Yesterday I wrote a short poem about a shell that I implored to lose its way. There was nothing left for me to do, after the big picture transformed itself into a living hell … I decided I might have more success speaking to small things and little details if I wanted to hang onto some form of survival in this hell …
Intimate dialogues with shells … learning the most appropriate way to die … welcoming loss. All these have become daily, automatic rituals. I practise them in a taxi while we wait to cross the checkpoints. Here, in my temporary residence, I learn how to exploit time anew. It’s hard for me now to listen to the details the drivers loudly repeat about what they’ve witnessed in different parts of Damascus and her outskirts, and about the neighbourhoods they can still get to. During the long wait, a pyramid rises in my mind, the details multiplying at its base and its levels growing taller while its tip jams itself into the top of my skull. As the details proliferate, the pain sharpens across my brain.
A little while ago in the Damascus neighbourhood of Zuhur, children were drifting off to sleep, believing there was a truce for the holiday. But they did not return to Earth, and their souls drifted higher and higher, never coming to rest. A curse on anyone who celebrates today …
And what if you weep alone at the end of the night … will the children find their way home in the morning, laughing, abundant as the rain?
They were in front of the Immigration Office: two women, one young, one old. They were wearing black and looked as though they’d stepped out of a painting by Louay Kayyali. There, in the space between his canvases, there’s no light except for the shadow of a candle, burning and pouring out onto those two faces.
They’re weeping. We try to understand their story, but our caution and embarrassment, and probably the situation itself, made us – my partner Zoya and me – hesitate. The young woman said to her companion: ‘I didn’t do anything deserving thanks’, but the older woman insisted on her gratitude … and on prayer … and on tears.
Two days ago we were standing where the long line of Syrians trying to leave the country waited … Nothing happened, except that we saw a nation where the sun had burned out. Over time, no light remained for its residents except the spark of their eyes, which were fading … like tears …
This may be a new definition for terror: the hollowing-out of the mind, positioned somewhere between the familiarity of the everyday and the imagination. It’s the space where details are pulverised, never to be realised or known, along the scarred edges of the imagination, where we see nothing but human wolves … like the first step on a long ladder … and on every step the creatures and stories grow more savage.
Here and now in Damascus, in spite of everything, there are white clouds laced with black; a light, cool breeze; the sounds of the call to prayer piercing the noise of construction on a nearby building.
Ordinary details: I let them soak into me. The pain in my head remains, waiting for the sound of the next explosion.
I’ll write a poem about time.
I dozed off at four in the morning and awoke at ten. Did my subconscious count the number of explosions and shells? All I know is that time passed. Probably what I don’t know will accumulate and take root in the soil of my subconscious, where no sun moves through its cycle of rising and setting, and no wind greets the passing of the hours. I think the explosions and shells will sprout into moss and fungus.
Every morning I trace the marks of time on the faces of my friends. I don’t look for anything natural; after two years, it’s become pointless to speak of time’s natural course here.
We all took an enormous capsule of time, but we forgot to take it with water, so it’s stuck in our throats. And now each of us is trying to swallow, in his own way!
On the face of every friend is a mark – or marks – caused by Syrian time. Do I write about everyone I know?
It’s enough for me that I’ve been told, after less than a year: ‘Ali! You aged ten years overnight!’ And now, after two years, I have reached the age of sixty without attaining my fair share of wisdom. No – I’m probably even crazier than I was before.
The faces of my friends bring me to tears!
At first I want them to be beautiful and resistant to time, but then I leave that idea alone. Instead, I try to rearrange time according to the ceaseless passage of details. Nearby, I hear the sounds of clashes. A little closer, there’s an explosion. Over our heads, the shells are coming …
I’ll write a poem about time, if any remains.
The many faces of Damascus. A man smiling at me even though his face is tired, on the verge of tears. A child sells me a cheap piece of chocolate, his face dreaming of new days … faces, faces, some of them tinged with pain, others smeared with hope.
This Damascus of so many faces can close her eyes for a little while. She’s worn out and haggard – but she’s not yet dead …
The faces of Damascus are just like her …
Soon, we Syrians will be free. We will be free of our faces and our souls – or our faces and our souls will be free of us. And the happy world won’t have to listen to our clamour anymore, we who have ruined the peace of this little patch of Earth and angered a sea of joy. Soon, mankind, you will have your quiet once more, and we promise we won’t disturb you again … for a pathway to the sky has opened for us, and look! We’re getting ready.
Those craters at the very centre of the heart – do you know them? They won’t stay put, but they move to the very top of the head and force desire to weep out into the open!
This happens to me when I read what Syrians write about their tragedies and their lost loved ones.
