By Ali Taha Alnobani
Every novelist must decide where a story belongs. Sometimes the setting is chosen because it offers a convenient landscape, an atmosphere, or a collection of historical details. At other times, the relationship between a place and a writer is more difficult to explain. The place has already entered the writer's imagination before the novel begins. Its streets, silences, contradictions, and accumulated memories become inseparable from the questions the writer wants to ask.
For me, Jerash belongs to the second category.
I chose Jerash as the heart of Venus's Tears not simply because it is my birthplace, or because its extraordinary Roman remains offer a visually compelling setting. I chose it because few places make the distance between the past and the present feel so uncertain. In Jerash, the ancient city and the contemporary city exist beside one another, but their relationship is more profound than physical proximity.
One can stand near monuments built for public ceremony and imperial prestige while knowing that ordinary human lives continue around them, shaped by work, family, suffering, hope, and the search for dignity. The apparent permanence of stone confronts the vulnerability of human existence.
This contrast provided more than the background for my novel. It offered a way of thinking about history itself.
Jerash Was Never Just an Archaeological Site
To many visitors, Jerash is first an encounter with monumental antiquity. They enter through the archaeological landscape and discover an astonishing urban world: the Oval Plaza, colonnaded streets, theaters, temples, gateways, and remains of buildings that once organized the civic and religious life of Gerasa.
The city flourished during the Roman period, although its human history extends much further back. As Gerasa, it was associated with the Decapolis, a group of cities in the eastern Mediterranean region distinguished by significant Hellenistic and Roman cultural influences. Its development was also shaped by the geography, resources, and commercial connections of the surrounding region.
These historical facts matter. A novelist who uses an ancient city cannot simply replace archaeological knowledge with decorative imagination. Yet archaeology, indispensable as it is, does not exhaust the meaning of a place.
Monuments tell us much about ambition, resources, technology, religion, and public organization. They reveal what different communities built, rebuilt, and sometimes abandoned. But their surviving grandeur cannot fully restore the experiences of everyone who lived within their shadows.
What did an ordinary person feel while passing through one of those streets? How did individuals experience the demands of authority, the obligations of family, or the inequalities that shaped their possibilities? What did love mean when personal choices collided with social expectations?
The surviving stones do not answer such questions directly. They invite historical investigation, but they also reveal the boundaries of what can be known.
In my earlier essay, Ancient Gerasa: The Roman City Behind Venus's Tears, I explored the historical city that stands behind the imaginative world of the novel. Here, the question is more personal: why did that city become necessary to the story I wanted to tell?
The answer begins with the conviction that a city's history cannot be reduced to the history of its most powerful inhabitants.
The Difference Between Looking at a City and Belonging to It
There is a meaningful difference between visiting a historical place and carrying it within one's understanding of the world.
The visitor may reasonably focus on the visible achievement: the architecture, the engineering, the beauty of surviving columns against the hills. The writer who belongs to that place may also be drawn toward what is less visible: the relationship between inherited history and the lives of people who occupy the present.
Belonging, however, does not guarantee perfect knowledge. Familiarity can create its own blindness. The places closest to us may become so ordinary that we stop questioning them.
Writing can interrupt this habit.
When I turned toward Jerash as a literary subject, the challenge was not merely to describe a familiar environment. It was to consider the city beyond the comfort of recognition, to see it as a meeting point between different experiences of time.
Jerash is both the archaeological Gerasa of the ancient world and a contemporary Jordanian city with its own social and cultural realities. Neither identity should erase the other.
The modern city is not a footnote to Roman history. Its inhabitants do not exist only to provide a human foreground for photographs of ancient monuments. Their lives have their own urgency, complexity, and historical importance.
Likewise, ancient Gerasa should not be treated as a collection of picturesque ruins, stripped of the political, economic, and human forces that once animated it.
A city becomes more interesting when we refuse to simplify it into a single image.
Two Thousand Years as a Literary Question
One of the central structural decisions behind Venus's Tears was to bring two historical worlds into the same novel.
In the modern narrative, Waheeb inhabits a world marked by personal loss, social tensions, and the difficult pursuit of justice and human dignity. In the ancient narrative, Venus and Dorotio belong to Roman Gerasa, where love unfolds within a social world shaped by authority, religious practice, and unequal power.
