| Summary/Abstract |
Annotating the history of the Syrian uprising of 2011 in poetic form, these poems focus on protests by Syrian women. The key goals of the 2011 Syrian uprising were first articulated in Kurdish protests such as the one led by Kurdish activist Hervene Ose, depicted in the first poem in this selection by Kahf. ‘The Street Is Ours’ was an early and long-running protest campaign engineered by women of Salamiyya, a city where Ismaili Shia affiliation is significant. Rima Dali’s 2012 countrywide campaign, ‘Stop the Killing: We Want to Build a Syria for Everyone’ was active in Suweyda, where the Druze demographic is important. Syrian women’s protests, particularly by women outside the mainstream ethnic and confessional backgrounds, were marginalised in both international media and in the emerging dominant narrative within the revolution as militarised and masculinist protest activities became normative. The author offers these poems toward an anti-imperialist and transnational feminist analysis of the uprising from a Syrian-centred feminist perspective that demands attention to Syrian diversity. We are often told that the revolution ‘failed.’ It has not failed; it is in process more than ever, and working on ourselves so that we as Syrians, in diaspora or inside, understand how to dismantle racist, anti-Black, misogynistic, sectarian, and state oppressions that structure Syria as we have known it, is part of the ongoing Syrian revolution.
|