How Creativity Blossoms in a Rigid Regime

In Syria, the secret police is as omnipresent as traffic wardens are in the West. Every movement and every word are registered. Yet some writers see this as a creative challenge rather than a nuisance. They use their wit, humour and imagination to offer the world an insight into a society that at first glance seems closed off. Susanne Schanda reports

It is one of those days. The narrator Fathi Schin doesn't even want to get out of bed. The heat in his room is oppressive and he can hear the obtrusive noise of a major organised demonstration with chanting demonstrators and marching music through his closed window.

Nihad Siris's novel, which was published last year in Germany with the title Ali Hassans Intrige (Ali Hassan's Intrigue), is a dark, bitter satire about the leadership cult in an Arab dictatorship. It tells of a day in the life of Fathi Schin, a melancholy author who has been forbidden to write. The day in question is the twentieth anniversary of the day the "Great Leader" came to power.

The streets of the city are blocked by a sweating, slow-moving river of people; every second person holds aloft a placard bearing the image of the leader; people with megaphones bellow out cues that are answered by idiotic rhyming declarations of love and devotion to the leader chanted by a chorus of voices: "Two, four, six, eight … leader, you are truly great!"

Source: Qantara, How Creativity Blossoms in a Rigid Regime