Writing Shame in Asads Syria.

Abstract

This article addresses the ways in which the Syrian author Khaled Khalifa describes and invokes feelings of shame as a literary strategy in the novel No Knives in the Kitchens of this City (2016). It argues that the author capitalizes on shame’s peculiarly unstable nature in expressing the unbearable subjugation to a system that is as brutal as it is banal under Syria’s president Hafez Al-Asad and later his son Bashar. Shame in this novel travels from character to character and from characters to readers in uncontrolled ways. The article teases out these trajectories in order to argue that the affective nature of shame is particularly suitable for addressing the conditions of living in Syria under the Asads.