DEFYING THE KILLERS: THE EMERGENCE OF STREET CULTURE IN SYRIA

Malu Halasa

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Taken on their own, graffiti, low-resolution pixelated camerawork and Arabic slang may not appear to be socially transformative. However, together their impact has had profound implications in Syria, where the cultural revolution that accompanied a broader political uprising is perhaps the only positive development in over four years of brutal conflict.

Syrian activists were not operating in a vacuum. For many young Syrians, developments in Egypt and Tunisia were a call to artistic action. In the early months of 2011, a calligrapher in the countryside outside Hama and a fine arts student in Damascus were designing posters and uploading them on the internet for Egyptian and Tunisian activists to carry in their demonstrations. Soon bloody events closer to home prompted Syrians to initiate similar activities for their country. Through the internet, with Syrians inside and outside the country, an anonymous poster collective, known as Alshaab alsori aref tarekh (‘The Syrian People Know Their Way’) created posters that demonstrators downloaded from Flickr and other social media sites and carried during the first year of the Syrian marches.¹

Graffiti was another form of street art that crossed borders quickly.² To a large extent, Syrians were influenced by the plethora of overtly political images and statements that appeared in the squares of Tunis and Cairo after January 2011. Egypt’s street artist El Teneen would repay the compliment several months later with a stencil showing Bashar al-Assad’s head sporting Hitler’s distinct hairline and moustache that spread across social networks.

In Syria, graffiti launched the uprising. It was not the face of a political figure but a slogan popularised in the heat of nearby revolutions. ‘Al-shaab yurid isqat al-nizam’ (‘The People Want to Bring Down the Regime’) was spray-painted by fifteen schoolboys on a wall in the town of Deraa on 6 March 2011. Until this point, Syrians had not yet demanded the overthrow of the Assad family’s forty-year-long dictatorship, only the easing of the Emergency Law and the granting of greater political freedoms. However, the arrest and subsequent torture of the schoolboys, followed by the shooting of unarmed demonstrators on the streets of Deraa, acted as a catalyst for further mass demonstrations. These quickly spread to Homs, Hama, Baniyas and Damascus, and paved the way for a social and artistic activism never before seen in the country. As the artist, cinematographer and writer Khalil Younes described it, it was ‘the revolution within the revolution’.

By that summer, as attacks and massacres by the shabiha regime-controlled thugs continued unabated, Damascus became a canvas for engaged art interventions. In particular people discovered that the most powerful weapon against a totalitarian dictatorship is ridicule. Activists turned the water in public fountains red. Hundreds of ping-pong balls carrying messages of freedom and dignity were released on Mount Qasiun, some of which rolled on to the grounds of Bashar al-Assad’s palace.

Near official buildings or heavily patrolled public squares, loudspeakers hidden on rooftops, in trashcans or treetops blared out the sounds of protest marches, which sent the Syrian mukhabarat, or secret police, scurrying. As one unnamed artist-activist explained, ‘Because we don’t have weapons, this kind of uprising is more intensive than an armed struggle. We want to affect the security forces, make them nervous, but we also want to suggest something smart, interactive and jokey.’

The spontaneous mass demonstrations that took place in the cities in the country’s north were ‘carnivalesque’ in the Bakhtinian sense of challenging authority and allowing transgressive ideas to flourish. In the city of Hama, the site of a brutal massacre by Hafez al-Assad (Bashar’s father) in 1982, the crowd of thousands singing along to fireman and local singer Qashoush’s wittily chanted verses from ‘Yalla irhal ya Bashar!’ (‘Come on, Bashar, get out!’) was cathartic. In Homs, when the regime checkpoints prevented people from entering the main clock tower square to demonstrate, they constructed their own miniature clock towers and processed around those.

Kafranbel, a previously unheard-of hamlet, emerged as a new centre for Syrian sardonic humour. Anonymous local illustrators and town wits garnered international acclaim for hand-drawn editorial cartoons and immaculately lettered protest banners authored as ‘Occupied Kafranbel’ or, by 2013, ‘Syrian Revolution – Kafranbel’. To this day, photos of these images held up by the town’s young men signal collective responsibility for the sentiments expressed.

