The below are articles written by a range of authors on areas of my interest, along with relevant research and analysis organized by topic.

Feel free to reach out for any recommended additions.

MEMORIALS & MUSEUMS

An Abandoned Village Bears Witness to Lebanon’s Famines – Old and New - Timour Azhari

“The Memory Tree, as the monument is known, was placed on the former front line between civil war-era Muslim west and Christian east Beirut – “a point of war but also connection,” he said. Its copper leaves are ornamental Arabic calligraphy pulled from poems by revered famine-era writers and poets such as Tawfiq Yusuf Awwad and Gibran Khalil Gibran – cultural giants respected by all segments of Lebanese society.”

Memory of a Mass Killing Becomes Another Casualty of Egyptian Protests - Kareem Fahim and Mayy El Sheikh

“Memory has become a frequent casualty of Egypt’s politics since the uprising against former President Hosni Mubarak in 2011. Leaders have tried to wipe away histories of atrocities by foot-dragging on investigations until new bloodshed dulls memories of the old. But nothing so far has matched the effort by the military-backed government and its supporters to extinguish the memory of Rabaa al-Adawiya, the site of the worst mass killing in Egypt’s modern history, and a dangerous reminder of absent justice and Egypt’s festering political feuds.

The traumas multiply, clouding Egypt’s path forward. Other countries with similar legacies of authoritarianism or widespread police abuses “had transitional justice before they were able to turn the page,” said Ahmed Ezzat, a human rights activist, who said that such a process would involve trials for perpetrators, truth commissions, reparations for victims and the reform of corrupt institutions.”

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Remembrance in Baghdad: Archives Preserves Memory of Hussein's Brutal Rule - Donna Urschel

“A Remembrance Museum in central Baghdad is needed to house and preserve the millions of Iraqi papers and records documenting Saddam Hussein's regime, according to speakers at a March Library of Congress symposium on Iraqi archives.

The mayor of Baghdad, Alla al-Tamimi, was the keynote speaker. He said he is granting to the Iraqi Memory Foundation a 40-year lease of the Crossed Swords ceremonial parade grounds complex in Baghdad, a 1-square-kilometer parcel of land, for the future museum site.

"It is a very important moment in history. We need to make a place in Baghdad for remembrance. Every citizen in Baghdad should know the truth of what has happened in Iraq," said Al-Tamimi, the city's first elected mayor. Fifty-one members of the Baghdad City Council elected him to his post in May 2004.

The symposium was sponsored by the Near East Section of the Library's African and Middle Eastern Division and the Iraq Memory Foundation. In addition to the keynote address, the symposium featured two panels of speakers, who conveyed the importance and challenges of preserving these documents, opening them up to Iraqi citizens and the world, and helping the people of Iraq recover from the brutal rule of Saddam Hussein.

During the first panel presentation, "The Iraq Memory Foundation: A Repository of Memory and Hope," Kanan Makiya, founder and president of the foundation, announced for the first time his effort to raise $100 million for the remembrance project.”

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Return of Saddam-era archive to Iraq opens debate, old wounds - Maya Gebeily

“A trove of Saddam-era files secretly returned to Iraq has pried open the country's painful past, prompting hopes some may learn the fate of long-lost relatives along with fears of new bloodshed.

The five million pages of internal Baath Party documents were found in 2003, just months after the US-led invasion that toppled Saddam, in the party's partly-flooded headquarters in tumultuous Baghdad […] But on August 31, the full 48 tonnes of documents were quietly flown back to Baghdad and immediately tucked away in an undisclosed location, a top Iraqi official told AFP.

Neither government announced the transfer, and Baghdad is not planning to open the archive to the public, the official said.  This could disappoint the thousands of families who may have a personal stake in the archive's contents. 

"Saddam destroyed Iraq's people -- you can't just keep quiet on something like that," said Ayyoub Al-Zaidy, 31, whose father Sabar went missing after being drafted for Iraq's 1991 invasion of Kuwait.

The family was never given notice of his death or capture and hopes the Baath archive could hold a clue. "Maybe these documents are the beginning of a thread that we can follow to know if he's still alive," said Ayyoub's 51-year-old mother Hasina. 

She spent the 1990s pleading with the Baath-dominated regime for information on her husband's whereabouts, and holds little hope of more transparency now. "At this rate, I'll be dead before they make them public." Some argue the archive could help Iraq prevent its blood-stained history from repeating itself.”

