Present/absent futures: waiting in the aftermath of a defeated revolution

ABSTRACT

This article explores time and temporality in the wake of the defeat of the Syrian 2011 revolution. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Syrian revolutionaries in Gaziantep, Turkey; it argues that waiting for detainees to be freed, for return to the homeland or for the revolutionary cycle's repetition and closure, deeply modifies displaced Syrians' relation to present, past and future. Syrians' waiting thus appears reversed - directed to the past and awaiting a different repetition of the past - for, in this context, the temporality of displacement is simultaneously a temporality of the aftermath of defeat.

KEYWORDS:

• Syrian revolution
• aftermath
• temporality

What I really hope for is that now the cycle of anger will start again. You know, now we are waiting for a second revolution! … 

Told me Abu Zein, a former Free Syrian Army (FSA) fighter in his early thirties, who used to work in a religious bookshop before the revolution started. In the above extract of one of our conversations – that took place in the summer of 2015, after he arrived from his besieged neighbourhood after being heavily injured -, Abu Zein expressed the hope that despite being seemingly defeated at a personal and collective level, a second revolution would begin in the future.

Analysing the temporality of the 2011 Syrian revolution’s defeat, this article questions the ways in which waiting redefines Syrians’ time – the layout of past, present, and future – and temporality – ‘the lived experience of time passing’, or the social relation between past, present, and future (Scott 2014, 1). In other words, it examines the disruptive effects of the revolution’s principal unintended consequence, displacement, on Syrians’ temporality and time (see Sanbar 2001).

I explore these questions through the ethnography of Syrian revolutionaries displaced at the Syrian-Turkish border in the city of Gaziantep during fieldwork conducted between 2014 and 2016. This article seizes and commemorates a specific period of time, when my interlocutors – Syrian youth and families who self-defined as thuwwar (revolutionaries) and/or nasheteen (active revolutionaries/ activists) – were still hoping for their revolution (thawra) to succeed when their hopes were annihilated by the intervention of the Russian army in Aleppo (2015).

This was a time of intense waiting and immense hope during which the rebels’ (armed revolutionaries) victory in Aleppo, the second largest city located just over a hundred kilometres from Gaziantep, was imminent. The Russian intervention however broke my interlocutors’ hope to see the city completely fall into the FSA’s hands. A fierce battle started over the city’s control that led to a brutal siege of its Eastern half. The city fell back into regime’s hands after its besieged areas were forcefully emptied of their inhabitants in December 2016 (Al-Kateab 2019).

Most of Gaziantep’s Syrian inhabitants were from the region and city of Aleppo, although my interlocutors came from all over the country. Many of the nasheteen present in the city were going back and forth between Gaziantep and Aleppo until late 2015 when the Turkish ‘open-border’ policy ended (Al-Khalili 2023a). The Syrian displaced revolutionaries with whom I lived and worked mainly belonged to the lower and lower-middle classes and came from suburban and countryside areas that were controlled by the armed opposition that were revolutionary bastions. Among the Aleppian activists, many were former university students, whose studies were abruptly interrupted by the revolution and the armed conflict. In Aleppo, the revolution started in and around the university campus, whereas it usually began around mosques in the rest of the country, the repression was thus particularly fierce against students.

Taking waiting as its topic of enquiry and looking at the temporal reconfigurations it instigates, this article asks: what happens to time when waiting is oriented and directed to the past? Examining the consequences of a thwarted political event on time, I argue that waiting for the revolution to repeat itself makes Syrians’ present ‘unliveable’, yet not because Syrians’ waiting is synonymous with fear and chaos (cf. Malik 2009), but rather because the hope they invest in the past and the uncertainty of their future leads to a suspension of their present. Hence, waiting has become the temporality of displacement and of the aftermath of a defeated revolution, a temporality oriented towards the paused revolution and Syrians’ recent revolutionary past.

Waiting for revolutionary action to resume inside Syria, and for the revolution to succeed in the near future, my Syrian interlocutors seem inhabited by a paradoxical hope for the past, as it becomes a hope directed at the past or what I call an inward hope. My interlocutors longed for a heroic and utopian past to replace a disenchanted and uncertain future. Pasts seem to be replacing futures. Yet it is not the repetition of an idealized past that Syrian revolutionaries displaced in Gaziantep hoped for – this would give rise to unalloyed nostalgia for the past -, but a different repetition of the past that one can only grasp if one understands time as duration (Bergson 1908; Deleuze 1993).

