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, 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.

__________________

Raja Salim

A Syrian journalist residing in Canada. Studied Communication and Women’s Studies at Concordia University Montreal. Her work varies between writing, program production, translation, and editing.

__________________

“On average, Americans prefer an 18-inch distance between themselves and someone else during a casual conversation […] The theory of proxemics was developed by anthropologist Edward T. Hall in the late 1950s and early ‘60s. While Hall served in the U.S. Army, he observed the distance people maintained from each other, and he found that different cultures perceive personal space differently. The British need a lot of space while the Middle Eastern Arab is comfortable in closer spaces.”¹

In recent decades, the word “distance,” in its abstract and immaterial dimensions, has occupied a significant space in the social and cultural spheres. With increased awareness of the individual self, personal spaces, and the privacy of others, distance has become a need, a demand, and an expectation—the distance of the individual from the group, the distance of the individual from the individual, the distance of the group from society, the distance of one society from another, and the distance of the individual from their self. And while the presence of the abstract dimension of the word deepened, the material dimension has begun to vanish as technological advancement has altered the nature of distance in its material form, as evidenced by the new Digital Age’s first slogan, “The world is a small village.”

This text is a review of my personal experience in moving from Syria and its environs to Canada, and specifically, how the concept of distance has influenced my first three years of this journey in a way that none of the other supposed factors have done. It has been eight years since this move, which I believe provides enough “distance” to speak of this experience from a more comprehensive viewpoint.

This is me. If you examined the picture closely, you would see that I am standing beside a lighthouse before the Atlantic Ocean. This photo of me was taken from a relatively far distance, on the third day after my arrival to the Canadian province of Nova Scotia on 2016-05-21. This was my first confrontation with distance in its material and moral sense. After leaving Syria, I lived for four years between Lebanon and Türkiye. At that time, I never once felt any distance or detachment from Syria; the sky in those countries was an extension of Syria’s sky; the sun there was at the same distance from our windows; nightfall there came at the same time; and as far as the eye could see, beyond the horizon, we were aware that our homes were there, even if we could not see them with our own eyes.

On the shores of the ocean, there is no place for imagination. In contrast to the portrayals in novels and movies, imagination fades in the presence of the ocean. At that time, the elements of nature conspired to nullify my memory and the strength of my imagination, although I am a Cancerian—with a reserved spot in the world of imagination—and fantasy is part of my reality. The horizon was far, and what lay beyond it was unknown; the sky was strange and obscured behind a thick cloud; the rocks beneath me were grimacing; I repeated in my head that the world is a small village, the world is a small village, the world is a small village… And thus, these words became the useless incantation associated with this new place.

“The world is a small village” is a slogan that expresses luxury and a distinction known only to a few in this world, known to those not forced to flee their countries, those who choose to wander the world out of curiosity and a desire for travel and exploration, those with the privilege to go whenever they want to wherever they want and still return to their homes willingly; as for us, we must accept our new domiciles and must create “our distances” from our emotions, our desires, and our causes, from the places we love, from everyone we love whom we’ve left behind. To survive in the new place, I needed to utilize the factor of physical distance—8,200 kilometers—to accept the fact that I am very far away, and as such I must create a mental distance from the other, very far, place.

Techniques for Duping Distance:

#1. The shortest route to Syria—the stomach

There is no space in the bags of those who flee for anything unnecessary or unimportant. Neither the closeness nor the far distance of the journey allows one to carry anything other than what is necessary for survival and for proving one’s identity; and even if it were possible to carry more, is there any bag, no matter how great its size, that can fit one’s memory, identity, habits, and ordinary routines? At the highest level of the hierarchy of needs lies survival—survival of the self, reaching a safe place, and avoiding death. There is no instinctual or social disagreement about survival’s status in the hierarchy, but what about living? Living becomes possible through everything that cannot fit in the bags—a taste that can summarize what we yearn for, a smell that makes the home warmer, or a plate that opens our appetite to live for another day.

Outlanders do not lose their appetite for their homeland’s cuisine no matter how long their years abroad may extend—“the stomach remains a hurdle for every integration and adaptation program,” as my friend Hussein Gharir once said.

Here I am, I who once described the yearning of outlanders (the displaced, the exiled, the refugees, the immigrants) for their homeland’s food as “emotional fragmentation,” here I am now one of them, one for whom food has far greater dimensions than mere taste; holding on to a style of food or a certain taste is one of the few remaining things remaining for us from our past life. For those without a home, a job, and a land, they should maintain a habit. In our homeland every season had its food, and every occasion had its dish—small details in the form of taste or smell that are enough to brighten the day and dispel forlornness even if only for mere minutes.

