Literature

The return to “home” is no longer a promise of salvation, but rather a disorienting experience that reveals the estrangement of home and the fracture of belonging—where the homeland appears familiar on the surface yet alien at its core. This feeling crystallised in my most recent return to Majdal Shams; a return that was not a fleeting journey, but a confrontation with a fractured identity reshaped psychologically, socially, culturally, and politically. The place became a blurred, fractured, and unattainable image.

In this context, I invoked the figure of Polyphemus, the one-eyed giant from the Odyssey, not merely as an external obstacle but as a symbol of a blind force that destroys anyone who tries to reclaim their memory. The “homeland” itself became suspect, transformed into an elegant trap designed to domesticate those who remain—those whose memory has slowly begun to erode.