches us is that Palestinians have always resisted erasure—and they’ve done so with incredible creativity and resilience. The erasure isn’t new, but neither is the resistance. What’s crucial now is to recover those histories—not just to honor them, but to learn from them. They remind us that we’re not starting from scratch. There is a long archive of creative defiance that can guide us through this moment.

WH: In your project to document this rich literature, what were the biggest challenges? And what were the biggest discoveries?

RA: The challenges were many—legal, logistical, emotional, conceptual. First, I had to accept that this project would never be comprehensive. Palestinian literary history is full of ruptures, silences, and missing pieces. I wasn’t dealing with a cohesive, well-preserved archive; I was working with fragments. That required a shift in mindset. I had to be okay with documenting what I could, knowing it would remain partial, interrupted, and unfinished.

There were also major logistical obstacles—accessing sources across geographies, finding rare materials, dealing with COVID travel restrictions. Much of the archive doesn’t exist in national libraries or formal institutions. It’s in people’s homes—private libraries, boxes in garages, basements, old community centers. You have to look in unexpected places.

As a literary scholar, I wasn’t trained in archival research or oral history. But I had to embrace those methods, because often there were no written records. Oral interviews became essential for filling the gaps—especially for capturing lived experiences and connecting dots that the written archive couldn’t provide.

Then there was the digital side. This was a team-based project, and it couldn’t have been done alone. We worked with researchers across the region—in Gaza, the West Bank, inside Israel, in Cairo, Beirut, Kuwait—and coordinated a small team in Berlin. Creating the project’s database  was hugely labor-intensive. There are no pre-existing datasets for Palestinian literature. Everything had to be manually collected, coded, and entered—biographical data, periodical metadata, geographic information, thematic connections.

And because the digital infrastructure is geared toward Latin-script, left-to-right languages, we faced constant hurdles with Arabic—OCR (optical character recognition) is still inaccurate, right-to-left formatting is often buggy, and nothing could be automatically generated. Every node and connection you see in the platform had to be mapped manually in Word docs and Excel sheets.

Conceptually, one of the most difficult questions was: how do I represent a fragmented, non-linear story in visual and textual form? Edward Said’s idea of “counterpoint” was key here—multiple narratives happening simultaneously, often in tension with each other. That’s why I created a timeline with overlapping geographies—showing events in the homeland and in the diaspora at the same time. Palestinian literature has never existed outside occupation. Whether in the homeland or abroad, it’s always responding to colonial pressure. Representing that contrapuntal history was a major challenge, but also one of the most meaningful parts of the work.

WH: What journey do you want the reader to take when navigating the site?

RA: This isn’t a conventional book. You don’t have to read it from beginning to end. The idea was to create multiple entry points so that readers—depending on their interests and background—could navigate the project in a non-linear, intuitive way.

The heart of the project is the timeline, which is also the landing page. It doesn’t follow a single narrative but offers seven overlapping historical periods, each with its own geographic and political context. As you scroll through the timeline, you can literally see the geographies shift—dots move across the map to reflect changing centers of literary production. The idea is to make the fragmentation and movement of Palestinian literature visible.

If you click into any period, you’ll find a narrative that includes highlighted elements. These highlights are color-coded: blue for literary figures, green for periodicals, and red for themes like censorship or exile. There are 94 highlighted figures, 35 periodicals, and 12 themes, all cross-referenced and pre-mapped to show how they connect.

From there, readers can jump to the network view—a meta-perspective that shows the relationships between periods, people, periodicals, and themes across different periods. This was especially helpful for me while writing. I’m a visual thinker, and I often needed to draw connections by hand just to make sense of the data. The network view automates that, allowing readers to hover over nodes, follow links, and see unexpected connections emerge.

There’s also a visualization gallery, which serves as a standalone knowledge source. These graphs and charts are embedded in each chapter but are also available on their own because they contain far more data than I could write about in the text. For instance, someone might discover that a writer based in Tunis was publishing in a periodical in Paris—things I couldn’t always explore in depth, but the data is there for others to pursue.

Finally, we have the audio interviews, which became a podcast. These are also standalone, and they add personal and historical depth to the project. Many of the voices you hear there reflect on periods, people, and publications that are documented in the text or visualizations, but from lived experience.

So, the journey is really up to the reader. You can enter through the timeline, the network, the visualizations, or the audio. You can follow a theme, a writer, a periodical—whatever interests you. The goal was to create an experience that is interactive, non-linear, and generative, where readers can follow their curiosity and find their own path through the story.

WH: What’s next for the project? How do you see it—or wish it—to live on?

RA: The current version of the project is static. That was one of the conditions of publishing with the digital arm of Stanford University Press. I can’t add to or update it, but the upside is that they’ve committed to maintaining the infrastructure over time—keeping the site online, updating it as needed, and ensuring its longevity. That was really important to me. I didn’t want to build something this labor-intensive only for it to disappear once the funding ran out.

