This article is part of a series produced in the Mafaza project – Battels Won and Lost. The research and creation phase of this project was completed with support from the Arts Council of Canada. You can read also in this series: Examining the Cracks of the Soul by Mosab Alnomire, and The Tune of Survival by Abdul-Wahab Kayyali.

Waeel Saad al-Din

Syrian poet residing in Canada. He published a poetry collection in 2010. 

“Rarely does one survive a disorder, awe at how he who survived survived!” – Abū al-ʿAtāhiya.

Survival has many levels, all connected to the concept of salvation. One definition of “survival” in the Arabic dictionary is “the lifting off from the ground so as to not be covered by a torrent,” with the torrent here signifying a sudden danger. Religiously, it is “salvation through adherence” in Islam and “preserving man from sin and its consequences” in Christianity. Philosophically, it could be an “escape,” although according to Marx, it is “changing the world.” Survival also relates to “survivor’s guilt” and attempting to adapt, as diagnosed through psychological observations and studies.

Here I ask, can “survival” and “defeat” arrive hand in hand? At the end of the day “survival” is a success, while “defeat” is a compounded failure. If the survivor was vanquished in their battle, can they be said to have accomplished a concurrent victory because they remained alive and as a result, have another chance at continuing? But what if the survivor had been vanquished in their dream, their hope, their homeland, and their people?

How can “survival” then be defined in light of the tragic state of war, massacre, and conflicts, both internal and external, that we have in Syria? Can the frustration, despair, and mental weakness be dealt with? Is there a possibility of adapting to a new life which maintains one’s supposed identity and values and principles?

“Freedom is a constant journey into the unknown,” – ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Munīf

The Syrian Revolution was infatuated with the Arab Spring when it began. What came to both of them came. The number of days multiplied, and the number of victims and months and events and years and organizations and massacres and losses. It all ended in sad memories and dashed hopes and a humanitarian crisis involving millions of people left beneath the poverty line. Ninety percent of them are still trapped behind those high walls.

I fled the butchery halfway through the year Aleppo fell to regime control, to Turkey, during the days of its summer coup attempt. On the seventeen-day journey from Damascus to Gaziantep the idea of running away weighed heavily on me. I had previously denounced many a friend for leaving behind the exceptional moment that we were experiencing. Until 2013, that is, the spring in which I was arrested. 

Hopes of overthrowing the regime were great at the start of that year, despite the heavy price being paid and despite the mistakes and sins of the revolution. There was still the possibility of building atop what was ruined and of renovating what might still be saved. And yet what happened happened. 

I left prison in the spring of 2016. My first steps toward defeat were to escape that place. Like many other people, the thought was no longer alien to me, that this monster Assad had turned the landscape into something strange, and that it was not wise at all to challenge him.  As I prepared for the difficult next step, I needed to abide by the rules of this painful game, adhere to the ethics of survival, and adjust my self and spirit to the notion of running away. 

Passing through the boundary of regime control brought about a deficient happiness. I was finally rid of the tyrant’s grip. I had reached a part of Syria that was not ruled by Bashar al-Assad – such a monumental thing cannot be described in passing. Like so many others, I lost many friends and relatives—and I myself was nearly lost —in service of accomplishing this dream. But I did not get to see the flag in which we wrapped our martyrs, save twice, in the few months following March of 2011. 

From Qalʿat al-Maḍīq in Hamah’s countryside, I passed dozens of towns and villages, finally reaching the walls that separate the town of Ḥārim, in Idlib’s countryside, from God’s wide earth. Half the flags flying above military checkpoints and buildings were white, the other half black. Those flags were split between Ḥarakat Aḥrār al-Shām al-Islāmiyya and Jabhat al-Nuṣra, not to mention that more than 40% of Syria’s territory was controlled by ISIS at that time, in the desert, the east, and in the Jazira region. One of the two instances in which I saw the three-starred flag was in a friend’s house, in the town of al-Atārib in Aleppo’s countryside, while we took a commemorative photo.

