On the occasion of the current catastrophe in the Middle East, we’ve invited authors from the region to write stories, poems and essays in order to draw attention to a different truth from the „breaking news“ from this region.

I leave behind me, every day, a grave for the man I was, a shroud for the man I will be. I leave behind me, every day, a bird that will surely arrive at my mother's bed before me.
I'm tearing my skin off here. The trade we learn in exile becomes an identity: tearing and erasing. It is we who re-examine our histories and their bitterness, and weave them into our present, where a deep torment persists. It poisons them, and every time we manage to overcome it, the scars of nostalgia and memories reappear.
Every time I tear at my skin, I find a fragment of it: men's fingernails stuck in the old town, clotted blood from childhood, my mother's hands washing me in our cold apartment, the smell of rosewater, my father's blows with his pomegranate-wood belt, the pricks of a blue Bic pen my brother used to stick into my skin. Every time I dig, I find the past written in my flesh: painful traces of love, frenzied kisses, bites of fear, my lovers become ghosts of the forest. Every time I tear myself apart, I come across broken steel, the steel of the city I left behind. This steel forgotten by those who remodelled me here, in this new country.

Suhaib Ayoub is a Lebanese playwright and novelist, author of two novels in Arabic published by Dar Nawfal in Beirut: Un homme de satin (2018) and Le loup de la famille (2024).

Here, we are forced, consciously or unconsciously, to reinvent ourselves, to step aside a little in order to welcome layers of new identities: some we approach with caution, others we must accept in order to adapt. Here, I have been reassembled. With them, I set out to redefine myself and rebuild my map. A new map is necessary, because we are no longer there. That difficult, tender, explosive, devastating, soothing, wild and miserable "there".
Here, in the present, we must create a mental map where mourning is not only possible, but constant. It becomes a permanent imprint, our language as exiles, different as we are. This mourning repairs our relationship to what we have experienced and what we are still experiencing.
 There - our homeland - everything is memorized. We move lightly, without need of guide or landmark . There, everything we've ever known, loved, hated or envied is now behind us, never to return. For, as the poet Issa Makhlouf writes, "it is on the side of absence that he returns". There, even incomplete, we knew, without our eyes, how to get home, walk our streets, sleep in our beds. But here, we're lost. We sleep in the beds and rooms of others, and we almost never sleep.
In exile, I don't sleep: I get lost in my nightmares, I sink on the tiles, in the meanders of the mind, in this ignored and accumulated fear, and in a death that survives the breaches of our lives.
I have shaped my body, broken many times during its long journey between cities, objects and the rubble of grief, and I have reinvented its inner exile. There is an exile within an exile, and every writer has multiple exiles. My body, now a wreck, finds its scars and its past in places that have become its refuges. This body has no home. Here, I have no home, and I know, deeply, that homes are above all our first homes, even if they are soiled, imbued with guilt or inherited hatred.
Imagination has thus become my home, and exile its future: it reflects and builds it, concept after concept, experience after experience, layer upon layer. Today, I am an edifice shaped by exile, without feet for anchor. It flies, settles for a moment to rest, then flies away again. It searches but never finds, for it has no roots, uprooted long ago. So I'm free. And this is where exile exerts its power: it shapes this freedom, pushes it madly, to the point of crystallizing my vision of the world, both as an individual and as a writer.
For nine years, I have not known how this body, forged by anguish, fear, distance and rupture, could return to a deep sleep. How could I not go back there, in nightmares and dreams? How could I not feel their fists smothering me, shaking me with my own weight and waking up, terrified? One day, Gloria Mizrahi, the protagonist of my novel, woke up in Madrid. She smelled bread coming from the oven in Plaza Malasaña, and committed suicide by returning to her city, Tripoli, with the last trickle of blood dripping from her temple. She lay among the objects she had taken with her from the city she had left behind forever.
Here I can express my deepest fear: that I will share her fate. That I'll end up committing suicide in someone else's city, far from my own. For, as Jabbour Douaihi once wrote in his collection of short stories: "Dying among your own kind is like falling asleep".
I am that being who wakes up, panicked like Gloria, gulps down water at two in the morning, and contemplates the silence of this city we call the City of Light. He leaves his house and takes a walk. There's no noise, maybe just that of a homeless man who's lost his drink. I'm like him, homeless. I refuse to acknowledge my condition. I put on my patterned shirts, colourful brooches and silk scarves, and step outside so they don't discover my wandering. I'm incomplete, and I won't admit it. But I try to live, with severed roots and a rebuilt body, whose joints try to come to life, to move, to stumble.
My exile, however, has broadened the horizons of my mind and enriched my knowledge. It has led me to dialects and languages, some of which I have mastered. It has offered me experimentation, freedom, and taken me where I could never have gone before: towards knowledge almost accessible to all, experiences almost magical, and relationships marked by diversity, freedom, and wonder.
Books, cinema and theatre, now part of my new life, are companions to my severe solitude in exile. They now form an invisible home that protects me, above all, from myself. When I landed at Charles de Gaulle airport, the last vestige of my former self had faded. It fell away like a distant sleep. I don't remember it. I can't even remember the last time I saw my city, Tripoli. So I imagine everything, with the innocence of those who reconnect with their memories.
I tried, and still try, to reinvent my city. Because here, I've been able to recreate it with immense spaces for evocation and love. I am no longer bitter about the pain it inflicted on me. On the contrary, I've learned to appreciate it by documenting it, freeing it from its bloody past and personal tragedies, and stitching together its stories with a detached gaze that no longer rejects it. Literature, this act of writing, reflecting and composing, has offered me playgrounds I'd lost. Literature is here, not there.
The literature I fashion in my Parisian bedrooms, in the city's bars, in its tormented nights, and with the freedom that exile has expanded in all its forms, today gives my writing about my distant city a particular intensity. It loosens my tongue and my fingers, and allows me to say what was unspeakable in that city. It helps me to move forward, to build another Suhaib, detached from the one I was, retaining only his name. Suhaib has become an enigma even to himself. His current outfit has nothing in common with the one he once wore, neither his accent, nor his language, nor even his writing, which now breathes the language of exile, through its words and its meaning.
I left behind my old language, forged by written journalism in Tripoli, then in Beirut. I've abandoned my mother tongue, which sometimes trips me up. So I take refuge in writing poetry in French, as a way of acknowledging this last aspect of my identity. I stroll the bars of Strasbourg-Saint-Denis, eat in the restaurants of Bastille and Saint-Germain, like an invisible man. Maybe it's a secret pleasure: becoming a ghost. I walk fearlessly through the metro stations, up the stairs of Montmartre, and lie lightly on the grass of the Luxembourg Gardens, observing this world with the tenderness of a stranger.
I am a stranger, as I already was in my own city, and as I will be in every city in the world. There is no escape from my exile, no escape from my strangeness. When I arrived in Paris, on a scorching day in late summer 2015, I left my body in Tripoli. And when I arrived here, I discovered that many ghosts had settled inside me.
For a long time, I believed that we keep our past imprints in our pockets, and that we can sow them behind us like seeds, to guide us one day. But I've come to understand that there is no path for us. We're just bodies shaped and transformed by the roads we've been forced to take. I'm a new body, with no connection to the one I was, nor to the one I'll become. I am a being who sleeps in a poem, in a movie scene, who wanders like a ghost between café tables, inventing heroes to bring back with him, at night, to his city.
Every day, I return to this city, then wake up, terrified, fleeing it. I quickly swallow a sip of water, and head down the street to find that homeless man who lost his drink.