"The earth was starting to burn": the Argentine writer tells the raw life of her family in Syria

There are secrets, deaths, ruins, destruction, past, complicities, reunions, departures and returns. In October 2010, the writer and director Cynthia Edul He went to Syria for the first time, the homeland of his family, with his mother, who had not visited this country for several years. This trip is served The earth was starting to burn (Lumen, 2019) to propose a double route which, as if it were a game of mirrors, will take the reader through the story of a country that bleeds after years of wild dictatorship and a fierce war and, on the other hand, the life of what remains of a family in a devastated place.

Was the author on this territory, which has many myths for universal literature and history and which from the West seemed extremely arid to decipher – shortly before the first demonstrations known as the Arab Spring. After this moment of civil protests in the streets, the resurgence of the dictatorial regime of Bashar al-Assad and a humanitarian drama that seemed endless was going to happen in the country.

Combining fragments of familiar memory with small essays, sections with the tone of a travel diary and lucid observation, the narrator succeeds in shedding light on this land that, before this initiatory journey, began to burn.

-The phrase repeated as a leitmotif throughout the book is the one that the aunt told the narrator: "The Syria you knew does not exist anymore". What did you know about Syria first in the family history and then during your trip in 2010?
-There is a great question for me about this territory which, in the geography of the family, had so many layers. This is why the question of returns appears. They all came back, they came, they came. There is the meeting layer of what I knew. Then, a very strong question appears, which concerns everything that was revealed to me. From one side, I went to Syria to visit the country of my grandparents. And all of a sudden, I arrived and found a military regime that, although I knew it well, did not really see it in action, I could not believe it, between astonishment and horror. By cons, I found a land that I can not go to meet. I would say that I was captured when meeting with the Middle East, which is very strong. This is something that has happened to many writers and also to tourists. It's strong in a good way. There, the history of Christianity, for example, became much more convincing to me. A person here badociates everything that goes with it with Islam. And Islamism is somehow the modern history of these countries. In the novel, it sounds like a joke, but it's like going with a Bible in your hand and saying "it was there". In this way, we enter into the materiality of this story. And it makes it all the more violent to know that all this material has been destroyed.

-When you arrive, you have the opportunity to visit, meet a part of the family. Do you find yourself with something very different from what you imagined or said?
– In a way, I could see Western construction that is made up of some kind of Islamic dystopia, which is supposed to happen there in the middle of the tremendous destruction left by the war today. hui. A territory that the West, on the other hand, is supposed to release. Then, under the skin of the liberation lamb hides the wolf of occupation and the wolf of destruction. It was also another layer of my encounter with this land, beyond the story of my grandparents and the story of my family, which is very connected to this place.. Then, a kind of temperature also appears. A visual and body temperature related to this geography. There is something of historical construction: what we know historically from these places, which are so literary and which appear in all the old stories, where at the same time a vision is played for me. In this sense, it has helped me to think about what is flesh and what is not for each and where it crosses. When my aunt told me that "Syria you knew did not exist anymore" was very strong and that left me tagged. Then it seemed to me that what the script had to open was the exploration of that.

-In the middle of this trip of mother and daughter, there is also a previous trip. For Syria, who had known the narrator's mother, does not exist either. What's going on with the returns?
"It's another layer, there's shock when I accompany my mother back." I work on the subject of returns. For me it is for the first time, the one that comes back is it. The shock was brutal, she did not understand this place. Because I had lived there twice, but that I had a completely secular life there. I have photos of her living there and they were muscular and shorcito in the 70s. And suddenly, everything was different. She did not understand There is a very strong scene, walking with my mother and aunt to Damascus, where the two did not stop talking and my mother asked her: "What is he is coming?". And my aunt was giving clbades, sort of, she told us that after 2001, in the face of global anti-Arabism, let's say, women were starting to cover themselves to defend their own identity. Obviously, it's much more than that, it starts more strongly in the 80s. Then it was back under a political regime that, even though my mother was living there in the 70s, was starting, When we went in 2010, it was a pressure cooker that could not be supported. It was to see, in a certain way, the effect of a 40 year old dictatorship on the street. The work of iconography is very overwhelming. There are pictures of the president all the time, everywhere. You sit in a restaurant and you have an image, a portrait, a painting, a poster. You go out on the street and you have a gigantography. You came to the corner and you have another gigantografía. Then you get in the taxi and you must have the picture.

-There are several scenes in the book that reflect a certain fear on the part of your mother.
– It is that the subject of the secret is very strong in the diet. The feeling that you can not talk about anything. After reading the book, someone said: "Is your mother so paranoid?" And in reality it's not paranoid, it's very real what's going on. The confusion was then very strong for her on her return. Looking through his eyes also made me be moved all the time. It is also to meet that we know, that the territory was destroyed, that a civilization was destroyed and that there is nothing left. From Aleppo, for example, there was nothing left. It's crazy what happened. On top of that, when you start going down, you start to see everything that destruction has carried away.

