Najat Abdul Samad is a Syrian fiction writer, poet and gynecologist. She has published several novels, including La Ma' Yarweeha (No Water to quench their Thirst), winner of the 2018 Katara Prize for the Arabic Novel, published in a German translation. She currently lives in Berlin, Germany.

I have two professions: gynaecologist and writer. The third, which always accompanies them, is reading. I don't come from a family of writers, poets, journalists or luminaries. I was born into a poor, religious family. My father was a bricklayer and my mother a housewife. They had nine daughters, then two sons. But I belong to a generation that has read a lot and cried a lot. When I'm writing, there's a phrase by Douglas Adams, the English novelist and musician, that always accompanies me to my desk. He said in his husky voice: "Writing is very easy, you just have to stare at a blank sheet of paper until your forehead bleeds."

Seven years ago, I found myself living in Germany, a large and beautiful country but with one small detail missing: it wasn't my homeland. I arrived here mid- life, under duress. I don't know if I should call it exile or diaspora, but in both cases, Syria, which had always been 'here', became 'there'.

From my very first days in Berlin, with the impetus of experimentation, out of necessity, and having left behind the suit, the high heels and the coiffed hair, I learned to walk in sportswear and trainers, a rucksack over my shoulders containing my new papers, a bottle of water, a sandwich of black bread and cheese, and a recipe for patience in the face of what had just happened in the life of a woman suddenly alone, a foreigner and more fragile than she had ever been.

I wandered Berlin for hours, days on end, through its streets and forests, alone, alone, alone. No family around me, no friends, not a single memory to connect me to this foreign capital. I wasn't born there, I hadn't grown up there, nor did I love it. I hadn't spent my childhood or adolescence there, and had never walked with a lover, heavy hearted, down it's narrow alleys.

I began to seek security in the trees, the flowers, the birds and the bees that flew high in the sky, up by the treetops. I watched the dogs pampered by their masters, I contemplated the tranquillity on the faces of the elderly who had no fear of old age. I breathed air that had neither been poisoned by fear, hunger nor the sleep of the destitute in the street; air that had not been tainted by the brutality of dictatorships, religious extremism or insecurity. Syria was far away - the land that the tyrant had ruthlessly scattered, throwing his children to the six corners of the world. Others are still there, struggling, running for a semblance of security, a piece of bread, a tiny candle to light up an interminable night ; or disappeared into the darkness of prisons, dead underground, or imagining themselves ascending to heaven as martyrs; or still here on earth, alive but missing an arm, an eye, a leg, a kidney, hope - or desperately seeking a glimmer of light, a bit of warmth, or an embassy that would grant them a visa, even for the Bermuda Triangle.

I survived, but I'm in exile. I cried, because things weren't right in my country either. The covers of the books I've written flash through my mind. I didn't publish them in Syria, nor did I publish a single article in the Syrian press. They were all born abroad, prohibited in Syria like any form of freedom of expression, reading or writing. But my books have found their way to readers. It is through them that I am learning to follow my own path towards what I desire.

I called on the heroes of my novels: "Didn't I give you life and open the way to salvation in your exile? Now it's your turn to help me; come and teach me not to fall".
And they came to whisper to me what they had learned: "Exile can also be a great opportunity, a providential country that rebuilds you in a different way. You're safe, and as long as your spirit remains healthy, it's always possible to rediscover a taste for life. The only place you can go is the future!
I temporarily tucked my past away in the attic of my memory and turned my gaze solely forward and upward. It's there, up there and ahead, that I'm going to rebuild myself from scratch, or even from a little less.

And since I arrived in Germany with my knowledge, my reading, my experience and my profession as a doctor - which Ibn Khaldun called "the honourable profession" - I converted to German. Like a little schoolgirl, I enrolled at a language school, took the exams and ended up speaking the language of the country. I then worked as a social worker while getting my medical diploma recognised, until I was able to work as a doctor again. I managed my life in my new society with my head held high, and I saw with my own eyes the changing way people saw me: from charity to a relationship of equals, and respect from one human being to another.

But exile, for those who don't know it, is a little death. And even if you live there for a long time, as I did, there remains an insurmountable pain - a pain that can only be fought through memory and language. Writing has become my surrogate homeland in exile.