I don’t think any nation in existence will match Syrians in their expressions of sadness, their airing of grief.
On all my travels – not that there were so many of them – I’d take a book to help me while away the unpleasantness of the journey. Usually, I’d leave the book in the country I visited, with a friend or with someone I’d met there. And when my friends took a trip, I’d give them a book of a type I’ve decided to call ‘Books of the Road’. There’s one exception: twenty years ago I gave one friend a small purse to safeguard the little money he had on the streets of Europe.
I gave up this ritual in March 2011. I think that if I’d kept going with it, I probably would have gutted the soul of my library by now. But my problem now isn’t the books that we give to the people who leave us, hoping they’ll return, but the books that go with the people who can never return …
I’d say ‘Books of the Dead’, but I don’t mean that in the Pharaonic sense …
Every person who leaves us is a book, a book in himself. And it won’t be long before we return … as we once were, a nation without books.
Time will pass. Maybe it would help us to document things by striking a giant copper bell. In Beijing they beat the drums once before the Tiananmen Square massacre, and after it the streets were silent.
The drums of iron and gunpowder will not be silent tonight. My heart beats and I reread The Seagull by Chekhov. But I don’t think of a suicide like Treplev’s!
My heart is a black lump of coal.
A soldier blackens his body after bidding farewell to his family and loved ones with a sigh of fear …
What the eye of the sniper’s target sees after closing involuntarily …
My heart is a full stop on a page. In it, the students of life will write letters of hope.
After two days of darkness and rain, a little god awakens and begins to share his wisdom with me. I am a creature trapped by my pain. I tried in his absence to cry and to scream, and now he returns to me smiling, like the hearts of the people who went out this morning to carry out their daily routines under the rays of the shy sun.
The people on our streets … each is a god walking on his own two feet … not floating on a magic carpet of incense and prayer …
Lost birds spent the night on the edge of the balcony, but when the long, leaden morning broke, they remembered their way and departed.
It used to be that there were three hundred names for the sword in the Arabic language …
But now, in the language of Syrians, there are a thousand and one names for death.
I no longer count the pictures of martyrs … but I will see each of their faces when I pass over into their world. They will file before me, a record of life in a nation that once resembled a paradise but has turned into a hell.
Between two darknesses, communication has no meaning except to convey the news of those who have departed …
Damn this life …
I’m finished … ‘I’ve got nothing left to say …’
Today there’s a soccer match between the residents of different areas and neighbourhoods: their goalposts are the shells raining down on them.
Today a child came back from the camp bringing presents for us: shrapnel from a shell that visited their house while they were away. The biggest piece of shrapnel was pulled from a computer screen he sat in front of every day, playing war games against imaginary enemies.
O shell, we thank you for hitting your mark.
While you sit with your friend somewhere, a massacre takes place on the other side of the city. You leave with your friend to investigate the situation. The news comes in: ‘Thank God everyone is safe.’ You get home, while somewhere else in this country more massacres occur.
One day, someone will ask me, what did you do on that day? I’ll answer him, naturally: I lived at the margins of the massacre.
He didn’t die of a heart attack or cancer: he was killed by stabs of sorrow.
We enter the phase of shuddering walls and shaking glass. This requires that we increase our doses of sweat by a glass or two.
Our days: a black box, never to be opened …
Even writing has turned into a blind shell …
A letter to a killer: before you perform your task, remember …
To my friend Rimbaud, you old tramp: how could you expect me to trust your book, A Season in Hell, you fool!!
We will forgive Hamlet his hesitation, and we’ll pardon Faust. And before that, we’ll help Imru’ al-Qays and search for the rest of al-Mutanabbi1 so that we can bury him as befits him. And we’ll spend the rest of our days archiving the wishes of the departed – but only if the country lends us enough time, before we meet an ignorant killer or a crazed criminal on some darkened road.
My country, please wait a little longer. We were only born a short time ago, and after a short time we will leave …
And the women of the fields and the mountains and the cities and the villages are still waiting for us …
Mothers and beloved ones …
Translated from the Arabic by Anne-Marie McManus
1 Imru’ al-Qays is regarded as the father of Arabic poetry. Born in the sixth century in northern Arabia, the son of a local pre-Islamic king, he is credited with inventing the qasida metre as exemplified by his classic poem, ‘Let Us Stop and Weep’. Al-Mutanabbi lived in tenth-century Abbasid Iraq, and won fame and notoriety for his witty, frank and often philosophical verse. Considered the equal of al-Qays in the early Islamic period, he was killed by a powerful fief who felt he had been insulted in one of al-Mutanabbi’s poems.