Those who are afraid of Dima Wannous. The genetic terror of Syrian society.
Technical specifications
Those who are afraid
Dima Wannous
Translated by Mohamed El Morabet
Sitara, 2019
284 pages
Two parallel narratives. Two unfinished stories. And yet, two interdependent, inextricable, symbiotic narratives. Fear is the thread that runs through them. A fear so ingrained that it seems atavistic, as if it had never originated, as if it had always been there, permeating everything, passing from generation to generation. Not by chance, the protagonists of the two chronicles that make up Those who are afraid (Sitara, 2019), by the Syrian writer and translator Dima Wannous (Damascus, 1982), frequent the advice of a psychiatrist and rely on psychotropic drugs to achieve a certain balance in their daily lives… The novel was a finalist for the International Arabic Fiction Prize in 2018 and is the first of this author translated into Spanish. It was precisely the translator of the work, the Moroccan writer Mohamed El Morabet, who had just published his first work with the same publishing house the previous year — the very interesting An abandoned site— who drew Sitara's attention to the quality of Wannous' work, according to his editor, Pilar González, during an interview at Casa Árabe in May 2020.
Graduated in French Literature from the University of Damascus, studies that she completed at the Sorbonne, where she also specialized in translation, and a contributor to media outlets, both in newspapers —As-Safir; Al-Hayat o The Washington Post—, as in radio and television, Dima Wannous is the author of a collection of short stories, Tafasil (Details), published in 2007 and of the novel Kursi (La Silla) from 2008. His literary activity has earned him inclusion in the prestigious Beirut 39 list, a compilation of the thirty-nine most promising Arab writers under forty years of age, selected by the Hay Festival in collaboration with the magazine Banipal, where he shares a seat with some of the leading authors of contemporary Arabic literature, such as Joumana Haddad or Abdellah Taïa.
Those who are afraid Giving voice to two young women who tell their story in the first person. Sulaima, a painter who suffers from anxiety and constant panic attacks, meets Nasim, a doctor and writer, in her psychiatrist’s office in Damascus. Nasim, a doctor and writer, whose nervous disorder manifests itself in self-harmful episodes in which he violently punches his face, begins a relationship marked by attraction, but also by each person’s heavy personal baggage. After the outbreak of war in Syria in 2011, which put an end to the pro-democracy protests that took place within the so-called «Arab Spring» in the region, Nasim leaves the country and takes refuge in Germany, from where she sends her last novel to her lover. «The manuscript of Nasim» forms the second narrative, starring a neurasthenic young woman who the Syrian war has pushed to Beirut and who is no longer able to read or write, «Because all my senses are focused on what is happening in my country.» Both stories progress in parallel, the one of Sulaima, introspective and profound; the one of the manuscript, more brutal and descriptive; until they come to blend into a intertwined narrative in which it doesn’t matter who the protagonist is because, as Sulaima herself explains in reference to the woman in the manuscript, «It’s true that she belongs to a different family and that she has completely different memories, but our souls come from the same universe.».
In this way, the main themes that contribute to creating that universe that has engendered a society paralyzed by fear, traumatized by panic, driven mad by terror are being revealed one after another… Because the experiences of the characters in this novel are only the stories of a few people among the 23 million «horrified» Syrians. «We all form one single story. As if we were clones, at school, in homes, on the streets, in the few movie theaters that there were in Damascus, in the theaters, in government buildings, until we even become one single story, sick copies of each other.».
The tentacles of omnipotent power are seeping through the walls of schools, teaching schoolchildren the essence of fear as part of their first education. One of the teachers at Sulaima’s school disappeared «forever» after her five-year-old son accidentally dragged the portrait of then Syrian President Hafez al-Assad across the floor without her noticing, during one of the events organized in honor of «our commander, the one with the high forehead.» Sulaima herself was interrogated by the school’s military instruction monitor, which caused her «extreme weakness and fragility,» as it was not a one-on-one exchange between a teacher and a student in an educational institution in a country where basic Human Rights are guaranteed: «I learned that my insignificant life depended on the vibrations emitted by the monitor’s voice.» The school also served to instill terror among the students by having the daughters of military officers and members of the ruling party teach them. «Yes, that was the place where they prepared the students for the life they might face in a country like Syria of the Lions» (an appellative used to refer to the al-Asad family. This is the plural meaning of the surname of the ruling dynasty in Syria since the father of the current president staged a coup in 1970).
