As the fourth anniversary of the Syrian uprising approached, Ayham Dayoub, was overwhelmed by a feeling that he had to say something. A great deal of pain, despair, hope and criticism has been bent up inside over the last four years, and now was the time to release it all.
Like many many ideas, inspiration always comes late. With the help of coffee and late nights, his experimental work with a disparate collection of footage and audiovisual material started materialising into a coherent structure: “No remorse, just nostalgia,” he called it. How does a young man of the revolution, think of that revolution four years on?
“The revolution has faded. What we see today is a civil conflict led by warlords, and international players. The regime has been defeated, but it wasn’t us who defeated it,” he says. “There is no remorse for the past. If the time would go back to that fateful March of 2011, I would have done the same. There is no other solution but to declare war on the regime, and our right to that is inalienable to me.”
In the 6-minute-long video, Ayham attempts to compress four years of intensive and contradictory emotions. Looking for what he believes are the reasons for our defeat. The clip starts with the penultimate moment in June 2000 when Bashar al-Assad officially inherited the Syrian presidency from his late father, Hafez al-Assad. “The root of the problem in Syria is the Assad regime. That Bashar inherited the presidency has long been a bitter pill,” he says. The Syrian revolution, according to Ayham, was a belated response to that bitter pill. The video combines different arts and pivotal scenes: the popular poet from Daraa, and the young man from Homs, who both led demonstrations in singing; a rap song and a famous Nizar Qabbani poem mocking dictatorship.
The dream that started in Daraa in March 2011, was soon hijacked by three powers: an incompetent political opposition (represented in the video by a clip of Michel Kilo), who shares with the regime their disdain to the public. “Moderate” religious figures, such as Moaz al-Khatib, the former Sheikh of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, also attract Ayham’s scorn. “He was a preacher, and now he has taken on the suit of politics as well. He can not have both, and he can not use one to further the other.” Finally, the extremist brand of religious preachers, such as the infamous Arour, who is, according to Ayham, as much dangerous, as he is simpleton “who believes using and abusing Jihadist rhetoric can topple a regime that controls every part of the state.”
The video has two controversial parts, the first shows a dancer at a traditional nightclub, while the other a scene from a traditional Syrian wedding. Ayham explains their inclusion as the first represents the state of conservatism and sexual repression, while the other represents the more open nature of traditional societies in Syria, where singing, dancing and mixing between the two sexes are the norm.
Ayham believes that Syria’s youth, despite the ordeal, has accumulated a wealth of experiences which, he believes: “will allow them to create a more modern country in the future.” That future is filled with nostalgia, but contrary to what the agents of tyranny hope, remorse has no place in it.
