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, Identity Survival in The Diaspora by Ola Barqawi, The World is Not a Small Village by Raja Salim, Living Wounds: Violations & Victimhood by Sasha Zack, To Be Understood Without Talking by Shaunt Raffi, and Furnishing Memory by Ali Zaraket.
Read the Arabic Issue here.
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Mosab Alnomire
Syrian-Canadian poet and journalist. Published two poetry collections and has published several articles in various Arabic newspapers and magazines. He is the founder and executive director of Henna Platform.
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The last century has posed various existential challenges and witnessed massive transformations in the Middle East. The colonial heritage and the brutal dictatorships that ruled for decades prevented the people from having the ability to thrive and develop naturally. The societies of the region lived complex traumas resulting from oppression, brutality, and deprivation. The Arab Spring came as an attempt to rise against these oppressive realities, but facing the complex and deep-rooted heritage of the last decades led most of these revolutions to fail.
The hopes for justice and freedom were crushed ruthlessly, leading to massive waves of refugees and immigrants. Surviving all of that was not a fun ride. Refugees have left behind their destroyed cities. Some of their loved ones were killed, drowned, or forcibly disappeared. They faced the traumas of violence in their homelands and on the way out. Those who arrived at “safety” had to start their lives from scratch and adapt to new and unfamiliar systems and lifestyles while also having to reflect on the brutal cruelty of what they had survived and fled from, in order to heal and be able to live on with some semblance of “normalcy”.
There is a pressing need today to meditate carefully and deeply on this legacy of harsh experiences to understand the extent of the damage done to our bodies and communities. Our ability to move toward the future on a solid and healthy footing depends on our understanding of the challenges we face today as refugees and immigrants in the West. These challenges revolve primarily around breaking the cycle of violence, deconstructing and comprehending its dynamics to ensure that it is not passed on to the coming generations. We also need to understand the systems under which we live today and be aware of their legacy of violence and marginalization. Hence the necessity of contemplating the idea of survival and its multiple layers. There is plenty to be said about survival as a philosophy, lifestyle, or complex system. This is what Mafaza Digital Zine aims to explore.
This series of articles is published as part of Mafaza Digital Zine, the second stage of Henna Platform’s Mafaza Project. The first stage of Mafaza Project was a research and creation phase that engaged with the theme of survival through poetry and music. This second stage aims to expand the reflection sight by highlighting different and experiences and observations on survival. The articles collected here are the product of that work. The third stage is going to be a theater play in November 2024.
The word Mafaza in Arabic means the dry and barren desert. The root of Mafaza comes from the root for winning (فوز), and Mafaza literally means the land of winning: those who cross its barren harshness alive being the lucky winners. To cross the existential challenge of Mafaza one must arm themselves with patience, focus, and hope. By mobilizing Mafaza as metaphor, this project aims to highlight the challenges faced by refugees and survivors of atrocities, those work to heal and to continue the struggle for justice while facing complex systems and policies. These systems do not only lack the knowledge and sensitivity to deal with trauma and cultural specificity; they continue to cause atrocities, directly or indirectly.
As our authors show through their writings collected here, physical escape from terrible events physically does not, by itself, constitute survival. Despite being thousands of miles away from our homelands, the catastrophes happening there have proven to us how our nervous systems can crumble and shake in their aftermath; how the echos of genocide, war, or natural disaster can shake our bodies and voices, flipping our lives upside down.
Atrocities leave their escapees with nerves ever-clenched, with painful and vivid memories, and a catastrophizing imagination that constantly anticipates the worst possibilities of destruction and harm. Survivors of those events feel guilty for leaving their flaming cities. They also feel confused and estranged while facing new worlds that operate in different rhythms.
All the contributors to this project are justice seekers and their lives are centered around survival and individual and collective healing. Most of them have gone through difficult experiences, such as detention, asylum, or genocide survival. The price of producing this knowledge was not easy at all. It required wading through our own vulnerabilities, often taking us places filled with fear. It was not easy also because the genocide we are witnessing in Gaza has caused a deep shock to our bodies and nervous systems and crushed our ability to focus, work, and live normally. At every step in this project, we noticed the effect of the ongoing genocide on our energy and attention. However, this project was a space for us to examine our ability to practice compassion, care, and understanding with each other during difficult times. It was an opportunity to examine our ability to balance between being hopeful and determined on the one hand and respecting and accepting our limits on the other.
