Political Performance in Syria: From The Six-Day War to the Syrian Uprising by Edward Ziter (review)

Edward Ziter’s Political Performance in Syria is a well-researched and remarkable book, tracing terror and performance across forty years under the Assad regimes. The book’s intense and provocative configuration of performance is haunted by an overwhelming desire to account for a comparative study of performances across national, cultural, social, and political borders, as well as by the tragic and epic historical events it genealogically tracks. Ziter effectively charts the history of a theatre that has longed for a civil society and imagined alternative political realities that can subvert the Assad regime and transform “the state of exception from an unassailable fact to an object of analysis” (1). Therefore, the claim this book invokes—that theatre remains important even in times of atrocities—will certainly give rise to controversial political responses and open up spaces for future scholarship.

Ziter’s attempt to intensively track terror and performance in Syria, political or otherwise, springs from his intention to give voice to the Syrian desire for “greater civil liberties long before the start of the Uprising [and Syrians’] pent-up desire to complain openly of injustices and argue for change free of the fear of imprisonment and torture” (2). He provides a provocative and meticulous reading of Arab and Syrian history through the rhetoric of performativity in order to offer helpful information on why and how “Syrian artists had long looked to the theatre as a possible arena of debate” (9). These contentious claims are framed within five logically sequenced chapters, alongside a preface mapping the theoretical terrain and a very insightful short “ending” that asserts the role of theatre in “the midst of apparent national disintegration” (239).

At first glance, the book’s title prompts the reader to inspect it from a historical point of view, from the traumatic defeat of the June 1967 war to the March 2011 Uprising, but the writer’s project in fact goes far beyond simply recounting Syrian history. Ziter describes his approach as “genealogical rather than historical,” and is “as much interested in the circulation of ideas in which the theatre partakes, as [he is] interested in the history of the Syrian stage” (3). From the beginning he draws our attention to the significance of “martyrdom” within Syrian society. This concept, according to him, is manifold: “I begin with one of the most over-determined and contested words in the Syrian discourse: martyrdom. The word condenses different political and social experiences into a single image—a lifeless body, the marks of its trauma still plainly invisible” (15). Such an assertion invites the reader to interrogate the religious and political liaisons of this concept with respect to nation, state, and regime, the latter of which “has systematically invoked ideas of martyrdom to legitimize its rule” (16).

“War,” “Palestinians,” “History and Heritage,” and “Torture” extend thematically across Ziter’s configuration of the struggle against the Assad regimes and the efforts to define a Syrian identity. Corresponding chapters chart the recent history of the Syrian stage based on a body of both oppositional and pro-regime plays and performances that highlight the traumatic debacle in the 1967 war and the contemporary ongoing civil war as well. Examples of these plays are Soirée for the Fifth of June (1968) by Sa’dallah Wannous; The Jester (1973) by Muhammad al-Maghut; The Trial of the Man Who Didn’t Fight (1970) by Mamduh Udwan; and The Strangers (1974) and The Palestinian Women (1971) by Ali Uqla Arsan. The choice of Soirée for the Fifth of June and The Trial of the Man Who Didn’t Fight reflects Ziter’s attempt to redefine the martyr who according to Wannous and Udwan sacrifices his life for freedom and dignity, and spawns the challenge against the state ideology of martyrdom and its perception of the martyr as an individual who dies defending the regime and its slogans of pan-Arabism, Arab nationality, and patriotism in...