These worlds are not identical. The purpose of placing them together is not to suggest that Roman society and contemporary Jordanian society share the same institutions, moral assumptions, or conditions of life.
Two thousand years have transformed political systems, religious traditions, legal arrangements, ideas of citizenship, and the ways individuals understand themselves.
To ignore those differences would be historically careless.
Yet transformation does not eliminate every form of human recognition. Across very different societies, individuals confront questions concerning belonging, vulnerability, attachment, exclusion, and the limits placed upon their choices.
The causes of suffering may change dramatically even when suffering itself remains intelligible to readers separated by centuries.
This distinction matters to the architecture of the novel. I did not need the two eras to mirror each other exactly. Their differences were part of their significance.
A meaningful parallel narrative does not require repetition. It requires relationships that gradually deepen the reader's understanding of each world.
The ancient story can complicate the modern one. The modern story can challenge the way we interpret the ancient one. Neither must function as an illustration of the other.
I considered this narrative challenge more closely in Writing a Novel Across Two Thousand Years. Its importance here is that Jerash makes such a structure feel organically connected to a particular geographical reality.
The two time periods do not float through unrelated imaginative spaces. They return to the same human landscape, even as that landscape changes.
What the Stones Preserve, and What They Cannot
One of the remarkable qualities of Jerash is the survival of monumental structures that still allow visitors to imagine the arrangement of an ancient city.
The Oval Plaza expresses a conception of public space through architecture. The colonnaded streets indicate organized movement and civic investment. Temples and theaters reveal the importance of religious observance, performance, and public life.
But even when buildings survive, the lives associated with them are preserved unevenly.
Historical evidence often makes some people more visible than others. Rulers, benefactors, officials, and institutions may leave inscriptions or impressive constructions. People without comparable wealth or authority may appear only indirectly, through material remains or fragmentary evidence.
This uneven survival of memory interested me as a novelist.
I wanted the imaginative possibilities of Jerash to extend beyond those who possessed enough influence to mark their presence upon stone.
That does not mean fiction can recover lost individual biographies as verified fact. It cannot. A fictional character does not become historical evidence merely because the author has conducted careful research.
What fiction can do is restore a sense of human possibility to a historical world whose surviving records are incomplete.
It can ask the reader to imagine how authority might have been experienced from below, how an intimate relationship might have become entangled with social obligations, or how ordinary people might have perceived events that official history commemorated differently.
Such questions must remain disciplined by what is known about the period.
The novelist's freedom is not permission to misrepresent the past. Rather, it is the freedom to construct a plausible human world within the acknowledged limits of evidence.
Why I Refused to Separate Beauty from Injustice
Jerash is beautiful. Any attempt to deny the visual power of its ancient architecture would be artificial.
Yet beauty presents a challenge to the historical novelist.
Monumental architecture can invite admiration so completely that the social conditions behind its creation fade from view. The grandeur of a temple or public square is easier to photograph than the unequal relationships through which power operated in daily life.
The beauty of a city, however, does not prove that its society was just.
Nor does the presence of hierarchy mean that every person experienced ancient life in the same way. Social positions, legal categories, religious affiliations, wealth, gender, and local traditions could produce significantly different possibilities and restrictions.
Historical fiction must resist both idealization and oversimplification.
For Venus's Tears, the tension between private longing and public authority became one way of exploring this problem.
Venus and Dorotio belong to an imagined narrative, not to a documented biography from Roman Gerasa. Their significance is literary. Through them, the novel can explore what happens when affection enters a world in which power is unevenly distributed.
The question is not whether love automatically defeats authority. Literature is often most revealing when it recognizes that love may be fragile, compromised, or defeated.
And yet an individual's capacity to love, choose, remember, and resist remains central to the moral imagination of fiction.
This relationship between private feeling and public power also runs through Love and Power in Historical Fiction, where the personal dimensions of historical conflict become a means of literary inquiry.
The Modern City Has Its Own Claim on Literature
If my novel had remained entirely within Roman Gerasa, Jerash might have become an evocative historical setting, but I would have lost something essential to my purpose.
Contemporary Jerash is not merely the place from which we observe the ancient city. It is a living environment in which individuals negotiate relationships, responsibilities, social expectations, and uncertain futures.
