Political Performance in Syria

From the Six-Day War to the Syrian Uprising

Edward Ziter

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137358981
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Darstellende Kunst

Political Performance in Syria, charts the history of a theatre that has sought the expansion of civil society and imagined alternate political realities. In doing so, the manuscript situates the current use of performance and theatre by artists of the Syrian Revolution within a long history of political contestation.

1

Martyrdom

A central argument of this book is that Syrian theatre artists have engaged or challenged government grand narratives by adopting or transforming many of the terms by which the state has represented Arab resistance to external threats. I begin with one of the most over-determined and contested words in the Syrian discourse: martyrdom. The word condenses different political and social experiences into a single image – a lifeless body, the marks of its trauma still plainly visible. In its control of school curriculum, and numerous voluntary organizations like the Baath Vanguard, the Revolutionary Youth, and the Union of Students, the Baath party has worked assiduously to shape the idea of martyrdom. Within Baath ideology, this martyr represents a pan-Arab commitment to resisting colonialism that began with the struggle against Ottoman imperialism and that continues in the government’s battle with foreign jihadists funded by the US, reactionary Arab states, and/or Israel. Martyrs gave their lives to secure a strong state and, now that this is accomplished, give their lives to protect that state. A quick glance at YouTube reveals that the idea has come full circle. In hundreds of thousands of videos the martyr is the man or woman who dies defying the state.

Syrian political theatre has taken up the idea of martyrdom in all of its complexity, and that is true across the period examined in this book. In Syria (and arguably most anywhere) martyrdom is both a religious and political concept, but it is hard to imagine the word’s use in Syria separate from considerations of state and nation. It is important to note that prior to the 1980s suicidal acts did not qualify as martyrdom, but that this has changed in many Muslim countries with the rise of “martyrdom operations” (or suicide bombings as they are known in the West). I do not engage the current debate over what constitutes martyrdom. Rather, I will argue that the Syrian regime has systematically invoked ideas of martyrdom to legitimize its rule, and that when Syrian playwrights and activists depict martyrs they support, undermine, or coopt the imagery of the state.

The ubiquity of such imagery is suggested by the fact that fifteen of the plays discussed in these pages address martyrdom, and that number excludes the video plays and online performance activism that I will discuss later in this chapter. Some playwrights, such as ‘Ali ‘Uqlah ‘Arsan, reflect Baath ideology in their work: the martyr gives his life for a pan-Arabism that lies at the heart of the Baath project. Many other playwrights, however, define the martyr as the individual who labors for Arab dignity or freedoms despite the machinations of corrupt states, Syria included. Muhammad al-Maghut provides the most irreverent response to the concept of the martyr: the state has rendered the word meaningless so the best one can do is to lampoon its current usage. The only remaining martyrs, for Maghut, are the artists who continue in their vain commitment to antiquated ideas like truth and beauty.

Maghut’s influence on popular understandings of martyrdom is not insignificant. There have been well over half a million downloads of the culminating scene of his play Cheers Homeland, in which the protagonist speaks magically with his father, “martyred in a recent war,” reluctantly acknowledging the political and social failures of the Arabs and earning his father’s curse in the process. The play has been broadcast repeatedly on television through much of the Arab world and is as much a part of Arab identity as A Christmas Story is a part of US identity. Can we look upon our martyrs with pride or should shame force us to cower before them? The question is central to how Syrian theatre artists imagine a national identity.

In any culture, dying for a cause is a powerful and emotional concept but that is not to discount the specific histories that give such deaths force for each community. In Syria, the Baath government has consciously framed a history that mobilized the idea of martyrdom to support the party and the Assad leadership. Theatre’s engagement with the idea of martyrdom is very much in response to this party project; those theatre practitioners that contest the state’s idea of martyrdom implicitly contest the state’s legitimacy. The state, according to its propaganda, leads the people in a liberation struggle that began with the martyrdom of nationalist leaders on May 6, 1916 and continues today. This idea circulates in history textbooks, ceremonies, and news broadcasts.

