I Never Wanted to Leave Debel

 Writing in the shadow of war, and loving a village that will always be home.

There are places in this world that we visit, places we remember, and places we carry with us long after we have left them.

And then there are places that become so deeply intertwined with our identity that imagining life without them feels almost impossible.

For me, that place is Debel.

A village in South Lebanon. A place whose name carries more meaning than I could ever fit into a paragraph, a poem, or an entire book.

I have never wanted to leave it.

Not because I believed life there would always be easy. Not because I imagined that the world would spare us its difficulties. And certainly not because I did not understand the uncertainty of living in a region where peace can sometimes feel like something borrowed, something temporary, something that might disappear before we have finished enjoying it.

I never wanted to leave because Debel is home.

And home is not always something we can explain to people who have never had to imagine losing it.

It is in the familiarity of a place. In the roads that become part of your memory. In the buildings whose appearance you recognize without thinking. In the feeling that you belong somewhere without having to introduce yourself.

It is in the ordinary things we rarely appreciate until circumstances remind us how precious they are.

A morning.

A familiar view.

A quiet afternoon.

The knowledge that the people you love are nearby.

The simple privilege of knowing where you belong.

We do not always realize that we are collecting memories while we are living them. We think there will always be another morning, another walk, another opportunity to return to the same familiar surroundings.

We assume that home will remain where we left it.

And perhaps that is one of the cruelties of war: it interrupts the ordinary continuity of life. It takes places that were never supposed to become symbols of loss and turns them into places people speak about with worry, fear, and uncertainty.

It makes us look at familiar things differently.

It makes us wonder whether the next time we see them will be the last.

And it forces us to confront a question we never wanted to answer:

What happens when the place you love is no longer a place you can safely remain?

Writing while the world trembles

I have always found refuge in words.

Writing has been one of the ways I understand myself, one of the ways I give shape to thoughts that otherwise remain difficult to carry.

But writing during a time of war is different.

There is something profoundly unsettling about trying to write a sentence while knowing that, outside your window, the world is experiencing things no sentence can adequately describe.

You sit with a notebook, or open a document on a screen, and try to find the right words.

You think about a character.

You return to a paragraph.

You correct a sentence.

And then reality interrupts.

The sound of the outside world becomes louder than the words you are trying to arrange.

Your attention moves away from the page.

You wonder about the people around you, the people you love, the homes and streets you recognize, and the uncertainty of what might happen next.

Sometimes, the words come.

Sometimes, they do not.

Sometimes, you write because you need to occupy your mind with something other than fear.

Sometimes, you write because remaining silent feels unbearable.

And sometimes, you simply stare at the page, realizing that there are experiences you do not yet know how to describe.

I do not believe writing makes anyone immune to what is happening around them.

A writer is not protected from fear because they know how to describe it.

A poem cannot stop a war.

A beautiful paragraph cannot repair a damaged home.

A book cannot promise that tomorrow will be peaceful.

But words can give us somewhere to place what we are carrying.

They can preserve memories.

They can record what it felt like to live through a particular moment, to love a particular place, and to be a person trying to continue creating something while circumstances are demanding every ounce of attention.

Perhaps that is why I keep writing.

Not because I have found answers.

Not because I have learned how to remain calm in every circumstance.

But because I still want my life to contain something beyond the things happening around me.

I want to write about love.

I want to write about ordinary people and their extraordinary capacity to endure difficult circumstances.

I want to write about tenderness, friendship, memory, and the small moments that make a life worth remembering.

I want to continue working on my books.

I want to imagine stories that have nothing to do with destruction.

And I want to write about Debel without having to explain it through the language of war.

Because my village deserves to be remembered for more than what has happened to it.

It deserves to exist in my words as a home.

As a place of belonging.

As part of a life that existed before the fear and continues to mean something beyond it.

I do not want to become a stranger to my own home

There is a particular kind of sadness in being forced to consider leaving a place you never wanted to leave.

It is not simply the thought of changing addresses or finding somewhere else to sleep.

It is the possibility of becoming distant from the everyday details that made your life familiar.

It is wondering whether the places you know will still be there when you return.

It is thinking about what you might miss, what might change, and what you cannot take with you.

And perhaps most painfully, it is realizing that loving a place does not always mean having the freedom to remain there.

I do not want to leave Debel.