I wanted to escape that catastrophe in any way possible and had lost the ability to face either friend or foe. Rules regulating the troubled relationship between dream and reality, between hope and experience, between freedom and lawlessness no longer existed. I jumped the wall twice and failed. I made it through the third time, with the help of one of my prison friends who had arrived at freedom before me. After I put several meters between myself and the border, after I boarded the car that would take me to my new destination, I said to myself, “Goodbye, o country; goodbye, o beloved, o cruel mistress.”

“He who is distanced from his homeland is not a stranger, but the stranger is he who tastes death,” – Umruʾ al-Qays

The southern cities of Turkey bear a special familiarity, carrying from history what they carry, well known to the Syrians who have passed through them. They have since leaned heavily on those who remain, due to the rising waves of racism against refugees throughout Turkey, which has transformed their deportation into an electoral platform.

The feeling of alienation associated with emigration was not fully present in Gaziantep even though a fear of police and Turkish military checkpoints had remained with me. I would call my mother and father in Damascus and say to myself that the distance between us, under normal circumstances, would only be five hours by car. Surrounded by Syrians on all sides, I listened to their stories about the revolution’s northern theater—Aleppo, its university, its countryside, and its revolutionaries—with immense passion and sadness. There, I met the Aleppans, whom I had never met in Damascus before the revolution. They had had no need for Damascus. They had their own big city with its castle, university, economy, and filthy rich individuals. I worked with a group of them at a non-profit organization that taught students who had missed out on elementary schooling in eastern Aleppo, outside of regime control.

Aleppo fell. Simply and astonishingly, Aleppo fell, and I left the organization due to an administrative disagreement regarding the number of work hours. I had to work more, even though I could not bear to work any longer, watching as those in the organization rushed and burned out, trying to secure any type of shelter for newly displaced Aleppans. Regret ate at me, and my uselessness crushed me. I did not confess to any of them what it was that I felt. I closed the laptop, handed it over to one of them outside the organization’s office, and left. I recognized that my speech had lessened, but I was even more aware of the defeat.

“And Allah will deliver those who were mindful [of Him] to their place of [ultimate] triumph. No evil will touch them, nor will they grieve,” – Qurʾān 36:61

I arrived in Canada in October 2017. I slept during my first day here like I had never slept before in my life. I felt sorrow for everyone who has never tasted such sleep. The time zone difference between Canada and “Syria, and Turkey” afforded me the least amount of communication with people. 

My small family. One hand’s worth of friends. An ordinary job in a small city. Extraordinary success at exhibiting survivor’s guilt. A prison accompanying my solitude like an ever-present obstacle, against which I compared everything. All these increased my inability to speak that “got me into trouble” to quote the Rashidun Caliph, Abū Bakr al-Ṣiddīq. I feel grateful that here no one is above the law. I do not fear the police because I am not guilty, nor did I cower at the sight of the one military vehicle I saw during my five and a half years here. But I am not okay.

The flag of the revolution is gradually returning to Idlib, through an unparalleled resistance by some of the good people still stuck behind those high walls – albeit without any real consequence of note. The flag has also returned to the lands north of Aleppo Governorate, though there it belongs to a different identity, to a lowly subordination, and to a military doctrine that refuses to fight Bashar al-Assad’s army. I say to myself: “It is okay; I’ve already been defeated before all of this, and I’ve already buried the flag alongside the good people that died for our noble idea and died to change, for the better, the world that we were living in.”

Defeat does not occur out of nowhere. There are necessary factors that inevitably lead to failure, the first of which is not the monster we face and the last of which is not the question of identity. We must first accept our defeat. As for survival, it requires continuous work and perseverance even to be considered survival. But how could we who have “survived,” as vanquished survivors, deal with “that which cannot be disclosed,” to quote Jacques Derrida? And how can we deal with the tragedy of our country?

I live now in Toronto, the largest city in Canada, surrounded by Syrians. I am taking slow strides toward “survival.” Sometimes solid steps, sometimes fragile ones. I look at Syria every day through my laptop’s monitor. I return to writing after years of inactivity and despair. Perhaps writing about the past can be a form of healing, but at the end of the day, one hand alone cannot draw a light at the end of the tunnel. I see many hands. Lift them up, please!