I’m wearied of displacement. Oh, the afflictions! The most terrible of which is making me feel like a burdensome «guest». Guests are burdensome usually, but they are even more so when they have no shelter, money, food, medicine, book or smile. My stay, or rather our stay, turned into a nightmare. They made us lose our real names. I love our names. They make us who we are. Without them we are no longer ourselves. We have become figures referred to as the refugees. This characterization used to arouse indignation in me, stripping away my humanity. I felt as if I was an object rather than a human. An object perceived with hostility. However, few understood us and knew how to deal with us, as one of the tormented of this land forsaken to violence.
I was a big family in my country. Where is my father? Where is my mother? Where are my brothers? Where is everybody? Why is no one with me? I ask about them in knowing silence. The war killed them in succession. There is no one left to call me my son, my brother, my pillar of strength. These names and epithets are dead. We’ve been bared in this humanitarian bare land. That is the curse of wars.
I am returning to my country, firstly because it’s my country. And no one can snatch it away from me or take it away from me. It has been mine since the day I was born, since my ancestors. It’s mine and my children’s. My mother comes after my country and I’m returning to my mother’s bosom…
I’m tired of longing and yearning. I am wearied by the enforced banishment and silent wandering through the alleys of the camps, seeing the misery and the miserable. Every day was as tall as a rattle and as big as gut-wrenching pains. I did not think about the food we had. A little would make us full. I was looking here for a living, for medicine, for a hunk of bread, for a book, for clothes. My dreams compensated for the misery of my waking hours. I always dreamed of my country, of mountains I was climbing, valleys I was descending and beaches in whose sunshine and waves I was bathing. There, our happiness was small, but it was as big as our biggest dreams. Dreams of growing up, learning, excelling, falling in love and having children. Dreams of specializing to become engineers, doctors, lawyers, teachers and managers. Some of us dared to be creative through paintings, sculptures, music, poetry, novels and theater. In our country, despite all the difficulties, we were normal beings, living in modest, neat, loving homes with their windows wide open to the sun and the wind. We were beings working diligently and getting tired, toiling and living truly by the sweat of our brow, and dreaming delectably of looking forward and upward. It is true that we often grumbled. Our country is beautiful, noble and imbued with history. It was plagued by political lethargy, social inertia and a lack of freedoms. Yet, the horizon was not overcast–we would dream of the wingspan of birds. How beautiful our dreams there! How terrible our nightmares beyond it! The nightmare of displacement, the nightmare of despair and hopelessness, the nightmare bumming for a fistful of money or food or a scrap of medicine. The nightmare of risking death, going through migration pirates to cross seas that washed you ashore a corpse.
Arguably, the worst thing a refugee experiences is the loss of faith in humanity. If not for the bare minimum consideration. Lebanon and Syria are light years away despite the short distance separating them. The return that was daily on our minds was moving further and further from us. I listen to Syria’s daily tragedy, and I burst out in anger, twist in sorrow, and overflow with silence and taciturnity. What brought on all these wars on my people? What kind of war are these related wars? How much stone has been ground? How many houses have collapsed and turned into graves? How many villages have been wiped out? How much land has been burned? How many of our peoples have been killed? How many persons have been displaced in the steppes of alienation, torment and waiting?
Sometimes, I doubted my return, or rather our return. What was left for us to return to? Why would we return and when? There is no sound more powerful than that of guns, rockets, planes, missiles and prohibited weapons. I frequently lamented Syria and wept over it; I would say, Syria is gone. Syria is no longer itself. It has slipped back into the Stone Age. The people who were kind and normal have become incomprehensible. They splintered in rancor. They have become many peoples, tribes and rebellions. Syria now banishes its peaceful people and welcomes enemies, the enemy of enemies, and regional, international and internal wars. Religion blended with politics and politics blended with weapons. Words died... Oh God, when will the bleeding of peoples and the fleeing from our country across seas end, the country of torment, displacement, humiliation, mendicity and death in boats of nonoptional mass suicide?
I am returning to my country. They say things have got better. Nowadays I wake up in the morning feeling optimistic. I check the news and I find a small glimmer; it looks large to me. We often have setbacks. Conditions for return are not present yet. We have become very burdensome. They have said foul and insulting words to us. Man can find no dignity except in his own country.
During my humiliating stay in the refugee camp, I knew that my house, that all our houses, had been reduced to rubble. No skies for them. No skies above them. No evenings to reassure them. Nothing to guide them but the crowing of negligence. They are a witness to the age of barbarism. I wonder who invented wars? Damn him! Wars are the original sin that man committed and continues to commit. I will return tomorrow or after tomorrow or the day after. I am always returning. No one can take my country away from me. The Lebanese have the right to grumble, but it is their brotherly and human duty to show consideration to my feelings.
We are an additional burden of problems. True. This was not our choice. This is the tax levied by wars on neighboring countries. However, I don’t hold a grudge against Lebanon. It is the country that took me in, sheltered me and offered me safety. I cannot but thank it and apologize for what it had to endure with its economy, environment and security. I do not await an apology from it because a part of it has hurt our feelings. Mutual forgiveness is a virtue of the honorable.
Tomorrow, as I return to my country, I believe that one of my primary duties would be expressing gratitude to humanitarian organizations. To be a human being only with human virtues and nothing else would be good enough.
I will not ask who will receive us in our homes. Those who reside there, in our country, are family and friends, even if we are different. We are not like peas in a pod. We are not peas at all. The war has taught us a lesson, the extent of devastation, murder, destruction, savagery... peace is our next banner. There is no value in any country if it does not live in peace.
Peace be upon you, Syria and its people.
Peace be upon you, Lebanon and its people.
We shall return.