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storytelling
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Who’s Afraid of (a) Minor Detail?
Adania Shibli and Specters of the Disaster on Literature and the Body
Tal Rifaat: A Hill With Many Flags
In February 2016, a number of websites published an aerial photograph showing trucks in Tal Rifaat, purported to belong to the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), carrying furniture that has been looted from the homes of civilian in Tal Rifaat, north of Aleppo. That was nearly two months after the YPG had seized control over the city, following fierce battles in which 80 people from…
Gaziantep: The Making of a Home Away From Home
Laughter of young children, the sounds of their feet racing across the building stairs, finally arrived and concluded with a few words addressed at me: “Give us your bags, auntie.” I felt at ease; these words relieved me some of my travel fatigue and my trepidation of a place I am entirely unfamiliar with. Never in my life had I traveled farther than Aleppo, or…
Hameesh Checkpoint: Business in the Time of Truce
Marwa and Zahra climb onto the minibus, which is supposed to take them from Hameesh bus stop to Al-Salam Mosque within Barzeh district, east of Damascus. Awaiting the bus to fill with passengers before continuing on its way, Zahra becomes restless. She occupies herself by watching the women getting on the bus and arranging the items and supplies they carry. Marwa chuckles as she looks…
I Once Had a Hometown Called Al-Midan
Whenever I talk about my Damascene neighborhood, al-Midan, I struggle against myself and my own mind as not to forget its features. Any omission of these memories would mean my true estrangement, and this is what I attempt to escape. To me, al-Midan was not only the place I was born and lived in, but has always constituted an identity and belonging, and left its…
Victories in Fictitious Battles
We can hear the roar of helicopters this morning, as on most mornings here in the city of Tartus. A few people gathered in a small workshop are waiting for the power outage to end. One guy prays for the victory of the air force and the end of the “crisis.” A second guy laughs at his stupid friend, who seems to never learn or…
Gaziantep: the Closest and the Furthest
Few are the Syrians who express a definitive opinion regarding the Turkish city of Gaziantep. It is a “problematic” city for most: some romantics describe it as the cold city; whereas others, who resent it and reside in other Turkish cities, would label it “the headquarter of the elitist clique,” or reduce it to “the activists,” which resembles a polite ostracization; the third party, who…
Qudsaya: The Last Sanctuary Declared Dead
I pack my suitcase and prepare to leave. Among the things I carry with me is the smell of blood and gunpowder, which has pervaded my every breath for three consecutive days. I also carry with me sounds that haunt me and drown my memory in grief and pain, in addition to many unfinished stories. Using my phone’s camera and its limited memory, I capture…
Abu Khalid’s Tea
“… So, Asma al-Assad brings in a silver-colored aluminum tray, on which is a plate of fried eggs with meat, a dish of blood-red chopped tomatoes with salt sprinkled on top, a folded loaf of flatbread and a cup of tea. She tells me: ‘Be my guest, Abu Khalid.’ She then steps away, and fixes her gaze at me from a distance, carrying Sham, her…
From Mansour Street to Rashid High School
The first time I ever found myself in conflict with my visual memory image bank was when, as a secondary school pupil, I went back to visit my primary school and discovered that it was much smaller than I had been picturing it. Of course there’s nothing particularly weird about that: to experience a disparity between the scale of things in our childhood memories and…
Five More Minutes
Five and a half years have passed since the Syrian revolution had erupted, almost half of which I have spent outside of my homeland. I can hardly forget any of the details of these years. Few successes, frequent failures, and too many disappointments. I constantly seek to forget the failures and disappointments, but memory has a mind of its own, often evoking our worst moments…
A Snapshot of Life in Damascus
The soldier gave the IDs back to their owners except for two people. He kept the door of the van open before he moved away a little bit. It was immensely difficult to see what was happening outdoors during the early morning hours of that winter with barely any light around me. The way a woman squatting next to the door looked at me was…
The Afflicted With Safety
There are aircrafts swarming over the Syrian city of Aleppo as I write this; aircrafts that hail death and horror, and provide brief lessons in history; aircrafts that rain down erasure of all the writings and voices whispering glory to the dead and the wounded, and to their incomprehensible images; aircrafts that nightly propel the outcasts in front of their screens of all sizes, keeping them…
A Cake Under Shelling
It’s 4 pm on a mid-June day in 2013. Al-Qaboun neighbourhood is virtually empty; everyone stayed home after hours of violent shelling, which usually begins early morning, only to partially stop by noon. My friend and I are looking for any shop that would have two packets of baking powder. “Is it really necessary?” asks my friend, distressed by the distant and close sounds of shelling. “Yes,…
Ba’ath Party Bones Jutting out of my Foot
The branch was broken off the tree itself, but was still suspended among the rest of the branches. I saw it as if it had already happened. The wind hadn’t yet tossed the branch onto the ground; it had other plans. Who am I to stir the wind? I concealed my surprise as I gazed at the branch and began to think about the tree….
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