In another setting, activists from the Kartoneh collective who remained in war-destroyed Deir ez-Zor used the familiar and neutral iconography of traffic symbols, tinged with mordant humour. For example, two cars side by side in a red circle told residents ‘No overtaking’ the goal of ‘Citizenship, Justice and Equality’ for all; or a road narrowing ahead sign, which warned that there are only two choices – either opposition or pro-regime. The activists’ aim was to create a non-sectarian signage that would galvanise people of varying religious and ethnic backgrounds remaining in the city. According to a collective member, they may have had 7,000 followers on Facebook, yet more than 390,000 people have shared or seen their posters.

Artistic activity by ordinary people came about, so said the country’s best-known editorial cartoonist, Ali Ferzat, because the barrier of fear erected and enforced by the dictatorship, had been broken. For decades, Ferzat published heavily metaphorical editorial cartoons critical of the state in the government-operated newspaper Al-Thawra (‘The Revolution’).³ In 2011, after he shifted from symbolic drawings to produce more explicitly targeted caricatures of Assad, Ferzat was attacked by outraged regime supporters and fled to Kuwait.

Cartoons and comic strips had featured regularly in official Baath Party children’s magazines for decades. However, for a new generation of Syrian illustrators, graphic designers and animators – some with backgrounds in fine art, advertising or film storyboarding – it was not the country’s official cartooning culture or Ferzat’s coded messages that inspired them. They found modern subversive narratives by reading Japanese Manga online in English translation.

Like the political posters of The Syrian People Know Their Way collective, Comic4Syria strips were uploaded on the group’s Facebook page for domestic and international consumption. They too documented the main events, themes and aspirations of the uprising. But the comic strips served an internal and sometimes critical purpose alongside their obvious storytelling. When the opposition Free Syrian Army was accused of torturing its prisoners, Comic4Syria produced leaflets distributed by activists which drew on the humane treatment of prisoners called for in the Qur’an.

Sumud (Steadfastness) by Comic4Syria, 2012, appears courtesy of the anonymous comic strip collective

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Alongside the anonymous young, Syria’s best-known painter, Youssef Abdelke, created the Facebook page Art and Freedom (art.liberte.syrie), where artists posted their work on the condition that they signed their names to show solidarity with the revolution. The website served as a counter to Syria’s small but formal gallery culture, where the more established art spaces would not have been able to operate without tacit approval from the government. Art and Freedom also narrowed the gap between what is considered ‘art’, whether from the academy or the cartoonist’s pen. However, distinctions like that were not made by the mukhabarat and Abdelke, like Ali Ferzat, was treated as a threat. Last summer, the artist disappeared at a government checkpoint and was held incommunicado for a couple of months.

An early indication that Syrians were formulating a highly unique creative approach to depicting and understanding the conflict was the 2011–12 staggered release on YouTube and Vimeo of Top Goon: Diaries of a Little Dictator by the anonymous artists’ collective Masasit Mati, named for the straw used by Syrians to drink the popular herbal tea, maté, now largely unavailable due to sanctions. In two seasons of thirty-four episodes, seen by over 1 million viewers on Facebook, an all-powerful president was reduced to the lisping, large-nosed finger puppet Beeshu, the Top Goon, often embroiled in Punch and Judy-type squabbles with a character named Shabih (Goon). Humour can defuse fear in the darkest hour. And for when it’s too hard to deal with, Masasit Mati quoted Nietzsche as guidance: ‘Be careful when you fight the monsters, lest you become one.’ If the message was too important to miss, the puppeteers came out from behind the curtain – their faces masked – and addressed the camera (and the audience) directly.

For many on the streets of Syria, truth had become stranger than the imagination. Ordinary Syrians started filming events using any recording device at hand – mobile phones, digital cameras and crap laptops – to address what they saw as the enormous gap between regime propaganda on state-run TV channels and their own day-to-day reality. Since 2011, Syria’s impressive citizen-journalist movement has posted over 300,000 short films and reports on the internet. The scope of the footage broadened as the movement became equipped with phones with better cameras and all manner of spy cameras through the organising efforts of the nationwide Local Coordinating Committees. Some of it included intimate scenes of torture filmed in claustrophobic settings by spy cameras. Sometimes, even more chillingly, the torturers themselves posted the footage as trophy imagery.