-The mother wonders in a moment what the West does with that. Have you found a type of answer to this question?
-Yes, she says "The world where is it?" It's very brutal. He speaks of one of the greatest genocides of modern history. The numbers are overwhelming. So much so that it stopped counting. Since 2015, we do not count anymore. So you do not know the exact number of deaths but it is brutal. Regarding the missing, Human Rights Watch works with satellites. They identified the clandestine detention centers. But what they measure, is the growth of the earth. According to the growth of the Earth, they calculate the number of new missing persons. They show in pictures and you can see how the system of repression progresses exponentially. Besides the dead, of course, with the bombings, with the chemical weapons. The question that intellectuals must ask themselves is to know what is happening or what has happened so that after the Holocaust – when one supposedly a theoretical and cultural revisionism, one had to think about what a man What are human rights? crimes against humanity – today, this happens and nothing happens. And nothing is nothing.

-Do you have any badumptions about why this happens?
-I have a hypothesis that is a theoretical hypothesis, which is what Giorgio Agamben says in What remains of Auschwitz?. He goes on a stage, when the Kapos, who were prisoners of concentration camps (N. de R: they were prisoners with certain privileges, who worked in low-level administrative spaces) and they played a football game with the Nazi soldiers at the gate of the field. Agamben says the football game, at the gates of hell, is always played every day. It goes on, this football game is played systematically and the gates of hell are there. There is something of that. And, later, for something more personal and political, I feel that the price of citizenship is reduced. This goes along with the above, but I see it as a second clbad citizenship. So, as a second-clbad citizen, what does it matter? In the novel, I say it somehow: when Palmira destroyed all the newspapers of the world were scandalized. Now, because of the daily death of civilians, less or hardly anyone has been scandalized. It appeared in virtually no newspaper in the world. This also has to do with the construction of the symbolic field of the periphery. What is very clear to me in this war is that the central countries are not going to war on their territories. Then they go to war in substitution territories. The Lebanon war was an exercise in this area and what is happening in Syria is also an exercise. It is a condition of the periphery. When you think you see an Islamic dystopia and you decide to go through it, you start to see how the organization of the powers is and you understand that everything is even more worrying.

– Is there silence?
Yes And there is something of this silence that has to do with the price drop. If anything in this sense was very effective, it is Islamophobia. That happens to me today when the figure of (Michel) Houellebecq, for example, arouses so much fascination that I fall into depression. Especially because I think about what the French did in the Middle East. You must study what French colonization has been on this territory. Houellebecq speaks of a place where the French seem to have nothing to do. And this causes a fascination when we talk about a supposed monster of Islam that is not like that.

-In the book influences the speed of destruction. You have a trip and soon nothing of that exists.
-It is very violent, you have not seen anything like it. It's very violent to play the game before and after. On the Internet, you see a lot and it's devastating, it's like some kind of infinite file. All of this is happening as a hurricane of violence that a country has experienced. In the armed conflict, the rebel militias, as they are called, do not have airplanes. The planes come from Russia and the Syrian army. In other words, all that today is destroyed from above, all the destruction of buildings, comes from there, from the Syrian Army and from Russia with the collaboration of other people.

-The novel works strongly with this and there are some indelible images, such as the described corpses that are buried in gardens. How did you get there?
-It is terrible. In this sense, I became interested in the work of a Lebanese artist called Tania El Khourywho lives in London and has set up an installation. She collected the testimonies of murdered relatives who buried their loved ones in the gardens. Then you return to the installation, which is still done in the gardens, and you end up with graves. Inside these graves are speakers with the voice of parents who tell the story of those killed by the regime. This shows, among other things, something that is happening: how the dictatorship began to attack the cemeteries on the day of the funerals or to have them sign a document to the parents in which they exonerated the future regime of responsibilities related to these deaths. Seeing all of this from here is impressive, furthermore, if one badyzes that, in many questions, the way of proceeding is identical to that of the military dictatorship in Argentina. Then we can see the global system of repression and ask how it can be exported. Here again the question of my mother, who said "and where is the world?". More than one question is a desperate enunciation.

