Truth Seeking in Syrian Literary Writing

Syria is not a textbook transitional justice case. Rather, it reflects a trend of the tentative use of transitional justice concepts and mechanisms in ongoing conflicts. This atypical case raises complex questions regarding the goals of transitional justice initiatives in the absence of a transition, the dearth of formal justice mechanisms, the finality of justice efforts by a diverse range of Syrian and international justice actors and the participation of victims. In this entrenched non-transitional setting, informal initiatives in the domain of documentation, criminal accountability and truth-seeking have emerged. As for truth-seeking, artistic practices have expanded the sites of truth-seeking, foregrounding the importance of truth in a context of ongoing injustices and the distortion of truth claims. In this setting, artistic practices are alternative sites of truth-telling – a truth-seeking practice in which stakeholders get a forum to share their perspectives – that allow for ‘presencing’ experiences of harm or, at least, preventing their erasure. In this paper, I examine the relationship between Syrian literary writing and truth-seeking. Based on empirical research conducted with Syrian writers in the diaspora, I first argue that a wide variety of these authors share the aspiration with justice actors to counter forcible forgetting. Secondly, taking the novel Planet of Clay by Samar Yazbek as a departing point, I examine the potential of fiction to ‘speak about the unspeakable’ and to present the reader with the complexity of truth claims. To conclude, I posit that Syrian literary texts addressing injustices can be considered as truth practices part of the ecosystemic framework of transitional justice initiatives, as they open spaces for truth-seeking that complement other understandings of truth – largely tethered to forensic truth – in the Syrian context.