Fadia Lazkani
Have You Heard the Testimonies of the Photographs, about
the Killings in Syria?
2014. Saqi Books.
All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.
A sister searches for her missing brother
A card
I come from a planet filled with questions that have no answers – a planet where all that is said is true and all
that is true is sad. The hearts of its residents carry the craziness of the question, one that haunts them whether
they are awake or asleep, in a land that conceals its secrets. Neither the tree branches nor the sidewalk offer
any answers. The minibuses heading to the Shoura district in Damascus do not care for all the tormented
songs about waiting, and the outer defensive walls of the al-Assadaat Security Branch do not yield to the
agony of its inhabitants. Waiting is infinite and unending, just like the stars.
I am the daughter of a question that creeps up like ivy on the floor tiles and stairs of the Muhajireen
district’s steep alleys, in al-Sibki Park and in the corners of a house in the Shoura, on its balconies and walls.
Silence is the guardian of deception. Eyes evade each other so that all can be unspoken. None of us asks the
others where I should hide the secrets of loss – Hama, Aleppo, Damascus, the north and south. It is as though
they have gathered the pieces of their bodies, wrapped them in white coffins and then … when the horn
echoes … Boom! Boom! Boom! … An immense army of the living dead proceeds in a convoy of the truth.
Every one of them carries his birth certificate, which testifies to the place and time of his death and name.
An ordinary death is hard to accept, so how can the soul believe in the death of someone who came into
existence from the same womb as you? How, when there is no gravestone, no body and no funeral? The
question is stuck to your heart. The question is your heart.
Sednaya/the prison
This is the first visit where I saw my eldest brother, after he had survived nine years in the Palmyra prison.
The common belief was that veteran prisoners were moved to Sednaya, the ‘five-star prison’, to regain their
human appearance before their possible imminent release within a year, more or less. My brother spent the
entire time during my visit trying to steal a moment, when our mom was distracted, to notify me with silent
movements of his lips that they had ‘finished off’ our brother Abid, the second sibling in our family. I didn’t
ever ask my eldest brother after that how he could be so cruel, quickly passing his hand at the speed of light
against his neck to point out to me that Abid had ceased to exist. On our way back from Sednaya, my heart
sank and became heavy, as though a stone had been placed on top of it – one that would remain with every
breath I took, wherever I went. I, however, did not believe it!
The mother’s house
Two years later, in our house in the Shoura, Muhajireen, the first sentence my brother threw at me after he
was freed from the Palmyra and Sednaya prisons was: ‘Abid, they have finished him off.’ I still did not
believe it! Hadn’t many people told us that their sons were released after fifteen or twenty years, during
which time their families had thought they were dead? Hadn’t they even held wakes and funerals for them?
Why couldn’t Abid be one of those?
I said nothing to my mother. Her concealed happiness revealed itself as she told us how the security
personnel had come once again. They knocked at our door and asked her about her absent son: ‘They kept
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coming and asking – they still come.’ The head of the municipality and some of the neighbours and
shopkeepers told her that men had come and asked them as well. Did I pity her, or did I pity myself? Was I
less miserable than her? I don’t know, because inside me hope started dancing with the devil again.
Spacious Damascus/claustrophobic Damascus
My eldest brother took me to an appointment with a masked man in the local vegetable market in al-Haal, so
that I would believe the news that ‘my brother Abid had ceased to exist’. The man said to me, solemnly and
with determination: ‘This is the end of the conversation. Do not ask anymore. It is the secret world of the
prisoners’ language. We know everything.’ He continued: ‘The last thing your brother said when they came
to take him, at four in the morning in al-Mazzeh prison, was: “Those of you who get out of here alive, do not
forget to tell my wife – I would like ‘Muhammad’ to be the name of my coming child if he is a boy.” At the
door, where he was seen alive for the last time, he looked back and added: “I entrust you with my mother.”
Then he shouted, with deep emotion: “Forgive me, Mother!”’
Before the masked man left, he insisted to me: ‘This appointment never took place. I never saw you, and
you never saw me.’
That was not the first masked man we had met!
