Robin Yassin-Kassab writes: Samar Yazbek’s shocking, searing, and beautiful new book, The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria, describes three visits to Idlib province in northern Syria, an area liberated from the Assad dictatorship “on the ground but betrayed by the sky.”
In the face of regime repression, Syria’s non-violent protests of 2011 had transformed into an armed uprising in 2012. By August of that year, when the author — exiled Syrian novelist and journalist Samar Yazbek — made her first trip, Bashar al-Assad’s forces had been driven from the rural border zones. From a distance, however, via warplanes and long-range artillery, they implemented a policy of scorched earth and collective punishment.
So Yazbek finds her homeland changed to a landscape of burnt fields and cratered marketplaces, with boys picking through collapsed homes in search of things to sell and displaced families sheltering in tombs and caves. Death is ever-present. Gardens and courtyards have become cemeteries. Yazbek never shies away from the horror but builds something worthwhile from it, a record and a reflection, for death is ultimately “the impetus of writing and its source.”
Known today only for war, Syria is heir to an ancient civilization. Idlib province houses the remains of Ebla, a 5,000-year-old city, and is dotted with half-intact Byzantine towns and churches. The war’s “ruthless sabotage of history” has damaged these priceless sites. In Maarat al-Numan the statue of 9th-century poet Abu Alaa al-Maari, a native of the town highly respected in his own time despite his unusual atheism, has been decapitated by armed Islamists. And the wonderful mosaic museum at the same location has been bombed by the regime and looted by various militias.
But amid these ruins Yazbek encounters a people giving voice to their aspirations after half a century of enforced silence. In revolutionary towns the walls are “turned into open books and transient art exhibits.” Activists organize “graffiti workshops, cultural newspapers, magazines for children, training workshops, privately-run community schools.” In the context of state collapse these projects are born of necessity, but they also reflect the kind of society the revolutionaries hoped to build — inclusive, democratic, forward-looking — one which they are in fact trying to build, even as extremists fashion their own, much darker versions.
Through self-organized committees and councils, Yazbek is told, “each region now has its own administration, and every village looks after itself.” This — Syrians’ willed self-determination, Syrian creativity amid destruction — is the positive story so often missed in the news cycle, and it represents a hope for the future, faint though it is. The activists know they are working against insurmountable odds, but continue anyway. They document atrocities and reach out to international media, an endeavor that has so far failed to bear tangible fruit. When they can, they laugh — it’s “as though they inhaled laughter like an antidote to death.” [Continue reading…]
