Mapping Knowledge in Damascus

By Selina Chen

The bus ride was bumpy and the Syrian sunset was molten gold. To Damascus, the sign read.

I had road trip songs in my headphones and the Syrian national poet’s words on my mind. ‘A Damascene moon travels in my blood/ and nightingales, and ears of wheat, and domes,’ Nizar Qabbani wrote of his home city. 

Westerners want to know about safety when they ask about Damascus. Damascus is beautiful, I say, and they blink in muted surprise. But the world’s oldest capital is beautiful. I stood barefoot, awestruck, in the Umayyad Mosque as a chorus of voices called people to the Friday prayer. I recited Qabbani’s ‘jasmine begins its whiteness in Damascus/, and her scent perfumes the fragrances’ as I sniffed the flowers on every street corner. When I sat down at a chic café, I recalled Qabbani’s ‘the coffee grinder is a part of our childhood/ for how can I forget? the aroma of cardamom’—and ordered my drink with the smoky spice. In a timeless world, I could be just a tourist.

But in our time, the jasmine’s whiteness is bloodstained. I was travelling eight months after the fall of Bashar al-Assad. In 2011, the notorious dictator responded to protests with mass imprisonments and indiscriminate killing. The ensuing civil war displaced millions, including refugees I met when volunteering in Jordan. I could not romanticise the trip because I felt the weight of stories they shared with me: a hasty last meal before fleeing, homesickness during the first Ramadan abroad, dressing sons in hijabs to hide from army recruiters, anxiously calling and calling authorities about ‘disappeared’ family members.

As my bus passed through Kisweh, half an hour out from Damascus, the driver noted that Israel had struck the town just two days ago. Six Syrian soldiers were killed, and Israeli warplanes circled overhead the next day. Voice rising, he launched into how his family suffered in the 14 years of civil war, words speeding up with emotions until I could no longer follow the Arabic except emphatic bursts of ‘prison!’, ‘age sixteen!’, ‘injustice!’, ‘occupation!’ Passengers hummed in agreement.

A greying man with a bit of a stomach under his bus company vest, the driver took me under his wing during the confusing procedures of crossing the Jordan-Syria border. He tried to bargain a cheaper visa fee for me, to the official’s amused headshake, and showed me off to Syrian guards who wanted to learn the word for ‘friend’ in English. The passenger next to me was a mother of twins. Overjoyed I was visiting her hometown, she extended invitations to her house and a wedding party.

Was I scared? Westerners like to ask. No, I felt safe because I was surrounded by strangers who cared. But, yes, I was scared too. I was 21, travelling alone as a woman. I think back guiltily to my will, written at the advice of the US embassy and scheduled to be sent if I didn’t return to cancel the email.

Another question Westerners ask: Why did I go to Syria? Because I heard Damascus was beautiful. Because I could, with my American passport. Because I was curious to see the political situation and write about it.

To write a travel reflection is to reflect on how a traveller can write about a foreign place. The answer could very well be, we can’t do so unproblematically. Edward Saïd pointed out how Orientalism has pervasively shaped our knowledge, and how we use that knowledge to shape the ‘Orient’. By we, I mean Westerners. Look at us, I’m writing in English, and you are reading in English. You are probably educated, like me, in Western institutions. If I call Damascus beautiful, then you may fit it into a mental schema of belly dancers and exotic carpets. If I talk about the dangers, then you may call to mind the stereotypical image that the Middle East is nothing but violence and oppression.

I exaggerate. I trust you don’t intentionally think like that. But the scary thing about Orientalism is that political circumstances shape our knowledge in the subtlest ways. If no knowledge is apolitical, how can we resist Orientalism when perceiving a foreign place?

In Damascus, the streets were dark. Not the sparsely populated small-town darkness I knew, but the sort of darkness where people got two hours of electricity for every four hours of power cuts. It marked an improvement, I was told, from the previous regime’s provisions of one hour of electricity for every six hours of none. Damascenes adapted to this reality with solar panels on every roof, battery-powered appliances, and buzzing generators.

A group of young men zoomed by on scooters while sporting some sort of bizarre red costume. On a closer look, I realised they were dressed up as human-sized snacks, an advertising stunt for some sort of strawberry roll. I laughed. They spotted my foreign face and hollered, ‘Welcome to Syria!’

Damascus was full of contradictions, much like the country’s new leader Ahmed al-Sharaa. Once an al-Qaeda-affiliated fighter who went by his nom de guerre al-Jolani, he is now a statesman in a suit, charming Western nations with promises of eventual democratisation. Worries linger, of course, over the new government’s roots as Islamist rebels. Sectarian strife continues, including violence in the southern Druze city of Sweida a month before my trip. Israel bombed central Damascus on that occasion, citing protection of the Druze minority, but critics saw it as aggression from a country that occupies Syrian territories.

