Syrian futures: Percolation, temporality and historical experience in the plural

ABSTRACT

A key ambition of this introduction is to bring the question of temporality to the centre of anthropological engagements with Syria and the diverse legacies of the past thirteen years of upheaval. Engaging with temporality, tempo and tempus are central to this endeavour. How can we, as scholars, speak across the moving and malleable terrain of discrepant Syrian experiences that are themselves moving in time - that are speaking back to what happened and holding on to hopes and futures envisioned in the past, while simultaneously moving towards new and different understandings and futures? By way of introduction to the issue, this article offers some theoretical reflections on this question in conversation with Syrians' varied and changing engagements with the past, which are crucial to comprehending how Syrians are moving towards the future, or more accurately different futures. Centrally, the text advances an understanding of how time and history not simply flow but rather, as Michel Serres points to, they percolate. Attending to such percolation allows us to appreciate the plural Syrian engagements with the past, present, and future.

KEYWORDS:

• Futures
• historicity
• percolation
• Syria
• temporality

Thirteen years on since the revolution, the situation in Syria is still a burning issue. Syria may not occupy the attention of the media and global public as much as it did when the revolution gained momentum in 2011, or when the situation changed and turned into violent conflict, proxy war and mass upheaval. Other zones of conflict and crisis may now be on the agenda, Ukraine and Gaza being the current points of gravitation. However, the Syrian situation is still a burning issue that merits sustained reflection and begs for ongoing engagement. The situation inside Syria is by no means resolved; the Syrian regime is still waging war on parts of the country. Moreover, Syrians have been displaced across the globe and face a plethora of realities in the places where they now reside.

Yet, while Syria remains a burning issue, the burn is perhaps a slower one today, as Lisa Wedeen has pondered. We have entered into a protracted situation in which the path that led from what happened in Syria in 2011 to the predicaments of Syrians today, and even their sense of future direction, have been lost or seriously cast into doubt. Such slow burn, such persistence is found in the artistic work of Syrian intellectual and playwright Mohammad Al Attar. In his play Damascus 2045, for example, the protagonists are projected forward in time to engage with a Syria that has been overtaken by the regime and in which all citizens have had their memories erased. At night, however, the protagonists’ dreams turn into nightmares that haunt them, making it almost impossible for them to find any rest. Exhaustion seems to be a prevalent condition – in the real lives of many Syrians as well as in the play. The issues of the past keep on burning, one could say, but no longer with the same ferocity. Rather, dislocation of the temporal ordering of past, present and future has left Syrians burnt by the events.

Something did happen when Syrians took the streets and defied the Assad regime. However, the uprising’s initial promise of ushering in the demise of the system soon gave way to a fierce and brutal response from the regime. As the course of the uprising gradually changed, the hopes of the demonstrators were thwarted and wilfully destroyed by the Syrian army, supported by Russian and Iranian forces. The Syrian regime also combatted the narrative of an otherwise, of a different way forward, and is now actively attempting to silence this narrative completely. Meanwhile, the active and ongoing writing of oppositional history has taken a novel form in the aftermath of the Syrian uprising, since evidence, testimony and historical experience have been documented so abundantly by way of cameras and cell phones, and in the memories graphically engraved on the bodies and minds of the Syrian population.

This immense catastrophe requires continued anthropological engagement and elucidation both on its own terms and as an exemplary case to think with (Bandak and Højer 2015). A key ambition of this special issue is to bring the question of temporality to the centre of anthropological engagements with Syria and the diverse legacies of the past thirteen years of upheaval. Engaging with temporality, tempo and tempus are central to this endeavour. How can we, as scholars, speak across the moving and malleable terrain of discrepant Syrian experiences that are themselves moving in time – that are speaking back to what happened and holding on to hopes and futures envisioned in the past, while simultaneously moving towards new and different understandings and futures? By way of introduction to the issue, this article offers some theoretical reflections on this question in conversation with Syrians’ varied and changing engagements with the past, which are crucial to comprehending how Syrians are moving towards the future, or more accurately different futures. It suggests that drawing on Michel Serres’ notion of percolation as part of our conceptual vocabulary for analysing the complex orderings of history and time may allow us to better capture the complex experiences and transformations that the Syrian situation has elicited.

