Lina Sergie Attar is a Syrian American architect and writer. She is president of Karam Foundation. Follow her on twitter @amalhanano.

One cold day in March, a history teacher stood in front of his young schoolboys in a classroom in Eastern Ghouta, outside Damascus, holding a camera in his hands. It was a typically drab room with gray walls, just like the ones in Aleppo where I spent my adolescence, only this classroom was much less crowded than mine ever were. These children were the lucky ones—still able to attend school in the midst of a violent war. A world away, at my home in a quiet suburb north of Chicago, I watched on YouTube what the teacher had recorded, the same way we Syrians have watched our country unravel for more than four years now—on screens.

The teacher tells the students, “What is happening to us right now is history, a history that will be recorded. History is being documented by video cameras. History used to be written on paper. Right? Let us document our history right now. In the future, if God grants us the destiny to live, you will grow up and tell your children’s children: This used to happen to us, we used to be in school, etcetera.”


A child wearing earmuffs in the front row raises his hands to his head. He stands up before we hear what he hears—a piercing sound that ends with a boom. The other boys fall to the ground and hide under their desks. All but one of them. I wonder about him. Has he lost his hearing during the war? Or simply his fear of death? The teacher runs to the courtyard. The frame jerks around with every panicked stride. The history lesson he had been taping is forgotten among the shouts and confusion. Beyond the school walls, a massive cloud of dust rises into a clear blue sky.

A different, unintended history lesson was recorded in that YouTube video, joining the thousands of others that continually document a country being ripped apart. This is everyday life in Syria. This is the very kind of harrowing experience the teacher wants his students to record and pass on to future generations—so that they never forget.

Yet, in a way, I found the teacher’s words more troubling than the bomb: “This used to happen to us, we used to be in school, etcetera.” He can barely articulate what it is the children are enduring, and stops before he even begins: etcetera. Syrians collectively carry a modern history of not naming what should have been named, clearly and without confusion, many decades ago: torture, corruption, executions, disappearances, rape, injustice. A history of concealment and fear, held in place by a dictatorship.

Our recent history tells us that the revolutions of the Arab Spring broke the walls of fear and silence, especially in Syria, where people began speaking, writing and chanting about the injustices they endured as they demanded freedom and dignity. Then, the years past, the losses mounted and the world grew more and more indifferent; it was three full years ago that President Obama pledged to intervene if the Syrian government crossed the “red line” of using chemical weapons, a promise he has broken. Some Syrians began to recede into silence, out of not only fear, and later, exhaustion, but collective trauma. In many ways, the realities Syrians faced had become simply inexpressible.

Now, the everyday violence and death Syrians witness is no longer recorded in full force unless events surpass the daily “acceptable” quota of death—like it did on August 16 in Douma, after more than 100 people were killed by a regime aerial attack on a crowded marketplace. These kinds of mass tragedies, like the chemical weapons attack in 2013 and the Daraya massacre in 2012, capture the world’s attention—headlines, outrage, condemnation—for a few moments before Syria’s suffering once again fades to white noise. When the country has been reduced to smoldering ashes and its people have been forced into a mass exodus to new countries and new homes, our capacity to document—to speak or write and chant—dwindles. History collapses into a simple etcetera.

***

In The Infinity of Lists, Umberto Eco explores humanity’s historical tendency to catalogue life . From iconic examples in art and literature to everyday menus and mathematical calculations, Eco argues that we make lists in a feeble and unsuccessful attempt to create order out of chaos, to take stock of the knowable in the face of the unknown. We compulsively list as we strive for immortality while facing the stark reality of death. A list, like time, can go on into infinity, far beyond the list-maker’s limited perspective.

Since the revolution began in 2011, Syrians have been living Syria as a list, a catalogue that oscillates between triumph and terror: lists of villages, towns and cities that joined the uprising for freedom and dignity Friday after Friday; lists of the revolution’s chants and songs; lists of the defected soldiers and officers; lists of liberated territories gained and lost in continuous waves. Lists, also, of the dead, of the missing, of the refugees; lists of the drowned, of massacres, of ancient sites and antiquities that have been destroyed. Shifting maps of alliances and territories held by changing militant groups with names new and old. Lists of the moderates and the extremists, of the good guys, the bad and eventually the Islamic State—the really bad.

