Back in 2014 a small independent publishing house called Saqi brought out a book called Syria Speaks. It’s a brave and remarkable publication recording the voices of human beings crucified by long years of human rights abuses and, in some cases, extreme poverty. Poems, stories, personal accounts, artwork, songs, cartoons: the book is filled with the humour and resilience of people plunged into worse and worse suffering.
In 2012, the UN had declared Syria officially engulfed by civil war; house-to-house conflict, no more electric light, or doorstep conversations. That’s you and your kids versus helicopter gunships. Which is a tragedy if it’s happening to fellow human beings. And if those human beings then had to flee Islamic State, risking death, abduction and extortion along the way – well then what a further tragedy that would be.
Various humans, including me, supported the book, in part because responding to horror with creative acts and beautiful things imagined for the benefit of strangers seemed to speak well for our species.
We couldn’t have guessed that Faizah Shaheen with her Middle Eastern-sounding surname and her not-quite-British-enough appearance – a psychotherapist who works to help prevent radicalised grooming of young mental health patients – would try reading the book in public. On a plane even. We couldn’t have anticipated that she would be detained and questioned, having returned from honeymoon in Turkey, having apparently committed the offence of Reading On A Plane While Muslim.
Or, actually, maybe we could. In 2014, our leaders were already offering us boil-in-the-bag patriotism, peppered with rabble-rousing fears. Our media were already a hatred machine, targeting Muslims – among others – with grinding regularity. Communities quietly bombed out by extinguished opportunity and vaporised safety nets were told to blame their pains on refugees, as were the squeezed middle classes. The endlessly sadomasochistic cycle of cuts? Blame the Syrians. So maybe we should have recommended Saqi put a warning on the cover: Please read in private. This book may cause you to question the dominant narrative. You may begin to see foreigners as human. Displaying the title of this book may cause alarm.
The book hoped, in a tiny way, to indicate that the nurses, lawyers, greengrocers, children and so forth who also happened to be Syrian might, nevertheless manage to be human beings; not cockroaches, not a swarm, not a problem. It couldn’t have predicted that by April 2016, a majority of British MPs could present accepting even 3,000 refugee children as an existential threat to the UK. Still, we could have guessed that within the UK there would be increased surveillance of cultural activities – particularly among our children-who-are-not-white-enough. The Prevent strategy – if it can actually be called a strategy – has increasingly become a pathway to stigmatising all young Muslims and has seen some schoolteachers acting as Blockleiters, leaping to the most terrifying conclusions possible when faced with mishearing of the word “cucumber”, or unexpected leaflets.
What to do? Read on. Read often. Read widely. Conventional media are influential, that’s what they’re for. That isn’t about stupidity, it’s about human nature. There, a perfect storm of cost-cutting churnalism, moral disengagement, Westminster threats and favours have created a culture within which reading can be a reportable offence. But nascent new media, with its demands for factual rigour, for expressions of humanity; these could keep us safe.
To be perpetually silent in the face of bigotry is to be complicit, but a little quiet reading in the privacy of one’s own mind? That can create an invisible revolution. Identification with authors unlike oneself can create solidarity, experiment, freedom. Totalitarians don’t burn books to roast marshmallows – they’re trying to destroy their power. So embrace that power. Conversations no longer dodged, appropriate, peaceable actions large and small, even the gift of a book. Our ability to thrive together is limited only by our imagination. Without that, the future gets dark.