My argument is thus twofold: to show that waiting corresponds to a temporal limbo or permanent temporariness, suspends Syrians’ present, and disrupts their sense of time, and to demonstrate that the disruption of Syrians’ experience of time has created a temporality of displacement that is simultaneously a ‘temporality of the aftermaths of political catastrophe’ (Scott 2014, 2). What is peculiar about Syrians’ experience of time is that it is marked by the tragic consequences of their defeated revolution. It is the temporality of immobility, a non-heroic or even anti-heroic temporality that contrasts with the temporality of revolutionary action.

I argue that Syrians’ tragic temporality leads to a reconfiguration of time itself: it is not only the lived experience and relation between past, present, and future that is changed, rather, the very definitions of past, present, and future are radically transformed. My interlocutors thus live between a heroic (revolutionary) past and a disenchanted near future, in a dystopian or tragic present.¹ Such relation to time can be defined as the Syrian temporality of the aftermath: the relation between past-present-future is redefined in the aftermath of revolutionary action, which creates the feeling of being suspended or stuck in the moment as Syrians wait for the past to be re-actualised in the future.

Displacement and permanent temporariness

‘This is the key of our home in rif dimashq (Damascus countryside),’ Mustafa told me with emotion as he took a bunch of keys out of the backpack he had just put on the floor. ‘I keep it with me all the time. Do you know why? Because we are going back! As soon as my town is liberated, I will be on my way!’

Mustafa is a man in his early twenties, someone I regularly meet in the flat where I live with two women respectively in their forties and fifties, as he liked to spend time with my host’s nephews. He fled his home in rif dimashq with his parents as the fighting intensified around the capital, and first took refuge in his family hometown near the Turkish border. As we sat together in the living room looking after the kids and drinking warm tea, I asked him about his story and his situation in Gaziantep. His reaching for his backpack embodies Syrians’ hopes to return home, and its necessary correlate for revolutionaries: the success of the revolution. Like most of my interlocutors at the beginning of my fieldwork – and until the summer of 2015-, Mustafa was confident that he would go home in the near future, thus envisioning Gaziantep as only a temporary stop.²

‘As soon as we [the revolutionaries] retake our town from Daesh, I will go back to my family place [near the border], and someday I will go back home [near Damascus]. I know I will go back home soon,’ Mustafa continued with confidence. These are not only emphatic words that demonstrate his commitment to the revolution and his faith that the regime and Daesh will be defeated; they were also embodied in different actions. My interlocutors always kept an eye on developments in the situation inside Syria, whether on TV or on social media. I rarely visited a house in which the TV was not showing the latest news from Syria, nor did I have many conversations without my interlocutors constantly checking their phones to read the latest updates on the situation inside and see the latest developments of such and such a battle. Moreover, the permanent readiness to leave Gaziantep and go home was vividly illustrated by Syrians preparing to return, and effectively returning, to Aleppo, as its liberation by the rebels seemed imminent in the early summer of 2015.

My interlocutors from Aleppo were very excited by the prospect of their city’s liberation. Knowing that my fieldwork would last at least another eight months they kept teasing me, ‘We’re going back! We’re not staying here! We’re going as soon as Aleppo is liberated! You can come with us or stay here alone … ’ I regularly met with a group of friends in the evening, but our usually noisy meetings, dominated by laughter, loud voices telling stories and jokes, and choir singing of revolutionary songs, turned silent. No one really spoke to one another any longer; everyone was fixated on their phones, waiting for updates on Aleppo’s situation. The young revolutionaries with whom I had first worked when I came to Gaziantep, when I volunteered in one of their organizations, were trying to evaluate when they should be ready to go back.

This excitement and the certainty of the city’s imminent liberation, many of them returned to Aleppo to help ‘prepare its liberation’ in the summer of 2015. Most of them were back in Gaziantep after a couple of months, however, when hope faded with the Russian intervention. Aleppo’s fate became worse as revolutionaries saw the part of the city they had liberated under siege by regime and Russian forces. Displaced Syrians’ waiting thus became indefinite as it was appended to a situation over which they had no power. This led to their displacement transforming from temporary to a state of permanent temporariness.

Waiting was imposed on Syrians displaced in Gaziantep, as movement was dependent on the revolution’s success, the end of the war, the opening of the border, the acquisition of administrative documents to cross the border, and so on; yet, despite their powerlessness in the situation, it was an active decision to keep waiting (Crapanzano 2003; Hage 2009b). Syrians were waiting for state apparatuses to release detainees, for administrations to deliver documents, for embassies to provide visas, for governments to open borders, and for conflict to end. In other words, they had little leverage on their waiting and its outcome. In fact, their waiting was shaped by states for whom it is a political tool (Hage 2009a, 3). In such a context, waiting amounts to an act of resilience (sumud) rather than patience (saber)³, which could be described in terms of ‘waiting for’ – when one is stuck in a situation and cannot do much about it – and ‘waiting on’ – an active decision (Schwartz 1975; Appadurai 2002; 2013).

