Fifteen years after leaving Syria as a child, I returned to a country I had come to know through my parents’ memories and the world’s perceptions, but rarely through my own.
The first thing I heard upon returning to Syria was drums.
My family and I had barely stepped out of the taxi outside my dad’s office-turned-home in Homs when they erupted above the street noise. Before I understood what was happening, there were chants, relatives, and then fireworks. My aunts, uncles and cousins were waiting outside while a Syrian zaffa band played loudly enough to draw neighbors onto their balconies.
Even strangers stopped. Some watched, others clapped, and a few congratulated us on coming home.
Amjaad and his family’s return to Syria was nothing less than a celebration, complete with a zaffa to welcome them home. Homs, Syria. 2026. Photo by Amjaad.
Then the men in my family pulled me into a dabke circle. There was only one problem: I didn’t know how to dabke. So there I was, welcomed home with fireworks, only to find myself in a dabke circle with no idea what to do with my feet. For twenty minutes, I felt joyful, overwhelmed, and slightly mortified.
Perhaps it was an appropriate return to a country I had spent fifteen years belonging to from a distance.
I was eight when I left Syria in 2011. My memories of life before then survive mostly as hazy fragments: a first-grade crush, my best friend who was also my cousin, and my parents’ newly built villa with its swimming pool, basketball court, and a garden planted with olive, fig, and pomegranate trees. Years later, we learned that soldiers loyal to the Assad regime had broken into the villa, looted it and taken it over.
I also remember the day my mother learned that her brother had been shot and killed. A month later, my parents decided we had to flee.
What followed was fifteen years of knowing Syria mostly through other people.
At home, my parents kept one version alive. They spoke fondly of its ancient history, landscapes, traditions, and faith. Syrian food and agriculture inspired an almost unreasonable pride. “The soil of our land is blessed,” I heard more than once.
Mostly, they talked about people, recalling relatives, neighbors, and strangers whose generosity seemed almost suspiciously endless.
Outside our home, Syria meant something else.
Growing up in Sweden and attending predominantly white schools, I learned what being Syrian could mean in somebody else’s imagination. I remember classmates playing ISIS videos and laughing whenever “Allahu Akbar” was shouted. I remember being told to “go back to your country.” My name, my language, and my Arabness—things that had once been ordinary—suddenly marked me as different.
Meanwhile, to most of the world, Syria became synonymous with war, refugees, terrorism, and destruction. None of that suffering was imaginary. But when a country reaches you primarily through catastrophe, catastrophe can begin to feel like the country.
Without quite realizing it, I had begun absorbing some of that gaze myself. I had seen Syria represented through destruction for so long that I had begun to struggle to imagine the ordinary life that continued beyond those images.
Swedish became the language of school, work, and friends; English the language I increasingly read, wrote, and thought in. Arabic retreated mostly into conversations with my parents.
After the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s government in December 2024, returning began to feel possible in a way it hadn’t for years. Yet one of my stranger anxieties wasn’t political at all: I worried my Arabic would embarrass me.
“Do you remember me?”
Relatives asked me again and again. Sometimes I did. Sometimes I searched a person’s face for something familiar. Most times, embarrassingly, I didn’t.
Nobody seemed particularly offended.
Instead, they fed me.
At family gatherings, I sat among dozens of relatives whom I was meeting again almost as strangers. Someone made tea, someone brought food, someone else arrived. Conversations stretched for hours.
A long table of food brings together relatives who haven’t seen each other in years. Baniyas, Syria. 2026. Photo by Amjaad.
Whenever I stumbled over an Arabic word, nobody revoked my Syrian citizenship. They waited, laughed with me, or supplied the word. What I had expected to expose the distance between us often became another way of closing it.
When other relatives returned from abroad, I learned that our extravagant welcome wasn’t an exception. My cousin would hire a fifteen-seat bus to collect them from Damascus airport, turning the journey home into a day-long celebration: shaabi music, a detour through Souq Al-Hamidiyah, pistachio-covered ice cream at Bakdash, and fifteen relatives talking over one another.
Other nights ended at four or five in the morning at my aunt’s house, over enormous pots of tea, gossip, and old photographs. Before Fajr prayer, someone would bring out Al-Maghtouta, a traditional Homsi breakfast dish, and only then would everyone go home to sleep.
Family members arriving in Syria after years abroad find themselves warmly embraced by their relatives, who have prepared a proper itinerary to celebrate their return. Damascus International Airport, Damascus, Syria. 2026. Photo by Amjaad.
At times, it felt as though we were trying to make up for fifteen years in a single day.
But what surprised me wasn’t that Syria felt exotic.
It was how quickly it became ordinary.
Red peppers dried in the sun across rooftops beside solar panels and satellite dishes. Scrap buyers drove through neighbourhoods, calling out over loudspeakers. The adhan travelled from one neighbourhood mosque to another. Neighbors planted small patches of green between concrete and rubble.
Red peppers left to dry on a rooftop. Homs, Syria. 2026. Photo by Amjaad.
Beyond Homs, Syria kept complicating the image I had carried with me: Aleppo rising in ancient stone, and the startlingly green hills and coastline around Baniyas and Tartus.
None of this meant the difficulties disappeared. The Wi-Fi was terrible. Unexpectedly, that became one of the things I loved: I looked at my phone less, and there was usually somebody more interesting in the room. More seriously, there were electricity and water shortages, pollution, damaged infrastructure, and economic hardship.
I don’t want to romanticize any of that.
The Syria I had encountered in Europe wasn’t false. It was incomplete.
A headline can tell you electricity is unreliable, but it cannot show a family figuring out how to keep the kettle hot anyway. Statistics can describe displacement, poverty, and destruction, but they cannot fully contain the scent of courtyard jasmine, late-night backgammon matches, the immediate warmth of ahlan wa sahlan, or three generations staying up all night together until exhaustion.
Amjaad’s young cousin on her first trip to Syria, taking in the view. Baniyas, Syria. 2026. Photo by Amjaad.
For much of my adolescence, Syria existed in the language of catastrophe.
Returning allowed it to become ordinary again.
Perhaps ordinary was exactly what I had been missing.
I still often feel too Arab among Scandinavians and too Scandinavian among Arabs. For years, I treated that contradiction almost like a problem waiting to be solved.
Returning to Syria didn’t solve it. It made me wonder why I thought it needed solving in the first place.
Maybe diaspora identity isn’t about standing with one foot in two different worlds. Maybe it is the bridge you build between them: speaking one language while thinking in another; wanting silence on public transport but missing the chaos of a souq; longing for alone time but still wishing for a house full of relatives, overlapping conversations and someone insisting you eat more.
When it was time to leave Syria again, I felt unexpectedly homesick.
Not because I had recovered the country I left at eight—I don’t think such a country can be recovered—but because, for the first time, Syria was no longer composed entirely of my parents’ memories, other people’s perceptions, or breaking news.
I finally had memories of my own.
And perhaps that was what my parents had been preserving for me all along: not a perfect Syria, nor one untouched by everything that happened after we left, but the possibility that one day I might return and understand why they had loved it enough to keep telling me about it.
Amjaad
Amjaad is a Syrian-born, Sweden-raised writer and multidisciplinary artist exploring identity, cultural optimism and the whimsy of everyday life.(@dearamjaad)
