La literatura siria contemporánea: estudio de las obras de Samar Yazbek desde la revolución hasta 2018

Resumo

This research aims at presenting and analyzing the four books of the Syrian novelist and journalist Samar Yazbek (Latakia, 1970) published between the year of the outbreak of the Syrian Revolution in 2011 and 2018. These books belong to the contemporary Syrian literary canon and collect the legacy of the social realism literary movement initiated in the 1950s in the Middle East area. Our research is based on the hypothesis that the four works Taqāṭuʻ Nīrān - min yawmiyāt al-intifāḍa al-sūrīyya (2011), Bawwābāt arḍ al-‘adam (2015), Al-Maššā’a (2017) and Tis‘a ‘ašara imrā’a: sūrīyyāt yarwīna (2018), represent the evolution of Samar Yazbek’s writing influenced by the beginning of the uprising, later affected by the occurrence of war and the author’s exile. This corpus focuses on memory and trauma, showing a transformation from an autobiographical gender perspective towards a poetic-politic writing style aimed at cultural and collective memory based on women’s testimonies. Similarly, the four books show the author’s trajectory of literary resistance and political commitment to the principles of the Revolution. The contents of her works reflect the intention to spread awareness on the reality of Syria and at the same time to fight against oblivion, which in this thesis we identify as literary-cultural memoricide. Samar Yazbek explores in each book a different aspect of her personal experience and that of other women with Revolution, war and with the events that have taken place as a consequence: suffering, death, trauma and exile. The writing style also represents Samar Yazbek’s evolution from a personal to a collective perspective of the situation in Syria over seven years. The analysis of the four works is carried out by applying the principles of the feminist literary criticism established by Elaine Showalter in her gynocritics theory, and by the “cultural and collective memory studies” defined by Maurice Halbwachs, Jan Assman and Luisa Passerini. Moreover, it is presented a comparison of the writing style and use of hybrid literary genres that characterize the literature of Samar Yazbek and the writer and journalist Svetlana Aleksievich. Traumatic experiences, both individual and collective, are inserted into the public sphere through the act of narration. Therefore, writing becomes the genesis of a testimonial narration of Syria's recent history where women's testimony functions as a link between archive and memory.