The Book Collectors

by Delphine Minoui

  In early February 2016, a friend of Ahmad’s takes over our internet chats, bringing me harrowing updates. Shadi is a round-faced twenty-six-year-old, with a timid voice that contradicts his lumberjack build. Unlike Ahmad, he’s not passionate about reading. But he does offer a new page in Daraya’s story: the war through images, which he has been collecting obsessively since the revolution began. Images that he circulates on social media, forcing the world to bear witness. Camera always flung over his shoulder, Shadi photographs everything, films everything. He weaves through his battered town all day long to better document its scars.

  His daily life can be summed up with one video, which he shares with me in one of our first exchanges. Barely a minute long, filmed in 2014, it has yet to stop haunting me. I watch closely. In a graying sky, a helicopter circles at low altitude, its menacing blades whirling. Suddenly, the belly of the metal bird opens, unleashing a cylinder equipped with fins. The lethal device begins slowly in its trajectory before accelerating in descent, nose-diving toward a row of buildings. I recognize Shadi’s panicked voice, nearly lost in the roar of the aircraft: “Allahu akbar, Allahu akb—” A first detonation, followed by a second, rips away the last syllable. The image jumps under the double impact of the explosion. The camera trembles, topples behind a balcony railing, but continues to shakily film two large clouds thickening in the distance. The barrel of explosives fell several feet away from Shadi as it let loose its devastating metallic cargo. Behind the viewfinder, the young man pulls himself together: “Allahu akbar, Daraya, January 12, 2014 … I filmed the barrel bomb! I saw it right in front of me.” In the distance, a voice responds, panting, “I wouldn’t have the guts to stand where you are.”

  Gutsy, but in shock.

  “I was in a daze for the next few days, unable to leave my house. The bomb fell so close. I was stunned,” explains Shadi.

  This is only the debut of a systematic barrel bombing campaign, and Shadi will record most of it.

  “Over time, the fear subsided. I started filming even more. I rubbed shoulders with death so often that I lost all emotion.”

  When Shadi talks, it’s with the precision of a miniaturist painter. Obsessed with sounds, images, shapes, and patterns, he is now well acquainted with every kind of deadly bomb that crashes from the sky.

  “We recorded nearly six thousand barrel drops in three years. Sometimes, as many as eighty fall in a day. When the helicopters enter the sky, we watch them and try to anticipate the strike so we can take refuge in the closest shelter. It’s a difficult exercise. The barrel fall only lasts thirty seconds, which doesn’t leave you a lot of time to run for your life. At night it’s even worse. You can’t make out the devices in the dark. People who have basements have set up mattresses there. Everyone else is forced to pray before they go to sleep, hoping they’ll still be alive the next day.”

  Since this January 2014 video, one of the most shared on YouTube at the time, Shadi has recorded hundreds of tragedies caused by these cylinders of evil. He’s still haunted by one deadly strike in particular, at the end of that same year.

  “A father had convinced his wife and their twelve-year-old son to move into a neighborhood less exposed to bombings. He had just dropped them off in the new apartment so he could go pick up the last boxes when a barrel bomb caught up with them. The wife and child died immediately, buried under the wreckage. The poor man was devastated.”

  Shadi, who reached the site right after the explosion, filmed everything that day. He filmed the building, caved in like a house of cards. He filmed the husband, his face ravaged by tears. He filmed the volunteers from the Civil Defense as they carried two long pink plastic bags. The bodies of the two victims …

  “This man wanted to protect his family from the bombings,” says Shadi. “And the complete opposite happened. Our lives are worth so little.”

  Shadi, who’s lost so many friends, knows this all too well. He tells me that death even follows him to funerals. One day, he lost friends to a barrel bombing during a memorial service.

  “It was August 2015. For once, I wasn’t filming. We were burying a dear friend, Ahmad Mattar. We were in the middle of reciting the Shahada prayer. Suddenly, there was a rumbling in the sky. The ground gave way beneath our feet. Two explosions. I could no longer hear anything. I had dust in my eyes and my head was ringing. When I could see again, after a few minutes, I saw the motionless bodies of two friends. They had been killed instantly. The barrels follow us everywhere. They can surprise us at any moment. They never let up,” he choked out.

  Like many young activists, Shadi learned how to film on the fly. He is a farmer’s son who quit his studies after high school to work in the food-processing industry. A reserved child who never dared challenge his teachers. A young man whose eyes were “suddenly opened” in the beginning of 2011, in the promising early days of the Arab Spring. “Before, I would watch the world comfortably from behind my glasses, without much second thought,” he says. The images of the Egyptian revolt transformed him. “When I saw Mubarak fall under pressure from demonstrators, I told myself, we can do it, too. I had always thought that the story of my country was already written, that nothing could change. Suddenly, we found ourselves in the streets demanding our right to write it ourselves, in our own words.”

  When the uprising turned into war, Shadi joined the local media center. He became one of many citizen journalists, indispensable intermediaries providing information inaccessible to foreign reporters. To better capture images, he traded in his smartphone camera for a real one. Then, in December 2014, when a friend contacted him from Damascus to offer financial aid, Shadi responded without hesitation, “All I need is a Canon 70D.”