Photos from the home of the author and her grandmother in Aleppo, taken in June 2011. | Courtesy of Lina Sergie Attar

Slowly, our lists grew as Syria transformed from a simple narrative of another Arab Spring uprising to a civil war to an international crisis that was just “too complicated.” We have become nothing but numbers. Every story in the media is marked with counts, ever growing, of the dead and detained, of the refugees and displaced, of the series of failed international talks that are like a Hollywood blockbuster growing worse with each sequel, as world powers keep “trying” to find a political solution to the crisis, as they stoke the raging fire in the name of geopolitical interests while public attention wanes.

The Institute for Economics and Peace recently named Syria the “most dangerous country in the world.” Still in denial, I clicked on a story about the ranking, and there we were, No. 1. In 2008, as I discovered, we had been No. 88 out of 162 countries. Even in our so-called “peaceful” days, before the “reckless revolutions and bloody uprisings,” when people silently lived under Bashar Al-Assad’s iron rule, when we couldn’t breathe yet were stable, Syria was already halfway from the bottom of the list, hovering precariously between dangerous and peaceful.

As the world assigns us a lowly rank on a list, Syrians, too, are cataloguing the war, capturing every detail of their lives on cameras and social media. They record their journeys across seas and oceans to seek better lives. They walk across continents, documenting their exodus through photographs of blistered feet shared with family on WhatsApp—evidence that they are still alive. Indexing our experiences has become an attempt to grasp loss, to document our own existence as it slips away with every entry. The more we list, the more we lose—yet we cannot stop. We add to this catalogue of loss with the insane expectation of an end, but the end stretches out into an unknown time, far from our understanding.

At the beginning of the revolution, documentation existed in the present tense, serving to expose what was happening in real time, and breaking Syria’s history of oppression by finally speaking and showing truth. But now, the urgency to be noble and fearless witnesses has faded. There is no humane “world” that exists to plea to for help. Syrians once believed that uploading hundreds of videos of barrel bombs dropping from regime helicopters on civilian areas would be enough to declare a “no-fly zone”—because what world would watch a government indiscriminately bomb its people and stay silent? People believed that documenting repeated chemical weapons attacks would eventually end them. Instead, Obama’s “red line” became a green light for the Assad regime to continue using chemical weapons, including chlorine-laden bombs, even after a United Nations Security Council resolution to ban them. People believed that more than 55,000 smuggled images of tortured, skeleton-like corpses in Assad’s prisons would create an international outrage that would finally send Assad and his regime where they belonged—a trial at The Hague. Instead, Syrians were left alone to battle Assad, Al-Qaida and ISIS.

Our lists now exist in the name of memory and truth, for future generations to make sense of—not for expectations of change or progress in real time. We have already begun rereading our lists with a cold gaze, reviewing our mistakes, our collective naiveté, and staring at our place in this tragedy. Was it all worth it? Can we even ask this question after the bloodshed of hundreds of thousands of people? Over the ruins of our cities? In the face of millions of refugees who will never know home again?

Yet we continue, adding more details to our lists, remembering more events, adding new incidents to previous ones. One day, like May 25, holds the memory of Hamza Al-Khateeb, a child from Daraa slain in 2011, and the Houla massacre in 2012. Same day, different years. They collapse in our minds as the time passes. Nothing changes but the length of our lists and the magnitude of our loss.

Passing the time watching the death of Syria, you begin to learn from the history of genocide: Memory is all you will have left in the end, your stories to tell your children’s children. So you remember the day you watched a YouTube video of a classroom, where the teacher was speaking about the importance of telling a story as a bomb fell nearby.

***

Every Syrian scattered in the world is a walking list of their history—lists that are nostalgic, bitter, angry, depressed, confused and increasingly apathetic. This is what it looks like to lose your country and watch it drift away in pieces. Every scent, sound, photograph is a memory to claim at once, before it is lost. A Syrian friend in New York posts melancholy Proustian lines on Facebook every time she receives a package of sweets from Damascus: “With every pistachio, I move closer to home. With every almond, I move farther away from Damascus. I dance the tango with my memories, moving one step forward and two steps back. My longing makes my head spin, so I unwrap the sweet and ask it to take me back there … to take me home.”

