“By a kind of miracle. The exile of Yassin Al-Haj Saleh ”, by Justine Augier, Actes Sud, 336 p., € 21.80.
The previous book by Justine Augier, Ardor (Actes Sud, 2017), was, through Syria and the luminous figure of the lawyer and muse of the Syrian revolution Razan Zaitouneh, a portrait of the Arab world, in its best and worst. His new book, By a kind of miracle, is a portrait of Europe, in its worst and best it can have. It mainly deals with Germany, a place of refuge for hundreds of thousands of Syrians. Yassin Al-Haj Saleh, a dissident intellectual who passed through the jails of the Assad regime, is the hero of this second Syrian opus. Through the gaze of this political exile on Europe and on Germany, which he discovers, Justine Augier speaks about us, our values and our renouncements.
After “De l’ardeur”, did you think you could escape Syria and move on?
I thought about escaping it briefly and realized that it was not possible. At the beginning of Ardor, there is a feeling which is very strong and which has persisted. A feeling of scandal in the face of the crushing of the Syrian revolution and in the face of indifference. I am not recovering from this double crush. Today is ten years later and it seems to me that, knowing the scale of the crimes committed, this forgetfulness and this impunity say something about the state of the world.
This story concerns me as an individual, as a European. When I learned that [l’intellectuel, opposant au régime de Bachar Al-Assad,] Yassin Al-Haj Saleh, with all the history he carries, settled in Berlin, in this city which has the history that we know, it gave substance to this feeling of being concerned. This is also why I write. To remember and fight against these attempts to crush, to forget. Forgetting is one of the great words of our time but, in forgetting, the notion of consequence is damaged. The language is also damaged.
Why the language?
When words are spoken and they have no consequence, the language loses its capacity to speak the real and to change it. This is something that I became aware of thanks to Razan Zaitouneh. After the chemical attacks on Ghouta, in 2013, which the West had fixed as a ” Red line “, she is there, she documents, she helps to bury the dead in terrible dread. But she does it with the idea that there is going to be an intervention. She can’t believe that if these words have been spoken, they have no consequence. It takes him weeks to figure it out. At the beginning, I took it for naivety and then I found it very beautiful: there is something of a call to order there.
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