This article is part of Mafaza Digital Zine that explores the concept of survival. You can read also: The Republic of Wounded Bodies by Nabil Muhammad, The Governance of Hope by Hsain al-Shehabi, Apocalypse in the Body by Kinana Issa, To Fall from Nowhere by Nour Mousa, The World is Not a Small Village by Raja Salim, Living Wounds: Violations & Victimhood by Sasha Zack, and To Be Understood Without Talking by Shaunt Raffi.
Read the Arabic Issue here.
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Ola Barqawi
A Palestinian-Syrian writer based in Toronto, pursuing a Master’s degree in Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto.
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“I’m from there, I’m from here. And I’m not there nor here”1
In their efforts to understand and define their identities and origins, many Canadians are keen to maintain their ethnic affiliation through language, food, clothing, or religion. They do so by passing on names and traditions across generations, engaging in cultural or religious communities, or blending inherited values with their present-day ones. Perhaps there is no difficulty for some in their expression of identity being somewhat vague or overlapping with other identity features. This blend, this mosaic of values from the past and present, showcases the beauty of the multicultural identity that has emerged in Canada over the years. As a Palestinian in Canada, I too engage deeply in this process, but not by choice, nor through a peaceful, smooth, or consent-driven journey of defining, understanding, and practicing my identity. I do this as a means of survival, to keep my identity alive.
I walked, for several days this past fall, on the stretch of Shaw Street connecting King and Queen Street. Every time I spotted a vehicle that resembled an ice cream truck from afar, I tried to look away; it was similar to one I had seen in a video from Gaza. In the video, a child spots an ice cream truck and asks his father, carrying blood-soaked cloth bags, if they could get some ice cream. The father replies that the truck is now for storing bodies because there was no more room in Gaza’s hospitals. The father then tells his son that he would be storing the remains of the child’s siblings’ in that ice cream truck. Each day, when I saw the truck on Shaw Street from a distance, I would turn my face away, trying to erase the image of the child, his father, and the bags of remains from my mind, and I would quickly walk away until one day, I actually looked at the vehicle. It was strewn with pictures of dozens of Israeli hostages, the phrase “Bring Them Home” emblazoned across it.
This was during the first two weeks after October 7th, when many of us, Palestinians and Arabs, felt an overwhelming need to defend ourselves, to educate those unaware of our history, urging them to see the full picture and acknowledge our narrative. When we tried to take them in the past by a few days, weeks, months, or even years, back to 1947-1948.
The live scene turned cinematic as soon as I understood what was being shown on the vehicle; I tried to walk faster, to banish the image of the child, his father, and the bloody bags of remains from my mind. But at that moment, the truck started moving alongside me… slowly… matching my steps as if it were guiding my pace until I reached the traffic light on Queen Street and took the opposite route.
“This earth is smaller than the blood of its children who are standing on the thresholds of Resurrection like offerings”
Before that date, my identity and sense of belonging to the Arab countries were often at the back of my mind, lurking uncomfortably as a complex and burdensome legacy, after years of carrying bloody patterns of tragedy and injustice. I longed to break free from it all, to distance myself from anything that tied me to those lands that had oppressed, expelled, and sent us to places we never asked to go. I didn’t want my old pattern to weigh down my steps as I struggled to move forward.
I was born to refugee parents. Their families were expelled from Jaffa and Tiberias in 1948 and settled in the Yarmouk Camp south of Damascus, Syria, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees found what they saw as a temporary home. Yarmouk Camp was later known as the Capital of the Palestinian Diaspora, it was after all the largest of the Palestinian refugee camps anywhere. And since the United Nations recognizes Palestinian refugees’ right to return to Palestine, all generations of Palestinian refugees in Syria, Lebanon and Egypt did not obtain their citizenship. Instead, they were born, grew up and died as refugees. Children of the Palestinian diaspora were refugees before they even understood what asylum meant. However, it was the Palestinians of Syria who came to grasp the full, lived reality of asylum when they were forced to seek refuge in other capitals starting in 2011. This experience finalized the vivid image of asylum in the minds of Palestinian-Syrian refugees, mirroring the hardships of asylum endured by their parents and grandparents who left Palestine decades ago.
In Damascus, I carried an ID card marked as a “Temporary ID for Palestinian refugees” and a “Temporary travel document for Palestinian refugees”. My temporary ID, however, could not offer a return to Palestine, nor did my travel document allow any simple exit from Syria.
My son had just turned two when the Syrian uprising broke out in 2011. At home, he added his own melodies to chants like: “Freedom forever against your will, Assad” and “The people want to overthrow the regime”. His kindergarten was called al-Awda (the Return), and there he would stare at portraits of Bashar and Hafez al-Assad at the front of his classroom, salute the Syrian regime’s flag, and sing the anthem of the military force that had disappeared his father into torture chambers for three months.
At the age of three and a half, my son responded to a sudden power outage in class by cursing the regime. The following day, I was summoned to the kindergarten, where terrified teachers surrounded me while indoctrinating my son with statements like, “We love Mr. President Bashar al-Assad, don’t we? We love the Syrian army, don’t we?” Eventually, President Bashar al-Assad’s army destroyed Rawdat al-Awda when it destroyed the capital of Palestine’s diaspora, Mukhayyam al-Yarmuk.
