In Praise of Hatred (39 page)

However, two years after leaving prison, I knocked on Hajja Souad’s door in the Sabil district of Aleppo and I almost didn’t recognize her, she was so excessively elegant. She had covered her arms with real gold bracelets as Aleppans usually did when they wanted to boast of their wealth. She hugged me cheerfully and kissed Sulafa warmly. The daughters of the
wali
’s palace, as we still called the prison, moved feverishly and longed perpetually for fun and sumptuous banquets. I kissed them all as they arrived and registered their disturbance at the fact that my face was now unveiled, although they didn’t comment on it. It was the last time I saw the Hajja before I heard that she had surrounded herself with the pomp of a mujahida, and now used her story to strike advantageous bargains with trading families who were sympathetic to our group. (Some time later, I went to visit Um Mamdouh in Hama, who resented Hajja Souad’s standing.) That day, we laughed with joy at being free, delighted with the plates of kebab and other skilfully prepared food. My position as a medical student and my uncles’ ascendancy in the carpet trade had prevented the trial which I expected from Hajja Souad, who had nothing more than her past to protect her. I felt that I still loved her when I saw her prison clothes, sewn with tokens of her wretchedness, hanging in her living room: a sacred amulet, testimony that the executioners had left us alive, although they were beasts whom we would never forgive.

*   *   *

I spent the last ten days in prison in great anxiety. Fasting calmed me and made me seem lighter, as befitted a woman about to leave Hell for all the minutiae of the outside world she had waited for so ardently. I had a few odds and ends which I gave to whoever wanted them, and left Um Mamdouh the task of distributing the rest. I closed my eyes and dreamed of a never-ending flight; from above, I could see rivers and countries, and I climbed over mountains as lightly as a butterfly. I hovered around Marwa’s house so she would notice me, before revealing to her that I was that young girl she had known, who was now returning to her notebooks, and sitting Marwa’s son down beside her. I had kept his picture inside my clothes, but I gave it to Layla after seeing her rush over and kiss it as if he were her own child, whom she had left with an old, half-blind mother. They lived in a house which was partly destroyed by a mortar shell. Layla had just left the bedroom to make coffee for her new husband; she went back in, and saw him in pieces. Our child slept in Layla’s embrace. I told him stories and tried to recall the ones about a fox, even though he didn’t know what it looked like. He only liked Rasha’s stories, so we tried to copy the alluring way she narrated them, and failed. She would tell him how the fox Abu Ali spoke to the dog Abi Mandhar, and our child would laugh and imagine the story coming to life in front of him, including in it the warders, whom he knew as well as they knew him. I offered to take him with me, as had everyone else who had been released, but Suhayr never agreed. She wanted an additional witness to her story. These witnesses had now grown into a crowd which came every night to hear snippets of a myth where legend mingled with reality.

I didn’t sleep at all on the last night. I was terrified that my name would be overlooked. In the morning, I kissed everyone and we all cried as we had never cried before. We released trills, which we called our twenty-one-gun salute to a guest of this large palace. In the office, I signed papers I didn’t read; I didn’t shake hands with the captors whose gaze still assessed the magnitude of the hatred I had borne and hidden inside me. I went outside with the guards who had come to effect my transfer. I got into the Peugeot estate; I carefully put my hands into the cuffs which a member of the Mukhabarat held up. We drove out of the prison. Omar and Maryam had been stationed in front of the main gate since dawn, but the only thing they saw of me was my handcuffed hands, waving from the car. I saw Maryam through the haze of my tears, and she looked like a scarecrow. The Mukhabarat officer refused my plea to stop for a moment so I could take her hand and reassure her. I saw the sky and it made me dizzy. The car went through Bab Masalla on its way to the Mukhabarat building. Seeing life passing by this simply and easily made me feel faint. I wanted to throw up; I couldn’t understand this rush of feeling. I could see Omar’s car in the rear-view mirror, and Maryam was leaning out as if she wanted to say something to me and couldn’t wait any longer.

