The reaction to revolution in Syria was cultural as well as political. Independent radio stations and newspapers blossomed alongside popular poetry and street graffiti. This is a story largely untold in the west: who knew, for instance, of the full houses, despite bombardment, during Aleppo’s theatre festival in 2013?
Dancing in Damascus by Arabist and critic miriam cooke (so she writes her name, uncapitalised) aims to fill the gap, surveying cultural responses to revolution, repression, war and exile. Dancing is construed both as metaphor for collective solidarity – the anarchist Emma Goldman said, “If I can’t dance, it isn’t my revolution” – and as literal practice. At protests, Levantine dabke dance was elevated from folklore to street-level defiance, just as popular songs were transformed into revolutionary anthems.
Cooke’s previous work, Dissident Syria, examined the regime’s pre-2011 attempts to defuse oppositional art while giving the impression of tolerance. It would fund films for international screening, for instance, but ban their domestic release. Dancing in Damascus describes how culture slipped the bounds of co-option: increasingly explicit prison novels and memoirs anticipated the uprising; once the protests erupted, “artist activists” engaged in a “politics of insult” and irony. Shredding taboos, the Masasit Mati collective’s Top Goon puppet shows, Ibrahim Qashoush’s songs and Ali Ferzat’s cartoons targeted Bashar al-Assad specifically. “The ability to laugh at the tyrant and his henchmen,” cooke writes, “helps to repair the brokenness of a fearful people.”
As the repression escalated, Syrians posted images of atrocities in the hope they would mobilise solidarity abroad. This failed, but artistic responses to the violence helped transform trauma into “a collective, affective memory responsible to the future”. Explicit representations of “brute physicality and raw emotion”, from mobile phone footage to Samar Yazbek’s literary reportage, soon gave way to formal experimentation. Notable examples include Death is Hard Work, Khaled Khalifa’s Faulknerian novel of a deferred burial; the “bullet films” of the Abounaddara collective and Azza Hamwi’s ironic short film Art of Surviving, about a man who turns spent ordnance into heaters, telephones, even a toilet. “We didn’t paint it,” he tells the camera, “so it stays as it arrived from Russia especially for the Syrian people.” The full-length film Return to Homs follows the transformation of Abdul Baset al-Sarout from star goalkeeper to protest leader to resistance fighter.
This book’s consideration of the role of social media goes deeper than most of the 2011 commentary on the cyber aspects of the Arab Spring. The internet provides activists with anonymity and relative safety. It also offers a space to display and preserve art, even as Syria’s physical heritage, from Aleppo’s mosques to Palmyra’s temples, is demolished by regime bombs and jihadist vandalism. Online gallery sites such as The Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution archive the uprising’s creative breadth and complexity.
Certain digital images “aestheticise” sites of destruction in order to both to lament and humanise the war. The best known are works by Tammam Azzam, which superimpose Klimt’s The Kiss on a crumbling residential block, Matisse’s circle dancers against a rubble-strewn street and Gauguin’s Tahitian women on a refugee camp.
As an example of refugee theatre created in the youth centres of camps and urban slums, a cross-border Shakespeare production via Skype and featuring Syrian children cast Romeo in Jordan and Juliet in Homs. The performance was completed despite bombs, snipers and frequent communication cuts. The play’s conclusion was optimistically adapted: the doomed lovers threw away their poison and declared, “Enough blood! Why are you killing us? We want to live like the rest of the world!” Euripides’ Trojan Women has been used to talk about the regime’s mass rape campaign. Director Yasmin Fedda incorporated the rehearsals into her prize-winning documentary Queens of Syria.
Dancing in Damascus doesn’t tell the whole story. The book tends to concentrate on “high art”, yet, with admirable concision and fluency, it assists with what journalist Ammar al-Mamoun calls “an alternative revolutionary narrative to contest the media stories of Syrian refugees and victims”. It shows how, despite everything thrown at it, the revolution has democratised moral authority, turning artist activists into the Arab world’s new “organic intellectuals”. As such it is an indispensable corrective to accounts that erase the Syrian people’s agency in favour of grand and often inaccurate geopolitical representations. It is a testament to the essential role of culture anywhere in times of crisis.
Robin Yassin-Kassab is the author of Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War.
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