As part of a new fws series, understanding: beyond geography, I asked Shaza Khalil, a contributor to the recent fws issue, what we kept: a geography, to write about being and becoming a writer and living in Syria. She said, “Yes!” Read her words. They are stunningly poignant.
One thing you will know immediately is that humans are humans and writers are writers with many, many similar life experiences no matter what language they speak, no matter what religion they practice, no matter where they live.
Leave a comment. Share. In this way, together, and as Shaza says, we can build understanding through sharing personal story. Enjoy!
I needed somewhere to put what was happening inside me.
~Shaza Khalil
From Syria
Yes… At first glance, it may seem as though I come from a place no one would dream of living in.
But I am not sure that the Syria others imagine is the Syria I know.
I was born in Tartus, a small coastal city on the Mediterranean. Our family home looked directly onto the sea. It was beautiful from the outside, and beautiful inside too. The strange thing was that the people who lived in it were not always as beautiful as the house itself.
To my friends, however, the house was a kind of privilege. Whenever they visited, they would tell me how lucky I was to wake up with the sea in front of me.
I was born with the sea in front of me, but no one ever taught me how to swim.
I could see it from the house. I could smell it. The scent of the sea would travel through the rooms faster than anything else. I went down to it often, and I still remember the foam reaching my feet.
I have a long story with swimming, and perhaps one day I will turn it into a short story. For now, I can simply say that I spent many years living beside the water without knowing how to enter it.
My childhood was, in many ways, a mixture of beauty and things I did not yet have words for.
In the Syria I remember from the 1980s and 1990s, life felt different. I remember religious holidays, new clothes, pocket money, family trips, poetry evenings, theaters, and cinemas. The cinema and the theater were not distant forms of culture to me; they entered my life early and stayed there.
My grandmother used to give me money generously, although my father would often take it from me. In the summer, my grandfather would take us to beautiful places and buy us new clothes. We children would run and play almost like mad things.
I was one of them.
There are memories from that time that still live somewhere in me. Sometimes they return through something as small as a song. There is a Michael Bolton song, “How Am I Supposed to Live Without You,” that is forever connected in my mind to a particularly beautiful period of my life.
My mother was a teacher. My father worked for the railway.
I was fortunate enough to have many beautiful things around me, but I did not have what I was searching for at home: that simple feeling of having somewhere emotionally safe to return to.
I often felt like a stranger within my own family.
School did not make things easier. In many ways, it felt like a place that belonged to those who had enough money. I was also bullied because I was very thin. I did not know how to defend myself very well, so I began to write.
Perhaps writing was my first private shelter.
I remember the first poetry evening I ever participated in was at my high school. My Arabic teacher used to ask students who wrote to show her what they had written. I would bring her my poems, and she would give me grades between eight and nine out of ten.
I was disappointed by the eight.
I wanted my writing to excel. Even then, I wanted more from my words.
My teacher later gathered the students who loved writing and organized an evening for us at the end of the school day. I was seventeen years old. It was the first time I stood before an audience and read something I had written.
I told my family that I wrote, but they did not seem particularly interested.
Years later, I took part in another poetry evening at the Al-Adiyat Association in Tartus. I was waiting for someone in particular to hear my work, but he never came.
That was my first literary disappointment.
After that, I stayed away from poetry evenings for a long time. Perhaps I did not feel that I belonged to the dominant poetic tradition around me. I was always drawn to what was different, daring, and elevated, to writing that did not want simply to repeat what had already been said.
I may have been wrong in some of my judgments. But I knew one thing: I wanted to find my own voice.
I grew up, married, and had children. This time, it was not the sea that lay in front of my home, but the mountains.
I loved the mountains more.
Perhaps because they were quieter. Or perhaps because by then I had become a woman searching for another definition of safety.
Before marriage, I was adventurous, a little crazy, affectionate, and deeply in love with life. After marriage, I began to lose some of that passion and then spend years trying to find it again.
There were times when I felt I had lost something precious in myself.
I had written poetry before I married, then stopped completely. It was as though I had closed a door inside myself and carried on with life.
Then the war in Syria began in 2011.
The war damaged many things in me. It damaged dreams I had not yet finished dreaming. It changed the way I moved through the world. I became less interested in being among people. I became more withdrawn.
And there was one particular moment I cannot forget: an explosion occurred near my home and shattered its windows.
It was not simply the glass that broke.
Something in my sense of the world broke with it.
During one particularly difficult period, I went to see my gynecologist and told her that I was experiencing panic attacks and desperately needed her help.
She was sitting behind her desk.
Then she stood up and hugged me.
She said to me, quite simply:
“You are a writer. Write about what you are going through.”