Temporal engagements with the Syrian events: percolating time

French philosopher and polymath Michel Serres’ (1930–2019) reflections on temporality and history across his extensive oeuvre offer anthropologists new pathways to grasp the porous nature of becoming (Bandak and Knight 2024). Centrally, Serres speaks about the legacies of temps as conjoining different fields; certain things pass, while others do not ([1990] 1995, 27; [1995] 2017; Serres and Latour [1990] 1995, 58). Serres’ conceptualizes this as a process of filtering or sieving that allows for diverse forms of sedimentation to take place, just as water in a river carries sediments downstream unevenly and at different speeds. For Serres time, history, and water do not simply flow; they percolate. In his own words:

A multiplicity of relations can attach or not a large number of objects or states of affairs to each other: this is percolating time, that is to say, real time, which can help us understand history. And what reason is there, simplistic or terrible, to reduce such a complexity to a couloir or a continuous line regularly linking one point to another successively? ([1995] 2017, xxxvi)

The idea of percolating time allows us to appreciate the diverse forms of sedimentation that massive events present, not just in abstract theoretical terms but also empirically, in people’s ongoing encounters with the noise and violence of the past. This, in turn, invites ethnographic engagement with the different positions and gradually changing perspectives among Syrians on what took place, and how those relate to the different stakes of continued engagement with painful experiences, as well as (for some) the question of how – even whether – to continue to engage. Temporality in the Syrian experience is thus tied to questions of historicity and temporal ordering, namely of how to bind past, present and future when one has engaged in and been marked by historical events or even history itself. Here, I draw on anthropologists Eric Hirsch and Charles Stewart’s influential formulation of historicity, which serves as a better frame than ‘history’ for capturing how people inhabit and locate themselves in relation to their past:

Our use of ‘historicity' … draws attention to the connections between past, present and future without the assumption that events/time are a line between happenings ‘adding up' to history. Whereas ‘history' isolates the past, historicity focuses on the complex temporal nexus of past-present-future. Historicity, in our formulation, concerns ongoing social production of accounts of pasts and futures. … We might say that historicity is the commitment to the possibilities that already are, but are present only as the ‘not yet' of the actual – the manner in which people imagine and reproduce the future, where past and future are simultaneously connected. (Hirsch and Stewart 2005, 262, 271)

This special issue interrogates how imaginings and reproductions of the future come into play when Syrians are moving into new terrains. At the present moment, it is impossible to think about Syria without engaging with the massive upheaval of the uprising-turned-war and attendant experiences of exile, displacement and diaspora. How, we ask, have personal and collective histories intersected, diverged or taken form during the past thirteen years? And how does historical experience live on in the private lives of Syrians? What temporal orientations are in play, and how do these point to viable forms of existence in the continuation and aftermath of tragedy?

Instead of assuming that the uprising changed everything or, conversely, that nothing really changed, our interest is in how and to what extent Syrians have been impacted by more than a decade of upheaval and diverse forms of social transformation. There is a need for anthropological reflection on what came to pass and the different effects that events had on people in different social locations, such as generation, geographical location, gender, class, religious identification and age. As such, the articles in this special issue deliberately home in on diverse social groups in order for us to better understand the varied impacts of historical events and the diverse ways that futures and future-making have come into the frame or been evacuated, privatized and turned into zones of abandonment (Povinelli 2011). These individual studies are situated within the same collaborative conversation, which seeks to bring together anthropological perspectives on how the temporal orientations of Syrians have been impacted over the last thirteen years.

Historicity and temporal orientations

As Hirsch and Stewart (2005) point out, we can never isolate the past. We must attend to the nexus between past-present-future, which is volatile and susceptible to being reread, as well as to being overwritten with new experiences. Historicity, according to their understanding, is malleable and marked by ongoing productions situated in medias res (see also Kermode [1966] 2000). Crucially, we need to situate not just present concerns but also future aspirations as part of the ongoing production of historicity, attending to both avenues to the future and the future’s changing location. Are the avenues to the future relatively open and accessible, or have they been severed and rendered impassable? This is surely a pressing concern for Syrians who have relocated and who use past experiences, vocabularies and expressions in their new circumstances, as well as those who use present predicaments and concerns to read what happened in the past.

Engaging with and unpacking Syrian orientations toward the future is a particularly promising avenue of exploration that can be pushed further than it has been in most existing scholarship on Syria. Rebecca Bryant and Daniel Knight (2019) conceptualize temporal orientations as being operative on different terrains, in which relations to the forthcoming are worked out in vernacular terms revolving around anticipatory faculties. As they posit, we may frequently orient ourselves to different potentialities at the same time, hence it is productive to talk of orientations in the plural. This conceptualization of ‘futural orientations’ (ibid.) offers conceptual purchase as it is sensitive to differing engagements with the time to come and the retroactive effect any reading from the present may have not just on the past but also on the forthcoming (Bourdieu [1997] 2000).

