Collective Witnessing
R. Shareah Taleghani
IN MARCH 2011, in the city of Dar’a, Syria, a group of children sprayed anti-government slogans on the walls of their school. The response was swift and brutal. Shocking images of their tortured bodies ricocheted around the country and the world, generating so much outrage that this act of cruelty is widely considered to have triggered the Syrian Revolution. But this violence was not new to the population of Syria. “The brutality of the state’s crackdown in 2011 against […] children,” R. Shareah Taleghani writes in her unflinching new book,
Readings in Syrian Prison Literature: The Poetics of Human Rights, “was not unfamiliar to Syrians. […] The detention, torture, and in some cases savage murder of the children in Dar’a are echoed in and connected to numerous stories told in works of contemporary Syrian prison literature.”