In Praise of Hatred
Page 31
She praises hatred because she perceives it to be, like the struggle for sterile purity, a means to power. She calls on it to save her from the ‘absurd compassion that threatened my inner strength’. She calls on hatred religiously; indeed there is a suggestion here that hatred is the common religious impulse linking up Syrian society. The regime, too, conflates compassion with weakness and violence with strength, as does the Islamist organization the narrator approaches first through women’s study circles. Her guide urges the girls ‘to hate all the other Islamic sects’.
* * *
The dictatorship in Syria gave secularism a bad name, because it was a forced and sectarian secularism, to fit with the general Middle Eastern postcolonial dispensation, in which minority groups ruled over majorities. The French had established an ‘army of minorities’ which took control of the state shortly after independence. In 1963 the military wing of the Ba’ath Party reached top position, and by 1970 Hafez al-Assad and his generals – from the Alawi community, an esoteric Shia offshoot – had reduced the Party to an instrument of absolute power.
At first the Assad regime was perceived as a popular nationalist, modernizing alliance between Alawi and Sunni peasants against the urban Sunni bourgeoisie. By the late seventies, however, unrest was bubbling in a population outraged by over-representation of Alawis in the security services, a corruption-crippled economy and, most of all, the regime’s 1976 intervention in Lebanon to aid Phalangist forces against the Palestinian-Muslim-Leftist alliance.
Syrian leftists and Islamists organized against the regime, which responded with savage repression. Soon opposition activity degenerated into an assassination campaign run by the Muslim Brotherhood’s armed wing. At the June 1979 Artillery School massacre, Alawi cadets – ‘the ones’, in Khalifa’s words, ‘who had descended from the mountains with limitless ambition and vitality’ – were separated from their Sunni fellows and shot in cold blood. The regime’s savagery culminated in the February 1982 massacre at Hama, where tens of thousands were killed, and in the slaughter of hundreds at Tadmor prison.
The poet Hassan al-Khayyer, an Alawi from the president’s village, summed up the tragedy:
There are two gangs: one is ruling in the name of patriotism but has none of it.
Another gang claims good faith; and religion forbids their sayings and acts.
Two gangs. My people, be aware of both! Both drink from the same evil waters.
The regime murdered al-Khayyer in prison.
* * *
From the eighties until 2011, Syrian society was effectively depoliticized. It became a state of fear, a kingdom of silence. Discussion of the ‘ahdath’ (‘events’) publicly was taboo. Stories were transported by whisper, in private.
So how brave and necessary it was to write a fiction of these ‘events’. In our narrator’s harsh euphemism, Alawis are ‘the other sect’ and the Ba’ath Party is ‘the atheist party’, but the historical references are unmistakeable. Khalifa plays one of the noblest roles available to a writer: he breaks a taboo in order to hold a mirror to a traumatized society, to force exploration of the trauma and therefore, perhaps, to promote acceptance and learning. He offers a way to digest the tragedy, or at least to chew on its cud. In this respect he stands in the company of such contemporary chroniclers of political transformation and social breakdown as Günter Grass and J. M. Coetzee.
The regime, which we now know hasn’t changed mentality since the eighties, didn’t recognize Khalifa’s achievement. In Praise of Hatred was published secretly in Damascus, where it remained available for forty days until the regime discovered its existence. Next it was published in Lebanon by Dar al-Adab, and was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, otherwise known as the Arab Booker, in 2008.
* * *
In purely literary terms as well as politically, the novel rises to a daunting challenge: how to represent recent Syrian history, which has often been stranger and more terrible than fiction.
For a start, it’s a perceptive study of radicalization understood in human rather than academic terms. It accurately portrays violent Islamism as a modernist phenomenon, a response to physical and cultural aggression which draws upon Trotsky, Che and Regis Debray as much as the Quran, and contrasts it with the more representative Sufism of Syrian Sunnis.
Next, it examines the dramatic transformations of character undergone by people living under such strain: the bucklings and reformations, the varieties of madness. The characters here are fully realized and entirely flexible – even our bitter narrator – and their stories are told in a powerful prose which is elegant, complex, and rich in image and emotion. There is musicality too in the rhythm of the episodes, the subtle unfolding of the plot.
If readers are imprisoned by the narrator’s perspective, they can escape into the many lesser stories within the frame. The detailed backgrounds and narratives of the characters met weave a realist fabric dense enough to rival that of Naguib Mahfouz. The range is broad: Turkish inn-keepers, English archaeologists, a Yemeni ex-Communist and a CIA officer who together enthuse over a future Islamic State, and a Saudi prince who wants a palace ‘that looks like his mother’s womb’. During the ‘events’ we meet death-squad members with skulls tattooed on their chests, kicking volumes of Shakespeare, and fugitives who evaporate into the night sky, and death becomes ‘as commonplace as a crate of rotten peaches flung out on to the pavement’.
Just a few days before sitting down to write this, I was lucky enough to meet Khaled Khalifa in Beirut. He was calm and effortlessly cheery, despite the fact that his arm was still in a sling, broken five weeks earlier when regime thugs attacked a funeral procession for the murdered musician Rabi Ghazzy.
Glancing from Khalifa’s novel to internet updates, it seems that nothing has changed since the eighties; the same massacres, tortures and battles unfold. It’s as if Syria is locked in a recurrent curse. But this twenty-first-century uprising is a popular revolution on a far greater scale than the one in the eighties; its revolutionaries arise from a far broader social spectrum. Instead of assassins and secret cells, there are grassroots organizers and defected soldiers. In the early months at least, the slogans on the streets focussed on freedom, dignity and national unity. Yet violence and the regime’s instrumentalization of sectarianism has reopened deep and rarely examined wounds. Khalifa’s plea for ‘absurd compassion’ is more necessary now than ever.
