Jebel Druze – Landscape by Nancy Lindisfarne

Nancy Lindisfarne writes: Here we are reposting a short story I originally published in Arabic in 1997. I did anthropological fieldwork in Damascus in the late 1980s, and from day one I saw the tyranny of the regime.  But I knew the whole time I was in Syria, and then again when I tried out the stories on friends in Damascus, that for their sake, I could only hint at the fear everyone felt.  As you can see here, the most politically explicit of my Syrian stories, ‘Fresh Apricots’, is little more than a bare whisper about a taxi driver picking up a fare on Sednaya Road in Damascus. In 1997, Mamdouh Adwan, the Syrian poet and playwright, translated into Arabic a collection of short stories I had written after my year of fieldwork. Al Raqs fi Dimasq was published in Syria before an English version, Dancing in Damascus, came out in 2000. But though a bare whisper, I also knew Syrian readers absolutely understood what I was trying to say.