My mother makes lists that she does not speak of, lists of everything in our home in Aleppo. Everything that did not fit into the two suitcases she took with her to America in 2012—the objects that tell the story of a lifetime. There’s the furniture inherited from my great-grandfather that took her years to reupholster to find the perfect striped blue silk textiles worthy of the antiques; the dozens of dishes collected over decades to fit every kind of meal she desired to make; the leather-bound albums of photographs carefully arranged in chronological order so my brothers and I could show our children all our happy memories of our once happy lives.

Sometimes, she mixes in wistful choices with the material objects on her lists: Why did she and my father decide to leave when they did? Had it been too soon? Would it have been better to wait the war out while living in their home? Would they have lost more? Or less? She and millions of other Syrians live within their dizzying lists of “what ifs,” what Eco would call vertigos. Incomplete and never-ending, these lists can never be contained or resolved. They linger—phantom pains you suffer when you become a citizen of a phantom country.

We never expected any of this. We expected that the weekly protests would end long before we would run out of names for each Friday, for the dead to stop dying before completing two thick volumes of their names, for the barrel bombs to stop falling from the sky before cities were completely destroyed. I think we expected too much. Justice and freedom were not on our collective doorsteps in 2011; instead, an evil we could not imagine was waiting to be unleashed upon our country.

Syria's Book of the Dead, an attempt to quantify the hundreds of thousands who have died in the war. | Courtesy of Lina Sergie Attar

It feels like the ultimate betrayal, but sometimes, in moments of despair, I wish we could go back to living in silence and fear, back to being only the 88th most dangerous country in the world. That way, we could erase all of the lists of loss. But there is no going back to a place that no longer exists. There is no taking back lists written in blood.

And so what is left? I can only think of the children in that classroom. They were born from the revolution, and experience life and war in a different way. Like the hundreds of outspoken and frank Syrian refugee children I spend time with every six months in Turkey, I know those children will not fear naming what they have seen, what they see every day. They will document their history for the world to read and remember. They will tell their children’s children about the day they were almost hit by a bomb while their teacher was giving them a history lesson. And they will not end their story with an etcetera. They will write boldly and speak freely—one of the few gifts of the revolution.

That is what I hope for them, at least. Eco says, “We like lists because we don’t want to die.” My generation, though, knows death is certain. We makes lists because we don’t want to forget. We want to name all there is to be named, no matter how gruesome or unimaginable. Even when we witness a new form of death, we record it before moving on to the next, because we know now there will always be more terrible ways to die. We live in Eco’s “cutout of infinity.” We are what lies beyond your frame of the videos you watch, on the margins of the articles written about us. We live to list and list to live, not for ourselves but for the boys in the classroom. Recording history means we still exist. Even though we may well be writing our own extinction.

***

What would Eco call an entire list—an entire country—reduced to an infinite etcetera? Would he define it as a poetic list? A practical list? A list of excess? Is it anything at all?

The Infinity of Lists made me realize that perhaps we Syrians have made a grave mistake in our catalogue of loss. Maybe the revolution did not ignite to absolve us from our past, from what we implied in our 45-year history of shameful etceteras. Perhaps it sparked as a lesson for the future. We represent the people who could not name what plagued them. We lived in the shadows and pretended it was light. We lived in fear and pretended it was freedom. We lived in danger and pretended it was peace. In our hesitation to speak the truth, we allowed dictators (and much later, extremist terrorists groups) to name things for us, to fill in the blanks with what we could not utter. And after that, nothing was ever the same.

The lists we wrote, and are still writing, have become nothing but a bloody record for the future—the ultimate history lesson.

If this is to be our destiny—to be defined by our ruins and our loss, if the future unfolds to prove to Syrians that the truth does not necessarily set one free—then you should learn from our mistakes now, before your country becomes just a number on someone else’s meaningless ranking. Silence to oppression, indifference to brutality and choosing stability over justice never ends well for a people or a country.

For there is nothing more terrible than watching your country become a mere etcetera.