When he was four, my son would run through the corridors of the prison to hug his father, accused of terrorism. On these visits, my son would scowl at the members of “Air Force Intelligence” and “Military Security” checkpoints, who used the child’s presence to crack silly jokes. One day after he turned five, my son snuck out of the narrow space in our home where we took shelter during the bombings. With cartoon-inspired heroism, he tried to rescue his favourite pencil sharpener; he couldn’t bear the thought of a bomb hitting the house and destroying it. Damascus seemed to shrink as siblings, friends, and relatives departed, some travelled or fled while others were imprisoned, tortured, killed. Scarcely anyone remained. Neither my travel document nor my son’s Syrian passport could get us out of Syria. We found ourselves stuck, alternating between the interminable visa applications and the endless wait for what was always a rejection. When we finally managed to leave Syria, our travel spanned nearly a decade before we found a lasting refuge in Toronto.
So, this is what it truly means to be a refugee. My grandparents left Jaffa with the dream of returning, but I left Damascus with a pang of grief, untainted with a desire to return. I left without regretting my departure, grateful simply that my son and I had survived it.
In his book, In the Name of Identity, Amin Maalouf says that it is not easy to demolish the feelings built up towards the land one has left behind. Because if one has left, it is because there are things one has “rejected–repression, insecurity… But this rejection is often accompanied by a sense of guilt… for abandoning the house you grew up in. As difficult as it is to let go of everything that has built memory and experience in the homeland, it will remain ingrained, just as it is difficult to get rid of the sense of familiarity with the homeland’s language, religion, music, traditions, and food”.2 Still, while I was trying to cut out any root, no matter how strong it was, and as much as I felt the insolence and ingratitude of doing so, I thought that by my premature burial of that identity, I would be free from everything that could hinder my ability to survive. I thought that in my hunt for peace in ways that would move me forward, I had to create a new self free from everything it had been taught. And that if I wanted to shake off that inhibiting feeling resulting from the conflict between my Palestinian and Syrian identities within me, I had to seek a sense of non-belonging.
“And I am my other self in a duality that blends between speech and reference”
After October 7th, I had to put my defences up when I realized that this is Toronto, not a place like Damascus, Beirut, Amman, or Istanbul, where almost everyone knew and acknowledged my version of history and my narrative of Palestine. I realized that at times like these, and for the first time, I was facing a diverse society even at the level of adequate understanding of the region I came from. And that if I had succeeded even a little over the past years in obscuring aspects of my belonging, I would not be so terrified now, so desperate to speak up, explain, and defend myself, my identity, and my land to people who knew little about what was happening there before October 7th. When Maalouf describes our characteristics as immigrants living in an age that has forced us “to live in a universe-bearing little resemblance to the place where we were born… and [having] the feeling that our own identity, as we have conceived of it since we were children, is threatened”3, he is, for me, talking about that scattered self that suddenly realizes she has no means in the face of all this injustice other than anger and searching for someone or something to calm her down, even for an hour, so that she can sort out her concerns. An hour in which she realizes that, from now on, she should wisely handle simple questions like: Where are you from? She should quickly examine her listeners’ impressions of October 7th and prepare for disappointment from someone asking about her homeland. Is it fair or reasonable for anyone in this world to feel that their listeners might be disappointed by an answer to such a question?
It has always been easier for me to write about my scattered self from a distance. I have always viewed my pre-leaving Damascus self, which was naturally my actual identity, as separate. So far, I have written about my various “I” forms in this article with little comfort. However, it doesn’t seem useful today to talk about that self in a detached manner for the rest of this article. Doing so would be another desperate attempt to observe my confusions, perceptions, changes, and survival from a dissociated perspective, avoiding any tone of rebuke for my previous quest for non-belonging.
After October 7th, it became urgent for me to find answers to questions like: To whom do you belong? To whom do you not belong? Are you Syrian, Palestinian, or Palestinian-Syrian? An Arab, a refugee, or an immigrant? Was Yarmouk Camp a homeland? What about your belonging to Syria? What are you doing with the Syrian accent that has overshadowed your Palestinian one? Who can you share any identity with? What is the affiliation that has formed, is still forming, and will continue to form your identity? All these questions, and more, must be answered to absorb all the pain inflicted upon and emanating from Gaza.
I had to look wide-eyed at every video documenting a child trembling with fear, being killed, or torn to pieces. I wanted to see all the undocumented scenes out of a sense of regret, as if the children were demanding, “Look at me… this is what is happening to me”. The more closely I looked at the fear in the eyes or the calmness in the death, the more I struggled, and the more I felt connected to their pain and the death that pursued them. With each instance, I let my roots grow from that prematurely buried sense of belonging, and I continued on the path of my identity survival.
