Sound prisoners: The case of the Saydnaya prison in Syria

Abstract

This article seeks to explore the manifold ways in which carceral violence and acoustics intermingle, as manifested in the case of the military prison of Saydnaya—an infamous, state-run torture jail in Syria. As revealed by survivors’ ear-testimonies and by the recent digital reconstruction of the prison’s interior (available on the Amnesty International website), sound seems integral to the dynamics of power at play in the Syrian prison. A great part of the violence committed there is acoustic, one that is meticulously based on defining properties of the aural experience. Sonic weaponization in Saydnaya has not been much addressed in the existing academic literature, except for discussions of its extreme silencing tactics, which this study intends to complement by a further inquiry into the sound/silence interchange in the Syrian prison, as well as into the ways in which the listening mode per se is turned into a mechanism of surveillance and torture, and also (paradoxically enough) of re-action and survival. To explore these issues, I draw upon existing theoretical perspectives on sound, silence, and listening per se—all measured against the actual backdrop of the Syrian prison. Herein, Saydnaya is theorized as an acoustically surveilled place of extreme listening and deliberate partial sensory deprivation, of weaponized silence and acousmatic violence, that is, a violence whose sound has no visually identifiable cause. Such practices form no exceptional case; Saydnaya rather joins, in this light, the sadly endless list of sonic warfare cases—the dark history of sound—as this has been recently brought to light by a number of critical sound theorists drawing attention to sonic weaponry, and more specifically to the all-powerful acoustics of incarceration. This study relies on ex-prisoners’ aural testimonies as published in Amnesty International Reports and not on self-conducted primary research, and thus many of the points raised here retain the character of hypotheses, pointing to directions of further research that may fully test them out.