The fact that Mustafa and others oriented their waiting towards returning home, rather than migrating to Europe or actively settling in Turkey, was a personal choice that can be understood as a political form of resilience. Waiting was a way of continuing the political struggle, of not abandoning their lands, of marking that Syria was still theirs, and showing that they were not planning to leave it to the Assad regime. Refusing to settle permanently in Turkey and treating it as a temporary stop was thus a way to mark their commitment to, and hopes for, the revolution. Yet the temporariness of displacement was not linked for all to their waiting to return home; it was, for some, entangled with their waiting to flee to Europe.

Spatio-temporal limbo: Waiting as erasure of the present

‘No one knows what will happen to us in Turkey but in Europe there are laws. We know what will happen and, as everyone says, it is better for our children’s future,’ Umm Mohammad told her sister, Umm Khaled, as she tried to convince her to flee to Europe. The two sisters came from a small town in northern Syria. They had to flee after Umm Khaled’s son and husband were martyred as they joined the FSA fighting against regime’s attacks on their hometown.

Umm Khaled, a housewife in her early fifties whose husband had been a civil servant, had fled with her daughter immediately after their town was besieged by the regime army, while her husband and sons stayed behind and took part in the armed struggle. Umm Mohammad had first moved to her in-laws town and had later joined her sister with her entire family. She was now waiting with her children to be reunified with her husband who had embarked on the perilous journey to Europe through the sea. Like many of my interlocutors, she did not envisage staying in Gaziantep as she saw no future in Turkey. ‘Ma fi mustaqbel hun,’ (there is no future here), my interlocutors often said, and many were looking at all kinds of ways to leave the country. The uncertainty of the future in Turkey was rendered more acute and was given a sense of urgency with the increasing pressure on Syrians in their host country, the deteriorating situation in Syria, and the opening of the Balkan route in the summer of 2015. Therefore, not only was Syrians’ present precarious and hostile but their future was increasingly uncertain.

‘I don’t think of the future! Never! I only think a couple of hours ahead, that’s all!’ Umm Yazan told me as we were on a bus to her place. She made this wider point as we were discussing her current situation in Turkey. Her words underline the unpredictability of Syrians’ future in the country. A fifty-year-old housewife living alone with three of her children, Umm Yazan would often tell me that living in Turkey was the best for the present moment but not an option in the future. She was thus looking for ways to send her children abroad while she herself either returned to Syria or joined them in Europe. In order to explain her decision to leave Turkey, she stressed the poor education system, the increasingly religious orientation of the curriculum, the growing authoritarianism, and the lack of affordable medical treatment. Another reason that pushed her to want to leave was the extreme instability of her situation in Turkey: she had just lost her job, her children were unable to find employment, and she was about to be evicted from her flat (Al-Khalili, 2023b).

My Syrian interlocutors rarely imagined their future in Turkey because of the increasing uncertainty and precariousness of their life and status as displaced subjects. Turkey thus seemed a place between two horizons: returning home and migration. Hence, the Syrians’ present in Turkey was pure waiting oriented to two different (spatio-)temporal horizons. Moreover, their future was somewhere else, and leaving or staying became an increasingly discussed topic amongst my interlocutors from the summer of 2015 onwards. For many of my interlocutors, migration seemed increasingly the only way to live in the present and to have a future (see Khosravi 2017). Yet, for them, migrating did not automatically mean the end of waiting; many found themselves stuck in refugee camps in Europe, and many were still waiting (elsewhere) to be able to go back home. Thus, spatial movement was not always an answer to temporal immobility. Ultimately, if displacement means being outside of space, waiting is experienced as being ‘outside of time’ (Rundell 2009, 50). In other words, Syrians lived in a temporal limbo: they were stuck between the past and the future but without present. But what does it concretely mean to have ‘no present’ and what happens to time when waiting is oriented and directed to the past?

