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 five times, having received several threats as a result of his political activities. Hezbollah are thought to be responsible.

One of the most prominent Syrian intellectuals writing today, Haj Saleh deals with the horror permeating the recent history of his country. That horror produced this book. The author spent 16 years in the prisons of the Syrian regime. His wife and partner, Samira al-Khalil was kidnapped and subsequently disappeared along with three others — known as the Douma Four — by an Islamic group in Syria’s Eastern Ghouta. 

The countries from which Salim and Haj Saleh hail have collapsed both economically and politically and have hosted both massacres and waves of human displacement.

Four months after Salim’s assassination, copies of this book were distributed, in the presence of his family and friends, near his burial site. Henna is publishing its own translation in English. 

Yassin al-Haj Saleh

This introduction is dedicated to the Henna platform, partners in a shared destiny. 

Introduction

The Atrocious

This book reflects on the atrocious, that whose form is warped by violence, as well as with the violence that deforms. Over the past decade, uncounted Syrians have experienced life worlds fraught with horrid experiences, including torture and imprisonment, the loss of loved ones, the destruction of living environments, asylum and separation, often preceded by uprooting and displacement. 

Some sections of the text herein address the demolishment of bodies. Others concern themselves with the workings of those who are demolishing bodies, and their rules in that destruction. Some investigate what is novel in the death of Syrians. Others explore the evocations of demolished bodies’ images. They all, however, tell parts of the story of a total carnage, which changes bodies, buildings, and civil facilities, in a manner that is disturbing, ugly, abominable. 

More than that, this abominable change leaves the victims of atrocities, whether objects or living beings, unrecognizable. Beings hit by the atrocious seem impossible – examples from a parallel and hellish world. 

The loss of form, suffered by bodies, living environments, and Syria itself, is an invitation for us, the people experiencing the atrocious, to undertake a reformation. To reclaim our form or to re-form in a manner more conducive to life. Insofar as culture, thought, literature, and art are all worlds of form, they constitute the realm available to us to respond, to answer the call of a disfigured world, one skinned alive. This book examines our distorted form and aspires to contribute to our distinct re-formation.

Chapters

The first section of this book addresses the production of the atrocious and its producers. The second is concerned with its representations, our ways of thinking of it and talking about it, as well as the forms we come up with as a response to the formlessness and disfigurement. In addition, the second chapter concerns itself with unrepresentability, misrepresentation, and failures of representation. Insofar as it is an attempt to name our condition, the notion of the atrocious as such is only introduced in the second chapter. 

This is because the experience of the atrocious precedes its conceptualization and its representations. However, we do not possess this experience and therefore appropriate it without fully working on it and representing it, that is without “consulting” it, taking its opinion on our tools of expression and thought. It is no longer a feasible path for us, in the tenth year of experiencing the atrocious and formlessness, to persist in the same old methods of expression and representation, to hold onto the tools that preceded this last decade. 

Our pre-existing methods are insensitive to our new, horrific, experiences. They in fact normalize horror by embedding it into preexistent language and methods of representation. They therefore dull one’s sense of the atrocious instead of sharpening it. This book aspires to contribute to an awareness of the atrocious shortly after its unfolding, with the hope that awareness conjures moral outrage and encourages creativity and justice.

The first part of the book contains four chapters, the first of which concerns itself with what is in common among love, torture, rape, and annihilation. The first three notions, transgressions of boundaries, are consensual in the case of love, forced in the cases of torture and rape. The boundaries transgressed are not only physical ones, but also psychological, social, and universal. The second chapter, the Political Relations of Torture, explores torture as the fundamental political relationship in Assad’s Syria for nearly half a century. Thus, any discussion of the political in Syria must begin with torture. The Palmyran Shari’a’ contemplates the generalization, following the revolution, of Palmyra’s torture camp system all over Syria — the palmyrization of Syria. The Assadist method of killing is juxtaposed with its siblings, Nazism and Stalinism, attributing the regime’s genocidal potential to its sectarian structure that, after the revolution began, took a racist bent. Finally, A Grave for a Person’s Entire Being tackles the great shifts in the death of Syrians, in parallel to the transformations of their lives since rebelling against Assad’s authority. All four explore the production of the atrocious and say something about the mode of production.

