Its a revolution: the cultural outpouring

fueled by Syrian war

miriam cooke is Braxton Craven Professor of Arabic
Cultures at Duke University and holds a PhD in
Arabic Literature from Oxford University.
Of all the Arab Spring countries, Syria has been the
most artistically and culturally prolific. Smartphone
videos, feature films, art photography, oil paintings,
watercolors, songs, and theatrical plays have flooded
the Internet over the past four years.
The wall of fear that had crushed the souls of the people under the draconian regimes of
Hafiz and Bashar al-Assad has indeed broken. Not only can the name of the president be
mentioned, unthinkable before the revolution broke out in 2011, Bashar is consistently
ridiculed and even openly attacked. The YouTube finger puppet series Top Goon shows
Beeshu (a diminutive nickname for Bashar) to be a butcher and a coward. Caricaturists
are having a heyday; in this image Amjad Wardeh depicts Beeshu getting high after an
explosion as he snorts a noxious mix of crushed bones and building dust.

The only materials to be exported from inside Syria, YouTube shorts are estimated to
number 300,000. Made by professionals and amateurs, they provide an invaluable archive
of the events and atrocities from the beginning of the revolution. Moreover, they are
beginning to create a new audio-visual language that contains techniques of immediate

cinema and eye-witness reports.1 All are powerful, but two are particularly poignant:
Jasmenco and Art of Survival.
While Facebook played a vital and well-advertised role in disseminating information and
mobilizing protests, its role in providing a home for artist collectives has not been
acknowledged. Facebook hosts countless sites with countless works of art produced
inside and outside the country. A treasure trove of oppositional art is The Creative
Memory of the Syrian Revolution site .2 It features hundreds of cartoons, banners,
murals, drawings, graffiti, calligraphy, sculpture, design, stamps, photography, cinema,
video, music, theater and radio from 2011.
The Syria ArtSyrian Artists page, opened on 28 September 2012, specifically calls
itself a Museum/Art Gallery. Despite that apparently exaggerated comparison with the
stone structures of the worlds great capitals, this museum/gallery is everything it
promises to be. Moreover, some of the art is for sale. Like conventional gallery owners,
the administrators of Syria ArtSyrian Artists choose the artists whose work interests
them, and they invite the artists to contribute some of their work. The utopian goal, art
photographer Khaled Akil now in Istanbul said, is to unite Syrians through art.3
In what has come to be an expected caveat in Syrian aesthetic projects, the Syria Art
site eschews ideological, ethnic, religious or political beliefs or issues. Our motto: We do
neither politics nor religions, we do ARTS. Quoting Kahlil Gibran, they write: We live
only to discover beauty. All else is a form of waiting.4 This desire for political blindness
has become critical at a time when so many new political groups are forming and it is less
and less clear who is an ally, who a friend and who an enemys ally. The artists party
affiliation does not matter only how a piece of art renders the humanity and pain of the
crisis and says No to the violence whoever the perpetrator.
Surfing the several Facebook pages dedicated to Syrian art, one meets hundreds of artists,
the dark matter of Syrias current aesthetic production. These pages marry the real to the
virtual by inviting visitors into the artists studios and to their exhibitions. But these pages
do something else that may be as important as the site itself; they create communities of
visitors who like the images and the videos. With their names and faces listed next to
the liked image they become friends. As such, they can discuss the art as though at a
literary salon and they can also, when necessary, intervene on behalf of the exhibited
artist when she is in trouble, or, on behalf of the page when it is censored.