Wannous echoes the alawite power—a religious minority that includes most of the country’s leaders and the vast majority of its security services—as a driving force that evokes fear in Syrian society, even inspired by people who speak what he calls «alawite accent,» that accent «capable of transforming a simple, modest and oppressed person into a powerful one (…). That accent is an identity, and not just any identity. It is the identity of absolute power, the identity of the despot and the tyrant. The identity of terror, of panic and of the unknown.».
In this Gulag Archipelago of «the lions,» the regime has also used the use of force against its own population as a tool of terror to silence dissent and as a form of intimidation for the future. In this way, fear is transmitted from generation to generation. Sulaima’s father had fled with his family to Damascus from his native Hama. The city, the third most important in Syria, became tragically famous in the country’s contemporary history after the army bombed it for days to eliminate a protest led by the Muslim Brotherhood in 1982, which triggered the so-called «Hama massacre,» where an estimated twenty thousand to forty thousand civilians were killed, according to sources. However, his father never managed to shake the fear that his birthplace would condemn him in the eyes of the regime. «(…) My father, despite the photograph that was hung on the wall of his office and the humiliating silence he kept and that my mother constantly reminded him of, was always afraid that they wouldn’t believe him».
The little Sulaima imagines her father and her only brother being humiliated and tortured—the author herself dreamed that her parents disappeared as a child—she even sees her father kissing the feet of an officer, although as an adult she thinks that this last thing is a real memory, since «at all times, throughout the day, there is a Syrian who gets down on his knees and is forced to kiss the feet of any officer.» Years later, the experience repeats itself and Nasim loses her mother and sister in the bombing of her house in Homs, destroyed from its foundations by the Syrian army during the current war. Her father survives although he becomes paralyzed and goes crazy when he wakes up and learns what has happened. Nasim writes about the skeletons of her loved ones, anticipating her own death, and has tattooed her name, date of birth, and address so that she will not become an anonymous corpse if she is hit by a bomb… Madness appears throughout the pages of the book as the ultimate consequence of fear, as a spiritual defense mechanism against a terror that we cannot understand or tolerate.
The fear of illness permeates the lives of the characters in this novel as well, a reflection of the author’s own experience: her father—a playwright by profession—died after a long illness. The father of the unnamed woman in the «Manuscript of Nasim»—also a writer—died as a result of cancer. When they announce that her father has only three months to live, her fear accelerates without limits: «From morning until evening I lived intensely, in the rhythm of a fear that was forming in my subconscious, whose symptoms accumulated and worsened without measure.» With the outbreak of the current war, Sulaima fears that her mother will fall ill during the war due to a lack of medicines and beds in the hospitals… But the fear not only diminishes people’s ability to live a normal life, but leads them even to impasse spiritual. Sulaima is a painter who cannot paint. Her mother’s gaze remains fixed on the same page of the same book for years. The unnamed woman is a writer who cannot produce a single sentence. Nasim is only able to create a story that actually reproduces in some way her friend’s real life, because «Every time she started a new novel, she sank into her own story and into that of her parents; then she threw away what she had written and started again.».
Those who are afraid It is the chronicle of a society subjugated by fear, the portrait of citizens terrified by the possibility of being betrayed by their neighbors, spied on by their families, humiliated, imprisoned, tortured, disappeared… until fear becomes a way of life, until the fear of fear—the most terrible form of horror—drowns their being. «The wait of fear is more difficult than the fear itself. Being in prison is easier than being afraid. And, generally, fear is less difficult than the fear of fear.» In this novel, Dima Wannous has managed to masterfully reflect the consequences of living in a society intimidated, while exploring the relationship between fear and the mental health of its inhabitants. This is one of the first testimonies about the current war in Syria, and in that sense it is pioneering in portraying the collective impact of a conflict that not only failed to end the regime of the «lions,» but has caused more than 400,000 deaths, five and a half million refugees and more than six million displaced people. A terror that undoubtedly is already part of the new generations of Syrians, as a meme that has been instilled into the DNA of the entire society.
By Natalia Arce
Portuguese