This article is part of a series produced in the Mafaza project – Battels Won and Lost. This project’s research and creation phase was completed with support from the Arts Council of Canada. You can also read in this series: On the Duality of Survival and Defeat by Waeel Saad al-Din, and The Tune of Survival by Abdul-Wahab Kayyali

Mosab Alnomire 

A Syrian poet and journalist residing in Canada, Mosab has published a poetry book and several articles in Arab magazines and newspapers.

The world of the genocide survivors is not the world of others. We may walk the same streets and attend the same jobs and classes, but things are paler and more dreadful from this corner. In front of the lake and the forest, in front of the splendid view of the world and the life in motion, there is a tingling in the heart and a constant feeling of turmoil and constriction.

People anywhere are vulnerable to harm and pain at any moment. Death, loss, departure, and unexpected accidents are a part of everyone’s life. However, the massacre, practiced by tyrannical or colonial regimes, is not merely a shocking and transient event in life that individuals can overcome following mourning. Turning the page is not possible because a massacre is an act by which life is redefined. It crushes individuals and explodes their communities and safety nets. This act does not happen in a flash and bang, it ends, allowing victims time to understand, mourn, and move on. It is a deliberate, long-term act that kills thousands or millions and leaves those remaining millions in a no-man’s-land between life and death, moving with tight nerves, running without knowledge of the destination. They live with intense feelings that are entangled, complex, and ambiguous. The massacre and the subsequent experiences as a refugee teach them a simple, straightforward, and hard lesson. This world is not safe. Survivors cannot stop worrying. They may try, but the world must try twice as hard to convince them that it is a safe place. A place where they can close their eyes for a moment and be at ease. Survivors do not truly survive until they believe it to be so. 

The Defeat’s Realizations 

In Syria, a popular revolution occurred against a regime that terrorized the country for fifty years. The regime responded by crushing the people with tanks, torture, and chemical weapons. Then, extremists spread like mushrooms across the map, which crumbled into four maps under the control of foreign powers. The United Nations has counted more than 300,000 dead, more than 10 million displaced out of 23 million total Syrians, and around 100,000 either dead under torture or forcibly disappeared with an unknown fate. In addition, there are 2.5 million children out of school and more than 12 million people below the poverty line. Missing from these figures is the number of people with mental disorders, including depression and post-traumatic stress disorder and so forth.

None of the Syrians I know are well. Most of us struggle to digest what happened and seek salvation. The realizations we had in the Syrian experience were very harsh. The desire to try and take initiative has been broken due to the high price we paid for aiming to change. Tyrants and criminals have triumphed and are being rehabilitated, while those seeking justice were defeated, not just in Syria, but across the countries of the Arab Spring, and ended up in prisons, exiles, or graves. 

When seeing what is happening in Palestine, Afghanistan, Iran, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, we are reminded of similar conclusions. Who cares about justice and the fate of the people if there is space for bargaining and maneuvering to pursue political interests? We try to continue, dictated by the idea of defeat. We may have survived the guns, the shells, and the handcuffs, but we have not yet survived the wounds in our bodies, hearts, and nerves. 

Hunting a Space for Grief and Redress 

Surviving brutal situations in which people’s will, ambition, determination, patience, and dignity are broken means not exactly surviving. Survival requires crossing from the shore of danger to the shore of safety and realizing that danger is far away. But reality does not say so, as the refugee is required from the first moment in the asylum journey to tighten the belt and be prepared for whatever might come. A race through hurdles awaits, and one must run and maneuver to secure the simplest necessities of living in new countries, whether Germany, Canada, or Sweden. Whatever the refugee’s professional experience, it may not mean anything in the new labour market.

Without family, friends, or safety nets, refugees are forced to continue to run in their new country. They were already running to flee their country and cross the borders. They looked death in the eye at sea and in wild forests, hoping for an opportunity to live in dignity, justice, and safety like other humans. During this relentless marathon, refugees do not have the opportunity to comprehend the scale of the horror they have gone through. They do not have a quiet moment to process the feelings of terror, guilt, anger, and defeat that paralyze them and prevent them from having a “normal” life. In addition, they live in an alert state, in fear because their families and loved ones are still in danger in Syria, or the neighboring countries of asylum, where the ugliest forms of racism are practiced against them. Hundreds were deported back to Syria from these and other places, despite the high risks of arrest and death awaiting them there.

But why do we say all this and emphasize it? Because the issue of asylum is often dealt with superficially and simplistically by entrenching refugees’ stereotypes. The refugees are either demonized, to be used as a scarecrow in political disputes, or be used as promotional commodities for the values of success and hope in a Hollywood story. In both cases, the essential context of their refugee story is either obscured or distorted, and the complex meanings and dilemmas that refugees live with every day are skipped over, often unknowingly. We tell our story because we want to do justice to our experiences and to possess the right of narration. And we want to possess our intuitive right to mourning, which we did not have a proper chance to experience —mourning for our good friends and people who do not deserve what happened to them. We narrate our stories slowly and calmly to challenge the frantic running and panting as a norm and a value and to have space for reflection and redress. To turn the pages we want to turn, by our choice, not against our will.

We say all this because meanings, ideas, and precious human relationships crystallize in fragility, weakness, and repeated attempts to continue life. We dive into the meanings of salvation, despair, and defeat, not in defense of nihilism or a desire for gratuitous complaint, but rather to see the world from this deserted and uncomfortable corner. From this corner, we test the limits of our capacity to be fair with ourselves. We also examine our resilience and ability to heal and cling to life. We say this because we are part of a story buried under superimposed layers of tensions, ideologies, and geopolitical complexities. It is the story of a human yearning for freedom and justice. It is the story of oppression, fear, and loss. It is a story about the search for meaning in a place where it can hardly be found.