In July 2025, “Syrians” burned down Mamdouh Azzam’s library and home in the village of Taara, west of As-Suwayda. According to the writer, who was in Britain at the time, the attack took place on 14 July, when “fighters from Syria’s General Security forces, the Ministry of Defense, and allied Bedouin and tribal forces” set fire to the village and everything in it.
Like countless other Syrians, Azzam watched the assault unfold on a screen, unable to believe what he was seeing. The invaders themselves documented the killings, arson, and looting with shocking brazenness. His home and library were reduced to a digital record, consisting of videos and photographs captured in haste. Sharing them on social media, Azzam wrote, “They are not barbarians. They are Syrians who burned my home.”
The library burned, and so did the house. The distinction between the two exists only in language. Inside Azzam’s home, some 7,000 books, his family’s memories, and the village’s history occupied the same space. Nothing remains now but ashes. But can one mourn a library, a house, or an olive tree? Is mourning even the right word?
Azzam himself moves beyond such questions. Standing, as he describes it, inside a “nightmare,” confronting those who stormed his home, he is left trying to understand one question: Why do you burn books?
Mamdouh Azzam’s attempts to answer that question, along with many others posed in the face of the invaders’ bullets, unfold in his latest book, From North to South: Stories of Home, People, Books, and Soldiers, recently published by Sard Publishing and Mamdouh Adwan Publishing and Distribution.
The book opens with the haunting line, “Every night I dream that they have killed me.” That recurring dream runs throughout the book, drawing readers into a confrontation with the possibility of death, in a country where one Syrian kills another. Along the way, we witness the destruction of Azzam’s library, book by book. We follow his attempts to make sense of the soldiers who carried out the killings, and, perhaps most importantly, we encounter a lesson in the craft of fiction itself. Azzam reflects on how stories become novels, while tracing the formative role that the books he once owned played in shaping him as a novelist.
Iron Cannot Keep the Invaders Out
A recurring dream haunts Mamdouh Azzam. Someone is knocking on the iron gate of his home, while the sound of nearby gunfire echoes through the night. If this book had a sound, its deafening crack would overwhelm the reader. The whine of bullets runs through its pages. Yet Azzam keeps writing, drawing stories out of death and fire as he confronts his would-be killers. He builds a stage for death rooted in the intimate landscape of his village, whose stories later found their way into his novels. At the same time, he separates the narrator from his own voice, revisiting what he has written while silently pleading with the soldiers: Leave the olive tree. Leave my books. But those bent on annihilation do not read. In doing so, he reveals the profound divide between the soldiers and their victims, a divide distilled into a single question: “What does it mean to be Syrian?”
Neither the iron gate, nor the village’s memory, nor thousands of books could stop the soldiers. They seem to belong to another world altogether. Were these truly the orders they had been given, to burn homes with their inhabitants inside? Azzam reflects on the world of soldiers, tracing their place through the history of art and literature, where their faces often disappear into anonymity. In Syria, however, the killers’ faces are unmistakable. They film themselves. They joke among the bodies and the ashes. These are men who hold the power to kill in their own hands, especially since many of them, as Azzam notes, had rushed to join the assault without receiving direct orders. This is what horrifies him again and again. They are Syrian soldiers, the lowest ranks in the chain of command, yet often the most brutal and the most eager to display their violence.
Azzam’s memory and his stories stand against the flames. Throughout the book, he reconstructs his village, its history, and its people, one by one. He inhabits the final moments of those who were killed, telling their stories while repeatedly returning to the possibility of his own postponed death. He writes about people whom the world knows only through images of their corpses, while the invaders laugh and amuse themselves with the killing of the other simply because they are Druze.
“Occupation: Reader”
In this book, Mamdouh Azzam also offers a lesson in the art of writing. He begins with a simple sentence: “The story ends where the novel begins. It becomes a text recreated anew.” From there, he guides us through the histories of places, people, and books, revisiting them one by one. Sometimes he lingers over their details. At other times, he recalls them with quiet longing. Azzam emerges not only as a novelist but also as a literary and art critic. These digressions, anecdotes, and branching reflections feel like a series of exercises preparing for the novel he is writing, the craft that defines him, even in the moments when he describes death itself.
We read long reflections on trees in literature and on the books he once owned, as though he is trying to confront the armed soldier with stories instead of bullets. Wait. Do not shoot the olive tree. Come, let me tell you about it. Wait before you burn this book. Let me tell you the story of its author. But the soldier is deaf, and in the dream, Azzam has no voice. Stories can hold back neither death nor fire.
Azzam tries to explain to the soldiers the beauty of books, but it is futile. They are, as he writes, “promised spoils.” “They do not know this is my home, or that its owner is the novelist so and so.” He asserts his identity in the face of the soldiers’ brutality, yet neither beauty nor self-identification can stand against iron and fire. Here, Azzam recalls Federico García Lorca before the firing squad and the soldiers’ profound ignorance of where their bullets would ultimately land. He searches for words, for any means of making them stop, or at least of drawing them into conversation. But as history has shown time and again, the human voice is powerless before the barrel of a gun. And so the many possible deaths of Mamdouh Azzam begin to unfold once more.
Disbelief permeates the entire book. Like many Syrians, Mamdouh Azzam could not comprehend what was happening. Is this truly our fate after the fall of Assad? Is this what Syria has come to, after all that was sacrificed to overthrow the regime, only to be met with calls for extermination? Yet the power of storytelling ultimately prevails. Azzam asks, “What can an unarmed person do in the face of weapons?” His answer lies in the library he reconstructs page by page, borrowing the voices of other writers in search of a response. But their fates converge. The unarmed are killed, and the library of the survivor is burned, even when that survivor is a novelist who never wrote a single line of his fiction anywhere but in his own home.