  This crucial delivery was incredibly risky. Accessing the besieged suburb required crossing the regime’s checkpoints, then passing through Moadamiya before rushing through the last access point into Daraya. This mile-long agricultural zone separating the two cities is in the crosshairs of the regime’s soldiers, who can shoot at any moment from their mountain military base. As happens often in war zones, where women are as invisible as they are effective, a Syrian woman served as “smuggler.” The camera hidden beneath her veil, she undertook the night passage on a deadly road where so many others had fallen. I can only imagine her thin silhouette weaving between the trees, furtively crossing swaths of grapevines and olive fields. Shadi has never seen her, but he owes her a great deal.

  “My camera’s become my greatest accomplice,” he says. “It never leaves my side.”

  Since then, Shadi doesn’t go anywhere without his precious device.

  He uses it to record everything to the smallest detail. The explosions of missiles. Facades riddled with bullets. Twisted beams and girders. Stone wreckage. Thanks to the images Shadi sends me, I roam the streets like in a video game, darting into abandoned houses, jumping at the sound of an explosion. Except that all this is quite real. Behind my computer screen, the war is live.

  The images are often jerky, filmed in a rush. Very short visual testimonials, hidden snapshots of this ephemeral life. When bombs rain down, the camera trembles, pivots, steadies. Zoom in, zoom out. Shadi isn’t a professional reporter. He’s a witness. An eye that stays wide open.

  In the rare periods of respite, time stretches out. At the library, which has finally reopened, Daraya’s militants film and interview each other, though their voices are sometimes inaudible in the videos. In one interview, someone is wearing a clip-on microphone, but it wasn’t turned on. In another, a thick blast of air obscures the conversation. Regardless of the footage quality, what Shadi and his buddies care about is shouting the truth through images while the regime’s cameras are trying to muffle it.

  A spirit of fraternity also emanates from these candid shots. These young men resist together, mature together, and live together, split up into small adjoining apartments in the media center. Sometimes, in the middle of a sequence, unexpected poetry emerges. A fighter slumped in exhaustion, legs stretche
d out on an old sofa, face bathed in light, is submerged in a deep and gentle sleep. A soldier resting before the next storm.

  As I gather more images, the library layout becomes even clearer. The white staircase leading to the basement. The scattering of shoes at the entrance. The central pole and its list of rules on a sheet of paper. To the right, the reading area. To the left, a space intended for debates and meetings—a new, separate area, which I discover while going through Shadi’s footage. I recognize Omar in one video. The fatigues-wearing Ibn Khaldun has thrown on a T-shirt to give a political science lecture. Twenty or so young men are gathered around him, sitting on plastic chairs. Ears perked, they jot down notes as they listen to the aspiring professor.

  “Most of the town’s professors are in prison, dead, or in exile,” explains Shadi. “We had to find a way to take over for them, to make sure people were still able to study. So our young people started taking turns sharing their knowledge with those who don’t have time to read. Omar quickly became one of our most esteemed teachers. When he’s able to get away from the front line, he meets with his students once or twice a week.”

  Shadi shows me another video: an English lesson given by … Ustez! I can finally put a face to the name of this cherished Daraya professor. Round face, thin beard, striped polo shirt. Not too different, in the end, from what I had pictured. A marker in his hand, he fills a whiteboard from left to right with short sentences in Latin letters. “This is a library,” repeat the students, deciphering the first line. Then it’s time for exercises. The students gather in small groups of three or four, tossing out “How are you?” and “What’s your name?” The dialogues typically transform into strings of wild laughter, interspersed with comments in Arabic, the students’ language quickly rushing back.

  “To be honest,” admits Shadi, “people are less interested in learning a language strictly speaking than, quite simply, the fact of being here. It’s such an enormous pleasure to talk about something besides the war. To hold a pencil. To fill a notebook. A feeling of normalcy. The everyday life that we’re starting to miss.

  “Once in a while,” he continues, “the space even turns into a dance floor. We push back the tables and chairs. We roll up the carpets. And we start to dance and sing.”

  I play a new sequence he sends me. In the right-hand section of the library, a dense crowd squeezes in. Hand in hand, dozens of men and boys rock their heads, then their shoulders, from right to left, then left to right. Standing on a small, improvised stage, two singers launch into well-known tunes with a microphone. Like a single body, the crowd starts to hum a jubilant melody. “Jenna! Jenna!” Paradise! Paradise! I recognize this chant. It’s the chant of their revolution, suddenly resurrected in this basement. “Jenna! Jenna!” they repeat in chorus. A throbbing call of hope. The solace of a shout for freedom emerging from the depths of the city.

  There’s something else striking about Shadi—his sense of imagination. For someone who doesn’t read, who’s never savored the company of books, he displays a surprising ability to project himself elsewhere.

  “You know, lots of times I’ll try to imagine the bombing of Daraya seen from Damascus. Actually, a few of my friends whose families moved to Sahnaya, a neighboring suburb, get panicked calls when their parents see the barrels drop,” he tells me one day.