1 Zahir Amrain & Shad Ilyas The Incomplete Syrian Cinema in Zahir
Amrain et al. eds. Suriya tatahaddath: Al-thaqafa wa al-fann min ajl alhurriya Beirut: Dar al-Saqi 2014, 264
2See http://www.creativememory.org/?cat=104 accessed 17 June 2014
3 Conversation with Khaled Akil, Istanbul, 5 September 2014
4

https://www.facebook.com/thesyrianart/info accessed 4 September 2014

There are real galleries also. Notably, the Damascus Ayyam Gallery that moved operations
to Beirut, Dubai, Paris and London after 2011. The curators have supported the work of
Syrian artists by arranging numerous exhibitions. One of the most-often-displayed artists is
Tammam Azzam. He developed a series of digital images made up of 19th and 20th century
European paintings by such masters as Klimt and Matisse superimposed on found images of
recently shelled buildings. Thanks to art dealers promotion of his revolutionary art, his
works are now fetching thousands of dollars. He is not alone at a time when art from Arab
Spring countries has acquired surplus value and dealers are scrambling to discover new
lucrative art.
In the aftermath of the early euphoria, despite the overwhelming odds against them, artistactivists continued to create, hoping that their art, fiction, films, testimonials and poetry
might make a difference and help to uproot the oppressive regime of Bashar al-Assad. While
a few have remained inside, most Syrian artists fled to Dubai, Beirut, Istanbul, London and
Paris where they have produced works that bear testimony to their belief that the revolution
is on-going. The regime has arrested many of the artists who stayed. With a war on its
hands, it is remarkable that goons are charged with finding and punishing those who dare to
oppose its brutality. But this reality testifies to the moral authority that still inheres in Syrian
artists work.
The tragedy of the Syrian revolution can be read in the numbers: at least 220,000 dead;
millions internally displaced people; unknown number of disappeared; and about 3
million refugees. Living in camps in Turkey and Jordan and scattered throughout
Lebanon and making up a quarter of its total population, some of these refugees are
making art and theater.
At the end of March 2014 in Jordans Zaatari camp, 100 Syrian children performed for
fellow refugees scenes from Shakespeare, including King Lear.5 Throughout the chorus
cried out hypocrite when the evil sisters lied to their father and truthful when
Cordelia spoke. The director, Syrian actor Nawwar Bulbul, worked with the children for
months, preparing them for this one moment of happiness in the desolation of the
crowded camp. Even if only for a short while, art brought dignity and a measure of
agency to Syrians who had lost everything.
Theater, especially ancient Greek theater, provided women refugees in Jordan and
Lebanon with a crucial outlet. In the fall of 2013 in Jordan 25 Syrian refugee women put
on Euripides Trojan Women. Giving them language--classical Arabic translation of the
classical Greek--with which to express the agony of exile, the play was a success.
Director Yasmin Fedda filmed parts of the play and its rehearsals. She interspersed the
dramatic scenes with the women telling their stories in their miserable apartments
Ben Hubbard, Behind Barbed Wire: Shakespeare inspires a cast of
young Syrians NYT 31 March 2014, see
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/01/world/middleeast/behind-barbedwire-shakespeare-inspires-a-cast-of-young-syrians.html?
emc=eta1&_r=0# (accessed 4 June 2014)
5

somewhere in Amman. The women seemed astonished at how similar their tragedies
were to those of some Greek women who had also witnessed the murder of their loved
ones 2500 years earlier. The documentary titled Queens of Syria6 premiered at the Abu
Dhabi Film Festival and in October 2014, Fedda won the Black Pearl Award for best
Arab director. In December 2014 in Beirut, another group of Syrian refugee women
reimagined another classical Greek tragedy. They performed Sophocles Antigone about
civil war in Thebes to render their own experiences and their struggle to bury their men.
The story of the cooptation of the Syrian revolution by the Assad regime and then by
extremist mercenaries is well known. Most pundits claim that if there was a revolutionary
moment it was brief and now its civil war. Artists and intellectuals beg to differ. With
pens and brushes they have insisted on the importance of naming and representing the
protests and demonstrations revolution. Charif Kiwan, one of the founders of the Abou
Naddara documentary film production said, We dont feel we are dealing with a war. We
are dealing with a revolution. I dont know what revolution is; I cant explain what it is,
but we have the feeling that we are in front of huge breakdowns, ruptures, something
very violent and also very beautiful. So, we cannot qualify this. We accept the idea that it
is a revolution.7

6 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MU6UgtCPTac Feb 24, 2015

7 http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/18433/abounaddara
%E2%80%99s-take-on-images-in-the-syrian-revolut accessed 7
September 2014