There was a city named Aleppo
Stream of consciousness — I’m writing down the thoughts that stream through me today, December the 13th 2016, as my consciousness takes in more and more photos, videos, and snippets of journalism capitalizing on the suffering of those we have refused to help.
There once was a city named Aleppo. It bloomed for centuries upon centuries (even millennia) and housed treasures of world culture and heritage. There was no other place like the city named Aleppo.
There once was a city named Aleppo. Halab. حلب.
Photos. Videos. Pleas. Destruction. Is this how a city ceases to be? Is this when Wikipedia (alongside our collective knowledge) changes the entry from “Aleppo is a city” to “Aleppo was a city”?
What remains of a city when it no longer stands? When the mass of its buildings collapses to rubble? When the dance of small feet, big feet, old feet, young feet, fluttering about their daily lives crumbles under the rubble? When the murmur of the ancient bazaars is silenced? When the lightness of dreams, love stories, and livelihoods is weighed down with death and separation?
What remains of a city that no longer stands? Is it the people? Is it in them, within them, through them, that Aleppo remains? Do they take Aleppo with them wherever they go? Do cities live perpetually across time within us? What then, when half the people are themselves dead and the other half are corpses of past lives and dreams?
Were it to be rebuilt, Aleppo of the future will never be the Aleppo of those who knew Aleppo yesterday, a decade ago, or a century ago — Like the Baghdad of my childhood that I will never be able to revisit, however many times I physically visit Baghdad today. That Aleppo is dead.
Cities die. Like people. Aleppo is taking its last breath. As Baghdad lingers within me, Aleppo will linger on in the memories, demeanor, accent, sense of humor, essence… that quality of its people which you can never put into enough words to capture. They’ll hold on to their Aleppo like a ghost they can only reference but never able to touch, point to, and say “there–that’s where I lived, dreamt, and became”.
Let Aleppo linger on—in your memories, in your culture, in your works of literature and art, so that through you, we may revisit the Aleppo that was once alive, again, and again, and again.
