Syrian intellectuals: Suzukis and jet planes

Setting aside vain hope and rosy dreams, the Syrian revolution of today was never going to be the same as the one that began last March. We do not live in a time of ideology, which sends millions scurrying out from their boltholes onto the street. Nor is it a time of revolutionary leaders around which the masses coalesce. The Syrian people, oppressed for nearly half a century decided to rise up of its own accord, an act without any specific temporal or locational symbolism. The first spark in Deraa passed to Homs and then on to Aleppo, and Syria’s other towns and cities. The streets and squares filled up, spontaneously erected banners instructed tyranny to “Leave!” and the Syrian people embarked on their first attempt to become a people whose will was uncoupled from the tattered institutions of the Baath.

Since March 15, Syrian culture has been steadily revealing itself to the Syrian people, and with it, its torch bearers: the intellectuals themselves. The moment in Old Damascus, which saw a number of young cultural types gather together to protest, marked the moment that we realized that the Syrian intellectual—whether theorist or observer, politician or writer—must assume his rightful place in the street or at least, keep step with it. Sure enough, we witnessed many intellectuals march in through the revolution’s broad gates, proclaiming their positions and many of them were, and still are, subjected to abuse and detention by the regime’s security forces.

At the same time, however, we witnessed certain prominent Syrian intellectuals and artists take feeble stances, stances that varied between outright support for the regime, fraudulent neutrality and a failure to appreciate the sacrifices made by the Syrian people. This changeable spectrum uncovers a structural weakness at the heart of Syrian culture and its intellectuals, one that calls for an extensive critical review of national culture during the long years of Baath rule, a period that riddled it with flaws and left it gasping on a sandbank, cut off from history. The person who treats Syrian blood with disdain, who considers himself above his people’s tragedies and pain—the slippery collaborator—is now exposed on the world stage: an exemplar of the Syrian intellectual.

The Syrian intellectual before the revolution

Since the 1970s Syrian culture has passed through the hands of two quite different generations, who wasted no time in joining forces with the dawn of the new millennium. The first is the generation of politicised intellectuals who were tucked away out of sight in the regime’s prisons for more than two decades. The second is a younger generation (relatively speaking), the cultural and ideological heirs to the legacy of the former. Recently a third generation of Syrian intellectuals has stated to emerge: a generation that belongs to the revolution; the children of the audio-visual age.The first generation was politically active in the 1970s and 1980s, part of the movement intractably opposed to the Baath regime. Yet this group, though espousing ideologies at odds with that of the authorities, was nevertheless very far from supporting freedoms, democracy and civil society. These terms had very different interpretations to the nationalists and Marxists who had sprung, in turn, from a previous generation that had itself produced Baathist thought and brought Al Assad senior to power. Some believed that the answer was a communist regime; others believed that only through a blend of nationalism and Marxism could Palestine ever be liberated, and so on.

The intellectuals of this generation emerged from their prison cells in the 1990s to form a read-made cultural elite divided between those who kept out of the public eye and those who the regime regarded as useful for their superficially “opposition” policies. A very few maintained their active political opposition to the regime, first through various party formations and ideological configurations, then via the Damascus Declaration and the revival of the civil society movement. However low key they were, they ended up paying the price for their positions and a large number of them either returned to prison or became persecuted. 

The second generation adopted the approach of swearing off politics and calling for “pure” (un-politicized) culture, music to the ears of any dictatorship. As a consequence members of this generation were to fill important senior cultural posts overseen by the regime and fill the airwaves of the state-run media. Many of them went out of their way to sing the regime’s praises and strike out against its enemies whenever the opportunity arose.

The seminars and forums of the Damascus Spring in 2001 represented a fledgling attempt to create some kind of political movement in the country, an attempt that was aborted when the authorities shut the forums down and imprisoned a number of intellectuals. At this juncture the names of opposition intellectuals who had not yet given up the struggle came to light, intellectuals who continued to write and remain active despite the attentions and sometimes the pursuit of the security services.

The intellectual and the revolution

The slap the Syrian people dealt the cultural elites is still making their heads spin to this day. The equation suddenly changed and the poets, writers and thinkers were left trailing far behind. The silence and fear that had been the bane of Syrian intellectuals for decades were cast aside by others, the ones who filled the squares and told the tyrants to “Leave!” without recourse to theorizing or backroom meetings. Spontaneity laid down the gauntlet to the intellectual’s stagnation and drab routine.