The unit’s guards, interrogators and officers were all three and a half years older, and I was three and a half centuries older. I saw that Abu Jamil was going very grey; he welcomed me mockingly, as if deriding my wish to leave prison. He used to openly state his sectarianism and praise the desert-prison massacre in front of us, concluding his speeches with expressions of revenge on our group. I had often remembered him when I was ordering my enemies in my head: he was the officer who had fallen in love with Suhayr. When we heard the news that he had lung cancer, we all set up a trill and Suhayr danced, carrying her child in her arms. He was now weak and feeble, and I looked at him pityingly. I almost kicked him, because I didn’t need anyone to lead me along the corridor to the cells. It was as if I were returning to a house I knew well. I waited in silence for four more months, sifting the gravel from a bowl of bulgur wheat with a skill we had all perfected, before they summoned me and led me to the commander’s office. His health had improved a little after the government dispatched him to a French hospital. He told me to sit, so I sat, and forgot my dream of leaving. He spoke at length about the good will of the compassionate leader, and I nodded. He concluded with a wish that the past few years had guided me on to the right path and convinced me that my group was criminal, and that they themselves were patriots who wanted nothing more than to safeguard the country. I didn’t open my mouth. When he got up and handed me the piece of paper which authorized my release, he reached out to shake my hand, so I reached out to transfer the poison of my hatred. I shook the hand of my enemy and looked into his eyes, and I knew that he was dead.

AFTERWORD

This novel’s main locus is Aleppo, a city surrounded by olive orchards and pistachio fields, ancient enough to vie with Damascus for the title of the oldest continuously inhabited city on Earth. The wider setting is the urban Levant, with its markets, mosques, caravanserais and luxury consumer goods, and the social networks and carefully guarded reputations of the traditional bourgeoisie.

Our nameless narrator is the youngest of a house of women who live suspended – like embalmed butterflies, to use one of the novel’s recurring motifs – waiting for men to act, and often suffering from their actions. Hers is an emotional, conflicted, self-contradicting voice, at once passionate, sensuous and austere. She is ‘the shy girl who used to stand on the doorsill afraid of loneliness and orphanhood’. She is also, by force of her context, capable of formulas like this: ‘We need hatred to give our lives meaning.’

Part of the problem is self-loathing and sexual repression. As she grows, the increasing weight of her breasts causes the narrator to talk less. She wears cruel bras. Her school friend Dalal tells her that women are ‘animated dirt’. And the narrator is trapped in this dirt: ‘I felt my body to be a dark vault, damp and crawling with spiders.’

In Praise of Hatred
is full of images of vaults, cloisters, enclosures. This is because imprisonment – by ideology, by history, by hatred – is the novel’s most persistent theme.

The values in the narrator’s home are sometimes harsh and unforgiving, but they are real and true nevertheless. Wrapped up with them are perfumes and carpets, music and plays, a rich Islamic and poetic heritage, precious mystical experiences.

But beyond the walls there’s a non-conservative Aleppo, too: the dominant secular world. At school the uncovered girls call the veiled girls ‘the Penguin Club’. The
mukhabarat
(secret police) sympathizers write reports on the indiscretions of their peers. These students, like Mao’s cultural revolutionaries, are able to terrorize their teachers and trample on the moral code. A girl called Nada, in her ‘suits of commando camouflage’, is kept by a much older lover who works for ‘the death squad’. Political and sexual transgression are closely associated in the narrator’s mind, and she is outraged when her friend Ghada gives up modest dress to enjoy an affair with a regime figure. ‘Hatred bewildered me,’ she confides, ‘just as powerful love bewilders a lover.’

She praises hatred because she perceives it to be, like the struggle for sterile purity, a means to power. She calls on it to save her from the ‘absurd compassion that threatened my inner strength’. She calls on hatred religiously; indeed there is a suggestion here that hatred is the common religious impulse linking up Syrian society. The regime, too, conflates compassion with weakness and violence with strength, as does the Islamist organization the narrator approaches first through women’s study circles. Her guide urges the girls ‘to hate all the other Islamic sects’.

*   *   *

The dictatorship in Syria gave secularism a bad name, because it was a forced and sectarian secularism, to fit with the general Middle Eastern postcolonial dispensation, in which minority groups ruled over majorities. The French had established an ‘army of minorities’ which took control of the state shortly after independence. In 1963 the military wing of the Ba’ath Party reached top position, and by 1970 Hafez al-Assad and his generals – from the Alawi community, an esoteric Shia offshoot – had reduced the Party to an instrument of absolute power.