The people in many countries across the Middle East have experienced horrible events recently. In the background of these violent political and social transformations, civilians have paid a heavy price. This is what Nabil Muhammad highlights in his article The Republic of Wounded Bodies. The investigative article presents shocking information about the permanent disabilities in Syria. It tells the story of a Syrian organization that provides artificial limbs for those in need, highlighting the challenges faced by the injured while trying to survive complex realities.
Individual and collective healing requires a lot of work, solidarity, and love. This is what Kinana Issa demonstrates in her article Apocalypse in the Body. The article highlights the difficulties of Individual survival, emphasizing the necessity of compassion and collaborative efforts. It also explains the dynamics of internalized oppression and how violent events strip collectives and communities of their ability to protect the vulnerable.
The ability to imagine and hope lies at the core of building new realities, as Hsain al-Shehabi explains in his article The Governance of Hope. Al-Shihabi illustrates how cognitive dissonance plays a crucial role in understanding how people respond and reconcile their worldviews during and after violent events, such as the genocide in Gaza. The article explains how our ability to hope and imagine is governed by our embodied responses to Western colonial capitalism and its dehumanization. Through telling the inspiring story of a youth he works with, Hsain brings to life how this psychological framework helps us reclaim the governance of hope into our own hands and with it our sense of hope and imagination.
There are many commonalities between the Syrian and the Palestinian tragedies. Both places have witnessed mass slaughter, massive forced displacement, arbitrary detention, and torture. One by a brutal dictatorship and militias, and the other by a racist settler colonial occupation. That is why the suffering of the Palestinian-Syrians has intensified since they lived both tragedies firsthand. In her article Identity Survival in the Diaspora, Ola Barqawi tells us about the challenges and privileges of layered identities, explaining how the genocide in Gaza has altered her understanding of her identity. Nour Mousa also shows how this layered identity shaped her life in her article To Fall from Nowhere. Mousa also illustrates how and why countries like Canada deny Palestinians from belonging to their country in official documents, highlighting how their capacity to survive and thrive are influenced by this denial.
Lebanon’s tragedy is no less painful than that of Syria and Palestine. This is what Ali Zaraket explains in his article Furnishing Memory, in which the author demonstrates the challenges faced by the Lebanese people in the last decades. Zaraket emphasizes that survival isn’t complete even after the threat of direct physical harm has passed. He suggests a more robust notion of survival to suggest that mindful work on memory is essential to this survival through furnishing it intentionally with new memories that bridge the gap between the old and the new worlds.
Distance plays a vital role between us and what we observe and interact with. More deeply, this distance changes between us and our emotions, thoughts, past, and present. In her article The World is Not a Small Village, Raja Salim entertains this idea by reviewing literature about distance. By revisiting her asylum journey between cities and countries she highlights the techniques she adopted to cope with her realities.
The Jewish writer and therapist in-training Sasha Zack reflects on the ongoing genocide in Gaza, arguing that Israel has distanced itself from the original wound of the Jews by projecting it onto the Other. Zack’s article, Living Wounds: Volation and Victimhood, suggests that survival is not possible without the conscious visiting of the original wound to allow it to heal, adding that the Jewish tradition calls for compassion and care for the Other.
Shaunt Raffi tells us about his journey of advocacy for justice in the Armenian diaspora in Toronto. In his article To Be Understood Without Talking, he traces the shifts in his understanding of how to save and protect tradition and culture, pointing out that openness and sharing, rather than isolation and entrenchment, are the best ways to preserve a threatened culture.
We hope that the knowledge developed and shared through this project, made possible through the generous support of the Toronto Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts, will be both useful and transformative, as its authors come from diverse ethnic, cultural, and gender backgrounds, each of whom approaches the theme of survival from a unique perspective.
