Rosa Yasin Hassan is a Syrian novelist and writer. She was born in Damascus in 1974 and studied architecture at university. Upon graduation in 1998, she worked as a journalist, writing for various Syrian and Arabic periodicals. Her first published book was a collection of short stories, published in 2000 under the title A Sky Tainted with Light. She has also written a number of novels, starting with Ebony (2004) which won the Hanna Mina Prize. Her third novel Hurras al-Hawa (Guardians of the Air, 2009) was longlisted for the Arabic Booker Prize. She has been a member of the International Pen Club since 2015 and teaches contemporary Arabic fiction at the University of Hamburg. She has been living in exile in Germany since the end of 2012.

The changing energies of places and people

One day, I fell in love with the Al Hamra theater in Damascus.
I discovered there a being imbued with a sumptuous calm: life bubbled around it, fast and noisy, while it remained unchanging, unaffected by anything said about its importance or influence. He was full of himself, but affectionate! Multiple in his states, just like his plays: romantic, absurd, existential, comic, philosophical, passionate, and sometimes musical. I loved him in all his facets, just as he loved me in all mine. A spiritual relationship was forged and deepened between us.

Then came a difficult day, and both time and geography pulled us apart. But love is too powerful to be broken and too flexible to be locked into a condition or state. I still dream that he's waiting for me on the street corner, near Salhiya's door, and I'm certain that when we meet again, we'll forget in an instant all these years of separation and our love will be reborn.

Yes, a woman can fall in love with a theater, just as a man can be passionately in love with a cinema. I know many such love stories. My father, for example, was a lover of the Ugarit cinema in his home town of Latakia. Do any of you know the Ugarit cinema?

The Ugarit cinema was located in the heart of a square that bore its name. It was supposed to be one of the oldest cinemas in my coastal town. This place holds a special place in my heart, as it's part of the love stories my father used to tell me.
I can still picture him, many years after its demise, exiting the covered market every morning in the mid-70s, crossing Ugarit Square on his way to work, and coming face to face with the splendor of the Ugarit cinema, majestic at the entrance to the square, before turning left. For a few seconds, his gaze rested on the poster for the new film, spread wide across the facade: A Forest of Legs, with Mahmoud Yassine lost beneath a multitude of seductive female legs.
Thank goodness my father left before witnessing the destruction of these places that were dear to him. I can't believe I'm saying this... But physical death is sometimes a blessing, the blessing of not seeing our loved ones disappear before our very eyes. The façade of the Ugarit cinema, which he had described to me with such passion, would fall into disrepair, and in less than forty years, the place would be transformed into a frightening military barracks. Opposite would stand a hideous army building, its bare facade now bearing only portraits of the dictator and inscriptions to his glory.

How could I have described to him this makeshift fence, made of black truck tires, cutting the square in two and rising a little higher every day? A wall erected for the sole purpose of disfiguring the space and imprisoning the cinema, so that people would forget what it had once been.

(1) For further reading, see: Place, knowledge and power. Michel Foucault and geography. Reading and commentary: Dr Karam Abbas Arafa. Reviewed by Dr. Atef Motamed. PDF, 2013).

Places are but mirrors reflecting the truth of those who inhabit them, mirrors of a collective unconscious.
When I think of all that has happened to this unfortunate cinema, I can't help but think of Michel Foucault and his idea that a place "is defined by its relationship with other places, especially those that are opposed to it, and that express in one way or another the stages of human life". (1)

The relationship between power, knowledge and space is inseparable. Freedom, social relations and places cannot be dissociated.

In Syria, as the regime tightened its grip on the country, public space gradually faded from everyday life. The deeper meanings of places, their historical, social, emotional and even moral connotations were brutally disrupted.

Over the years, the Ugarit cinema became a center from which terror and the regime's militias emanated, terrorizing the whole city and, in particular, those who had dared to oppose the bloodbath that had ravaged the country since 2011.

