On Shaping ‘The Book of Damascus’
On Shaping ‘The Book of Damascus’
Zaher Omareen in Conversation with Fifi Bat-hef
The Book of Damascus, ed. Zaher Omareen, is a new anthology in their “Reading the City” series. Here, editor Zaher Omareen talks with Fifi Bat-hef about selecting ten stories to represent a city as complex and storied as Damascus.
You can also read Haseeb Al-Zainy’s “The Blacklist” here on ArabLit, and get the whole collection from the Comma Press website. Tomorrow, we’ll have another talk with contributor Alaa Rashidi.
As both editor and contributor, how did you approach selecting the ten stories? What made these particular voices essential for capturing Damascus?
Zaher Omareen: I think these stories largely reflect the personal experiences of the writers themselves, whether as witnesses to a particular period or event in the life of the city, or simply as people who belong to Damascus and have experienced its everyday life through living there.
Each story offers a different perspective on Damascus. It is almost as if we are looking at a single great beam of light refracted through a prism into different colours, languages, events, rhythms and voices. These elements diverge and sometimes clash, yet they also intertwine to create the portrait of one city, an immensely fascinating and complex one.
Your introduction looks back from 2026, while the stories were written before the fall of Assad. Did the collapse of the regime change the way you curated/arranged/framed these stories?
ZO: These stories had already been written and completed months before the fall of the regime, and the book had been on its way to publication since then. In fact, both the publishers and I were committed to remaining faithful to the moment in which these stories were written—that is, before the fall of Syria’s dictatorship, because altering them in light of what happened afterwards would have produced an entirely different book.
In my introduction to the collection, however, I tried to provide a broader post-regime context through which these stories could be understood, both politically and on a human level.
As a war correspondent, filmmaker, and writer, how has your multifaceted background influenced your editorial approach to balancing humor, dignity, absurdity and grief in this collection?
ZO: All of these experiences have certainly left their mark on the stories I write, but my relationship with creative documentary filmmaking has probably had the greatest influence.
I believe deeply that any literary work can, in some sense, be understood through that early definition of documentary: the “creative treatment of actuality.” Humor, absurdity and grief, then, are simply different aspects of my own artistic treatment of a reality I have lived through or witnessed. They are ways of re-presenting people I have known, or of reweaving images I have seen or imagined.
You’re not just applying that “creative treatment of actuality” to your own story, but also shaping how other contributors’ experiences of Syria come together on the page. How do you navigate the space between creative treatment and responsibility to the people and events behind their writing? Are there particular editorial instincts or boundaries you find yourself holding onto in that process?
ZO: I think there is a fundamental difference between the creative treatment of reality and reshaping it to fit a preconceived idea. That distinction becomes even more important when the story is not your own, but an experience lived by someone else.
As an editor, it was important to me that the different texts did not become a single voice or a homogeneous narrative about Damascus. Each writer has their own city, shaped by their memories, their relationship to it, and their perspective on it. I think part of the value of the book lies precisely in placing these different versions of the city alongside one another, with all their intersections and contradictions. So I saw my role as finding a form that allowed these voices to coexist and interact, rather than making them conform.
Of course, there are editorial interventions concerning structure, rhythm, clarity, and the relationship of each piece to the book as a whole. But the boundary I try to hold onto is that the editorial decision should never become more present than the person whose experience is being told. This is particularly important when writing about Syria, where even a small personal detail can carry behind it a history of violence, loss, or exile, and therefore cannot be treated simply as a literary matter.
This is why I understand the “creative treatment of actuality” as a search for the form best able to convey an experience, rather than the form that makes it most dramatic. Creativity here does not mean moving away from the truth, but finding the language and structure that allow a deeply personal experience to reach someone who has not lived it.
The Book of Damascus opens with a preface by the late Khaled Khalifa. What felt essential about ensuring his voice served as the collection’s threshold?
ZO: He really is the threshold through which the reader first looks onto Damascus. This has to do with the richness of Khaled Khalifa’s language and imagination, and with his extraordinary ability to condense so many events and realities into intensely concentrated pulses.
It also has to do with his place in contemporary Syrian literature: he was one of the very few writers and novelists who chose to remain in Damascus and write about its devastation throughout the harsh, lean years of Assad’s rule.
For these stories, his voice felt like the principal musical theme, the note that sets the rhythm for the stories that follow and prepares their path towards the reader’s heart.
In your introduction, you described the euphoria of December 2024 as “walking on water,” an impossible lightness that was followed by heavy grief. How do you see the individual stories anticipate the tension between joy and despair?
ZO: That is something I would rather leave to the reader to judge. But the relationship with Damascus has always been a tense one, even before the years of the revolution. That is simply the nature of this city: it weaves its spirit out of contradictions. Even when its face is smiling, it cannot help but carry deep scars.
So despite the very different backgrounds, styles and experiences of the writers in this collection, I think there is one thread running through all of the stories: an underlying tension, and questions that remain suspended without answers.
Your own story, “What Only the Chickens and Donkey Know about Abdulwahab,” is rich in tragicomedy irony – food and desire weighed down by the security state, the absurd death while laughing. How consciously did you weave in that “walking on water” paradox, pleasure followed by tragedy, while writing this?
ZO: When I began writing the story, the final image of its protagonist, Abdulwahab, was almost the only thing I could see. Everything else the contradictions and ironies the story creates or explores seeped out of that image.
In many ways, Abdulwahab reflects the relationship that many Syrians had with their own private lives under the rule of the two Assads. There were very few choices available to them. It was as though they were moving towards an inescapable fate already drawn for them by the dictator and his security apparatus. There was little room to maneuver and few alternative paths.
That is why Abdulwahab appears naïve and almost stripped of agency. And when he finally tries to escape his reality, even for a few moments, luck is not particularly kind to him.
At least, that is how I see him. I do not know whether the reader will come away with an entirely different impression of the story. I hope so. After all, what use is literature if it does not leave us with questions?
Some of the featured writers, (and your own protagonist, Abdulwahab) carry regional backgrounds and traumas from outside Damascus. How did you balance capturing the magnetism of the capital without erasing the deep regional fractures that exist across Syria?
ZO: For anyone who has lived in Damascus, creating that contradiction is not particularly difficult. It is already part of everyday reality; there is very little need to invent it. All you have to do is hold up a mirror to the streets of the city and you will see endless reflections of those contradictions.
Especially these days, I like to call Damascus “Disneyland for writers.” All a writer really needs to do is sit, watch, and record what they see honestly, with their eyes wide open. Its reality has always been, and will probably remain stranger than fiction itself.
And finally, what do you hope readers outside Syria take away from The Book of Damascus?
ZO: I hope the reader comes away with some impression of Damascus. Like the great ancient cities that fill our part of the world, it has its contradictions, its magic, its wounds and its complicated history.
And if Damascus has one quality that distinguishes it from other cities, it is this: the more you drink from its water, the thirstier you become. So I would not be surprised if readers finish this collection with a long list of questions about Damascus. And why not? Curiosity has never killed anyone.
Also read: “Every Alley, a Different Damascus” and “A Life not Defined by Death: A critical reading of The Book of Damascus”
Fifi Bat-hef is a literature enthusiast from Mombasa who revels in literary fiction and short stories, with a bias for postcolonial African and Arab narratives. Her reviews have appeared in Lolwe, The New Arab, Red Pepper Magazine, and Middle East Eye.