Essays and Features

Prison:  A Geography of Despotism without a Place in the Nation

A picture of a wood stove warms hearts.

The gas stove in the picture has an odor.

The prisoner never drew a stove on the prison walls or on the screeching iron gates. 

The geography of the prison is coldness and solitude.

Everything I read about Ghayath Mattar confers an image of a young man who was a model activist in the ongoing Syrian Revolution. Ghayath was a pacifist and advocate of non-violence, states the Madrid-based Syrian exiled author Nawal al-Sibai, according to the website Aklam Hurra (Free Pens). She points out that Mattar’s legacy is what can be called a political will: “Even if they kill us all we should not resort to weapons to defend ourselves.”

The images of murdered men, women, and children broadcast in snippets by Arab and world satellite stations from the battlefields of the Syrian revolution have become almost like a live “exhibition,” with images rolling in day after day uninterrupted... It is as if the charred and dismembered remains of human bodies are all identical, regardless of the region or neighborhood.

To the young Syrian filmmaker--I do not like parallel montage--this is just how god of cinema designed me
And who can argue with the gods?
But I do not like the parallel montage...for another reason:
While I was speaking at the other end of the world
(at the Museum of Modern Art in New York)

One might wonder about the title of this article at a time when Syria is paying a heavy human cost on a daily basis. The environment of killing created by the Assad regime is producing a culture of death, as many of us have witnessed via graphic images on satellite TV, Facebook and YouTube, video which amounts to some sort of terrible Reality Television.