Copies of ArabLit Quarterly’s Spring 2026 double issue, guest edited by Ghada Alatrash and Fadi Azzam, are available for sale through our Gumroad store, at the ArabLit shop, through Amazon, and in select bookshops worldwide. As always, if you need a free e-copy, email us at info@arablit.org.
Also: Look for more about launch events coming in Doha, Berlin, and online, as well as select excerpts from the magazine.
Foreword
It is no easy task to tell the Syrian tale, one that is written—and still being written—in the midst of both darkness and light. Yet, Syrian literature and art have taken up this task: not only to record events threatened by historical erasure, but to transform a time stained with blood into an anthem of resistance.
When the Syrian revolution began, writers and artists refused to remain mere chroniclers; they entered the struggle as souls fighting on the frontlines of language, color, and sound. What they created was more than a response to oppression and tyranny—it was a declaration of the right to exist freely, a means of imagining a liberated homeland.
In this issue, we have tried to listen to some of Syria’s pulse through fragments of voices, testimonies, and imagery that reveal how words and art can distill half a century of tyranny and a revolution still searching for its deliverance.
From poems soaked in the moon’s grief, to texts laced with tears, to paintings where color exposes death, there emerges a bold narrative: a collective dream of freedom, a panorama of what might be called Syria’s own Guernica.
And today—amidst imprisonment, torture, diaspora, exile, and massacres—Syrian literature and art continue to turn ruin into language and dust into color. For Syrians, creativity is no luxury; it is survival—life defying death.
The works in this issue do not claim to represent all Syrian voices and visions; no anthology could. They are a narrow opening in a vast wall of silence. We invite our readers to look through this window and see how Syria is not only war footage—it is unrelenting creation, pain sculpted into meaning, hope hammered into purpose, a flower forcing the concrete to crack.
We hope our readers are able to see Syria as some of its writers and artists do: a besieged land that refuses to stop dreaming, an exhausted nation that keeps on singing. In these selected pieces, one can hear long-suppressed sobs, feel the splinters of exile, and trace the frantic search for a homeland through words and colors. Syrian creativity affirms the human capacity to create amidst ruins.
Eternity has, indeed, fallen. But any nation disfigured by dictatorship, one that fails to lay justice as the first stone of its rebuilding, is doomed to collapse into tyranny’s ruins.
This is a country that, on December 8, fell into a moment both empty and dreamlike. A single, staggering moment. An unbelievable moment—everyone within it, and everyone who belongs to it, laughed and cried at once.
And now, once again, it mourns. Its longed-for dream now stained with blood, after eternity had fallen.
In every text, every poem, every work of art, there is a brave confession: freedom is not granted—it is seized; it is seized with love, with words, with color, and with a deep conviction that all humans deserve to be free.
Ghada Alatrash and Fadi Azzam, Guest Editors