Parable of the Syrian in Diaspora
I had a vivid dream, a vision a few years ago, one of many “parables” I have seen about my people. I recently found it again in my journal from November 21, 2015. In Syria, a revolutionary struggle against Assad’s authoritarianism was at a peak, which still continues today. The Paris attacks had just happened. I had been desperately trying to share about the conditions in Syria, hearing from family and friends, when the world was consumed by the news of Paris. It was heinous what happened, but the hypervisibility of that event and the consequences that followed with French airstrikes, the Assad regime’s continued impunity, Russia and Iran’s support of his annihilation of the Syrian people, and Da’esh’s chaos made me feel like the voices of the Syrians on the ground, resisting everyday, were being drowned out.
In November 2015, gunmen attacked a concert hall, restaurant, and bar in Paris, killing 130 people. The attackers were Arab but not Syrian. A widespread panic ensued over terrorism in Syria and the rise of ISIS. Worldwide hashtags circulated to #PrayforParis and #Prayforhumanity. Kanye West’s new album opened with the lyrics “Pray for Paris/Pray for the parents/This is a God dream.” France “retaliated” by bombing Raqqa. Headlines read “French Jets Pound Raqqa,” “France Strikes ISIS Targets in Syria in Retaliation for Attacks,” “France Bombs ISIS HQ, Hunts Attacker Who Got Away,” “Revenge From Above: France Pounds ISIS Capital.” Metonymized, machoist, militarized headlines imagined Raqqa as an empty, violent wasteland inherently deserving of death. This horrendous retaliation was positioned as “justified.” Raqqa was one of the first Syrian cities to be liberated from the Assad regime in 2013. It was a beautiful moment of victory, one where the thought of liberation became possible. The people of Raqqa took to building an entirely new infrastructure until Jabhat a-Nusra and ISIS invaded and occupied the town. Syrians in Raqqa were already target practice for the regime, then Russian airstrikes, then Jabhat an-Nusra, then ISIS and then when the West felt justified they had to suffer more. It took the struggles and extreme violence Syrian people face everyday spilling into the imaginary of the West for it to be a concern. The Islamophobic fear of the Other triggered passionate defense of French revenge against Syrians who themselves were being terrorized by ISIS. Syrian people became subsumed by one representative category and were also shamed for mourning their losses in the context of the “larger” injustice in Paris. There was no consideration that any casualties would result from the retaliations, that real people would be hurt. Several questions arose while I was watching the events unfold, in the U.S., and with Syrian friends and family on the ground. Whose humanity was #prayforhumanity referring to? What dictates how and when we grieve? Why did no one speak about the regime, who at the time had caused 95% of Syrian casualties since 2011?
(The current percentage of Assad and Russian allied atrocities today accounts for 91% of the total casualties according to Syrian Network for Human Rights.) Why could people not conceive that a secular, Western-educated dictator was an equally alarming source of barbarism and genocide, and why did people seem to believe only the extremist militias (that Assad and the U.S. in part radicalized and created) were the primary source of violence? Which Raqqa were they really bombing? The revolutionary Raqqa, regime-controlled Raqqa, rebel controlled Raqqa, Jabhat an Nusra controlled Raqqa, ISIS Raqqa? The women and youth of Raqqa building civil society institutions from the grassroots? Who were they retaliating against?
Many Syrians I speak to feel a loss so large, an inability to speak, and some of us with the privilege to be far away, although still impacted, are often consulted on things that our family or friends did not live to tell. What is interesting is that a sister-friend of mine, who is also an activist, would be murdered two years after I received this dream, for documenting and witnessing the stories of the Syrian Revolution. I wanted to share this after seeing Israel’s illegal plan to annex (forcibly displace and ethnically cleanse) Palestine’s West Bank, slated to begin July 1. How helpless it feels to see that, not be on the ground, but feel so connected to our people there, wanting the world to know what they have been through at the hands of the Zionist regime. It also reminds me of some of the stories I have seen and heard, from refugee camps in Greece to hospital rooms in Amman… the stories of my family and friends surviving regime prisons, years of torture and state sanctioned violence, especially as outside courts begin to investigate many of the sexual based torture tactics the Assad regime uses. In my own family, I have seen outside researchers tell our stories of survival without mentioning the creativity and resilience of our people. It is disrespectful to the dead, especially when many times, the genocide of our people at the hands of the state becomes just another number on the news. Often times Syrians are displaced from our own tongues. May those stories one day be shared in full, on their own terms.
Here was the story I was shown.
It started off calm and the ocean was warm and brewing. I met a girl who became my friend on the sea shore. She invited me with a circle of friends to stand on this pier above the shore. We started playing cards, smoking shisha, enjoying the evening together. There were some people underneath the pier, hanging out. It was a sweet and pleasant time, although we were aware the ocean was brewing around us. Suddenly the waves began to rise higher & higher. The people on the shore began to run frantically. It looked like the shore was disappearing rapidly. We were trapped above, neither in the sea nor on shore. It was vivid and real and I could taste the saltwater on my tongue. I was terrified to be trapped above on the pier. I watched with my new friend as people began scrambling, running to leave the sea shore as the ocean was rising higher. People were being swept away to the waves. There was a small child, around three years old, standing with his father on the shore. They were scrambling to hold on to the disappearing sand. Someone screamed. “Watch out! There’s a red leopard shark! Red — -” and we watched as it bit him in the leg, once, then as his father rushed to help him, twice. Then it bit his father in his midsection. It was horrific, and we watched the indigo water turn shades of red. We looked at the sunset spilling onto the clouds, the sunlight reflecting on the water, how traumatizingly surreal the colors were during this time. We felt frozen & heartbroken. I felt like I could not move or speak. The ocean absorbed the father and son into its waves. Suddenly we were able to climb down the pier and escape, but I blacked out.
