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E-book Waiting For The Revolution To End : Syrian displacement, time and subjectivity

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Penilaian

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‘Look! All the paths are closed!’ Hanan tells me, pointing at the pattern made by the grounds of the coffee we have just drunk from small white cups decorated with a blue eye. She continues to lament while turning her cup in her right hand: ‘Everything is closing down, everything is dark. There is no hope! There is nothing good coming. There isn’t even a small path!’ It is early morning in the autumn of 2015; the two children are still asleep on the floor of the living room, undisturbed by our morning coffee reading. Hanan has been obsessed with coffee reading for the past couple of weeks as she is looking for signs and answers to the conundrum of her future. Will she stay in Turkey? Will she go back to her parents’ village in Syria? Or will she cross into Europe? We turn to look at Dina’s cup. Hanan asks me what I see in it. I see a lot of people running towards a place that is white and open. Bearing in mind her recent preoccupations and the news,2 I suggest that the space is an open road for refugees to Europe, but Hanan does not agree. She sees a lot of people standing together, which to her represents the protest we are attending later that day. ‘The white opening is the positive outcome of today’s protest’, she says, pointing to the part of the cup that is clear of coffee grounds. This references the weekly protest in which we participate, replicas of those that used to occur in the early days of the revolution in Syria. Hanan also sees two people hugging one another behind a dark shape. She reads the same shape at the bottom of the cup after pressing her thumb on it, saying that they are friends reunited after a long time apart. Hanan, a former civil servant in her fifties, and I are living at Dina’s, a former teacher in her forties. Hanan is a Kurdish woman who comes from a small village near the Turkish border but used to live in a city in the north of Syria. Dina, although originally from eastern Syria, used to work in a city in the centre of the country. Hanan shares Dina’s room and I sublet the second room of the apartment in Gaziantep, a city near the Turkish–Syrian border. The two boys sleeping on the floor of the living room, aged 10 and 12, are Dina’s nephews, recently arrived from their war-torn city in eastern Syria, where the situation is deteriorating. Their mother sent them to stay with her sister while they wait for visas to join their father in Europe. For a week I have been woken by Hanan’s early Skype calls with relatives and friends, either in Europe or in Syria, and daily we drink and read – literally ‘open’ (iftah) – coffee together. Since the summer of 2015, the number of Syrians fleeing to Europe has increased greatly, and every day she reports that a relative, friend, or acquaintance is on her way to, or has arrived in, Europe; this paralleled the opening of the ‘Balkan road’. For Hanan, however, leaving the border town where we live means abandoning her country and, most importantly, giving up hope that the Assad regime will eventually fall and the revolution succeed. ‘As long as I can stay here I will, but as soon as the border opens I will be on my way home’, she once told me, referring to her in-between situation. In order to be able to stay in Turkey, however, she must find a job, since she will not be able to survive for long on the modest savings she brought out of Syria when she fled.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

303.645691 ALK w

Penerbit

London : UCL Press., 2023

Deskripsi Fisik

235 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9781800085039

Klasifikasi

303.645691

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Civil War and Revolution in Syria

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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