Omar Alhadi is a Syrian writer, journalist and architect. He has been working in the independent Arab press since 2021. He publishes on several literary and scientific electronic platforms. Winner of two awards in playwriting and opinion journalism, he also contributed to the book Mu'allaq, with the support of Al Mawred Al Thaqafi.

Cameras have manufactured, over time, countless doubles of us. From childhood to the present day, they have stored faces frozen in images... yet we Syrians continue to search for our own, that lost face, that last glimpse of a smile that had once truly existed.

A man walked into a shop in Damascus. He bought two eggs and a little oil; ten thousand Syrian pounds would buy less than half a litre. Hesitantly, he handed the money to the shopkeeper, took his purchases and headed for the exit. But before he reached the door, an egg slipped from his hand and smashed. The man turned around, terrified, as if he'd just lost a treasure. The shopkeeper had no choice but to hand him another egg in compensation.
With a sigh, he blurted out: "We're both losers! This broken egg will cost me more in cleaning products than both eggs put together". Then he pointed to a surveillance camera hanging in a corner of the shop: "See that camera? It records scenes you'd think impossible. If I played them on TV, it would be the best comedy ever."
He laughed as he scrubbed the floor, while I looked up at the surveillance lens... with dull trepidation.

Smile at the camera
Every surveillance camera awakens in me an ancient memory from my childhood. As a boy, every time I walked through the door of a store, I would indulge my curiosity for exploration, the adults oblivious. I'd stroke the sleeves of hanging garments with my fingertips, slide the dry grains into my palm, stir them, sometimes even taste them, dizzy with wonderment. Space, then, became my secret domain.
And if, in a corner, I discovered the red eye of a camera, I'd stand in front of it, full of bravado: I'd stare, stick out my tongue, strike poses. The adults laughed, charmed by the childish audacity. The scene was repeated over and over again, until one day the words came: read, write, understand. From then on, the formula became clear to me: "Smile at the camera, you're being watched". From then on, space no longer belonged to me. Everything around me seemed to be watching, my every move observed. Something inside me froze then: my childhood freedom collapsed, giving way to a silence, a restraint, a feeling of being followed by invisible eyes.
Once, the image was simple: running, laughing, smiling, while a photographer, in the distance, captured my face with a click on a small coloured sheet. But over the years, the ritual has become more complex. Clothes must be prepared, hair tamed, posture decided on, smile corrected. And sometimes, I'd have to start all over again, until the image "looked right".
The cameras, however, only engraved frozen smiles in my memory. They imposed a version of me, sharper perhaps, but alien. Looking at myself in these shots, I realised that I had become several: a first, a second, and a third face. Me. The camera. The mirror. Three faces for a single body. And in this fragmentation, I discovered the essence: I am someone who dreads the mechanical eye, the surveillance, and the encounter with my own distorted reflection.

The Syrian face... my first face
Today, we Syrians are trying to emerge from the grip of war: to push away the weighty blankets, to free ourselves from a long period of waiting, obsessive thought and ingrained fear. These features have stuck to us until they've become a second skin. We've learned to live in repression, in enforced modesty, as if the very place where we breathe were only a temporary shelter, destined to disappear from one moment to the next, like our intimate space, lost forever. Thus we are constantly exposed, as if the distance once preserved between us and the camera has melted away, the camera becoming too close, almost intrusive.
Between the camera and our reflection... where exactly are we? This doubt is not just mine: it pervades an entire generation that has learned to protect itself from the world, to control and hide its face at the first hint of danger. Deep down, we know that our faces have changed. They no longer belong to us. They no longer look like us. But we refuse to admit it. We refuse to acknowledge this distance that has grown between us and ourselves, producing places and images that are not our own.

Yes... there is no privacy for Syria. This country on which the world's eyes have been focused, every camera, every recording. It has been shown at its most pathetic, with no respect for its privacy. The tired, grieving faces of its children have been displayed on the world's platforms without their consent. We aroused pity, but we remained prisoners of the scene, under its searing spotlights and the clatter of cameras.

Faced with this outpouring, we had no choice but to adapt our gestures. We began to scrutinise every space, dreading the proximity of any camera pointed at us. The Syrian interior became juicy media material, audience fodder, especially during these thirteen years of war. Everyone pointed a lens, exploiting our torpor, our face, our voice, manipulating our presence to manufacture a harrowing image.

From surveillance cameras to film cameras, via those on the social platforms that now swarm the streets... these images run through my memory like the "negative" strip you slip into the back of an album after developing photos, a strip containing all our past faces.

