Kinana Issa

Syrian refugee writer, artist and community researcher in Canada. She conducted and supervised community based researches in Syria, Lebanon and Canada, and currently she’s focusing on issues related to mental health. An honorary fellow of the International Writing Program in IOWA university..

Survival is not simple, it’s not enough to survive physically to say we’re well. One of our biggest problems is the denial of our internal issues. Sometimes, even when we acknowledge it for ourselves, we sweep it under the rug once we have a guest. There are issues that can’t just be thrown into the garbage, they are integrated within us, in our most invisible and vulnerable parts: our nerves and emotions. The only way to deal with it is slowly and honestly, with an enormous amount of faith. It’s a tough journey but venturing through it is the only way for true survival. In this piece, I talk about my experience and invite those who were able to find their own ways through it. 

Like many Syrians, I have gone through the experience of unjust detention, twice, and like many of its survivors, I enjoyed talking about it with my peers while I avoided talking about it publicly. I didn’t want anyone to think I was  asking for special treatment. Like many Syrians, I went through inhumanely hard experiences. Many of my close friends have died and disappeared. I witnessed numerous betrayals and fallbacks, while  experiencing displacement. Like many Syrians, being alive out of prison felt like a privilege, I needed a way to carry it and weave our stories so we don’t turn into mere numbers. 

In Syria, then Lebanon, I went through turmoil. Yet, being around peers I shared mutual experiences which  didn’t make me feel isolated. I was one of many. Even more, my situation wasn’t the worst; I was able to work, produce and create an environment for civil work and arts in my humble house in Beirut. That wasn’t the case when I came to Canada. Here I was the stranger with no peers. Being involved with the Syrian diaspora network through virtual platforms, didn’t allow me to feel the gap at first. After a year, I had a personal accident whose implications  forced me to see there was a problem and I needed to find a new approach to cope. 

Not giving in to my inner pain empowered me in a way while  also allowing it to spread like a cancer that isolated me from this world and its real needs. To me, the freedom I held on to in my prison is a flame that lights up the dark road of diaspora. It’s the prisoner’s loyalty to her dream of freedom, and to the might of the spirit that refused chains. My prison experience taught me a lot. One thing it taught me was to depend completely on myself. It happened that I was all by myself most of the time in detention. This forced me to establish every means to keep myself as independent as possible. I didn’t realize that was the way in which my internal system continued to navigate through the world: ignoring myself, not admitting feelings of pain, keeping to myself, and dealing with my problems on my own. In prison, I became aware of how the heart, in the end, is only a muscle. One day it was beating so fast until it felt like a sore muscle. If I weren’t lucky to have a caring inmate to hold my hand at the time, it may have even stopped. In 2016, when the same situation recurred here, in Canada, out of the prison, it didn’t even cross my mind to call 911. In 2018, I realized it even had a name: panic attack; and those who had it went to hospitals to take care of it, not just tried to control them on their own!

Here in Canada it was safe, but I was on my own, I couldn’t explain what my experience was, and those around me couldn’t relate. Doctors just wanted to get me on medication, counseling sessions were not always accessible and weren’t enough, and many are more interested in the political symbolism of such an experience rather than dealing with its implications. I wanted to turn my weakness into strength, but I didn’t have the tools. I was never the kind who knew how to ask for emotional help or create the right support network. I had my analytical and critical skills, writing and artmaking, and my social empowerment experiences. I packed all of these and went on my solution-finding journey. Some of it involved writing or artistic and collective work initiatives, some counseling, and the rest was relying on the internet: reports, scientific and academic research, personal experiences, self-help books, etc. The trauma didn’t really help me  find my answers fast, I had to read the same page more than once to make sure I processed everything correctly.

Yet I couldn’t find one source that had all the answers. My trauma was not only emotional and psychological, it also posed big existential, intellectual, cultural and social questions that demanded answers. It’s not enough to work on individual recovery, a collective process needs to be involved. I made different social and artistic experiments, but they all bumped into the wall of survival needs for one, the social reality for a second, and the limitations my inner turmoil and the nature of being a refugee in a new country have imposed on me for a third. There weren’t ready-made solutions for me, I had to tailor my own, but I’m not a psychologist, and given the collective nature of my experience, I couldn’t search for tools that would only help me  and not involve something that would help the rest. 

