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Displaced from the Future: Crossing the Sea Back to Syria in Nesrine Khoury’s Speculative Novel Wadi Qandil

By Annamaria Bianco

Since ancient times, the Mediterranean and its intersections have been central to much literary work that idealizes its unity and interconnectedness. This is particularly true within modern European national literatures, which incorporated this tradition in their canons, infusing lifeblood into “Mediterraneanism” – an ideology that asserts that Mediterranean cultures share distinct common characteristics.[1] In the 20th century, Fernand Braudel emerged as a prominent advocate for this perspective, while also cautioning about the divisive potential of the sea itself. His warnings thus can be seen as an early anticipation of contemporary analyses of the region’s complex realities.[2]

An old map of the mediterranean.
Al-Idrīsī’s world map, 1152, Sicily, Italy. Photo via Library of Congress.

In the late 1990s, the establishment of the border-free Schengen Area (1995) within the newly formed European Union was counterbalanced by sudden restrictions on the granting of visas to citizens of third countries. These laws primarily affected the mobility of people from former colonies in the South of the Mediterranean, leading many to seek alternative, often illegal, immigration routes. The tales of their perilous experiences of crossing converged in a specific sub-genre of migration literature, known as Harraga[3] literature, which originated in Morocco and has spread like wildfire to other countries in the region, affected by the same phenomenon of mass emigration due to socio-economic reasons or political conflicts. In this context, which worsened after the Arab Spring in 2010–2011, Arabic fiction began to depict how the Mediterranean, once envisioned as an open sea by Braudel, has been transformed into a “closed sea” by European politics to stem the threat of what was described by some media and far-right political parties as a “migrant invasion”. This shift in Western discourses reflects an unequal mobility system, where different traveling subjectivities —such as tourists, harraga and asylum seekers— now traverse the same geographical (and symbolic) space in starkly different ways.

In this contribution, I will specifically use the prism of contemporary Arabic literature of migration and exile to engage in a post-colonial critique of the Mediterranean hierarchy of mobility. After reviewing the features of this literary genre, I will mainly focus on the Syrian case, with a close-reading of Wadi Qandil (Wādī Qandīl), a novel published in 2023 by the Spain-based writer and poet Nesrine Khoury (Nisrīn Akram Ḫury, b. 1983). My analysis will eventually show how this book, which falls into the subcategory of “refugee futurism”, contributes to the rewriting of the contemporary Mediterranean imaginary, proposing a heterotopic vision of this dual space at the time of the so-called migratory crisis. I present the writing process as a cathartic, yet memorial act, aimed at creating a counter-archive of the Mediterranean recent history, as well as of the Syrian revolution, in order to rewrite the future of migration and hospitality as well as the very idea of refugee futurity. The critical function played by these speculative texts will eventually emerge as a tool of advocacy for socio-political change, claiming for more equal forms of global mobility, transitional justice and imaginaries of homecoming.

“Refugee Futurism” in Arabic Literature of Migration and Exile

As I already reported in a previous essay for the Trafo Blog series,[4] in her recent book, Arabic Exile Literature in Europe: Defamiliarizing Forced Migration (2022), Johanna Sellman notes that since the end of the last century, Arabic exile literature has increasingly been written from the perspective of undocumented migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees. This shift reflects a growing focus on the experiences of those displaced by war, political unrest, and economic hardship, whose voices have traditionally been marginalized in literary narratives. These works challenge conventional notions of belonging and identity, offering a more nuanced and urgent exploration of the complexities of exile and displacement in the modern world. In other words, the liminal status of these new literary subjects has reshaped the aesthetic and political dimensions of fiction. Arab authors have moved away from traditional frameworks such as the East-West encounter, political commitment, and modernist conceptions of exile. Instead, they have engaged with new forms of writing about displacement and nostalgia. These texts explore the dynamics of border spaces in both Europe and the Middle East, mediating different temporalities, spaces, and social realities through the symbolic dimension of writing and its horizons of possibilities. By doing so, they create narratives that reflect the complexity of migration, identity, and the interplay between the past, present, and future.

