Month: July 2017

A Play About Syria as a Country in a Coma

JULY 23, 2017

When one’s entire life is spent waiting, how does one measure the time? In the play “While I Was Waiting,” which on Saturday wrapped up a run as part of the Lincoln Center Festival, Omar (Mustafa Kur), a former telecom worker from the less affluent and besieged Damascus suburbs, gives us the sum of his life in days—10,749 to be precise. We quickly learn, however, that these only account for twenty-nine of his thirty-one years, as he has spent the past two years no longer alive but not quite dead, suspended in a state of unconsciousness after the pummelling he received in Syrian prisons.  [full story]

Losing Syria, and my grandmother

JULY 20, 2017

I lost both Syria and my grandmother in 1980, when I was 6 years old. Though men — especially one man, Hafez al-Assad — dominated Syria, my early experiences of it were dominated by women, especially my grandmother. To me, she was Syria and Syria was her.

My parents were living in the United States but committed to returning home. Then two tragedies struck in quick succession. In June, while we were in Damascus as usual for the summer, my grandmother’s brother was murdered, with no consequences for the killer or killers — a commonplace occurrence in Assad’s Syria. In October, while visiting us in the United States to try to escape the grief, anger, and impotence she felt following her brother’s death, my grandmother suffered a stroke that left her “locked in.”  [full story]