Writing about Azzam’s book is itself a challenge. He is, above all, a reader, one who continues to surprise even the most self-assured critic. Despite the enormity of the tragedy, he speaks to readers on multiple levels. He patiently rebuilds his library, his village, and Syria itself, offering a masterclass in writing memory. He recalls the libraries of other Syrians that were also set ablaze, drawing attention to a striking detail. The owner of the library never appears in the images of its destruction. There are only burned books, ashes, and scattered scraps of paper that somehow survived. The fragility of writing and its apparent powerlessness in the face of massacre are distilled into a line that sends a chill down the spine: “When a revolution triumphs, you no longer fear for your books.” He immediately follows it with another: “The burning of my library is powerful evidence that the Syrian revolution did not triumph.”
Azzam also reads the history of Syria, and of As Suwayda in particular. Through a political lens, he traces the retreat of the state and the rise of customary rule, following a way of life that existed beyond both war and the state, an isolated space where he and those around him had found a measure of stability. But, as he writes, “A sense of safety can sometimes be a trap, a snare, the cause of a sudden and inexplicable death.” It is a death he explores through the region’s history, and one he had already narrated in his novel The Southern Regions. In this text, the novelist, the political observer, and the individual become inseparable. Before our eyes, he reconstructs his library, tracing what memory and fire have erased while explaining why he read what he read and wrote what he wrote. The library becomes a threshold between two worlds: the endless story and the novel confined by a finite number of pages. It is a laboratory for imagination, storytelling, and memory. It is the memory whose loss wounded Azzam most deeply, prompting him to write: “I have no mustache for them to cut with their scissors. I have only a library.”
Reflections on Libraries and Killing
Azzam does not attempt to hide his love of books. They occupy a substantial part of his home, placing this work within the literary tradition of books about books, perhaps the most rewarding genre for readers who cherish pages and understand the language books speak when placed in conversation with one another. Azzam writes that “A library in a home is the opposite of an archive.” The desires of its owner govern its order. It is a private paradise, a walled garden of delights. Unlike an archive, its arrangement follows no institutional logic but the taste of the reader, who reigns as the sovereign of the space. There is no dust in Azzam’s books, only annotations, memories, and the aura surrounding each volume. The home library becomes a place where the beasts of Alberto Manguel are tamed, where Gargantua and Pantagruel find refuge, where Don Quixote rests, and where the spirit of Hussein Mroue comes to settle. Yet it cannot stop a bullet.
Throughout the book, Azzam tries to speak to his would-be killer. He tells him about the village, the library, the books, and their histories, but the killer remains deaf. Instead, he issues commands such as “Dig your grave.” Even as Azzam dwells on the last words of the victims and on their instinctive obedience to the man leading them to their deaths, he offers an act of defiance: “I refuse the order. I will not take orders from a killer.” Perhaps this is the novelist’s privilege, the ability to imagine such resistance. In reality, obedience and defiance are equally meaningless before a soldier determined to kill.
No language can stop a bullet. Bullets do not only destroy bodies. They shatter glasses and coffee cups. They loot the home, stripping ordinary objects of their intimacy until they become spoils of war, valued only for their material worth. Fire then arrives to erase whatever remains of stability. As Azzam writes, “Hundreds of things that no one thinks about except me…” He creates an atlas of loss, mapping it onto the geography of the house and the library, transforming objects and books into stories that, we sense, will outlive the flames.
Against the “Late Style”?
Azzam resists what might be called the late style. This is not an ending. Instead, he patiently reorders the stories, the novels, the library, the village, the city, and Syria itself, arranging them once more in preparation for writing. Every person who was killed carries within them a novel. Every story becomes a testament entrusted to readers and aspiring writers alike. Here are the stories, he seems to say. Fire, bullets, and soldiers cannot kill them. There is a quiet poetics in the sentence Azzam repeats throughout the book: “The gunfire woke me.” The bullets awaken the novelist, provoking the narrative itself to stand against the flames.
Azzam writes predominantly in the past tense. I kept a book. I had books. The present is consumed by fire, while the past survives only as a trace gradually erased by memory and flames. The future, meanwhile, gathers itself into stories waiting to become literature, stories that try to grasp what seems impossible to explain. How can someone murder a man, take his musical instrument, then sit laughing beside the corpse?
These are the chilling questions Azzam poses. “What can you do if angry soldiers, restrained by neither conscience nor law, storm your house and order you to play the violin?” They are questions he cannot answer within the recurring nightmare of death, even when death itself appears in the form of a soldier asking something as simple as, “Where is your picture?” Yet where Mamdouh Azzam the man is left speechless, Mamdouh Azzam the novelist finds another response. He leaves readers with the promise of a new novel, condensed into a single question that is also its central premise: “What happened to the Syrians?” Simple in form yet devastating in implication, the question reassures us that the writer will not be buried beneath ashes and memory.
Until the book’s final page, Azzam remains, above all, a reader. He reflects on Waiting for the Barbarians, the poem that later inspired novels and films, commenting, as only a devoted reader can, on literary history. He observes that the barbarians themselves rarely appear in literature. Art often erases the faces of killers. Reality does the opposite. They record themselves. In Syria, Azzam writes, “Those who invaded our villages and homes and killed us were Syrians, not barbarians.” Then he adds the crucial qualification: “They are Syrians, but they are not all Syrians.”
In the closing lines of the book, Azzam distills the life of books into a brief elegy:
“In the beginning, books prepare us for what is to come.
In the middle, they try to explain fear, love, and war.
In the end, they are consumed by fire.”
