UC Davis

This dissertation is a poetic inquiry into the denaturalization of war. It examines forms of life in a rural borderland in Lebanon and Syria called the Bekaa Valley. Life for Syrian refugees living in the Bekaa Valley is a struggle. Most live in enclosures at risk for fires in the summer and floods in the winter, and the children are sometimes the only people permitted by local authorities to leave the tent to work. The Bekaa Valley is also entangled in an ecological condition of co-creation that has cyclically returned fertility to the place as rain, sedimentation, and agricultural growth. In the Ugaritic creation story of Canaan, the fertility god is referred to as Baal. Historically and ethnographically, Baal’s collaboration with his sister Anat is what contests the supremacy of the sea god of the abyss (Yam) and engenders liberation. To make sense of the kind of liberation that is possible for refugees living in the Bekaa Valley, I draw on Augusto Boal’s methodology in Theater of the Oppressed and the creative practices and explanations of Syrian children and youth to investigate how queer theory and the living environment intersect.

My inquiry into refugee social life unfolds in three parts as a journey from the tips of the eastern Lebanese mountains to the Mediterranean Sea and focuses on the moment of Now as a source of ongoing life. In my first chapter, I introduce the idea of Now through the pixels of a documentary film called Live Broadcast. Directed by a young woman Syria, Live Broadcast points to how the specific co-creation of light, vibrations, and bugs gives humans the tools they need to resist and endure war. In Chapter Two, I elaborate on the Now by introducing a play directed by young artists at Women Now, a Syrian mutual aid organization. The children of Women Now teach the importance of collaboratively looking for “the Prince” in the living environment. In the third chapter, I show how three young Muslim men whose “Prince” has been found partner with their sisters to improvise emergent forms of pedagogy that are both ancient and innovative. Called “emergency schools”, these forms teach students/teachers how to study change within a place (Moten 2014). I conceive of this work as an attempt to liberate the self as place.