The sixth of May 1916, it should be noted, is a questionable starting point for an ongoing war of national liberation, but spotlighting the event does important ideological work for the state. On that day the Ottoman Governor of Greater Syria ordered the execution of twenty-one urban notables in Damascus and Beirut. William Cleveland has suggested that most of the notables had been singled out for earlier activities in the Ottoman Decentralization Party, a party that called for reform of Ottoman administration of Arab lands not independence. This followed eleven executions the previous year, and all were prompted by Ottoman anxiety about Arab loyalty in the midst of the First World War. To quote Cleveland, “The coincidental timing of the second wave of executions – one month before the proclamation of the Arab Revolt – gave all of the victims an aura of martyrdom, and their deaths came to be associated with the cause of Arabism” (Cleveland and Bunton 2009: 154).

The Baath party has done much to strengthen the association between the 1916 executions and the rise of Arab nationalism. Since the party adopted its constitution in 1947, it has held that: “The emblem of the Arab state is that of the Arab revolution begun in 1916 to liberate and unify the Arab nation” (Arab Baath Party 1962: 236). By citing 1916 as the starting point for Arab nationalism, the Baath party posits a fully indigenous anti-colonial movement, centered in Damascus and Beirut, before the French assumed the administration of Syria and Lebanon after the defeat of the Ottomans in the First World War. According to this timeline, the Arabs of Greater Syria longed for a state before European colonialism entered the Levant, even before the Arab Revolt in which the Hashemite ruler of Mecca, Grand Sharif Hussein, entered into an agreement with Britain against Ottoman forces – significant given Syria’s later opposition to the conservative Hashemite monarchies Britain created in Jordan and Iraq.

When the Baath party came to power in 1963, it immediately set about centralizing educational policy and overseeing the preparation and approval of all textbooks (Alrabaa 1985: 337), policies that would lead to the dissemination of the Baath history of the Arab revolution. The following year saw the publication a new high school history textbook that described the 1916 execution of notables as a “deep influence” in prompting the declaration of the Arab Revolt (Aflaq et al. 1965: 201). A more recent Syrian high school textbook cites this execution as a principal cause of the Arab Revolt, and goes on to depict “the martyrs of May 6” approaching the gallows and repeating in a loud voice a chant that concluded: “We are begot of Qahtan [the legendary ancestor of the South Arabians], the grandfather of all Arabs” (Syria. Wizārat al-Tarbiyah wa-al-Ta‘līm 2001: 169). Resistance to Ottoman oppression is depicted as prompted by feelings of pan-Arab unity.

Muhammad al-Maghut, in a signature gesture of his dramatic canon, transforms the state’s repeated invocation of martyrs into comically transparent self-aggrandizing and a blatant effort to distract from the needs of the present. That strategy is evident from his first published play, The Hunchback Sparrow (1967). It depicts a group of political prisoners, who later reappear as Prince, Holy Man, and The Accused. The play’s absurdist transformations and fable-like character-types mask a realistic examination of Syria at the time of the play’s composition. Rapid coups and multiple cabinets afflicted Syria between 1949 and 1963 when the Baath party seized power. (There were four coups between 1949 and 1951 alone.) Maghut particularly blurs the boundaries between absurdism and satire in the second act of the play, when an Industrial Commissioner addresses the peasant farmers of a drought-plagued village.

The villagers had anticipated a visit from the Agricultural Commissioner, who would investigate their misery and listen to their descriptions of a village in which everything is “dry and blazing,” from the fields and livestock to the men and women (Maghut 1981: 405). The Agricultural Commissioner does in fact drive through the village, but without stopping, glancing at a field from his car window and continuing with a yawn. Instead the village receives a visit from an Industrial Commissioner who clearly has no interest in or expertise on their crop failures, but comes simply to deny the slanderous claims that the authorities know nothing of the people’s “crusty fields and hungry poultry” (417). His long speech attacks those who slander the state and he praises officials who “travel like clouds in the desert to the farthest villages, the most filthy and disordered, to console the wounded mother or the grieving father” (420). The speech only makes passing reference to the drought when the Commissioner concludes: “We do not care if the branches (āghṣān) are green or yellow, so long as they make fitting frames for the pictures of our heroes and martyrs” (421).

