History and Heritage

Abstract

Saadallah Wannus, the most prolific and respected of Syria’s playwrights, was also the one to challenge Syrian conceptions of national identity most consistently. The three of his plays that I have already discussed — Soirée for the Fifth of June, Cleansing the Blood, and The Rape - reveal the range of styles with which he experimented while posing the question “Who are we as Syrians?” Despite the stylistic heterogeneity, this small sample of his work also reflects what I will argue is a central concern of his opus: the processes and strategies of narrating the past and how these narrations open or foreclose possibilities for the future. For Wannus, Syrian identity is tied to how Syrians (both as individuals and as a community) manage a past shot through with trauma. In this chapter I will take up five plays that directly address heritage arts and historiography as identity forming enterprises: The Adventures of the Head of Jabir the Mamluk (1970), An Evening with Abu Khalil Qabbani (1972), Historical Miniatures (1993), Rituals of Signs and Transformations (1994), and Wretched Dreams (1994). These plays, I will argue, present heritage and history as mutually constructed ideas. In representing this dialectic, Wannus’s works intervene in existing patterns of knowing the past, undermining the inevitability of such patterns and proposing new models for understanding Syria’s past and present.