As Syrians seek to understand from their current locations what came to pass, the various aspects of revolution, war, crisis, upheaval and tragedy obviously necessitate a temporal orientation to the past. However, we also need to pay attention to the various futures past produced during the last thirteen years, which many Syrians have found it critical to hold on to (al-Khalili 2023; Haugbølle and Bandak 2017). Futures past, as conceptualized by Reinhart Koselleck ([1979] 2004), are the way that past engagements with the future looked before new events, understandings and translocations made their impact and changed the outlook of that future. In addition to these futures past, there is a significant contribution to be made by asking how temporal engagements with various presents and futures in the here and now hold promises or not for Syrians as they are variously situated today.

In describing and analyzing situations in flux, the oft-used Koselleckian categories of horizons of expectations and spaces of experience can be productively related to Serres’ understanding of time and history as percolating. Certain things pass, others do not. An understanding built on the Serresian notion of percolation better equips us to engage with futures ethnographically as it allows us to keep hold of the heterogeneous qualities of any temporal orientation (Henig 2024), and to appreciate the internal differentiation, speeds and rhythms found in the flux of experience, time – and even history. For Serres time percolates ‘in several directions, multiple speeds and numerous rhythms’ ([1987] 2015, 169; see also [2004] 2020, 122). Branches and bifurcation are, accordingly, central figures of thought in his writings, since they create space for multiplicity and complexity ([1982] 1995; [2004] 2020). This understanding and these figures of thought are pertinent when engaging the diverse ways Syrian experience has branched out, percolated and sedimented at various velocities and across diverse terrains.

This special issue’s inquiry into the temporal engagements and futural orientations of Syrians across a range of contexts is a concerted effort by a set of anthropologists who do not take 2011 as the sole starting point of the conversation. As pointed out in recent anthropological scholarship (Appadurai 2013; Kleist and Jansen 2016), future-making and the capacity to aspire are critical faculties, inflected and impaired by crisis, war and the dark registers of human experience. Exactly how actors – and in particular actors situated in relatively similar conditions – come away with different senses of agency, is a key point of exploration. It raises the question, addressed by Catrine Brun (2016) in her analysis of humanitarian policy and practice in Jordan, as to how Syrian lives are afforded or inhibited from attaining a sense of normalcy, familiarity and recognition under changing legal and humanitarian conditions. This includes, crucially, negotiation of bureaucratic requirements, as Veronica Ferreri (2022) details in her study of the quest among Syrians in Germany to obtain the right documents. In this issue, she examines this same issue in the context of Lebanon, one of the hubs for Syrian refugees after the revolution turned into a protracted crisis and brutal war. In 2016, changes to the visa legislation meant that almost overnight the expectations and plans of Syrians in Lebanon were suddenly up in the air. Trepidation, doubt and panic struck as one way to plan and foresee the future suddenly dissipated. As Ferreri compellingly demonstrates, papers and plans are instrumental for inhabiting both the shorter – and longer-term future, and for giving people a sense of agency that at least part of that future is their own hands. Questions relating to legal rights and entitlements are key to Syrians’ sense of mobility (or lack thereof) and how they make plans.

In contrast to the German and Lebanese contexts, Syrian youths in Jordan, grapple with a lack of foreseeable futures because of legal restrictions on non-Jordanians joining the work force. In their contribution to this issue, Birgitte Stampe Holst and Anders Hastrup show that these Syrian youth therefore inhabit their Jordanian present by sealing off any bigger aspirations for the future, commonly remarking: ‘There is no future here’. However, as Holst and Hastrup argue, this larger claim lives alongside all sorts of smaller projects, the timescale as well as the size of which are drawn close to the personal realm. The future is barely conceivable beyond the immediate context (see also Holst et al. 2023). In such circumstances, we see how many Syrians, faced with disappointed and thwarted hopes, might be left with disorientation, confusion and depression rather than orientations towards the future. While these hopes may have shifted from change inside Syria to smaller-scale personal and familial aspirations of migration and safety, for many Syrians the latter remain hard to realize. And even for those who manage to arrive at an aspired for destination, the weight of the past impairs what remains to be desired of the future.