The modern narrative of Waheeb allowed the novel to approach questions that cannot be confined to archaeological imagination.
What happens when a human being's dignity is challenged by circumstances beyond personal control? What forms of injustice become normalized through habit or institutional indifference? How does someone continue searching for meaning when the surrounding world offers few reassuring answers?
These are literary questions, not claims that all contemporary inhabitants of Jerash share the same experience.
Every city contains differences of opportunity, belief, class, ambition, and personal circumstance. No single character can represent an entire community.
Waheeb's story is therefore not intended as a comprehensive portrait of Jerash. It is one imagined human path within a larger contemporary world.
But the decision to place that path alongside a much older story gives the city's continuity a narrative purpose.
The ancient and modern characters do not need to meet. Their experiences meet through the reader's awareness of place.
In this sense, Jerash becomes more than the location in which events occur. It becomes a principle through which the novel organizes its understanding of time.
A City Is Not the Same as Its Monuments
The most familiar images of Jerash often emphasize the archaeological city in isolation: a colonnade beneath an open sky, a dramatic theater, a temple rising above the surrounding landscape.
Such images are valuable, but they can produce an incomplete impression of what the city means.
The archaeological site is not the whole of Jerash. The surrounding urban environment, neighborhoods, social institutions, and contemporary cultural life belong to its identity as surely as the ancient stones do.
The history of the city also extends beyond Rome. Late antique, Byzantine, early Islamic, and subsequent periods contributed to its changing landscape. Modern settlement introduced other communities, experiences, and layers of belonging.
The city's historical continuity should not be confused with the idea that its population, institutions, or cultural practices remained unchanged.
Continuity can exist through transformation rather than through sameness.
For a novelist, this is an especially productive idea. A place may preserve traces of earlier lives without requiring present inhabitants to reproduce them.
In The City That Became a Character: How Places Shape Literature, I examined the ways places can participate in the development of literary meaning. Jerash offers an intimate version of that larger question.
Its importance lies not simply in what survives from antiquity, but also in how an ancient landscape continues to exist beside the needs and realities of people living now.
Memory Is Not the Same as History
One danger in writing about a familiar city is the temptation to turn personal attachment into historical certainty.
Memory and history overlap, but they are not interchangeable.
Personal memory preserves the emotional meanings attached to experience. Historical inquiry asks questions about evidence, chronology, interpretation, and the relationships among recorded events.
Fiction operates differently from both. It invents characters and circumstances in order to explore possibilities that neither personal memory nor historical documentation can fully contain.
When these three forms of understanding enter the same novel, their boundaries must remain recognizable.
My attachment to Jerash can explain why I wished to write about it. It cannot establish what an ancient inhabitant thought or believed.
Likewise, an archaeological description can help reconstruct the physical environment of Roman Gerasa, but it cannot supply an invented character's private consciousness.
That consciousness belongs to the novelist's imagination.
The responsibility lies in making imagination credible without disguising it as recovered evidence.
I see this as a productive limitation. Research prevents the historical world from becoming arbitrary, while fiction prevents the narrative from becoming a mere summary of archaeological findings.
Why a Local Story Can Speak Beyond Its Borders
A frequent assumption about literature is that a story must move away from the local in order to become universal.
I have never found that assumption convincing.
A deeply situated story can reach readers far beyond its geographical setting, not because it removes cultural difference, but because it makes particular human experiences meaningful.
Readers do not need to have walked through Jerash to understand a character's fear of exclusion, desire for freedom, experience of loss, or need for dignity.
At the same time, they should not be asked to imagine that the city's history is merely interchangeable with the history of any other place.
Specificity is not an obstacle to literary reach. It is often the condition that makes a fictional world convincing.
Jerash carries a recognizable history and geography. Its identity cannot be transferred without loss to another city chosen only for architectural similarity.
The same is true of the social environments in which modern characters develop their relationships.
Literature gains depth when it allows the reader to encounter an unfamiliar world without demanding that the world surrender its distinctions.
To write from Jerash is therefore not to write only for Jerash.
It is to begin with a particular place and allow its human questions to travel.
