There was an interesting article in The New York Times last Sunday about a poetry salon in Damascus, Syria.  It reminded me of the theater movement I studied in Poland in the 1970s.  Both the theater movement and the poetry salon are examples of constituted free zones in repressive societies.  I think they demonstrate the possibility of re-inventing political culture, the possibility of reformulating the relationship between the culture of power and the power of culture.

The secret police are present at Bayt al-Qasid, the House of Poetry, in Damascus today, The Times reports, but it is also a place where innovative poetry is read, including by poets in exile, politically daring ideas are discussed, a world of alternative sensibility is created.  Not the star poets of the sixties, but young unknowns predominate.  The point is not political agitation nor to showcase celebrity, but the creation of a special place for reading, performance and discussion of the new and challenging.  The article quotes a patron about a recent reading.  “‘In a culture that loathes dialogue,’ the evening represented something different, said Mr. Sawah, the editor of a poetry Web site. ‘What is tackled here,’ he said, ‘would never be approached elsewhere.’”

Cynics would say that the Polish theater and the Syrian salon are safety valve mechanism, through which the young and the marginal can let off steam, as a repressive political culture prevails.  But in Poland, the safety valve overturned the official culture, even before the collapse of the Communist regime, as I explained in my book Beyond Glasnost: the Post Totalitarian Mind.

I don’t want to assert that this happy ending is always the result of such cultural work.  Clearly, it’s not.  But I do want to underscore that the very existence of an alternative sensibility in a repressive context changes the nature of the social order.  Poland was not simply a repressive country then, and Syria is not simply repressive now.  They are places where the possibility for dialogue was established, places where poetry can prevail, and because of this, political culture can be reinvented – in Syria, at least for a discrete number of people in a particular location at a particular time.  But the limits of today may be very different tomorrow.  This I learned as I observed my Polish friends.