The ethnographies brought together in this special issue allow us to see varied possibilities but also structural similarities across Syrians’ diverse geographies of displacement. This enables us to think about and discuss futures and future-making specific to the Syrian situation but also to contribute more broadly to social theory. The questions asked by the contributors revolve around the kinds of futures seen as impending and how various actors and media have made leaps into known or unknown futures. Their articles also explore how historicities and temporal orderings are produced and stretched in situations of protracted crisis, placing ethnographic attention on the formation of and changes to perceptions, memories and potential futures in both lived experience and cultural production. Lastly, they reflect on how changing political contexts in the present impact on the reading and use of the past in the creation of viable futures for Syrians both inside the country and in neighbouring countries and beyond.

Why engage with Syrian futures and future-making right now? We posit that ‘now’ may be a good time to reflect on them. We are at a point where we may be witnessing what Syrian author and playwright Mohammad Al Attar has described as ‘a cycle coming to an end’, from the uprising and popular mobilization, through urgent documentation efforts, to apparent defeat and, now, reflection (pers. comm. September, 2021). This perspective helps bring into focus the particularities of the present moment as we look both back and forward on the Syrian situation with its shifting energies, intensities and contexts. Syrian documentarist Rami Farah has similarly spoken of ‘a circle coming to an end’ in his reflections on the lives of exiled Syrians, which he describes as passing through the different phases of denial, recognition, depression and, now, integration into new contexts (pers. comm. March, 2022). This means that we need to explore the changing locations of the future as well as the new situations produced in exile. Hence, one central concern of the articles in this issue is the role that the nexus of past-present-future has for exiled Syrians as they reflect on the past thirteen years. Taken together, they also allow for a keen appreciation of the complex nature of percolation, which the Syrian experience pushes us all to reflect on.

Syrian collective experiences: the futures in question

The Syrian uprising started at the beginning of 2011. With popular protests already having actively changed the outlook in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, their spread to Syria seemed to present an opportunity for change. The formal starting point is now regarded as March 2011, when several Syrian youths, none aged over fifteen, were detained after having sprayed graffiti on walls in the Southern town of Deraa. When respected elders and leaders tried to talk with the security officers who had seized the youths, they were met with disdain and disrespect (Ajami 2012, 74). Eventually, the youths were returned to their families, albeit having undergone abuse and torture. Infuriated citizens of Deraa took to the streets and toppled the statue of former president Hafiz al-Assad, the first act of open protest against the Syrian regime. Citizens in many other towns and cities followed suit, hoping for change.

Although the response of the regime was brutal, for Syrians the events in Deraa testified to the possibility of Syrians being able to shape history. In early 2011, there was a prevailing sense that they were not merely witnessing events but actively bringing them about. Accordingly, large numbers took to the streets hoping that peaceful chants and the sheer number of protesters would break the wall of fear and touch the hearts of the army and its soldiers. The initial moment of the uprising helped shape a sense of Syrians being united, being collectively engaged in their own destiny, as expressed in one of the oft-heard slogans: Wahid, wahid, wahid, al-shab al-suri wahid! (One, one, one, the Syrian people is one!). The vehemence of the violence unleashed by the regime soon made protesters realize the dangers of coming out, and the peaceful protesters gradually parted ways in their views of how to change the system. This episode in recent Syrian history is detailed elsewhere (al-Haj Saleh 2017; Della Ratta 2018; Pinto 2013; Yazbek 2015), as is the nebulous violence that accompanied it (Ismail 2018; Baker and Ümüt Üngor 2023). But the peaceful start is important to bear in mind when engaging the diverse Syrian realities that emerged from it.

What moved people may not have been the same in the southern town of Deraa and in larger cities such as Homs and Hama in central Syria, Deir al-Zour in the desert, Lattakia on the Mediterranean coast, and Aleppo in the north. But the uprising forged new relationships and brought people together who felt united despite their differences, at least in the early phase. Syrians at that point were collectively moved. The uprising generated feelings of elation – of seizing the moment, taking to the streets and perhaps breaking new ground, away from entrenched forms of politics. As the regime’s brutal backlash ensued, the urge for change prompted ferocious attempts to document and distribute information, images and insights both within Syria and to the outside world. Media centres popped up and activists heroically sent news into orbit. The sense of change not only opened different registers of action and engagement, but also called back memories of the notorious violence in Hama in 1982, when the regime erased an entire neighbourhood during a crackdown, leaving up to 30,000 people dead (Ismail 2018; Lange 2019).

