Beren Birsaygili Mot
For many years, I have been teaching courses on Palestinian literature. In these lessons, I have always tried, alongside discussing literary works, to speak about the courage that made their writing possible. I have explored the lives of writers who resisted the occupation, expressed the injustice inflicted upon their people, and refused the silence imposed upon them. For we cannot fully understand the value of certain words in a poem or a story without knowing the circumstances in which they were written.
When I spoke about Ghassan Kanafani, for example, I did not limit myself to discussing Men in the Sun and Returning to Haifa. I also examined how the exile he experienced as a child, his life as a refugee, and his sense of responsibility toward his people shaped his experience as a writer. The silence that confronts us at the end of Men in the Sun went beyond the boundaries of a literary question in our lessons and became a question that we could direct toward our own lives. And when we read Mahmoud Darwish’s poems, we tried to understand the traces left in his language by his uprooting from his homeland, his being forced to prove his existence in his own country, and his continued life in exile.
Behind the voice we hear in the poem Identity Card was a human being defending his right to exist—by his name, his past, and his people.
The life of Fadwa Tuqan revealed another dimension of this courage. On her path toward poetry, the obstacles placed before her because she was a woman became intertwined with the pressures imposed by the occupation. Over time, her struggle to find her own voice developed into powerful literature expressing the pain and resilience of her people. In the poems of Samih al-Qasim, too, we saw the traces of a will that refused to surrender its word despite threats, imprisonment, and repression. When I told the stories of these writers, I emphasized that courage does not always appear in great acts that attract attention. Sometimes it appears in remaining on the same land; sometimes in repeating a forbidden word; and sometimes in recording a life that others want to be forgotten.
Ten days from now, we will begin, for the first time, our lessons in Syrian literature. I feel very excited because this academic program is being offered in our country for the first time, and hundreds of students have applied to take part in it. Over the course of six weeks, we will examine Syrian literature from within the struggle of its people for freedom. We will try to understand the lives we encounter in novels, stories, and poems in light of the historical circumstances surrounding them.
Our lessons will begin with the French occupation and the literature of that period. We will listen to the voice of a people trying, under colonial rule, to have a say in their own country, and we will discuss how the desire for independence found expression in literature. We will then move to the establishment of the independent Syrian state, the hopes that emerged with its creation, and the new horizons that opened before literature. Together, we will examine the years in which people believed in their ability to shape their own future, and how that belief gradually came to be disappointed as political life grew increasingly restrictive.
After that, we will discuss the Ba’ath Party’s takeover of culture alongside its takeover of the state. We will try to understand how literature managed to continue to exist in a country where the authorities determined what a writer was allowed to write, which words could be used, and which pain could be expressed. When we address imprisonment, Tadmor, and exile, we will look not only at those who were detained, but also at the lives of those waiting for them outside. We will remember the families who waited for years to receive news, the children who were frightened whenever someone knocked on the door, and the people who lowered their voices even when speaking inside their own homes. Through literary testimony, we will read how fear settled into the details of everyday life and how it affected people’s speech and silence, friendships, and dreams of the future.
From within this accumulation of experiences, we will discuss the path that led to 2011, and the Syrian revolution and exile. We will try to understand the pain and hopes from which the demand for freedom emerged, and how those forced to leave their homes carried, in their words, the life they had left behind. We will see that exile does not end after crossing a border; it remains alive in a person’s language, memory, and simplest habits. A house key, a family table around which the gathering was never completed, or a street to which one can no longer return may carry, within the texts we read, the story of an entire country.
For this reason, in our lessons we will focus only on writers who sided with the freedom of the Syrian people. We will speak about those who did not remain silent in the face of massacres committed against the people, who defended human dignity in opposition to the Ba’athist regime, and who were willing to pay the price for doing so. We will remember how these writers chose to remain alongside the oppressed rather than pass through the doors opened to them by those in power. Alongside their works, we will discuss what these choices cost them in their lives.