The temporality of active waiting: Punctuated time

As I walked into Umm Ahmad’s living room, a working-class housewife in her mid-forties, whose three sons were martyred and two forcibly disappeared, she greeted me and, as soon as I was seated, she asked me, ‘Do you have any news about Abu Moatassem [the detained father of a close friend]?’ I answered in the negative before telling her that I had been advised to meet with a detainee, freed a couple of weeks earlier, who had just arrived in town. I was often told that meeting with freshly released prisoners usually offers the best chance of hearing about missing relatives. Former detainees who became my acquaintances and friends explained that they memorized each other’s phone numbers as they were about to be released in order to call and give their co-detainees’ relatives news of them. They also memorized the names of those who had been killed under torture (see Khalifa 2007).

I asked Umm Ahmad if she wanted me to ask this particular ex-detainee if he knew anything about her sons’ fates. She agreed and told her daughter to bring paper, pen, and the pile of precious family photographs she kept in a handbag. Alongside her sons’ names and dates of birth, as well as her own and her husband’s, she wrote the dates and places of their disappearance. I asked Umm Ahmad if her sons had been seen in any security branches or prisons since their arrests, but she answered by the negative. She then offered to give me pictures of her sons so they could be physically identified.

Before I could answer, she started to show me the photographs, commenting on the date, place, and occasion on which each had been taken. She became very emotional as she spoke of her detained and martyred sons and showed me the picture of her youngest son recalling the story of his arrest and death under torture in a regime jail. Three of Umm Ahmad’s sons were martyred in protests and detention and two were still missing since their arrest by the regime. Her daughter selected a couple of pictures that she photographed with her phone and sent to my WhatsApp.

Meeting former detainees occupied a large part of my fieldwork. Each time I met a former detainee, I would ask about Abu Moatassem and about Umm Ahmad’s sons. For detainees’ relatives, searching for a detainee and trying to get him⁴ released was a complicated, costly, and time-consuming task that included finding middlemen who could pay someone in the regime side to get information and broker a deal: first to get him transferred to a civil prison, or to arrange a visit, and then to get him out of jail. It was a risky transaction as one could lose a huge amount of money if cheated by the intermediary. The transaction was thus usually twofold and involved a third person, with payment being made in two instalments, often remaining with the third person until the detainee was visited or released. This quest could also include trying to get a detainee’s name on a prisoner exchange list and the constant search for a better, more trustworthy and efficient intermediary. The whole process of searching for relatives and attempting to negotiate their release periodically turned into a flurry of daily activity.

Abu Moatassem had been detained for three years and his family had made many attempts to have him released when the middleman called Moatassem and announced that his father would be freed in a week. Moatassem started to think of ways to get his father out of the country, since staying in Syria could mean his being arrested again. He had to find a safe way for the old man to cross Syria and be smuggled into Turkey. Moatassem began to contact friends and acquaintances to find out about the newest roads and to get tips; he also had to arrange a money transfer to pay the middleman. He made several phone calls to see who was still doing this and how much it would cost. As the day of release approached, Moatassem became increasingly tense and, on the day itself, life seemed to pause and time stop. Moatassem could not eat or work and was annoyed when I tried to open a conversation. Time passed slowly, becoming sticky, dense, and heavy, as he spent his day staring at his phone, watching the time pass, expecting his father’s release at any moment.

For a year, every couple of month or so the middleman had called and announced a release that never happened, so hope decreased as the day advanced. Periodically, Moatassem contacted the middleman to be updated on the situation but he didn’t know what was happening and Moatassem was left waiting in front of his phone. Abu Moatassem could be released any time between 12 and 4pm but, as 4pm approached, Moatassem started to lose hope that it would happen. Although, by 4pm, it was very improbable that his father would be freed, Moatassem was still hoping that it might happen at an unusual time. As on the previous occasions when he had been told that his father’s release was imminent, Moatassem continued to wait for another couple of days, unable to resume his ‘normal life’ and focus on his work, as he kept calling his family and the middleman, hoping for a satisfactory resolution. The middleman would always come up with an explanation as to why the release had failed and would then disappear until he announced Abu Moatassem’s imminent release again, a cycle usually repeated every other month. After these intense upheavals everything seemed to go back to ‘normal’ waiting, until the middleman got in touch again.

My interlocutors’ paused and suspended present appears as time ‘punctuated’ (Guyer 2007), regularly interrupted by different events linked to their waiting for things to happen in the near-future. Since there is no formal procedure that one can follow to get someone released from jail, or to arrange a visit, the present of detainees’ relatives is not routinized and structured by administrative agendas. If there is a ‘lack of progression of time’, similar to the one experienced by Palestinian wives of detainees; I argue that such a contraction does not ‘restrict lives to the present’ (Buch Segal 2013, 125) as there is no resolution of the situation for Syrian detainees and their relatives, and one has to prepare for new upheavals. In fact, the present for relatives of Syrian detainees is rather punctuated by outbursts of intense activity that momentarily interrupt its normally suspended state.

