Scholars of Syrian literature have shown that themes of silence and use of indirect signifiers have constituted creative responses to political oppression and surveillance, sometimes even been figured as a kind of exile without physical displacement. As the conflict following the uprisings against Bashar al-Assad’s regime gave rise to large-scale migration and internal displacement, the geography of Syrian cultural production has been radically transformed, with diasporic settings and voices becoming more central to Syrian literature and arts. This paper elaborates on some of the new modes of writing exile and migration in Arabic literature and then probes some of the new configurations and expressive possibilities of silence as it relates to emergent contexts of mobility and displacement. In Samar Yazbek’s 2017 novel Al-Mashāʾa (She Who Walks) the theme of silence and mobility converge in a young protagonist who refuses to speak and is afflicted by a mysterious condition that causes her to walk ceaselessly unless fettered. Yazbek’s first novel since leaving Syria after participating in the early days of protest in 2011, Al-Mashāʾa is told from the perspective of an adolescent narrator who prefers to not to use her “tongue muscle” other than to recite verses from the Qu’ran and instead expresses herself through drawings and in her fanciful written account addressing the reader directly. Her silence is interpreted by those around her not as a choice but as a disability. Her walking poses a danger and must be curtailed, first by her mother who uses a rope to keep her in place and then, after her mother’s death at a checkpoint, by her brother who moves her into a rebel-held area. Her choice to not to use her tongue coexists with a drive to walk that seems to defy individual agency. In this unnamed narrator, a drive for mobility thus coexists with multiple constraints, both individual and collective. The novel’s exploration of mobility within multiple contexts of constraint connects it to literature of contemporary forced migration both within and across national borders and presents a continuation and transformation of the theme of silence in Syrian literature.