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Mohamad Alaaedin Abdul Moula: You don’t really need to go to school to write poetry, you are just born with it. Actually, I barely finished high school. In 1980, when I was 15, agents from the secret police came and took my three brothers away, because they were against the political system at the time. That’s when I started writing. My brothers spent a long time in jail. I loved them a lot, and that’s when those words started to come out from inside me. I realized they were not regular words, but a poet’s words.They accused your brothers of belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood. What was the basis of their allegations?
They were Muslims, but they were never involved with the Brotherhood. They even thought that I was involved, too, but that was never the case. What is true is that they did not like the government, and only my older brother was politically active against it. But in a system like ours, when they find someone guilty of something, the entire family is guilty. Back then, the Muslim Brotherhood was fighting against the regime of Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father, but the secret police would capture anyone who was against the government and would judge them all the same way. I even knew people who were put in jail for allegedly belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood; after they spent years in prison, the government would finally recognize that they were Christians. The government killed two of my brothers in 1981. The third one spent ten years in jail.
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There’s no more Homs. Everything is destroyed. Homs is in the center of the country. Many centuries ago, Julia Domna lived there, and she ruled the Roman Empire for a long time. I worked for the Ministry of Tourism, cataloging and describing ancient things at the Homs Museum. Homs was a city full of poets and writers.

Before the museum, I was working at a gas station. But one day the secret police came and said I couldn’t work there anymore. Then I worked in the museum for seven years until the secret police showed up and said I had to leave that job, too. Because my brothers had been in jail, we all had to pay the price. In Syria, citizens don’t have rights.What sort of work were you able to find after the museum?
I was writing and sending stuff to competitions, and I also started selling clothes on the streets. That’s how I supported my family.How did your first collection of poems, 1990’s Elegies for the Family of Hearts, come about? There seems to be a consistent mood and theme that runs throughout.
I got engaged to my wife on February 14. On that same day, my father passed away. He was an imam, but not affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, and he died of a heart condition. I felt such sorrow the day he died, and that’s when I started writing those poems.What about your last work published in Syria, Baghdadi Exercises for the Nightfall in 2009? What inspired that collection?
I remember feeling a deep sadness on April 9, 2003. I thought the US invasion of Iraq was terrible. Everything was being bombed and destroyed. I knew Saddam Hussein was also to blame for what was going on. He wasn’t a democratic leader. I felt very sad, and that’s why I started writing that book.
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That poem is not really about pornography. I just talk, for example, in poetic ways about the parts of the body. In that poem and others, I wanted to lay things bare about a lot of taboo subjects—religion, sex, and politics. An imam who was close to the previous president, Hafez al-Assad, said that my work was bad, so he took all my books off the shelves of bookstores and libraries, and a huge controversy started about the things I was saying about religion and the dignity of the human body.What kind of things did you write about, specifically, that brought you so much heat?
“Pornographic Poetry,” for example, is about a Christian priest who is preaching, and all these girls with cleavage and exposed legs are sitting in the first rows, and he looks at them with desire. I’ve also written about the secretions that women have when they get turned on. Things like that got me in trouble.In the Arab world, subjects such as those are taboo. Kids in the region don’t hug or kiss one another in the streets, but that’s something that is completely normal in non-Arab countries. I remember once that the principal of our local university found a guy kissing a girl behind a tree, and he was expelled. Why are those things banned in my country and considered normal in other places? If that university principal visited Mexico, he would have a heart attack. People here make out everywhere!
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I prefer a country where people are free, because those things are personal. Whoever wants to do those things, they should be free to do them, and whoever doesn’t like them, they don’t have to do them. I don’t want someone that comes and tells me what to do. Things like these are personal. I prefer freedom.What’s your social life like in Mexico? You don’t speak Spanish, and Arabic is not widely spoken here.
My life here is not complete. But thank God I have a lot of friends who are bilingual, and they take me out to visit museums or even to travel to other states. I’ve been to Puebla and Oaxaca. Most of my friends are of Lebanese descent or are Mexicans who studied Arabic in school. I have a Mexican friend who doesn’t speak Arabic, and I don’t speak Spanish, but we still manage to go out—even if we don’t understand a word of what the other is saying. We smile. I met him when he came to interview me a while ago. We don’t really talk, but we still hang out. I hope one day we can learn each other’s languages.Have you gotten in trouble or into uncomfortable situations because of the language barrier?
I had a funny accident. I went to the supermarket, and I can’t really understand the text on the different products. I bought two cans of food without any images on the label, and after I ate one I started feeling a bit ill. Then a friend of mine showed up and asked me what I had done. I told her and showed her the cans, and she started laughing hysterically. Once she was done laughing, she informed me that it was cat food.
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I have two sons. One is at the university and the other one was doing his military service when I left. My wife passed away two years ago.You left your country less than three weeks before the conflict began. Did you have a premonition?
I was feeling uneasy and unsafe. I knew the government was going to start killing people, and my family, my sons, were there. I knew that they were killing innocent people every day, so I was very afraid. I was also against the government, and there was nothing good for me there. Everything that was going on around me was asphyxiating. Everything was unjust. That’s why I decided to find a way out.Are you worried your relatives will be targeted because of your writing?
Of course. I want to bring them here. More than ten relatives of mine have been killed. My son, who is just 21, escaped from his military service and joined the FSA. That worries me even more.What do you think about President Bashar?
I hate this president, because he’s committing crimes against humanity. He’s killing Muslims and Christians all the same. He’s destroying houses, churches, mosques, he’s destroying tourism, he’s destroying everything. I will be happy the day he’s captured and sent to The Hague to be judged for his crimes.What do you think would have happened to you if you had stayed?
If I had stayed there, it would be one of two options: I would either be dead, or I would be fighting against the government.What are your plans for the future?
My residency here ends in February, but my Syrian passport expires next month. I need to get a new one, but renewing it here is not going to be easy. But I don’t think I can go back to Syria anytime soon. I might apply for asylum in the US, Canada, or Sweden. I don’t know what I’ll do, but I know that, after February, things are going to be much harder for me.Photos by Mauricio Palos
Poems translated by Leri PriceFor an overview of the issues that have fuelled the conflict in Syria, we recommend reading "Road to Ruin," our condensed timeline of Syrian history, and "The VICE Guide to Syria," a crash course on the country's geopolitical, cultural, and religious complexities.
