Abstract
To the Man Who Took the Footage We Had Filmed During a Month Working Undercover in Syria, as well as My Journal, and My Laptop
I don’t know anything about you. I have a mental image of you, a stereotype in a cheap fake leather jacket and a dark moustache. I imagine you searching the flat, throwing clothes and bed-sheets around, ripping beads off necklaces, tearing open tampons and packets of painkillers, grabbing the camera, the hard drives, my laptop, my journal. Smiling to yourself at your cleverness and your accomplishment. You didn’t expect to find so much so easily, did you?
I don’t know if you were following us from the start or if you just stumbled upon us that day. It was our last day in Damascus. How ironic. Or maybe not.
Did you laugh at our stupidity, leaving everything in the same flat we used to live in and eat in and interview wanted opposition activists? Don’t shit where you eat. Or deal with the consequences.
There was a half-hearted attempt at heightened security I must admit. We hid the hard drive in the washing machine. Just the once. It felt silly. Stupid. No one could possibly come and search the flat. These things just don’t happen. You hear about them, but they don’t really happen to us. The Mukhabarat, the secret police, do not raid my bedroom and take my journal and my laptop – these things don’t happen in my real life.
Anyway. That is how I imagine you. With an arrogant grin and a bag full of the Mukhabarat equivalent of finding a bag of pills in the grass on the last day of a festival. The fun has just begun.
Do you count on the arrogance of undercover filmmakers? Do you count on the blindness of those immersed in a film? Do you count on the liberties we take, on the mistakes we make? Sit back and relax. Let us do your work for you. Let us deliver you their necks in the noose. Let me write and sign my own confession while I have my morning cup of coffee.
The last thing my mother said to me before I left for Damascus was ‘never trust a Syrian’.
To be frank, I have always had a strained relationship with Syria, ranging between love, hate and paranoia. My first memory of Syria is of the border at night. I am in the car with my parents and brother and sister. It is very very dark. We are trying to cross into Lebanon but the officers at the border want bribes − they take our bread, some rotten bananas, perfume, my mother’s jewellery. They terrified me. And in Lebanon we always lived in the shadow of this invisible evil presence: the Mukhabarat.
They are always out to get you, and they know EVERYTHING. It’s like CCTV with fangs and handcuffs and bad haircuts. We grew up hearing stories. Of people disappearing, of torture, of surveillance, of corruption and bribery.
Do you count on the liberties we take or the mistakes we make?
But I never thought we would get so close, you and I. I never thought our paths would cross.
Close, and yet total strangers. You know so much about me. Would you recognise me if you saw me in the street? Or perhaps if you heard my thoughts?
Have I ever seen you? Were you ever sat next to me in the bar? Did you walk past me in the street? Did I brush past you as I bought some bread at the corner shop?
It’s crazy how the mind starts spinning these fantasy scenes and images, made up of a steady diet of nothing except paranoia and hearsay. You leave me with no proof either way. My faceless foe.
You took my friend. You took my work.
You have shaken my faith in what I do.
You did your job. I congratulate you. A worthy opponent.
You did your job. I did not do mine.
At the end of the day, we are all just trying to get by.
I came, I saw, I filmed, I left behind a trail of imprisoned activists, families smuggled into safety in other countries, people still living in fear of being caught.
Never trust a Syrian. Never trust a filmmaker. ❒