War is “never elsewhere”

Interview with Rabab Haider

31 October 2019

What motivates you to write about war and what do you think writing about war can achieve?

Rabab Haider: About war in particular, I started writing to maintain my well-being, something like digging a hole in the ground to shout in it "the King has the ears of an ass"! I did not care at first to be published or to be read.

Reading history one can find out easily that almost the same stories repeat themselves with every war, so why do we tend to forget them? Try to ignore any lesson learnt? Thus, we writers, individually, tend to write things we don’t want to forget. Things for ourselves, and for the future.

At one point, I felt the urge to tell it all, to fill the gaps that the news agencies do not care to mention, either because they did not care (the small stories are not hit news) or because our stories do not fit with the orientation of the news agencies and information channels.

"I felt the urge to tell it all, to fill the gaps that the news agencies do not care to mention."

One of your texts is called ‘Ein Kriegsbericht, der nicht traurig sein soll’/ حديث لن يكون حزينًا عن الحرب. (A war report that is not meant to be sad). The text renders a lot of what the newspapers and TV news leave out about the war visible. It is certainly a sad text. What made you choose this title?

Rabab Haider: The war is sad, but we were not sad.

During explosive moments of humanity, people do not feel sad, one feels anger, madness, unbelief!

Sadness needs space which war does not give you. It becomes like a luxury you cannot afford dodging a bullet, or a bomb, or bad news of loved ones who have died or disappeared!

Actually, we were so consumed in survival mood, so one becomes practical and adapting!

If you surrender you will not get sad, you will crack down and lose your mind!

Sadness is something for the watchers to feel, on the other side of the tv screen!

Actually, surviving as a collective effort was so funny sometimes (a kind of dark irony, but it makes you laugh) like when the revolutionists against the regime wrote the names of the missing people who were kidnapped by the regime on tiny Ping-Pong balls. Then, from the highest streets of a slum neighbourhood that lead to the heart of Damascus – the capital – those tiny bouncy balls were released.

Can you imagine the picture of security and intelligence agents bouncing behind those balls for miles and miles??

When the regime prevented the protestors to reach the main square of "Homs", the clock square because of the statue of a big clock in its centre, the protestors made a paperboard replica of the statue, placed it in a hidden avenue, and gathered around it. Hundreds demonstrated and had their pictures taken. The pictures went viral.

The protestors were laughing in the pictures. We laughed. The world laughed, and the regime killed, kidnapped, or forced everyone they recognized in those pictures to flee!

Or making fun of our new skills to cook wild plants or create heat in winter by burning an old pair of jeans without getting suffocated by the smoke of the heavy cotton fabric!

For those in Germany, the war in Syria takes the form of “violence elsewhere”, what does this mean to you?

Rabab Haider: Humans, in their attempt to adapt maybe, they tend to forget!

It is never "else where" this term gives a false sense of "the other" other places or other people or other countries or other circumstances!

But wait, before it happened in Syria it happened in Iraq, before that in Lebanon, before that in the Balkan countries, before that ww one and two.

As if war is a repeated human mistake.

History says it is never "elsewhere" rather it is always hovering in a layer under our feet

The moment it finds a crack or weak ground, it bursts out.

'It is never "else where" this term gives a false sense of "the other" other places or other people or other countries or other circumstances!'

Do you think those who have not experienced the consequences of war can ever understand it? How can better understanding be facilitated?

Rabab Haider: I would love to answer, "yes we do understand it even if we have not experience it"

But no, even if we experience it apparently, we tend to forget.

We better keep an eye on our selves not to repeat it again.

That brings us to the second part of the question:

Let us study the war, the circumstances, ourselves, to never ever repeat the war again, let’s do the social and political studies to prevent reaching the boiling point that led to the war.

Let us write about it – literature, documentaries, biographies – so we will look at it from different perspectives, discuss it, and figure it out.

As I said before: History says it is never "elsewhere" rather it is always hovering in a layer under our feet, the moment it finds a crack or weak ground, it bursts out

I might sound a bit pessimistic, but I am not. Humans have not found a system that controls man's greed (neither capitalism, nor communism, nor anything in between) but good law and healthful executing of this law is always a good defence.

I do believe in Human Consciousness when it awakens.

I do believe in the great ability of our beautiful human mind to reach solutions as it now reached diagnosis and causes and symptoms of our problems. I believe we reached very good points until now:

Dictatorships will always lead to the worst catastrophic wars,

Oppressed people will be the cruellest soldiers or the most helpless victims.

Economic injustice will always create a class of ignorant radical extremist, the perfect ready-to-use fuel for any war.

The right kind of education (not institutionalised, patriarchal, or misleading) is a real defence against violence.

All photos and illustrations in this article were kindly provided by Weiter Schreiben.