I thought the past would fade, dissolve, die; but the years of exile pass, and that past does not fade, does not die. My native village never leaves me: "Al-Douwayra", in Jebel al-Arab, "Al-Rayyan", in the governorate of Soueida, in southern Syria, where my paternal grandfather had emigrated from Mount Sheikh, in western Syria, in search of a land that offered bread without humiliation. Before him, his grandfather had emigrated from the Chouf mountains in Lebanon, where our family comes from. A mountain range that has seen the birth of generations moved from one peak to another, at the mercy of sectarian wars or wars for bread, struggling to anchor themselves in these mountains and adopt their stubborn character.

My paternal grandfather had emigrated to Jebel al-Arab as an old man, blind and deeply pious. He was accompanied by my grandmother, also elderly, and a twelve-year-old boy, Hussein, their only son, born of a late marriage. Years later, Hussein became my father.

From childhood, Hussein had to look after his parents. He grew up with the same piety as them, memorising the books of wisdom (the religious book of the Druze), the community to which we belong, and more specifically the Ajaouid group, rigorous in their faith. He soon learned the mason's trade, and became an accomplished calligrapher, copying the books of wisdom with his expert hand, binding them himself and decorating their covers with mosaics similar to those in the Umayyad mosque in Damascus, so that the works looked as if they had come out of the workshops of the ancient master printers. Hussein sold them, using the money to support his parents.

From my father, I inherited a trinity: poverty, hard work and ambition. I was six years old when my father decided to move to Soueida, where there were more job opportunities. He bought a small, isolated plot of land - cheap, of course - which he cleared and then on it, built a rudimentary house for us.

We planted trees and vegetables that produced two harvests a year, one in summer and the other in winter. Then he bought two cows, and we girls were the only ones to support this small farm which, thanks to our efforts, produced as much as one five times bigger. There was no electricity at home. We learnt to get up early. My sister and I milked the cows, worked the land, did the housework and then walked about a kilometre to school. In winter, the rain or snow would seep into our cheap boots, and our feet would freeze from the damp and the cold, but it didn't matter to us: at school the stories of our Arabic language, its songs and its science lessons were waiting for us. Their call kept us warm until we arrived.

We girls walked in single file like beads on a rosary. We were nine sisters, and our parents were still waiting for a male heir. My father brought us up to be religious, like him. And the religious rules condemned public and secular schools: they distract from the worship of God and lead to polytheism. The sons and daughters of pious men were to attend them just until they could read and write. After that, the boys were to take up free trades, and the girls were to devote themselves to housework, waiting their turn to marry.

And religion was not wrong to fear the consequences of educating girls, to fear the awakening of their minds. Every day, we borrowed books from the school library, which we pawned for two francs - all our pocket money meant for a sandwich or sweets. But stories attracted us more than sweets. They were our key to the world; we girls who knew that as soon as we deciphered the letters we would be forcibly snatched from the paradise of school, and promised to marry before we were even fifteen, to give birth and reproduce the lives of our fathers...
But reading had forged our minds so that they would not be moulded by our fathers' hands.

We have lived more in the world of stories than in our earthly world. Reading took us far beyond our inevitable fate. As well as the stories my mother's mother told me, we grew up with Osama magazine, the Green Library series, Dar al-Ilm lil-Malayin, Gibran Khalil Gibran, Mikhaïl Naïma, the novels of Naguib Mahfouz and Hanna Mina, those of the European Renaissance, Soviet literature, and later American, Latin American, Japanese and Chinese literature...

At home, when we argued and insulted each other, like all children, one would call the other "Shylock in The Merchant of Venice", and when another wanted to make up, she would apologise like this: "You're as kind as Victor Hugo's Cosette, or as inspiring as Esmeralda, Quasimodo's beloved gypsy, or as wise as Hind bint al-Nu'man, or as beautiful as Marilyn Monroe, Kennedy's mistress...".

