Return to Jableh after more than a decade.

Written by Mr. Ali Qasem.

If a genie had come out to me a year ago from his lamp, shouting his famous phrase: “At your service!”, I would not have dared to ask him for a visit to my country Syria…
Even the genie, most likely, would have been afraid of the Assad regime’s intelligence services and prisons in my homeland.

But God’s grace is immense, granted to whom He wills… And God willed it so: the Tyrant of the Levant departed never to return, and Syria was restored to its people and its children.

At that moment, Jableh appeared to me like a mother, putting on her bridal veil and opening her arms, waiting for her children who had grown up in the harsh embrace of exile, far from her and from her sea.

Ten years in which distance sank its claws into my heart, and exile carved every detail into my soul and body, until I was no longer myself, and my soul was no longer mine.
And today… I return to Jableh, for my soul to return, and to meet myself once again.

Move your heart wherever you wish in love
For love is only for the first beloved
How many homes the young man may grow fond of on earth
Yet his longing is always for the very first home

The dreams of a lifetime come true, and today my feet step on the soil of Syria, that soil I no longer recognize.
On my way to Jableh, the war had left its mark on every city and village I passed through…
In every breeze of air, the dust carried the groans of destroyed buildings and the tears of mothers…
In the chirping of birds that still echo the words of those who departed defending this land.

The car wheels do not move over the asphalt of the streets, but rather roll over the veins of my weary heart, a heart longing to meet its mother…
A mother who has lain for ten years beneath the soil of Jableh, and whose grave I do not know the way to.

My heart leads me into the cemetery, searching among the graves that outnumber the homes of the living…
Until at last I stood before your grave, my mother, shedding tears a decade old…
Watering your soil with them, that soil I now breathe, hoping to catch your scent within it— the scent that has left me, though I have never left it.

Mother… I am here. I stand at your grave,
Did you recognize my choked voice?
Did you recognize the steps of my wandering feet?
Did you hear the fall of my tears upon your soil?
Oh mother, my solace in you is that today I am here… returning as a child in his school uniform, resting in his mother’s embrace as she gently runs her fingers through his weary, flowing hair.

Here… the beginning and the end of the world.
And here is a story that never ends about a love renewed with every wave of the sea, with its chapters written in the eyes of its people.

It is not a romantic tale that tickles the dreams of lovers…
It is the unchanging, everlasting truth…
It is an eternal story of a Jablawi who loved the “Lady of the Lands,” the bride of cities, and was so consumed by her love that she became a tattoo flowing through his veins.