The Stomps of Our Feet and the Grip of Our Pens
- Sarah Al Saeid
- Mar 18
- 16 min read
The quotations interspersed throughout the following article are excerpts from a monologue in the play Shaqa’iq al-Nu’man (Anemone) by Syrian poet and playwright Mohammed Al-Maghout. These excerpts do not follow the original sequence of dialogue but are rather deliberately shuffled to allow for a narrative flow that echoes the themes of the play.
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Nimer: I shall tie the dreams of millions of martyrs with a rope made of anemone. The million martyrs you are discrediting... Is that not shameful of you? I shall tie their dreams in a rope made of anemone, and I’ll turn it into fabric and make it sail. I’ll make the sinking ship sail. Because if the ship sinks, we’re all sinking. No one will survive… No one. Don’t think there is someone close to them and someone far away. Oh no no no… all of us… all of us to them are a bunch of savages, camels, and horses.
In navigating my Syrianness, my existence in diaspora, and my Arabness, I find myself ironically studying the Middle East as an academic pursuit while being physically far away from it. I sit in discussion groups, surrounded by people who have built careers out of analyzing my world, even treating my hijab as a point of analysis for a social anthropology class as a means to decipher the “Arab mind.” Our struggles are academicized and transformed into topics for the next seminar at the Middle East Center. Amidst this juxtaposition, I experience the abundance and yet statelessness of my Arabness, feeling its collective essence beyond the confines of state-imposed borders.
I grew up watching plays by the famous Syrian poet and playwright Mohammad al- Maghout, including Kasak Ya Watan (Cheers, O Homeland), Day’et Tishreen (The Village of October), Shaqa’iq al-Nu’man (Anemone) and Ghurba (Alienation). These are plays rich with critiques of imperialism, colonialism, and populist revolutions, and reflect on
themes of hunger, oppression, and tyranny. Their performances also feature the venerable Syrian actor Duraid Lahham, whose political stances have since diverged from the pan-Arabist ideals he once dramatized. I am no psychoanalyst to probe the transformation of public figures like Lahham, who professed commitment in his career to an Arab Nationalist cause, yet fell silent when the Syrian Revolution called for voices against injustices. Lahham, for many Syrians, became emblematic of the Assad regime's propaganda, critiquing the foreign hands wishing on the destruction of Syria, and dismissing the "Arab Spring" as an "Arab Autumn."
It becomes therefore crucial to question how we then articulate the position of Lahham, a long-beloved cultural icon in Syria and beyond, someone who, alongside al-Maghout, has seen their artistic endeavors transcend Syrian borders and resonate with numerous Arab audiences, when their plays were performed in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Abu Dhabi. Understanding Lahham, both as an artistic character through his roles in al-Maghout’s plays and as a symbol of Syrian "cultural iconography," aligns with what Max Weiss describes as subversive affirmation.1 Subversive affirmation, as Inke Arns elucidates, and as referenced in Weiss, is a strategy in art and media where certain ideologies, norms, or practices are seemingly endorsed or exaggerated, through an “over-identification” with a cause, yet with a critical intention to undermine or question them1. This technique involves adopting the language, aesthetics, or forms associated with the critique’s target, using them to highlight their absurdity and contradictions. Lahham is then not outrightly rejecting or critiquing the absurd reality and injustices portrayed on stage but is rather affirming them in such a way that their flaws become apparent to himself and the audience.
My intention is not to diminish the themes in al-Maghout’s plays but to acknowledge them in a way that their portrayals—and the flaws therein, as intended by the writer—provoke realization among both audiences and the artists themselves. This perspective aligns profoundly with Lahham's reflection in a CNN interview, responding to the backlash over his perceived stance on the Syrian Uprising and the Arab Spring as a whole. He lamented, "It seems our people are prone to forgetting, or have forgotten their history and the legacies of their artists. And I don’t believe that I or Ms. Mona [in reference to Mona Wasef] are the sole targets, but rather, it might be an attempt to marginalize Syria by undermining its artistic and cultural symbols2."