I do not want to learn how to speak about it only in the past tense.

I do not want my relationship with my village to become a collection of photographs, memories, and stories I tell people about somewhere I used to live.

I do not want to say, I remember when we lived there, as though belonging to a place were something that could simply be concluded.

I want to be able to return without wondering what has changed.

I want to see familiar surroundings without having to search for what remains.

I want ordinary days.

I want the freedom to make plans without considering the possibility that circumstances might take those plans away.

I want to write in peace, to work, to read, to sit with my thoughts, and to live without having to negotiate every ordinary activity with uncertainty.

I want the kind of life that does not require courage simply to enjoy a quiet morning.

Perhaps that is what I miss most about the idea of peace: not the grand declarations, not the political language, not the speeches about what a country should become.

I miss the possibility of an ordinary life.

A life in which people can love their homes without being afraid of losing them.

A life in which children can grow up with memories of their villages that are not dominated by fear.

A life in which families do not have to calculate how much they can carry if they are forced to leave.

A life in which returning home is simply returning home.

Not an act of courage.

Not a risk.

Not a question mark.

Just home.

A village is more than its buildings

When people speak about destruction, they often speak in terms of buildings, roads, houses, and material damage.

Those things matter. They are part of people's lives, and losing them can be devastating.

But a village is more than what can be counted or photographed.

It is the people who give it meaning.

It is the relationships formed over years.

It is the familiar faces, the shared history, the stories that belong to particular families, and the memories that are understood without needing to be explained.

It is the sense of continuity between generations.

It is the feeling that you are part of something that existed before you and, hopefully, will continue after you.

A home can be damaged and still remain deeply loved.

A road can become unfamiliar and still belong to your memories.

A place can experience terrible things without those things becoming its entire identity.

And I refuse to believe that the story of Debel should begin and end with war.

I want to remember the village beyond the headlines.

I want to remember it as a place where people have lived their lives, made their plans, built their homes, raised their families, and imagined their futures.

I want to remember that there is a human story behind every home, every family, and every place that appears on a map.

When we speak about villages in South Lebanon, we are not speaking about distant points on a geographical map.

We are speaking about people's lives.

About belonging.

About the right to live somewhere without having to wonder whether that right will be taken away.

And for those of us who love these places, the pain is not abstract.

It has names, faces, memories, and rooms we can still picture in our minds.

It has a place we call home.

The words I write are also a way of staying

I sometimes wonder what it means to be a writer during circumstances like these.

How do you continue creating when the world around you is demanding your attention in ways you never anticipated?

How do you write about tenderness when the news is filled with suffering?

How do you imagine a future when the present itself feels uncertain?

How do you write about a home while worrying about what might happen to it?

I do not have a universal answer.

I only know what writing means to me.

It is a way of holding on to the parts of myself that circumstances cannot be allowed to define completely.

When I write, I am not pretending that the world is peaceful.

I am not denying what is happening.

I am simply insisting that there are other things worth recording.

There is still love.

There is still memory.

There are still stories waiting to be told.

There are still people whose lives deserve to be described with tenderness rather than reduced to statistics.

And there are still places that deserve to be remembered for their beauty, their humanity, and the lives they hold.

My book, I Wrote So I Would Not Fade, was born from a deeply personal need to give words to experiences that were difficult to carry.

I did not write it because I had figured out how to live.

I wrote because I needed somewhere for my thoughts to go.

Perhaps that is what I am doing again now.

Writing so that the person I am, the village I love, and the life I still hope to live do not disappear beneath the weight of everything happening around me.

I want these words to remember Debel as I know it, not merely as a place mentioned in a report.

I want them to remember that someone loved this village enough to write about it.

That someone wanted to stay.

That someone imagined a future there.

That someone still dreams of ordinary mornings, peaceful evenings, and the freedom to live without fear.

And perhaps, one day, when these pages are read in circumstances very different from the ones in which they were written, they will carry a little of that truth.

Not the whole story.

No book could contain it.

But a fragment of it.

A testimony of love.

I want to stay because I still have a life to live here

I have dreams.

I have books I want to finish, stories I want to tell, and words I have not yet written.

I have ambitions that extend beyond the circumstances of this moment.

I want to build a life in which writing is not merely a way to endure difficult days, but also a way to create something meaningful.