Where's the camera?
In recent years, social platforms have spread like wildfire. Carried along by the all-digital system, they have discovered a vast terrain to infiltrate. At first, society believed in them, listened to them, applauded them, as if they were an escape from a harsh reality. The need to laugh and be entertained gave rise to filmed programs, dubbed "social reality platforms", which quickly became established on the Syrian digital scene. Some of them are now trying to shed light on another Syrian face: that of comedy and sarcasm.

But this industry has shifted from joke to cacophony in an instant, at a moment when things were already tense and fragile. This is not insignificant: you can't show off the Syrian, scarred by decades of fear and fatigue, in an improvisational comedy setting, under the guise of experimentation and entertainment. Close proximity to the event is not the same as observing it from afar. How can the outside world understand the Syrian experience through these cobbled-together, fast-paced, deceptively funny videos, which reduce everything to a bad "hidden camera" prank?

Even if these platforms initially displayed positive intentions, they quickly drifted into a grotesque caricature bearing no resemblance to us. To make light of the Syrian emotion is to cross a line. The crises this region is experiencing deserve a different approach.

Making a Syrian laugh is a goldsmith's task, a demanding skill requiring rare finesse. It's no good simply applying standard formats. Embarrassment, intrusiveness and annoyance are not the comic springboards for an exhausted people.

I walk the streets today like most young Syrians, on the alert. I turn around, convinced that someone is going to pop up and trap me in some ridiculous set-up. Whenever I see a microphone and a camera, I get as far away as possible. I have no desire to have my privacy violated so that someone can throw "have you eaten?" at me from a sidewalk, or force me to take on challenges for a bit of cash, and see, all around me, so many people give in, despite the humiliation.

Social networks and war
Syrians today are trying to snatch life from the jaws of war, with the same force and grit. What has been taken must be taken back in the same way: this is the rule by which most of them live. Despite the weariness etched on their features, they retain a will to carry on, to invent little battles: getting a loaf of bread, keeping one's place in a queue, making it to the end of the month on a single wage... 
These scenes, and so many others, can be found in every corner of the country. Everyone has become used to them: we experience them, endure them, at best ignore them. But when one of these moments turns into a limp sketch on a digital platform, it attracts millions of views and becomes a public affair, "trending" on social networks, pitting the content's supporters against its detractors. Crowds flock to any event, no matter how random: and therein lies the problem. Outrage at a situation means it's rare; wonder at a simple gesture proves its rarity. This is what characterises everyday life in Syria today, which - without the eye of the cameras, without the actor who imagines himself a hero in the eyes of others - seems devoid of authentic, spontaneous human reactions.

These platforms have given a voice to those who had none, a chance to express themselves. But as most digital spaces in Syria lack safeguards and professional regulations, certain fragile and isolated opinions have been erected into defensible positions. The simple act of projecting them into the public space and getting the public to react to them has ended up transforming the real world into a tangle of hypotheses and opinions, nothing more. Just like the official and specialised media which, only yesterday, filtered events and disseminated them according to their political orientation. Bit by bit, Syrian reality has been dissolved.

In this struggle for survival, adaptation has become an integral part of Syrian daily life. And this adaptation, itself, resembles a performance: Syrians play a role in their own lives, in their speech and in their gestures. They play at being alive, at being happy. They play at having survived all that has happened.

For as long as we can remember, we Syrians have dreamed that everything around us is just a "hoax". The speed with which this country and its people have been thrown out to pasture, transformed into a panorama of open-air conflict, remains hard to comprehend. We'd like to believe that all this is just a filmed production. We wait for the moment when the filming ends, watch for the hidden camera lurking around us... and, in this dream, we’re laughing as we point towards it.

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This text offers a panoramic reading of the Syrian street. It follows the Syrian face and its reflections over the course of the war, questioning its relationship with the camera, that omnipresent element that has accompanied us throughout these years. He shows how the Syrian scene became a trompe-l'oeil in front of the cameras, while the true reality disappeared behind them.
The central idea of the article highlights the influence of the media on the Syrian interior, and how reality has faded in the face of the political agendas of the media organs. A question runs through the text: "Between the camera and our reflection... where exactly are we?" This seemingly simple interrogation is but an attempt to grasp the distance that has separated us from ourselves, producing spaces and faces that don't look like us.

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Article winner of the first prize in the Michel Kilo political opponent competition for opinion essay.