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Israel’s army of archaeological looters - Dima Srouji 

“Multiple settler-colonial authorities that have controlled Palestinians over the last century have weaponized archaeology in some form. Today, Israel sponsors and promotes archaeological initiatives in Palestine with the sole purpose of linking only the Jewish narrative to our land, rather than embracing its entangled complexities […] This military archaeologist — which, as a profession, should simply not exist — was celebrated as a heroic figure in a 2018 exhibition at the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem. Entitled “Finds Gone Astray,” the exhibition essentially glorified the Israeli military’s role in confiscating archaeological artifacts from the West Bank. According to the museum’s director, roughly 40,000 artifacts were “recovered” by the Israeli authorities.

This stark number of artifacts should raise major warning flags — especially during a time of increased black market activity, after the wars in Iraq and Syria. It is unclear where the artifacts were retrieved from, and not knowing their provenance makes it challenging to date them with credibility and prove their authenticity. This act of displacement gives museums, collectors, and cultural ministries the power to reframe theft as recovery and to loot houses as prestigious institutions.”

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In Srebrenica, a new war is waged - Emir Suljagic

“We still see the people, who came to our villages in the 1990s to burn them down, walking in the streets freely; we still hear the same dehumanising vocabulary from the Bosnian Serb and Serbian politicians we heard back then; we are still the hated "Asiatic plague", as a former University of Sarajevo professor and leading member of the Bosnian Serb assembly referred to us in one of the sittings.

That is why working at the Srebrenica Memorial sometimes still feels like being in a war-time enclave. I cannot say I mind the feeling. On the contrary, having once lived and survived the experience of an enclave, I have continued to feel surrounded even after 1995. It comes to me naturally, I even like being surrounded.”

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Fan Jianchuan’s Museum Industrial Complex - Barclay Bram Shoemaker

Unique position of memory under authoritarianism in China. “In holding this mirror to history, the Jianchuan museum is part of a recent development in the global history of the museum — the birth of the memorial museum. Writing in 2007 Paul Williams, a professor of museum studies at NYU, identified the rapid growth of museums “dedicated to a historic event commemorating mass suffering of some kind”. Though the earliest such museums were anti-slavery museums built by abolitionists in the early C20th, it is the legacy of the holocaust and the impetus that ‘we must never forget’ which has most keenly sparked a rush to memorialize atrocities throughout the world. This demand for memorialization has concretized around sites like the Cambodian Killing Fields, in New York at the 9/11 memorial, in the museum for the desaparecidos in Chile, in the recently opened National Museum for African American History and Culture, and in dozens of others beside.”

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My Grandmother, Icon of Palestinian Resilience - Mohammed El-Kurd

How does one exist through time, and have a life symbolize something beyond oneself? “In truth, I am not ready to eulogize her. Even in writing this, I find myself having trouble with tenses. There are people who cannot exist in the past tense. For a hundred years, she walked a tightrope between pride and self-respect. My grandmother taught me everything I know about dignity. She taught me how to launch my sentences like missiles. How to be resilient. Even in the face of eviction, monetary punishment, tens of trials, and threats of imprisonment, she persisted. “

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City Limits of the Dead - Sharif Abdel Kouddous

Sharif writes about how the government in Egypt decided to bulldoze parts of a historic cemetery in Cairo - including his family’s plots. “Our bodies are never safe from the people who rule this place. Not in life, not even in death. What about our memories? Will they too be slowly erased along with the city?” he writes.

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Highways raise alarm in Cairo's historic City of the Dead - Lee Keath

“As bulldozers worked, families rushed to move the bodies of their loved ones. Others faced losing their homes: though known as the City of the Dead, the cemeteries are also vibrant communities, with people living in the walled yards that surround each gravesite. Cairo’s governorate and the Supreme Council of Antiquities underlined that no registered monuments were harmed in the construction.”

MASSACRES

Destructive Creations: Social-Spatial Transformations in Contemporary Baghdad - Omar Sirri

“‘Karada died that night.’ Like many others, Manal insisted there was something different about what has since colloquially become known as ‘the Disaster’ (al-kaaritha), when compared to past attacks on and in the area – such as the 2010 storming of and massacre inside Our Lady of Salvation, the Chaldean Catholic church.2 Part of what made the Disaster different was how it brought about fundamental social-spatial transformations to everyday life in Karada […] If cities have memories, then the Disaster is seared into Baghdad’s.”