The second section of the book comprises four chapters concerning representations of the atrocious and wonder about its possibility. The first, Pathways Regarding the Atrocious, tries to define the atrocious in terms of violence and formlessness, and discerns four different pathways to address the experience of the atrocious: outrage and indignation; silence and retreat; creativity; and violence. Staring into the Face of the Atrocious examines the Syrian debate on imagery of the atrocities. It argues, due to the fact that our anticipated emancipatory culture would be built upon our current destructive experiences, for the necessity of making such imagery available to the public, particularly if one does not suffer directly from the atrocious in reality. Wounds and Words contemplates the representation of our experiences and our crises. It distinguishes between two faces of representation: expression associated with experiences and formation related to heritage. The article examines the representation of our experiences within a broader conception of representation, one that includes political representation and the representation of our work, with incomes and revenues. Finally, Expression: Words, Violence, and Tears, attempts to answer the question of what happens when words fail. It examines the issue of freedom of expression from a novel angle, that of the death of expression, or the killing of expressive potential, rather than the repression of expression.

Politics of Meaning

This book is an attempt to provide additional elements for a theoretical framework that represents and defines “Assad’s Syria.” There is in this work, as with all works by the author, a substantial amount of politics. Politics is our condition and destiny. 

All the experiences associated with the atrocious are an invitation to retell, to revise what has already been told and to experiment with new words. In confronting the atrocious that strips us of form, the production of forms, meanings, concepts, representations, and expressions, is a fundamental field of struggle – the struggle for meaning.

Beyond this, the previous decade demonstrates that there is not politics in what is thought to be political in Syria (and perhaps in a larger area around Syria). To a great extent, politics as it is practiced here is washed out in torture and the torturous war by Assad and his protectors. It is heavily diluted in religion and its adherents, and in “jihad”  (for the Islamists’ Jihad is torture and forced disappearance, not only war). As for the traditional opposition (from whose milieu I descend) politics is consumed in divisions and mutual suffocation. There is, conversely, a real  politics of struggle for meaning, to name and to define what we have experienced, such that we do not separate knowledge from experience, or meaning from suffering. 

The bridge between meaning and suffering (the two have the same root in Arabic) is the most suitable basis on which to represent our experience and create a different cultural homeland, a republic of renewed meanings. However, this requires an effort of empathy and a shared sense of participation. This is precisely what is lacking in the handling of Syria and the Middle East by experts who share their interpretation of Syrian affairs in the west. This book considers itself in opposition to these experts and to the type of knowledge that they offer. It does not simply claim that other knowledge is possible. It argues that the point of entry into knowledge of Syria is Syrians’ most cruel, atrocious experiences.

By attempting to trace some of the facets of our most recent hardship, contemplating its representations and generating meaning from them, we render meaning itself a field of fundamental struggle, and work to develop a distinct and contrary politics – again the politics of meaning.

Such a politics could assist Syrians in reclaiming their experience, incorporating them into a historical effort to redirect Syria’s form, away from violence, complexity, and formlessness, towards a regenerative contemplation that produces concepts and forms. As a fundamental pillar of the politics of meaning, the representation of our experiences places us in a more empowered position, in regards to political representation and to speak up for ourselves.

Troy

It is unknown if Troy really existed, whether its ten-year war, much like ours, really occurred. The Iliad and Odyssey created a reality more powerful than history. Greek mythology, theatre, and a substantial body of thought extend their roots into the narrative of the Trojan War that Homer “created” (while it remains unknown if Homer, himself, was an actual historical figure). This is a grand example which cannot possibly be emulated. However, the purpose is exemplification, not emulation.

There is an example closer to our own: the Holocaust. The Nazi extermination of Jews has today become a founding myth, not only for Israel, but in a way for the post-war west. The Holocaust became a “civil religion” in the contemporary west, one that invokes degrees of sanction against those who deny or question it. In that way it is a religion with shari’a, similar to Islam. Prior to this the Holocaust was the subject of stupendous research, and it continues to be written about and contemplated. This is another example where exemplification is attainable even though emulation is not.

The exemplification hypothesis might claim that our experience over the past decade is a point of reference. That our representation of our experience is open to be referential, that the representation can clash with, narrate, and unpack the experience, creating a turning point in our sensibility, thought, and judgement. The cultural revolution which is repeatedly called for in this book is both a response to the referential character of our Trojan experience, as well as an endeavour to contain the failure of the political and social revolution. More true, perhaps, is that when its representation is not a referential one, prompting minds to return to it for decades and generations, addressing the depths of the self and instigating unending curiosity, the reference of experience is lost, and what remains of it is merely a confused memory of ambiguous pain.