A review by Alma Abou Fakher for ‘Moyen-Orient’ magazine, October – December 2025

The year 2011 marks a major turning point in the cultural history of contemporary Syria. The civil protest movement against the regime of Bashar al-Assad (2000–2024) cannot be understood solely through a political lens; it also triggered an unprecedented artistic dynamic. By cracking the mechanisms of intimidation and repression that had silenced cultural actors, this situation opened up a new space for creation. Literary expression thus freed itself from the ideological constraints imposed by the state to explore new registers, forms, and themes

The literary production has established itself as a privileged space for narrating both the self and the collective, while also contributing to the reconfiguration of a Syrian imagination in search of meaning. The rise of the Syrian novel cannot be reduced to a mere contextual consequence; it responds to an existential need to speak the reality of the moment, at a time when familiar reference points are collapsing and frameworks of understanding are faltering….

Samar Yazbek is one of the most representative voices in Syrian literature. From the very beginning of the revolution, she adopted an approach based on testimony and documentation. Her novel Taqatu Niran (In the Crossfire, 2012, translated into French the same year by Buchet-Chastel) established itself as one of the first literary works to depict the uprising. The book, subtitled Journal of the Syrian Revolution, explicitly claims a documentary purpose, presenting itself as a collection of firsthand accounts recounting the first four months of the uprising, from March to July 2011.

A figure of opposition to the Al-Assad regime, Samar Yazbek was forced into exile in 2011, but the urgency to bear witness drove her to secretly cross the Turkish border to return to Syria. During three trips to the Idlib region, particularly to Saraqeb, a key site of the protests, she shared the daily lives of activists and immersed herself in the horrors of war. From this experience arose Bawwabat Ard al-Adam (The Gates of the Void, 2015, published by Stock in 2016), in which she deepens her reflection on the ravages of the conflict and intimate fractures, offering a meditation on human tragedy and shattered hopes. From the momentum of the first peaceful demonstrations to the formation of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and the emergence of the Islamic State (IS or Daesh), she provides testimony on the survival of both fighters and civilians, recounting the smell of earth after a bomb explosion, terror in people’s eyes, and mutilated bodies.

Samar Yazbek did not seek merely to bear witness to events, but also to give a voice to the voiceless, bringing to light stories long buried in the silence of those who carried them. It is in this perspective that Tisata Ashara Imraa Suriyyat Yarwina (Nineteen Women: Syrian Women Speak, 2018, published by Stock in 2019) was conceived. The book gathers a series of interviews conducted with Syrian women about their intimate experiences of the revolution and the war. It reflects a determined effort to build a memory grounded in facts, in rupture with the official narrative, which seeks to justify the crimes committed.

In parallel with this effort of documentation, the presence of the body runs through the contemporary Syrian novel, which has become a central space of memory. In many narratives, the body takes the form of a living archive: a site for recording violence, but also a medium for activating buried memories and stories long pushed to the margins. It embodies both individual suffering and a collective memory torn between trauma and resilience.

This somatic dimension of memory can be observed in works such as The Frightened by Dima Wannous [Gallimard, 2020] ; Al-Mawtu amal Shaqq (Death Is Hard Work, 2016, published by Actes Sud in 2018) by Khaled Khalifa; or Al-Mashaa (The blue pen, 2017, published by Stock the following year) and Maqam al-Rih (The wind’s abode, 2021, published by Stock in 2023) by Samar Yazbek…

Through the emergence of new voices, the experimentation with unprecedented narrative techniques, and the redefining of what is at stake in writing, the contemporary Syrian novel actively contributes to reshaping the Arab literary field as a whole.

This literature operates on two levels simultaneously. On the one hand, it remains firmly rooted in a fragmented and painful national experience. On the other hand, it circulates more and more within transnational networks: translation, literary festivals, and global publishing channels have given it renewed visibility, enabling it to cross borders, enter into dialogue with other literary traditions, and integrate into multiple spaces of reception. This dual positioning—both local and global—constitutes at once a major opportunity and a significant challenge: preserving the singularity of the Syrian literary experience while making it accessible and intelligible to diverse cultural horizons.

Contemporary Syrian literature thus asserts itself as a true narrative laboratory, where individual and collective memory is replayed, where the function of speech is reflected upon amid the ruins of history, and where new ways of expressing reality are tested. In the face of extreme violence, this writing does not limit itself to mere denunciation: it reconfigures the relationship to the world, inscribing time not as a linear continuity, but as a fragmented space, haunted by ruptures, silences, and new beginnings. By giving form to shattered lived experience, it opposes erasure with a living memory—a form of resistance.