All According to Plan: The Rab’a Massacre and Mass Killings of Protesters in Egypt - Human Rights Watch

“Human Rights Watch’s one-year investigation into the conduct of security forces in responding to these demonstrations indicates that police and army forces systematically and intentionally used excessive lethal force in their policing, resulting in killings of protesters on a scale unprecedented in Egypt. The evidence we examined includes on-site investigations at each of the protest sites during or immediately after the attacks were underway, interviews with over 200 witnesses, including protesters, doctors, journalists, and local residents, and review of physical evidence, hours of video footage, and statements by public officials. On this basis, Human Rights Watch concludes that the killings not only constituted serious violations of international human rights law, but likely amounted to crimes against humanity, given both their widespread and systematic nature and the evidence suggesting the killings were part of a policy to attack unarmed persons on political grounds. While there is also evidence that some protesters used firearms during several of these demonstrations, Human Rights Watch was able to confirm their use in only a few instances, which do not justify the grossly disproportionate and premeditated lethal attacks on overwhelmingly peaceful protesters.”

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Memory of a Mass Killing Becomes Another Casualty of Egyptian Protests - Kareem Fahim and Mayy El Sheikh

“Memory has become a frequent casualty of Egypt’s politics since the uprising against former President Hosni Mubarak in 2011. Leaders have tried to wipe away histories of atrocities by foot-dragging on investigations until new bloodshed dulls memories of the old. But nothing so far has matched the effort by the military-backed government and its supporters to extinguish the memory of Rabaa al-Adawiya, the site of the worst mass killing in Egypt’s modern history, and a dangerous reminder of absent justice and Egypt’s festering political feuds.

The traumas multiply, clouding Egypt’s path forward. Other countries with similar legacies of authoritarianism or widespread police abuses “had transitional justice before they were able to turn the page,” said Ahmed Ezzat, a human rights activist, who said that such a process would involve trials for perpetrators, truth commissions, reparations for victims and the reform of corrupt institutions. But none of Egypt’s leaders possessed “the political will” to confront the abuses, he said. Instead, reminders of the past have become a threat. “

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The Paris massacre that time forgot, 51 years on - Tahar Hani

On October 17, 1961 “French police – under the leadership of Paris prefect Maurice Papon – brutally crushed peaceful demonstrations of Algerian anti-war protesters who had gathered in and around the French capital to protest against a French security crackdown in Algeria.

The incident occurred at the height of the Algerian war of independence, when the French colonial administration was locked in a bitter battle with the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) – the Algerian party fighting for the North African nation’s liberation from France.

More than half-a-century later, the details surrounding the October 17 massacre – including the casualty figures – remain murky. A day after the demonstrations, the left-leaning French newspaper Libération reported the official toll as two dead, several wounded and 7,500 arrests. The death toll, however, was disputed by the FLN, which claimed that dozens were killed.  Many of the bodies were found floating in the River Seine.”

MASS GRAVES

UN says at least eight mass graves have been reported found in Libya - Sharif Paget, Jomana Karadsheh and Chandler Thornton

At least eight mass graves been reportedly been discovered in Libya, according to the United Nations Support Mission in Libya.

In a tweet, the UNSMIL expressed "horror" over "reports on the discovery of at least eight mass graves in past days, the majority of them in Tarhuna."

Last week, Libya's UN-recognized Government of National Accord (GNA) announced control over Tarhuna, a key city to the southeast of capital Tripoli, after pushing back eastern forces led by renegade general Khalifa Haftar. The town was previously occupied by the self-styled Libya National Army (LNA) forces loyal to Haftar.

The city was also under the control of the Kaniyat militia, which is allied with Haftar. Kaniyat took control of the city last year when the LNA launched an offensive to take the capital. The militia has long been accused of committing atrocities in Tarhuna.”

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Into the Abyss: The al-Hota Mass Grave in Northern Syria - Nadim Houry, Sara Kayyali, and Josh Lyons

“According to local residents, the al-Hota gorge once offered a pleasant escape from the dry plains north of Raqqa – a place for family picnics.

