Faraj Ahmad Bayrakdar was born in Homs, Syria, in 1951. He studied Arabic at the University of Damascus. He was arrested by Syrian Military Intelligence in 1987 on suspicion of membership of the Party for Communist Action. He was held incommunicado for almost seven years and was tortured. In 1993 he was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Bayrakdar was released in November 2000 following an amnesty without obligation to renounce his political activities. He left to Sweden and has been living there since 2005.

The following are excerpts from “Mirrors of Absence,” a long poem Bayrakdar wrote in Saydnaya prison between 1997 and 2000. Translated by Sinan Antoon. The Arabic original can be read here.

Mirrors of Absence 

These mirrors could have been

pure rain

or pure silence

But things were made of stone

The clinking of time and space

was bloodied

with what resembles madness

or gods

1

Thanks

for what has to go

Thanks

for what has to come

Thanks

for what succumbs to silence

and never returns

never

4

His heart is a bell

his body a church

eyes shut

upon a woman

wearing her sorrow

holding a mass of tears

for his return

7

They whispered:

who other than the madman

sharpens the rose

and is merciful to the knife?

O Khadija, the lamps of your sadness!

If you only knew

how many roses

and how many knives

I tore apart

and how many

tore me apart

9

There is no freedom

outside this place

but it cries

whenever it hears keys

laughing in their locks

10

All the cracks you see on the wall

were carved by my eyes

they have been looking at them

for years

No use counting them

11

A time

without dates

A place

without directions

O woman

wounding like lightening

bleeding like a song

Go!

Nothing is present

except absence

12

Thus

prison is time

you mark the first days on walls

the following months on memory

but when the years become

a long train

tired of whistling

despairing of a station

you try something else:

forgetting

16

There is no sun here

I find myself naked

without shades

no woman either

I find myself naked

without myself

18

O

How can I see myself

when I am always with me?

How do I know myself

Do not say no to the mirror!

Mirrors,

even the ones I write

can only enumerate me

or make me one

I am not like that

I am in no state

whatsoever

23

- Whose funeral procession is this?

I asked the old man

While I am going away.

- It is for meaning my son

He replied

and stood there

like a headstone

29

Here

and there

on the wall

on my heart

on the night and wind

on doors, dates and sidewalks

on fear, despair and nothingness

Eyes

deep like blackness

black like catastrophe

catastrophic like silence

silent like howling

nothing before or after them

except fallen banners,

God and I

in adjacent cells

30

Eleven harvested deserts

without a woman`s shadow

four thousand blind nights

without a blink for the morning

a hundred thousand bleeding hours

with nothing but thorns, sand and scorpions

six million gasps

on a knife`s edge

and the match goes on bloody and mad

between the wolves of death

and the gazelles of life

31

Yes O God!

this is Syria

how shall we raise

condolences to you

with which clouds will you cry?

34

Now I am 46 dances old

on the brink of the abyss

my poems don`t express me

any more than an arrow

expresses its prey 

35

No

not God

but a woman

the colour of wheat and carob

a woman

between coffee and milk

between silence and speech

she taught me the rose in the morning

and before the night climbed

taught me the storm

37

Freedom is a homeland

and my country an exile

I am my antithesis

this is my deposition

written with my mother`s milk

stamped with all my chains

38

I hide inside the poem

search for myself outside

but we cheat at times

she invites me to her bed

I respond

she takes off her clothes

I, mine

she puts me on

and I remain naked

Saydnaya Prison 1997-2000