It is only natural that the Syrian intellectual be asked to play some role, whether loyalist or opposition, either because the intellectual stands clear of the herd who do not possess his unique abilities or because of his unparalleled suffering in the regime’s prisons. But what was set in motion on March 15, 2011, proved much more severe; what the Syrian people subsequently endured made the intellectuals’ sufferings seem like luxury in comparison, nothing besides the tragedy of a mother from Homs losing her children and seeing her home razed to the ground.

The street returned the intellectual to his proper place. It summoned him from his cultural bubble and brought him back into politics, forcing him to make a choice between tyranny or standing with the people in the street. The inescapability of this choice created a stark dividing line: on the one side the spectre of losing privileges and the siren call of sectarian and regional loyalties, on the other a revolution that represented a total break with everything the intellectual had ever written.

Nevertheless, they joined the revolution in considerable numbers. Despite their lack of experience and primitive approach, intellectuals of the first generation rose to prominence as politicians, divided in turn between those operating within Syria and those abroad. Those from the second generation acted as observers and commentators, lending the uprising a cultural veneer by contributing critiques and voicing reservations characterized by a minority perspective. The third generation found its place on the street, demonstrating, reporting, photographing and working as activists. They were wholly absorbed in the revolution and at its service.

The wise man of the revolution and the godfather from Qassabeen

Amid the clamour over intellectuals’ positions and their loyalty or opposition to the revolution, amid the emergence of new cultural groups and the rise and fall of names, certain cultural figures have attracted a disproportionate share of controversy regarding their stance on the Syrian revolution. None more so than Ali Ahmed Saeed Esber, better known as the poet Adonis, who for all the years of the Baath dictatorship has been regarded as the godfather of Syrian culture.

There are constant comparisons drawn between those intellectuals who support and praise the regime and those who belong to the revolution and theorize on its behalf. Such comparisons deal with two clearly stated and incompatible positions. A more useful comparison, however, is between the intellectual who conceals his position and the one who states his openly: between the intellectual in the street and the one holed up in his ivory tower (regardless of whether they both profess the same beliefs). It should come as no surprise to find Yassin Al Hajj Saleh’s name coming up in this regard.

Yassin is one of the very few intellectuals not to have abandoned politics. He may be the only writer who has concerned himself exclusively in recent years with freeing Syria from dictatorship. From the time he got out of prison in 2000 he has dedicated himself to writing, using his articles to try and deconstruct dictatorship and outline the problems inherent in Syrian society and the obstacles to its advancement. Yassin was for the revolution before it even began and he was there to accompany it the day it began, as though he had been expecting it.

It was Yassin who first earned the nickname “Suzuki intellectual”. He took to the street himself, calling for the downfall of the regime, before embarking on a new series of articles that anthologized Syria’s current reality and attempted to provide a theoretical underpinning of events written from within not only Syria, but from within the revolution itself. Yassin refused to be a member of anything other than the revolutionary youth, to belong to anything other than the street, and he refused to leave Syria.

A few months after the revolution began, he was forced to leave his home to hide in one of the revolutionaries’ safe houses, moving with them from hideout to hideout, sharing their thoughts and experiences, not as some sort of intellectual guide, but as a true revolutionary, whose only home is the street, scrambling onto the back of a Suzuki to escape from the shabiha.

Yassin, who spent fifteen years of his life inside the regime’s jails, did not run away or turn his back on public life when he got out. While others continued to sniff after positions in regime-run institutions (after showing the necessary deference to the authorities: the political prisoner is stripped of all civil rights) Yassin al-Hajj Saleh cast his own optometrist’s certificate aside, in the conviction that the pen is mightier than the scalpel. Despite his many enemies and the plethora of criticisms he faces daily, Yassin remains a unique case in the Syrian cultural scene. He is an intellectual who has the courage to throw off the protective clothing of cultural cliché and embrace the revolution unreservedly. Because he has spent the last decade devoted to the study of Syrian society (unlike his contemporaries who have been isolating themselves from reality) he has shown not the slightest hesitation in giving his wholehearted support to the revolutionary movement and taking up the slogans and demands of the street. The man from the city of Raqqa never took the easy way out. He did not step back to study and analyze the situation like a typical intellectual might: instead, he is a revolutionary, identical to all those Syrians who took to the streets to demand the downfall of the regime.

Quite simply, Yassin is a Syrian who wants to bring down the tyrannical regime that rules his country, an attitude that no other intellectual took up with comparable speed. Yassin is not afraid of society because he is of it. He is not alienated and isolated in his coffee shop or garret. Yassin’s articles are the most followed commentary on events in Syria, and his youthful, optimistic presence on Facebook is similarly popular.