In place of Rushdi Abaza and Nadia Lotfi, it's now Abu Jaafar who occupies the space, organizing his death squads in the burning neighborhoods. And instead of seeing Nahid Sharif walk out of the cinema door to thunderous applause, it is now, in the greatest secrecy and chilling silence, bodies wrapped in dirty sheets that emerge - those of opponents who died under torture! Cinema, too, has become a prison of torture!

Cities thrive on the energy of their inhabitants, but could we have imagined that the destiny of squares would change, that the destiny of cities and countries would topple?

Ugarit Square was an agora, a nerve center in Hellenistic times, in a city inhabited since the Paleolithic, nearly 125,000 years ago. A city with the oldest human traces dating back to the sixth millennium B.C. at Ras Shamra, as well as mankind's first alphabetic script.

A city with many names - Lattaquié, Ramitha, Laodicea - as varied and motley as its appellations. It embraced early Christianity, experienced the yoke of dozens of governments and occupations, and was repeatedly destroyed by earthquakes. But each time, she rose from the ashes, like her inhabitants, in the image of the phoenix - their totem.

She has known revolutions, famines, disasters, tragedies and always remained standing, until one of her own came to violate her coastline and disfigure her face, a face marked by time but still bewitching: that of a mature woman, laden with the wisdom of the ancients.

The destinies of our places are bound up with our own, just as we are shaped by their own destinies

Our relationships with places are not so different from our relationships with human beings, or even from those we have with ourselves. They are constructed in ways that reflect our relationship with "the Other": sometimes imbued with love, sometimes not based on understanding and empathy, or on the contrary on rejection and incomprehension. They are influenced by our moods, our experiences, our memory, our ideologies and our ability to accept difference.

And since our relationship with "the Other" mirrors our relationship with ourselves, each singular relationship to a place reflects a different part of our own identity.

(2) From a work in progress by Nawal Al-Halh, Representations of revolution and exile in the Arab novel after 2011, winner of the AFAC prize.

Researcher and friend Nawal Al-Halh writes:
"A place is a particular point of view on the world, which crystallizes through the interaction between characters and events. There is no such thing as a place that is described in any other way than by a point of view." (2)

If this is the case, then our ties with some of our former places are destined to break, especially after the tragedies Syrians have experienced since 2011. Exactly as once-strong friendships and relationships have shattered.
But does this mean that a place can develop its own point of view over time? That those who dominate it can alter its very perception and essence?

There is a dialectical, complex and reciprocal relationship between a place and its inhabitants. This question haunts me constantly.
In the twenty-second rule of Shams al-Din al-Tabrizi's Forty Rules, it says: "When a true worshiper of God enters a tavern, it becomes his place of prayer. But when a drunkard enters it, it becomes his tavern."

Does this mean that our interaction with a place transforms it, changes its essence and energy, just as it acts on us?

When we enter a place, we perceive its vibration. There are masculine and feminine spaces. Ibn Arabi wasn't just talking about linguistic feminization when he said:
"A place that isn't feminized can't be trusted."

He was evoking a spiritual feminization, charged with the energy of life, welcome, openness, diversity and intuition.
One day, some of our beloved places changed, becoming hostile, closed, masculine and oppressive - just as we saw our own energies transform.

An unchanging being called: Place

One day, my project director, in her fourth year of architecture, said to me:
"A place is a creature you create. Like any living being, it will detach itself from you to lead its own existence, with its own emotions and thoughts. You have to see it that way!"

It took me a while to grasp the depth of his words, for understanding is only a fruit of our own consciousness.
A place we create carries with it deep emotions that interact with its inhabitants. Its personality is influenced by its environment, just as it in turn influences that environment. It picks up what's going on in and around it, and others hear its voice, even without realizing it.

They hear it with their soul, their unconscious, even if they don't perceive it with their hearing and conscience.

We don't just draw lines on paper, then stack stones. We give birth to a story, that of a being more rooted than any other on this earth - perhaps even more sensitive.

This is what my architectural studies should have been. But it never turned out that way.

