Video: I’m Blue – Director: Abu Ghabi‚
I’ve had a recurring dream since I fled the Yarmouk Refugee Camp and came to Beirut. The dream takes me back to besieged Yarmouk, where death and destruction have found a way to settle in all its details. I am not sure whether it is a dream or a nightmare. But I live in this open-ended waiting with images of that place and the difficulty of abandoning it. Maybe the sound of my friend Ayham’s piano changed the nightmare into dream and the place into a legend. Here, there is no geography, a place between two times, the first is a tent and the second is bags packed for other conquests. These conquests stimulate the hardness and bitterness of our catastrophes and previous disappointments. We pack our luggage to find only our memory that tells the stories of our relation with the wind. We, as witnesses of disappointment and hope.
This is the famous photo that Niraz Saied took of me in Yarmouk.
Lamis al-Khatib approved the photo for publication on my website.
On July 18, 2018, the following article was published by Aljazeera:
An award-winning Palestinian photographer from the Yarmouk refugee camp in Syria was confirmed dead years after his arrest by Syrian government forces, according to family members and close friends. Niraz Saied, who was known for documenting life in the camp in southern Damascus, was arrested in October 2015 by troops loyal to President Bashar al-Assad, shortly after the government promised him a safe exit from the country. After years of hoping that they would see their loved one again, family members in the Syrian capital received confirmation that Saied died about 18 months ago, he was 26 years old.