Building on Weiss’ suggestion, I view Lahham not merely as a participant in subversive affirmation but as its very audience and subject. By positioning himself as a mirror to Syrian society and its cultural artifacts, Lahham becomes a living example of the potent subversion he portrays, fully embodying the satire of his performances. While he might have been perceived as the flagbearer of an Arab Nationalist cause on stage and screen, he also represents all that has been fed to us about the absurdity of the Arab mind, its psyche, and the very broken future we are purported to have. For Lahham, the average Syrian who participated in the 2011 demonstrations has not yet reached the full maturity required for democracy. He represents the deep surrender that Arab history has been written through, of an inherent incapability to understand freedom, an un-deservingness of freedom. Weiss explains that subversive affirmation "does not always follow from a calculated political objective, but can also emerge from the vagaries and inaccuracies of performance itself."
If we were to read Lahham in that lens, how would we then read al-Maghout? Lahham drank from the same cup that Al-Maghout critiqued and intended to spill. Perhaps al- Maghout was not an opponent to the Assad regime in the literal sense of opposing the regime. But to dilute opposition and forms of resistance to an outward and complete rejection is to take away many forms of resistance, however implicit or explicit. To speak of artists and curators who produced and continue to produce work under authoritarian regimes or a settler colonial project as carrying some sort of moral hypocrisy is to take away from the discursiveness that makes up acts of resistance through such productions. Viewing Al-Maghout as a living tradition rather than an object of analysis opens up a richer understanding of revolution and resistance’s discursive nature within such artistic endeavors.
Despite al-Maghout’s works being produced under sponsorship from the Assad regime, it was never truly about placing him at the forefront; instead, it was about leveraging his message through state endorsement. The state, an entity in constant flux seeking fresh avenues of representation, found value in the narratives of figures like al-Maghout—individuals it may have previously sidelined. This strategic alignment served to offer a breathing space (fusha), a release valve of sorts (mutanafs), while simultaneously relegating the architect of these messages to the periphery. Through this process, the state aimed to harness the essence of al-Maghout's work to fulfill its evolving needs for representation, employing his insights as a means to ventilate societal pressures, all the while keeping al-Maghut himself at arm's length.
From the wealth of books, newspapers, and social media documenting Al-Maghout’s life, I perceive his enduring legacy as that of an Arab and Syrian—a profound writer, and a brilliant, sarcastic critic who feared the trappings of politics rather than the concept of politicization. His writings were deeply politicized, with his stances reflecting a complexity beyond mere moral neutrality, never aiming for objectivity. His decision early in life to join the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party (SSNP) instead of the Ba'ath Party illustrates his aversion to politics rather than to politicization. He recounts, “I joined a party without reading its principles. It was cold and wintry. The Ba'ath Party was in a distant alley, muddy and filled with dogs, whereas the SSNP was conveniently located next to our house, complete with a heater, prompting my visit. The person in charge at the Ba'ath Party was a boxer, and my disdain for physical aggression, coupled with fear, swayed me away from them.”3
Perhaps Al-Maghout wrote his works under the rule of Hafez al-Assad and attended his plays in the presence of Assad the Father. Yet, even then, he chose to sit seven people away from Hafez al-Assad. As Talal Tawfiq recaps, “after the end of the first performance of the play "Kasak Ya Watan," Hafez al-Assad clapped and stood up, so did everyone. The actors rushed to him and greeted him, with Lahham leading the way. Everyone waited for al-Maghout. Al-Maghout did not move from his seat, so Assad called and approached him. Moving slightly, standing halfway up, and shaking Assad’s hand, Assad said, “May you be well, and we will work on addressing the shortcomings.” To which al-Maghout replied in a hoarse voice: "God willing, God willing," and turned his head.”4
Perhaps I am biased towards al-Maghout, and I have no problem with that. As he said in his poem "The Icon," "I write and wipe my pen under my arm because I write about honor.
And I let my pen graze wherever it pleases because I write about freedom." 5Al-Maghout let his writings graze as they pleased, as long as their voice would reach, without the ornamentation of literary figures who do not speak the language of those in the streets. His politicization alone was out of hunger and fear, and so was his presence in Syria, despite his arrest and then state-promised protection. If someone knocked on his door at night, he would not open it for fear of arrest, even though, as he describes, "the state protects me, but I am still afraid.” 6
I read Al-Maghout from his writings, not from the state-sanctioned productions of his writings. After all, writing about something is to enter into a relationship with it—a relationship defined by one's support, opposition, or perceived moral neutrality towards the subject. Al-Maghout, as a vibrant, living tradition, embodies precisely what Talal Asad means when he speaks of living traditions: “There clearly is not, nor can there be, such a thing as a universally acceptable account of a living tradition. Any representation of tradition is contestable. What shape that contestation takes, if it occurs, will be determined not only by the powers and knowledges each side deploys, but by the collective life to which they aspire, or to whose survival they are quite indifferent.” 7
The quotation from Anemone above, and those that follow, are from a play originally meant to be experienced on stage rather than confined to written text. Nevertheless, although al-Maghout’s thoughts were conveyed through live performance, I hope in the translation of these excerpts to preserve the livid emotions of al-Maghout’s thoughts – as acted out by Lahham – and what they can teach us today about Arab consciousness.
