Gardens Speak

by Tania El Khoury

Across Syria, many gardens conceal the dead bodies of activists and protesters who adorned the streets during the early period of the uprising. These domestic burials play out a continuing collaboration between the living and the dead. The dead protect the living by not exposing them to further danger at the hands of the regime. The living protect the dead by conserving their identities, telling their stories, and not allowing their deaths to become instruments of the regime.

Gardens Speak is an interactive sound installation that toured around the world. It contains the oral histories of ten ordinary people who were buried in Syrian gardens. Each narrative has been carefully constructed with the friends and family members of the deceased to retell their stories as they themselves would have recounted it. This book contains the narrative text of ten of those oral histories in both English and spoken Arabic. It includes an acknowledgement and introduction by the artist, and illustrations of the audience experience in Gardens Speak.

80 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2016

Reviews

[ambyr · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found the exhibit this book is designed to accompany a powerful experience (and wrote about it in detail elsewhere), but by its nature the exhibit allows you to hear only one of ten stories it tells. I wanted to know more, so I bought the book to read the rest of them. I was pleased to find it also contained design sketches from the exhibit as well as a series of participants' letters, which were intriguing. I'm glad I bought it. As a companion to the exhibit, it's worth owning.

As a stand-alone work, though, I can't recommend it. Inevitably, it lacks the depth of emotion that the multi-sensory, interactive exhibit conveys. If the author had used it as a way of imparting background material, collecting essays putting the Syrian conflict into historical and international context, then I could see its independent value, but alas she doesn't. Typographically it's a lovely book, but in terms of content it's very bare bones.

[Rithin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Garden speaks


This book may be very thin but don’t let that fool you. The words within it are heavier than a hundred concrete blocks. As someone who was unaware or rather ignorant about the crisis in Syria, this book served as an eye opener and a wake up call. The injustice and atrocities committed against Syrians by their own government regime and terrorist groups are beyond heart breaking.

I really liked the letter writing format used by the author to tell the stories of each martyr. It adds a personal touch and creates more of an impact on the individual reader. Since the author asks the audience in the performance piece of this book to write a letter to the martyrs, I would like to further continue this analysis in a letter format.

Dear martyrs,

I was touched by each and every one of your story.
The words pierced my heart like bullets
and crushed my soul like a fallen shell.

It numbed everything inside me after each story
and ended up leaving a void within myself.

Tears were coming from my eyes
as each story left me in a state of shock.

Thank you for telling us your stories.
Wherever you all are now, I sincerely hope
you find happiness, peace, and most importantly freedom!
Rest in peace and always in power.

Sincerely,
Rithin.

[Reem Z. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here are some of the most powerful and most real monologues I've read. Very impactful work, this can inspire a thousand production.