How Syria’s History Shapes My Writing

Introduction

You don’t choose the country you’re born into. But it does, in many ways, choose the stories you end up telling.

I was born in Damascus, but I’ve never known Syria without its weight. Its beauty was never separate from its pain. That duality—that constant tension between what we were and what we’ve become—has shaped everything I’ve written. Sometimes directly. Sometimes quietly, like a shadow in the background of a sentence.

This blog isn’t about politics or policy. It’s about what it means to write when your homeland is a place people only seem to know from war footage.

Leaving Doesn’t Mean Forgetting

I left Syria when I was nine. Too young to understand the political fallout that pushed my family into exile, but old enough to remember the smell of orange blossom trees and the sound of radios humming in the narrow streets of Damascus.

When you leave home under pressure, the memories don’t follow you in sequence. They come in fragments. And for a writer, those fragments eventually become material. They become metaphors, questions, and obsessions. I didn’t start out wanting to write about Syria. But Syria found its way in—sometimes through a character’s silence, sometimes through a city’s name buried in a backstory.

Conflict Isn’t a Theme—It’s a Presence

Many people see Syria only through the lens of war. I understand that. It’s what dominates the headlines when we get mentioned at all.

But for those of us who grew up within that context—or were shaped by its aftermath—conflict isn’t just something you reference. It’s something you carry. In Guard Thy Heart, the protagonist Paul is haunted not just by a woman, but by a version of himself he’s unsure he ever knew. That’s not unique to fiction. For people touched by conflict, you’re always trying to reconcile who you were before with who you became in the fallout.

The war in Syria didn’t just destroy buildings. It shattered timelines. There’s a before. There’s an after. But the middle—the confusion, the silence, the disconnection—that’s what I often write from.

The Complicated Gift of Perspective

My family name brings with it certain assumptions. I’m not naïve about that.

I was raised in a political household, and I carry the name of a man who played a controversial role in Syrian history. I won’t deny that I’ve had access that others have not. But access isn’t clarity. It doesn’t make things simpler. In many ways, it complicates them.

It took me years to find a voice that didn’t feel like it was performing either guilt or defense. I’m not here to rewrite history. I’m here to write stories that ask:

What now?

What next?

Who do we become when the old narratives no longer hold?

Writing as a Way of Preserving and Questioning

Syria is often described as ancient. And it is. But that doesn’t mean we’re only made of the past. We’re made of what was interrupted. What was forced to pause. In Palmyre pour toujours, I didn’t just write about ruins—I wrote about what we lose when memory is turned into ash, and what it means to try and rebuild it.

Writing has always been my way of holding onto things that feel like they’re slipping. But I don’t write to preserve nostalgia. I write to question it. To ask what we’re carrying, and why. To ask what’s worth saving, and what we have to let go of in order to survive.

If You’ve Ever Looked Away

I understand why people turn their gaze away from Syria. The headlines are heavy. The pictures are devastating. And there’s a sense of helplessness that comes with watching from afar.

But if you’ve ever felt that pull—a flicker of connection, a curiosity, even a guilt—then I invite you not to look away. Read the stories. Not just mine. Read the stories written by Syrians who stayed, who fled, who returned, who endured.

Because if Syria only exists in your mind as rubble, then you’ve missed its most enduring truth: we are still here.

Conclusion

Syria’s history is not a chapter in a textbook for me. It’s the space between sentences. The reason I write at all.

I don’t claim to speak for a country. But I do try, as honestly as I can, to speak from it. From its contradictions, sorrow, and beauty. And from the hope that maybe, through story, we can start to rebuild the things war tried to erase.

Thank you for reading. For staying with me. And for seeing Syria as more than what the headlines allow.