As Moatassem’s story shows, detainees’ relatives would suddenly engage in a flurry of activity in the search for their relatives’ whereabouts and for solutions to free them and, after encountering blank walls, would momentarily pause their research until they found another option. Such effervescence was often linked to the news of a collective release from the regime’s jails, to the constitution of a list of detainees to be exchanged between the two camps, or to the announcement by a middleman of the detainee’s imminent release. Syrians’ waiting was thus punctuated by periods of intense activity that brought them back to a present that otherwise seemed suspended. I further deepen the analysis of the effects of waiting on one’s present by examining the temporal effects of waiting on Syrians’ relations with the past and future and their experience of time.

I argue that my interlocutors clearly see the distant future as the time of the revolution’s success, but the near future, as with the present, is left uncertain and precarious: it is the time of the revolution’s defeat. But what repercussions did Syrians’ inflected-by-waiting present have on their relations to the past and the future? Waiting does reshape relations with time and Syrians’ past-present-future perception.

Time out-of-joint: The temporality of the aftermath

My interlocutors’ experience of time in displacement has been marked by the tragic unfolding of their revolution, as Islamist groups increasingly took over rebel groups and the FSA in liberated areas, the regime’s besieging and retaking of liberated territories, and the conflict between regime army and rebel battalions turned into a proxy war. During the revolution and the first years of displacement, the time of struggle and planning was the near future: of the success of the revolution, of a new Syria, of return home, of detainees’ liberation. With the revolution’s defeat becoming clearer, however, it seems that the near future has been evacuated, yet this period is central to revolutionary action for it is the time of ‘the reach of thought and imagination, of planning and hoping’ (Guyer 2007, 409). Moreover, the revolution’s defeat also led to a shift in temporal horizons from the near future to a present consisting of waiting and a long-term horizon of the revolution’s successful return. In the aftermath of the revolution, the near past and distant future appear as the main horizons of the revolutionary project and action, and are invested with hope, whereas the near future is a time of uncertainty that seems an extension of displaced Syrians’ indefinite waiting in the present.

After Umm Najem’s husband was arrested in Idleb by the regime forces, she did not hear of him for nine months despite her attempts to discover his whereabouts. When the security forces sent his belongings to her home – his watch, his ID card, and other things he had with him when he was arrested – they announced that he was dead (‘killed under torture’ Nura specified). She had four small children, and she was living in her in-laws’ home. After her husband was martyred, and after the four-month mourning period, she married his brother so she could keep living with her children at her in-laws. It had then been over a year since her husband disappeared, and she had lost hope that he was still alive. A year after she married her brother-in-law, her husband was released from jail and he came home to find that his wife had married his brother and was pregnant by him … Can you imagine these people’s situation?! This is why people never give up hope and, unless they see their relatives’ bodies, never accept they are dead.

I first heard the following story from Nura, a widow in her thirties from a small town in north-west Syria, who had continued her revolutionary work (sheghel b-l thawra) inside Syria until she became wanted by an Islamist group controlling her region. Her own husband had been martyred in the early days of the revolution and the story she tells can be read as a moral parable on hope, and an injunction to resilience and patience, as well as testifying to arbitrary arrests, indefinite waiting, and uncertain temporality, and their effects on kinship and gendered relations. I heard different versions of this tale from women waiting for relatives detained in the regime’s jails and, despite some variations in names, locations, and other details, the story always included the same narrative elements: (1) the arbitrary arrest of the husband; (2) the belief that he is dead because his belongings have been returned; (3) the wife’s marriage to her brother-in-law; and (4) the return of the detained husband.

As Nura compared the incomparable – the martyrdom or detention of relatives – she used this story to contrast waiting for a detainee with her own situation. She had nothing to wait for, no hope that her husband would ever come back. She felt that if he had been detained there would still be a slight hope that he would. Yet waiting for a victim of enforced disappearance in a country known for its arbitrary arrests, and for torture on an industrial scale,⁵ is an indefinite and uncertain process. It is an unlimited process especially for those of whom no one knows anything about since their abduction, and those still detained in security branches who are not allowed visits and do not have a ‘judgment’ or a release date.

Waiting, as the parable shows, belongs to an economy of hope. Hope becomes a specific temporal orientation and social practice when people continue to hope to be reunited with their relatives despite the circumstances, despite the slim likelihood that such thing could happen, and despite the repeated failure of things to work as planned. The ‘work of hope’ (Pedersen 2012) is also apparent in Moatassem’s renewed hope each time he heard from his middleman. Each time he hoped that his father would finally be released.