History Does Not Repeat Itself as a Simple Pattern
A novel that moves between two distant periods risks encouraging an easy conclusion: that nothing changes, that power always behaves in exactly the same way, or that humanity endlessly repeats a single tragedy.
Such conclusions may sound dramatic, but they diminish historical complexity.
The Roman world possessed social arrangements, legal categories, religious institutions, and political structures fundamentally different from those of modern Jordan.
Recognizing these differences does not make comparison impossible. It makes comparison more responsible.
The literary value of two timelines lies in placing human experiences into conversation rather than declaring the eras identical.
The constraints imposed on an individual in one century may have little institutional resemblance to those encountered in another.
Nevertheless, examining both can encourage readers to think more carefully about how authority, dependency, belonging, and resistance take different forms.
This is why I prefer the idea of historical resonance to mechanical repetition.
A resonance is not a duplicate. It is a relationship between distinct experiences that becomes perceptible through the structure of the work.
In Venus's Tears, Jerash provides the geographical connection through which those resonances can emerge.
Why Jerash Had to Remain at the Center
As a novelist, I could have treated the city as a frame around the characters, something to establish atmosphere before the narrative turned toward more obviously personal conflicts.
But that would have weakened the relationship between the structure of the novel and the questions it pursues.
Jerash made it possible to bring historical distance and human closeness into the same field of imagination.
The ancient city raised questions about the survival of memory, the public expression of power, and the lives left at the margins of monumental history.
The contemporary city allowed different questions to emerge: how individuals negotiate dignity, how communities respond to vulnerability, and how private lives are influenced by social institutions.
Together, these worlds give the place a role that no decorative background could fulfill.
I also wanted to resist the division that sometimes separates a city's internationally celebrated past from its less visible present.
It is easy to praise ancient civilizations while paying insufficient attention to the dignity of people living beside their remains.
Literature offers no automatic solution to that contradiction, but it can expose it.
For this reason, choosing Jerash was not simply an aesthetic decision or an expression of attachment to my birthplace.
It was a way of insisting that history matters because human lives matter, and that the significance of a place cannot be measured only by the monuments it leaves behind.
The Place Where Past and Present Remain Unfinished
A city is never fully contained by its historical descriptions, its monuments, or the stories written about it.
Every representation is necessarily partial.
Archaeology reconstructs the past through evidence. Personal memory preserves the past through experience. Fiction approaches both through invention, interpretation, and the imaginative possibilities of human life.
Jerash gave me the opportunity to place these forms of understanding close to one another without pretending that they were the same.
Perhaps this is the deepest reason I chose it.
I did not want a city that would merely make my novel appear historical. I wanted a place whose existence would continuously challenge the distinction between what survives and what disappears, between public memory and private suffering, between the visible achievements of civilization and the fragile lives through which civilization is experienced.
Jerash contains these questions without answering them for us.
Its stones remain, but the people who once inhabited its ancient streets cannot return to explain themselves. Its modern inhabitants continue creating lives that no monument can fully represent.
Between those realities, literature finds an important responsibility: not to speak as if it knows every silence, but to recognize that each silence may conceal a human story worth imagining.
That is the Jerash I wanted at the heart of my novel.
Not a museum without people. Not a modern city without history. But a living place in which the past and present continually alter the way we understand one another.
The Connection to Venus's Tears
Venus's Tears brings together two fictional worlds connected through Jerash: the ancient Gerasa of Venus and Dorotio, and the contemporary city of Waheeb. The novel does not claim that the same lives recur across two thousand years. Instead, it explores how different historical circumstances can illuminate enduring questions about love, power, loss, and human dignity. Jerash provides the geographical and imaginative center of that exploration. Its importance lies not in making the two eras identical, but in allowing their differences and resonances to become part of a single literary experience.
Historical Background and Further Reading
The historical descriptions of Jerash in this essay draw on archaeological research and official site documentation. The characters and private experiences in Venus's Tears belong to fiction, not to the documented historical record.
Jordan Tourism Board — Jerash Archaeological Sites . Official descriptions of the ancient city's principal monuments and public spaces.
Getty Conservation Institute — Jarash Case Study . Historical urban development, archaeological preservation, and the relationship between the historic remains and their setting.
Journal of Global History — Urban and Environmental Relations in Gerasa . Scholarly research on the city's long-term development and changing urban environment.
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