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SKeyes Center for Media and Cultural Freedom - Samir Kassir Foundation

When Syrian Cities Tell their Story

Wednesday , 17 January 2018
 
Artistic expression merged with the Syrian uprising on Friday, January 12 at The Creative Memory’s discussion on their book, “The Story of a Place, The Story of a People.”

Speakers at the discussion included Sana Yazigi, founder of the Creative Memory Project, Hazem Saghieh, a journalist and writer and Luqman Slim, a writer and director of Umam Foundation for Research and Documentation. Ayman Mhanna, executive director of the Samir Kassir Foundation, moderated the event at Dawawine, a restaurant and library in Beirut’s Gemmayzeh neighborhood.
The speakers tackled themes of memory, art, truth-telling and writing, and how these elements relate to the Syrian Conflict.
With the Syrian Civil War reaching its seventh anniversary, it is crucial to remember the events and the causes many Syrians have been standing up for. Remembering them not as mere memories, but as stories from different parts of the country that shaped the whole atmosphere of the war.

“This book is for us, the Syrians, for our children, our present, our history, our future,” said Yazigi. “It is also for those who participated in the revolution, because it is very easy to forget what happened. While working, we realized that the main information on some events and massacres was not enough, so our job was to add as much context as possible. It is basically for us, to remember in details the things we lived.”

The team who worked on the book focused on giving people a different way of learning about the war through artistic creativity. While there are many documents and articles related to the current raids on the Syrian city of Idlib, an example that Yazigi used in the conference, there is also a wall graffiti that tells the same story in a completely different manner. This goal of the book is to preserve the Syrian creativity in this time of conflict.

Saghieh continued on Yazigi’s point and emphasized on the importance of documentation: “documentation works on circulating the truth and confirming the events that took place. The problem arises when we are dealing with a regime whose documentation is based on lies and spreading lies (…). This is what I would call ‘anti-documentation.’”

He also argued that influencing people through lies is extremely dangerous. It is a symbol of degeneration for people all around the world. To him, United States President Donald Trump is making matters even worse for news as he is basing his work on lies and unverified information. Saghieh expressed his concern for the causes and movements that are being ruined due to this strong wave of misinformation.

To go back to the book itself, Slim said that the detailed description and additional documentation the book provided allowed him to not just read, but see the places and feel with the people who suffered while making these artistic pieces. He appreciated that the book is very clear in its plans and goals and that it makes the reader discover places in Syria he or she might have never heard of before.

The choice of words is critical when releasing a book. Saghieh pointed this out when he criticized Yazigi and her team’s overuse of terms such as “majzara” — massacre — in the description of several events. He claims a massacre connotes to genocide and would’ve preferred to use words such as “jarima” — crime — or “maqtal” — killing. He also focused on the term “shaheed,” which is the Arabic term for martyr. The constant use of this word made it lose its value, he believes.

Yazigi did not agree with her fellow speaker and justified her team’s work: “we spent a huge amount of time working on labels and words (…). We have to follow how the people themselves call a certain event so we can write in a language that is close to theirs. This is very important for future researchers to see how the Syrian people described what they lived. If they said ‘majzara’ and ‘shaheed,’ we have to respect that. When it comes a martyrs, however, we did change the term to ‘victims’ on several occasions, but there were some people whose deaths couldn’t be described as anything other than martyrdom.”

The choice of words influences how people will remember a story. An author cannot predict what a reader will retain from his or her book. Yazigi emphasized that The Story of a Place, The Story of a People is not a novel. It involves thousands of sources that sometimes contradict each other when talking about the same episode. They tried as much as possible to distance themselves from emotions to keep their work as objective as possible.

“I still believe that it is normal to have emotions in a book,” she added. “As for what memory remains, I believe everything remains. Every time I look at this book I tell myself that ‘We [the Syrian people] are here, we won’t forget.’”

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