In December 2024, shortly after the fall of Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad, who, together with his father Hafez Al-Assad, had ruled Syria for almost six decades, Belarus-based Syrian author Mamdouh Hamada decided to publish his eight volumes of short stories that he generically named “Dafater Mamdouh Hamada” (The Mamdouh Hamada notebooks).
The stories were published sequentially from 2016 to 2023. Every volume is approximately 100 pages long with one central theme that runs through it. These are The Emperors, The War, The Village, Exile, Hallucinations, The Conscripts, and Love and Drama.
The suffering of Syrians under Al-Assads' dictatorial rule underpins the entire collection, as well as the heavy price Syrians paid for revolting. The stories also deal with a subsequently “engineered civil war” that led to much bloodshed, terror, and the exile of many.
Hamada began writing his cynical and sometimes quite witty short stories in 1987 after leaving Syria. He kept writing until 2013, the eve of Syria’s civil war.
Hamada’s stories lack any references to specific incidents or atrocities committed by Al-Assads. Still, every story recalls the collective agony Syrians felt during those sixty years, and, alternatively, is a tribute to the revolution.
In one of the collection’s most poignant stories, in the second volume titled The War, Hamada vividly portrays a group of disenfranchised young Syrian soldiers fighting a war alien to them, without knowing where it leads or how it might end. They blindly follow orders lest they be rebuked or, worse, tortured in a state prison.
One of the soldiers, whose platoon had been ordered to shoot onlookers from balconies indiscriminately, faces “the most beautiful girl ever to look at him” before someone snatches the girl from inside, silencing her and shutting the balcony.
Putting aside his gun and lighting a cigarette, the soldier is unsure whether it was he who had given the girl life or she him.
In this volume’s introduction, Hamada wrote that “nothing could ever tell the agonies of war, especially for children.”
In another story in the same volume, Hamada tells of a young boy who, before he could eat his favourite Dutch cheese for breakfast, was rushed out of his house only to leave Syria for years with his mother and siblings after his father “went to the war and never came back.”
In the volumes themed The Emperors, The Village, and The Conscripts, Hamada meditates on individuals’ fear and deep apprehension, lest they provoke state security personnel to arrest them and perhaps even torture them.
In the volume themed Love, he mockingly narrates how, before the advent of mobile phones, an innocent exchange of light signals between two lovers to indicate the possibility of a midnight telephone call away from parental scrutiny caused a huge stir among state security personnel.
When they realize that neither the boy nor the girl is politically active, they drag the boy and torture him into confessing his political affiliation. After releasing him, the boy decides to use telepathy instead of light signals.
However, when telepathy fails, the girl tells the boy that state security probably uses “a more advanced technology to intercept telepathy.”
Moreover, Hamada writes about Syrians’ continuous fear of the Al-Assads despite having left Syria. He also portrays Syrians’ yearning for their country.
In the volume themed Exile, he depicts a Syrian man living in Europe who listens daily to Syria’s state radio, “The Voice of Damascus.” He says, “I know it is all a bunch of lies, but just listening in takes me back home to Damascus.”
Hamada’s profession as a journalist and a cartoonist has strongly influenced his writing. He was born in 1959 in the Golan Heights before Israel occupied the region in 1967.
His family then moved to Sweida, south of Syria. In 1986, Hamada went to the USSR, where he studied journalism and filmography. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Hamada lived in Belarus.
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