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Syrian Studies Association Newsletter 14.2 (2009) Spring Issue Book Review: A Memoir-Novel of Tadmur Military Prison
Mustafa Khalifa. Al-Qawqa’a [The Shell]. Beirut: Dar al-Adab (http://adabmag.com/books) ,
2008.

[This review is based on the Arabic original. The book is also available in French:
Moustafa Khalifé. La Coquille: Prisonnier politique en Syrie. Traduction Stéphanie
Dujols. Arles: Actes Sud, 2007.]
By Shareah Taleghani
In 2001, following the release of several hundred political prisoners, the Syrian
government ordered the closure of its most notorious detention center—Tadmur Military
Prison.

Located in the desert near the ancient site of Palmyra and originally built by the
French Mandate authorities, Tadmur has been described as a “kingdom of death and
madness” by Syrian poet Faraj Bayraqdar and the “absolute prison” by dissident Yassin
al-Haj Salih.

The abject conditions of torture, daily degradation, and arbitrary execution
which prisoners experienced there were the subject of intense scrutiny by both
international and local human rights organizations throughout the 1980s and up until its
doors were finally closed almost eight years ago. The site of a massacre of suspected
members of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1980, Tadmur, according to a 2001 report by
Amnesty International, was and is “synonymous with suffering”.
In the recent proliferation of contemporary Syrian prison literature, most narrative
accounts of prisoners’ experiences of surviving the conditions of Tadmur have been
circulated in the form of testimonials and memoirs.

Aside from a website dedicated to testimonies of former Tadmur prisoners, Muhammad Salim Hammad’s prison memoir
Tadmur: Shahid wa-Mashhud [Witness and Witnessed] recounts in linear and
chronological fashion his experience of detention and torture at the prison as a suspected
member of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Faraj Bayraqdar’s own poetic prison memoir
Khiyanat al-Lugha wa al-Samt [The Betrayals of Language and Silence] (2005) dedicates
an entire chapter to what he calls “Tadmuriat”—brief, disjointed fragments of
descriptions of terrifying events and moments he witnessed while detained at the
infamous prison—moments that appear to escape the possibility of representation
because they are “beyond surrealism”.
Mustafa Khalifa’s recently published work al-Qawqa’a [The Shell] (2008) is one of the
first novels dedicated to the story of a detainee’s imprisonment in Tadmur. Detained
himself from 1982 to 1994, the author presents the story of a seemingly apolitical
protagonist who returns to his homeland after studying film in Paris and is arbitrarily
detained.

Musa is arrested upon arriving at the airport, brutally tortured at an
interrogation center of the military security service, mistakenly placed with detainees
who are members of or suspected members of the Muslim Brotherhood, and then sent to
the “desert prison”.

He will not learn what precise crime he had been accused of until
close to the time of his release. Like many prisoners, Musa discovers and masters the
skill of oral composition and memorization. He has no paper and no pen. But throughout
his detention, in his mind, he composes his diaries, memorizes them word by word and
sentence by sentence, and retains each entry in his memory until he is eventually able to
record them on paper after his release. Except for the very beginning, the novel is
composed of these dated entries—some just a day or two apart and some separated by
several months. Each entry contains parenthetical observations—editorial comments or
additions that the narrator makes to his own memorized composition, seemingly at a later
point in time.
Musa is never sentenced by a court, and he is never placed on trial, but he will spend
twelve years in the desert prison. He is however, sentenced to silence by his fellow
detainees, when he is overheard telling his torturers that first, he is a Christian and then
declaring himself an atheist and therefore in no way affiliated with the Muslim
Brotherhood.

Ostracized completely by the rest of the inmates in his mahja’ (dormitory
or communal cell), he describes himself as withdrawing into his shell. The subtitle of the
novel is “diary of a secret observer” (yawmiat mutalassis).

Musa is constantly “peering”
or “creeping out of” his shell; he listens attentively, meticulously observes, and diligently
records all of the horrors he witnesses in the prison. From the beginning of his enforced
sojourn in detention, his life is threatened not only by the brutality of daily forms of
torture and degradation, but by the Islamist extremists in his cell who believe that he
should be executed as an unbeliever.