I read in secret, unbeknownst to my family, who lived in a single room heated by a stove, while outside it was snowing and windy. Under the pillow where I hid the novel, the voices of the fairies would call me to look at it with one eye, while the other watched my father to make sure he was busy and didn't see my secret sin. One day, I carelessly left a book by Ghassan Kanafani on the shelf where I kept my clothes - an open shelf, as we didn't have a wardrobe. My father saw it and flew into a rage: "Any reading other than religious books will lead you to hell and a miserable fate." That night, I sank into bed, my eyes riveted to the ceiling, where the damp and the remains of rainwater leaks had drawn random shapes. Among them I made out the image of a bearded man in a turban, whom I imagined to be my father's god, reaching out to strangle me.

Television was forbidden in the homes of devout Druze. At home, there was only one radio, reserved for my father, who only used it to listen to the news and weather. When he was away, I would take the radio down from the shelf to listen to the news, cultural programmes, games and whatever else was happening in the world. Still very young, I already knew what the two blocs were - capitalist and socialist - and what the Non-Aligned Movement meant.

Who could rival the dreams of a child brought up with a passion for knowledge?

Did my father sense my ambitions, which were growing like small floods? Did he, who had done his utmost to turn me away from books that awakened in me a desire for knowledge, hope to convince me to immerse myself solely in religious reading, so that I would resign myself to accepting God's will and his decree?

I wasn't removed from the paradise of school once primary school came to an end. In fact, I was a brilliant pupil, and every year the teachers interceded with my father until I passed my baccalauréat. That's when the real battle began. I won the right to go to medical school. The university was in Damascus, and the religious rules stipulated that "a woman must only travel when necessary and accompanied by a mahram". Patriarchal society had even taken this rule a step further: "A woman is not allowed to travel further than the space of a tethered hen". And my father wasn't about to break the teachings of religion. An enlightened sheikh issued him with an innovative fatwa: he could confront the other sheikhs and silence them by arguing that I would become a doctor, and that I could examine their wives, thus sparing them from having to reveal themselves in front of men. It was through this door that he passed, and in my eyes, it was a profoundly revolutionary gesture!

I studied my first year at the Faculty of Medicine at Damascus University and received a scholarship to continue my medical studies in the Soviet Union. It was impossible to discuss this with my family. 

Of course, no teacher, no uncle, no enlightened sheikh supported my decision. They said I had crossed the line, that I had undermined my father's social and religious position. Even my mother didn't support me: she was overwhelmed by her own torments, concerned about my father's status and wanted to marry us off as quickly as possible.

But I dreamt big, nourished by books and by the stories told to me by my mother's mother - that exceptional woman whose biology, soul, vocation as a doctor and storyteller I inherited. She was a woman of rare wisdom, who had lived in the shadows, far from the limelight, like a full-time institution, acting with taste, discretion, and without fanfare, organising village life from the courtyard and back rooms of the house. She was the village 'daïa'. We were all born into her hands - we, her granddaughters, and all the children of the village. Once a month, she would carry twenty kilos of provisions on her back for my uncles who were studying in town. She would tell us her stories as she spun wool, wove carpets by hand, or fashioned clay jugs for us, which lent the water their earthy taste...

Her voice lulled me to sleep as she recounted the epics of the heroes of the Great Syrian Revolt, popular poems, the stories of the prophet Job, Joseph, Dhu al-Nun al-Basri, Rabia al-Adawiya, as well as those of Arab princes and their lovers: Hamda and Mohammed, Antar and Abla, and many others... She told her stories with a clear mind, a memory that flowed like a river, and a theatrical diction that many professional storytellers could never match. Her stories made love a religion, courage a code of honour, determination a principle, sincerity an obligation; they rejected injustice, condemned lies and liars, and advocated the victory of truth over falsehood.

And even if what my grandmother told us was sometimes myth, utopia or pure fantasy, it was a faithful version of what we read in children's books written by educators. It was this same world that fired my childish mind with questions: "If I had a choice, which side would I be on? These were the questions I asked when I was a child with a passion for storytelling - and they have stayed with me throughout my journey to becoming a doctor and a writer, inhabited by the spirits of writing and by my own battles, foremost among them: truth, resistance to oppression, injustice and any attack on freedom and human dignity.