That said, I see this project as a foundation for future work—my own and hopefully others’. It was also a way for me to document everything I wished I had time to explore in more depth. I plan to return to many of these threads, starting with the Mahjar period, which is incredibly rich but still under-researched. There are several figures, texts, and publications I want to dive into further. The data I gathered points to so many pathways—Palestine and the Maghreb, Palestine and Latin America, Palestine and Europe—each deserving much more detailed study.

This atlas is also a map for my future research—articles, books, maybe even new collaborations. And I hope it will be the same for others. I wrote the texts in accessible language, without academic jargon, and it’s all open access. That was intentional. I wanted to break through the academic paywalls and make this resource usable for people outside the university—students, educators, cultural workers, or anyone interested in Palestinian literary history.

I’m also developing teaching tools based on the platform. During the project, I didn’t have time to build them, but I’ve started working with collaborators to create digital teaching modules—courses that can be used in schools, universities, or workshops. I’d like to expand that work further, especially with cultural centers and museums, so people can engage with this material outside of academic settings.

Some colleagues are already using the platform in their teaching, which is great to hear. I want to do the same with my students. The idea is for this to be more than a static archive—it’s meant to be a living, generative space where people can learn, research, and pursue their own questions. I hope others will take it in directions I haven’t imagined yet.

The post A Country of Words: Mapping Memory, Resistance, and Exile in Palestinian Literary History appeared first on Untold.

I try not to imagine my nephews or nieces because thinking of them under a barrage of bombs could break me even more. That day I received a WhatsApp message from my niece. It said, “Is my grandmother fine?” She sent it and then seemed to lose her internet connection.  For the past two years, I have been doing everything I can to provide for my family in Gaza, hoping to give them a small sense of safety—like a bird sheltering its young in a nest.

I immediately knew something was serious. Why would my niece contact me and not my brother, who lives with my mother? I called her on her mobile and she said, ‘they say that my grandmother is very ill, and my mother has run to her.’ That day in Gaza, dozens were killed by Israeli drones and attacks. When I called my brother, he was crying. I knew that my mother died. I said to him, “God has chosen her. Be strong”. I hung up the phone and burst into cries. 

I did not know that my mother was killed by Israeli drones. I imagined my mother had died naturally, having suffered from a lack of medication and malnutrition. She had lost a lot of weight. I continued running towards home, but tears were streaming down my face.  My mother was gone. They had killed her. 

Countless Loss

This was not the first time I had experienced loss during the genocide in Gaza. The year before my mother was killed, on December 4, 2023, I opened my Facebook account to see a picture of my niece and mourning messages for her. She was planning to apply for her PhD. She was killed in Deir Al Balah while displaced from her home. I felt devastated at that moment. 

In summer 2024, I opened my eyes to dozens of messages and missed calls. I thought of the worst. But one message got my attention, “We are fine. Mother is fine”. It was from my brother. It happened that when I closed my eyes around 2am, Israel attacked a place where dozens of my family members live, killing 17 among them, and later, my aunt joined them. 

I returned to news channels, and social media reports, it only said my family name. If I was awake, it would have caused me tremendous panic, considering the inability to reach my brother. Reflecting on this, and after twenty months, it seemed that death was just a matter of time, and my family was waiting as if they were standing on the gates of a human slaughterhouse, run by Israel.   

How? Why? I lost more than 70 other members of my family in the recent twenty months, just in August and September 2025, I mourned one or two relatives every week. In between the first draft and the final one of this article, Israel killed two relatives. But this was not the first time I had lost loved ones to the Israeli occupation. I had experience of this at ages seven, 12, and 16.  

Grieving Home

In December 2023, I learned to grieve not just people but my home and my physical memories. I was sitting at my desk in Stockholm at work when the Israeli propaganda machine shared videos of their attacks on Gaza City, claiming they were annihilating Hamas. 

I had been advised to avoid constantly looking at my phone during the first few months. I still did – as I watched the video, my brain stopped working when I saw the Israeli army’s propaganda. There was an attack on the home where my family lived and where I grew up in the Shejaiya area. This place was filled with memories of my childhood. I ran in that street bare feet, I chased goats there, and there I sat with my father and walked along that street for years. 

In the video, soldiers were running, shooting, and attacking our home. It was a shocking moment. I continued working that day, but I was devastated and lost concentration. Since the start of the Gaza genocide, I occasionally see friends being mourned and family members being announced dead. Every time, it feels more devastating, and it only makes me fear loss more. 

Loss and trauma at the hands of Israel is part of being a Gazan. From the moment I took my first steps until my school years and then years later, I was a small, impressionable child caught in a society overwhelmed by soldiers, guns, pervasive fear, violence, and confusion. This reality was ingrained in me, as integral as my own skin, tightly woven into the very fabric of my existence and not easily shed even once I left Gaza and moved to another country. 

