Those who are afraid of Dima Wannous. The genetic terror of Syrian society.<\/p>\n
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Technical specifications<\/strong><\/p>\n Those who are afraid<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n Dima Wannous<\/span><\/p>\n Translated by Mohamed El Morabet<\/span><\/p>\n Sitara, 2019<\/span><\/p>\n 284 pages<\/span><\/p>\n 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 <\/span>Those who are afraid <\/i><\/b>(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\u2026 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 \u2014 the very interesting <\/span>An abandoned site<\/i><\/b>\u2014 who drew Sitara's attention to the quality of Wannous' work, according to his editor, Pilar Gonz\u00e1lez, during an interview at Casa \u00c1rabe in May 2020.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n 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 \u2014<\/span>As-Safir<\/span><\/i>; <\/span>Al-Hayat<\/span><\/i> o\u00a0 <\/span>The Washington Post<\/span><\/i>\u2014, as in radio and television, Dima Wannous is the author of a collection of short stories, <\/span>Tafasil <\/span><\/i>(Details), published in 2007 and of the novel <\/span>Kursi <\/span><\/i>(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<\/span> Banipal<\/span><\/i>, where he shares a seat with some of the leading authors of contemporary Arabic literature, such as Joumana Haddad or Abdellah Ta\u00efa. <\/span>\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Those who are afraid <\/i><\/b>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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u00abArab Spring\u00bb in the region, Nasim leaves the country and takes refuge in Germany, from where she sends her last novel to her lover. \u00abThe manuscript of Nasim\u00bb 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, \u00abBecause all my senses are focused on what is happening in my country.\u00bb 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\u2019t matter who the protagonist is because, as Sulaima herself explains in reference to the woman in the manuscript, \u00abIt\u2019s true that she belongs to a different family and that she has completely different memories, but our souls come from the same universe.\u00bb.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2026 Because the experiences of the characters in this novel are only the stories of a few people among the 23 million \u00abhorrified\u00bb Syrians. \u00abWe 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.\u00bb.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019s school disappeared \u00abforever\u00bb 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 \u00abour commander, the one with the high forehead.\u00bb Sulaima herself was interrogated by the school\u2019s military instruction monitor, which caused her \u00abextreme weakness and fragility,\u00bb 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: \u00abI learned that my insignificant life depended on the vibrations emitted by the monitor\u2019s voice.\u00bb 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. \u00abYes, that was the place where they prepared the students for the life they might face in a country like Syria of the Lions\u00bb (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).<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Wannous echoes the alawite power\u2014a religious minority that includes most of the country\u2019s leaders and the vast majority of its security services\u2014as a driving force that evokes fear in Syrian society, even inspired by people who speak what he calls \u00abalawite accent,\u00bb that accent \u00abcapable of transforming a simple, modest and oppressed person into a powerful one (\u2026). 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.\u00bb.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In this Gulag Archipelago of \u00abthe lions,\u00bb 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u00abHama massacre,\u00bb 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. \u00ab(\u2026) 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\u2019t believe him\u00bb.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The little Sulaima imagines her father and her only brother being humiliated and tortured\u2014the author herself dreamed that her parents disappeared as a child\u2014she 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 \u00abat 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.\u00bb 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\u2026 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The fear of illness permeates the lives of the characters in this novel as well, a reflection of the author\u2019s own experience: her father\u2014a playwright by profession\u2014died after a long illness. The father of the unnamed woman in the \u00abManuscript of Nasim\u00bb\u2014also a writer\u2014died as a result of cancer. When they announce that her father has only three months to live, her fear accelerates without limits: \u00abFrom 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.\u00bb 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\u2026 But the fear not only diminishes people\u2019s ability to live a normal life, but leads them even to <\/span>impasse<\/span><\/i> spiritual. Sulaima is a painter who cannot paint. Her mother\u2019s 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\u2019s real life, because \u00abEvery 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.\u00bb<\/span>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Those who are afraid <\/i><\/b>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\u2026 until fear becomes a way of life, until the fear of fear\u2014the most terrible form of horror\u2014drowns their being. \u00abThe 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.\u00bb 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 \u00ablions,\u00bb 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.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n By Natalia Arce<\/b><\/p>\n <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Los que tienen miedo de Dima Wannous.\u00a0El terror gen\u00e9tico de la sociedad siria. Ficha t\u00e9cnica Los que tienen miedo Dima Wannous Trad. Mohamed El Morabet Sitara, 2019 284 p\u00e1ginas […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":74243,"template":"","meta":{"_tribe_events_status":"","_tribe_events_status_reason":"","_tribe_events_is_hybrid":"","_tribe_events_is_virtual":"","_tribe_events_virtual_video_source":"","_tribe_events_virtual_embed_video":"","_tribe_events_virtual_linked_button_text":"","_tribe_events_virtual_linked_button":"","_tribe_events_virtual_show_embed_at":"","_tribe_events_virtual_show_embed_to":[],"_tribe_events_virtual_show_on_event":"","_tribe_events_virtual_show_on_views":"","_tribe_events_virtual_url":"","footnotes":""},"tags":[],"tribe_events_cat":[],"class_list":["post-74242","tribe_events","type-tribe_events","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tipologia-otros"],"yoast_head":"\n