The problem is, I belong to a generation whose connection with place has been largely destroyed - just like so many other aspects of our existence in Assad's Syria.

Just as the concept of national identity has been emptied of meaning, so too has that of belonging to a place.
So, how could we ever envisage treating these places as beings in their own right, endowed with their own identity and rights?

The authorities' treatment of places is similar to their treatment of people. Places are slaves, just like individuals: surveilled, violated, frightened. The absence of social, political and economic justice has unfortunately manifested itself with painful clarity in the absence of spatial justice. The destruction of millions of homes, buildings and squares after 2011 has never been dissociated from the murders, deaths, arrests and displacement of millions of people. The annihilation of the memory of places is also part of the erasure of the memory of the people, recreating a new memory and a new narrative, that of the tyrants, which will mark the country for a long time.

Over time, as the Baath regime's control over the country intensified, its features changed and its ancient beauty faded, for places are the imprint of the country. The shantytowns that have invaded the outskirts of the big cities, the ugly buildings resembling faded concrete cubes, the desert that is nibbling away at the country's greenery... Anyone who compares today's Syria with its past will find it hard to recognize it. Cities are like human beings: they are born, go through childhood and adolescence, grow old and eventually die. But in Syria, the death of places has been forced: a deliberate assassination of their pride, a destruction of their ancient charisma, a form of implicit revenge. This revenge has many causes, which can be analyzed from a social and cultural prism, as well as a political and economic one, through the study of the reactions, feelings, thoughts and beliefs of the inhabitants. However, it has manifested itself most clearly in the public arena. All it takes is a glance at its places to identify to which political era Damascus belongs.

(3) For more information, see Edward W. Soja's article entitled: "The City and Spatial Justice", translated by Sophie Didier and Frédéric Dufaux, published in 2009. See also: https://www.jssj.org/article/la-ville-et-la-justice-spatiale/.

The absence of the concept of "spatial justice", developed by the American Edward Soja, was glaring throughout the country. Likewise, it was clear that Syrians were losing the battle for social justice, which was also proving to be a battle for geography, more and more each day. According to Soja, "social justice implies a fair and equitable distribution in space of resources of social value, as well as the possibility of using them". His analysis allows us to observe how political and social injustice has materialized in space, through the austerity policies that prevailed in the country, but also through "the reconstruction processes that have guided the planning of major cities over the last forty years". Here he refers to recent urban expansion, which "testifies to growing economic inequality and increased social polarization". (3)

My dilapidated old school, for example, didn't look much different after being repainted white and surrounded by a black metal fence! On its facade still loomed the huge flag of the Baath Arab Socialist Party, next to a portrait of "the illustrious comrade Hafez al-Assad", as big as the flag itself. The schools were military barracks, loaded with all the memories of the barracks. The same was true of our school, albeit repainted white. It wasn't long before insults and obscene graffiti reappeared on toilet walls and doors. The suffocating smell of ammonia and urine, the floor strewn with dirt and excrement... that was our school! In the mornings, when we discovered broken benches, horrible drawings and insults on the walls and blackboard, we would laugh ourselves sick. But this provoked the anger of the teacher, who summoned the principal to reprimand us severely, before sometimes inflicting collective punishments on the whole class. Yet nothing we did to the school's facilities or furniture made us feel guilty. We didn't own the benches, we didn't own the school, we didn't own the streets where we threw our garbage, we didn't own the public facilities, the sidewalks, the gardens or even the trees! A diffuse, unconscious feeling pervaded us: our town didn't belong to us, and neither did the beach. Everything around us confirmed this feeling: "You don't own anything! You're just guests in a country that belongs to the 'guiding father'".

Over time, the authorities began to hand over public spaces to certain people, as part of what came to be known as privatization policies. This was done through sales contracts or long-term leases, including for historic buildings. The underlying message was clear: "Nothing belongs to you, not even yourselves!" I can only see the many crimes of antiquities smuggling committed as a manifestation of total detachment from the place and its history, or worse, as a sense of enslavement. Those who stole and continue to smuggle antiquities are truly willing to sell the memory of place for their own gain.