The plays of al-Maghout remain rooted in our reality. They are plays which are satirical, concise, scorching and spontaneous; plays that celebrate our strengths and criticize our impotence under cowardly world leaders. Fernando Pessoa, in his Book of Disquiet, described literature as “art married to thought, and realization untainted by reality […] To express something is to conserve its virtue and take away its terror. Fields are greener in their description than in their actual greenness. Flowers, if described with phrases that define them in the air of the imagination, will have colours with a durability not found in cellular life. What moves lives. What is said endures. There's nothing in life that's less real for having been well described.”8 In this regard, not only does al-Maghout’s work live and endure, but it is more relevant now than ever.
Nimer: So long as there is a writer in this homeland who is starving because of his thoughts, so long as someone dares to say no at this stage – even to his wife – I shall not give up, Zahra. Colonialism is not soldiers and tanks anymore, for the tanks and soldiers of the colonizer no longer instill fear. When children of the occupied land, are being martyred while resisting a tank with a rock, and the children of the south are self-immolating, with their school books still on their backs… if they do not ignite fire within us… then these are not acts of martyrdom but of suicide.
I have always found myself connecting struggles with their manifestations, and connecting Arab consciousness with a cause – be it the Spacetoon9 theme songs, the meaning and depth of which I only really noticed once I grew older, or the songs on Palestine and Arab unity which taught my 6-year-old brain the meaning of resistance, the idea of a child martyr, and the image of a rifle. I always thought I grew up in an apolitical household, as none of my family members were engaged directly with politics.
Eventually, however, I realized that it was not my house that was apolitical, but rather that politics was our natural state of being. Politics was me resting my head on my dad’s shoulder while he listened to Lotfi Bouchnak’s song, Ana Muwatin (I am a Citizen). Politics was watching al-Maghout’s plays every Friday and singing along to Rayat Al-Sawda (The Black Banner). Politics was me and my friends singing Toyor Al Janah’s song Lamma Nistashhid (When We Are Martyred) at the top of our lungs on a school trip. My family did not engage with politics through political debates or reading political discourse, but rather through explaining to their six-year-old daughter, as she listened to Al-Hulm Al-Arabi (The Arabic Dream) on TV while waiting for her dad to get dressed to buy her the promised goldfish, that that song was about Palestine, unity, and martyrdom.
My seven-year-old self came to understand the meaning of poverty and inequality through watching the Spacetoon song Ba’i’at Al Kibreet (The Little Match-Seller Girl). I remember crying listening to it on a cassette that my sister Ola bought from her school fair, and I remember my brother, Alaa, telling me it wasn’t real, but just a song in a cartoon show. My political reality, the one I was conscious of and the one I wasn’t, was amplified by words – words that for a few minutes could transport me to a state that I was privileged enough not to directly live in, but was nonetheless aware of.
Nimer: Keep arguing, keep disagreeing, get lost, and get us lost with you. Turn your radios on full volume, from the ocean to the gulf, curse each other and slaughter each other. The parties shall slaughter each other in every street of the homeland. You are all right, you all have a point of view, and you all have an ideology. You are all right. How could you not be? You are all right, except for the homeland. If the homeland is wrong, I shall stand by it. Because the homeland is poor, the homeland is destitute, just like me. It’s cold? I’m its clothes. It's feverish? I’m its neck. It’s old? I’m its stick. It’s barefoot? I shall be its shoes because the homeland is the crown atop my head. The homeland is the soil of an ummah.
