By Dr. Adnan Bozan

Don’t ask me how I’m doing... As always, I’m writing.

I write not to answer, but to strip the question of its false mask. I write to clear the clutter from my mind and the dust from my heart. I write because I have no land in which to plant my dreams except these forgotten lines of paper, and no homeland to inhabit except the kingdom of meaning, where words are not forced to carry arms.

Why do we write?

It’s a question posed each morning by the armies of silence to the soldiers of the pen—a question like a soft slap on the cheek of time, not meant to insult but to awaken.

We write because there is within us a spark of noble madness, a flicker of that first fire lit by humankind to frighten away the night; because we hold a trace of the child's shiver at the sound of their first “I love you,” of the lover’s gasp upon reading their first poem of longing. We write because there is too much shouting and too little listening—so we stretch our lines like a bridge across the abyss, that meaning may not fall.

To you who ask, do not listen to those who say that writing cannot fill a stomach or pay the bills—for they do not understand that the deeper hunger lies not in the belly but in the mind, and that the poorest of the poor is the one whose heart has died without knowing it.

We write because the cities that betrayed us, and the countries that forgot our names, left us nothing but the corners of letters in which to seek refuge—refugees from the absurdity of the world.

Each time I hold my pen, I find it resembles not a bow that fires arrows, but a wound that drips truth. Each time I dip it in ink, I feel as though I am washing it of life’s lies with the water of purity.

And sometimes... sometimes, when I write, I feel as if I am summoning the prophets of meaning from their long exiles... as if words are prayers not rising to the sky, but descending upon our souls to cleanse them of the filth of the ordinary, the habitual, the banal.

They said: “The pen is the weapon of the powerless.” And I smiled—because they never knew that the truly powerless is the one who cannot find even a single word to build a bridge to a lonely heart.

They said: “Words don’t satisfy hunger.” And I told them: but they plant wheat in the soil of the soul. Is there any poverty greater than a land that cannot dream? And is there any wealth nobler than an idea that saves a person from despair?

I write not to chase rank between ink and air, but to search for my face in the mirror of language, for my name among the ashes of centuries. I write so humanity won’t forget its features in the crowd of beasts, so kindness won’t abandon its last coat beneath the rain of mockery and ruin.

With a word, the miracle begins. With a word, the moon was split. With a word, wars erupted—and healed. With a word, souls embrace—or clash. With a word, a nation rises—and another is buried.

We do not write for those who swallow meaning like a pill, but for those who savor it like the first raindrop after a long drought. We write for those who hear the moan of paper when scratched, and smell the fire beneath the ashes when a burning letter passes by.

We write to plant roses on the maps of blood, to draw windows into the walls of prisons. We write because, quite simply, we cannot not write.

In the beginning, there was no man.
In the beginning, there was the word.