The only place where one could truly feel "at home" was: at home. That's why Syrians have always been keen to maintain and "own" their homes, as a last-ditch attempt to anchor themselves to this land, or to forge an intimate bond with a space in a country that has become increasingly alien. Many of us remember the voices raised after the great wave of forced displacement suffered by Syrians: "We were living in exile in Syria, and we're just moving from one exile to another." This may sound exaggerated to some, but it's a reality deeply felt by many Syrians in their "new" exile.

The house, in my country, has a special value. It carries with it a story, a narrative, a reality of its own. My friend Khaldoun - who was later killed during the revolution - once told me how much he missed the creaking doors of his parents' house after being forcibly torn from it. Each door has its own sound, a unique creak, a voice that addresses its inhabitants with an intonation all its own. For him, the sound of home was a painful nostalgia. Today, when I hear the creaking of doors in my own home, I can't help but think of Khaldun. Maybe that's why I refuse to oil the hinges...

In Syria, the house was a member of the family. It was even the most important member, with its face, hands, smell, smile and mood.

Place, time and travel:

Recently, I've started writing about my family, and perhaps you'll agree that the further we get in life, the more we delve back into our memories. One of the most important figures in my life is my maternal grandmother, the wife of a respected sheikh. In my community, a prominent sheikh like my grandfather was not allowed to work, which meant that my grandmother had to carry a burden that five women would have found hard to bear. She worked in the "Al-Rijji" tobacco factory, where she remained until shortly before her death. At the same time, she was the mother of eight children and took sole responsibility for everything. My grandmother embodied struggle, strength and unconditional love.

This woman had a strange power over plants: her hands were so green that the house looked like a little paradise in the Sheikh Dahir district, right in the heart of Latakia.

One day, in the early 1980s, she was forced to leave her home. The (sectarian) events that were shaking Latakia at the time prompted many Alawite families to return to their villages, shortly after leaving them to settle in the city. My grandmother was forced to abandon her home, her job and her beloved city in an instant. In an instant, she lost everything. And less than two months later, racked with grief, she died in her remote village. My grandfather didn't survive her for long: six months later, it was his turn to go.

I believe that our collective memory, as people of the Levant, is saturated with similar images and stories, whether through our myths and religions, our folk tales and songs, or through our contemporary narratives of exile, uprooting, dispersion, displacement... Call it what you will: these are just terms that condense one and the same reality - that of tearing human beings from their places, i.e. depriving them of their loved ones. A strategy perfectly mastered by the tyrannical regimes that force peoples into exile.
Displacement and enforced disappearance are not just a physical departure from a place: it's also the places themselves that, emotionally, leave us.

Just as memories, experiences and relationships are constructed, so too are places socially constructed, through the individuals and groups that inhabit them. The sense of belonging to a place, the attachment we have for it, is inseparable from the attachment the place itself nurtures towards us and our presence. Places have souls, emotions and sensations - just like people. They become attached to their inhabitants, and perhaps never forget them.

Like all living things, a place merges space and time within itself, to the point where it becomes impossible to dissociate them. As Gaston Bachelard writes: "Place, in its innumerable closed compartments, contains condensed time; this is the function of place" (For more, see: Gaston Bachelard, La Poétique de l'espace, translated by Ghaleb Halsa, Éditions de la Fondation Générale pour l'Étude, la Publication et la Diffusion, Beirut, 1984).

So, the relationship we have with a place is a deep spiritual one, far beyond a mere physical connection. Have you ever wondered why, in our dreams, we so often revisit places from our past? Our ethereal bodies cross space and time to go and live again, in dreams, in those places we loved so much - or perhaps we should say, in the reality of the dream.