I want to see my work reach readers.

I want to experience the ordinary happiness of completing a project and knowing that I gave it everything I could.

I want to have conversations about literature, music, and life without the shadow of war entering every sentence.

I want to make plans without immediately thinking about what might interrupt them.

And I want to experience these things without feeling that I must choose between having a future and belonging to the place I love.

I do not want to be forced to imagine a life elsewhere simply because the circumstances around my home have become uncertain.

I know that safety matters.

I know that circumstances can leave families with decisions they never wanted to make.

And I know that sometimes leaving is necessary, even when the heart remains behind.

There is no shame in protecting the people we love.

There is no shame in seeking safety.

There is no shame in leaving when staying becomes too dangerous.

But acknowledging that reality does not make the desire to remain any less sincere.

I can understand why someone might have to leave and still wish, with everything in me, that leaving were never necessary.

I can recognize the importance of safety without pretending that displacement is painless.

I can accept that circumstances may not always be within my control while refusing to surrender the love I have for my village.

Because I do not want to leave Debel.

I want to live there.

I want to grow older with memories that continue to accumulate in the same place.

I want to write books while knowing that home is nearby.

I want to look at the village and see the future, not only remember the past.

I want peace to become something ordinary enough that we no longer have to write about its absence.

Until peace allows us to live normally again

Perhaps one day I will read these words from a quiet room, somewhere in Debel, with no urgency in the air.

Perhaps I will open a notebook, look outside, and find that the only thing demanding my attention is the sentence I am trying to finish.

Perhaps the news will no longer determine the rhythm of our days.

Perhaps families will be able to make plans without considering whether they might have to abandon them.

Perhaps people will return to the ordinary business of living.

I hope for that day.

Not because I believe that a single morning will erase everything that came before it.

Some experiences remain with us. Some losses cannot be undone. Some memories will always carry sadness.

But I hope that peace will give people the opportunity to live beyond the circumstances that have interrupted their lives.

I hope Debel will be spoken about in conversations that have nothing to do with destruction.

I hope children will grow up with the freedom to imagine their futures without fear becoming part of every plan.

I hope families will feel secure in their homes.

I hope people who have been separated from the places they love will have the opportunity to return, if and when it is safe.

And I hope that I will be able to write there.

Not about having to leave.

Not about the uncertainty of returning.

Not about trying to preserve memories because I am afraid of losing the places that hold them.

I want to write about life.

About the books I am still working on.

About the people I meet.

About the things that make me laugh.

About the ordinary beauty of a place that has been allowed to live in peace.

Because Debel is not simply a place I come from.

It is a place I want to continue belonging to.

And there is a difference between remembering home and being able to live in it.

I want the latter.

I want the mornings, the evenings, the ordinary days, and the future.

I want to stay.

Not because I am unafraid.

Not because I cannot imagine another life.

But because this is the life I want, in the place I love.

And I should not have to stop loving my home simply because the world around it has become uncertain.

---

I do not know what tomorrow will bring.

I cannot promise that circumstances will become easier as quickly as we wish.

I cannot write an ending to a story that is still unfolding.

But I know this:

I never wanted to leave Debel.

I never wanted to become someone who speaks about his village as though it belongs only to the past.

I never wanted war to become the most important thing people know about the place I call home.

I wanted a life there.

A peaceful, ordinary, imperfect, beautiful life.

And while I continue to write, I want my words to remember that desire.

Because beyond every headline, beyond every report, beyond every description of destruction, there are people who simply want to live.

People who want to return home.

People who want to plant, build, read, write, love, and grow old where they belong.

People who do not ask for extraordinary lives.

Only the freedom to live ordinary ones.

And if one day someone reads these words and wonders why leaving a village can hurt so deeply, perhaps the answer is simple:

Because sometimes, home is not somewhere you want to visit again.

It is somewhere you want to spend the rest of your life.

Debel, I never wanted to leave you. I only ever wanted the peace to stay.

— Jean T. Hatoum

Author of I Wrote So I Would Not Fade and J’ai Écrit Pour Ne Pas M’effacer

If these words felt like home, the rest of the map is in the book.

Kindly & Please: if you are able to supporting my journey, buy the books, check out my fundraising or simply share it, it will  help me graciously to continue treatment and afford my medications the that keeps my own fractured ember burning. 

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