by Mike Thomson
Another author whose books adorned the shelves of the secret library was Ali Ahmad Said Esber. Better known by the pen name Adonis, he is regarded by many as the greatest living poet in the Arab world. Though yet to win a Nobel Prize for Literature, he has been nominated almost every year since 1988. Many compare Adonis to T. S. Eliot, due to the equivalent impact he has had on Arabic poetry. ‘There is Arabic poetry before Adonis and there is Arabic poetry after Adonis,’ said the poet Samuel John Hazo.
Adonis’s legion of admirers praise him not just for the quality and artistry of his writing, but also for his creation of a whole new style of poetry. It is certainly fresh and compelling to me, even in the English translation. I only wish I could read Arabic properly, because to read his poems in the language he wrote them must take them to another dimension still. Adonis’s poetry is rooted in classical verse yet encapsulates the many profound issues now facing the Arab world. Take his poem, ‘A Time Between Ashes and Roses’, which explores the utter devastation felt by many in Arab countries after the defeat of the forces of Egypt, Syria and Jordan by Israel in the Six Day War of 1967:
A child stammers, the face of Jaffa is a child
How can withered trees blossom?
A time between ashes and roses is coming
When everything shall be extinguished
When everything shall begin19
Adonis is adored and respected by many, but never seems to court popularity. In fact, at various times in his life, his work has upset just about everyone. Recently, for example, he managed to anger both sides in his country’s civil war. In the early days of the uprising, Adonis criticised both President Bashar al-Assad, warning him against trying to ‘imprison an entire nation’, and then the opposition, whom he accused of ‘violent tendencies’. His questioning of the conservatism of some deep-seated traditions of Islam has also earned him death threats from some Islamic scholars, including calls for his books to be burned. Far from being shocked or cowed, Adonis said: ‘I am not sad about burning my books, because this is an old phenomenon in our history. We are fighting to found a dialogue and a debate in a peaceful way. Founding differences in opinions is a wealth source. This counterfeiting humiliates Arabic.’
The indomitable Adonis has always carried on regardless, despite the wrath his work has engendered, though this has often had to be done at a distance from his homeland. In 1971 he travelled to the United States where he also courted controversy. In one of his best-known poems, ‘A Grave for New York’, he dwelt on what he saw as the city’s desolation. The piece was roundly condemned as ‘violently anti-American’.
In 1980 Adonis moved to Paris to become Professor of Literature and has lived there for many years, a Syrian author in exile–a fate forced on so many of his countrymen who have dared to speak their mind.
Although I had heard of Adonis before, I knew little about his work until I talked to those who had built the secret library. Just about everyone mentioned him at one time or another, and suggested that I read his poetry. So while they were reading the works of authors such as Shakespeare and Agatha Christie in Arabic, I was busily making my way through books by Adonis in English. It was illuminating. I felt I was getting not only a kind of history lesson on Syria’s recent past, but also an insight into the way some major events might be seen by many Syrians.
Until talking to Sara and the other members of the library, I was also unaware of the extent of the role played by Syrian women in literature and poetry. Given the country’s patriarchal society, I had incorrectly assumed that their work would have struggled to be recognised. I soon discovered how wrong I was. As both Sara and Aysha told me, some of the finest wordsmiths from this region have been women, and their huge influence continues right up to this day. In former centuries, many were highly controversial and are now recognised as having been among the earliest feminists. Their works often focused on defying the expectations around women’s subservient role in their society. One of the most prominent female Syrian writers today is Maram al-Masri. Born in 1962, she is a Sunni Muslim from Latakia on the country’s north-west coast. In her early years, she adored listening to the popular music of the day, including foreign artists such as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. Maram also had a great passion for poetry and began penning her own verse as a child. In later life, her poems on feminism and female sexuality were to make her name, but many believe some of her finest works are those concerning her country’s ongoing civil war.