At first the Assad regime was perceived as a popular nationalist, modernizing alliance between Alawi and Sunni peasants against the urban Sunni bourgeoisie. By the late seventies, however, unrest was bubbling in a population outraged by over-representation of Alawis in the security services, a corruption-crippled economy and, most of all, the regime’s 1976 intervention in Lebanon to aid Phalangist forces against the Palestinian-Muslim-Leftist alliance.

Syrian leftists and Islamists organized against the regime, which responded with savage repression. Soon opposition activity degenerated into an assassination campaign run by the Muslim Brotherhood’s armed wing. At the June 1979 Artillery School massacre, Alawi cadets – ‘the ones’, in Khalifa’s words, ‘who had descended from the mountains with limitless ambition and vitality’ – were separated from their Sunni fellows and shot in cold blood. The regime’s savagery culminated in the February 1982 massacre at Hama, where tens of thousands were killed, and in the slaughter of hundreds at Tadmor prison.

The poet Hassan al-Khayyer, an Alawi from the president’s village, summed up the tragedy:

There are two gangs: one is ruling in the name of patriotism but has none of it.

Another gang claims good faith; and religion forbids their sayings and acts.

Two gangs. My people, be aware of both! Both drink from the same evil waters.

The regime murdered al-Khayyer in prison.

*   *   *

From the eighties until 2011, Syrian society was effectively depoliticized. It became a state of fear, a kingdom of silence. Discussion of the ‘
ahdath
’ (‘events’) publicly was taboo. Stories were transported by whisper, in private.

So how brave and necessary it was to write a fiction of these ‘events’. In our narrator’s harsh euphemism, Alawis are ‘the other sect’ and the Ba’ath Party is ‘the atheist party’, but the historical references are unmistakeable. Khalifa plays one of the noblest roles available to a writer: he breaks a taboo in order to hold a mirror to a traumatized society, to force exploration of the trauma and therefore, perhaps, to promote acceptance and learning. He offers a way to digest the tragedy, or at least to chew on its cud. In this respect he stands in the company of such contemporary chroniclers of political transformation and social breakdown as Günter Grass and J. M. Coetzee.

The regime, which we now know hasn’t changed mentality since the eighties, didn’t recognize Khalifa’s achievement.
In Praise of Hatred
was published secretly in Damascus, where it remained available for forty days until the regime discovered its existence. Next it was published in Lebanon by Dar al-Adab, and was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, otherwise known as the Arab Booker, in 2008.

*   *   *

In purely literary terms as well as politically, the novel rises to a daunting challenge: how to represent recent Syrian history, which has often been stranger and more terrible than fiction.

For a start, it’s a perceptive study of radicalization understood in human rather than academic terms. It accurately portrays violent Islamism as a modernist phenomenon, a response to physical and cultural aggression which draws upon Trotsky, Che and Regis Debray as much as the Quran, and contrasts it with the more representative Sufism of Syrian Sunnis.

Next, it examines the dramatic transformations of character undergone by people living under such strain: the bucklings and reformations, the varieties of madness. The characters here are fully realized and entirely flexible – even our bitter narrator – and their stories are told in a powerful prose which is elegant, complex, and rich in image and emotion. There is musicality too in the rhythm of the episodes, the subtle unfolding of the plot.

If readers are imprisoned by the narrator’s perspective, they can escape into the many lesser stories within the frame. The detailed backgrounds and narratives of the characters met weave a realist fabric dense enough to rival that of Naguib Mahfouz. The range is broad: Turkish inn-keepers, English archaeologists, a Yemeni ex-Communist and a CIA officer who together enthuse over a future Islamic State, and a Saudi prince who wants a palace ‘that looks like his mother’s womb’. During the ‘events’ we meet death-squad members with skulls tattooed on their chests, kicking volumes of Shakespeare, and fugitives who evaporate into the night sky, and death becomes ‘as commonplace as a crate of rotten peaches flung out on to the pavement’.