Rescued and then protected by the moderate
pacifist Shaykh Darwish and a physician who treated the wounds afflicted by his torture,
Dr. Zahi, he nonetheless remains isolated for ten years. No one will speak to him
because he is impure—this silencing imposed not just by his jailors but by his fellow
inmates mimics the muting of thousands of political prisoners who passed through
Tadmur and other sites in Syria’s infamous carceral archipelago who have never been
able to tell their stories.
Nonetheless, Musa speaks through his diary, and in doing so, he introduces his reader to a
gruesome lexicon of torture and detention. He tells of the “reception” the prisoners
receive upon their arrival to the prison: each is forced to drink the putrid filthy water
from a sewage drain. Those who resist are beaten to death. Those who drink are treated
to more torture or “hospitality” as the guards call it.

Day after day, the torture continues.
Daily activities can bring arbitrary death. He describes the “breather” or break where
prisoners are routinely whipped, lashed, and beaten. He recounts how prisoners were not
allowed to raise their eyes towards their jailors. He recollects the warden coming into the
cell and randomly executing fourteen of his cellmates because of a threat he received in
the outside world.

He witnesses the weekly execution and trials of inmates in the
courtyard through a tiny hole he discovers in the wall of his communal cell. He also
methodically describes daily aspects of prison life—surviving the baths, illicit prayers,
the confining, airless dimensions of the mahja’, the brutal shaving of prisoners heads and
faces, the secret forms of communication between prison cells, the innovative modes
prisoners use to treat the sick and wounded when deprived of medical care, and the
myriad forms of resistance that detainees develop despite the ever looming threat of
death.
Musa will remain in complete isolation from his cellmates for ten years. After nearly a
decade, he is once again confronted by an extremist calling for Musa’s trial, judgment,
and execution by the other prisoners; finally, he breaks his silence and vocally confronts
his would-be executioner.

From that moment, he becomes intimate friends with Nasim—
an inmate who was detained as a hostage due to his brother’s affiliation with the Muslim
Brotherhood.

Like others, Nasim will eventually suffer a breakdown; his dissent into
madness occurs when three brothers are executed after their father was promised that the
youngest would be spared. Abruptly, in twelfth year of detention, Musa is transferred
from the prison back to the military interrogation center.

He learns that his influential
uncle has been attempting to obtain his release. But before he is actually freed, he will be
interrogated in three different branches of the security services because he refuses to
confess to belonging to any political organization, to write a thank you letter to the Syrian
president for his release, or to renounce involvement in politics.
After his release, Musa returns to his family home that he inherited from his father and
lives with his niece and her family. Despite family pressure to marry and to work, he
does neither. He isolates himself from the world around him. Eventually, he learns that
Nasim as well as others he was imprisoned with have been released. Nasim, however,
has never recovered from his breakdown, and takes his own life in front of Musa after a
brief reunion of former cellmates.

At the end of the novel, there is no sense of
celebratory liberation for Musa. Instead, noting that he has never truly been released
from prison, he describes himself as having lost the ability to communicate, as perceiving
an insurmountable abyss between himself and all others, and as carrying a grave within
himself. Rather than creep out of his “shell” to watch and record what is happening
around him, he remarks: “I do not want to look outside. I close its holes in order to turn
my gaze entirely to the inside, to me, to my self”.
Narrated in stark, simple language, the basic plot of The Shell, along with the framing
device of a prison journal, will be familiar to readers of prison literature. Khalifa’s direct,
documentary style lacks elements of formal experimentation seen in other recent works
of Syrian prison literature such as the fragmented, stream of consciousness narration in
Hasiba ‘Abdalrahman’s prison novel Al-Sharnaqa [The Cocoon] (1999) or Malik
Daghastani’s Duwar al-Hurriya [The Vertigo of Freedom] (2002).

However, the
absence of experiment with form in the text does not detract from impact of the narrative
on the reader. The history of Tadmur Military Prison, the stories of the human lives
detained and lost inside its walls, are still in the process of being written, and Mustafa
Khalifa’s The Shell marks a significant contribution to the beginning of that process.
Shareah Taleghani is a PhD candidate in modern Arabic literature in the Dept. of Middle
Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. She is completing her dissertation
on the relationships between contemporary Syrian and Arabic prison literature, human
rights discourse, and literary experimentalism.

