Syria’s women prisoners, drawn by an artist who was one
Azza Abo Rebieh was held in a Damascus prison and wants her fellow inmates to be remembered
This is Hiam, a 65-year-old woman smoking a cigarette and sipping matteh, a warm herbal drink popular in Syria. It is a moment of solitude in a soul-crushing place; the bed is a prison bed. Hiam spent 30 months in prison, most likely for the simple reason that she came from an area that rebelled against President Bashar Assad’s government.
The artist who drew her, Azza Abo Rebieh, was one of 30 women sharing a cell with Hiam in the Adra prison in Damascus. Then 36, Abo Rebieh was on her own surreal journey through the Syrian security system, detained because of her art and her activism.
Abo Rebieh’s artwork, from the start of Syria’s uprising in 2011, held up a mirror to a society in turmoil. Risking arrest, she painted graffiti murals about the protest movement. After security forces cracked down and some in the opposition took up arms, she helped smuggle food and medicine to people displaced by fighting.
In September 2015, Abo Rebieh received a call from an activist friend asking her to meet at a café. It was a trap. When she arrived, security was waiting.
Abo Rebieh, a member of the educated middle class, found herself imprisoned with women who were barely literate, and mostly arrested at random. She became a kind of spokeswoman and sounding board, conveying their needs and requests to guards and helping them talk through experiences.
Her art then became a mirror for fellow prisoners who had none: She drew them so they could see themselves. She drew them all in shaded black and white, their grimacing faces and thin limbs influenced by one of her favourite artists, Goya.
Abo Rebieh was released in 2016, but her case was still open. She fled to Lebanon, where she is stuck because she is still wanted in Syria. Last year, she won an art residency in Spain, to study Goya and paint Syria’s ghosts as an echo of his. But the Spanish government denied her a visa.
Recently, supported by the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, she had a solo exhibition, including many new works, at a Beirut gallery, 392rmeil393. She has continued to create art about the women she met in detention.
“I want to draw them so they are not forgotten,” Abo Rebieh said in her small living room, where her prison art hangs on the wall, along with string dolls she made in prison from olive pits and yarn from worn blankets. “This is the message. I keep remembering that I am out and they are in.”
Before Abo Rebieh’s arrest, the British Museum bought three of her works.
One was an etching from 2011, called They Carried Him — The Shame. Abo Rebieh based it on a video that had spread on social media, showing security officers dressing a male protester as a woman and driving him around the artist’s home city, Hama.
Another, Still Singing, reflects on a protester whose chant “Yalla irhal ya Bashar” (“Come on, leave, Bashar”) became a symbol of the uprising. Demonstrating and chanting was enough to get people shot or arrested. They could just disappear. The government has only recently begun to acknowledge that hundreds, possibly thousands, of people have died in detention without any notice to their families.
After her arrest, Abo Rebieh spent 70 days in the detention cells of one of Syria’s feared security agencies, crammed into a small, filthy cell with 15 other women. The prisoners had lice in their hair and moths in their blankets. They could visit a toilet, littered with excrement and cockroaches, for a few strictly timed minutes each day. Tens of thousands of people have disappeared into such places, their families unable to learn their fates.
While there, Abo Rebieh got to draw only once. Her interrogator knew she was an artist and had a special request for her: Draw hatred.
“He gave me a pencil and a paper and forced me to draw,” she recalled. She had been blindfolded so she could not see who was interrogating her, but her blindfold was lifted to let her draw. “I sat there with my hands trembling.”
She drew a toothless old man with an evil look, squeezing a bird in his hands.
“Wow,” the interrogator said, as the others crowded around, impressed. “This is us. We do this.”
Afraid, the artist demurred, saying: “This is not you, this is someone else.”
“No, no,” he replied. “This is what we do. We know it, we are happy with it.”
“And this,” he said, pointing to the crushed bird, “is you.”
Conditions improved when Abo Rebieh was moved to Adra, an official prison, where she was finally able to persuade guards to bring her paper and pencils, and she began drawing the people she was confined with:
“There were no mirrors inside the prison, so the drawings I made of the women made them see how they look. They are even more beautiful than the way I draw them. There is nothing to do, so you make up your face, your hair; some girls ask their parents to buy them make-up. They are very young. They dance at night, and compete over who dances better. Sometimes they cry when they dance.
“On New Year’s Eve, the guards let us have a party. I drew on the girls’ faces, one a cat, one a butterfly. The guards agreed to allow it for one night only. So we wrote them a card, saying, ‘The ladies of Cell No. 4 congratulate you on the New Year’.
“When the guards saw that we called ourselves ‘ladies’, they went crazy. They said, ‘You are terrorists, not ladies’.” On a cold day in January 2016, five thin, tired women arrived from the town of Madaya. Abo Rebieh was not aware of what was happening outside the prison walls.
She did not know that Madaya had been besieged, with several children dying of malnutrition. When the food came — just a few pieces of potato — the women devoured it as if, she said, they were eating lamb chops.
“They explained, ‘We are from Madaya. We spent six months under siege and we didn’t eat anything except water and spices’. One added, ‘When my child cried to eat I would beat him until he went to sleep and then I beat myself till I fell asleep next to my child every single day’.”
Not long after, Abo Rebieh was released. But she still faced more prison time because of the open case. She bribed her way out of Syria and escaped to Beirut.
“I felt guilty that I left and they are still there,” she said. “I was eating walking and sleeping with the security in my mind outside the prison.” She saw a psychologist, who urged her to draw everything: “He wanted me to believe that I am out of prison.”
At first, Abo Rebieh felt blocked and depressed, but then the work began to flood out: a series of more developed etchings of her prison experience.
“After I did all this work, I felt relieved. Like I was holding these things inside me, and now they are out,” Abo Rebieh said.
“We should keep telling the story of prisoners,” she said. “My art is dedicated to that.”