Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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

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""Dissident Syria" is an important and urgent book. In her fascinating account of Syrian cultural productions during the 1990s, miriam cooke documents the abyss between Syrian lived experiences and the rhetoric of the state. She extols the creative minds whose works exemplify the power of art."--Susan Slyomovics, author of "The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco"

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Dissident Syria

Duke University Press

Contents

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

Chapter One

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

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

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

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

As If ...

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

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

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

State sloganeering and the public response to it in pre-1989 Eastern Europe illuminates the situation in mid-1990s Syria: arbitrary abuse of power; the repression of culture dubbed its development; and proscribed speech and writing translated into the highest form of freedom. Havel's offhand "military occupation becomes fraternal assistance" described Syria's 1976 military occupation of Lebanon during its civil war, an...