Al-nuzuh: Displacement as Keyword

Abstract

In 2022, more than half of Syria’s population have been displaced as they escaped from the destruction of their homes and livelihoods, forced resettlement, terror and overall defeat. This article focuses on the keyword al-nuzuh (displacement). It explores how al-nuzuh generates new representational codes for Syrian and Syrian-Palestinian experiences concerning the politics of displacement and an accumulated sense of loss. These codes encompass the material hardships of displacement but also make visible Syrians’ and Syrian-Palestinians’ affective, social, and existential experiences of precarity and abandonment. In this sense, my explanation of al-nuzuh departs from humanitarian and conflict management discourses to center on the perspectives of those who feel defeated in Syria and its diaspora. The article explores cultural production by Syrians and Syrian-Palestinians and how they relate to new forms of memory and collectivity about uprooting and defeat. These forms reject existing rhetorical modes of depicting mass displacement to re-write the connections between the contemporary destruction of social worlds in Syria and earlier in the former and Palestine since 1948.