“Wild flowers would grow in the spring and families would gather between the crevasses for shade and cool air,” recalled Zakaria, a man who lived in the area.3 Pigeons built nests in the crevasses and flew around the sinkhole, he said.

The deep pit enchanted people from the area but also induced fear. No one knew its depth and locals spoke of an imaginary feminine creature – al-Sa`lawah in Arabic – that ate anyone who dared to climb down.4

When the Syrian conflict began in March 2011, the stories about al-Hota as a dumping ground for bodies began to spread.”

STORIES OF DEATH

How the Mafia infiltrated Italy’s hospitals and laundered the profits globally - Miles Johnson

“The body of his son was barely cold when the grieving father was threatened by men from the funeral company. Inside the mortuary of an austere hospital in Lamezia Terme, a city in southern Italy, the dead were not left in peace. Each corpse was now a highly prized commodity, worth thousands of euros to Europe’s most ruthless organised criminals. The men from the funeral company somehow knew which patients had passed away even before their own families did. Through intimidation they had gained access to the hospital’s central medical records, allowing them to screen for those sickest and most likely to die. If relatives considered picking a different funeral company to take away their loved one, the men would soon ensure they changed their minds.”

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The Woman Who Cared for Hundreds of Abandoned Gay Men Dying of AIDS - David Koon

Who has the right to be buried? To be remembered? The fear around HIV/AIDS and the stigmatization of the disease continued into death.

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Where do we go now? - Alex Rowell

“Yet even more potent and deep-seated than the angst about the fate of the city per se is the individual anxiety raging inside the minds of so many, concerning their and their families’ personal future in Beirut, and Lebanon as a whole. Well before the explosion, the vertiginous cocktail of economic ruin, currency collapse, and rapacious political dysfunction had pushed ever-growing numbers to take the agonizing decision to leave their city and homeland altogether. They include people whose names are bound inseparably with the city, such as the journalist Giselle Khoury, head of the Samir Kassir Foundation and widow of the late Kassir himself, who was Beirut’s historian as well as one of its most courageous and charismatic agitators, until a car bomb cut him down at the age of just 45 in 2005. How many more will leave now, then, having discovered that the gangsters in charge thought nothing of storing fireworks in the same warehouse as three thousand tons of explosive ammonium nitrate, in the densely-populated center of the capital city? Certainly, there are some for whom this only redoubles their commitment to staying, precisely in order to hold those very gangsters to account and turn the page on their murderous regime once and for all. “Revolution is born from the womb of sorrows,” as the poet Nizar Qabbani put it, in a line the Lebanese army censored out of a song played at their annual festival only three days before the explosion. But there will also be many who say they’ve suffered rather enough for one lifetime, and would prefer their children didn’t have to endure the same pain and misery themselves. Nor does this apply exclusively to the well-heeled either; the Lebanese taxi drivers in Berlin and Montreal certainly didn’t grow up in Sursock Palace, nor graduate from the American University. In 2011, Beirut’s Oscar-nominated director Nadine Labaki produced a film titled “Where Do We Go Now?” This is the question on every mind in Lebanon today, on all fronts, and in all senses of the words.”

THE MISSING

Algeria buries remains of 24 independence fighters - Middle East Monitor

“In the 19th century, France shipped off the skulls of 37 resistance fighters to be stored at the Museum of Mankind in Paris. Algeria has been demanding the return of the skulls since 2011 for their burial — a demand rejected by Paris. Later, French President Emmanuel Macron announced that French officials were ready to enact a law that would allow them to hand over the remains, though the process was delayed for years. Tebboune pledged after he came to power on Dec. 19 last year to restore the fighters’ remains and bury them in Algeria.”

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Outspoken father of missing activist killed in Iraq’s south - Samya Kullab

“Aboud was uncommonly vocal in his search for his son Ali Jasb, a lawyer who was one of a number of activists who vanished at the height of Iraq’s mass anti-government demonstrations in October 2019. Aboud publicly accused a powerful Iran-backed militia of kidnapping him and even took the dangerous step of seeking to take its leader to court. Other families of missing activists were more reserved, often fearing reprisal if they spoke out.”