Rao Zubair Ali, Blurred Car Lights on Street by Museum of the Future, Dubai, 2016 via Pexels.

While many of these literary works undoubtedly prioritize a documentary or autobiographical narrative, another significant portion intersects with broader trends in contemporary Arabic fiction, particularly in the realm of speculative writing. These narratives introduce a new perception of time shaped by the experience of displacement. They create literary spaces, often set in unusual spatio-temporal dimensions, that allow, through a major distancing process, for the processing of traumatic memories, the exploration of the unknown, and the imagining of alternate worlds. Through this, they offer a means of thinking “outside of contemporary political impasse”,[5] employing defamiliarizing modes of writing and techniques of estrangement, that are typical of fantastic scenarios, magical realism or science-fiction literature. These approaches challenge the reader’s expectations, creating a sense of escape and distance from real life experience that invites reflection on the complexities of exile and the fragmented realities of war from afar. The sub-genre of “refugee futurism” specifically interrogates aesthetic strategies within the context of forced displacement. It seeks to enable migrant subjects to break free from the automatic association of futurity with collective catastrophe, offering them the possibility to imagine or represent alternative, better futures.[6] By moving beyond the dominant narratives of loss and destruction, refugee futurism envisions new possibilities, where displaced individuals can reclaim agency over their futures and imagine worlds that transcend their current realities of displacement and survival. This literary approach, often marked by fragmented or non-linear chronologies, alongside the disruption of traditional storytelling techniques and the cohesive unity of literary spaces, subverts conventional understandings of time and narrative, by creating a sort of Chinese box system of exceptional events and a nest of polyphonic stories. These techniques encourage an exploration of what may lie beyond the trauma of exile, using a language that is deliberately visionary and forward-thinking.

The Syrian Case: Archeo-fiction and New Futurities

In the case of Syrian literary production, both in fiction and non-fiction, the elicitation of the theme of future has been further compounded by the uncertainty of homecoming until a few months ago. When the dictatorship of Bachar al-Assad came to an end, many Syrians in exile have returned to their country, either permanently or temporarily, and started questioning the future of the Republic and the role that culture and freedom of expression will be able to play under its new government.

Prior to this and for nearly a decade following the outbreak of the revolution, Syrian writers have faced significant challenges in producing works that genuinely capture their experiences of exile or address their concerns and hopes for the future. Initially, their focus was predominantly on documenting the horrors of the conflict and the dangers of fleeing. Over time, however, this effort shifted toward a form of writing centred on their feeling of transience. This sense of precariousness transformed the timelines of the stories into a suspended state of waiting, where the imagined future often took on a dark, apocalyptic tone, shaped by the images of destruction.

While many Syrian writers focused on the collective and individual traumas of their people, another group also addressed the collateral damage caused by the war on the environment, local heritage, and urban landscapes. Anne-Marie McManus analysed a body of these recent cultural works and observed the emergence of a common aesthetic of devastation, particularly in the recurring motif of “ruins” (al-aṭlāl). This iconography, she argued, connects contemporary fiction to both the pre-Islamic traditions of classical poetry and Walter Benjamin’s reflections on history and modernity,[7] allowing people to grieve for their losses while trying to move forward: writers seek to preserve their memories creating what at times takes on the form of an actual “archeo-fiction” in order to avoid history repeating itself. In this literary sub-genre, exploring the past within future worlds underscores the role of myths in shaping history and defining national, social, cultural, and individual identities. In the Syrian context, it serves as a means of constructing a counter-archive that preserves the memories of the conflict, offering a poetic reflection on the politicization of local heritage as well as on the exploitation of sectarian discourse.

The temple of Bel in the sun.
Temple of Bel in 2005, Palmyra, Syria, first and second centuries C.E. Photo by ian.plumb via Flickr.