The temporality created by this work of hope is one in which the future has an effect on people’s actions in the present. Hope modifies the articulation between future and present for it is not defined as the imagination of the future in the present but rather as the future becoming a model for actions in the present (Miyazaki 2006, 157). Conceiving hope as a process explains why Syrians’ repeatedly unsuccessful attempts to release their relatives from regime prisons did not halt their continued efforts. On an individual scale, Syrians’ orientation towards the future through hope thus explains the evacuation of the present and its replacement by a pre-experience of the future or a re-experience of the past. But this thought of the future that is yet unknown also suggests the idea of a pre-experience of the future that does not correspond to a clear image of it, as it is still unknown.

My interlocutors’ persistent hope against all odds, especially for the release of detainees who may have been dead for years, and increasingly in the success of their revolution – and the actions that sustain these hopes, working for one’s relatives’ release and for the revolution, – can be explained by seeing that the future, the success of these actions, is pre-experienced in the present. But the temporal effect of having relatives detained also led to a re-experience of the past, in the present.

Past re-experienced in the present

When your son is martyred, you can find some peace because you know he is with God. He is in Paradise. But when your son is detained, you can’t be at peace. If you eat you think: did he eat today? If you’re cold you think: is he cold now? If you take a shower you think: did he have a shower today? Each time you do something you think of him and wonder what is happening with him … 

Umm Ahmad had not heard from her two detained sons since they were arrested four years prior to our conversation, while three of her sons had been martyred. Most people who knew her thought that there was very little chance of any of them being alive. Yet Umm Ahmad was still waiting for her sons and still searching for signs of life from them. She refused to go through the pictures of detainees killed under torture for she would only believe her sons were dead if she saw their bodies. Her life and her family’s was greatly affected by this hopeful waiting. Umm Ahmad story shows how the past is re-experienced in the present through narratives, conversations, actions, activities, and gestures.

In this family the most striking evidence of the past being re-experienced in the present was the naming of Umm Ahmad’s grandchildren after the martyred or missing. Traditionally, grandchildren are named after their grand-parents, especially grandsons. It was expected that Umm Ahmad’s first grandson would be named after her husband. Following such practice, the son virtually becomes the father of his father: Rashid’s firstborn would be named Hussein after his father, making him Abu Hussein, literally the father of Hussein. But he called his son Ahmad (after his brother), becoming Abu Ahmad like his father. It is as if his martyred brother was born again, thus seemingly reproducing the past in the present. This was reinforced by the fact that Rashid had chosen this name after he met his son for the first time because he saw a strong resemblance with his brother Ahmad.

During my weekly visits to Umm Ahmad, a ubiquitous topic of discussion was her disappeared and martyred sons. She told me about their childhood, their education, their characters, their involvement in the revolution, their disappearance and tragic deaths. Her stories were never univocal, as her daughter and daughter-in-law did not only constitute an audience but also contributed to the stories with anecdotes. Umm Ahmad would often illustrate her stories by showing me pictures of her sons. She had also kept all their diplomas, certificates, transcripts, and a few notebooks from their time in school. These items were wrapped in a small plastic bag placed in a handbag she had taken with her when she fled. She was proud that her sons had been shater (brilliant students), and these documents seemed to be among her most precious belongings. Even more than illustrating her stories about her sons, the artefacts seemed to be an embodied synecdoche of her sons: these material artefacts seemed a part of her sons that preserved them with her in the present.

The stories that acted as subtitles for the pictures and diplomas were often repeated, as well as the ritual of carefully passing the items from hand to hand around the room. Umm Ahmad, who sat next to me, talked me through them pointing at the name, grades, and levels and recalling anecdotes about her sons. As she recalled these stories her voice would break and she often burst into tears. Seeing her grandson Ahmad walking around the room, she recalled with emotion how her son Ahmad and his younger siblings sang Marcel Khalife’s ‘Wa ana amshi’ (And I Walk) on the balcony of their house. This memory seemed to be sparked by the fact that Ahmad, like her son that day, was wearing blue jeans and a red shirt.

Moreover, as she described in the extract above, Umm Ahmad’s life was structured around and by her sons’ absence. The absence of her sons could be described as their phantom presence since, as phantom pain their absence is present and has effects on the living lives in the way a missing limb is still present to the body that lost it. This indexes the sensuous absence of those materially absent (Bille, Hatrup, and Sørensen 2010, 3) making apparent the presence of the absent, and the strong effects of her absent sons on her life. In addition to making her sons present through shared memories and producing their phantom presence through artefacts, along with one son’s metonymic embodiment in her grandson; Umm Ahmad’s constant thinking and talking about them could be described as inducing their haunting presence.