PRISON AND TORTURE

‘I Wished I Would Die’- Syrian refugees arbitrarily detained on terrorism-related charges and tortured in Lebanon - Amnesty International

“Hundreds of Syrian men, women and children who found refuge from the Syrian conflict in Lebanon have been arbitrarily detained on terrorism-related charges since 2014 until present time. During detention, Lebanese military intelligence tortured or otherwise ill-treated refugees. Amnesty International’s research shows that Lebanese security forces failed to notify refugees of the reason for their arrest and did not allow them to contact their family or a lawyer. Their trials have not met international standards: refugees have been tried in military courts and court decisions have been based on weak evidence, extracted under coercion.”

Surviving monstrosities: An interview with Yassin al-Haj Saleh - Marina Naprushkina

“Starting from the etymological link between meaning and suffering in Arabic […] Representing our experiences and producing meanings from them enables us to communicate to others, and to build a community of suffering-meaning with them. So, history and society are made from these experiences.” “Still, even this emancipation is by no means a fair compensation. There is no possible compensation. There are no spare parts for our twenties and thirties when they are devoured by the monster of jail. And most of those years were devoured in my personal case. But we must tame the monster as much as we can to be able to survive it. Some of us were able to do this. And I think this is a genuine act of resistance. At times, especially after Samira’s silent absence, I keep wondering if I have not been transformed into a monster myself. Does one really survive monstrosities?”

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Middle Eastern dissidents find no peace in exile - Sarah Leah Whitson

Whitson looks at the impact of authoritarian and torture regimes on dissidents from the MENA region, interlinking Sarah Higazy’s death by suicide to the far-reach of oppression spreading from countries like Egypt into immigration and asylum structures.

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Syrians find heartbreak among republished Caesar torture images - SOHR

“After years of asking questions, of contacting anyone who may have seen his parents in prison or heard of their whereabouts, he now has some closure. Yet the fate of his mother remains unknown. A report by Human Rights Watch identified that at least 6,786 people among almost 29,000 of the Caesar photographs had died in detention or military hospital, while the other pictures showed attack sites or the bodies of those who were identified by name.”

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Fighting for graves we can visit - Yassin Swehat

Interview with Maryam Al Hallak, head of the Caesar Families Association, advocating for the rights of detainees, justice for their killers, and the preservation of victims’ memories.

“The emergence of the Caesar photos had a positive aspect, in that it exposed criminal practices and allowed a large number of people to learn what happened to their detained children, about whom they had little to no information prior to that point. Nonetheless, it was done in a poor and crude manner. It is distressing to repeatedly see your dead son’s picture because someone thought it was a good idea to post it.” '"'[…] “Feeling like you are on an important mission has its own momentum. All of us members of the Association feel this way. We want to tell the world about the suffering of thousands of Syrian families, and we want to show everyone the gruesomeness of this monstrous regime. This is our drive and the basis for our work. We are all volunteers here; we receive no pay for our work. Our sole and shared goal is to safeguard the rights of our children, the victims. Unfortunately, we cannot demand their lives back, but we can hold accountable those who committed crimes against them and all Syrians, and we can protect their memory. A few days ago, during a conference for the Association, I mentioned how I wished a museum would be built in Damascus to portray the atrocities committed by the regime, including the Caesar photos, so visitors could learn what the regime has done to us.” […] “I often contemplate the idea of the grave being a dream. Some time ago, I attended an exhibition on the Holocaust victims, where we were told that the major efforts to protect memory were carried out by civil society. We visited a symbolic cemetery for the victims, and saw volunteers caring for it, visiting it, and putting roses on the stones. I asked myself, when will we have this in Syria? When will we have a grave that, even if only symbolic, we can visit?”

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After 13 Years in Syrian Prisons, I Knew Assad Would Win - Mustafa Khalifa

“In late November 2011, I wrote an essay predicting the victory of Bashar al-Assad over the Syrian people at a time when many observers, political analysts, and even politicians agreed that the regime was on the verge of collapse. But I knew this regime from the inside. I knew its savagery and criminality. I pointed out its extreme cruelty and the ease with which it kills; its arrogance and constant resistance to any concession, no matter how small; its brutal revenge against those who did manage to force any change, no matter how tiny. Many could not understand my argument because they did not go through what I and others went through.”

