This presentation focuses on the literary narratives of Berlin-based Syrian author Rasha Abbas. Specifically, it considers how her work on migration and border crossings displace and reinvent 20th century notions of politically committed exile literature to arrive at an exploration of the personal and the speculative. Rasha Abbas is among a younger generation of Syrian writers and artists who, following the mass displacements of the Syrian war, are making a home in Berlin. Active among numerous writers, filmmakers, playwrights, and other artists in the city and beyond, she is part of a large and rather vibrant diasporic Arabic-language literature and arts community in northern Europe. In this presentation, I focus on the stories in Abbas’s 2017 short story collection Mulakhas ma jara (The Gist of It). The discussion of these stories will emphasize the way that Abbas is re-writing notions of politically committed exile writing that flourished in the latter half of the 20th century. In the place of al-qadaya al-kubra (“the great issues”) and the literary discourses that would place literature in the service of political causes, Abbas’s writing insists on the personal and the artistic autonomy to explore topics such as migration, closed borders, and war in ways that emphasize creative play, the subjective, the humorous, the mundane, and even the fantastic. In addition to Mulakhas ma jara (The Gist of It), Abbas has written a humorous account of learning German in Kayfa tamma ikhtira’ al-lugha al-Almaniyya (The Invention of German Grammar) (2016). Her forthcoming novel Sab’ Ku’us (Seven of Cups) uses tarot cards as a starting point to narrate the short-lived union between Syria and Egypt (1958-1961), a product of Arab nationalist ambitions but also a reminder of how rapidly borders can change. Although her texts resist categorization as “refugee literature” they are creating alternative narratives of place and mobility and, like many other contemporary Arabic literary narratives of migration, are forging new narrative modes in the process.

This paper explores the meaning of indigineity in the work of Salim Barakat and Ibrahim al-Koni. Indigenous identities are usually tied to a specific relationship to land or to citizenship status in a particular ecosystem, but what happens to writing when the writer no longer inhabits the land? Barakat and al-Koni both live in Northern Europe (Switzerland and Sweden respectively), write in their second language (Arabic) and create literary spaces for ethnic minorities within the Arabized regimes of postcolonial nation-states. The tension between rootedness and deterritorialization, between inhabiting and becoming, are explored in Barakat’s work novel through the circumscribed structure of the house. In Arabic, bayt means “house” and “home”—the physical space, as well as the affective quality of being at home. Its verb form, bata, is past and incomplete; it means “to spend the night [in a house]” and “to become.” In Sages of Darkness, the stability of Kurdish houses collapses as their physical homeland veers towards the fantastic, disrupting the spreading sovereignty of the Ba’athist state but also the community’s anchored nature of inhabiting it. What is the relationship between fugitive identity, inhabiting, and becoming? In what ways does this relationship shift when Kurds like Barakat are no longer able to inhabit the Kurdish homeland?  For Barakat, inhabiting a space is constantly haunted by uncanny occurrences that disrupt scientifically measurable habitation structures but allow for a discursive double occupancy. For al-Koni, habitation structures are the antithesis of indigenous being and becoming. Central to his vision of indigineity is nomadism, since sedentary life bordered by the limits of nation-states cannibalizes the Tuareg soul. How can we read the work of these authors in the post-Arab Spring and in the midst of Europe’s migration crisis?

“I know Syria is à la mode these days,” the Moscow-born, Damascus-raised, and Berlin-based playwright and filmmaker Liwaa Yazji told me in 2016. Analyzing the 2016-2018 productions of Yazji as well as similiarly aged fellow displaced Damascene playwright-directors Mohammad al-Attar and Omar Abusaada, Ziad Adwan, and Ayham Majid Agha, this paper examines how this talented cohort of 40-something theatre-makers has responded to the conflicting demands and opportunities of artistic careers in Germany: pressures to testify about the war, to satisfy German audiences’ ethnographic curiosity about Syrian culture, and to make “serious art.” I analyze the professional, ethical, and psychological challenges involved in producing high-profile works for mainstream German and international (rather than exclusively Arabic-speaking) audiences: Adwan’s English-language magazine A Syrious Look (Berlin) and play Please, Repeat after Me (Munich), Yazji’s film Haunted and play Goats (Royal Court, London), Agha’s co-directed play Die Hamletmaschine (Gorki Theatre, Berlin), and al-Attar and Abusaada’s plays Iphigenia and The Factory (Berlin Volksbuehne). This paper argues that this particular cohort of Syrian playwright-directors in Berlin, although their works differ in theme, scale, and style, represents a new and coherent phenomenon in the history of Arab/ic theatre. Previous scholarship has framed Arab dramatists working in Europe and the United States in terms of the figures of “Sindbad” and “Houdini”, i.e., either entrepreneurial ocean-crossing ethnography peddlers (such as the early work of Anglo-Kuwaiti playwright-director Sulayman Al-Bassam) or immigrant artists repeatedly donning and slipping the handcuffs of local audiences’ stereotypes (such as Egyptian-American playwright Youssef El-Guindi). This paper argues that those contexts, while not wholly irrelevant, fail to explain the precise situation and strategies of Syrian playwrights in Berlin today. Also relevant but insufficient are the century-long histories of exile, migrant, and “post-migrant” theatre in Berlin and the still fragmented post-Cold-War geography of the city itself. Another vital but partial context is the global interest in Syrian cultural production sparked by the 2011 uprising and the 2015-16 “refugee crisis,” especially pronounced in Germany. Juxtaposing all these contexts with the artists’ particular biographies and artistic philosophies, this paper strives to explain why some of their plays have failed to translate the writers’ intentions into production, how others have partially succeeded, and what this portends for the future of Syrian theatre in Berlin and worldwide.