The Very Short Story at the Time of the Revolution: al-Mihmāz (The Spur) and the Syrian Writer Zakariyyā Tāmir
in La rivista di Arablit, a. V, n. 9-10, dicembre 2015, pp. 72-86.
The mass protests that swept through the Middle East in early 2011 underlined the role of modern information-communication technologies (ICT). From a literary point of view, the Arab Spring inevitably marked the birth of a new model of writing, characterised by a more participatory, global and immediate manner of expression that could be defined as Humanism 2.0. In this context, we may insert the experimental writing by the famous Syrian author Zakariyyā Tāmir: on the
al-Mihmāz (The Spur) Facebook page the writer begins a literary journey publishing daily posts and explicitly supporting the Syrian revolution. This contribution intends to analyse a few of Tāmir’s most significant posts published on Facebook. The time span is 2012, just one year after the beginning of the Syrian revolution: thanks to aphorisms, posts and short stories, a new literary pact with potential readers is inaugurated, within a phenomenon that we can call al-adab al-raqmī (digital literature).