Maram’s son joined rebel forces when the revolution began in Syria. No fan of President Bashar al-Assad, she later said: ‘I was so happy. I would have felt so bad if he had said no.’ Being a mother, however, she must constantly have feared for his safety and this may have inspired several poems she has written about children caught up in the conflict, including this powerful one that makes me think of Aysha and her son:
Have You Seen Him?
Have you seen him?
Carrying his infant in his arms
advancing with magisterial step
head up, back straight…
As if the infant should be happy and proud
to be carried like this in his father’s arms…
If only he was alive.20
Syria’s civil war is the subject of her latest book, Elle va nue La Liberté. Written in French, it looks at the conflict from several different perspectives. Some of her poems are very down to earth and concentrate on the stark realities of warfare. I found one of them, ‘In a Small Suzuki Van’, haunting because of the way it mixes the ordinary, almost mundane things in life–a Suzuki van and a bag of bread–with the stark reality of war. It reminded me of scenes I had witnessed when covering wars: people cradling loved ones, their treasured husbands, wives, sons or daughters, now lost for ever.
Any discussion about prominent female Syrian poets would be incomplete without mentioning perhaps the most controversial of them all. Ahlam al-Nasr is in almost every way the polar opposite to Maram al-Masri; about the only thing they have in common is their hatred of President Bashar al-Assad. Al-Nasr is a fully committed supporter of IS and has earned the moniker ‘the poetess of the Islamic State’. I can only conclude that her books cannot have been very popular in Daraya because nobody I asked there had read any of them and it’s thought none was in the Secret Library. Given how unpopular IS was among the founders of the library, this fact did not surprise me.
I first heard about Ahlam al-Nasr through a group of anti-IS activists in the Syrian city of Raqqa, which had become IS’s caliphate capital in June 2014. One of them quoted to me, with utter contempt, an article she had written, praising the nobleness of the group’s black-clad fighters. To people who had witnessed IS’s appalling brutality, which included mounting the severed heads of those who had displeased them on fence posts, her words were preposterous. On reading up on her life I discovered that al-Nasr was born into a well-to-do, highly educated family. Her exact age is unknown but she was born in Damascus and is thought to be in her mid-twenties. She was encouraged to write poetry by her mother, a professor of law, who once proudly stated that her daughter ‘was born with a dictionary in her mouth’. Al-Nasr began writing in her teens. Her favourite subject then was the plight of the Palestinians. Her maternal grandfather, an imam, was a firm supporter of President Bashar al-Assad, yet far from following in his footsteps, the young al-Nasr joined the street protests calling on Assad to step down. It’s possible that her growing radicalism was fuelled by the brutal manner in which those demonstrations were crushed by the security forces.
In the autumn of 2014, al-Nasr fled first to the Gulf before travelling on to Raqqa, Soon after arriving, al-Nasr began posting her thoughts online. In 2014 she published a collection of poems called The Blaze of Truth, in praise of the jihadi world around her. Unlike IS’s gruesome videos of people being shot or beheaded, which were largely aimed at Westerners, her poems were targeted at other jihadists.
Al-Nasr went on to write a thirty-page defence of the barbaric burni
ng to death of the Jordanian pilot Muath al-Kasasbeh in early January 2015. While much of the world viewed Raqqa as one of the most brutalised and fear-ridden places on earth, to al-Nasr it was a pristine and pious paradise: ‘In the caliphate, I saw women wearing the veil, everyone treating each other with virtue, and people closing up their shops at prayer times… children played with sticks, pretending these were weapons they would use to fight heretics and unbelievers.’
Here was a great propaganda tool for IS. While they had plenty of young, tech-savvy video-making men, here was a female poet to proclaim their cause and woo more women to the caliphate.