All of this is good, but at the end of the day distance continues to reign supreme, for once the meal saturated with memories and identity and affinity ends, distance returns to stand before you on the kitchen’s windowsill, to stare you dead in the eyes, while you wash your plate.

#2. Philosophizing

Length of time depends upon our ideas.

Size of space hangs upon our sentiments.

For one whose mind is free from care,

A day will outlast the millennium.

For one whose heart is large,

A tiny room is as the space between heaven and earth.²

In Japanese culture, there is a concept known as Ma (間), which is described as a pause in time and a gap in space that is required for life to grow. The Japanese author Kiyoshi Matsumoto describes Ma as a Confucian concept about the distance between two edges, between the beginning and the end; it is a pause in time in which we test life; it speaks of silence as opposed to sound, and dearth as opposed to excess. It is the momentary pause during speech that grants meaning to what is being said; it is the silence between two tones that creates music. The concept was originally derived from Buddhism to express the essence of emptiness. Matsumoto quotes a poem from the 12th-century hermit Saigyō:

Sound of water,

of this lonely hermitage

the only friend becomes,

in the gaps and gaps

of the mountain storm.³

The new place forced me to adopt new techniques and approaches for dealing with it, such as thinking about all my surroundings from a philosophical perspective, where I apply with a suitable philosophy—based on the present moment and the feelings I am experiencing—all of the material factors that I must deal with. Every time I read about a culture or a philosophy that I had been unaware of, which deals with the self and distance and time, I adopt it and try to apply its rules to myself—thus I become both the lab rat and the experiment. I study the social media profiles of friends that have been scattered all across the world, and I peek at the adaptation techniques they’ve developed. This friend has chosen to live in an Arab or Middle Eastern majority neighborhood in order to weaken the feeling of alienation; that friend has chosen the path of spiritualism and has started connecting with herself, her identity, and her past through meditation and through harnessing energy to recall modes of life that have long since passed; there’s the friend who hurried to form a relationship, to have children, and to form a replacement family; and there is the friend who rejected the new reality, and who was assisted neither by his strength nor by his social environment to continue, and thus he put an end to his past, present, and future life. Social media fails to nurture the skills of adaptation and persistence—I shut the windows overlooking Beirut, Berlin, Paris, Vienna, and Istanbul, and I return to my bed that is located in my room, in Halifax, Canada, in North America, which is about 8,200 kilometers away from “there.”

One day, two days, a week, two weeks—my ability to philosophize about things and create new dimensions for them expires, and all the soothing writings of poetry, studies, and journals fail to deliver me once more from this unripened reality.

#3. Self-rebuke

This technique contradicts the concept of silence instead of sound, for here the internal voice returns to chant a reminder that I am inventing for myself a crisis out of “nothing,” and that I am complaining about a reality seen by many as a dream. I recall that I am safe from war, expulsion, arrest, and fear and that it is within my power to start my life here quietly. But isn’t this selfish? And can sole survival be seen as survival in the first place? I am not referring here to the survival of the individual vis-a-vis the destruction of their country—I am referring to the sole survival of one individual in relation to the rest of their family and their friends.

“Survivor’s guilt” is a term that has naturally established a strong presence in our lives following the war in Syria—the living feel guilty toward those who perished; the uninjured feel guilty toward the injured; those who did not lose their homes feel guilty toward those who were dispossessed and displaced; those who have left the country feel guilty toward those who remained; those who left for Europe and for the Americas feel guilty toward those who are stuck in Syria’s neighboring countries; those who attain residency feel guilty toward those who are undocumented; those who were able to bid their lost ones farewell feel guilty toward those who were barred from doing so—thus, guilt travels with no end.

But what if? I ponder the endless possibilities—what if I had remained silent in 2011 and did not participate in the protest movement (even though my participation was very simple)? Had I done that, I would have been in Syria today (putting aside whether I would have been there as a living being or as a corpse); what if I had participated in the revolution and had remained in Syria and applied my profession as a journalist in the lands outside of regime control? Those lands did not officially exist yet at that time. What if I had been a supporter of the regime? What if I hadn’t left my small city, what if I had stayed and lived and married and had children, and left changing the country to others who are more capable of changing it? What if the revolution had succeeded? What if Syria had never gone through this war? What if I developed amnesia?

“Do not be ungrateful,” I rebuke myself again—focus on the survivor and forget the guilt; at the end of the day, you survived, and the guilt will be resolved with time.