I sometimes wonder if, when the souls of my loved ones return, they will go back to those places from which we were driven... to graves we can no longer flower, that we can no longer cover with myrtle branches, candles and incense. Is this why we Syrians attach so much importance to the graves of our loved ones?
Forced displacement is not simply a transfer from one geography to another. It is a political, human and emotional crime that is not limited to its demographic repercussions on individuals and communities, but also disrupts their collective unconscious as a whole.

Starting from scratch elsewhere is like being forced to leave a love relationship in which you had invested everything. It's like losing your roots, seeing the most solid foundations of your existence crumble. Suddenly finding yourself in a void, without a base, without attachments.

The siege: the prison of places

I distinguish two painful and contradictory experiences linked to places: displacement and the siege. If displacement, as I said above, is a tragic wrenching away from places, siege, as the opposite experience, is a form of forced imprisonment of places in us, just as it imprisons us in those places. At a certain point, the places we love turn into a harsh ordeal that alters our emotions towards them and the memory we have of them.

The experience of imprisonment is perhaps also a form of siege.

(4) For more on this, see: Négatif: de la mémoire des prisonnières politiques dans les prisons d'Assad, Rosa Yassin Hassan, Cairo Center for Human Rights, Cairo, 2007.

In my documentary story "Négatif", written between 2004 and 2007, I conducted dozens of interviews with a group of female political prisoners from various political and ideological currents. These women's experience of space was a central theme, common to most of the stories. One of the stories that struck me the most was that of dormitory n°6, located in a branch of the Damascus security services. (4)

Dormitory n°6 was a dark, suffocating underground cell, despite the presence of a metal-barred window fixed at the very top of the low ceiling and overlooking the prison's inner courtyard. A veritable hell where forty-five Communist women prisoners were crammed together.

One day, the face of a child appeared behind this window, like an angel fallen from heaven, throwing little yellow wild flowers through the bars! As many of the inmates were mothers who had been deprived of their children for years, the presence of this little angel was enough to transform this hell into a paradise, however temporary.

In a matter of seconds, the atmosphere of the place changed: the smell of pus and mold, the incessant noise of torture, the slamming of cell doors... all disappeared. Even today, after many years of freedom, this memory remains engraved in Mona's mind: how could such an atrocious place be transformed entirely because of the face of a child and a few wild flowers?

As for Doha, who was pregnant at the time of her arrest and gave birth in prison, she once confided to me that she only realized the horror of this place when her daughter was taken away from her. When little Diana was taken away from her after a year and two months, the cell, which until then had seemed a familiar place to her, immediately turned into a brutal prison.

"I want to put a sea in the cell,
I want to steal the cells and throw them into the sea,
I want to capture a cloud and hide it in my bed,
I want thieves to take away my bed and hide it in a cloud"

These few lines from Riyad Al-Saleh Hussein's collection "Like an Ibex in the Forest" were enough to make Granada's soul escape as she read them in the darkness of the cell. Suddenly, the walls moved away, the darkness split, and the prison became a forest. A few words of poetry were enough to breathe beauty and love into a place as arid as a desert, as dark as a tomb - like a dead woman awakened by a lover's kiss! Places really are human beings.

When siege turns places into hell

But while forced displacement has turned many of our lost places into a utopia, a distant, idealized paradise emptied of all imperfection, siege, on the other hand, has turned many of our captive places into hell. Many Syrians have seen their relationship with their spaces shattered by siege. The siege turns our places into prisons, and the attention of those trapped there, like that of the prisoners, is reduced to the instinct of survival: staying alive, finding something to eat, fighting hunger.

The physical siege, anchored in space, and the struggle to survive turn memory into a siege in its turn, just as powerlessness becomes a form of confinement. Just as incarceration and torture aim to break man from within, to deconstruct his perception of himself, to erode his faith and dignity, so siege, accompanied by the deprivation and violence that accompany it, works to destroy the inner bond that human beings have with their space and to deconstruct our vision of the places we inhabit.

This is one of its most pernicious functions. The war in Syria was first and foremost a war for possession of territory, for its occupation, and forced displacement and siege are just two opposing faces of the same strategy: dispossessing the inhabitants of their beloved places.

