The romantic struggle of my generation’s diasporic experience has been forever immortalized. It is in the articles we write, the conversations we have and the longing in our hearts. I wish I were there, in the homeland, instead of here, we think. But who, I wonder, will tell the story of our parents?
Who will write about my mother, who left everything she knew in Lebanon behind for a life here, just to feel the guilt of being the only one in her family who doesn’t have to flee a war? Who will cry the tears of my father, who must watch with his hands tied as his family home is bombed a thousand miles away?
We have forgotten the quiet pain of our parents. We have grown so used to our own complaints, a litany of ungrateful cries, as if coming here was a choice made without consideration for our future. In the same breath, I wish to be in Lebanon and thank God that I am not.
And what about my parents? I claim to feel the tie of the jnoub, swear that it is the direction of my heart’s compass, but I will never hold the same claim to it as they do. I do not have childhood memories of swimming in the nahr like my mother, nor of playing soccer in the se7a like my father. It is not the home I grew up in that is being bombed.
A couple of months ago, among the many casualties in yet another one-sided ceasefire, journalist Amal Khalil was killed in the south of Lebanon. My sister’s name is Amal. In the midst of a million headlines, of death tolls and prayers and vivid descriptions of all the vile things happening around the world, it is her name that held my attention. I could not stop reading and rereading it, imagining my own family name replacing “Khalil,” imagining all my relatives’ names instead of Amal. How many names are forgotten? How many people perished, buried beneath rubble or too broken to be recognized?
On the phone with my Tata, I dance around wishing her a “Eid Mubarak” while she tells me how, although she is safely evacuated, there is nowhere like home. I write messages to my Khalo and listen to his harried recorded message back, his voice the heaviest it has ever been. I send condolences to my friends, whose relatives were killed or who, if they were to go to Lebanon, would no longer have a home there. I wake up daily to new pictures of people sent around, some I recognize, many I don’t, halos pasted above their foreheads. Every WhatsApp status update is like a stab to the heart.
Is this what it means to be Arab? I can’t help but yearn to be from a people that are called anything but brave. To come from a country that doesn’t have to be spoken about in hushed tones and furtive glances. I’m so sorry sits on the tip of my tongue in every conversation, like those three words will magically make everything else go away. Like a child, I feel the urge to cry out, to kick and scream — I want to go home.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the concept of home. I think of my parents, up and leaving Lebanon for a better life, starting from square one in a foreign land with nothing but hope and ambition to keep them going. I think of my relatives in Lebanon, so close yet so far from everything they have ever known. I think of myself, born in one state, living in another, always with one foot some 6,000 miles northeast.
Maybe my parents and I have this in common: we don’t understand what separates us from those suffering besides the distance. We don’t get why the rest of our family must brace themselves for each unfolding horror while I sit in my room and write about it.
I have sat down to write this article more times than I can count. I place my fingers on the keyboard and beg the words to come. Nothing feels right. No words feel strong enough to describe either the constant ache in the center of my heart or the catch in my breath when I check which cities are being told to evacuate.
What is home, for the immigrant? For the refugee, the survivor, the escaper? If it is a place, what do you do when it is ripped away from you? And if it is a feeling, how do you find it again in the midst of despair?
MiC Senior Editor Amany Sayed can be reached at amanysay@umich.edu.