I had not expected the embrace.
I had never thought of myself as someone who deserved one.
To someone who lives in a society where embraces are commonplace, this might sound like an ordinary moment. It was not ordinary to me. In our part of the world, an embrace can mean many things.
When she hugged me, I cried.
Then I decided to return to writing.
I did not know that day that her words would become the beginning of my creative journey.
I wrote my sadness as diaries at first. I wrote because I needed somewhere to put what was happening inside me.
Writing did not heal me quickly. Perhaps I cannot even say that it healed me completely. But it helped me live. It helped me place what was happening inside me outside my body, on the page, and look at it from a distance that allowed me to breathe.
Writing became the place where I could be completely honest.
When I returned to writing, I was no longer the same girl who had stood at that first poetry evening.
My early work emerged from places of deep pain. It was wild, emotional, and rebellious. I wrote about love, the body, loss, and things women were not always expected to say aloud. Perhaps that was why some of my work began to attract attention.
I felt that my writing had its own scent.
The scent of rebellion.
I wrote about my first love at university, a young man I lost for reasons larger than either of us. Years after our last meeting, I wrote him a story called “What Is Your Name?” It won first place in a competition run by the Bahraini newspaper Al-Wasat in 2017.
I also wrote “A Luminous Woman,” about a woman moving through a dark period and finding her way back to writing. It received third place in the Aqua Creative Writing Initiative in Alexandria in 2022.
Later came my first poetry collection, written after years of experience, loss, and searching. It received the Gallery of Literature Prize in Morocco in 2022.
But the awards, beautiful as they were, were not what brought me back to writing.
I have since written many short stories and two novels. One of the novels has been published, while I am still looking for a publisher for the other.
But the awards, beautiful as they were, were not what brought me back to writing.
That embrace did.
What kept me writing was the gradual discovery of myself.
I think the word that best describes me at the beginning of my life is passion. I was passionate about almost everything around me—even butterflies. I had an enormous desire to love life with all its force, perhaps even to burn in love until there was nothing left of me but ash.
Somewhere along the way, I came to believe that what we do not receive in our first home might be found elsewhere.
That search sometimes led me into relationships that were not healthy for me. My early writing was, in part, the cry of a woman searching for love without yet knowing how to protect herself from it.
But I changed.
Year after year, through everything I lived and everything I wrote, my understanding of love became wider and quieter. It moved from loving a man to loving beautiful things: flowers, children, laughter, the sea, books, small moments—and eventually, myself.
My voice changed with it.
At first, my writing was concerned with the lover, the lover’s body, and rebellion against social conventions and traditions. Later, it became concerned with me: with freeing myself from the burdens of the past, the present, and the future, and with becoming a woman who no longer feels the need to apologize for existing.
Today, I write with greater maturity, more patience, and a deeper respect for my life, for the world around me, and for the word itself.
Perhaps I have not yet arrived at writing that is completely free of the weight of language, nor at a self completely free of the weight of what it has lived through.
But I am working toward both.
I think that is what writing is for me: a continual attempt to become lighter.
I still live in Syria. The country I inhabit today carries a history that is difficult to explain to someone who has never lived through it. But I do not want my story to be reduced to war, nor do I want Syria to exist in the imagination of others only as a place of destruction.
I come from a place where children once played almost like mad things in the streets.
From a house with the sea at its windows.
From a grandmother who gave me too much pocket money, a grandfather who took us on summer trips, a mother who taught, a father who worked on the railway, a school where I discovered both humiliation and language, and a city where cinema, theater, poetry, and the sea all became part of the person I would eventually become.
I come from a complicated family, a complicated country, and a complicated life.
But I also come from beauty.
And perhaps this is what I most want people far away from Syria to understand: a country can be wounded without being only its wounds. A person can carry pain without being only the pain they have carried.
I said at the beginning that I spent many years living beside the sea without learning how to swim.
That is true.
But I think writing has taught me something else.
It did not merely teach me how to swim.
It taught me, with a certain poetic madness, how to walk on the surface of the sea.
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Shaza Kamel Khalil is a Syrian writer whose work includes poetry, fiction, and literary essays. She received the Qumra Grant in Beirut (2023) for her debut novel, Tall Al-Khuzama (Lavender Hill), and the Gallery of Literature Award in Morocco for her first poetry collection, A Narrow Space for Love. She has also won the Al-Wasat Newspaper Short Story Award (Bahrain, 2017) and the Aqua Creative Writing Award (Egypt, 2021). Her literary essays have been published in Al-Hiwar Al-Mutamaddin, Sharjah Cultural Magazine, Al Faisal, and Oxygen. She lives in Tartus, Syria
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