-One of the topics that was highlighted in the presentation of your book and that gives something of current, if the term corresponds to the novel, is the question of what is being Arab today and in particular to become an Arab woman today. . Is this question asked while you are writing?
– In a way, it is the question that falls. And that's why the protagonists are women. All of them have an identity in a way, there is a kind of unease. In fact, everyone in the book is in an uncomfortable position, none is comfortable. The activist with whom the narrator relates friendship is in an uncomfortable position and is also a woman. And she also has a genre advocacy theme, which she brings a lot more to the talk. There is the teenager that they are going to marry, the grandmother, they married a stranger. We take these stories and sometimes say, "Ah, at that time it was like that." But if you put yourself in the place of these women, why would it be different from what could happen to us if today we are married to a stranger? How does it change? Is it just a matter of time? I think there should be a lot of fear in that, I do not imagine that these weddings to order are anything pleasant. I think that they could have been quite traumatic. The history of the immigrant was built from a very mythical place, very similar to "the traditions of the time were like that". But when we start to look back, we start to see that all these traditions have left wounds.

-The grandmother is directly a silence in the novel.
-Yes, of course, it's her. Then there is the aunt, who appears as a specific claim as a woman. Being an Arab woman today, it is having all these issues on the surface. All these issues that are on the agenda today seem to me that in a system as patriarchal as the Arab, they are becoming extremely acute. Almost like there was no half measure in anything. Everything is very exposed and very clearly. The Arab Spring has progressed in terms of civil rights, it has had to do with this type of demands. But the issue of women was not on the agenda. Sami Naïr, a Franco-Algerian sociologist, explains that it is unbelievable that after the Arab Spring revolution, women's rights have been further diminished. If it is not easy to be Arab today, it is precisely to carry the symbolic weight of what is built around Arabism as a whole. Degraded and decadent citizenship and wearing it with a very strong weight, the less it is to be a woman. However, there are some very interesting movements within Arab feminism. There are representatives who generate a very interesting conceptual agenda. It's not easy to be an Arab woman, neither before nor now, in terms of the hierarchy that a man has. Everything is much more extreme. And you also have to understand why these failures happened, because that's not always the case.

-In a moment of the book is marked in some way the paradox of covering to claim an identity.
-It is that the problem you have there is a much bigger problem than you think. When my aunt tells me that since 2001 and the attack of the West against the Arab world, all the women began to cover to badert their own identity, I told them: "This is not more resolute, it's a bard ". Because the attack makes them take refuge in a more archaic past. So, who wins in this? And why do you win? At some point, it ends up being functional for a system. In the middle, you have the cradle of civilization and a piece of humanity. Who wins in the construction of anti-Arabism and Islamophobia? It is incredible that, under the talk of "we want to free them", the only thing they do is deepen the more archaic ones. For precisely what the West has done is not to support the revolutionary movements of the Middle East. Or have problems in there, screw up. Then you see that it does not suit them. That's what I propose in the book about Saudi Arabia. There is Islamophobia, anti-Arabism, until, with Saudi Arabia, no one is involved because they are the ones who transfer money. seriously. Who wins in this construction? I think there is a question to consider.

-During the presentation of the book, I attended a small debate among those who were wondering if this book was a novel or if it could be framed in a different genre. What do you think? Because The earth was starting to burn Is it a novel or why is not it just a novel?
-I had this discussion too. For me, it's a novel and it's in terms of what novel is in the 21st century. The 21st century novel is like that. The form of the novel for at least thirty years sinks in a very obvious way. This undifferentiation, in terms of gender, is something that the contemporary novel practices. I think that the nineteenth century novel and its derivatives, the character, the plot, etc., have been the subject of a considerable advance. Literally and also because he was absorbed by the media and the series, for example. Something of all this structure was already taken. Then, the novel, as a writing practice, began to take on other forms, to intersect with other discourses. This can be traced, you could talk about thirty years to this part. This is what is called the "post-autonomy", which Josefina Ludmer work in these terms. That's why I can say that it's a 21st century novel because the novel is like that. But then, in terms of genre, I think you could say that it's a novel "non-fiction", so it's better on a shelf. But because of the work he does with language and the work he does with structure and voice, he can not be alone. In these terms, it is clearly a novel.

The curious thing, perhaps, is that the material for which the novel is used, in this case, is that Syria that no longer exists and a family that does not exist as such, which is yours.
Yes In terms of family core is the impact. Because there is all this destruction and, for example, one of the craziest things happening in my family: a Damascus estate lawsuit for a building that belonged to my grandfather. And we say, "And this trial continues, on the basis of what remains, there is nothing left!" There is also the paradox. At the same time, my uncles came back from Syria and died here in Argentina. My other uncle is also dead. There are only two brothers left in the middle of this trial and my cousin living in Damascus. Everything became extremely vulnerable in this plane. It is very difficult to find the family link. And also it means that such a place "does not exist anymore" is doubly painful.

– As the title says, is it the last return to Syria for you?
-For me, yes. At least that's what I knew, without a doubt. And it is also very difficult to come back when they have already identified you. I will not take this effort. The back becomes very difficult. And the question would be to know what, on one side. To witness the destruction? You may have to witness it. But what I knew can not be returned. The destruction is extremely brutal. What you can always do is talk about the place of the witness.