The effect on her husband of their sons’ disappearance and of waiting was even more dramatic, as he was the victim of regular panic attacks that made him unable to work or to have any kind of social life. I never met Abu Ahmad over the years that I knew his family although he was always sitting in the room next door, only separated from the room where his sons were embodied through discourses and artefacts by a glass door. Through the account of Umm Ahmad’s life, one can see the deep impact of the permanent or momentary absence of relatives on Syrians’ lives. Syrians’ past, the revolution, and the memory of revolutionaries are present in people’s everyday lives and they are also re-enacted through performances.

The re-experience of the past in the present was further engineered through different public and semi-public performances: in protests and through the singing of revolutionary songs and the performance of dabkeh (traditional Syrian dance) like in the first protests of 2011. My interlocutors thus refused to relinquish the revolutionary past, re-actualising it in the present. Dinners and wedding parties were often occasions for the past to re-emerge through spontaneous moments of singing and dancing that reproduced songs and dabkeh performed in the early protests. One of the attendants would suddenly begin a revolutionary melody and would be followed by the rest. They would rapidly form a circle, burst into anti-regime slogans, and perform a dabkeh, or just jump to form a circle and hold one another by the shoulders, following the patterns of the early protests in Syria. These performances were much more intense at weddings where they had the proper space to happen. Traditional wedding songs would suddenly be interrupted and the wedding-hall turn into a protest area as young people formed circles and started to sing.⁶

Actual protests were re-performed weekly on a larger scale in Gaziantep’s main squares until they were forbidden by the local authorities, whereupon they shifted to parks and smaller squares before they were scattered by the police. During one of these protests, I saw Umm Khaled spontaneously join the large circle of protesters as she heard the revolutionary slogans and saw the revolution’s flags from the park across the road where she had taken her daughter to play. She joined the circle and start singing along, tears slowly rolling down her cheeks. It was a very emotional moment for her to re-experience the early days when hope in the revolution was still high, before losing her husband and one of her sons. On another occasion, former detainees organized a protest on Gaziantep’s main square in support of detainees in regime jails. The protest took the form of a cathartic reproduction of prison scenes with some of the protestors making up an audience as they stood in a half-circle that formed a stage for other protestors to act as detainees. They sat next to each other, blindfolded, handcuffed, and tied to one another. Others nearby re-enacted scenes of torture.

These outcroppings of the past in the present re-performed the first days of the revolution, not only as a form of remembering it, but also as a reactivation of hope and a repetition of the revolution itself. It is in this sense quite different from the repetition at play in Rebecca Bryant’s analysis of the ‘time of crisis’ in Cyprus which leads to an ‘uncanny present’: a time when a traumatic past is repeated and forbids Cypriots to anticipate the future (2016). The time of revolution I describe here rather resonates with the temporality of the Nakba that Anja Kublitz describes as ‘a kind of mythical time that conjoins past and present’ (2013, 108). Similarly to the repetition of Syrian protests that are supposed to lead to another outcome and open up a different future, the repetition of the Palestinian past is not identical: ‘repetition in a Deleuzian sense should not be understood as repetition of the same, but as repetition of that which differs-from-itself’ (Kublitz 2013, 117). In other words, Syrian performances link the past directly to the future: through the repetition of the past, they hope to change the future. The repetition is therefore the future tense: the past is meant to be repeated (though differently) in the future. This creates a time that is non-linear and non-progressive.

The ideas of a non-linear and a non-chronological time grasped by the Bergsonian concept of duration are central to understanding displaced Syrians’ time wherein pasts are in the present and futures remain without presents. This describes the paradoxical movement from past(s) to future(s) without a present. Moreover, not only does the time go from past to future, but the future also appears as a repetition of the past. The present disappears through waiting and through hoping that the past will be realized in the future. My interlocutors hoped for the past to be repeated in the future and were longing for this repetition. Yet, there is not only one revolutionary past. Doubts are thus soaring about the collective future: would it be a successful repetition of the heroic past or an apocalyptic version of its tragic ending?

Conclusion: The temporality of tragic aftermaths

As Abu Zein and I were drinking coffee on his mother-in-law’s balcony in the late summer of 2015; he told me, continuing the opening sentence:

… We are preparing to be ready this time. But maybe the second revolution will never come. Maybe we won’t see anything; maybe only the generations of our children will see it.

