As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow
As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow
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Zoulfa Katouh on As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
The story no one was tellingWhen Katouh moved to Switzerland to study German, the questions her classmates asked about Syria revealed a gap she had not fully measured before. People in Europe were watching the refugee crisis unfold on their televisions and had no framework for what they were seeing. That mismatch between the spectacle of departure and the erasure of its causes became the book’s driving argument.
I wanted to write a story about why people make the difficult decision to leave their homes and risk their lives — risk drowning in seas for an uncertain future that may or may not happen. Because everywhere in the world all that’s seen is the consequence; refugees coming into the countries. I wanted to write the why. That no one wants to be a refugee.
Katouh was sixteen when the Syrian revolution began in 2011, and for years the only channel available to her was social media. She watched events unfold from outside the country and wrote posts to people who had already made up their minds. The frustration of that impotence never left her, and the novel was in part an answer to it.
When the revolution happened I was 16-years old and all I could do was write Facebook posts, to people who already knew what was happening. So I wasn’t changing anyone’s mind.
The absence of Syrian voices in English-language YA publishing was not abstract for Katouh. In her SWANA Heritage Month keynote she named it plainly: before 2022, the category simply did not contain a Syrian author. Most accounts of Syria that existed in fiction, she noted elsewhere, were written by people who had not lived it.
It gave me the spark to be that person for my own identity. To speak myself. And that’s what I hope my book, As Long As the Lemon Trees Grow, can be. Speaking Myself.
The essay in which this appears traces how watching BTS carry their Korean heritage publicly and without apology broke something open for Katouh. She had spent years flattening her own identity to make others comfortable. The book was the decision to stop.
How she wrote it
Five years, three rewrites, and a waveKatouh started the first draft during NaNoWriMo 2017 and spent the next five years querying, revising, and rewriting before the book sold in February 2021. The manuscript that sold bore little resemblance to what she had first typed. What did not change across any version was the core story and the core argument.
This isn’t the book I first wrote. It’s not the one I edited in Author Mentor Match. It’s not the one I signed with Allie. And it’s not the one I sold. It has now reached its final form which is a cultivation of all the great input I got. But throughout it all, the core message and the core story stayed the same.
The earliest draft was not hopeful. Katouh had originally titled it something that announced death before a reader reached page one. Friends who read it told her the suffering was so unrelenting it had stopped registering emotionally. Their feedback forced her to rethink the structure, not the subject matter.
It’s like a wave. There are the loud moments and the quiet moments. The loud moments are what happens in the hospital and the fear Salama goes through. The quiet moments are the ones she spends with Kenan and Layla. Each moment amplifies the other.
Khawf, the physical embodiment of fear who haunts Salama throughout the novel, was the first element Katouh conceived, arriving before the protagonist herself. She wanted a speculative device that would let a story set during the Syrian revolution function as YA, and her answer came from Islamic theology. The reasoning was not decorative; it came from something she believed. [paraphrased from audio]
In my faith, we believe everything has life. From the moon to the seas to the grass. So I thought of abstract notions that are believed by every single person out there. Why would they not have life as well?
Salama’s moment of moral crisis, in which she uses a wounded child as leverage to secure safe passage out of Syria, did not exist until the third rewrite. At a Politics and Prose event with Sabaa Tahir, Katouh described pushing Salama to an edge no earlier draft had reached, and what that scene made visible about the choices that precede every departure.
Katouh described writing the scene in which Salama is pushed to a moral extreme in the third rewrite, and what it made visible: that refugees face decisions they will never speak about, carrying the guilt and shame of having been forced into a corner, and that the world only ever sees the moment of departure, not what preceded it. [paraphrased from audio]
The title connects to documented protest history. Banners carrying the poet Nizar Qabbani’s verses appeared in the town of Kafranbel during the revolution, and a specific regional saying about the city of Homs folded into the same phrase. Both sources traveled together into the novel’s name.
It came from Nizar Qabbani’s poem verse ‘every lemon shall bring forth a child, and the lemons will never die out.’ It was written on banners by the protestors in Kafranbel. Also, there’s a saying that every house in Homs has a lemon tree. So, it was an homage to both the verse and the city that shows hope will never die.
The personal thread
Writing toward a self she had hiddenThe novel’s composition ran parallel to Katouh working through something she described as years of self-erasure. Before the book existed, she had operated as what she called an apologetic Arab Muslim, shrinking in social situations to avoid friction. The manuscript became the place where that habit ended.
I try to heal my 13-year-old self who hasn’t seen herself in books, I write it for people who don’t know much about Syria, I write it for the Muslim teenagers now and I write it for adults. But, I also write it for myself. This is me healing my trauma and I deserve those stories.
The first draft’s emotional register reflects where Katouh was when she wrote it. She has described that period as one without hope, and the manuscript’s original 130,000 words bore that out. The book only became what it is after she found a way to believe in the ending she was asking her readers to trust.
The very first draft was 130,000 words of pure pain. I wrote it at a time when I had no hope.
On what’s at stake
Muslims who love who they areKatouh was specific about what kind of Muslim characters she had grown tired of finding in fiction. The familiar templates placed Muslim characters in conflict with their faith or their family or their culture of origin. Salama and Kenan were built to refuse all of those templates at once.
I wanted to write outside the box of what happens to Muslim characters. Salama’s issue isn’t strict parents who confuse religion with culture nor is it her rebelling against where she comes from. She loves who she is. Kenan isn’t misogynistic nor unkind. He’s a wonderful older brother and soft hearted but strong at the same time. These kind of characters for Muslims seldom exist.
The book’s argument about refugees is not only about Syrians. Katouh returns repeatedly to the gap between what the world sees when people arrive at a border and what it cannot see: the calculations, the losses, the thing a person becomes in order to survive. What she wanted readers to carry away from Salama’s story was a correction to a flattened image.
That Syrians and refugees as a whole are more than their pain and trauma. They have hope and dreams and ambitions and a history. They are not their situation they’re in. They’re more than that.
At the Politics and Prose event, Katouh described tracking down a specific detail from the early years of the revolution: a line spoken by a three-year-old Syrian boy in a hospital, recorded and shared in Facebook groups that were relaying news from inside the country. She wanted it in the novel because a single news cycle was not enough to hold it. [paraphrased from audio]
Hope. That despite everything that’s going on, hope persists like it always has. My goal was always for my readers to see my characters as more than their pain and trauma. They live on despite it all.
That persistence is structural in the book, not decorative. The wave pattern Katouh described in the revision process was a formal decision to keep hope breathable: without the quiet scenes, the hospital scenes would have stopped landing, and readers would have closed the book before the ending could do its work.
What she wants us to sit with
Hope as a decision, not a comfortKatouh has been asked about hope in nearly every interview she has given for this book, and her answer is always the same word and always specific about what she does not mean. She does not mean comfort or resolution. She means the thing that continues even when nothing else does.
Hope. That despite everything that’s going on, hope persists like it always has. My goal was always for my readers to see my characters as more than their pain and trauma. They live on despite it all.
Katouh addressed the novel’s audience in the broadest terms she uses anywhere in the synthesis. The book was not written for a single kind of reader or a single kind of purpose. Healing and witness and representation and personal reckoning all belonged to it at the same time, and she did not rank them.
I try to heal my 13-year-old self who hasn’t seen herself in books, I write it for people who don’t know much about Syria, I write it for the Muslim teenagers now and I write it for adults. But, I also write it for myself. This is me healing my trauma and I deserve those stories.