Faraj Ahmad Bayrakdar was born in Homs, Syria, in 1951. He studied Arabic at the University of Damascus. He was arrested by Syrian Military Intelligence in 1987 on suspicion of membership of the Party for Communist Action. He was held incommunicado for almost seven years and was tortured. In 1993 he was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Bayrakdar was released in November 2000 following an amnesty without obligation to renounce his political activities. He left to Sweden and has been living there since 2005.
The following are excerpts from “Mirrors of Absence,” a long poem Bayrakdar wrote in Saydnaya prison between 1997 and 2000. Translated by Sinan Antoon. The Arabic original can be read here.
Mirrors of Absence
These mirrors could have been
pure rain
or pure silence
But things were made of stone
The clinking of time and space
was bloodied
with what resembles madness
or gods
1
Thanks
for what has to go
Thanks
for what has to come
Thanks
for what succumbs to silence
and never returns
never
4
His heart is a bell
his body a church
eyes shut
upon a woman
wearing her sorrow
holding a mass of tears
for his return
7
They whispered:
who other than the madman
sharpens the rose
and is merciful to the knife?
O Khadija, the lamps of your sadness!
If you only knew
how many roses
and how many knives
I tore apart
and how many
tore me apart
9
There is no freedom
outside this place
but it cries
whenever it hears keys
laughing in their locks
10
All the cracks you see on the wall
were carved by my eyes
they have been looking at them
for years
No use counting them
11
A time
without dates
A place
without directions
O woman
wounding like lightening
bleeding like a song
Go!
Nothing is present
except absence
12
Thus
prison is time
you mark the first days on walls
the following months on memory
but when the years become
a long train
tired of whistling
despairing of a station
you try something else:
forgetting
16
There is no sun here
I find myself naked
without shades
no woman either
I find myself naked
without myself
18
O
How can I see myself
when I am always with me?
How do I know myself
Do not say no to the mirror!
Mirrors,
even the ones I write
can only enumerate me
or make me one
I am not like that
I am in no state
whatsoever
23
- Whose funeral procession is this?
I asked the old man
While I am going away.
- It is for meaning my son
He replied
and stood there
like a headstone
29
Here
and there
on the wall
on my heart
on the night and wind
on doors, dates and sidewalks
on fear, despair and nothingness
Eyes
deep like blackness
black like catastrophe
catastrophic like silence
silent like howling
nothing before or after them
except fallen banners,
God and I
in adjacent cells
30
Eleven harvested deserts
without a woman`s shadow
four thousand blind nights
without a blink for the morning
a hundred thousand bleeding hours
with nothing but thorns, sand and scorpions
six million gasps
on a knife`s edge
and the match goes on bloody and mad
between the wolves of death
and the gazelles of life
31
Yes O God!
this is Syria
how shall we raise
condolences to you
with which clouds will you cry?
34
Now I am 46 dances old
on the brink of the abyss
my poems don`t express me
any more than an arrow
expresses its prey
35
No
not God
but a woman
the colour of wheat and carob
a woman
between coffee and milk
between silence and speech
she taught me the rose in the morning
and before the night climbed
taught me the storm
37
Freedom is a homeland
and my country an exile
I am my antithesis
this is my deposition
written with my mother`s milk
stamped with all my chains
38
I hide inside the poem
search for myself outside
but we cheat at times
she invites me to her bed
I respond
she takes off her clothes
I, mine
she puts me on
and I remain naked
Saydnaya Prison 1997-2000