He writes with two distinct voices. The first provides a cultural and political gloss of what the Syrian people want: a translation of the revolutionary movement—its slogans, its evolutionary changes and all its little details—into a formal cultural-political language which analyses its emotive cry for freedom and creates an epistemological space for the uprising and its baggage, from banners to combat units. The second voice theorizes about the state and politics. Yassin employs it to develop an overview of the Syrian situation and propose constructive ideas designed to correct the course of the movement and better understand it. Furthermore, it provides a reading of political developments in the region and internationally and analyses them to understand how they might affect Syrians. In both of these voices one senses his constant fear for Syria’s future and he is continuously making efforts to construct plausible scenarios for the creation of a state that honours the rights of citizenship, public freedoms and justice. Yassin the troublemaker always finds time to jot down comments on Facebook, to provoke and to engage with responses in exchanges that often grow heated. He has many devoted young followers on social media sites who call themselves “Yassin’s shabiha”, coopting one of the many insults that have been leveled at them in the past.

Yassin learnt that he had received the Prince Claus Award while holed-up in hiding from the regime. He dedicated it to all imprisoned and martyred Syrians and to the revolutionaries. The wise man of the revolution, as he’s been called, wants nothing for himself. He has joined no opposition blocs nor has he left Syria. He possesses no passport and does not regard himself as a man of politics: he is rather a revolutionary, a writer who dreams of a civil, democratic country in which all Syrians can live together without fear.

If Yassin alHajj Saleh’s name comes as no surprise, nor should that of Ali Ahmed Saeed Esber. First a Sufi, then a Syrian nationalist and most recently a devoted seeker of literary acclaim, the man now known as Adonis was born in the village of Qassabeen on the Syrian coast. With a resume chock full of literary, intellectual and critical achievements, and positions both firmly held and decidedly changeable, Mihyar Al Dimashqi’s lyricist at last found international recognition, becoming a cultural superstar feted here and invited there. For forty years Adonis has lived in what he calls “the lands of colonialism”, an honoured guest of the French government. He has perfected the art of networking and winning prizes and medals and has long since abandoned the role of intellectual. He has transformed into a glittering star, vanishing here and surfacing there. Cultural affairs have been reduced to lightweight “poetical” pronouncements that brush the surface of weighty issues, like Palestine for instance. He is too grand for petty details, like a teacher who numbers his remarks so his pupils might memorize them more easily. Adonis has started to quote himself: he sees nothing but his own beautiful and elegant formulations.

Anyone who has distanced themselves from Syrian society for fifty years is naturally going to find themselves in a position like that of Adonis today. It is no different to asking a French intellectual to take a stand on events in Syria. Adonis found himself before a people who did not know him, a people who were making history and shattering the chains that he had accepted his whole life. The first person he chose to address was the president, praising him and sharing his fears of extremism and fundamentalism. Those close to him chided him and asked him to take a closer look at the history of the Baath Party. With the utmost superficiality, Adonis appeared before the Syrian people to direct his words to a regime that none of them accorded the slightest legitimacy and proclaimed that the problem did indeed lie with the Baath Party. If he had watched a single demonstration he would have known that the Syrian people had already left that rusted old institution far behind and that their problems had nothing to do with it or its shopworn principles. This profound thinker on the history, culture and myths of the region did not seem to realize that Syrians were suffering from a lack of dignity and freedom. The poet’s head had never felt a military truncheon slam down upon it; he had never received kicks and punches like the old man in the video clip, beaten as he wept and pleaded.

Thousands of martyrs, millions displaced, orphaned and left homeless, cities and villages razed: all of it worth nothing compared to the suffering of a poet expelled from the Arab Writers Union. With complete shamelessness, the Nobel nominee saw fit to remind Syrians of the time he was arrested while in the Syrian army and chucked out of the writers’ union. Not a single, plainspoken word to console Syrians for their sufferings: everything was wrapped in evasion and ambiguity. He seemed incapable of being straightforward, of saying, like other Syrians might: “God have mercy on Syria’s martyrs.” God forbid. This is the way the commoners’ speak; it’s not in Adonis’s dictionary, that thick and oleaginous tone, offspring of surrealism and metaphysics. The poet prefers floating, detached phrases, phrases that transcend the tangible and perceived. He is not, after all, concerned with details, but makes do with poeticized scraps of political vocabulary: a dense self-contained whole, impervious to analysis and precision, especially when it comes to one of the most complex current events in the world.

