Living in the Past

Lately, I have relinquished the habit of planting things in soil and have taken to creating water gardens. I have replaced earth with water. This occurred during the ‘latest war’, a phrase liable to alteration at a moment’s notice; wars, here in the Middle East, do not end. Right now, in this moment, I can define ‘the latest war’ as the attacks on Iran and Lebanon by the USA and Israel, and as the reciprocal bombardment by Iran that extends across the entirety of the Gulf states as well as other states in the region. The news hasn’t called it a World War, but it is a war of many countries that plaster it with slogans of peacemaking. Meanwhile, amid the flames of these wars, I was travelling between Lebanon, Qatar, and France. France is supposedly my official exile because I hold French citizenship, or I suppose I am an exiled writer in France. But I was in Doha this time, where we were subjected to daily bombings. Doha is one of the nicest places you can imagine. Quiet and serene. It is impossible to imagine it being part of this war, and as I heard the sound of bombs, I said to myself, ‘But this is a lovely war!’ In the recent past, and in Syria, war for me meant pulling corpses out from beneath the rubble; in Doha, war meant warning sirens on our mobile phones, not leaving our homes, and listening to the ongoing battle between missiles and anti-aircraft defences. Once again, I said to myself, ‘This war is delightful!’ I was more accustomed to brutal comparisons between atrocities. I say this because I wanted to reflect on the past, which neither moves nor ends here. War is my time in which I weigh degrees of contradiction between past, present, and future. 

I will return to the water garden I created in the most recent house I lived in (I exchange houses and exiles non-stop). Inside glass vases of assorted shapes and sizes, I place my plants. I fill the vases halfway with water to the same level so that the line separating the transparency of glass from the transparency of water appears clear and even across them all – a delicate, precise line. I place the variously shaped vases – oblong, square, prismed, cylindrical, and circular – in front of a large glass window so that the scene transforms into a carnival of radiance from the movement of light doing its work, delineating the frail interval between the line of glass and the line of water. Then I position my plants so their roots are clearly visible to the eye. In water, the roots resemble an Impressionist painting, and they remain bound by the large halo that the sunrays reflect over ever more minute details, and I am able to see the subtlest movement of the roots, how they position themselves, alter, inhale, or writhe. These roots are right here, clear and apparent – unlike mine.

In the space between the leaves bursting out of the vases and the sleeping roots coming to settle in the water – this space known as ‘living in the void’, a waterless void inside the glass container – this frail, separating space between water and air is what gathers together past, present, and future. This space makes it clear to me that I have no wish for the earth to conceal the watery roots that, through the work of days, transform into beings independent of green leaves. These plants resemble the state of my own relationship with time. I cannot name ‘the past’, or ‘exile’, or ‘yearning’, or anything that can be explained by a clearly visible idea upon which I can construct a clearly visible concept of what is termed ‘the past’. The past means memory. Isn’t that so? I am currently finishing a new book that commits to memory the massacres committed along the Syrian coast, and I have placed all the memories collected inside a glass vessel known as ‘the past’. In doing so, however, I wish to summon up the future, a future that does not arrive in this region cursed with wars. I can never consider planting things in earth. I treat my plants fairly – I make them live like me. I aspire to be just to the living beings around me and do my best in how I live, because like my plants, I am without soil. In the course of my many exiles, I have no need to pull up my roots, to move from water to water, from nothingness to nothingness. I do not live in the past, because the past is always present and I cannot name it thus. I walk across the water then plunge into it and discover the nothingness of the world around me, then I plunge once again. I live the past and the present as a single action, and there is no future. A gelatinous state that does not cling to anything – that is the past. My plants and I move from water to water, and our roots have started becoming gills.

I did the same thing the same thing with my library. Books are the past: they are created out of the present and the future. This is the absolute minimum of what can be supposed to be the root and foundation of a writer’s life. Recently, for the third time, I left behind the library I created in France. I used to carry these books in my heavy suitcases; I would buy books and arrange them. The leather-bound volumes of art and art history are my favourites and they were afforded priority – huge books I have carried from country to country. They infused the roots I planted in the soil of exile with strength and permanence, but I left them anew for yet another exile. In Damascus, when I left my huge library 15 years ago, I was literally torn apart. The paperbacks that I’ve lived alongside, the characters within them, are part of the minutiae of my daily life. I would re-read Dostoyevsky and debate with Raskolnikov on the subject of evil. I could turn the pages over time and again without growing bored. Antonio Tabucchi and I were good friends, Mrs Dalloway likewise, and I lived inside Virginia Woolf’s room. I would move my fingers over the words on the pages. Roots are words, the words I need to pass my eyes and fingers over to stay alive. Every book I own is a complete planet, and with my books and my library, I feel as though I have a past, a present, and a future. This is how my writer friends, they and their characters, lived in my house; they were friends and loved ones. I used to think all the time about my books, lonely between the walls, and I would tell myself that life without a library is a life without a past. My library is my roots, my past, my life – and it has vanished. Exile means our books have left us. 

In Doha, the most recent place I have lived in and where I currently and temporarily reside, the situation was different. I wanted to transport my books from Damascus and Paris to Doha where my family has settled following the coastal massacres in Syria in March 2025, and because family are roots. I kept moving between their various exiles, between Lebanon and France and Qatar, and thus I failed to move either library and the books remained in Syria and France. Lately, I have resorted to composing an electronic library of thousands of books that migrates with me wherever I go, just as I did with films. Well, here it is impossible to think of a timeline of everything I need to live: cinema, books, green leaves. All of them live in nothingness – the books and films in the ether, the plants in water, all changeable elements. Water and air are two of the four elements that create life. I cannot possess earth, but I can possess water and air, and in this way I can continue living.

I don’t live in the past. I recycle it, as waste is recycled. I invent new reasons for life so I don’t halt in the past, because the past does not move. The past forms part of the yearning for what we were, but when the processes of uprooting and exile are repeated, when death never stops arriving, the past becomes meaningless. War acknowledges neither past, nor present, nor future. We live only to survive. We live to stay alive between the day’s beginning and its end, we live to save our families and our children, we live and we try to move forward, the same as any other creature. It is the survival instinct that does not admit reflection on the past, and I believe it is one explanation for why I am inexorably drawn to the work of documenting the suffering of others; I want to feel that I have roots, and my roots, my very being as a writer, are closely linked to such suffering. The past is a movement of continuous pain, and, to me, life is a gruelling battle that begins in the morning and ends in the evening. The following morning, if we have survived, another life begins. And so it goes. Those living in a state of survival do not think of the past. Perhaps I can speak about the future as a contingent event that does not extend beyond thought of the immediate moment. 

Yes, I am still battling and recycling time. My past is like those roots in water, which remind me every morning that there is no permanence to be found there. Because the immediate moment prompts me to remember that the most important thing I can do to preserve the past is to live the present to the full. This is a means of confronting the insolence of relentless death . I defy past, present, and future with the staunchness and resolution that can only ever be achieved by seizing all times, all at once, with every breath.