Strange how the memory of emotions linked to a place can metamorphose! Before the siege, it's filled with love; after the siege, it's gorged with oppression, lack and pain.

Place doesn't stay place, we don't stay us, and our relationship to space never remains intact. A crystal ball thrown to the ground by a careless child, shattered into a thousand pieces.

(5) Une chambre à soi, A Room of One's Own, essay by Virginia Woolf, published October 24, 1929.

In another part of the world and at another point in the narrative, in an essay entitled A Room of One's Own, English novelist Virginia Woolf expresses this paradox that arises from the contrast between space and our experience of it, when she writes:
"It is terrible to be shut up in a room. But how much worse is it to be deprived of entry into a closed room." (5)

But siege doesn't have just one form, it takes on multiple forms in countries run by dictatorships. Insecurity is a siege. Fear is a siege. To have one's livelihood threatened is a siege. Paying the price for your human and moral reactions is a siege. In Syria, siege has materialized and continues to manifest itself in everything that surrounds Syrians, in everything. It begins with the omnipresence of death, whose scent has been wafting for years, and doesn't stop with perpetual doubt: the anguish that every person, whether we know them or not, could be an informer for the regime, even if they're our closest friends.
The shattering of dreams and the loss of all hope for the future are among the cruelest forms of siege.

(6) For more information, see the UNICEF website: https://www.unicef.org/ar)

But those whose memory of places is likely to be most distorted are children. When a place is associated with oppression, deprivation, ugliness and death, its meaning and value are degraded, like a being who has come into the world already disfigured. This was expressed by Anthony Lake, Executive Director of UNICEF, when he said:
"The lives of millions of people in Syria have become a never-ending nightmare, especially for the hundreds of thousands of children living under siege. They are killed, injured, too scared to go to school or even play, surviving on barely enough to eat and without access to healthcare. This is no life, and many of them are dying." (6)

Yes, for Syrians who lived through the siege in many parts of the country, it was no life. And it wasn't just about the destruction of their link with their places of origin, those places where they were imprisoned, where they witnessed and suffered tragedies. It was also because they were deprived of any link with other places, inaccessible behind the walls of their captivity. This applies to hundreds of thousands of children in refugee camps, where the house became a tent, the school became a tent, and to millions of refugees for whom the café where they met every day became a tent. There's no need to mention all the other places that disappeared from their existence: theaters, cinemas, public squares, gardens...

In refugee camps, and for years after, everything was reduced to tents. Tents that fill with water after the rain, blow away in the storm, suffocate in the summer heat.
Ephemeral places, where all that reigns is insecurity, fear and the absence of hope.
Yes, that's simply no life at all!

Al-Farous Square in conclusion:

I'd like to conclude with my own memory of Al-Farous Square, in my hometown of Latakia.

I can't think of this square as anything other than miserable, overrun with filth, saturated with the smells of smoke, chicken and blood, due to the poultry stalls and dozens of minibuses that had turned it into an open-air garage.

Crossing this place was for me, and for many others, a punishment.

My greatest amazement was to learn recently that this square was one of the most important in Latakia, indeed one of the most significant in the entire Levant.

It was like discovering that this poor beggar, dirty and ragged, rummaging through garbage cans while mumbling angrily, had once been a genius artist, a brilliant teacher or a loving and inspiring father, before fate dealt him its hardest blows.This neglected square, this ugly square, this forgotten square, was once the square of the "Monastery of Al-Farous", one of the oldest and most prestigious Christian monasteries in the Levant, where a handwritten copy of the Bible, written by Roman bishop Theodosius in 181 AD, had been found.C..

It was in this same monastery that, in 990 AD, the poet and philosopher Abu Alaa Al-Maari had come to study Greek philosophy!

An obsessive torment haunts me, insistent, oppressive, impossible to chase away: How can the destiny of this country be so brutally reversed, so tragically chaotic?!