About the author (in a way)

I was born in Syria, in a village called Taara near the city of Suweida.

We didn't have electricity in the village until I was seven, but I've understood the value of light ever since. I first learned to write in lamplight and so letters seem to me to shine even as the world grows dark.

I learned everything important in life by the time I was seven years old: the meaning of light, nature, what it meant to be born innocent. All of that before the grind of school, party, and sect. Letters and words were the only things that could fly me up over the walls of these confines, and as I near forty, it seems not much has changed.

Words make us free. Anytime a place or a period of time goes wrong, the suffering turn to words. Words console, they give hope. I know their value because I grew up in a dazzling darkness. Sarmada is part of that darkness though it was written in the flicker of a white candle and the faint light of a lamp. As words grow, space narrows, and as ideas expand, words fail to stretch. I felt I had no choice but to leave the most mysterious place I've ever known.

That was Damascus.

I moved there when I was only eighteen, desperately seeking love, freedom, and life. And it took me a decade of living in Damascus to realize that it's the only place on earth that doesn't care about passing time. It's puzzlingly steady. Everyone runs and hurries, wars and emigrates, but she simply waits for them to return.

No matter where you end up, Damascus is there waiting for you.

It's a mind-blowing and captivating city, cocooned in magic. You've got to fall in love, go to jail, go hungry and hang about before Damascus will give you the keys to its secrets. Otherwise it'll just carry on, content merely to be the oldest inhabited capital in the world.

When the brief Damascus Spring collapsed in 2001, I moved to Dubai.

It's the total opposite of Damascus. Dubai is a city of fantasies. Damascus is a fantasy city.

But Dubai gave me a passport to other cities: to London, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Prague, even to Paris, where in the drizzling autumn, on some side street, I met a woman who combined the darkness of Suweida, the light of Damascus, and the fancy of Dubai. We got married and she led me to a place where I could settle down. And then came Sarmada. Born out of the wombs of fertile cities. And my son, Adad, too, has been born—a second baby—as I watch my country struggle to bring its own more beautiful child into the world. Syria is in labor and freedom draws near.

Fadi Azzam, 2011