A reading of the short story collection “Exhales on the Pavements of Fear” by the Syrian writer Diaa Iskandar

Avin Alo

After a collection of short stories entitled (breasts on Hanano Street), the Syrian writer Diaa Iskandar recently published a second collection of short stories, titled (Exhales on the Pavements of Fear), by Shler Publishing House.

The collection includes (24) stories of varying size, with titles such as: (Love in a Time of Oppression, America at the Door, Where Should I Hide, People, Waiting for Dawn, The Cellar Barber, Minutes of a Meeting, It is Forbidden to Approach and Photograph, etc.).

This collection contains a lot of revelations, suffering, and pictures of daily life with minute details. It tells real stories and events that the writer lived or that people close to him lived through within the geography of the country. It tells stories of suffering from tyranny and oppression to which those who tried to search for freedom and a decent life were subjected.

The stories were written at different times, but they were at the same time, the time in which tyranny and oppression prevailed against everyone who said no to authority. In the story “The Glass Eye,” which simulates torture and tyranny at the height of its madness, where one of the detainees is exposed to what resembles death at every moment, and he had lost one of his eyes in his childhood, and filled its place with a model similar to an eye. During a state of torture, the model comes out of his eyes, which remarkably generates fear among his torturers.

As for the story “Blind for Three Minutes,” it is an excerpt from a long novel entitled (In the Grip of an Ally), as the storyteller noted in the form of a note.

The short story is a window into many imaginative worlds, allowing the reader to delve into the depths of human feelings and explore the secrets of the human soul. Hence the importance of the stories (Exhales on the Pavements of Fear) by the writer “Diaa Iskandar”, which is a charming but painful and difficult creative journey.

Between the covers of this collection of short stories, there are images and scenes that take the reader through waves of elaborate tales and painful thoughts that have a heavy impact on the human soul. As is evident in this collection, the writer’s superior ability to weave and knit stories brilliantly, through bitter life experience.
The writer says in the story “But We Have Not Met”:

(One night, just before dawn, while everyone was asleep, he extended his hand from between the bars in the ceiling of the cell. There was a ventilation hole in the middle of the ceiling, in the form of a window with crossed bars. He found an iron skewer on its roof. He quickly pulled it out and busied himself with removing the lock of the cell with that skewer. The jailers woke up. On the movement of the fleeing prisoner, they arrested him immediately, and threatening screams spread throughout the cellar, mixed with the prisoner’s screams and howling, as they beat him severely. They tied his hands behind him and his legs together with an iron chain, so that he could not walk except by jumping, and suddenly the door of our cell opened and they pushed him inside and closed the door and quickly left. The prisoner stood, panting, looking at us with fear and panic. He was disheveled and completely stunned.

This book is a journey through the worlds of fear with a striking creative texture, where reality mixes with dream, a journey that excites our thinking and stimulates our imagination as if it were a symphony of voices whispering in the soul, with a smooth style and exciting events despite their pain. The writer has excelled in drawing his characters accurately, making them seem real and they are… Really so.

The events of the group’s stories have a human depth that touches our feelings and arouses our complete sympathy. The diversity of topics and ideas, the ingenuity of narration, and the beauty of language make the stories have intellectual and human value. Each character is distinguished by special characteristics and experiences despite their proximity to each other in the arena of fear and panic. They embody the reality of tyranny, oppression, and arrests, and shed light. On the suffering of those who face everything difficult in very harsh circumstances. After the reader finishes reading the collection, he may feel his body or his feelings, feel the deep pain hidden for years of repression, deprivation, and slow death across the geography of injustice and freedom.