This is evident in novels such as Aljamiado (2022) by Ibrahim Al-Jabin (Ibrahīm al-Ǧabīn, b. 1971), where the story follows a group of researchers spread across Europe and the MENA region, excavating the ancient city of Damascus in a distant future. The novel draws parallels between the fall of Syrian civilization and that of Al-Andalus, and is structured as a multimedia archive, complete with photographs, maps and annotations. These literary elements seek to unearth the past, reinterpreting Syrian collective history in order to reclaim the tale of the revolution — a story that has often been diminished by official narratives and has literally fallen into oblivion.

On the other hand, Wadi Qandil — the novel which I will focus on in my analysis — transports us to a nearer future, leading us to reflect on the immediate consequences of history and, above all, on the role of its transmission through the act of writing, at a time when the present can still be changed, thanks to the preservation of memory.

Wadi Qandil: Regaining the Past to Restore the Right to the Future

Khoury’s novel tells the story of Ṯurayā, a former asylum seeker who returns to Syria in search of her childhood memories in 2034, after being raised by a Cypriot adoptive family. Her journey starts from the remote coastal area of Wadi Qandil, which used to be a popular tourist destination prior to the revolution that multinationals are trying to recreate. There, in an old guesthouse, she discovers a copy of a book by a writer named Ġaym Ḥaddād, whom she starts searching for. Driven by a desire to better understand her Syrian legacy, the 20-year-old woman embarks on a path tracing the footsteps of the author that ultimately leads her to (re)discover her forgotten roots and the situation of the Christian communities and other minorities in the country.

The novel unfolds across three main overlapping timeframes: the years of the Syrian revolution and its descent into civil war, spanning from 2011 to 2014, followed by events in 2029 and 2034. This fragmented chronology constantly intersects, creating a fluid movement between past and future, while also alternating between different narrative voices. Ṯurayā, the sole survivor of a group of Syrians who drowned off the coast of Larnaca in 2014 while fleeing the war, when she was 4 years old, narrates the chapters set in the future. The novel begins with one of these episodes, set in Fnaidek’s cemetery (Lebanon) in 2034, where Ṯurayā encounters a woman she believes to be Ġaym, whose voice echoes through the chapters recounting the past.

Through reading Ġaym’s writings, Ṯurayā forms a deep connection with her and meets her companion Anas, a renowned Syrian writer and intellectual who has settled in Beirut. Seeking to learn more about Ġaym’s life, Ṯurayā decides to write a novel inspired by her journal. The girl’s identification with this unknown Christian woman from Homs, whose image resurges forcefully from the past to symbolize the Capital of the Syrian revolution, grows so strong that she embarks on a love affair with Anas. She endures this relationship throughout her whole futile search for the woman. Five years later, Anas’s death brings Ṯurayā back to Lebanon, and in the final pages, it is revealed that the girl she encountered in the cemetery at the start of the novel was not Ġaym, but rather her daughter, Leah. The young woman delivers a letter from her father, which turns out to contain the message Ġaym had left before her suicide —a message filled with despair; devoid of hope for Syria’s future, regardless of the war’s end.

The novel’s Chinese box system and circular structure is sealed at this point by an open-ending chapter, oxymoronically called “al-Bidāya” (The Beginning), in which the voice of a narrator, this time heterodiegetic and unknown, describes Ṯurayā at Beirut airport holding two different one-way tickets: one to go back to Larnaca and one to continue her journey to Damascus. After a brief moment of uncertainty, the girl discards one of the tickets into the trash and proceeds toward the gate. The opacity of her decision leaves the reader to speculate on the future she has chosen, set against a backdrop where it remains unclear whether the war has truly ended.

