To those who do not know Firas Saad here is a short introduction:

Firas Saad was born in the coastal village of Kanjara, few kilometers from the city of Latake. He was raised in a Baathist peasant family that reflects many facets of the middle class in Syria. His father was a peasant and an elementary school teacher, he was later appointed in the education department in Latake. His mother was also a school teacher and originated from the village of Sheikh close to Tartous. Firas is the only male child so he was spoiled and was taught the Baathist ideology. Firas’ problems with his family and his baathist surroundings started at the beginning of the century due to his curiosity, talent, passion for reading and internet. All these elements added up to the local and world transformations and made his opinions more pronounced; he rejected the one-party, and one opinion culture.

In the cultural dialogue forum in Latake, Firas used to call things by their names. He was straight forward and cared little about the informants that surrounded him. He even told them once:
“Our meetings in this forum will not last for long. They want us to meet for drinks and gambling rather than to read and discuss books. Asked about the proof of his allegation, he said: “look at what happened to the Kawakibi forum in Alepo and how they dismantled it by force while the same day they facilitated the meeting of thousands of supporters of “Rouwayda Attieh”.

As the older people in the forum, we were fascinated by Firas and at the same time we feared for him because of his courage and his constant calls for freedom. We were so attached to him that we wanted to pass on to him our experience that will prevent him from getting too carried away. He categorically refused it and wanted to build his own experience no matter the sacrifices.

It is possible to compare Firas’s suffering to that of all the talented Arab youth. Talent is nourished by freedom and cannot be accomplished away from it. However, the official Arab regime has inherited a thousand years old oriental tradition of tyranny that has a thousand legs, most important of which are two:
The first one is a patriarchal family where the father looks at his son as he looks at his shadow. He wants his son to be an extension of him, to inherit everything. He loves him and fears for him and for his future so much that he wants him to abide by his orders as a way to protect him. If the son refuses to do so, the father does not refrain from cooperating with authorities in order to discipline his son.
The second one is a dictatorship whose slogan is: the prison is a school where docile people are formed.

The result is that our talented Arab youth is, like Firas, deprived of job, income, house, wife, kids, and future. I wonder if the Arab regimes know that the way they treat talents and the way they punish those who are talented is the main reason for all our Arab defeats since 1948 until our present time. We find that we are at the bottom of the world system.

Prison is the image of the grave and storage of bones. Prison destroys the body and the soul. Firas described it as the poet Abdo Wazen told us in the Annahar cultural appendix, in his article entitled “The Syrian poet Firas Saad, an unknown prisoner”. The article was published on the 9/9/2007:

“Firas writes about the prison as if he had experienced it before. He talks about the gods of coldness, and how he turned cold into a blanket. He describes how the walls write on his ribs. This is an image both funny and tragic. It is not the prisoner who is writing on the walls but the walls that are writing on the ribs of the prisoner. It is the tragedy that only the prisoners can know about.”

If every rule has its exception, the exception in Syria is those on whose ribs the walls write and then get out of prison as intellectuals that their Sheikh Yassin al-Hajj Saleh calls, the prison intellectuals, those whose culture grew in prison, and whose pens came after the suppressed Spring of Damascus. They are now suffering in Syria. We expect Firas to join these people once out of prison. The proof is what he said addressing the gods of the cold in his only trial session:

“I love my country. I might have miscalculated the political situation, but in any case I expressed in my writings the opinion of a specific group of people, and opinions can be wrong.”

Finally I can only join my voice to that of the poet Monzer al-Masri who wrote an article about Firas in the Lebanese newspaper Assafir on the 24/8/2007 entitled: “release the poet whose poems are waiting… Firas Saad dotted with politics and poetry.” He concluded the article as follows:

“Release the poet whose poems are awaiting, release the bird that the sky, the trees, and the rooftops are awaiting. Birds, as all bird enslavers know, die in cages.”