damascene chiaroscuro

Via the Arabist, I have discovered Cairo-based journalist Elijah Zarwan (aka the Skeptic) and his thoughtful post and luminous photoset from Damascus. He captures the atmosphere of caution and complicity that penetrates and overshadows daily life in Syria:

Before I left, one western diplomat who had spent some time working in Damascus described it to me as “a city full of intrigue.” I didn’t stay long enough to begin to untangle the web of politics, patronage, and dirt that blankets the city and constricts your chest. Just long enough to feel it. I’d once thought of living and working in Damascus. The woman at my work then responsible for security told me to forget it.

“It’s the sort of place where you’d feel totally comfortable until you stepped out of line,” she said. “By the time you felt the state’s jaws closing, it would be too late.”

...Were I Syrian, would I spend my life like Anwar al-Bunni, on a revolving door in and out of prison for speaking my mind, or would I shut up and enjoy my rose-petal jam?

But his photographs also capture its beauty (and its beauties), which seem to endure no matter how many activists and writers sit in prison, biding their time; or how many ugly concrete buildings rise above the battered streets of Souk Saroujah. I love these images of pigeons, too, sailing loose over the rooftops.

For some reason, that first, elegant black-and-white photo has me, in this cold New York December, thinking of a different chiaroscuro in Damascus, the characteristic banded stone of As'ad Pasha's Khan (one of the places I love best in this world, hidden like an empty secret behind a great wood-and-iron door sunk low in a wall of one of the Souk al-Buzuriyya's passageways) and other buildings of the Old City, in the bright hot light of an August day in 2004.






(all photos courtesy of the old crappy 2.0 megapixel camera, as usual. But in three weeks I'll lay hands on the film photos from my 2002 trip to Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey, and may get round to some scanning in the new year.)