When I woke up, I was in another place.
I was standing on this all-white interior, white floors, white ceilings, a vast empty space filled with people running around in circles holding iPads and newspapers. It was a giant arena on a huge white boat, like a sterile cruise ship. People were frantically talking about national headlines about the attack. My brother and I were standing together in this place. I was standing there, disoriented, having flashbacks about everything that happened. I felt it all in my body, remembered myself watching the scene from two stories above, terrified & paralyzed. My little brother had Instagram on his Ipad and had taken a picture of the scene yesterday from afar. He showed me the photo. I saw the vivid colors of the waters, the sunset light exploding onto it, the neon pink & yellow clouds, their fluorescent violence against the deep blue / red / indigo water, with clouds of foam on its surface. There were thousands of comments on his photo. Some were spam and concerned me for his safety — I was wondering how he, as a child, could have so many followers, and how dangerous that is. Many of the comments were making light of the tragedy in inappropriate, sexualized ways which I feared for him being exposed to. Some were trying to locate the little boy who had been attacked. Some were suggesting that his name was Cory or Chris, but I knew the boy was brown, he was not white. I felt my stomach drop as I asked my brother how he got the picture. He said, “A lot of people were watching from far away, but they couldn’t zoom in on what was happening. I took a picture of the landscape and horizon to capture the whole view.” I hadn’t realized that anyone else outside of our seashore was watching us, or would know what happened.
I was surprised when journalists and politicians approached me asking what I had seen. Suddenly something that had felt so huge & so small, something that I thought only my friends and I were seeing became a huge public event. World wide. I tried to remember what happened between standing on the pier and how I got on the boat, but my memory blacked out. My friend was gone, but I felt like she was still with me. I suddenly became the closest witness and “expert” on the shark attack and my position was heroized even though I had been paralyzed and did nothing I could have done when I witnessed it. I felt shocked and numb, and used for political agendas on this arena where people were scrambling trying to figure out what to do, running in circles. Someone who claimed he was president of the boat came to shake my hand. I stood, frozen, next to my brother & his Ipad, who also became this huge primary source because he happened to take the only picture directly after it had happened. And the beauty of the colors back in our sea shore was lost — the red blood became the hyper-focus of the photo, the only evidence.
There were policy makers and environmental scientists coming up to me, declaring they had made calculations about how to eradicate the Red leopard shark by 2032. I felt like the situation was absurd because we were all so far from where it happened. I felt alien for being the only person who was relatively near the tragedy but still not the people who had drowned. And why was no one talking about the tidal wave? The larger wave, that had killed so many people? The shark attack was horrible, but why did no one mention that thousands of people were lost to the flooding beyond their control? What were the names of those people? Everyone was talking about the dimensions of the shark, what size it was, the color of its stripes, what it looked like, how it came there, not the will of the people who were fighting to live as they clawed the sand to hold on before washing away. Not the fear and not the anguish of the father jumping to save his child from another violent force, so much smaller than the ocean, but still terrifying and immediate, watching him hold his child that last time, seeing their wound gashes & the people behind them fleeing & around them screaming for help. No one talked about how even then, the people were still trying to help each other and and warning him about the shark, even as they were struggling with their own fight to live.
I remember my role, how desperately I wondered if the boundary between the pier and the shore could be broken, and what would realistically happen if I tried to jump off the pier to save them from drowning, what kind of an arrogant useless activist I would be for acting like throwing my body at the situation could help. What a self-serving kind of solidarity, to throw myself to the waves as they were drowning. I asked myself why I was given the fate I had in that world- I had to witness and feel the trauma so deep, to feel the loss and suffering that would later be a contained spectacle. One that these “specialists” were trying to find the dimensions of through a telescope, an Ipad screen, through their useless research instruments. On this boat/arena, people in business suits & everyday clothes scrambled from point to point looking busy, doing nothing. I missed my friends & how we used to play cards, smoke shisha on the pier, the people we were when we first came, before coming up on the balcony, when we still lived on the shore.
What happened to my friends? Were they swept away too or did they get transported to another world like I did, were they even real to begin with? Was it a memory reconstructed from my own nostalgia of being on the pier, though it was such a short and coincidental passing that I happened to be there in that time and space. Who was I on the shore? Why couldn’t I remember? Where did the shoreline begin? Where was that black space in my periphery between the shore and how I got here? And if I had stayed, if I had not woken up in this arena on the giant boat- would the water kept have rising until it swept me away and my friend away too? Would we have been able to run away & ask for help? Would I have felt so lost and permanently alien, standing in a jarringly different landscape, mourning for the vibrant colors I would never see again, even if there were made of blood & wounded people? Time began to pass in the dream, in this world I arrived to, and I began to feel like I lived my whole life in the second place. I became busy and started scrambling around like the people on the boat so I wouldn’t look lost. I knew I had my brother. I started realizing that maybe there were other members of my family and friends here. Something in me gradually began to forget, but I didn’t want to. Occasionally people would bring it up on the boat, during their fancy dinners. Once it happened at a table full of people, someone asked me what I thought about the dimensions of the shark, and the memory of the whole scene flooded back to me. I suddenly realized that we were floating on a water of dead bodies and lost screams, we were floating on ghosts acting like the ground was firm. The whole structure was precariously balanced on the bodies of my people & these people were acting like the boat was made of the hardest material on earth. Suddenly I realized I could hear the spirits of the dead beneath us, crying out from the waves, begging to be remembered by name. I had to wake up after that.
I refused to fall asleep again, because I didn’t want to remember the waves.