The narration is indeed consistently shaped by an atmosphere of geographical and temporal uncertainty, embodied by the character of Ṯurayā, who, lacking a past, feels she has no claim to a future. In her attempt to overcome this condition, she tries to appropriate Ġaym’s story — whom she also bears a striking physical resemblance to — crossing the boundary between fiction and reality through the act of writing. She even goes as far as merging her body with that of Anas, who might represent a metonymy of a time now lost for the entire Arab world, shaped by the committed left-wing intellectuals of the last century. Anas, like Ġaym, has existed in a perpetual state of limbo since the war began, with death being the only force that ends their suspended lives. While Ġaym chooses oblivion and ends her life, Anas is haunted by the ghosts of the civil war. Ṯurayā, however, is desperate to remember. She has been consumed by this need since childhood, a pursuit supported by her adoptive mother, a former Red Cross worker. The woman gave her an Arabic name and enrolled her in language classes early on, so she could maintain a connection to her Syrian heritage. Every day, Ṯurayā would check the map of Syria hanging above her bed, driven by an unfillable sense of loss she could only begin to address by returning to the place where she felt she truly belonged, by crossing the Sea once more.

This element carries rich and powerful symbolism throughout the novel. For Ṯurayā, her origins lie precisely “somewhere at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea”[8], which robbed her of her biological family and her life as a Syrian. Her relationship with the sea is thus framed throughout the novel as a constant act of defiance, where the childhood fear rooted in trauma is gradually silenced by her resilience. As she matures, Ṯurayā learns to swim and continually invents new ways to ‘conquer’ the Mediterranean, also thanks to her adoptive family and the boat trips that they regularly take. She finally tips the balance of power between herself and the sea when she decides to retrace back the only 200 nautical miles separating Cyprus from Syria, determined to reclaim her lost story — not as an asylum seeker at the mercy of the waves, but as a free traveller, destined for a future better than that of her compatriots.

Wadi Qandil, the starting point of her research, becomes a symbol of this duality, immediately establishing itself as a non-place, suspended in both space and time — a nerve centre of liminality. Throughout the novel, this place mirrors the Mediterranean Sea’s dual nature, as the remains of the shacks that once sheltered those displaced by the revolution — creating “a new country by the name of UNHCR”[9], the UN Refugee Agency — are gradually torn down to make way for tourist resorts, on land still marked by checkpoints. The boarding house run by Ḥanān, where Ṯurayā arrives several years after Ġaym’s suicide, serves as both a physical and symbolic barrier against the bulldozers of time and human forces, standing as a living archive of Syria’s past and a simulacrum of the life that she could have lived. Ṯurayā, initially a passive observer, quickly transforms into an active scribe of history. As she listens to Ḥanān’s stories and reads Ġaym’s diary, she becomes less interested in simply understanding what has happened to her country. Instead, she seeks to give a face to the countless disappeared people lost to the revolution, the sea, or exile, each of them having borne their own share of the war, just as she did, growing up under a different identity, in another place and time.

Whether through Ṯurayā’s words or Ġaym’s, the theme of war’s memoricidal impact emerges repeatedly, with the arts standing as a force that can revivify the forgotten past. However, while for Ġaym, writing serves only as a catharsis for her recent memories, insufficient to heal the survivor’s guilt or the trauma of sectarian violence, for Ṯurayā, it is a far deeper excavation: she must exhume memories buried deep within her ‘drowned brain’ in order to reclaim her future. The act of writing becomes a crucial journey of identity discovery: despite her continuous exposure to Arab culture, Ṯurayā has lived as though she were not a refugee, only confronting the reality of her inherited condition when she travels back to Syria. There, she is powerfully confronted by the ghosts of war. The past she has long sought ultimately pulls her in, yet it also grants her the realization that she has a right to a future, a right that does not require the rejection of pain or grief but acknowledges it fully.

Conclusion: Reversing the Path of Exile

For Syrian writers like Khoury, envisioning alternate realities involves navigating the tension between the urge to soothe the pain of exile and the need to fully embrace it, in order to redefine the understandings of nostalgia, home, and belonging. And this is exactly what the author has tried to do in her novel, in which it is possible to find various autobiographical elements, such as the partial setting in the city of Homs, where Khoury was born and grew up, along with the religion of Ġaym.