Gradually, however, the nature of the uprising changed. Even if Syrians shared the same starting point to a large extent, the events that subsequently unfolded revealed and promoted differences in orientations, social class, gender, geography, political orientation and religious identity. As the regime succeeded in defeating the sense of unity among the protesters, a plethora of factions, battalions and proxies emerged. With the passage of time, the tempo and immediacy of events also changed. From a relatively peaceful start and hopeful beginnings, the world has witnessed massive destruction and upheaval inside Syria, as well as displacement of Syrians to neighbouring Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, across the Mediterranean to countries in Europe, and beyond to Australia, the US and Canada. Today the Syrian tragedy is one of protracted crisis and impasse. Its tempo is no longer marked by an urgency to act but rather by the slower pace caused by exhaustion and burnout or as people have reflected on and striven to encompass what came to pass in order to create a semblance of ordinary life.

An example of the attempts made by Syrians to attain a form of normalcy in the current predicament is found in the contribution by Maria Kastrinou and Hannah Knoerk. They show how Syrians arriving in Lesvos, Greece, at the cusp of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in 2015, started using hospitality as an idiom and practice with which to bind the nexus of past-present-future. By envisioning themselves as future guests of Lesvos, they enabled temporal engagement beyond the confines of the present. Kastrinou and Knoerk argue that past and present dangers made any reckoning with the future among their interlocutors a political act, not just a personal one, and that sharing advice became a significant idiom of sociality and collective hope. In the Greek context, as in many others, Syrians used hospitality not just to address present concerns but also to create a future and to connect that future to the core value of hospitality as it existed in Syria before 2011.

However, for some, the temporal sequence of past-present-future came to appear unhinged, with past scenes repeating as the protagonists tried to get a grip on their current situation. Syrian artist and curator Dunia al Dahan points to this sense of disorientation in her eloquent discussion of the experience of Syrian artists:

The relationship with time was particularly crucial for those of us who have lost our places in our countries – and sometimes our loved ones as well – and often feel that in doing so we have lost ten years of our lives. Lives in which memories and reality are so intertwined that we lose the notion of time and place where we are. Past confusion results in present – and even future – confusion, even for those artists who continue to work with the same implacable drive. (2020, 163)

The lack of direction and energy, and the monumental weight of what has taken place and still is taking place in Syria, has caused a disequilibrium of the senses, and at times, in what to say and express. Ethnographically, the Syrian tragedy has, in different ways, thrown Syrians into new existential situations. For some this has resulted in lasting crises. Others have found different ways to accommodate or come to terms with what, for the time being, appears to be the defeat of the uprising – and with what for many is the aftermath of war and tragedy, regardless of where their loyalties or hopes were placed. For Syrians to engage with the question of Syrian futures necessitates meditation on the routes that were taken during conflict, and its shared beginnings and diverse outcomes, all of which beg the question of what to retain in order to preserve elements of the past for future reengagements, personally, collectively and even institutionally.

Engaging the past on one’s own: moving towards the future

While writers, journalists and activists such as Kassem Eid (2018), Alia Malek (2017) and Samar Yazbek (2015) have worked hard to keep the actuality of the Syrian tragedy alive, we are now at a point where several Syrian artists, journalists and thinkers have started to engage with what happened in a different way. They are not questioning what happened and what continues to happen in Syria, but they have started to reflect on their own role in events, asking how things came to pass the way they did (Bandak forthcoming). In other words, they are supplementing their own accounts and voices as witnesses with new takes on what happened.

One of the main mediums through which Syrian artists and intellectuals have worked through the Syrian tragedy is documentary film. The construction and contestation of memory through the burgeoning Syrian documentary scene is the focus of Nina Mollerup and Christine Crone’s contribution to this issue. Focusing in particular on Rami Farah’s Our Memory Belongs to Us (2021), Obaidah Zytoon’s The War Show (2016) and Waad Kateab’s For Sama (2019), Mollerup and Crone show how Syrian documentaries point to the pasts being kept alive and their uncanny potential to resist being buried. Haunting is one of the preeminent and unruly features of the Syrian tragedy. Graphic images, absent loved ones and disappeared persons keep many Syrians awake at night or haunt their dreams, making genuine rest scarce. But as Mollerup and Crone show, filmmakers have also used visual documentation of the Syrian crisis and of Syrian lives to create space for new orientations toward the future, in part through the ‘selective abandonment’ of certain images and memories.