Each day as a child, the sight of military jeeps in Gaza became intertwined with my childhood fantasies. They were so entrenched in our lives that we began to name these intruding vehicles of occupation after animals, drawing inspiration from their strange shapes and distinctive sounds. There was for example the  cockroach for its noisy sound and its shape.

From a young age, I was familiar with not just violence, but death. I encountered it more closely than most. In 2000, an Israeli sniper shot a rubber bullet toward my head, and fortunately, it narrowly missed my right eye. If it had gone half a centimetre lower, I might have been dead or at least disabled, losing vision in one eye. 

My life could have been extremely different. Our relative was assassinated during the First Intifada, and I cried for him, for the first time mourning someone’s death. My classmates were killed in the Second Intifada. I walked behind and carried their coffins. Since I left Gaza in 2007, I stopped counting how many of my classmates and childhood friends had been killed. I counted more than fifteen, and I stopped. Each name I counted felt like a hammer dropping on my chest, pounding it. 

Scars of Trauma

Death suddenly became my friend. I thought I knew death, but not until the Gaza genocide started. I started to say that my life after 2007 is just a surplus, and an extra time was given to me. 

My life has helped me to understand the meaning of loss amid a genocide, and what it means to grieve. Grief is a response to a specific event, such as the loss of a beloved person, losing a place, a memory, turning one’s thoughts to that person, and reflecting on their life, or thinking about memories and lost places that hold psychological and mental connections. Part of grief is learning to adjust to the loss. 

For me, to adjust to my grief, it means that an emptiness arises, and this affects plans, activities, and even future vision. It can be a moment of refiguring one’s life and purpose. When we lose someone, we love and care about, we can lose the anchor that holds the family together. This is particularly the case when losing a father or mother. When we relate to a loved one, we create a bond, a memory, and an identity that surrounds them. 

I formed an identity around my father as the carer and provider of our family, and that’s why when he died, I had to take over his position sometimes to check on and care about my siblings, before and after the genocide. 

As the time passed, I thought about my niece, mother, aunt, relatives, friends, the city where I was born and grew up, and the memories we shared. I realised I couldn’t cry anymore. It felt like my entire world and my siblings were on the verge of dying, and my heart was frozen and crushed, yet I couldn’t find the power or time to weep. I just had to keep going with my life, because my first thoughts are that others are relying on me. 

Even before the genocide, I had tried to be strong, knowing that as someone who had lost so much, I couldn’t afford to be weak or surrender. But this time was different – one memory after another had been destroyed, and there were no tears to be found. My eyes were dry, and I’d never felt my tears so dry. 

When my mother passed away, I felt completely isolated. She was the one who would always check in on me, or so I thought. I wondered why I didn’t cry more for her, why I could hear my heart crying and my soul being crushed but I couldn’t seem to break down. Some might argue that it was because I grew up in a society that discouraged men from crying and encouraged women to weep. But I saw my father crying for his mother, and I saw many men, since I was a child, crying for their siblings and loved ones who were killed by Israel, just as I cried and wept alongside them as a child. Yet now, for my mother I couldn’t cry. 

Everyone I’ve lost carried the scars of the trauma Israel has inflicted on them and on all Gazans. My father died in 2019 and I was not able to bid him farewell after 13 years in exile. My mother was murdered in the Gaza genocide. They were in their seventies, but their absence was sudden and unexpected. Our separation was inhumane and painful.  

Beyond Stages

As Palestinians, we’ve known from a young age that life and death are not in our hands, but in the hands of the Israeli occupation. They can kill us, starve us, torture us, or let us live in inhumane conditions. We can do little to object. I remember my parents would say to us when we were in our forties, “There aren’t as many years left as many as we’ve already lived.” Or “When we’re gone, take care of your sisters.” The last words of my father when I left him in Gaza were “Make me proud, alive and dead.” Their words were tinged with the reality of living in Gaza where death is part of our life. 

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s book, Death and Dying, describes five stages of the grieving process: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. These stages are essentially a progression of people’s emotions and may apply to certain cultures or typical death situations. 

However, in my experience, and that of the Palestinian people, these stages merge and persist, overwhelming us every hour and minute. Even if they aren’t immediately apparent, they linger in the back of our minds and consciousness. For us, grief is a constant process of piecing together the shattered remnants of our lives and coping with the residual trauma. 

The grief we experience is compounded by multiple losses and griefs over time. It’s like being repeatedly cut by a shard of glass that shatters on our faces each morning, reminding us of the injustices, losses, and ongoing pain, as well as the unpredictability of what the next wave of grief might bring. Usually, grief in Western scholarly work focuses on specific processes and stages, which reflects how Western culture views grief and adapts the concept of the five stages. For Palestinians, it is more complex, and for Gazans, it is even more so, both individually and collectively. 