In my grandmother's time, women were not completely crushed or humiliated. They still had a space, to a greater or lesser extent depending on their personal abilities. They had to draw on their individual courage, even their deepest reserves, to wrest a right that has now become a matter of course. With each step, their hands and feet bleeding, they blazed their own trail, opening a breach, however small, to allow other women to move forward. Of my mother's generation, only a few women - very few - learned to read and write; some became primary school teachers. In my generation, less than a third of women went on to university, in Damascus, the capital, or more rarely in Aleppo. One of their number, I had a personal project that was maturing in my head with the ardour of a lover and the patience of a mother: I would fight to break the rule of the "tethered chicken", whatever the cost. I would leave, get a higher degree, live the Soviet experience and pass it on to my country - a country that can only recover thanks to the will of its women, even before that of its men.

I was stripped of all weapons, except for a secret light inside me that called out to me: "Risk everything you possess to learn, and you will come out the winner." This was my second cause.

My education was a daily battle against my father - pure, repeated oppression. We were like two adversaries in our divergent reading choices. After much struggle, with neither of us giving in, we came to understand that we were, in truth, following the same path in life: he towards his God in heaven, and my sisters and I towards our God, the conscience that resides within us and guides us, through our work, along the earthly path. It's as if we were two sides of the same coin: my father, whom I always saw surrounded by religious books, his hands dripping with sweat and fatigue as he provided for this family - this tribe. And he continued to read, even after work.

We were not raised to be individualistic. A group spirit reigned in the home, the family, the neighbourhood... My parents never gave us affection in the traditional sense of the word, but they gave us something else. They taught us that public affairs are also personal affairs, and that each of us is responsible for them. That work is a sacred part of human life. My mother farmed and worked like my father. She also cared for widowed and poor neighbours. From my parents, we learned that parents don't need to tell their children: "Don't steal, don't lie" - it's enough for them to be sincere and honest themselves for their children to follow.

The family is our first institution. School comes next. This was my third cause.

The only person who supported me in my travel plans was my maternal grandmother. She asked me: "Are you going to the Soviet Union at public expense? I replied: "Yes". She said: "Then leave your father to me. I'll try to convince him.

My illiterate grandmother instinctively believed in the existence of a state where citizens would not be orphans, if the institutions really worked. She had believed in education ever since she would carry twenty kilos of provisions on her back for my uncles in town, as if she were feeding her own soul and not just her children. Without realising it, she embodied the words of the German philosopher Hegel: "It is education that makes men moral".

My grandmother wasn't able to convince my father, or appease him, or even reduce his anger. But her attitude did calm a little the thousand demons that, in turn, came to assail me with fear when I finally left to study, accompanied by my father's anger and a secret, sincere intention: I won't let him down, if he'll only let me have a few years!

I kept my secret promise to my father. His face, and the cracks on his hands, remained my driving force to study with all my might, until I became a doctor. In my final year of study, I witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union, the regime that had guaranteed its people education, housing, healthcare and jobs, while taking away their freedom of choice. It's true that you can't live without bread, but you die without freedom!

I returned and worked in my country for 25 years, between my practice and hospitals, in obstetrics and gynaecology. My practice was my window on the reality at the bottom of our society, where religious power and paternal power combine to prevent women and girls from doing anything other than what they decree. And above all that, despotic power represses everyone.

My job took up all my time, I read as much as I could and my mind was always racing. The tumult kept echoing in my head until I started writing my first novel, at the age of forty. It was about the forced exile of the men of our country to earn their bread, the suffering of the women left behind, and the children deprived of their fathers. Young people too, with university or higher education qualifications, ready to do anything to obtain a work visa in the Gulf or Libya. Because there is no dignity for the unemployed in their own country. It was from them that I got the idea for my first novel, Bilad al-Manafi (The Land of Exile).

I went to Beirut with my manuscript, to Dar al-Rayyes. What drove me to leave Syria for this famous Lebanese publishing house? I wasn't alone. Syrian creative writers were fleeing the censorship that was crushing all free, critical and constructive thought. That's why my eight books, children of exile, were born.