Source : http://www.scpss.org/libs/spaw/uploads/files/English%20Content/Books/TheShell.pdf

I was beaten while being questioned by State Security Intelligence, Branch No. 285 (based in Damascus). The interrogator slapped and punched me several times, and I was forced to stand, blindfolded with my hands cuffed behind my back, for the entire three-hour interrogation.  The interrogator more than once threatened to use the “tire” on me and whip me. When I refused to answer some questions, I was made to kneel down on my knees.

Prisoners arrive at the Sednaya Prison cuffed and blindfolded, having no idea where the security truck is taking them as they leave the detention centre. Prisoners are usually transferred in groups. After I reached the prison, I was thrown in a solitary cell; it was smaller than I was and I could not stretch out. The cell was two floors underground, dark with no light, measuring about 160 by 180 cm. It contained a detached toilet about halfway up the wall. The cell smelled awful and filth was everywhere.

The next day, food was distributed. Through holes in the door, I saw rations in front of each cell for four people. It later turned out that the two solitary cells facing mine and next to me held four individuals—four people packed into the same space that was confining for me alone.

In the evening, I heard the First Aide to the Director of the Shift Guard tell the guards not to touch me, since I was connected to the press and appear on television. He told them that the prison director explicitly stated that “we don’t want problems with this prisoner.”

Groups of prisoners began arriving in the next few days. I spent 55 days in that cell during which two groups of prisoners arrived, each one numbering seven to ten people. Three prisoners arrived individually.

The guards began screaming, “They’ve brought them, they’ve brought them! May God send good fortune, bring the tire.” Prisoners arrived to the hall, lined on both sides by solitary cells like mine. More than ten guards arrived with a major from the Military Police, which runs the Sednaya Prison. The guards began beating the prisoners using rubber car tires. The prisoner would lie on his back and bend his legs, after which the tire would be put around his legs. Then the prisoner would be turned face down and a guard would stand on his back to prevent him from moving. Other guards would then whip the soles of his feet, and the screams would grow louder. The whipping was done with a very thick piece of rubber, probably an engine belt from a large machine.

The guards beat the prisoners—at the very least, each prisoner got more than 50 lashes. During the whipping, a guard would stand on the prisoner’s back to prevent him from moving and the major would make fun of the prisoners as they were being tortured. This is a verbatim dialogue of the conversation between the major and a prisoner undergoing torture:

Major: What do you do?

Prisoner: I’m a farmer.

Major: So you know what a tractor sounds like.

Prisoner: Yes sir, I know.

Major: So let’s see. Make me the sound of a tractor or else the beating won’t stop.

Prisoner: I swear, I don’t know how, sir.

Major: You don’t know, or you forgot?

Prisoner: I forgot, I forgot the sound.

Major to the guards: So remind him (an order to whip him).

The guards gave him more than 20 lashes and the prisoner screamed.

The major stopped the guards and asked the prisoner: So, have you remembered?

Prisoner: Yes, yes, I’ve remembered.

Major: So do it, make the sound of a tractor.

The prisoner began making a tractor-like sound while the major and guards laughed for five minutes.

The major ordered the prisoner to be quiet: So, you remembered quite well. Now c’mon, make him forget

the sound again.

He ordered a new round of beating and the guards gave him more than 20 lashes.

At this point, another prisoner had nearly passed out from his own screaming. The major stopped the

guards and threw water on the prisoner’s face.

Major: Are you okay?

Prisoner: If you want to whip me, whip me, but don’t let anyone stand on my back. I swear, I can’t

breathe.

Instead of stopping the torture, the major followed his wishes and he was whipped without having a guard stand on his back to restrain him. This torture session lasted more than two and a half hours, after which the prisoners were stuffed four in a cell, as small as mine.

The second group of prisoners was larger. This time a different officer, a captain, came, but the captain also kept his sense of humor while torturing the prisoners.

During the whippings, he would ask the guards to stop and then order the prisoner restrained by the car tire to sing. He would say, “Sing this song by so-and-so,” and then later the singing would be used to justify more torture. The captain would scream, “Shut up! Shut up! Your voice is disgusting. Give me a scream instead of a song,” and then he would gesture at the guards to resume the whipping.