Yet, each of us has a different story. Some have a history of depression, some have a family and support network, some have difficulties with self-expression, while some have survived other traumas such as domestic violence, bullying and rape. Some need some silence to recover, and some need action. There isn’t one size-fits-all. 

What can I do? 

I still remember the thick fluffy snowflakes the skies bled the day I found my way. I was preparing materials for my work at a community center in Toronto to facilitate a session about Community Based Participatory Research, the type of research that sees community members as partners and leaders in the research process. It was such a big revelation to learn the term. It was something I did and defended back in Syria and Lebanon without knowing. The research took me back to Syria for a while, and then I thought, wouldn’t there be something similar for survivors of trauma? Something that considers them as an authority in dealing with their experiences? 

My research revealed something that was groundbreaking for me; the survivor’s led research. It’s an approach that sees where medical systems fail to provide solutions for mental and psychological problems. It considers the lived experience of the survivor to be equal to that of the academic researcher. At the time I just wanted to jump right at starting my own research, isn’t that similar to what I’m working on anyway? Well, maybe I needed to make sure I tamed all my demons first. Experts told me I may be adding to my load as  I needed to focus on my recovery first so my experience would have more weight in the research process. 

It wasn’t long before I was no longer working with the centre and COVID changed the face of the world. My isolation was doubled, and I started regressing. I had nothing but the internet to ask for practical solutions. Eventually, Facebook’s algorithms  advertised a free webinar about trauma designed by a trauma survivor. 

She didn’t have any formal training, but in many ways she was like me; she went through difficult times and she only found her solutions in the library. The way she introduced the subject was captivating. Her personal story got to me. Some things are hard to fake and can only be felt when vibrational fields resonate. The way in which she explained her process was the first to capture both my attention and emotions. I was just about to sign up for her program when I found a fatal flaw in her approach: she sold the program with the illusion of complete recovery within a specific amount of time. That’s impossible. Traumatic reactions come and go, there are ways in which we can control their negative effects, but they don’t just disappear. I read about many lives that were devastated due to such convictions. 

While her program didn’t offer me a solution, it anchored me. I started working towards my recovery enthusiastically. I began a series of therapy sessions with a roadmap I created for myself and how I envisioned its relationship with the collective. I drew, wrote, and researched thinking of all those I would give new tools to help them smile again. I may have needed to focus on myself, but the collective was in my heart and soul all the time. All the friends who miss me. All the victims and survivors I’d be able to tell: I made it!

A couple of months ago, as I was becoming an expert in taming my complex trauma beast and its effects, I felt the need to step out of the individual and get back to the collective, only with baby steps this time. I decided to work with a friend on establishing Balkonet Canada, a series of virtual conversations about individual and collective well-being, where we invite friends in Canada for a closed session to talk about our individual and collective needs for recovery and healing. An attempt to create a small safe space to think and bond. Friends in Henna were part of the group. At first, we thought about condensing some of our conversations in a couple of published articles, then I wrote this piece on survivor’s based research to ask friends for their participation when we thought about having a collaborative project to collect our experiences on survival, to examine what stands in the way of our awareness for mental and emotional wellbeing, and share our information and resiliency tools. It’s an initiative that encourages individual/social/educational proactivity for sustainable mental survival. 

We invite survivors to share their observations and solutions, raise their voices, and work out their research tools so we can heal together. Many of us live silently with our monsters and many have lost the ability to communicate, let’s be their voice. Let’s give our communities tools to stand by us and embark on a  search for freedom that isn’t bound by mental, emotional or physical prisons. Let’s continue to survive, together, let’s help ourselves and others to fully survive. 

If you’re a survivor or an ally and you may like to cooperate, volunteer or share your observations and experiences, please send an email to: survivorsknowbest@gmail.com