As usual, our country’s breaking news paints the news screens with red alert banners. We’re sick and tired; I want a new, vibrant country that’s not our country, not a corpse in the shape of a country or the other way around.
I mean a sky and clouds not obscured by the smoke of warplanes. I want a country where tears turn into delicious pieces of chocolate, at least in my imagination.
Our imagination is preoccupied with a tiring reality, or for example, that our wounds and pains heal with bandages like any other wound. It’s okay to wish for everything beautiful because we deserve the tranquility of life.
We wish, for example, for a calm, innocent love, far from fanaticism and sectarianism, a love that we Syrians can exchange without barriers of religious or national fanaticism, and without a geographical compass to restrict the embrace of our souls. I’m talking about wishes that our feelings might one day realize, who knows?
Our breaking news about kidnapping
We’ve grown used to our muffled screams being ignored by successive ruling authorities, and the world’s ears are deafened by their silent complicity. The number of kidnapped women is estimated to be around 150, though the figures remain unconfirmed.
If this doesn’t fill the world with noise and provoke some kind of action, then what will put an end to the enslavement of Syrian women in the age of social media? What’s happening now is nothing new; just a few years ago, thousands of Kurdish women from Sinjar/Shengal were enslaved in the Raqqa, Deir ez-Zor, and other Syrian provinces during the ISIS control.
Yazidi women were bought and sold based on their bodies and ages, with prices and trades fluctuating. For example, women in their teens and twenties were the most expensive. Now, Alawite women are priceless, subject to simple bartering between Syrian and non-Syrian elements.
This includes bartering for rape, and the release of some in exchange for a monetary ransom. From Yazidi women displayed in slave markets (according to the testimonies of over forty Yazidi victims) to kidnapped Druze and Alawite women released for a financial ransom, this is the tragic reality.
I want a country where tears
turn into delicious pieces of chocolate
The lust for war consumes women’s bodies, kneading and shattering them, turning them into frozen, soulless figures. These are wars fueled by women, governed by a so-called religion. The faces of those who rule this land have become terrifying, like an identity that paints a picture of violence.
Don’t feminist organizations and movements hear their cries for help? Does the echo of Syrian women’s screams resonate? Will the female victims lean on the pain of what has happened to them? Is there any hope for a new reality that will erase their suffering?
The agony of migration
Who will intercede for every regime and authority that has oppressed our country, oppressed and forced everyone to emigrate across the seas and through forests to Europe? These are migrants whom this bleeding country has constricted and choked, and for whom the mouths of sea creatures and the fangs of wild animals have made room.
Forests in the form of labyrinths envelop their travelers, tree by tree, in the hope of a path to salvation. Like the sea, all destinations disappear from view and turn into a single, distant point.
Harsh forests and seas make sacrifices for their travelers, who are like people chasing a mirage that disappears at every moment of arrival. Some survive, while others are deported by fate and betrayed by their hopes for a new life in European countries.
As for us, the ones who remain, we are like tears in a frying pan. The poems of nostalgia for home or for a foreign land no longer move us. This is a country that has lost the emotions of yearning to return in the lines of its exhausted details. The dictionaries of its rich and attractive meanings have been lost in our eyes, which are afraid of every unknown that is yet to come.
I am not looking for the impossible
I yearn and search for any way to escape the routine of painful endings
We need many nights of dreaming and dreaming for something to be realized, any dream, like leaping into crazy dances to music with words we sing together. And if the music suddenly stops, we can easily sing the words despite our different languages, sects, and nationalities.
I’m not searching for the impossible; I yearn and search for any way to escape the routine of painful endings, in reality and in metaphor. The day begins with mornings where beautiful beginnings pulse with calm. This is all I wish for. Will I live to experience these moments in my life? Perhaps.
About the Identity of Syrian Violence
Every time, Syria falls into a dark abyss with no bottom. People are caught between being for and against the government, with no escape below and nothing to hold on to above. The victims become mere numbers on global news channels, while their tormentors justify their violence, proudly displaying their pictures with confidence, knowing they are supported by neighboring countries.
We will keep drawing new paths toward that beautiful future, even if it is painful, even if we fail. Our past and present have burdened our pains with even more pain. Therefore, we will wait for tranquility to settle in our souls, just like a birth, with a new form, image, and pulse.