The door was opened by a stern-looking man who pointed toward the reception room and left us alone for
a while. We stayed, my brother and I, without being invited to do so.
‘I brought you my sister so she could hear from you and believe,’ said my brother. ‘I know from prisoners
who were brought from the Palmyra prison that you were with our brother Abid throughout the last six
months of his life in al-Mazzeh. Have you…?’
The young man did not let my brother continue. He stood up with extreme agitation, and said: ‘I have no
idea what you are talking about!’
He had been close friends with Abid. He had been arrested and incarcerated in al-Mazzeh prison, as we
were told. There he spent a year, and was released, after which he reopened his private engineering firm.
As for the third masked man, we never got to meet him.
During a long road trip to the town of M–, which seemed to be located at the end of the inhabited world,
neither my brother nor I uttered a word. After our arrival, the woman who opened the door said to us after a
few minutes’ wait: ‘No one by this name lives here.’
On our way back, the only thing my eldest brother said, as usual avoiding looking me in the eye, was:
‘Sis, stop your search and delusions. If I were to see Abid walking in front of me now, I wouldn’t believe it is
him.’
I did not believe it.
Air Force Security Branch/office of A. D.
After enormous effort, my uncle managed to gain access to a high-ranking official. This official looked at the
two files in front of him and said grimly: ‘The oldest one is in Palmyra prison; the second one, ask after him
no more.’ I did not believe it.
Kafrsouseh/office of the head of the State Security Branch
The head of the branch was aware that I knew my eldest brother had been arrested. The meeting took place
near his office, and that was a remarkable visit. A month later, he summoned me back to his office one
evening. At the end of the interview he said to me: ‘It seems that the stories of your brothers have affected
you and complicated your situation.’ I spent the remaining three years, two months and ten days – which they
thought was enough time for my incarceration – wondering why he had been ‘mixed up’, saying ‘your
brothers’ rather than ‘your brother’. It didn’t occur to me that I should understand it.
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The Investigative Branch in al-Assadaat, al-Khatib/office of Major T. A. D.
They returned me to the branch that had received me three years and two months earlier, before this branch
handed me over to the branch-cumprison in Kafrsouseh. I was later to know that all of this had been arranged
in order to reopen the investigation and carry out the bargaining rituals before I could be set free. A second
time, a third, a tenth, you have to talk about your family, your siblings and your parents’ grandfathers. Each
one has their own national registry office. Where were they born and where do they live and what do they
do?
The major took my papers after I completed them. He scanned them with eyes filled with mockery.
However, I shall never forget how he suddenly paused, nor how his look and his expression changed the
moment I asked him, simply: ‘What did my brother Abid do?’ Later, I would remember how I thought I saw
a small tremor in his facial muscles … He remained silent for a second, and then asked me: ‘When was the
last time your brother Abid visited you?’
Paris/al-Sham [Damascus]
Profession of brother and location of his residence …
Administrative documents accept no blank spaces …
My brother was young and handsome. He was in his last year at the electrical engineering faculty. He loved
al-Sham and his mother; repression did not give him the chance to add to this list his son, who would be born
seven months after his disappearance. Once again, I was in an office filling out administrative documents that
accept no blank spaces. Come to my rescue, verbs of all languages. Come to my rescue – what should I write
to fill in ‘Occupation’ and ‘Location’? Here I am, isn’t this the billionth time I find myself writing this song
of desperate hope? I had a brother who was playing, and then suddenly a big hole somewhere in Syria
swallowed him up on one of the days at the end of December in 1983. What should I write, to fill out the
administrative documents? For my brother is still alive somewhere in the national registry office, and I
wouldn’t have believed it had I not heard the testimonies of the photographs.
The testimonies of the photographs
My brother’s wife waited for him with patience and devotion for over eight years. She must have made sure
of the news of her husband’s death somehow before she declared her separation and started divorce
proceedings (the reason was that he had ‘abandoned’ her). That was the first bullet to pierce my mother’s
impenetrable waiting defences. I had no one but my brother’s wife left. Perhaps he had said something to her
before marching toward his cross. Perhaps she can give me her conviction? It was now less than a year since
she had remarried. I hid my fears and silence, the loud cry of my heart deep inside me. I had always been
afraid of this moment, and contemplated it. I asked her about his fate, as though I were praying in a sanctuary
and pleading with God.