Other studies concerning loss suggest that depression tends to lessen over time, but for me, anxiety, depression, feelings of loss and unsafety remain the same or even increase over time. This is because the conditions are still present and getting worse. The Israeli killing and destruction machine, a genocidal state, is like a ghoul waiting to harm more and more. 

Dry Tears

When it comes to sleep, I barely slept more than five hours a day in the last twenty three months of the genocide. For some weeks and for many days, only three hours. However, when I began to sleep more, particularly after my mother was killed, as she was the one I felt I needed presence from, it reflected in my being, and I saw my mother in my dreams. I started seeing other dead people. I saw my father more often and many others whom the Israelis murdered. I would also dream of the war, of my childhood home back in Gaza. I would wake up and run to the internet to seek interpretations of my dreams. Usually, they are helpful, but sometimes they make me overthink and start calling my siblings in Gaza.

Such a dream would leave me reeling for two or three days, until a new one took over and I began to think about new challenges and what’s to come. These dreams make me take on even more responsibility – a social and religious one, where I feel like I must be a fitting legacy for my beloved, lost ones. And that grief would be on a different level altogether. 

For me, death has become a barrier to life, not the end of our connection. But this loss isn’t a normal one; it was caused by a coloniser and oppressor, which makes it even harder to accept that someone has shattered part of me.  

For Palestinians in general, and Gazans in particular, the uncertainty of life makes grief impossible and complicated. You need space and time to grieve. You need peace. In a genocide, just the thought of surviving day to day, and who might be lost is unbearable and takes up all your mental energy. 

In a genocide, strikes are sudden, as perpetrators hunt people down, killing them with joy. When I try to grieve, the uncertainty of keeping the rest of my family safe haunts me, and I put my grief on hold, keeping the shattered pieces inside, leaving scars that continue to wound. However, this uncertainty takes a significant toll on one’s mental state. Research shows that people who struggle with uncertainty are more likely to develop depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts. 

This explains why, with every attack on Gaza, I start tracking the attack and check in with my siblings who are nearby. I often glance at my phone, checking in every so often. Recent research showed that the Palestinians in Gaza who suffer from genocide suffer from fear of death, depression, and loss of life satisfaction. This illustrates why, during a meeting and a motivational moment at work when a colleague asked everyone who felt proud to stand, I did not feel proud. I wasn’t satisfied with my achievements, even after signing a contract for my childhood memoir. 

Art dealers started to offer to buy my work—though I never saw myself as an artist—and I felt I was doing something for the Palestinians, yet none of this made me feel proud. Nothing makes sense when I’ve lost my mother, home, and my loved ones are being destroyed. This ongoing trauma and suffering are relentless. 

Gaza Annihilation Traumatic Syndrome

The trauma experienced by Gazans should warrant a new term, ‘Gaza Annihilation Traumatic Syndrome’ (GATS), which would signify the destruction of individuals, memory, identity, and potentially their future. Persistent and complex grief can lead to mental disorders related to traumatic events. In 2018, the World Health Organization included a grief-specific mental disorder, known as prolonged grief disorder (6B42). This condition is characterized by intense longing, persistent preoccupation, and significant emotional distress—such as anxiety, denial, anger, feelings of having lost a part of oneself—and substantial impairment in daily functioning over time. 

Unfortunately, mental health concerns and this disorder may become widespread in Gaza, requiring targeted attention. Including 6B42 in GATS could add complexity and highlight the need for effective interventions to address mental health impacts in affected populations.

After my mother’s death, challenges began to make sense. I was strong enough and had more strength to stay focused, but then things changed. Staying focused while working without watching the news became difficult. My psychological therapy was ineffective, and I started waking up around midnight to do things I never thought I would do.  For example, I would wake up at three in the morning to paint or make coffee. I started to forget things, and my mind began to feel foggy inside. 

Sleeping pills helped, but I felt tired most of the day. Running helped me to regain some sanity, but I occasionally felt sleepy, and my face lost its usual smile. I felt as though I had suddenly aged by 20 years. My perception of faces and the world around me changed. 

My mother’s death occurred during the Gaza starvation, which made me look at food differently. I decided to eat only one meal a day as a gesture of solidarity and grief for my siblings in Gaza. I realised that I was unable to present a coherent face to the world, and my smile started to seem fake day after day. At times, I wanted to cry, but my eyes held back tears, while my heart continued to cry beneath my skin.  

As someone who started running as a coping mechanism for depression and PTSD long before the ongoing Gaza genocide began, running has become a dangerous habit. Once I start running, I lose track of time, and when I begin walking, I lose track of time. I end up in the same places repeatedly. Of course, it is a way to minimise anxiety, but the scariest part is when news becomes overwhelming, especially when I read that Israel wants to ethnically cleanse Gaza. 

I think of my father’s grave in Gaza, my mother before she was killed, and my siblings. It’s frightening to see how my city and loved ones can be erased, with no hope or help in sight. My name has been linked to Gaza; friends and colleagues in many places called me “the Gazan”. When I think of the city, my siblings, I feel like I am going crazy. I need to leave the office or set work aside and go wash my face or walk. The feeling of losing my mind thinking is indescribable.