The village has a desperate need for water, but rather than an irrigation plan they receive party officials who travel like “clouds in the desert.” It is a cruel response to the drought since these officials do not dispense rain but (supposed) “comfort” to wounded mothers and grieving fathers. The Commissioner shifts attention from the lack of water to some obscure past melee – for whom does the father grieve, how was the mother wounded? One grasps at phrases as the official races over images until concluding with a less than stirring reference to martyrs and heroes, whose veneration is far more important than whether mere branches or twigs (āghṣān can mean either) are healthy or withered. The villagers are unimpressed:

Grandmother:	Nonsense. Everything he said was nonsense.
Pregnant Woman:	I didn’t understand a word he said.
Unknown:	I understood some things. Our martyrs don’t need frames to preserve their memories.
Grandfather:	Because most of them die from hunger or boredom. (421)

The great enemy is not colonialism, according to Grandfather, but want and inactivity. Both, the play implies, grow common when the rains dry up and the government is absent.

Government creates martyrs through its inattention when it is not creating martyrs through outright oppression. Earlier the play features a conversation between a student and a shoemaker in prison – literally, in a “nameless human cage in a nameless desert” (345). From their conversation, the shoemaker concludes that the student is a member of the Nationalist Party, “one of those who carry winding-sheets and combs” (384). Banners are imagined as burial sheets and every protester carries a comb to prepare the body for burial. The government does not preserve the memory of martyrs, as suggested by the Industrial Commissioner, but actively creates martyrs when people inadvisedly take to the streets with demands. The lines are not hypothetical; Maghut was imprisoned in 1955 and again in 1962 for his membership of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP). The founder of that party, Antun Saadeh, was executed in 1949 after the Syrian authorities handed him over to a Lebanese military court. Saadeh died within forty-eight hours of his capture and is described as a martyr in much SSNP literature.

The play was published in Beirut in 1967, and Maghut presumably composed it before the June War. After that debacle, it became a more complicated thing for Syrian officials to evoke the glory of the nation’s martyrs. As has been discussed extensively elsewhere, Syrian missteps were instrumental in bringing about a war that neither Damascus, Cairo, nor Amman was prepared to fight.¹ Leading up to 1967, Damascus supported Palestinian fedayeen attacks against Israel, intensified anti-Israel rhetoric, and vociferously critiqued President Nasser of Egypt for his more cautious approach to the Palestinian problem. After the Soviet Union incorrectly informed Nasser that Israel was massing troops on the Syrian border, Egypt (which had signed a mutual defense treaty with Syria in 1966) mobilized troops into what had been the demilitarized Sinai Peninsula. Things came to a head on May 22 when Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping – despite Israel’s assertions that doing so would be considered an act of war. On June 5 Israel launched a massive air attack effectively destroying the Egyptian air force on the ground. The Israelis then destroyed the much smaller air forces of Syria and Jordan.

Without air support and believing Egyptian press reports of victory, the Syrians stayed out of the ground war for the first four days. Their defenses had already been compromised by repeated purges in the officer corps (particularly after a 1966 inter-party coup in which the Baath General, Salah Jadid, seized power from the National Command of the Baath party). When Israel did attack, Syria withdrew forces from the Golan fearing an attack on Damascus through Lebanon. Israel took the Golan Heights by June 10, precipitating a chaotic retreat. Syrian radio announced the fall of Quneitra before fighting even began, prompting an exodus of surrounding villages and confusion among military ranks that, in their disorganization, were getting much of their information from the radio (Seale 1965: 140–141).

