In Baw?b?t Ar? al-?Adam (The Crossing, 2015), Syrian writer Samar Yazbek chronicles her return to Syria on three separate occasions between 2012 and 2013. Typical of Arab diaspora women writers, who carry the homeland’s pain within in exile and whose shuttle journeys inevitably lead them back to the homeland, Yazbek’s homecoming is motivated by a profound need to reconnect with the spatial dimensions of her country, and to understand the reasons behind the revolution’s setbacks. The Crossing uncannily captures the dismemberment of the country, the horrific destruction to both country and citizens alike, and the surreal absurdity of the civil war in Syria. As she walks through the demolished streets and talks to the victims, Yazbek assumes a dramatically different role than the typical flanueur (tourist). The flanueur as a figure, first developed by Baudelaire and later disseminated in the works of Walter Benjamin and Michel de Certeau, establishes walking as primarily a masculine urban act, capable of retrieving the lost history of the city (Benjamin 1985, de Certeau 1984). By contrast, the female flanueuse, as depicted in Yazbek, is interested not in retrieving but in exposing the discontinuity of the architecture, the dismemberment of both the city and its people. She does not depict pictures through her singular lens, but rather captures the national body politic by recounting the collective viewpoints of the Syrian people. Yazbek’s detours do not follow typical street routes, but traverse through people’s homes, making unusual, yet necessary, topographic and intimate connections. The parallel between “linguistic uttering and pedestrian uttering” in Yazbek’s diaries reveal the difference between the female flanueuse, who regains the dismembered bodies’ agency in her narrative, and the stance of the world as a male flaneur engaged in passive voyeurism that locks the body in arresting paralysis. Yazbek’s diaries celebrate the Syrian body in its overcoming of decades of fear, in its courageous stance against tyranny, its subsequent dismemberment by regime fire, and potential rise from the ashes after the dust settles. The Crossing articulates how Syrians defy the forced burial of their urban landscape by charting a new revolutionary cartography that resists the discourse of death.