#4. “How suffocating is life without the respite of hope”⁴

In the same way that my ability to philosophize about reality had run out, I could no longer bear to continue the journey of guilt as a “survivor.” As such, I began to search for a horizon I could look forward to. Once, I soothed myself with the thought that the war would end, that the tyrant would fall, and that we would return home; once, with the thought of attaining the new country’s passport which would allow me the chance of a return to a place that is close to Syria; once, with the thought that time will allow me to adapt to the new place and to love it and to become a part of it; once, by seeing the physical distance between here and Syria as a real chance to survive that should be utilized to start anew; once, by deciding that sole survival is a destructive goal, whose realization is an illusion and a betrayal of our cause and our demands. A friend once asked me if I still defined myself as a refugee or as a foreigner in the new country—I answered her that I would not willingly let go of this identity, for letting go of it would mean forgetting the reason that brought me to this country in the first place. My answer signified an acknowledgment that survival is not necessarily achieved through complete acquiescence to the new reality nor through its utter rejection. The first step toward positive thinking was to change the city, and we also have in our friends’ tricks against alienation a useful precedent—I picked a city dense with “foreign” immigrant communities, or stated more clearly, a city where Whites are not the majority. I picked Montreal, where Arabs—both from the Mashreq and the Maghreb—and Kurds, Armenians, Hispanics, Africans, Indians, Middle Easterners, and others, walk the city’s streets together, where no color outshines any color, and no lifestyle overshadows any lifestyle. In Montreal you are not special, nor are you the recent arrival that everyone wants to get to know and whose story everyone wants to hear—here you can be a nobody if that is your desire.

In the new city, I met people similar to me both in appearance and in essence. We share an identity, a cause, and a memory, and we try to develop our survival tools together. Sometimes we succeed in supporting one another, and sometimes we fail. We sometimes share the blame and the self-rebuke as we ponder the morality of our arrival to a country that has stolen Indigenous peoples’ lands, a country that is still discovering mass grave sites for Indigenous children who had been kidnapped away from their families and herded into Catholic schools designed to erase their identities and to replace them with White colonialist identity—a country where those children ended up as corpses beneath their stolen lands. And what if we said no to Canada, where can we find that innocent land over which no blood had been spilled and no sins had been committed? And if we do find such a land, would we be sufficient masters of our fate to be able to seek it out and settle there?

The Document for Deposing Distance

Days after receiving the Canadian passport, I booked two flight tickets, one for Cairo and one for Beirut. I wanted to visit cities that I thought were the closest to Syria, both in terms of distance and in terms of culture. In these two cities, I felt that I had regained sovereignty over myself and that I had decreased the material and symbolic distance between myself and my culture and my natural place—I returned to myself as I was eight years prior, speaking my language and blending into the culture of the place. I lived under the same sky, witnessed the same nightfall, and the same sunrise, as the homeland. In “our lands” my accent exposed me as a Syrian, and thus the owners of furnished apartments, hotels, and any other service requiring proof of identity were hesitant to welcome me, but the moment I divulged the detail that I am a Canadian citizen was the moment when faces would turn, eyes would glimmer, grins would widen, and prices would double. Once again, the truth became apparent—here I am able to freely roam the streets of Beirut and Cairo just because I am a Canadian citizen. Good! This truth put a stop to the “emotional fragmentation” that I had allowed myself to live through, and it brought me back to reality, to the reality that says the Earth in its entirety is occupied.

This visit coincided with the invasion of Gaza in October 2024. The sky I had dreamed of living under again was now the same sky that rained down rockets and bombs on Gaza; its nightfall was the same nightfall that brought the fear of waking up to discover a new massacre. The air was laden with the smell of death and gunpowder, and souls were departing this world in waves. I walk in Beirut. I witness the grief and powerlessness on the faces of people during the morning, and I witness the anger and rejection filling their throats during the night as they gather before the embassies of Arab and Western countries, demanding to stop the genocide in Gaza. At that time, the age of the war was not more than two months. Today, we are close to a year since the start of the genocide. What is certainly true is that nine months ago there were 37,000 lives dreaming of some type of future, 37,000 lives with a horizon to look forward to, before each of those lives were turned into corpses beneath their stolen lands. On the flight back to Montreal, questions whirled within my mind—was the world always this ugly, and we simply weren’t cognizant of it because of our youth? Will we survive due to a miraculous turn of events in the final episode? Is survival an achievable goal?

The flight lands, and I prepare to exit. Here I am, returning to “my home” in the other half of the globe, repeating in my head the phrase “the world is not a small village” and mumbling to myself:

---

1. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/proxemics  ↩︎
2. MA: Place, Space, Void May 16, 2018 / HIDDEN JAPAN. Gunter Nitschke ↩︎
3. MA: Place, Space, Void May 16, 2018 / HIDDEN JAPAN. Gunter Nitschke ↩︎
4. Quote from al-Ḥusayn bin ʿAlī bin ʿAbd al-Ṣamad al-Aṣfahānī al-Ṭaghrāʾiyy ↩︎