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Tomorrow there will be Apricots

17 images Created 13 Sep 2015

Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots
Five years in the lives of Syrian women in Jordan (2012-2017)

This project is born out of the current terrible moment, when even greater blackness has enveloped the country. As a photojournalist, I was often assigned to cover the spillover into Jordan of Syria’s disaster. But after each story was finished and filed, I still had endless material that was outside the scope of those assignments but needed to be shared and at the same time, needed a different kind of canvas to be more fully explored. After all, much of what defined these Syrians’ lives were the absences – of both people and places. But how do you photograph what isn’t there? To overcome such challenges, I worked collaboratively with the people I photographed to create these performed portraits.

This project is, therefore many things: study, investigation, documentary, reenactment, archive, rumination, and even séance, for those desperate to resurrect the dead or confront the past and its ghosts. Currently on view at the Bayeux Museum in France and then traveling to the Australian Centre for Photography, the project is an interactive webdoc. Viewed on pads, including installation, prints, and conceptual looping videos.

An emotive and investigative narration divided into three distinct chapters of the Syrian civil war. This project is, therefore many things: study, investigation, documentary, reenactment, archive, rumination, and even séance, for those desperate to resurrect the dead or confront the past and its ghosts. Please contact to view interactive website.

*All names have been changed to pseudonyms at the request of the interviewees’ for their protection.

CHAPTER ONE
MARTYRS’ WIVES BUILDINGS
(2012-2014)
CHAPTER TWO
SYRIA VIA WHATSAPP
(2014-2016)
CHAPTER THREE
THIS IS HOW I DANCED,
THIS IS HOW I CRY
(2017)
TESTIMONIES

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  • “Why did you leave me when I needed you?”<br />
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Aysha, 30, has been widowed for four years after 11 years of marriage to “Abu Layla,” who was a fighter in Deraa. Here, she shows
 a tattoo on her shoulder that reads, “Why did you leave me when I needed you?” The tattoo relates to a dramatic quarrel the two young teens had when they were dating— upon making up, they each tattooed the message as a reminder of how horrible it was being apart. She never imagined the tattoo would take on such poignant meaning years later. Her Nokia once held photographs and texts from her husband from the frontline... which she said infused their romance anew. The last image she had of him was of his body wrapped in a shroud. The phone has since died along with all of the digital memories of their union.
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  • Nadia, 25, is a refugee in Jordan, living with 17 family members in a rented two-bedroom apartment. Above hangs one of Nadia's mother-in-law's few pieces of intimate lingerie, which she smuggled out with her from Syria -- she has offered to share it with her daughter-in-law when her son returns from the front lines. Nadia fled Syria with the clothes on her back, and nothing else.
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  • 'Selene', 36, (mother of Hala) still keeps her husband’s favorite white slacks, fantasizing he will return. He went missing for seven months in Syria, before she learned of his fate. She refused to see the digital images marking his death. He was killed by a sniper in Deraa while fighting with the FSA, leaving her with six children. She jokes with her fellow widows that if he comes back, she will share him in the evenings. She is the most optimistic resident in her wives of martyrs building, noting how difficult life is in the refugee camps of Jordan. She deeply loved her husband, and is struggling to make a future for her children, desperate to find a husband for her divorced eldest daughter, pragmatically feeling it is the only hope Hala has for a future. 2014
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  • ONCE HER CROWNING GLORY...<br />
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An 88 year old woman brushes her hair, once her crowning glory.  Her son died fighting in Syria.  She advised him on his wedding night to slap his new wife once, to assert his authority.  Despite that abrupt  beginning, the marriage had been a happy one until his death.  Her granddaughters quietly laugh at the elderly women’s advice about how women should live.  She died one year after this photo was made, a Syrian refugee in Jordan.
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  • Layla, 15, stands alone in the niqab she recently started wearing. Her 17 year old sister has just married, leaving her alone in the house with her widowed mother and four siblings. The marriage proposals are already coming to her. She had dreamt of finishing high school and becoming a teacher. She says that while early marriage was common in Deraa, at least girls were allowed by their families to walk freely in their community and go to school. Here, she feels she is slowly dying indoors, day in and day out. 2014
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  • Layla and Sama are 13 and 15 years old. Their mother, Um Muhammad, 39, says life is hard without her fighter husband. The mother of six is struggling to secure the monthly rent, is under constant pressure to marry off her daughters to Jordanian and Syrian suitors...Layla, right, was trampled upon in her sleep when an army unit stormed their house looking for their father before they fled to Jordan. 2013
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  • "Hala" tries on her younger sister’s wedding lingerie, jokingly placing a scarf on her face as she poses. Hala, 19, divorced her husband after only 25 days, forced to marry her abusive cousin after her father was killed. Her 17-year-old sister was recently married to an older Syrian after meeting him three times in two weeks. “Do not expect me to get married like my sister. I want someone to fall in love with,” Hala had insisted at the start of summer. By the end of summer, she was considering a proposal from a Saudi who she had yet to meet in person, tired of spending her days “counting ants” in the same apartment day in and day out. 2014
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  • When her husband  was alive, he would send "Aysha" sultry texts, poems, and fighter images from the front lines. It was by text message she found out that he died while fighting in Syria. When her old nokia died, she lost her trove of memories. This is the only image she has from that time before his death. 2014
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  • Satellite news depicts a martyr from the Syrian Civil war. Such images are ubiquitous on television sets and mobile phones of Syrian refugees in Jordan. 2012
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Tanya Habjouqa

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