In several of these recent documentaries, made by some of the most gifted Syrian cultural producers, it is possible to discern a shift in tone and reflection from earlier works. It is no longer just the recounting of facts and bearing witness that is at stake, but also artistic expression and the articulation of suppressed truths. Max Weiss describes this as a change from rapid to slow witnessing (2022, 227ff.). After an initial phase of cultural production that was heavily driven towards documentation, archiving and preservation, new openings for different forms of engagement have emerged in both filmic and literary works by people such as Wael Ali, Odai al Zoubi, Mohammad Al Attar, Hala Mohammad and Hanadi Zarka, to name but a few contemporary Syrian artists and intellectuals. These works illustrate some of the percolations occurring through Syrian experimental writing, which takes up darker emotions, insomnia, exhaustion, depression, suicide, doubt and the sense of defeat, but also attempts to work through registers of sorrow, anger, longing, nostalgia, endurance and perseverance.

Let us take, for example, how Al Attar has been engaging with the past in his work. As we have seen, he has deliberately experimented with projecting Syrian reality to the future in the play Damascus 2045. In an essay entitled ‘Theatre’s Open Endings’ he reflects on a question put to him by one of the senior actors in this play: what did he want from theatre today?

On the one hand, I want to resist the deep pessimism that arises in facing the current reality of Syria and the Middle East, but on the other, I do not wish to surrender to false optimism and illusion. … Theater helps me find hope. More than ever before, I understand that resisting despair is fundamentally a political act. Can we invent hope through theater and art? I cannot be sure. But I know that we try. (Al Attar 2022a)

Hope, justice and the battle over narrative are significant themes pondered by Al Attar. Since there are no easy solutions, he offers open endings. An open ending attests to ongoing efforts to grapple with that which came to pass, but also to the questioning of that past and the attempt to open it up for collective exploration through theatre.

Al Attar is similarly candid when he reflects on the current predicament that he and other Syrians find themselves in. In another essay, ‘Letter from Berlin. Two Neighbourhoods, One City, A World Apart’ (Al Attar 2022b), he meditates on the six years he has spent in Germany after being expelled from Beirut in 2016, having first been forced to flee Syria. Al Attar ponders the meaning of exile, the experience of settling in and the meaning of home. Taking the reader on his nightly wanderings through the neighbourhoods of Neukölln and Grünewald in Berlin, and a brief return visit to Beirut, Al Attar reflects on class and privilege, and the diverse routes that life can take. In his elegant phrasing:

What if I had stayed in Beirut, stayed in this house? I browse through the images and words of my life that wasn’t: the love interrupted; the friendships dispersed. From here, my other life, the one shared by Neukölln and Grunewald, seems like a parallel reality, the life of someone I barely know.

Al Attar’s reflections on living in and getting to know Berlin, and of leaving Beirut, signal the difficulty of accommodating both the bigger story of the revolution and continued fight for justice, and the new terrain in which everyday life and personal circumstances are negotiated. He openly reflects on sleepless nights and what he calls ‘intensifying bouts of insomnia – my frequent visitor in Berlin’. By reflecting on his attempts to make himself at home in new cities, new languages and different political realities, Al Attar speaks to aspects of existence shared, but faced alone, by many Syrians.

In the same essay, Al Attar also raises the difficulties of continuing to write or speak about Syria, using as an example a homeless man from southern Lebanon called Abbas with whom he often shares a meal or cup of tea. Each time they meet, Abbas repeats his story ‘with unfading passion’, as if telling it for the first time. Al Attar sees this as mirroring the condition that many exiled Syrians have found themselves in:

For me, Abbas embodies the story Syrians tell about their country. They believed that if they spoke, someone would care. So they spoke. Over and over. Each time impelled by enthusiasm, fervor, or sheer need. They retold and rehashed, conveying what was happening, warning of what was to come. But no one listened. Unlike Abbas’ inexhaustible zeal for storytelling, my words about Syria have dried up in recent years. Writing about Syria – writing in general – has become an exacting task, when I was once impassioned about writing, blogging, and narrating. In recent years I find myself resorting to silence whenever I consider talking about Syria. Every attempt falls silent. Sometimes, while standing next to me, Abbas notices my long silence. He wants to make sure I am still listening. (Al Attar 2022b)

Stories to be told. Ears to listen. Silence. These are profound motifs that attest to the difficulty of keeping the story going as time passes and years go by. The passing of time is also evident in the bodies and traits of Syrians, worn and marked by concerns and worries. Time is passing but with no discernible direction. Al Attar captures this in his description of a reunion with his mother in Beirut:

I watch my mother asleep on the sofa. There is more gray in her hair, more fatigue in her face, in the many years I have been away from her. Then, without warning, the questions stab like a knife: ‘Where did the last ten years go? Who stole them from us?' I walk over to my sleeping mother, touch her head gently to adjust her sleeping position, to ease her neck. I mean to whisper in her ear: ‘Better days are coming, there will be many visits, maybe we will live closer to one another'. But I stop myself. I follow her steady breathing, then step away. (Al Attar 2022b)

In his meditations, Al Attar wanders to various locations that could have been or are still possible. He engages with the past not only as it was, that is through an assertion of facts, data and actuality, but also as it were, a less definite register that opens up the subjunctive mood and creates space for hesitation and for experimentation with remembrance and recollection (Bandak forthcoming). The passing of time presents new options for engaging with the tempo, tempus and indeed temporality of the Syrian experience.

As it were: Syrian politics revisited

In her unrivalled reading of Syrian politics, Lisa Wedeen (1999; 2019) argues that Syrian society and politics have been interpellated by authoritarian symbolism for decades. Syrians were forced to enact a politics of ‘as if’ – that is, to act as if they revered their president, the party, and state-forged reality, even if such a staged form of politics was unconvincing for most (ibid.). As Birgitte Stampe Holst (2023) has shown, authoritarian politics have also been influential beyond Syria’s borders, moving with and playing out in the lives of Syrians as they have been dispersed to neighbouring countries and beyond. The revolution allowed Syrians to break from the politics of ‘as if’ and act with the hope of bringing about a just state. But many Syrians did not take to the streets, whether out of fear (Bandak 2015) or because they saw more opportunity in not breaking alliances with the system (Wedeen 2019).

While the Syrian uprising may not have been spurred by religious incentives, it is evident that religious and sectarian identities became a factor during the deterioration and war unleashed by the regime on its population. The regime deliberately played on the fears of many Syrian Christians, discouraging them from joining the revolution, even if there were some key Christian figures such as Father Paulo Dall’Oglio and the famous actor Fares Helou who were very active. In this volume, Paulo Pinto points to the fragmentation of Sufism in Syria as shaykhs took different positions, some siding with the revolution, others with the regime, while memories of past repression meant that many Sufis were ambivalent about participating even if they were critical of the regime. But Pinto also shows how some Sufi religious circles, both inside Syria and in exile, found ways to survive and continue in new contexts, bringing the past into the present through, for example, ritual continuity or dreams and visions, thus affording the creation of new orientations toward the future.

Even among those who participated in the revolution sectarianism gradually created fissures between what different people hoped for and expected from it. This is elucidated in Charlotte al-Khalili’s article in this issue. Al-Khalili unravels the diverse ways that Syrian revolutionaries lived with their zeal as the future of the revolution moved further and further away from realization. The future of the revolution moved and migrated with the revolutionaries, who left Syria and took refuge in Gaziantep and later destinations further away. In that process, hopes were transformed from a possibility in the here-and-now to a later possibility to repeat the revolution but with a different outcome. As al-Khalili (2023) has previously observed, aspirations for change in Syria turned into a ‘waiting for the revolution to end’.

Syrians who participated in the revolution moved from living a historical moment, with a sense of directly affecting its course, to a re-living and remembering of what came to pass. This was a significant change, accompanied by a shift from the register of collective, political action to that of the personal domain, and even the intimate and private sphere. It also affected narrative forms and memories, with reflection and pause becoming critical. As time passed, what happened in Syria was articulated in new ways, the story becoming more fragmented and personalized. This is evident in the recent documentary Our Memory Belongs to Us by Rami Farah (Bandak, Crone, and Mollerup 2024; see also Crone and Mollerup in this issue), which moves away from the narration of events, lives and the stakes of what happened merely ‘as it was’ into the ‘as it were’. In this register, memories draw from what happened but also often inadvertently play with that reality as Syrians reflect directly on their position and engage with what took place at a distance.