According to Lisa Shulman, the brain acts as a filter, sensing the threshold of emotions and memories that we cannot handle. However, in a long process of genocide, daily killings, and constant fear and worry, the brain finds it difficult to function normally and work as a filter. Even if my brain may work generally, the trauma affects work performance. 

Humans cannot change that, according to Shulman, we are, as humans, at the mercy of the process by which the brain handles emotions and memories, with grief occupying a significant portion of the brain’s bandwidth. This is worse for Gazans as they experience complicated, prolonged  unending grief. 

Other studies have found that grief alters the brain size and its activities. A study found that individuals experiencing prolonged grief had a smaller left hippocampus, a brain region essential for memory formation. Researchers suggest that grief may indirectly reduce the size of this area due to increased stress. Changes in memory function have been observed following significant losses and during periods of heightened stress. Other research indicates that prolonged severe grief may permanently reduce an individual’s capacity to learn, use language, and manage thoughts. This is thought to occur because grief affects two areas of the brain: the amygdala, which determines significance and manages anxiety, and the paraventricular thalamic nucleus, which influences responses to long-term emotional memories.

I am terrified about the potential development of complicated, prolonged, severe grief, as I call it: GATS, both for myself and for members of the Gazan diaspora who have endured prolonged periods of mourning. Research indicates that individuals who have experienced the loss of loved ones due to violence are at greater risk for complicated grief. 

The symptoms overlap with depression, PTSD, and anxiety, and may also involve cognitive decline. Although individuals with complicated grief often appear to manage daily life, they typically alternate between intense mourning and fulfilling routine responsibilities. This has been my experience; I find myself compelled to continue with daily tasks while processing my grief. 

Moments of remembrance involving my parents sometimes occur unexpectedly during professional activities such as moderating sessions, writing emails, or attending meetings. This became more frequent following my mother’s killing, evolving from occasional recollections of my father to regular, sometimes hourly, experiences. Despite these challenges, I strive to manage feelings of despair and maintain resilience. I run, I smile, I paint, I write, and I cook. But behind all of this is a weight of mountains on my heart and shoulders.

While reading about grief, as a coping mechanism and experiencing it myself, I have found that grief is a complicated journey, and it can take a long time. According to a study, grief can last up to fifteen years if not forever. One of the symptoms that persists for a long time is lower satisfaction with life.  

One day, I may come to accept the fact of loss as shattered, sharp glass that hits me every day but that reminds me that I’m alive and breathing and how lucky I am to carry the legacy of those I’ve lost. 

For Palestinians, grief is one-of-a-kind, and nothing resembles it. It should be respected and acknowledged as such. 

The post A Chronicle of Loss and Unending Grief: Gaza’s Genocide and the Weight of Inherited Grief appeared first on Untold.

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.

It is fitting then that Peter Wollen’s Friendship’s Death (1987), the one film that Swinton chose from her extensive filmography to be shown at Berlinale this year – a film centered on the very idea of boycott’s political efficacy and its ethical, humanistic urgency – was screened in the film program of On Strike Berlin, an alternative programme running parallel to Berlinale in various venues across the city. 

Indeed,the program was organized collectively by On Strike: screenings & talks striking Berlinale to answer a call by Strike Germany and Film Workers for Palestine to boycott this year’s Berlin Film Festival. On Strike cites numerous reasons on its website for joining the boycott. Among them the German state’s foreign policies pertaining to Israel’s assault on Gaza, German politicians’ backlash against expressions of solidarity with Palestine, and the events that took place at the 2024 Berlinale, including the recriminations in Germany against the Israeli documentary filmmaker Yuval Abraham and the Palestinian filmmaker and activist Basel Adra, the co-creators (alongside Hamdan Ballal and Rachel Szor) of the searing documentary No Other Land (2023), documenting the displacement and destruction of Palestinian homes by the Israeli army in Masafer Yatta, in the occupied West Bank. 

The film won Berlinale’s Best Documentary award and subsequently the Best Documentary award from the American Film Academy at the Oscars, yet faces censorship and reprisals as it screens globally. 

To counter this climate of silencing voices speaking against the decimation of the Gazan population, the illegality of forced displacements, and against Israel’s assaults, as well as to create a richer climate of discussion about the ongoing occupation of Palestine, the screening of Friendship’s Death featured special guests: British film scholar Nicolas Helm-Grovas (presently writing a book titled Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen: Towards Counter-Cinema) and Palestinian editor and educator Hazem Jamjoum, moderated by filmmaker Philip Rizk, to contextualize the film’s socio-political and historical context, and its present relevance.

