Looking Back at the Syrian Revolution: ʿAwdat Dāntūn (A Scar without Skin)
in La rivista di Arablit, a. XIII, n. 26, dicembre 2023, pp. 55-78.
Centering itself on the rehearsal space of Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death,ʿAwdat Dāntūn (The Return of Danton, 2021) by Syrian playwright Muḍar al-Ḥaǧǧī (Mudar Alhaggi) unfolds in the form of meta-theatre in conversation with the momentum of the Syrian uprising and the personal narratives of exile of a group of Syrian artists. I argue that Danton’s Death becomes a prosthetic memory – if I want to reroute Alison Landsberg’s term: rather than being a remembrance that suggests different levels of social justice, Büchner’s text manifests itself as an impasse. While tinkering with trauma studies, I claim that the inter-textuality of Büchner’s/al-Ḥaǧǧī’s text is curated by both un-utterance and spatial withdrawals: I therefore intend to highlight the ways with which un-utterance can be analyzed as an act of (non-)remembrance while introducing the concept of “A Scar without Skin” (plaie sans peau).