Passing by the Ministry of Defence building targeted by Israeli strikes, it was hard to miss the shattered concrete and stray rebars—like ruptured flesh and tendons. At a nearby bar, a young woman told me her office building was just five minutes away from the explosion site. That day, she felt the full force of the blast and sprinted to open the office windows so they wouldn’t implode inward. Then she took shelter and called her mother.

But life went on. On warm summer nights, young women went out in tank tops, and alcohol flowed freely at rooftop bars. Young men were breakdancing in a garden where the previous regime had banned public entry. There was joy, bold and infectious, in their reclaiming those square metres of grass. Watching the breakdancers’ handstands and backflips, I saw why, when rebels took Damascus, people flooded the streets to celebrate. I saw why people flew new flags and welcomed travellers to what they call a ‘free Syria’. 

Beauty, to Qabbani, has always been inextricable from freedom. In ‘The Damascene Poem’ he wrote: ‘what will remain of poetry’s authenticity/ if liars and flatterers take over?/ and how can we write with locks on our mouths?’

I want to tell you I saw freedom. But I didn’t see the Druze, the Kurds, or the Alawites. So perhaps I only saw the freedom of the majority.

Western states saw enough freedom, though, to lift their sanctions this summer. Yet sanctions never stopped Assad and his cronies from enjoying lavish lifestyles, impassive to the civilians’ economic deprivation. My guide for the day, Adnan, complained he never saw the point of sanctions anyway: ‘They weren’t bad enough that I wanted to overthrow the government, just inconvenient to my life,’ he grumbled. But he was a middle-class Damascene; the rebellion rose from the provinces. How much did the sanctions achieve? Westerners debate it, arrive at some ‘knowledge’, and impose it on faraway countries.

Banks needed time to regain confidence in Syria. For the time being, ATMs and all online payments remained nonexistent. I exchanged £50 worth of Jordanian dinars for a stack of Syrian pounds so thick I might as well have been holding a brick. On the bills, Assad’s face smirked hauntingly. In a cash-only society facing hyperinflation, even small establishments like a shawarma shop used whirring cash counters. On the streets, money changers made small profits off the difference between the black-market rate and the central bank rate.

I write as a student of politics for whom regime change, sanctions, and hyperinflation were only academic concepts in library tomes. I write as someone who can turn my lights on any time. I write as a traveller with the privilege of visiting a country before the refugees who, for complicated reasons, could not return to their homeland.

Saïd wrote in English as a Western-educated scholar for a Western audience—a position entangled with Orientalist ideology despite his heritage. In 400 dense pages, he tried writing around the censor embedded in the very vocabulary he employed. He wanted us to know what our knowledge itself was trying to obscure. But in his position, plenty must have been obscured from him, too.

When you ask me about Damascus, you expect a tale of adventure, not my tangled doubts and half-obscured thoughts. I don’t trust myself to articulate my knowledge, and even if I articulate, I can’t trust my knowledge anyway. I can show you my photos of charming alleyways and say that I felt safe, a truth; or I can show you my photos of devastated neighbourhoods and say that I was scared, also true. I can see Damascus through Qabbani’s poetry as well as refugee’s stories. 

The world has its eyes on Damascus as the capital of a fledgling regime. Westerners want to know, can Syria democratise after overthrowing its dictator? But in a country lacking basic infrastructure, perhaps water, food, and electricity matter more than the casting of a vote. I saw politics at play, and my academic side couldn’t help but analyse. But I also saw how ordinary lives were lived, grievances and joys and all that I write about. If I write around the censor, and if you ask questions you didn’t already ‘know’, we can resist a little—we can know a little.

Qabbani was born around the Great Syria Revolt against occupation. French warplanes shot down at the city, leaving thousands of bullet holes on the roof of Souq al-Hamidiyah, the city’s busiest marketplace. Today, sunlight pours through those bullet holes onto the well-trodden floor, like dancing spots of molten gold. Damascus has always been a city that turns wounds into beauty.

With a fierce love for his people, political problems and all, Qabbani wrote his visceral declaration: ‘I am Damascene…If you dissect my body/ out will flow grapes and apples// If you cut open my veins/ in my blood you will hear voices of the departed.’ I passed by the poet’s old house. He’d long departed, but in the chipped paint I thought I could hear his voice and wondered what he’d write of the new regime.

The streets were dark, as always, when I rode shotgun in a car with three Syrian friends. They were friends of a friend of a friend, but that’s how connections got made in Syria. They turned on the music. I didn’t recognise the Arabic song but knew the traditional rhythm well enough to dance, hands and shoulders and hips. They cheered at my moves and joined me until I couldn’t tell if the car was rocking from our impromptu joy or the bumpy road. Damascus may not have electricity, they said, but ‘the people are its light’.

SELINA CHEN reads Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Oxford. She wishes she'd chosen English and Arabic.

Photos by Selina Chen