The emergence of a political consciousness

Wollen’s Friendship’s Death tells the story of an extraterrestrial android called Friendship, sent to Earth on a peace mission. Friendship originally is meant to address the United Nations in New York, hoping to persuade humans to abandon their bellicose ways and their annihilation of all life forms. Much of Friendship’s journey to Earth is enclosed within the larger philosophical consideration of her quest for autonomy: A sophisticated robot – a futuristic AI – uploaded with advanced data and facts about Earth by her extraterrestrial creators, she nevertheless originally lacks the sense of  self-determination. Not cognizant of having a choice to decide her own fate, she will only come to it slowly. 

This aspect of self-determination and autonomy, mingled with Friendship’s undying fascination with and compassion for humanity, serves as the basis for Wollen’s launch into historical and political debates running throughout the film. In this sense, Wollen’s film is particularly urgent today, because its underlying theme is the emergence of a political consciousness, and the contrast between passivity and commitment, with Friendship’s android mind serving as a cognitive tabula rasa, in which this consciousness emerges.

The film’s historical backdrop is “Black September” of 1970; the action takes place in a hotel in Amman, Jordan, where Friendship lands, after her spaceship crashes mid-flight. Friendship loses her documents, suddenly becoming a non-entity: As an android, she’s trapped in the human shell, essentially undocumented, and stateless – a fact that immediately aligns her with all the Earth’s political outcasts, as all people denied their dignity, and their civic and political rights. This position gradually pushes Friendship from her original impartiality and wish to complete her mission to her alignment with the oppressed and the dispossessed; a stance that leads her to abandon her diplomatic mission and join the Palestinian cause.

Questions of solidarity 

Friendship has only one close contact at the hotel: Sullivan, a British journalist who is covering the Middle East conflict, and is sympathetic to the Palestinian struggle. Friendship and Sullivan are stranded at the hotel, in the midst of Jordan’s civil war. This aspect of the film, in particular, gained much from the Q & A discussion, during which speakers framed it within international solidarity and the 1960s’ revolutionary movements. 

Solidarity is indeed a motif running through the entire film. There are the limits of Sullivan’s solidarity, in the sense that his job is to report on the conflict, yet he doesn’t see the possibility of an immediate positive outcome, and, by the end of his stay sounds defeatist (Wollen’s critique of Sullivan aligns with the criticism that Adra makes in No Other Land of journalists expecting immediate resolution to a conflict spanning decades). 

There is the clear theme of Friendship’s solidarity with humanity – her concern about its self-destructiveness, which makes her empathize with both the Palestinian and Israeli victims; an empathy which doesn’t preclude her recognizing that her peacemaking mission is bound to fail; she is more likely to be captured, and used by the US industrial complex to manufacture weapons of destruction, than she is to convince militaristic societies to abandon their quest for power. In this sense, while Friendship’s boycott of her mission is undershot by pessimism similar to Sullivan’s, it is uniquely linked to her acknowledging that she isn’t an innocent bystander; as a robot, she is part of the techno-military complex that perpetuates wars. Wollen clearly also means to say that we are all implicated in the foreign policies and territorial grabs of our governments.

The equally pertinent question of solidarity on which Wollen touches, explained in detail by Hazem Jamjoum during the film’s Q & A, lies with the Middle East: Friendship’s Death records a critical moment in Middle East history, when, after Jordan hosted Palestinians in the wake of the Arab defeat in the 1967 Six-Day War against Israel, the idea of Pan-Arab solidarity that had mobilized the region in the early ‘60s, giving rise to the idea that the Arab countries would liberate Palestine, comes to an end, as Jordan attacks Palestinian resistance fighters: “A crushing moment for the notion of the Arab revolution.” 

Jamjoum also stressed in the Q & A that the student movements aligned with Palestinians, some formed into militant factions, were anti-authoritarian and anti-monarchist, which put them at odds with regressive Arab regimes. One might add that, in Europe, solidarity with Palestine was inscribed in an anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist, anticapitalist ideal, which also died in the 1970s.

Friendship’s answer to this collapse of solidarity is manifold. When questioned about her position on the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacking planes, she commiserates with both the fear and suffering of the kidnapped, and the anger and desperation of the hijackers. 

In a crucial conversation with Sullivan, Friendship relates how she ventured outside the hotel, to Jerash, a city in the North of Jordan, and was picked up and interrogated by the Jordanian Army Patrol, alongside her PLO escort. Friendship repeatedly confides her helplessness trying to ensure her escort’s safety; she fails as they are separated – a traumatic episode, which, not incidentally, coincides with Friendship identifying the hotel in Amman as “home” for the first time. 

Similarly, in No Other Land, Abraham tries to safeguard Adra and others as the Israeli army bulldozes Palestinian homes, yet Adra’s cousin dies of a bullet wound after being shot by an Israeli soldier. Like Abraham’s, Friendship’s political consciousness evolves out of a profound sense of helplessness, and a growing awareness that the efficacy of her civilian actions is limited. 

