Zoulfa Katouh never saw herself as a writer.

She thought being a writer entailed studying English literature, earning the label through educational pursuits, and that was never Katouh. She comes from a family of engineers and scientists. She was, however, a huge reader growing up, which she credits to her grandfather’s love of storytelling and L. M. Montgomery.

“The first book I ever read was Anne of Green Gables,” Katouh recalls from her home in Switzerland. “Bless her, she fed my imagination.”

Her first foray into writing came in her early 20s, and took the form of fan fiction, which she still writes today. The idea of writing a novel never occurred to her until she moved to Switzerland and began taking German classes, where Katouh, a Syrian Canadian, was regularly asked about Syria by the other students.  

“How do you not know what’s going on?” she remembers wondering. “I thought it was clear as the sun, but the media wasn’t really talking about Syria, and that was a kind of download. I wanted to write a story about why people become refugees, so people would understand this is not an easy choice. This is not about people taking your jobs or stealing from you. Everybody wants to go back home. This is the only choice they have.”

During NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) in 2017, Katouh set pen to paper, starting what would become As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow, her young adult debut. The novel, set during the Syrian Revolution, follows Salama Kassab, an 18-year-old pharmacy student who becomes a surgeon, as she determines whether she should stay or flee the country; the novel would become a finalist for the 2023 Governor General’s Literary Awards.

While As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow was the novel she had to write to help people understand the plight of refugees, The Ocean Would Paint Me Blue (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, June 2), is the one she’s always wanted to write.

“This [novel] is my whole life, it’s my personal experience,” she says. “The experience of those who look different and live in the West or in Europe.”

It was also a means for her to make things right: to reveal the genuine beauty of her mother tongue, Arabic. Her starting point was the word jihad; it’s a word that has been villainized, but is rooted in resilience and strength and means “a struggle to become the best version of yourself.” In Katouh’s eyes, it’s steeped in an “ocean of meaning.” So, she named the main character of The Ocean Would Paint Me Blue, her sophomore young adult novel, Jihad Dabbagh.

The novel follows Jihad, who wears a hijab, as she finishes her senior year at Braxton Academy, an elite all-white school, while grieving the death of her mother. “When we name our children, we always choose names that have meaning,” Katouh says. “I wanted to show the meaning of jihad in this 17-year-old girl who always strives to be the best person she can be and fight for what she deserves.”

And Jihad does fight. She fights the looks, the whispers, the slurs that follow her through the halls of Braxton Academy by continuing to show up, which she does even after a brutal beating at the hands of fellow students. “That was very difficult for me to write,” recounts Katouh. “But I wanted to show the insidious side, because it’s happening. In my research, I was shocked to learn how many Muslim Arab children have committed suicide because of bullying. I feel, within our schools, we need to unearth this, because if it happens to one child, that’s one child too many.”  

Showing up is not the only method Jihad uses to fight back. She also picks up her great-aunt’s sketchbook and allows her heightened sense of colour, one of the magical blessings the women in her family possess, to harness the pain that lives inside her and set it free. 

Unlike Jihad, Katouh’s artistic ability, she confesses, is limited to stick figures, but she does love art as much as she loves a sunset. In fact, when she was in university, she would head to the beach every day after class, to simply sit and watch the softness, the richness of the sunset. “I took that love and I wondered, ‘How do I translate how I feel when I see colour, or when I see a sunset?’” she recalls. She has no definitive answer, but believes those moments found a home in her heart, and when it came time to write how Jihad sees the world, they were at the ready. 

“Jihad being an artist was very important,” Katouh says. “I’m a pharmacist, but I can see the effect my words have on people, what my books have done. I wanted her to be someone who draws and paints because art is how you change the world.”

If Katouh were to condense The Ocean Would Paint Me Blue to one word, it would be healing. For herself, yes, but also for the generations that came before her that never got the chance to explore their creative side because they felt they had to do a certain thing.

“I mourn for these hidden talents that were never discovered,” says Katouh, who is the first in her family to follow a creative pursuit. “I understand where our parents were coming from, but I want this part of our lives to be cultivated as well. We can do both. We have such little representation that we need to do both.”