LCB diplomatique This photograph was taken in our house, my wife Samira Al-Khalil and me (Samira leans her head on my shoulders at the back), in the Qudsayya suburb to the west of Damascus towards the end of 2005. The photograph encompasses a lot of Syria’s history in the last half century, without being a…
Crisis and Unrepresentability
PEN/Opp publishes “Crisis and unrepresentability” – a new written lecture by the Syrian author, thinker and the Tucholsky Prize winner Yassin Al-Haj Saleh. The lecture was previously presented in Sweden on the 28 of August at the School of Gerlesborg and the 29 of August at the World Culture Museum as part of a conversation…
Atrocity, Violence, and Distorted Forms
Henna The Atrocious and Its Representation: Deliberations on Syria’s Distorted Form and Its Tumultuous Formation, by Syrian intellectual Yassin al-Haj Saleh, was recently published by Dar al-Jadeed. The Lebanese writer, publisher, and intellectual Luqman Salim had been supervising the editing of this book when he was assassinated in Lebanon, February 4th, 2021. Salim was shot…
Worldless Syria: Depopulated discourses and denied agency
Al-Jumhuriya Dedicated to Kelly and Steve. In the West today—and, consequently, around the world—there are three dominant discourses about Syria (and the Middle East more generally). The first is geopolitical; the second culturalist or civilizationist; and the third might be called top-down anti-imperialist. In analyzing these three, along with the ways in which Syria’s…
The Syrian Genocide and Diaspora, and the Imperative of Cross-Cultural Exchange
DAWN- dawnmena.org Before the Syrian uprising ten years ago, there was a scarcity of literature by Syrians about the country during the long decades of the Assad family rule. No doubt, this scarcity in cognitive representation derived from the void in political representation, especially during the decades of the 1980's and 1990's, a brutal and…
The Syrian Revolution: reflections on a decade of struggle
ROAR Magazine The cycle of protests that collectively became known as the “Arab Spring” were triggered by a desperate event outside a government building in the small Tunisian city of Sidi Bouzid in late December 2010, when Mohamad Bouazizi set fire to himself in an act of protest. Mass demonstrations followed across Tunisia and quickly…
The legacy of the Arab Spring: “The Syrian revolution is resumable today and tomorrow”
Qantara.de A tradition is unchanging rules that govern human action, while a revolution is a transformative event that follows no predetermined path. As far as a "revolutionary tradition" is a contradictory term, it also tends to obliterate the revolutionary event and impose its rules upon it. This is remarkably evinced in the communist "hard tradition",…
The struggle for life: An interview with Yassin al-Haj Saleh
al-Jumhuriya [Editor’s note: The below interview was originally published in French by Le Monde on 12 March, 2021. It is published here in English, with minor edits, with the permission of its author.] Today, ten years after the outbreak of the Syrian uprising, how many “Syrias” currently exist? There is the territory held by the…
Syria: a speicide story
Versopolis Review By March 2021, a whole decade will have passed since the popular uprising in Syria started, and a titanic tragedy has been unfolding itself. What is so crushingly peculiar about these ten years is that Syrians have no promises whatsoever that things will be better, or even that the worst is already behind…
The greater jail: The politics of prison in Syria
Al Jumhuriya [Editor’s note: The below has been adapted from a talk given by the author on 10 November, 2020, at an event co-organized by the University of Cologne and the MENA Prison Forum founded by the activists Lokman Slim and Monika Borgmann, who attended the online discussion. Slim was assassinated earlier this month in…