Later the captain would order the prisoner to bark, howl, or make other animal sounds. After one prisoner began howling like a dog at the captain’s order, the captain shouted at the guards, “I told you he’s a dog. Go ahead and beat him.” The guards then began beating him again.

This torture session lasted more than three hours, after which the prisoners were placed in solitary cells like mine.

Three prisoners arrived individually, not part of groups. The three were severely beaten. Apparently, if a prisoner arrives by himself, it gives the guards more time to be creative with the beating.

One prisoner, Khidr Abdullah Ramadan, reached the Sednaya Prison on about April 18, 2006, after being held for 70 days at a military detention branch run by Military Intelligence.

The prisoner was placed in the “tire” and four guards began whipping him. They competed to see who could cause him the most pain, who could make him scream more. I started to count the lashes until I reached 58 and then stopped when I realized that the session would be a long one. During the whipping, the guards began getting inventing new methods, like jumping up in the air and then bring the whip down on the prisoner’s feet. After whipping for more than 30 minutes, by four guards together, they couldn’t find any empty space in any cell. They sent for the first aide and he came. They told him there was no other place but with the journalist, meaning me. The aide vehemently refused and insisted on stuffing the prisoner into any other cell. At that point, one of the guards said, “We’ve got 131 prisoners in 31 solitary [cells], where should we go with him, sir?”

The aide opened the door of my cell, came up to me, and said, “Look, we didn’t treat you like the rest. We’re treating you much better. You know that. This prisoner’s going to share your cell. Talk is prohibited. If anything happens, it’s him we’ll beat. We’ll torture him very badly, and it’ll be on your conscience.”

The young man, his head completely shaved, was brought into my cell, which was too small for just me alone. The guards forced him to jog for a half hour so the blood wouldn’t clot on his feet. They kept saying, “Trot, you animal.”I carried the young man to the toilet for three days after that since he could not stand on his feet.

Abdullah, my cellmate, told me terrifying stories about the torture he had seen at the military interrogation center in Damascus. He had spent 70 days there in a group cell. He said that he wasn’t beaten at all at the branch, but that every day a prisoner would be taken in for interrogation and would be brought back bleeding on a blanket. The thing he most remembered was one prisoner who was severely injured by the torture. After he was carried on the military blanket and thrown down by the soldiers, he didn’t stop bleeding. The prisoners started screaming that he would die. The soldiers came back with some gauze and disinfectant and threw them through the small slot in the door of the cell and told the prisoners to clean up his wounds.

Often the soldiers, the prison guards at the Sednaya Prison, would force the prisoners to make sport. A guard would open the small slot in the cell door and order the prisoners to lie down, stand up, jog, or jump, knowing that the cell wasn’t big enough for even one prisoner to do this.

In some cases, the prisoners would bang on the cell door. When the guard would ask who it was, the prisoner had to answer with his cell number; the use of names was prohibited. Most often, the prisoners asked for water. The water in the cells had been cut off and was turned on for only ten minutes three times a day. When the water was turned on, the guards would tell the prisoners to fill their plastic containers or to use the toilet.

The scarcity of water was a big problem in the Sednaya Prison. I spent 55 days in that filthy cell, bathing only once. Prisoners began scratching themselves. The guards were worried and sent for the prison doctor an officer at the rank of first lieutenant, who diagnosed the problem as scabies. He ordered the guards to distribute a gallon of hot water to every prisoner, and he gave them a disinfectant solution which they put in the water. That was the only time I bathed.

After that, I spent 18 days in a group cell on the third floor, measuring 9 by 6 meters. It was very large. I was placed in there with my father, the writer Ali al-Abdullah, who told me about cases that were totally like what I had seen.

In the two months we spent there together, I learned for certain that as soon as any prisoner arrives to the Sednaya Prison, he is greeted the same way, in what is known as a welcoming party, or the welcoming tire. The beating is very severe, after which he is placed in a solitary cell with three other prisoners for up to one full year, during which time he does not breathe, or see light or sunshine. He only bathes if the doctor orders it, fearing the spread of scabies or other skin diseases.

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