Raghda Hassan

Raghda Hassan was a writer and activist from Syria. She became renowned as an opponent of the Syrian dictatorship by her political efforts against it during the eras of Hafez al-Assad and his son Bashar, and was detained once in each era. Raghda changed to writing at some point and wrote several pamphlets, as well as a large novel titled "The Morning Star" as an autobiography in which she discussed her upbringing and adolescence, as well as a second novel titled "Where there is No Damascus There." It's a novel in the same vein as the first, and it's considered jail literature. Raghda was working on her third novel at the time, but she died of cancer in March 2021 before it was officially released. Raghda spoke about her story in the novel "The Morning Star", where she touched on her early life and childhood, the beginning of her political activity and her struggle against the Syrian regime, as well as the experience of imprisonment twice and marriage. She also addressed the issue of her residence in Yarmouk camp, where she had two children with her husband, Amer. At some point, Raghda avoided political work after all that happened to her, but she did not stop following public affairs, as she mentioned in her book, which represents a detailed biography of her. She devoted herself to writing and tried in most of the pieces to talk about her experience and the experiences of others in detention in Syrian prisons. She also wrote about love and other things. Raghda Hassan's renown grew as a result of her book "The New Prophets," in which she focused on fluid narration for the sake of narrative structure, as well as lyrical pick-ups. Raghda leaned on realism in her story by providing authentic depictions of people and locations. In her work, Hassan discusses what she refers to as the "dream of liberation" in the hearts of eager young armed only with their live consciences and poetry. Raghda also discusses the stench of clotted blood and her terror of security guards, executioners and dungeons, love, and poetry. Some novel critics viewed the conversation as "warm and personal as it promotes closeness, and premature." Raghda focuses on the issues of those she refers to as the persecuted in their homeland in this work, as she tells about the expelled, and then regression to the dream, as is the story of Hatem, the protagonist who dies at some point under torture and all the torture and abuse parties he lived before her separation. She also discusses systematic torture in Syrian regime jails and explains it in significant detail, including the use of a triple wire with a German chair and torture equipment imported from Nazi dungeons. Raghda Hassan's life was the subject of award-winning documentary “A Syrian Love Story,” filmed by British director Sean McAllister. She had been living in Istanbul for nearly three years before her death.