Abstract
The brutality of political prison as an unlawful space of incarceration, of the state as an all-encompassing prison that violently constrains its citizens, and of hatred as a prison of vengeful ideas that decimate the nation, are at the heart of Syria’s recent and current history of conflict, from the upheavals of the early 1980s to the civil war that we have been witnessing. This chapter examines some of the post-2005 Syrian prison writings, especially novels and memoirs by Khaled Khalifa, Mustafa Khalifa, and Yassin al-Haj Saleh focusing particularly on Tadmur prison, as a historical background and an anticipation of the climactic explosion of the divisions and distrust that were contained behind the bars of the security state until 2011.
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Notes
Al-Qawqa‘a is partially based on Mustafa Khalifa’s own experience as a political prisoner in Syria from 1982 to 1994 where he was accused of membership in the prohibited Party for Communist Action.
Riyad al-Turk described Syria as a big prison in an interview (See Haugbolle 2008, p. 269).
Al-Haj Saleh was arrested in 1980 when he was a medical student in Aleppo and a member of the Syrian Communist Party.
Khaled Khalifa was born in the city of Aleppo that he portrays in his fictional recreation of the brutal showdown between the regime and Islamists in the 1980s. His novel Madihu l-Karahiya was published in 2008 and translated into English in 2012, in a slightly shorter, edited version In Praise of Hatred. The ‘Translator’s Note’ explains that: ‘the English edition looks quite different to the original text. After consideration, the publishers have decided to make some editorial changes, taken in consultation with the author, and the result is a novel that ends differently from the original’ (2012, p. 298). The translator continues by commenting on the ongoing ‘insurgency’ in Syria and adds that ‘In Praise of Hatred is a study of the absence of love and understanding in a nation historically famed for its tolerance’ (p. 299).
See Fouad Ajami (2012), ‘The Honor of Aleppo: A Syrian Novel and a Syrian Revolution’, The New Republic (7 February 2012), http://www.newrepublic. com/article/world/magazine/100436/syria-aleppo-khaled-khalifa-praisehatred#.
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© 2013 Rita Sakr
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Sakr, R. (2013). ‘We Would Meet Them One Day, and Call Them to Account for Their Oppression’: Post-2005 Prison Writings in Syria. In: ‘Anticipating’ the 2011 Arab Uprisings: Revolutionary Literatures and Political Geographies. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137294739_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137294739_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, London
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