In 2011, the Syrian revolution broke out. The regime crushed it by any means: repression of freedom of expression, barrel bombs, chemical weapons on civilian neighbourhoods. We resisted. I got involved in humanitarian aid on the ground, in workshops to empower displaced women, and I documented what was happening through my writing. In this climate of terror, I wrote three books: Syrian guernicas, In the tenderness of war, Houses of the Homeland. Fear and courage went hand in hand to guide me in denouncing the horror of political and social injustice, which had been affecting men and women for a long time, but which was made worse by the war. And women continued to suffer, over and above patriarchal authority. All the paths of life converged on the women, who became victims of dictatorships, wars, exile and masculinity. The women's destinies shared the same pain, in all the diversity of their personal wounds: those whose bodies, hearts and souls had been violated by the wars; those who had lost an eye, a hand, their virginity, their child; those who had been widowed, their flesh, their clothes or their homes burnt. They did not accept that they were simply victims; they never stopped trying to rise above their tragedy.

The war dragged on and intensified, and we all began to slowly die. I cured women with medicine and I cured my pain with writing, with art, which is the only thing that can keep us alive in this age of generalised death. I withdrew into myself to lay down this ancient burden and write my novel There's no water to drench it, far from the inferno. I wrote and wrote, giving myself over to the torments of writing, protesting, shouting, revealing myself, going deep inside myself to find what was sleeping there, soothing my pain, settling an old score with my mad love for Soueida, my city, for the village of Douayra where I was born. My attachment to its black stones, its rare water, the thousand tiny details in its narrow spaces... I extracted them from my head to deposit them, one by one, on the keys of my computer. In the hope of healing, and of going far away, when my life there was no longer safe.

With blood on my forehead, I wrote There's no water to drench it, and I left.

I won the Katara prize in Berlin. But my real reward had already come from the words of the critics and readers. Men wrote about how their characters had softened, how their behaviour towards their wives and children had changed after reading it. And many women wrote that they recognised themselves in the characters, that they felt less alone than they thought. So these are our readers: our unknown friends, the silent witnesses in our minds as we write a novel. Through our writing and their reading, we complement each other; we communicate through reason, through weighed words that order the chaos of concepts and values. All within the pleasure of a carefully constructed story, in the hope of awakening the best in human beings, inspiring them to create their own dreams, to fight for life, not death.

This is what the novel does: a sudden intrusion into the reader's intimacy, a purification of instincts, an awakening of the will, a goal that takes shape. A parallel life, supported by the beauty of form and the depth of meaning; a new light on the link between man and existence; a revelation of the underbelly of the world and its torments; an elevation of the earthly world, making it less ugly, less unfair; an inexhaustible source for man, so that he never ceases to dream; he discovers his dream, clings to it with strength, and because of it, can rise up.

This is the novel: an act of fidelity to beauty, a gift for the afflicted, a shoulder to support us whenever we are alone. It is a white revolution, slow and profound, which will eventually bring about change, even if it takes time...

In exile, I continued to follow the path of fiction, and my latest novel, Le Fil du pendule, was written in Berlin. It is the culmination of my dual vocation: medicine and writing. It explores the life of a gynaecologist and the theme of motherhood. I found myself writing, once again, about the issues facing our Syrian people, including the question of women - but from a different perspective. I found myself addressing myself as much as the world, and particularly young people, especially those in Syria, who have only known the face of war. These young people have the right to know that there was, and still is, a time of beauty, a magnificent country with a long history - and that this time will come again.

As I wrote it, I gradually realised that this exile, while it had taken so much from me, had also given me so much. It was as if I had had to reach Germany, to travel thousands of kilometres, to finally turn to my innermost depths, to delve into them, to reconnect with my roots and discover myself - as a human being and as a woman. I realised that sadness and joy are personal experiences; that my pain, whether that of an individual or a Syrian woman, is neither the greatest nor the only pain in this world. I began to take an interest in human beings, in the suffering of people all over the world, all linked by the same umbilical cord, the root of which is the pain born of the absence of justice.

As a human being and as a woman, I will never stop dreaming of and pursuing justice. To be what I want to be, not what the authorities - whoever they may be - want to make of me. To raise my sons and daughters with respect for the human person, so that dignity becomes a natural right for men, women and children. I want a world without war - not to have to pay with my life or that of my children for conflicts, nor to be tested by war to discover how far it can hurt me and how far I can survive. I want to live as an aware, responsible woman, happy to have these small, ordinary human experiences, in my country or elsewhere. I want to come and live in Germany by choice, not by compulsion.

And today, the Assad regime has fallen in my country. I can choose to stay abroad or return. In either case, I will continue to do what I have always done: move forward and choose writing as my homeland.