One of the important roles of women in IS’s self-proclaimed caliphate was marrying its jihadists. Al-Nasr was happy to fulfil this task too. On 11 October 2014, soon after her arrival, she married an Austrian fighter in the Raqqa courthouse. It was a second marriage for her new husband, Mohamed Mahmoud, who was born in Vienna in 1985. Mahmoud, who had earlier burned his Austrian passport, had previously been a propagandist for al-Qaeda. If there had been a jihadi equivalent of Hello! Magazine to cover their wedding, they would surely have been invited. For this was a celebrity event, announced on jihadi networks across the caliphate. But with IS’s lands now lost, Ahlam al-Nasr’s future looks bleak. And it seems unlikely that other Syrian poets will be rushing to her rescue.
Neither, sadly, was there any realistic prospect of the outside world coming to rescue the people of Daraya. With the recent intervention of Russia on the regime’s side, as well as ongoing military assistance from Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia, the fortunes of President Bashar al-Assad were improving by the end of 2015. The once iconic FSA, though still strong in Daraya, was losing cohesion across the country as a whole, largely due to the growing influence of Islamist and other extremist rebel factions. Ever since its formation in 2011, the FSA had functioned as an umbrella group for different forces, but these were now becoming ever more numerous and disparate.
I was asked many times by people in Daraya why the international community, which had often spoken out strongly against Assad, failed to combine their words with action. I told them that fears were growing in the West that money and weapons given to the FSA might fall into the hands of extremist groups, such as IS or the al-Nusra Front. But we don’t have groups like that in Daraya, they would tell me indignantly, outraged that the outside world did not understand this. Many were unaware of the growing influence of extremist groups elsewhere in Syria, marooned as they were in their besieged town.
Yet, despite all this, Daraya’s secret library continued to generate hope. It also helped its people to feel connected with a world that seemed to have deserted them. Omar Abu Anas summed up what I am convinced were the inner thoughts of many of those around him. ‘Books motivate us to keep on going. We read how in the past everyone turned their backs on a particular nation, yet they still made it in the end. So we can be like that too. They help us plan for life once Assad is gone. So we are in the process of planning what comes next. We can only do that through the books we are reading. We want so much more than Assad. We want to be a free nation. And hopefully, by reading, we can achieve this.’
Chapter Ten
During a brief break from reporting the troubles of the Middle East, in January 2016, I was on a train hurtling through the frosty English countryside to see relatives in the West Country. It can’t have been much after four in the afternoon, but the pale wintry light was already fading. The scene outside my window had a rather bleak, monochrome look. Could it really be that dark already, I wondered. Before I could come to any conclusion, my thoughts were interrupted by a voice to my right. ‘It this seat free?’ I was asked. It probably didn’t look that way, given the pile of research notes covering it. When I had moved all the paperwork out of the way, a smartly dressed woman sat down beside me. ‘I think this is yours,’ she said, handing me my copy of The Times, open on an article on the Syrian civil war, which had slipped onto the floor by her feet. ‘It’s ghastly, isn’t it,’ she muttered, looking at the photo of the devastated urban landscape that dominated the page. I nodded in agreement, adding that there seemed no end in sight to the suffering of the population there. I mentioned the people I had been talking to by phone in Syria over recent months and the terrible scenes they had described. She sighed and said, ‘I imagine it’s different when you live in a country like Syria, isn’t it, not like it would be for somebody like you or me. They must have got used to it by now.’
This was truly shocking to me. How could anyone, anywhere, ever, ‘get used’ to being bombed, shot at and starved? Yet this woman, who clearly meant no harm to anyone, appeared to think this was a rational idea. Perhaps, as I reflected later, it is just the courageous way people in war zones get on with their lives that might give that strange impression. And it was true to some extent–the resilience of people in Daraya, and so many others elsewhere in Syria, never ceased to amaze and humble me. Sometimes I would call Anas or Abdul Basit and all I could hear were explosions. Yet they rarely flinched, unless the explosions were so close that they could feel the heat of the blast. Even after having to step over bodies in the streets, breathe through the reek of chemical waste, or forage for food, life went on as it always did in Daraya. When the sun rose the next day and the day after that, its people just carried on. Nobody seemed to ask what they had left to live for. Not when death could come so quickly.