Arab history transcends the narrative confines of Arab leadership. It encompasses the collective struggles of Arab people, our colonial struggles (including the Palestinian resistance) and the broader fight against tyranny and injustice–longstanding issues predating the events of the Arab Spring. To view this history merely through institutional leaders through the lens of a top-down approach is not only a misrepresentation but also deceptive. Such a perspective reduces modern Arab history to the official narratives and stances of national leaders, embodying a form of identity politics that pigeonholes our triumphs and resilience, as well as our suffering and grievances.
The struggle for Palestine and against the settler colonial State of Israel did not stop after 1973. Arab history neither begins nor ends with Arab leadership: true change originates from populist collective action, not from governments, elites, the affluent, or intellectuals. Arab leaders in the Arab-Israeli War opposed an international colonial settler project for personal and national interests, rather than for the benefit of the land’s rightful inhabitants.
In recent times, unable to engage in physical warfare, these leaders have resorted to mere condemnations, expressions of concern, and calls to action, functioning more as political commentators than as leaders of governance.
Nimer: Oh, Ismail. History has been written, my son, and the present is being written now… but thank God, my son, the future is a blank white page. Not like what Zahra thought. The future is a blank white page, and we shall all stand together, shoulder to shoulder and hand in hand, and write it, together.
Zahra: But Nimer… we do not know how to write and we do not know how to read.
Nimer: Then we shall write it with the stomps and bangs of our feet.
During a recent lecture at the Middle East Center at the University of Oxford, Professor Elizabeth Kassab raised a critical question: Who truly represents Arab thought? Is Arab contemporary thought as contemporaneous and as Arab as such academics aim for it to be?
In my view, those best-positioned to represent Arab thought are the writers and artists who operate beyond the confines of scholarly discourse and the bubble of academic political correctness–those who dwell on the fringes and whose creative works embody their realities and ideas. Al-Maghout, whose work has been dispersed across the internet in pirated and poorly recorded formats, as well as tucked away in family cassette collections, was undoubtedly one of them. Those who try to speak on behalf of a monolithic Arab collective often fall short; conversely, those who strive to articulate their individual realities, firmly rooted in a collective experience, end up being the true torchbearers of an authentically Arab and contemporaneous narrative.
Literary works reflecting on al-Maghout’s plays often allege that, decades after their production, his creative endeavors have yet to yield results. They argue that such work has struggled to resonate with receptive minds capable of grasping the perils surrounding our troubled region, marred by persistent conflicts. However, I find myself in disagreement with this viewpoint. In retrospect, when I examine al-Maghout’s body of work, I see it not as an attempt to shake awake a sleeping Arab consciousness but rather as an endeavor to depict a harsh political reality through a satirical lens. The Arab consciousness, that of your average citizen–not the government, not the elites, nor the bourgeoisie–is alive and well.
It is so alive and well that we have seen how collectively we have succeeded in shifting the Zionist narrative and rhetoric on an unprecedented scale. It is alive and well to the point where the people themselves succeeded in connecting Gazans with the rest of the world amidst a complete communication blackout implemented by Israel. Grievances are shared, transcending borders, and people are beginning to recognize many international human rights organizations as mere instruments of imperial powers. Meanwhile local organizations like Syria's Violet and Molham, among many others, which were established by the youth, achieve remarkable successes.
Against this background, al-Maghout’s works serve as a mirror held against the struggles of the Arab collective, both against external powers and from within our own societies, because they ground us just as strongly as they remind us of our adversaries. Kasak Ya Watan (Cheers, O Homeland), Day’et Tishreen (The Village of October), Shaqa’iq al-Nu’man (Anemone) and Ghurba (Alienation), are fragments of al-Maghout’s mind, brought to life by actors who may no longer align themselves with the same fervor for that struggle as they once did on the stage. And that's perfectly acceptable. These plays were not intended to serve as permanent fixtures in the careers of these artists, but rather as vehicles for conveying contemporary Arab thought.
It is perhaps the very fact that Lahham strayed away from a malaise he once perfectly depicted on stage that opens the floor for a conversation about the evolving nature of political expression in the Arab world. This shift reflects a broader narrative of change and adaptation, demonstrating how discourse on the Arab collective is not static but rather a continuously evolving entity that adapts and responds to the changing realities and sentiments of their societies. In this way, Al- Maghout’s plays, and the diverse reactions to them over time, encapsulate the dynamic and ever-changing landscape of Arab intellectual and cultural thought.