Showing short, sharp fragments, devoid of a wider context, was not enough for a growing number of anonymous documentary film-maker collectives. These include DOX BOX (now working as the Proaction production company), Abounaddara and Bidayyat Audiovisual Arts, which started posting short films showing interviews or diary reports. News, shorts and feature-length films from Syria were no longer the preserve of media outlets or aspiring movie-makers; it was something that anyone could do, regardless of background, experience or even equipment. Often the most powerful imagery was low-resolution, heavily pixelated and blurred.

Again these developments on Syrian streets were not without danger. Some films showed the death of a camera-person after he or she had been shot by the sniper who had been filmed by the camera. Like the disputed Iranian elections of 2009, which spawned the failed Green Movement, the still or moving camera served the function of a spy on the street. The authorities had declared war and realism, gritty and otherwise, became an enemy of the state.

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The rise of the street has also been mirrored in the language emerging from Arab revolutions. Syrian writer and broadcaster Rana Kabbani noted the increased use of slang and colloquial Arabic in the postings on Facebook and Twitter. This language entered the chat room and allowed for a larger liberation in terms of who could express themselves. Instead of being forced to rely on Modern Standard Arabic, the formal language, grammar and approach of ‘proper’ public discourse across the Middle East, people were suddenly expressing themselves in the everyday manner in which they spoke and thought. This informality also encouraged the unbridled public airing of once-taboo subjects for the first time – sometimes if only for their shock value.

Before 2011, twenty-something Muslim Syrians used euphemisms to vent their frustrations in public. Derogatory words or sexual slang were not considered polite or acceptable language in a traditional society firmly anchored by family and conservative social mores. Social media provided a platform for more explicit views. Last year one activist wrote ‘dick bitch’ on his Facebook page twenty times and then added, ‘Now do I have your attention? Four hundred people died in Syria today.’

The internet has always encouraged slang and abbreviated writing in English and other languages; Arabic would prove no different. Last year saw the publication of The Smartest Guy on Facebook: Status Updates from Syria by Aboud Saeed, a former blacksmith who left school when he was in the ninth grade. Described as ‘the Syrian Bukowski’, Saeed found his own free space in the ruptures of his society. His wide-ranging topics included his traditional henna-tattooed mother – ‘My mom has never been to Tibet, she’s never worn a bikini and doesn’t know how to sit on a toilet’ – to existential musings – ‘Is there less death on Twitter?’

Saeed’s flippancy was all the more significant considering his location. Manbij, near Aleppo, currently under Islamic State rule, also featured in a short documentary by Masasit Mati not released as part of the Top Goon episodes. Entitled I Love Acting, it tells the story of a 2013 cultural festival painstakingly planned by activists in the town that was disrupted after Manbij was shelled by the regime the day before and several people were killed.

You don’t have to be male and working class to write edgy prose. Established short-story writer Rasha Abbas, with a background in Syrian television, uses fiction to affirm the value of the individual amid the collectivist barbarities of the conflict. As her translator, Alice Guthrie, described Abbas’s most recent collection, tentatively entitled The Gist of It, ‘Eclectic, intense, often psychedelic, many of her stories are dreamscapes which creep up on the reader with sudden plunges into haunting hyper-realism, operating within a punk aesthetic.’⁴

Another Syrian in exile, Khalil Younes, was one of the first artists to emerge with a distinct style, showing the Syrian revolution through bold pen and ink drawings initially of martyrs. As his series continued, his portraits included metaphorical figures that represented massacres or representations from other wars. ‘Our Saigon Execution’, for instance, transfers Eddie Adams’s famous 1968 photograph of the shooting of a Vietcong officer to the Syrian situation.

Younes, who grew up in the alleys of Damascus, has been posting short stories from forty to 400 words on the internet. He maintained that many of the new Syrian writers are writing short as opposed to long because short stories are better adapted for reading on smart phones and tablets. Younes also belongs to a group of artists who, in the early days, acted as a bridge between untutored ‘arters’ and the West, where Younes has been living since 1998.⁵

This professional group of artists discouraged less sophisticated images of, for example, naked children’s bums as a metaphor for circumstances in Syria. They discussed with their fellow citizens the kind of visual material that could more strongly affect and appeal to international audiences schooled in advertising and contemporary art. The internet and social media may give the impression that the featured art and culture were posted spontaneously. In fact, much exploration, experimentation and editing have gone into producing polished, engaging and powerful imagery and text.

