The Swamp

Description

The Al-Saz neighborhood was mired in misery, its inhabitants living in a muddy swamp. Winter arrived, and unemployment was rampant in the city. News arrived from other Syrian cities that the economic crisis had affected them to varying degrees… The French Mandate, in collusion with other powers, had decided to sever the Sanjak from Syria and give it to Turkey. Syria, under this mandate, struggled in vain to thwart the conspiracy. Thus, the Sanjak became an arena for political conflict, and we, its inhabitants, were destined to witness those turbulent days when we went out, from morning till night, in demonstrations calling for the Arab identity of the Sanjak and denouncing the ongoing conspiracy. In an atmosphere filled with suffering, oppression, and deprivation, the events of the quagmire unfold: a tormented, displaced childhood, deferred hopes, hastened pains, colonialism, a mandate, and unjust rulings that severed the homeland of the soul, “Alexandretta,” from the heart. Hanna Mina’s child’s story is marked by the beginnings of a revolution against the regime and darkness. For the eye must resist the awl and break it one day. And here is the child remembering. That, twenty years or more later, when he heard the story of the eye that cannot resist the awl again, he remembered that year, the storyteller, and the advice of the neighborhood elder, and said to himself: The French have left, and the labor movement has gained weight. What the early workers did, who struggled in The 1930s.