What War and Displacement Taught Me About the Power of Storytelling

There are wounds that don’t bleed. They appear in silence, in hesitation, in the way someone pauses before answering a simple question like “Where are you from?” I’ve seen it, lived it, and written through it. That’s the impact of war and displacement on storytelling; it changes how you write and what you dare to say. What you don’t.

When you lose a home, whether it’s a physical place, a culture, or a past you can’t return to, storytelling becomes more than art. It becomes a memory. Survival. A form of resistance. And sometimes, it becomes the only place where what was lost can still live.

Exile Changes the Narrative Voice

I left Syria as a child, but Syria never left me. The act of leaving creates a crack between who you were and who you’re expected to become. And if you’re a writer, that crack becomes the page. For years, I tried to write “from the outside,” from where I lived, studied, and worked. But every story I wrote pulled me back. Not always in setting, but in feeling.

That’s the thing: the impact of war and displacement on storytelling isn’t always about describing ruins or writing war scenes. It’s about writing characters who carry absence in their bones. Who carry names they no longer say out loud. Who love, leave, resist, or forget because of something that can’t be seen, only felt.

Stories Become Carriers of What History Erases

War doesn’t just destroy buildings. It wipes out archives, interrupts traditions, and forces languages to go quiet. In such moments, stories become vessels, places where culture hides until it’s safe to come out again. That’s what I tried to do in Palmyre pour toujours. It wasn’t just a reflection of the ancient city. It was a way to ask: what happens when the keepers of culture are scattered? When is memory itself endangered?

The impact of war and displacement on storytelling is most visible in the urgency behind the words. Writers from conflict zones don’t always write “about” war. But they write from within its shadow. And that tension between the desire to forget and the need to remember shapes every paragraph.

Characters Who Belong Nowhere and Everywhere

In A Coeur Perdu, Paul Ollenson isn’t a refugee. He’s not even Syrian. But he carries a displacement of another kind. A transplant recipient is a man who doesn’t feel at home in his own body, in his marriage, or in the spaces he moves through as a UN official. That, too, is a kind of exile. And it’s no accident that many of my characters carry this theme of in-betweenness.

This isn’t limited to me. Across world literature, especially in Middle Eastern and diaspora writing, we see this: characters who exist on the edge. Who speak multiple languages but sometimes say nothing at all. Who long for places they can’t return to or fear remembering them too clearly.

That’s the impact of war and displacement on storytelling; it births characters who mirror the reader’s own fragmentation. Who allows people to say, “Yes. That’s what I feel too. Even if I’ve never lived in a war zone.”

Why Writing Becomes a Political Act

I’ve always believed that storytelling is inherently political. Not because every novel has to take a side, but because choosing to write at all when your culture is under siege is already a declaration. When history is being rewritten or erased in real time, fiction becomes a place to preserve truths.

When I wrote Guard Thy Heart, I was telling a story about love, memory, and searching for meaning. But beneath that was a deeper tension: how does someone try to live a meaningful life in a world where meaning feels compromised by what’s been lost? That question haunts many people in exile. And it’s embedded in every word I write, even when the story takes place far from Damascus or Aleppo.

New Languages, Old Roots

Writing in English and French has opened doors for me. But it also comes with its own kind of grief. There are things I can say in Arabic that don’t quite translate. Cultural references. Idioms. The feeling of a phrase that carries a century of weight. And yet, I’ve learned to carry Syria into these other languages, not through direct translation, but through emotional truth.

That’s another impact of war and displacement on storytelling: the blending of voices. We begin to tell stories across borders, in borrowed tongues, through fragmented memory, and somehow, something new is born. Not better. Not worse. Just different. And deeply human.

Final Note

When people ask me why I write, especially in a world filled with distraction and destruction, I tell them this: because stories outlast borders. Because the human spirit doesn’t disappear when the bombs fall, it writes poems. It sings lullabies. It tells jokes around small kitchen tables in unfamiliar lands.

The impact of war and displacement on storytelling is real. It reshapes voices, burdens characters, and shifts themes. But it also deepens empathy. Expands imagination. It reminds us that even when we lose a place, we can still find ourselves on the page.