  The explosion of violence darkening the plains of Daraya occurs only a few miles, as the crow flies, from downtown Damascus and the luxury hotel housing the envoys of the UN. And, again, a few miles from the hillside of the Mezzeh military base, headquarters of the air force intelligence services and their sinister prison, and where the shellfire originates.

  For Shadi, there’s no need to look up at the hill to know that he’s in the sights of Assad’s soldiers. Facing these robotic figures, guided at a distance by Bashar, he knows he’s in constant danger. He is Shadi, the son of a farmer, an inspired cameraman, a militant for freedom. To them, he’s just one more shadow, or worse, an “extremist” to be killed, a dangerous enemy within cannon reach. A bullet, missile, or bomb can bring him down in a fraction of a second. Shadi, a mortal among mortals …

  “We’ve learned to live with the idea that death is at the street corner, that it could visit us at home, in our houses, as we sleep. Or in the mosques as we pray. Death won’t leave us. If I told you we’re not afraid, I’d be lying.”

  Perched on another hill, farther east, is the presidential palace. The inhabitants of Daraya can make it out with the naked eye.

  “And Assad,” I ask Shadi, “how do you imagine him? Have you already tried to put yourself in his shoes?”

  “Assad…,” repeats Shadi. “The problem is that he’s wearing blinders. He refuses to see us and accept us as we are. It’s like we’re living on two different planets.”

  How ironic that a president who studied ophthalmology now seems to suffer from selective vision. Not to mention that Assad is known for being a big amateur photographer. While his opponents film the government’s many attempts to kill them, the Syrian leader feeds his Instagram account with selfies with fans, poses near the front lines, and struts around with his wife and children wearing a custom suit. Hunkered down in his palace, a bunker measuring several square miles, atop a hill in the Syrian capital, he spouts conspiracy theories and refuses the idea of a moderate opposition. The syndrome of nearsightedness. Or rather of distorted reality, like the analog photos developed in a darkroom—easily manipulated. They can be modified depending on the effects of light and shadow you want to add. This warped vision has colored his words as well: “It’s me or chaos,” he repeats over and over, deaf to the opposition’s calls for peace.

  Among Shadi and his friends, creativity has no limits. They find enormous pleasure in exploring a new vocabulary, inspired by the roots of their rich Arabic language. While Assad speaks of “chaos” using the classical Arabic term fauda, they retort with a synonym, the more informal karkabeh—which can be roughly translated as “snafu”—to describe their daily lives under the bombs. This word even became the title of a bimonthly magazine created in early 2015, with the means at hand. With a circulation of only five hundred copies, produced with a photocopier saved from the rubble, Karkabeh is primarily a survival guide. How to burn plastic to make heating oil? How to conserve rainwater for drinking? How to grow tomatoes on your balcony? Everything is explained, in black and white, sometimes illustrated with photos or sketches, and distributed on the front line and among the city’s residents.

  The magazine also includes short news articles about politics, sports, and cinema for those who don’t have the time or patience to dive into a long literary or philosophical work. “A mental diversion to try to get our heads together,” explains Shadi. He, Ahmad, and other friends in Daraya created this self-published magazine to maintain a social connection and prevent despair from leading to radicalization.

  I skim a few pages that have been published online. The “chaos” they offer their readers is perfectly organized, arranged by theme. Poems by the exiled Iraqi dissident Ahmed Matar are joined by texts dedicated to Ibn Battuta, the fourteenth-century Moroccan explorer; Alfred Nobel, the creator of the eponymous prize; the different Syrian flags in the country’s history; the martyrs of Daraya; and the refugees exiled to Turkey. Raw stories. Neutral words. No value judgments or partisan stripes. There is no place for the vocabulary of threats and fear, prized by the pro-regime media, in this “chaos.” Karkabeh also has nothing to do with the propaganda newsletters produced by the Islamic State and circulated in several languages on social media. No bloody death scenes or dramatizations. The articles are simple, stripped of all forms of provocation—apart from self-deprecation.

  The only real danger comes from laughing too hard, especially when doing the crossword puzzle. Under empty boxes, which readers are invited to fill using only a war vocabulary—siege, bombs, soldiers, martyrs—the budding journalists have appended an “editorial note”: “The magazine is not responsible for any fainting sp
ells or heart attacks caused by this wordplay.” Amid the ruins of their town, they are sculpting a new language of the absurd. Molded by reality, their writing is both tragic and comical. Here, real life reigns. A town telling its story as it fights for survival, making fun of itself, and mocking its fears and daily worries to better control them.

  Another page offers the weekly horoscope. The traditional zodiac signs have been replaced by more familiar symbols: rocket, kitchen, rock climber, fuel oil, etc. The pseudoastrological advice is of course adapted to the particular chaos of Daraya: “If your friends invite you over for tea, better eat before you go. Otherwise, you’ll starve to death.” “Today’s commute is hopeless; all roads closed till further notice.” “You keep digging tunnels to protect yourself. But fortune may smile upon you: you will eventually unearth a treasure.”