Theatre responded. The next chapter examines two plays about defeat written in the aftermath of the humiliating 1967 War – both of which critique the state’s invocation of the martyr. As I will discuss later, Soirée for the Fifth of June (1968) by Saadallah Wannus undermines official rhetoric invoking the glorious sacrifices of Syrian soldiers and the assertion that such losses were not in vain. In that play, actors playing audience members contest such statements, relating their own experience of a confused and disorganized retreat, and asserting that substantial social and political change are necessary if there is to be any hope of redeeming the sacrifices of the war dead. In The Trial of the Man Who Didn’t Fight (1970) by Mumdoh ‘Adwan, the dead stand in relief against a population that cowers before both foreign invaders and their own authoritarian rulers. That play depicts the trial of a thirteenth-century peasant farmer accused of fleeing before the Mongol invader, Hulagu. The farmer views his timidity before the invader as an extension of a timidity cultivated through years of bowing before a repressive regime. The farmer envies his son for his refusal to bend, both earlier when he resisted arrest without charges and now when he dies resisting the invaders. By contrast to the son’s dignified martyrdom, the father lives on “to flee like a terrified rabbit” (‘Adwan 2006: 1:158).

After Hafez al-Assad came to power in a 1970 intra-party coup, he reasserted the state’s claim on the concept of martyrdom, declaring May 6 a public holiday to honor all who had fallen for the country – not simply those executed on 1916. Under Assad’s rule, according to one historian, “sacrifice for one’s country was treated almost as an alternative to religious sanctity” and Martyrs’ Day became a celebration of “national unity” and a “source of power, valor, active pride, patriotism, and courage.” Recent Arab failures (the Wars of 1948 and 1967) were subsumed within a long struggle replete with acts of heroism. The state presented the Syrian martyrs of 1916 as “the most revered of mankind, and the noblest of men,” to use Assad’s own words (quoted in Zachs 2012: 85). Assad implicitly acknowledged the human losses of 1967, during which time he served as Minister of Defense, without naming that debacle. Instead the death of reputed nationalists resisting Ottoman oppression became an occasion to remember all who died for country. Ottoman imperialism eventually collapsed and – by extension – Zionism would one day as well.

In this context Maghut penned a much more damning critique of the state’s rhetoric of martyrdom. His next play, The Jester (1973), is not specifically an examination of the June War but clearly reflects a growing frustration with hollow party propaganda accompanied by an inept foreign policy. The play begins in an Arab working-class neighborhood with an itinerant acting troupe performing a comically populist version of Othello, followed by a seemingly improvised riff on the Muslim conqueror, Saqr Qurash. The play then travels back in time when the troupe’s leading actor, the jester, is summoned to the eighth-century court of the actual Saqr Qurash. The play concludes when Arab officials detain the actor and Saqr Qurash at an inspection office on the Israeli border. These wildly different episodes are linked by a false nationalism – each location is the setting for bad theatre in which self-serving actors promise to defend “the people” when in fact they manipulate and diminish the people for their own benefit.

The first act begins with a barker resorting to nationalistic slogans to scrape together an audience for Othello. It is not clear whether their performance or their ideology is more hackneyed and self-serving. Their noble goal is to “bring the theatre to the people.” They do so without a playhouse because “this land could be used for growing crops or building a factory.” Nor do they use a curtain, for cloth is better used in “bandaging the wounded, clothing the naked, and shrouding the martyrs” (Maghut 1981: 505). After performing a burlesque of the bedchamber scene, the barker summarizes: Othello was a “brave Moroccan hero” committed to the “struggle against colonialism”; Iago represents “the enemies of the nation” using nefarious means to distract the Arab hero from “his duty” (515) and “crush” him.

The audience knows its part as well. In response, one spectator connects Othello with a recently murdered Moroccan left-wing politician, spontaneously shouting “Long live the martyr Mehdi Ben Barka!” Ben Barka, who was abducted by French police in Paris in 1965 and then never se...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Timeline
• Introduction
• 1 Martyrdom
• 2 War
• 3 Palestinians
• 4 History and Heritage
• 5 Torture
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index