Nimer: Our nation is huge, but we gravitate towards exile. An ummah, a history, but we are searching for an identity. We sing for unity, but we are divided. Petrol – but people are cold. Skyscrapers – but people are homeless. Resources – but people are hungry. My God... do we not have half of the world’s weapons, but cannot beat a cotton leafworm? [...]. The battle is with the enemies of the inside [...]. Those are the rats of the ship. Those are the ones that want our nation to turn into a loaf of bread, that runs… and we run after it. And we will not be able to catch up. With every bite of that bread, we shall swallow a piece of our dreams, and they shall build and build with our sorrow, they will build palaces! Let them take everything with them [...]. Let them fill up the coffins and bury them underground. Let them share them with the worms [...].
Al-Maghout’s poignant reflection on these paradoxes–wealth juxtaposed with deprivation, armaments contrasted with impotence against simple adversities–naturally gives way to a deeper, more introspective critique. To reflect on Kassab’s question, the diverse streams of Arab intellectual thought in the 21st century, while addressing themes from post-Arab Spring reflections to gender and feminism, can often be seen as byproducts of a Western intellectual framework. This framework tends to dichotomize history and reality into binaries: darkness and light, freedom and oppression, authoritarian regimes and democratic aspirations.
However, the essence of what I term the “Arab malaise” transcends these simplifications. For me, it is a profound yearning for a sense of home, a deep-rooted value system that we firmly inhabit. We are not cultural byproducts; we are intricate systems with distinct values and a history that resonates profoundly. October 7 has shifted the scales of American-Western dominance in the region, a change only amplified by Israel’s response. Such dominance is reaching a crucial tipping point.
Resistance as such is not a quest for revolutionary fervor to make sense of our reality, but rather, is grounded in a shared, collective pain. While we mourn our living and revere our dead, the anguish of Gaza and the brutal reality of Idlib are trivialized into a charity soirée– an elegant dinner at Oxford. Here, intellectuals come together to pledge donations after savoring a three-course meal, only to recharge for the after-party where Arabic melodies play. It’s a dance atop the graves of our struggle, a bizarre act of exotifying our attachment to a cause.
To this I feel I must respond: Do not commit us to memory. We will remember ourselves. Spare us your understanding, and your cinematic portrayals of our strife as your next scholarly endeavor, your next film screening.
Echoing Al-Maghout's complex relationship with the state—his paradoxical experiences of endorsement, imprisonment, and protection by the very entity he critiqued—I perceive his revolutionary essence as one that resists easy categorization or memorization. A living tradition, he embodies his defiance not just in public declarations but in the privacy of his fears, a simple act of reluctance to open the door at night. Al-Maghout never set out to compose for the Asads, neither father nor son, nor to articulate the narrative of a singular entity. His creations were not penned for the ears of a regime; they were not confined to the contemplation of power structures. Yet, through his artistic endeavors, he engaged in a form of resistance, distinct from the archetypal revolutionary bearing arms.
A “red Bedouin,” navigating a landscape of contradictions and illusions, al-Maghout once lamented that his sorrows left no room to make his poems rhyme. This is my tribute to al- Maghout, my attempt to preserve a fragment of his fragments and a nostalgia I yearn for;
my attempt to address a malaise I deeply wrestle with, from the margins of my diasporic reality—a sentiment which many of my generation will undoubtedly share.
Sources
Al-Maghout, M., Laham, D. (1989). Anemone
1. Weiss, M. (2022). Revolutions Aesthetic: A Cultural History of Ba'thist Syria. Stanford University Press.
2. An interview with CNN as referenced in Emarat El Youm https://www.emaratalyoum.com/life/culture/2011-11-01-1.434507
3 From a Al Jazeera interview with al-Maghout https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iVh6FKwUOM
5 From his book, The Red Bedouin.
6 From a Al Jazeera Interview with al-Maghout https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iVh6FKwUOM
7 Talal Asad in the idea of an Anthropology of Islam, p. 24
8 Pessoa, F. (2003). The Book of Disquiet (Zenith, R., Trans.). Penguin Classics. (1998).
9 Spacetoon is a popular Arabic television channel that first began broadcasting in the early 2000s. It is primarily known for its programming aimed at children and young audiences, featuring a wide range of animated series which are dubbed into Arabic from various languages. Spacetoon has been significant in the cultural upbringing of many Arab children, as it not only provided entertainment but also often included educational content and moral lessons.
Image Credit: Rossem