COMPETITION OVER PROVIDING SERVICES AND INFRASTRUCTURE

Between Regime and Rebels: A Survey of Syria’s Alawi Sect - Elizabeth Tsurkov

“Facing a grave challenge to its monopoly of power from 2011 onward, the Assad regime sought to ensure the loyalty or neutrality of Syria’s minorities. Before the war and the demographic changes it wrought, about 65 percent of Syria’s population of 21 million were Sunni Arabs, 10 percent were Sunni Kurds, another 10 percent were Alawis, and about 5 percent were Christian. To ensure the allegiance of Assad’s base, the Alawi community, the regime employed several tactics. First, in speeches during the early days of the uprising, he portrayed the protesters as Sunni extremists and armed terrorists. Second, in a move apparently designed to ensure a radicalization of the opposition and to weaken its secular-democratic elements, in the first months of the uprising, the regime released hundreds of jihadists from prison, while jailing peaceful activists. Third, the regime staged provocations such as sending men to shoot into the air or cut tires of cars in Alawi neighborhoods to instill fear, and then went about distributing guns and sandbags to Alawi inhabitants to reinforce a sense of their being a community under threat from the opposition—even though, at that stage, there were no armed rebels.”

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Waste Away: Notes on Beirut’s broken sewage system - Lina Mounzer

“Perhaps that is why, then, the truest sign of unbridled, irrevocable disaster is when the figurative becomes literal, when the destruction is so large scale it erodes the distance between fact and allegory. The metaphors we’ve borrowed from the subterranean world of the unconscious, that help us shed a different light on reality so that we might see it better, become the actual reality we have to contend with. When the border between this world and its underground twin collapses, we have no choice but to live with the monsters of our worst nightmares. All that shit we tried to hide, forget, reroute, ignore, is out now, flooding the streets for all to see. The corruption of our politicians, the rotten sectarian infrastructure upon which our system is built, our failure to deal with the past before burying it: that’s the shit we’re living in now.”

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What Mutual Aid Can Do During a Pandemic - Jia Tolentino

“Kaba, a longtime Chicago activist who now lives in New York and runs the blog Prison Culture, describes herself as an abolitionist, not as an anarchist. She wants to create a world without prisons and policing, and that requires imagining other structures of accountability—and also of assistance. “I want us to act as if the state is not a protector, and to be keenly aware of the damage it can do,” she told me. People who are deeply committed to mutual aid think of it as a crucial, everyday practice, she said, not as a “program to pull off the shelf when shit gets bad.”

Historically, in the United States, mutual-aid networks have proliferated mostly in communities that the state has chosen not to help. The peak of such organizing may have come in the late sixties and early seventies, when Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries opened a shelter for homeless trans youth, in New York, and the Black Panther Party started a free-breakfast program, which within its first year was feeding twenty thousand children in nineteen cities across the country. J. Edgar Hoover worried that the program would threaten “efforts by authorities to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for”; a few years later, the federal government formalized its own breakfast program for public schools.

Crises can intensify the antagonism between the government and mutual-aid workers. Dozens of cities restrict community efforts to feed the homeless; in 2019, activists with No More Deaths, a group that leaves water and supplies in border-crossing corridors, were tried on federal charges, including driving in a wilderness area and “abandoning property.” But disasters can also force otherwise opposing sides to work together. During Hurricane Sandy, the National Guard, in the face of government failure, relied on the help of an Occupy Wall Street offshoot, Occupy Sandy, to distribute supplies.”

ART AS COMMUNICATION

After Daraa; Syrian Art Today - Maymanah Farhat

“Political censorship, in its current manifestation, has plagued Syria since the second half of the twentieth century. Official policies, such as those that demand preapproval of exhibitions and events by government agencies, have worked to maintain the Ba`thist regime’s firm grip on virtually every aspect of local visual culture. Intimidation tactics, including the court marshalling and imprisoning of artists and the ransacking of studios and art spaces, have created a pervasive climate of fear. While it is difficult to ascertain the extent to which this has impacted the formalist development of contemporary art in terms of its impeding of experimentation, it is widely known that barefaced criticism of its political system has remained off limits for generations of citizens. In the past, a large percentage of artists often tapped into a tradition of coded visuals that is characterized by subtle representational clues, weighty doses of allegory, and outside historical references that imply or signal notions of the abject through which dissent and disenfranchisement is communicated to a wide audience. Everything from ancient mythology to the ongoing Palestinian struggle has served as a vehicle for addressing the modern Syrian experience. Decades of dodging the secret police have made Syrian artists masters of triggering the intuition of viewers.”