The Ba’athist Regime and Israel in the Same Position
In our literature lessons, the Ba’athist regime and Israel will stand in the same position. They will meet at that point where control is imposed by force over human life and freedom, where people’s voices are suppressed, and where they are prevented from telling their own stories. We will read together the pen that stood against occupation in Palestine and the pen that stood against the regime in Syria.
The Ba’athist regime and Israel will appear in our lessons as two obstacles confronting these two pens: two terrifying forces standing in the way of people’s ability to make their voices heard, preserve their memory, and defend their freedom—forces that cannot tolerate a people telling what they have lived through in their own words, and that seek to control even the name a people gives to its suffering. Forces that attempt to silence the voice rising from the ruins of demolished homes, the streets emptied of their inhabitants, and the people who never returned; forces that impose forgetting and silence upon those who remain.
In the works of writers who stood against them, we will read the courage of people who preserved their words despite all this repression. We will see the determination to keep alive the waiting of a mother, the years spent by a prisoner in darkness, and the memory of a home slowly fading from the memory of a child in exile. Because every person whose name is remembered in these works, every street restored to memory, and every loss whose story is told will open a door in the wall of silence that tyranny sought to build. In this way, the lives that were meant to be forgotten and the voices that were meant to be silenced will reach us, even years later.
Writers Who Defended the Ba’athist Regime and Zionist Writers in the Same Position as Well
This moral standard will also apply to writers who stood alongside those in power. A writer who defends the Ba’athist regime’s oppression of its people and makes excuses for its massacres will stand in the same position as a Zionist writer who legitimizes the Israeli occupation and the violence inflicted upon the Palestinian people. We will discuss how both used their pens to justify the force that caused suffering instead of giving voice to the human being experiencing it.
We will apply the same standard to writers who, after 1967, defended the consolidation of the occupation under the idea of “Greater Israel,” and to writers who, after the outbreak of the Syrian revolution in 2011, sought to strengthen the regime that suppressed the people’s demand for freedom. What determines the matter in both cases is the writer’s choice when confronted with power. There are pens that defend retaining occupied land, and others that defend the continuation of domination imposed upon a people. The memories of massacres in Gaza, Aleppo, and Eastern Ghouta will be present in our lessons. Therefore, there will be no excuse for any writer who stood against these victims. We will place such writers in the same category as Zionist writers.
Only Those Who Deserve to Remain in Memory Should Be Remembered
We will therefore begin our lessons in Syrian literature with a firm belief that we must speak about those who deserve to remain in memory. We will devote our six weeks to writers who never abandoned the defense of human dignity during the darkest days of their people’s history. We will devote them to those who spoke despite fear, those who told what they had witnessed after leaving prison, and those who carried the wounds of their country in their words while living in exile.
To those who chose to remain alongside the oppressed, even though they could have built safe lives for themselves close to those in power; to those who put their own futures at risk in defense of the lives of others—we will devote our hours to them alone.
As for those who sought to protect the reputation of killers while their people were being killed, those who concealed massacres behind every possible justification, and writers who praised those in power after their fellow writers had been exiled, we will not even mention their names. If such names appear in our lessons, they will appear only in connection with the support they gave to injustice.
Our attention will be directed toward writers who showed us the dignity of the pen. When we read them, we will speak, alongside the beauty of their words, about the courage they displayed in protecting those words. We will speak of the doors that were opened to them, the opportunities offered to them, and the silence expected of them. We will remember how, in the face of all this, they chose to give up their comfort rather than conceal another person’s suffering. The writers to whom we will give a place in our memory are those who were able to preserve the dignity of their pens during the most difficult times.
If they have passed away, we will remember them with mercy and seek to carry the words they left behind to new generations. If they are still among us, we will continue to follow their journeys with respect and listen to their voices.
I am excited, and so are we. There is little time left before we open the pages they wrote together with a large group of students. Their voices have reached us despite every attempt to prevent them from doing so. And now we are preparing to give them the floor in full.