Can cinema forge a vision of solidarity, dignity and justice?

Both Sullivan and Friendship face choices with political implications: Sullivan returns to England; Friendship stays in Amman. Wollen shows her wearing a militant uniform, and in the voiceover, she is heard reading a note, hidden in her pocket, to her future killer. The film ends with Sullivan reminiscing about Friendship years later, in London, trying to watch a film she left behind, finally decoded with a more advanced technology. Yet Friendship’s file is an abstract puzzle of signs, in a way suggesting that humans still lack the wisdom to receive her message. 

Lacking a coda, what remains of Friendship’s legacy is her choice to bear witness and her sacrifice – Wollen gives Friendship the most searing lines in the film, in which she expresses her desire for her existence to have meaning, looping back to the film’s ethical resonance. Friendship chooses to resist, but it is Sullivan who tells her tale, and his daughter who decodes Friendship’s film. In the end, Wollen’s film expresses a hope that cinema can forge a vision of solidarity, dignity and justice; or, to quote Swinton’s Berlinale speech, to be a vehicle for inclusion, making us consider “what sovereignty means to humans” – one of the most pressing questions of our time.

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Syrians had barely emerged from the “intoxication” of their global celebrations over the fall of a regime that had displaced them to various countries. On the morning of 9 December, they were abruptly confronted with a startling decision: several European countries, including Germany, announced they would halt the processing of Syrian asylum applications. This development placed an uncomfortable and premature question squarely on the table: What does this mean for me? Will I have to return?

German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser acknowledged the uncertainty surrounding the evolving situation in Syria, stating that it would be unwise to speculate about the possibility of Syrians returning under such volatile circumstances. However, she defended the decision to suspend consideration of approximately 47 Syrian asylum applications, arguing that it was the correct course of action until the situation becomes clearer (previous asylum decisions would remain unaffected).

Instead of sharing in their Syrian compatriots’ joy, politicians from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party and the Christian Democratic Union (CDU)—a leading contender to head the next government in the upcoming elections this February—have rushed to capitalize on the moment by envisioning mass deportations of hundreds of thousands of Syrians. Former Health Minister Jens Spahn proposed chartering planes to send Syrians back to their homeland, even suggesting a €1,000 incentive for those willing to leave voluntarily. In a follow-up proposal, Spahn recommended that Germany, Austria, Turkey, and Jordan convene a conference on return and reconstruction by next spring. Meanwhile, Jürgen Hardt, the CDU’s foreign policy spokesperson, urged Chancellor Olaf Scholz to quickly engage Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for cooperation on this matter. Andrea Lindholz, deputy chair of the Union bloc, called for an immediate cessation of Syrian admissions altogether.

The German Green Party politician of Syrian origin, Lamia Kadour, condemned these “extremely shameful” proposals, questioning how they align with the “Christian values” that Christian Union politicians often invoke. She argued that, for these politicians, the issue is not about people or their plight but rather an election campaign tactic. Kadour emphasized that “the situation in Syria is still very unstable and unsafe,” adding that more time is needed before serious discussions about returning Syrians can take place.

Leila Al-Zubaidi from the German Heinrich Böll Foundation criticized these calls as disrespectful, pointing out that “Syrians all over the world are still afraid for their missing loved ones, and efforts to rescue survivors on the ground are ongoing without any external assistance.” Hiba Zayadin, a Syria investigator at Human Rights Watch, described the decisions by France, Germany, and Austria to halt temporary protection for Syrians as premature and irresponsible. “Syria is still in a fragile transitional phase, and the future of governance, safety, and stability are far from guaranteed,” she noted. Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock urged caution against rushing to conclusions. She argued that those exploiting the current situation in Syria for partisan purposes have lost touch with the complexities of Middle Eastern realities, which remain subject to change.

The number of Syrians residing in Germany is estimated at around one million people, of whom approximately 5,000 have been granted political asylum, around 321,000 have been granted refugee status, and around 330,000 have been granted so-called temporary subsidiary protection. Syrians were the largest group among asylum seekers this year, numbering around 72,000. Those who have obtained German citizenship remain a minority, totaling around 175,000 since 2010.

The scenes of queues of cars returning Syrians from neighboring countries to Syria seem to make Western politicians salivate. They appear not to take into account that this return is not solely driven by passionate feelings, rightly so, about returning to their homeland. Instead, it is also influenced by the disastrous living conditions Syrians face abroad. Living under a roof and four walls, without fear of destruction by missiles, is considered acceptable compared to a tent that offers no protection from the cold or heat. Furthermore, blatant racism, which has sometimes escalated into frightening persecution campaigns in Turkey and Lebanon, pushes many Syrians to prefer returning to a homeland with dire economic conditions. 

Anyone familiar with the decision-making process for granting asylum or extending the residency status of hundreds of thousands of Syrians—decisions that will necessarily hinge on a new assessment by the German Foreign Ministry of the security situation in Syria—understands that this will involve a long waiting period.

