Joan Tatar's memory falters on scenes that Syrians experienced in the laboratory of their torment. It is the slow Syrian time that brings and brings with it in Tatar’s diary the various elements of the experience: starting from the market, to the soldier, to being discharged from it, in a biography that contradicts time, from symbolic death to symbolic birth, in a country that resembles a long dormitory crowded with people. Throughout this cycle of Syrian life, murmurs and stinks are present. Life, as Joan Teter portrays it in this book, is an experiment with low sounds that end in final silence. An experiment with the depths of fear. Is it deeper than we imagined? Is it possible to escape from the fear that has become part of water, and from thirst, part of glut, and part of hunger? Many opposites meet on that distant horizon that made the Syrian dough in the soldier’s laboratory. Were they prisoners or soldiers? Are they condemned or heroes? Everything is equal, all values are equal in that horizon which is the space of Syria, the space of fear and pleas for freedom.
