I was 25 years old and had a novel written when someone named the feeling that has chased me my entire life.
Survivor’s guilt.
I sat on a Zoom call with someone I didn’t know, but who’d read my debut novel and used these two words to describe it like it was nothing more than a theme. She asked me how survivor’s guilt impacted me as a Syrian American. I stared back at her blankly. Some people search their whole lives for a diagnosis—visiting countless experts, regurgitating their symptoms—until they obtain the validation that comes with uncovering what is wrong with them.
At first, I liked it: Two words that captured what I’d needed ninety thousand words of a novel to understand. They described the devastation I’d felt in the years of the Syrian Revolution and the exodus of Syrians that followed. Finally, I’d heard the two words that labeled how it feels to see a kid who looks like my mirror, who speaks in the same Arabic accent as me, who sings the same nursery rhymes as I sang, who roams the streets that I’ve memorialized in my head.
I see that child on the news while they get killed on those same streets instead of me.
To watch the boy like my brother in a shroud ready to be buried, his face a hue of gray that should never visit anyone’s face. To witness buildings, like my family’s apartments, blasted into a mountain of cement and dreams. To see orphans, like my nieces and nephews, searching for their martyred parents. To hear refugee mothers, like mine, scream at a camera that the world left them to die so what was the point of filming.
In my Arab household, like all the others, we watched this happen uncensored, way before social media was around. No journalists who’d be better actresses, no blurring, no ushering the kids out of the room. Those of us in the diaspora—old, young, sick— we all bear witness. I don’t know of an Arab who wasn’t acquainted with watching bombings falling on their homelands on the news since childhood. Because the difference between us and them is an enraging stroke of fate and injustice that altered our birthplace and gave us this life instead of theirs.
In another version of this world, I make the terrifying migration from my home in Damascus under fire and fear. I have never known a life without this rage that I am not there.
This was what my life was before the Syrian Revolution changed me forever. But this started before 2011, this struggle has existed during the war on Iraq or the call for a free Palestine long before I was born. The connection to the Palestinian right to their homeland is the greatest cause for Muslims everywhere, and that has been a fight for decades. The Syrian and Palestinian dialects are similar; our communities are linked. When I tell other Arabs my last name, they ask if I come from the Palestinian family with the same name because our surnames don’t follow the borders drawn by foreign powers. In the Palestinian genocide in Gaza and in the increasing aggressions in Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen. Our pain and loss are intertwined and are felt at the deepest level.
As the public’s awareness of the current Palestinian genocide grows, those of us who have lived with ‘survivor’s guilt’ for our whole lives can see that the people who have been recently visited by it are in the early stages of accepting it. Their denial, their rage, their spirals, we’ve felt it all before. There’s not much you can do once this ‘feeling’ comes, but here’s a heads up for the beginners.
Survivor’s guilt is two words and meaningless. It is an attempt to categorize a feeling which fails to capture a way of life. You don’t wake up with more guilt some days than others, you don’t learn to cope, you don’t talk this away in therapy. For those of us well-versed in this existence, this becomes the way we move through the world. Because it never goes away, this feeling that it is hopeless and powerless.
Guilt makes it sound like a curse, like it’s something I need to shake off to make myself right again. But I don’t remember a time before this, and nothing fills me with more purpose. Because movements are born where there is no hope or power.
This “survivor’s guilt” isn’t my trauma—it’s my pride. I have all this empathy, this compassion, this understanding that most people might never truly feel. It’s an honor to be related to such a resilient people.
It’s the string that pulls my chin up and the ringing in my voice when I say the words “I am Syrian.” It’s the shifting of soil when a grandmother says, “I am Palestinian.” It’s the only motivation I have to keep writing onto a blank paper or spitting my words at empty ears.
Maybe this article, like all my writing, is another long-winded explanation of why I refuse to allow my experience to be diluted. Maybe my refusal is another act of inflicting pain on myself, an inability to accept that this will only ever be guilt.
Survivor’s guilt.
I’m grateful for these two words. I can pitch to publishers and outlets to write about this indescribable way of life because of them.
They are why I get to write a blurb for my debut about a Syrian American confronting her privilege of being born in a Detroit suburb when she meets a Syrian refugee. How I can write my sophomore novel, Six Truths and a Lie, about six very different Muslim teenagers faced with criminal charges and an opposition determined to make them take the blame for a tragic attack. The kids point fingers at each other, frantically defending themselves, not knowing that at the expense of their freedom is watching others lose everything and the burden of our imaginary friend: survivor’s guilt.
We are filled with their stories of the people we lost, the children we’re losing, our reflections who live on the other side of the world.
Reem, “the soul of my soul.”
Wael al-Dahdouh, the Al Jazeera journalist who buried his entire family after Israel massacred them.
Refaat Alareer, the Palestinian writer who penned “If I Must Die” before being murdered in a targeted killing.
Hind Rajab, a six-year-old Palestinian child whose call to the emergency responders lives in my head forever, was killed by Israeli forces in her car.
They are the true poets, and our survival—if you can call it that—makes us their mouthpiece.
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