In this context, the Mediterranean becomes a space for new literary heterotopias, evoking visions of mobility that contrast sharply with the current binary reality, where every journey to the northern shore comes at the cost of one’s identity, or even life. Crossing the sea back to Syria thus symbolizes reclaiming control over one’s life, restoring the freedom of self-determination that is often lost upon gaining refugee status, just as in the case of Ṯurayā, who grows up very differently from her fellows. This crossing is therefore framed not just as a physical transgression, but also as a crucial temporal shift, intended to define the evolution of a path toward belonging, at the intersection of multiple identities. With this in mind, embracing a “restorative aesthetic” of migration could play a pivotal role in reshaping the future of hospitality, since it stirs an entire horizon of possibilities in the reader, sparking a call to change one’s life and confronting the discrimination of mobility and border-politics that characterise our era.

The revival of the sea’s liminality, as seen in Wadi Qandil, holds the potential to reimagine the Mediterranean as a utopian space capable of righting the wrongs of history, in contrast to the distorted reality shaped by laws. And it is within this potential that the power of refugee futurism resides, both in Arab and World literature, and proves even more necessary now, at a time when Syrians once again find themselves facing an unknown destiny, yet full of possibilities.


Notes

[1] William V. Harris, Rethinking the Mediterranean, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, 1.

[2] Nahrain Al-Mousawi, The Two-Edged Sea. Heterotopias of Contemporary Mediterranean Migrant Literature, Croydon: Georgia Press, 2021.

[3] The term “harraga” (from the Arabic verb “to burn”) refers to the practice of burning passports and other identification documents to prevent authorities from tracking migrants, effectively becoming “illegal” in the process.

[4] Annamaria Bianco, Moving Through Space, Sheltering Across Time: Alternate Realities in Contemporary Arabic Fiction of (Forced) Displacement, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 27.04.2023, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/46821.

[5] Johanna Sellman, Arabic Exile Literature in Europe. Defamiliarising Forced Migration, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022, 5.

[6] Hadj Baraka, “Refugee Writing and the Problem of the Future”, in: Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi and Vinh Nguyen (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives, New York and London: Routledge, 2023, 483–493.

[7] Anne-Marie McManus, “On the Ruins of What’s to Come, I Stand: Time and Devastation in Syrian Cultural Production since 2011”, Critical Inquiry, 48/1, 2021, 45–67.

[8] Nisrīn Akram Ḫury, Wādī Qandīl, Milan: Manšūrāt al-Mutawassiṭ, 2023, 12.

[9] Ivi, 83.


About the Author

Annamaria Bianco holds a double PhD from Aix-Marseille University and University of Naples “L’Orientale” (DAAM). She is currently associate researcher at The Institute of Research and Study on the Arab and Islamic Worlds of (IREMAM) and at The French Institute of Near-East Studies (Ifpo), while working as teaching assistant in Arabic language and literature at University of Toulouse 2 – Jean Jaurès. Bianco’s research interests focus on creativity and diaspora, the circulation and translation of Arabic literature, Arab exiled and refugees’ literary productions, as well as the representation of minorities and human rights discourse in fiction. Among her several publications, she co-edited the volume Exile and translation. Insights into a fertile crossroads (in French, 2025). Her PhD dissertation on the representation of refuge in the 21st century Arabic novel received a special mention at the GIS-Middle East and Muslim Worlds Award and the Aix-Marseille University Dissertation Prize. She is one of the editors of the journal Maydan – rivista sui mondi arabi, semitici e islamici and she is in the Board of The European Association for Modern Arabic Literature (EURAMAL).


Citation: Annamaria Bianco, Displaced from the Future: Crossing the Sea Back to Syria in Nesrine Khoury’s Speculative Novel Wadi Qandil, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 19.08.2025, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/60940

 

 


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Forum Transregionale Studien (August 19, 2025). Displaced from the Future: Crossing the Sea Back to Syria in Nesrine Khoury’s Speculative Novel Wadi Qandil. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved November 10, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/14hh9


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