Engaging historicities: elucidating experiences

The articles in this issue illustrate just some of the ways that Syrians have lived on with what happened and is still happening in Syria. We posit that one way of situating these and other discrepant forms of living on is to explore them as significant engagements with time – engagements that attest to changing orientations toward and expectations and ideas of the future. Accordingly, the Syrian situation allows us to think through the global registers of action and involvement that emerge from massive destruction and displacement. Homing in on how the initial sense of urgency among Syrian protestors led to stalled forms of presents just a couple of years later, for example, pushes us to reflect on the different ways history is lived, as well as on the different stakes, claims and experiences that undergird social and cultural life. There are considerable challenges in excavating how such transitions in temporal orderings take place as people move from situations of immediate war and crisis to slower forms of engagement in new terrains. The social and cultural impacts and purchase of such a temporal shift from urgency to stasis and impasse remain undertheorized (Bandak and Anderson 2022; Hartog [2020] 2022). But by comparing across diverse Syrian experiences, we are able to see more clearly where actual circumstances impact on and create tensions between differing engagements with time. The heightened sense of the importance of time, and of stalled presents and collapsed hopes, all need contextualization. We need to first unravel diverse Syrian experiences if we are to understand them and allow their gradual change to be related to the present context and beyond. By discerning and interrogating the multiplicity and heterogeneity of situations that social actors find themselves in, the future might again become something that people can orient towards collectively.

It is not possible to write, speak or think as if Syrians today have a single or simple relation to time. By sharing discrete and disparate ethnographies as partial readings of the complex that the Syria experience was, is, and is in a state of becoming, we may understand how Syrian futures may again become discernible. To draw on Serresian terminology, ours is not an attempt to deduce one overriding explanation nor to reduce complexity and multiplicity to simplicity. Rather, what we hope to bring about is a shared conversation, one in which we hold up the various locations and times of Syria for inspection and elucidation. As I have argued here, percolation offers a productive frame for understanding temporal relations. The flux of time is never simple, its passage always varying in tempo and intensity. Like water in a river, time does not merely flow but also filters, allowing the passage and sedimentation of different experiences at various points. As Serres ([2019] 2022, 53) puts it: ‘Time is layered in local space. But is it the same time in each case? How is time to be counted?’ Similarly, history, as Serres conceives of it, bifurcates, branches out, and is never neat; it is noisy. It leaves traces, but these traces lead both backward and forward. The movement of both time and history therefore needs to be explored both upstream and downstream ([1983] 2015, 199; [1987] 2015, 129). Borrowing from Serres, we might say that with this special issue we are working toward an ichnographic approach that tries to capture something of ‘the ensemble of possible profiles, the sum of horizons’ ([1982] 1995, 19), rather than searching for a singular, defined meaning or direction, which can only ever be ‘a profile seen from a particular site’ ([1983] 2015, 20).

As a case to think with, the Syrian experience offers ethical, empirical and theoretical insights to the study of mass destruction and violence, but also to that of the relocation of hopes and dreams to other geographical locales, as well their transition to different scales. One such scale is that of the intimate and personal, where traces and splinters are carried forward even if collective aspirations have dissipated and, for most, become fragments. With this special issue, it is our hope that we can spur on a conversation on Syrians’ varied and changing engagements with the past, rebounding off our own ethnographic and empirical material, as well as art and writing. We see this as a first step toward a broader anthropological engagement with the divergent locations of the future as well as the discrepant Syrian futures in those locations. Such work needs to be attentive to how past migration and displacement made Syria the nation that it once was and now is (Chatty 2017), but also to how current modalities of migration and displacement will shape Syria’s future both inside and outside its territorial borders.

The general future may look bleak. Nonetheless there are various ways in which Syrians are laboriously enduring and living on in the midst of damage, destruction and displacement. The diverse legacies of Syrian pasts as well as the multiplicity of present situations make it hard to envision Syrian futures in any simple manner – perhaps rightly so. Even if some questions are still burning, they may have different stakes and consequences for individual Syrians, wherever they are now situated. Time has moved on, but not as a steady flow, rather as a percolating force that has filtered and sedimented experiences differently along its turbulent course. This collection aims to unpack these experiences as they have moved (or been stalled) in time, thereby inviting comparative engagement with the futures that radical events release, even if they later transform and move in unexpected ways.

Acknowledgments

I am most thankful for the productive engagement from all contributors as well as editor, David Henig, and the anonymous reviewers, who offered readings for this special issue. Further, I want to thank friends, who have been important for the fruition of this piece including Paul Anderson, Wael Ali, Dunia al-Dahan, Mohammad Al Attar, Emma Aubin-Boltanski, Steve Brown, Rebecca Bryant, Jane Caple, Rami Farah, Daniel M. Knight, Bjørn Thomassen, and Lisa Wedeen.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The special issue was made possible via the Independent Research Fund Denmark and their support for the collaborative project Archiving the future: re-collections of Syria in War and Peace (9062-00014B) and the Novo Nordisk Foundation with their support for collaborative project Viable Futures: Near and Long Term Prospects among Syrian Youth in Jordan (NNF20SH0064193).