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When Masasit Mati snuck back into Syria to perform with the finger puppets and filmed I Love Acting, the director Jameel (a pseudonym) said they had to be careful of being caught not only by the regime but by the newly dominant Islamic militias. ‘They don’t like theatre,’ he observed succinctly.

In November 2014, the photographer and film director Ziad Homsi was kidnapped in Raqqa by IS and suddenly released over two weeks later. He is best known as the co-director of Notre Terrible Pays (‘Our Terrible Country’), with Ali Atassi and produced by Bidayyat. Homsi is an active member of Lens Young, unofficial groups of citizen-photographers documenting Syria’s destruction. Increasingly, artists were critical of the Islamist forces as well as the regime. However, since the rise of the Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq, cultural resistance has had to be highly secretive.

Cameras can’t be openly brought on to the streets, so they are invariably hidden under a niqab face-covering. Last September, an anonymous woman activist filmed public life in Raqqa with a hidden camera. During the short film, two men in a car scolded her for not fully covering her face. In another scene, shot in an internet café, a French-speaking jihadist bride tells her sobbing mother over Skype that she is not coming home. So was the film, broadcast on the TV channel France 2, an example of engaged culture or an exercise in straight-up reporting? Or was it the revenge of a street that should have been kept hidden, docile and uncomplaining – like the Syrian street under Assad, which had been known for its vibrancy in manufacturing and design but for the most part was silent, while politically critical in private but very rarely in public. In the areas inside Syria where IS hold sway, the barrier of fear once the preserve of the regime has again been erected by the jihadists.

Realism as well as satire appears to be a tall order for IS, which will behead anyone caught filming.⁶ It would be mistaken to blame the strict fundamental version of the religion that the militia purports to follow, where human representation is not allowed. In a political movement as savvy as theirs in its use of social media, their motivations have more to do with control and mission-branding. Their threatening communiqués demanding ransom or showing gruesome beheadings have been made to either strike fear into the heart of their enemies or appeal to disaffected radicalised youth around the world. Unlike the art, film-making, culture and writing of the Syrian uprising, these are messages that entirely disallow creative expression, contestation or dissent.

Despite the violence, disruption and threat of arrest of 2014, the country played host to the first ever Syria’s Mobile Phone Films Festival, organised by activists and the Alshare3 (‘The Street’) Foundation, which works across the arts – film, music and visual arts. Ten short films made by Syrians vied in four categories for prizes of $1,000 each. Festival organisers were planning to hold simultaneous screenings at various locations inside the country. Kobane was intended to be one of the towns, but fighting between IS and Peshmerga forces forced them to cancel. After that, the festival responded flexibly and revealed the time and place of its screenings on Facebook or locally. Sometimes the choice of venue had a particularly powerful resonance, like Jabal al-Zawiya, the site of a major 2011 massacre by soldiers. After years of mutual destruction, Syrians came to the festival to be reminded of the best of themselves.

Graffiti on a wall inside Syria: ‘Has to be Freedom! Come to the Street.’ Kafranbel, 2013

Postscript

The book Zaher Omareen, Nawara Mafoud and I edited, Syria Speaks: Art and Culture from the Frontline, featuring over fifty Syrian contributors and much of the material discussed in this essay, serves a similar function. At a time of continuing violence – from the regime, Islamist forces, US air strikes and much more – the voices and aspirations of ordinary Syrians obscured by repressive authoritarian rule are finally reaching audiences inside and outside the country.⁷

During last winter’s staged performance, entitled ‘Readings from Syria Speaks’, musically illustrated stories from the book were presented alongside as yet unpublished work. The sell-out audience laughed during the darkly humorous passages and seemingly held their breath as the subject matter turned grim. If the articulate, often hilarious and elegiac Syrian voices are heard, real lives emerge – not victims or war statistics – from a conflict that has wasted a country. The power of Syria remains in people’s memories, aspirations and poignant sense of irony and beauty. The metaphorical ‘street’ can be anywhere; it has the power to sustain even those who are living in exile.

Last year, Syria’s best known-novelist, Khaled Khalifa, came from Damascus for the Syria Speaks book tour. At a literary workshop in Bristol, Khalifa slipped outside for a cigarette, only to be joined by a group of Syrian asylum seekers. By coincidence they were all from the same rural Kurdish Syrian village surrounded by olive groves where the author had grown up. As they gathered around him, they asked about the trees and the harvest.