Why I Write: Cultural Memory, Literary Resistance, and Syria’s Survival

If there’s one question I return to often, both in life and in literature, it’s this: What happens to a culture when the world stops seeing it? When cities are reduced to rubble and traditions are severed by exile, how do you hold on to the meaning of who you are?

For me, the answer has always been storytelling.

Whether I’m writing about a heartbroken UN lawyer in A Coeur Perdu, a postwar reckoning in Guard Thy Heart, or a vanishing city in Palmyre pour toujours, each sentence is an act of remembrance. A small resistance against erasure. A way of saying: We were here. We are still here.

This is why my work matters, not for literary recognition or commercial success, but because it participates in something far older and more urgent: the fight for cultural preservation.

Memory as Resistance- The Hidden Cost of Conflict

When we talk about war, we often speak in numbers, casualties, dates, and ceasefires. But war doesn’t only destroy buildings and take lives. It erodes memory. And memory is the foundation of culture.

In Syria, this erosion has been relentless. Mosques bombed. Libraries emptied. Ancient cities like Aleppo and Palmyra scarred beyond recognition. But just as dangerous as physical loss is the slow forgetting that follows. When the world looks away, stories disappear. Languages fade. Generations grow up disconnected from their roots.

That’s where literature comes in. A novel can carry a city long after its walls have fallen. A poem can remember a dialect, a gesture, a grief that’s no longer spoken aloud. This is what I try to do in every book: protect cultural memory from slipping away.

Palmyra, Poetry, and the Duty to Remember

The destruction of Palmyra devastated me, not just as a Syrian, but as someone who had walked among its ruins as a boy. I remember the columns, the stillness, the echo of something greater than time. When ISIS desecrated the site, I didn’t know how to respond. I felt powerless.

So I wrote Palmyre pour toujours.

It wasn’t enough to mourn. I wanted to honor what was lost by rebuilding it in language. I called upon history, memory, and imagination to give voice to a place that had been silenced. The result was more than a book. It was a personal act of cultural preservation.

Because when we tell these stories, we resist the idea that our past can be deleted. We make it live again, one sentence at a time.

Literature as a Living Archive of Syrian Identity

You cannot understand a people solely through news cycles. Syria is not just a headline or a battlefield. It is a place of music, of hospitality, of literature recited aloud under olive trees. When I write about Syria, I try to show that, to restore the depth that is so often flattened by politics.

Le temps d’une saison may be set in the 1920s, but it echoes the Syrian diaspora’s struggle to find belonging in foreign lands. Guard Thy Heart, though deeply personal, explores broader themes of identity and resilience in the face of moral dislocation. Each of these stories, while fictional, preserves aspects of a Syrian cultural psyche fractured by exile.

Why my work matters in the fight for cultural preservation isn’t about my name. It’s about what the stories carry. They are vessels of memory, empathy, and pride. They remind readers that we are not just a war-torn people, we are a civilization.

Diaspora, Displacement, and the Stories That Endure

Millions of Syrians now live outside their homeland. And in every country where they’ve resettled, they bring with them not just trauma, but knowledge, song, recipes, prayers, and yes, stories.

But exile is tricky. It bends memory. It dilutes language. It asks us to assimilate without disappearing. In this fragile state, literature becomes even more vital. It’s not just an artistic expression; it’s a cultural anchor.

I’ve met young Syrians born abroad who read A Coeur Perdu or Palmyre pour toujours and wrote to me saying, “I didn’t know we had this.” That is the greatest compliment. Because it means the work did its job, it passed on something essential. Something that borders and bombs tried to take away.

Fiction Isn’t a Luxury, It’s a Defense Mechanism

Some might ask, why fiction? Why not just write history? My answer is simple: because fiction moves differently. It enters the heart before the mind. It invites emotion, not just information. And sometimes, especially when dealing with trauma, people need to feel before they can fully understand.

This is especially true for cultural preservation. A novel might be someone’s first contact with Syria that isn’t rooted in conflict. It might be the first time they see Syrians as lovers, artists, dreamers, not just victims or migrants. That’s powerful. That’s transformational.

That’s why Siwar Al Assad’s work matters in the fight for cultural preservation, because it builds bridges where headlines build walls.

Conclusion

Syria has given the world so much- science, art, poetry, and philosophy. But in recent years, what the world sees is mostly destruction. It’s up to us, those who remember, to correct that lens. Those who remember fight for cultural preservation.

I don’t claim that my books can rebuild a country. But maybe they can protect pieces of it. Maybe they can whisper to a generation born in exile: This is who we are. And this is why we matter.

In the end, cultural preservation isn’t just about safeguarding old buildings or ancient manuscripts. It’s about keeping stories alive. It’s about telling the world that even in loss, we do not vanish.

We write. We remember. And we endure.