Anyone familiar with the decision-making process for granting asylum or extending the residency status of hundreds of thousands of Syrians—decisions that will necessarily hinge on a new assessment by the German Foreign Ministry of the security situation in Syria—understands that this will involve a long waiting period. The German Foreign Ministry cannot base its assessment on the events of a single week in a country where the future behavior of the next government and its treatment of religious and ethnic minorities remain uncertain. This is especially true amid early expectations in Germany of a potential wave of migration from Syria’s coastal regions.

A spokesman for the German Interior Ministry stated that revoking the protection granted to Syrians would only be possible if the situation in their homeland improves “permanently,” clarifying that short-term changes would not suffice. “We must be able to rely on these changes being permanent,” he explained.

However, no matter how much this discussion is postponed, more than a million Syrians in Western Europe, particularly in Germany, will eventually face a new reality in which politicians strip them of the freedom to decide whether to stay in Germany or return. In the years following the revolution, the fallen Assad regime forced them to flee the country and press the “restart” button on their lives, which meant changing their professions and spending years trying to adapt to a country whose language and lifestyle they did not know. The question now postponed is: Is there room for another “restart” at this stage—starting over and attempting to adapt to Syria, a country they haven’t set foot in for more than a decade? How will their children cope with the removal of the German state from their lives and their relocation to a country they only know through pictures and their parents’ stories? And, if this German government insists on such a move, should it negotiate with Turkey regarding the Syrians?

However, no matter how much this discussion is postponed, more than a million Syrians in Western Europe, particularly in Germany, will eventually face a new reality in which politicians strip them of the freedom to decide whether to stay in Germany or return.

If the Syrians have truly brought down the regime, they must feel the consequences of this in their lives; otherwise, the scenes of toppling the statues of the Assad father and son will lose their significance. If the Syrians have really overthrown the regime, they must experience, perhaps for the first time, that their government prioritizes their interests over pleasing donor countries.

The “former” opposition must be bold enough to take the initiative, step out from under the shadow of supporting countries, and, from this moment on, ensure that any return of Syrians is decent and safe. They should start by directing the Syrian Foreign Ministry and the embassies that are still operating as usual to support Syrians rightfully.

Syrians have the right to expect that the former Foreign Minister, Ghassan Sabbagh, who is still in office and was, until a few weeks ago, trying to save Assad’s position, will first direct the ambassadors to issue Syrians passports free of charge for at least a year, as compensation for the astronomical sums of money they were robbed of by his former president, Bashar al-Assad.

Syrians have the right to expect that this interim authority, until the transfer of power, will work to communicate with European governments and European Union institutions, providing an updated picture of the situation on the ground: the destroyed homes that are simply uninhabitable, the need to establish a fund that offers reasonable grants to support reintegration into life in Syria, exceeding the ridiculous amounts that German politician Spahn is offering to Syrians. This fund should be part of several funds that any future government should establish, such as a fund to compensate detainees and displaced persons.

If the Syrian state is truly a state, it must compensate its citizens for the crimes of one of its former dictators. The German state compensates prisoners for every day they spent unjustly behind bars if they are proven innocent.

The “former” opposition must be bold enough to take the initiative, step out from under the shadow of supporting countries, and, from this moment on, ensure that any return of Syrians is decent and safe. They should start by directing the Syrian Foreign Ministry and the embassies that are still operating as usual to support Syrians rightfully.

What Syrians in Germany and the rest of Western Europe will also need is greater activity from civil society organizations and human rights activists, offering a different, clearer vision of Syria than the one presented by the country’s populist politicians in the media. There is also a need for activists to engage with European politicians on this matter, an effort that should be supported by any future interim Syrian government.

It was striking that former Green Party politician Tariq Al-Aous, who works for the refugee rights organization Pro Asyl, appeared on Germany’s second channel, expressing his shock, like many Syrians, at the fall of the regime. He also explained that a worrying future is emerging, with a religious leader, formerly linked to Al-Qaeda, now dominating the scene, and voiced his recent lack of confidence in his open and measured speech. Can one trust him in the long term? Can a broad spectrum of people living an open life in Europe imagine themselves living in a religiously strict country? Al-Aous also explained in a radio interview with the public broadcaster NDR that, in this German political debate about the urgent return of Syrians, there is a risk of exposing the Syrian community in Germany—who has already suffered from the security services—to new trauma, as they fear sudden deportation.

“It is ridiculous to ask people who have probably worked hard to build a home for themselves in Germany to simply disappear. Politicians who demand such a thing should go through the same situation themselves. Then they might just stay silent forever,” SPIEGEL says in its daily email.

Because we know that German politicians will never imagine themselves in the place of Syrians, we need a future Syrian government that is truly supportive of its citizens, and efforts by Syrians in Germany like Tarek to make the decision to return or stay as safe and dignified as possible.

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