She said, patiently and calmly: ‘My heart believed it after eight years.’ That was the only answer she ever
gave.
I persisted, and could see the pity in her eyes. She told me about the large yellow envelope and she turned
her head so I would not see her tears.
‘Your brother gave me that envelope a week before he disappeared,’ she said, before her eyes stared off
into the distance at nothing.
In the envelope there were large black and white personal photographs, just like the ones families display
of their … martyrs. There were six pictures. An arrow shot through my ribs and settled there. I could see my
brother, one day, during the third week of May 1983, making a special trip to the photographer and having
six copies made of his picture. He counted us. We were four siblings; his wife, who was two months
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pregnant, was the fifth person, and our mother was the sixth. It had never occurred to me that the number of
copies he had chosen was half the average number when making copies of one’s personal pictures in
Damascus.
This time, Abid dissipated into a corner with all the tenderness and love that a father can give to his child.
He sang and swayed with joy and affection as though he were Abd al-Baset, who so marvellously recites the
last part of the al-Barqara sura from the Qur’an. My brother then whispered to me, gently and with
compassion, that I should believe – before he vanished into the clouds.
I then believed!
This happened on 25 July 1993.
Author’s note: This text was written many years in the past. It was rewritten two and a half months ago, after
I deleted and concealed a few names (September 1995 to August 2012).
Translated from the Arabic by Leen Zyiad
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Khaled Barakeh
Regarding the Pain of Others and Damascus 15 Feb 2012
19:47:31
Artistic responses to the violence in Syria
Photographs by Jens Steingässer
Since the beginning of the revolution in Syria on 15 February 2011, it had become necessary for me to keep a
distance between my art practice and the actual events unfolding there. I was overcome by the realisation that
no matter what art may be able to produce, it would in no way be as effective or as relevant as, for example, a
sixteen-year-old protesting in the street and putting his or her life on the line. Because I felt so pained,
concerned and overwhelmed by emotion in response to the situation, I was quite unsure about how to
participate from abroad. With all the complexity and egregiousness of the events occurring there over the last
few years, I didn’t feel an artistic approach was appropriate.
However, I kept engaging myself through many other avenues. It became something like a full-time job,
spending hours on the Internet and on the phone with people to follow stories from inside. There was a
fissure, akin to schizophrenia, whereby my body was in Germany but my heart and mind were in Syria. From
abroad, I began to discover ways to involve myself with the struggle on the ground through social media
networks. People in Syria began organising themselves in secret groups on Facebook and preparing events in
response to action on the ground, and those events were iterated back into the media. We ended up creating a
virtual ‘parallel republic’, a term I use to describe this digital, integrative approach of journalism, arts and
activism taking place in the streets and virtual networks of Syria.
Since the start of the revolt, there had been relevant international coverage, but over time that waned to
near-disappearance. People stopped being curious, or even asking me about it. I realised that the moment had
arrived and that it was not only right for me to begin to help tell some of the stories about what is occurring
there through artistic endeavours, but that it had become absolutely necessary to do so, still to this very day.
Through the parallel republic I came across an image of a funeral – one of the only situations in which
people are allowed to gather without permission from the state (the others being in mosques or at weddings).
I felt that for people in Europe to have a real experience of the atrocities happening in Syria, I needed to bring
some part of this giga-event to them, literally. People were just sitting in their comfort zones watching the
news from a distance, unaffected and impersonal. I felt I needed to change that relation, for it to become
more personal, and this image of a funeral sparked with an idea I had been developing.
With the confidence and trust of many new friends I had made through social (activist) media networks –
many of whom I have still not met in person – I shared my plan for a new work. As I began to explain my
intentions, many people were curious and hesitant to really help. Finally, through a friend of a friend, I
managed to get in touch over the phone with a religious leader from the mosque in Da’al, in south-west Syria.
After explaining the plan, the process and the complexity of the work to him, the sheikh agreed to help and
actually began setting the wheels in motion.
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