Revolution as a cycle could seem to index the word’s first meaning (Koselleck 1985). However, it is not a circular return to the past but rather a different repetition of the past to which Abu Zein alludes here. The kind of repetition at stake here, a repetition with difference thus resonates with Bergson idea of duration and Deleuze’s concept of different/ciation. The concept of a nonlinear and virtual time and the correlated idea of a different repetition are central to understanding Syrians’ sense of time in the revolution’s aftermath. By collapsing the tripartition of time, the concept of duration helps making sense of Syrians’ past-oriented hope for a different repetition of their revolutionary past in the future. But if Syrians’ waiting seems reversed – directed to the past – it is because the temporality of displacement is simultaneously a temporality of the aftermath.

In the aftermath of their thwarted revolution, my interlocutors thus awaited a future that is not a utopic time contrasted with a past to forget, but a different repetition of the defeated past. This reconfiguration of time, this time of revolution, is also a reconfiguration of my interlocutors’ relations with their revolution: outside (in displacement), the revolution – understood as the possibility of the political enactment of justice, dignity, and freedom – does not seem to belong to the present anymore, as it was juwwa (inside)⁷; rather it belongs to a finished past, a distant future, and another space.

In this moment of revolutionary defeat and political and humanitarian catastrophe, a sense of out-of-jointness emerges as ‘time is no longer assimilable by history’ (Scott 2014, 9). This ‘time out of joint’ is a time of ‘loss of the old metaphysical security of futures to come’ and the experience of the present as ‘ruined time’ (Ibid.: 10). In the aftermath of the Syrian revolution, time is no longer linear or progressive. Contrary to revolutionary temporality that is usually understood as one of ‘progress’ – the past is overthrown and the present sacrificed for the sake of a utopic future – for my interlocutors, the utopia belongs to a finished past and an unreachable inside, the present is tragic and defined by unlimited waiting, and the future uncertain. Moreover, Syrian hope is turned towards the past rather than the future: my interlocutors waited for the past to be repeated in the future.

The aftermath of the Syrian revolution is thus characterized by a sense of inward hope: a hope directed to the past. This inward sense of hope differs, however, from nostalgia defined as ‘waiting for the past-to-come’ (Hage 2009b, 207). Whereas such nostalgic waiting is defined by the longing for a ‘lost plenitude’ (Ibid.), my interlocutors never reached this lost Eden nor do they aspired to return to a perfect (and idealized) past. On the contrary, they hoped for a different rendition of the revolution, as it could not fulfil its aims in the past.

Yet, this is a paradoxical sense of hope only if the past is seen as abolished by a present that is marching towards a better or utopic future, but the paradox evaporates if the past is understood as what is meant for the future, or, rather, the future is meant to repeat the past and make it last. Therefore, it should not be a repetition without difference; in the future the revolution should not end tragically. My interlocutors lost their sense of present not because they found pleasure in past memories and hope in the future  – they were rather scared of such mental projections  – but as they re-performed and pre-performed the past|future in the present.

Acknowledgements

This article is based on fieldwork supported by the ERC project Comparative Anthropologies of Revolutionary Politics (2013-CoG-617970) for which ethics approval was granted by the ERC ethics panel and UCL anthropology ethics committee. This article was presented in a publication workshop on Syrian Futures organised at the University of Copenhagen. I am thankful for my colleagues’ rich suggestions. I would also like to thank Andreas Bandak for his feedbacks as well as the anonymous reviewers and journal editor’s for their insightful comments. I am particularly grateful to the Syrian women and youth who have trusted me with their stories and have encouraged me to write about them.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Leverhulme Trust.

Notes

1 This sense of tragedy is very well grasped in Syrian playwriter Mohammad al-Attar’s work, in which Syrian refugee women are re-interpreting and re-staging classic Greek tragedies.

2 This continued to be the case for many of my interlocutors after that date for they did not feel that Turkey could become a permanent home given their ambiguous and precarious legal status (Al-Khalili 2023a).

3 See on the difference between resilience and patience in other contexts Janeja and Bandak 2018, 8; Khalili 2006.

4 Although there are many female detainees in the Syrian regime prisons, and I met many former female detainees, the families I worked with were exclusively looking for male detained relatives. This is why I use the masculine pronoun here.

5 This is visible in the Caesar file that contains 55 000 pictures of 11 000 people killed under torture in Syrian regime jails.

6 Maria Kastrinou beautifully describes dabkeh’s political significations in (pre-)revolutionary Syria in her monograph (2016).

7 See more on this point in Al-Khalili 2023b.