“Wind is a compass to the stranger’s north…”
All the answers to my questions intersected into one realization: I was, still am, and will always be one of them. I now have to dismantle the distorted forms of my identity that I deliberately and recklessly built after leaving my temporary home, Damascus, ten years ago. Examining Edward Said’s experience as narrated in his memoir Out of Place made it easier to deal with that process.
Growing up there, Damascus offered me no sense of being a temporary place. It was the city in which I formed a concept of identity that unintentionally overshadowed my Palestinian identity, one I was never certain I would belong to exclusively. After leaving Damascus, I could never be certain of returning to it. My belonging to both Palestine and Syria, as two identities and two places, became an idea that might one day be lost to uncertainty. In Out of Place, Said discusses the phrase “anxious moodiness of travel,” which is a feeling of envy for those who remain in place; there is something about the “invisibility of the departed, his being missing and perhaps missed… the intense, repetitious, and predictable sense of banishment that takes you away from all that you know and can take comfort in… though, the great fear is that departure is the state of being abandoned, even though it is you who leave”.4 Every departure of the Palestinian diaspora from a land of refuge necessarily becomes an exile when that land prevents our return the moment we set foot on the departing planes. If we had previously become accustomed to turning our backs on every land without returning, and if we managed to settle somewhere, we might abandon our defences, exhausted by all those farewells. We would finally yearn to stay in any place where we find safety, where our complex identities, upbringings, and the injustices that have befallen us and our ancestors are recognized. We may realize that every departure, even towards new opportunities, makes us search for any trace we may have left behind, a trace that could allow us to one day return. Every departure becomes a forced rupture that transforms the previous place into a mere idea that bears no certainty.
“Identity is a daughter of birth. Yet, eventually, it is the creation of its owner, not the inheritance of the past”
Among the details of the difficulties that the Palestinian diaspora may face, Said says in his memoirs that his new life in the United States forced him to try to unlearn what he had been taught in Jerusalem and Cairo. He had to start “relearning things from scratch, improvising, self-inventing, trying and failing, experimenting, cancelling, and restarting in surprising and frequently painful ways”.5 However, he acknowledges that the process of weaving and observing identity continued throughout his life, never-ending. For him, exile offers greater opportunities compared to those who remain in one place and live their lives at the same pace since birth. Said says in an interview that exile has the privilege of having multiple perspectives, each shaped by the places one has visited. Instead of seeing an experience as a single, integrated entity, the exiled eye views it from at least two angles: one from the perspective of the person who has experienced it directly, and another from the perspective of someone familiar with similar experiences from their homeland. When these two perspectives are combined, a positive duality of experience is created. There is a virtue in being Palestinian, Said says in the interview. The pleasure of being Palestinian is that it teaches one to feel a sort of particularity, not only as a problem but as a kind of gift. In fact, being Palestinian gives one an aura–not one of sanctity, but a space that allows Palestinians to experience their own particularity in a new way. And when they realize that this mass society has destroyed identity, the sense of particularity becomes something worth keeping.
I had been absent from the usual gatherings of my Syrian friends for a long time before I recently attended a Canadian citizenship celebration. The party included friends from Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Canada, and others I did not know, all speaking in various Arabic and English accents. It seemed they had created a community of harmony, support, and love in a way I had never noticed before, or perhaps I was the one who had chosen not to notice it before that evening. There was intimacy all around–in the warm hugs, in the joyous dancing, and in the lively conversations. And when, among the joyful songs being sung, a song about Palestine played, we found it difficult to continue eating. For a moment, the small space, no more than fifty square meters, felt like a piece of land from which each of us came–be it Damascus, Beirut, Cairo, Amman, or Baghdad–transplanted into the heart of Toronto. The keffiyeh rested comfortably on the shoulders of young men and women and had become a must at such gatherings. They passed it around, cheering whenever someone raised it high. These keffiyehs would also be present the following afternoon in the weekly demonstrations in which many friends, burdened by the pain from Gaza, marched.
On days like these, the identity of the Palestinian diaspora is strengthened and deepened as we recognize the privilege of still being Palestinians. Disappointment and frustration have been deeply ingrained in our collective consciousness for decades, with little hope for political solutions that might bring justice or restore rights in the near future. Although justice and restoration of rights are the most urgent demands, we often find ourselves in the diaspora forced to negotiate even to have our narratives recognized. However, as long as the bet on the ‘fading of identity upon the passing of those expelled from Palestine and then its gradual loss with subsequent generations’ is still not winning, I have hope. And as long as the new generation actively demonstrates, boycotts, resists the silencing of voices, and challenges wrongful narratives, then translates privilege into actions oriented towards justice and truth, some hope is sustained. At the age of 15, my son marches through downtown Toronto with his friends in support of the Palestinians in Gaza. He swaps his guitar for an oud to play “Mawtini/My Homeland” and learns to play some of Umm Kulthoum’s songs. He listens curiously to poems by Mahmoud Darwish with me and then recommends others to me. My experiences will build upon previous ones, possibly enriching my layered identity. It might be beneficial to accept the idea of not resolving the complexity of layered identity. An identity aware of its struggle against marginalization can gather its scattered remains to form–from everything it can save–an identity that survives to continue forming itself as one that belongs and relates to that land.