Yet I still wondered, how could such things ever be normal, however often they happened around you? Perhaps it was just that people simply became a little more able to cope with such horrors when they experienced them so frequently. But in a world where a kind of survival mode operated most of the time, what room would there be for other things in life? Chief among those must surely be romance. Many of the people I had got to know in Daraya, for instance, were young men in the prime of their lives. Yet so far none of them had even raised the subject of relationships or marriage. Might this, I wondered, be because in their often nightmarish existence there might be no time for such things? I found that hard to believe. We are, after all, dealing here with one of the strongest human motivations.
It took me quite some time to work up the courage to ask about this topic. First, this was a war zone and many women had left. Also, those I had come to know seemed tolerant and open-minded, but almost all were strongly religious. I feared some might view enquiries about their love life as frivolous and inappropriate. But given my belief that we human beings are all essentially the same at heart, I decided to go ahead anyway. Abdul Basit, who appeared to wear his heart on his sleeve, seemed like a good person to start with.
It turned out that I needn’t have worried. True to form Abdul Basit was relaxed about the whole issue and happy to answer my questions. He told me that he was already engaged, though getting married was clearly going to be difficult. His bride-to-be, Zohour, lived only a couple of miles away, but it might as well have been a thousand. Her family home was in the neighbouring town of al-Moadamyeh, so close to Daraya that they could almost have waved to each other. But due to the siege they were now separated by a wall of steel. It was touching to hear the change in Abdul Basit’s voice when he spoke about his fiancée. There was a softness, a warmth in his tone that had not been there before. I settled back to listen as he told me how their relationship had come about.
Abdul Basit’s parents, who had been living with him in Daraya before the siege, had often talked of plans to find him a wife. But, perhaps because of the rapid descent into war, this had not been mentioned since. In fact, there had been such a long hiatus that Abdul Basit had almost forgotten about the subject. Then, out of the blue, he received a phone call from his sister. She was ten years older than him and had always been a bit like a second mother. This, he told me, is how the conversation went:
‘“Tell me what sort of qualities you are looking for in the woman you would like to marry,” she asked down the line in a matter-of-fact way. I didn’t know what to say. I mean, it was all a bit su
dden for me to just rattle off a wish list for the girl of my dreams. So I promised to get back to her. Later that afternoon I sat down with pen and paper.’
After much thought and crossings out, Abdul Basit finally assembled a list of desirable qualities for his perfect wife. Not, he quickly told me, that he ever expected to find one, should such a woman even exist. But he had done his best. Even if the future Mrs al-Ahmar had only a couple of the attributes he had asked for, she would still be quite a catch. So, long list in hand, he had called his sister back. That same evening his mobile rang. Had she struck gold already? Surely she could not have found anyone scoring so many ticks on his list that quickly. To his surprise it was his mother on the line. Abdul Basit told me that he was glad to be sitting down when he heard what she had to say.
‘“We have found the woman you are looking for, no doubt about that at all.” “This can’t be possible,” I said to her, “I’ve only just given my sister the list! I assume this must be somebody you already had in mind, but kept secret until you saw my wish list?” “No,” my mother replied, “this woman is even better than what you asked for.” At that moment I knew this was it, there would be no escape!’
Abdul Basit had the feeling that even if this chosen woman hadn’t ticked any boxes on his list, she was now set to be his wife, come what may. Not that he really minded, as he had a feeling that he was going to like her. Yet he felt uneasy–she didn’t live in Daraya, so how was he supposed to meet her? And what future could their relationship have when they were living in two different places? He didn’t know it then, but his parents had already devised a plan. As a young man of fighting age he was unlikely to get through the regime’s checkpoints without being arrested, but such a crossing should be less of a problem for middle-aged people like them: ‘You see, Mike,’ Abdul Basit told me, smiling, ‘we Muslims have a different way of getting engaged than you in the West. To begin with, neither me nor my prospective fiancée played any direct part in what followed. Instead, my parents went to visit her parents and they proposed on my behalf.’