So this is a work of immediate importance, but Khalifa is keen to escape stereotypes. ‘I don’t want people to read my book because I’m an “oppressed writer” or a “writer who lives under dictatorship”,’ he told me. ‘I want them to read it because they’re interested in the story, and because they enjoy it.’
Both for its style (translated here beautifully) and for its human truth, In Praise of Hatred is a supremely enjoyable book.
Robin Yassin-Kassab
July 2012
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
While translating this novel in the second half of 2011, I experienced one of those rather neatly choreographed moments that rarely occur in real life. It would open a writer to the heinous crime of a ‘contrived device’ if it were to be included at a pivotal point of their plot. Towards the middle of In Praise of Hatred you will read a description of the ruling regime’s systematic cleansing of Aleppo’s university, and the arrest, interrogation and exile of those professors who were deemed to be insufficiently loyal. On the day I translated that particular passage, I turned on the news to hear the headlines – the second news item of the day was a story about Bashar Al Assad’s methodical purge of Aleppo University, complete with enforced resignations and the arrest and subsequent ‘disappearance’ of several members of staff. It was a grim reminder that, although the players may have changed, little else about Syria’s rulers has.
Readers may remember that before the current uprising against Bashar Al Assad, there was also an uprising against his father, Hafez, and it is this period of unrest that for
ms the focus of the novel. In the mid seventies Syria witnessed a marked increase in hard-line Sunni fundamentalism in response to the totalitarian excesses of the ruling elite, comprised mainly of individuals from the Alawite sect, a branch of Shia Islam. As the majority of Syria’s Muslims are Sunni, widespread resentment at this monopoly of power was a useful ally for Islamist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, who harboured ambitions of overthrowing Alawite rule and instituting a state under sharia’ law, of which they would naturally be leaders. After a series of increasingly violent attacks and reprisals by both the government and the Islamists, the city of Hama eventually declared open war on the Assad regime on 3 February 1982; in response to this challenge, Hafez gave his brother, then head of his security apparatus, carte blanche to deal with the insurgency as he saw fit. The result was the systematic destruction of one of Syria’s most beautiful cities, and the massacre of tens of thousands of its inhabitants. Aleppo was not immune to crackdowns during these years after an increase in violent activities and assassinations. A regular target for the authorities, the trauma it suffered from was a drawn-out and relentless affair, documented closely by the novel.
It is vital to remember that In Praise of Hatred is not a historical record, but a representation of a particularly painful episode of Syria’s history. Nevertheless, events draw heavily on real life and none of the atrocities committed by either side are fabricated; although no names of contemporary Syrian figures or organizations have been given, readers may recognize the oblique references to events and people from that time.
It is worth mentioning for those who don’t read Arabic that the English edition looks quite different to the original text. After consideration, the publishers have decided to make some editorial changes, taken in consultation with the author, and the result is a novel that ends differently from the original.
At the time of writing, the current uprising has passed its first anniversary. The Assad regime has been shelling the Baba Amru suburb of Homs; even the most conservative estimates of casualties are still numbered in the many thousands and Syrians live in terror of arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, where torture and murder are rife. In contrast to the uprising central to the novel, this insurgency does not have a stronghold in any particular political ideology; it is another manifestation of the wave of discontent that has swept the Middle East, where the populace has had enough of the dictators draining their countries dry. When Bashar assumed power in 2000 it was hoped that he would reform the draconian rule instituted by his father, but any hopes for a more open and democratic government had been dashed long before this brutal crushing of dissent. It is difficult to know what direction events in Syria will take, but readers may see that the Assads have always been willing to go to extreme lengths to retain their grip on power, and the mindless sacrifice of innumerable Syrian citizens is a price they are more than content to pay.
In Praise of Hatred is a study of the absence of love and understanding in a nation historically famed for its tolerance. Khaled Khalifa has said before that the novel does not espouse any political ideology, but was written as a plea on behalf of the Syrian people for tolerance and peace. At the present time Syria’s future is uncertain, and somewhat bleak. Nevertheless, as long as there are voices like Khalifa’s raised against hatred and championing humanity, there must still be a ray of hope for this beautiful, blighted country.
I would like to thank Elias Saba for very kindly providing a translation and background information for the poetry by Mutanabbi here. And of course, many thanks are due to the author for his constant patience and good humour, both when dealing with my questions, and in general.
Leri Price
March 2012
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Khaled Khalifa was born in 1964 near Aleppo, Syria. He is the fifth child of a family of thirteen siblings. He studied law at Aleppo University and actively participated in the foundation of Aleph magazine with a group of writers and poets. A few months later, the magazine was closed down by Syrian censorship. Active on the arts scene in Damascus where he lives, Khalifa has written four novels. His most recent, No Knives in this City’s Kitchens, won the 2013 Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Leri Price is a translator based in the UK. She has translated literature from Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Syria and Saudi Arabia.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
IN PRAISE OF HATRED. Copyright © 2008 by Khaled Khalifa. Translation copyright © 2012 by Leri Price. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.thomasdunnebooks.com
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First published by Dar Al Adab
First U.S. Edition: April 2014
eISBN 9781466853898
First eBook edition: March 2014