Adonis, who left Syria as a young man, has become cut off from the country and its grief. He only sees Syrians from above, an orientalist criticizing their Islamism, proclaiming their imminent demise and the fruitlessness of trying to shift them. Why should he be otherwise when they are so ignorant and backward? He has no wish to concern himself with the details of an un-secular people. Even the dead must be secularists if they want his attention; the blood dripping from a child’s cut hand must be secular; remote cities and villages in the Syrian countryside must forget the regime and come out in support of separation of religion and state if he is to favour them with a swift glance over his shoulder. But an un-secular people perishing beneath hordes of regime tanks and artillery bombardment do not even deserve to have Ali Ahmed Saeed Esber say nothing that they must change. Must the mother hiding her children from the falling shells teach them how to separate religion and state and teach them Adonis’s poems? Must Syrians everywhere chant his verses? Instead of leaving the mosque must they walk out of the Madraj Jabla Al Athari  (the Archeological Jabla Stadium) where Adonis’s festivals in praise of the supreme leader are held? The master of the fixed and the mutable pictures society as a monolithic entity. From his lofty seat he asks it to change itself, to make a break with its accumulated heritage of cultures and customs and become secular in the blink of an eye, while he sips his morning coffee in Paris.

Today, Adonis only mentions Syrian society through the prism of the al-Assad regime. This shorthand symbol of Syrian culture is equivalent to the symbol of the leader as shorthand for Syrian culture and politics. Arrogance, disdain and paternalism; the constant delusion of knowing everything, of controlling everything; contempt for man, for his blood and his sacrifices. Anything anyone else says is irrelevant and does not deserve the slightest attention. He is the master of absolute knowledge, the god of poetry: everything begins with him and ends with him. The common herd, idiots and fundamentalists by nature, understand nothing, while intellectuals float about proclaiming in the name of the poetical giant, envying him and trying to imitate him. This cultural thuggery and paternalism mirrors the thuggish policies practiced by the regime in the region for decades now. And further, both the regime and Adonis complain of extremism and fundamentalism. The regime uses this as a pretext to exterminate everything. Adonis, meanwhile, sees ignorant, backward societies that must secularize if they are to deserve anything at all. The victim is no better than the executioner when he is ignorant and un-secular. Adonis’s detachment from reality is like that of the regime, like the pilot who drops his bomb without knowing where, or on whom, it will land. This is what he is. Perhaps he has no desire to enter into greater detail about Syrians, because he is fundamentally ignorant on the subject, and has nothing to say about Bannash, or Dael or Al Atareb. [1]All he knows are his fears for the country’s minorities, in which peculiar case his zealous secularism does not seem to have affected his compassion.

Although Yassin is a member of the second generation of intellectuals and Adonis belongs to the first, a comparison between them, far from being too obvious to bother with, is in fact a duty. Together they represent two prominent examples of the Syrian intellectual. The first has spent half his life in the regime’s prisons and the other half hiding from its brutality. He has chosen change and the street, to be at one with society and those around him. He debates their issues and speaks their language. He is the organic intellectual, a product and a part of his environment, whose pen is dedicated to the cause of a plural and democratic homeland. The second lives a life of bourgeois contentment. He has chosen to keep his status and privileges. He has chosen to flee in advance and to hide behind metaphor and language. He is evasive and reluctant to accept the slightest degree of responsibility towards his people.

Yassin Al Hajj Saleh writes as a worker, a fighter and a demonstrator. He writes, not in anticipation of reward, but because he believes it is the path to his dream of a new Syria. Ali Ahmed Saeed is a poet and thinker, a cliché of Syrian culture with which we are all familiar, a cultural personage who has done his bit and now waits around for a Nobel prize.

On the other side of the tracks from Adonis and his jet plane, shuttling between Beirut and Europe, the Suzuki intellectual is in hiding with the revolutionary youth, on the run from regime. By candlelight he writes his articles, unaware of the cloud that passes by the jet plane’s window up above, nor the golden beams that gild the cloud to come. Yassin Al Hajj Saleh writes from a much lower vantage point, kilometres lower in fact. He writes from beneath the rubble addressing the heavens. He writes from within the revolution and to it. He theorizes for it and deals with its issues, concerned with every detail, with the significance of every drop of Syrian blood that falls. He is a son of the revolution and reality both. Far from the cultural posturing of celebrities he hides from MiG bombing runs, the very planes that Adonis’s jet passes by as it circles over a Damascus aflame. The poet sees a cloud!

--