On the Lived Experience of the Syrian Diaspora in Canada

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2019-01-03 On the Lived Experience of the Syrian Diaspora in Canada

Alatrash, Ghada

Alatrash, G. (2019). On the Lived Experience of the Syrian Diaspora in Canada (Unpublished doctoral thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB. http://hdl.handle.net/1880/109417 doctoral thesis

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UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY

On the Lived Experience of the Syrian Diaspora in Canada

Ghada Alatrash

A THESIS

SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENT FOR THE

DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

GRADUATE PROGRAM IN EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH

CALGARY, ALBERTA

JANUARY, 2019

Abstract

The Syrian Diaspora today is a complex topic that speaks to issues of dislocation, displacement, loss, exile, identity, resilience and a desire for belonging. My research sought to better understand these issues and the lived experience and human condition of the Syrian Diaspora. In my research, I thought through this main question: How do Syrian newcomers come to make sense of what it means to have lost a home and a homeland as it relates to the Syrian Diasporic experience? I broached the Syrian diasporic subject by thinking through an anti-Orientalist, anti- colonial framework, and I engaged autoethnography as a research methodology and as a method as I reflexively thought through and wrote from my own personal experience as a Syrian immigrant so that I could better understand the Syrian refugee’s human experience. I held three open-ended, unstructured, interactive interviews in which I engaged my participants’ voices and stories in co-constructing knowledge on my research topic. My research participants were three

Syrian refugee families in Calgary, and the interviews were held with the adults in the family. I sought a heterogeneous representation in my participants by seeking diversity in religion/ethnicity, in educational and socio-economic backgrounds, in political affiliations, as well as in their routes of immigration. I employed the notion of a “cultural verstehen of others,” or an empathetic understanding of others, and I reflected on how it can act as an important tool in a process of “cross-cultural pollination” (Chang, 2008, pp. 27-29) between Syrian newcomers and Canadian hosts. As I autoethnographically analyzed, presented, and interpreted the stories as told by the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora, I identified the following themes: “On the meanings and feelings of the lived experience of the Syrian Diasporic realities,” “On issues of language,” and “On creating new possibilities: Activating and actualizing the third space.” My findings spoke to the meaning of homeland, the meaning and feeling of being refugee, forced

displacement, cultural identity, negotiating differences, resilience, language, cultural intersections and third spaces, and activating and actualizing the third space.

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Preface

“‘Syria has become the great tragedy of this century - a disgraceful humanitarian calamity with suffering and displacement unparalleled in recent history,’ said Antonio Guterres, head of the UN High Commission for Refugees,” (Watt, Blair, & Sherlock, 2013). In October of

2015 during Canada’s Federal Election campaigns, the Government of Canada “committed to resettling 25,000 Syrian refugees by February 29, 2016.” As of August, 31, 2018, a total of

58,600 Syrian refugees have arrived in Canada to date (Government of Canada, 2018). The

Syrian Diaspora today is a complex topic that speaks to issues of dislocation, displacement, loss, exile, identity and a desire for belonging. The aim of this study was to better understand these issues as well as the lived experience and human condition of the Syrian Diaspora who have become, within the past two years, part of our Canadian citizenry, local communities, and members of our schools and workforce.

As I thought through these complex realities, my study was driven by the following research questions:

• How do Syrian newcomers come to make sense of what it means to have lost a home

and a homeland as it relates to the Syrian Diasporic experience?

§ What stories can Syrian newcomers share with us about their experiences in

Syria since the eruption of the war and after their arrival to their newfound

city of Calgary?

§ What do Syrian newcomers believe are ways in which Canadians (educators,

employers, community organizations, policymakers) can help as they try to

make meaning of family and home in their new homeland, and as they

negotiate and remediate their identities?

As I tried to understand these complex questions, I broached the Syrian diasporic subject by thinking through an anti-Orientalist, anti-colonial framework to disrupt a narrative that has historically contextualized the Arab/Middle Eastern subject through a fixed colonial lens. I aimed to contextualize my research topic within historical and political discourses, particularly within the context of Western ideologies. Here, I considered these questions:

§ What pre-existing knowledge do we hold on the Arab/Middle Eastern subjects,

and what are its limitations; and could a shift in our knowledge allow for new

possibilities of knowing to emerge?

§ How have colonial Orientalist epistemological impositions come to shape our

ontological views on this subject, and how do narratives written by peoples of the

Diasporas come to create new possibilities on knowing the Syrian Diasporic

subject?

I drew from the theoretical works of Palestinian Edward Said to help make meaning of the complex and layered topics of displacement and exile. I found that Said’s writing brings us to question the hegemonic dominant colonial narratives and offers a critical lens to examine that which has been prolifically presented and disseminated in Western discourse as knowledge on the Middle Eastern/Arab subject. I deeply believe that the relationships between Arabs and the

West is governed by questions concerning power and is weaved in a very complex web of hegemonic, colonial, political, imperialistic frameworks. Also, as I tried to make sense of

European colonial formations of history and knowledge and of their contradictions, I relied on the works of Frantz Fanon in an attempt to “find something different” (Fanon, 1963, p. 311) and to offer alternate ways of knowing and understanding the human condition. In my attempt to counter the dominant colonial narratives, I looked for ways to evoke the voices of the “Other”

and to invite a “renarrativization” (Xie, 1999) of colonial discourses by way of “restorying . . .

[and] reshaping narrative to better reflect a diversity of perspectives” (Thomas & Stornaiuolo,

2016, p. 313). I believe that we can come to unmute what has been silenced or dismissed in our discourses by engaging, as in Said’s (1979) words, a “cultural position” of the Otherized subject.

Also in this dissertation, I presented my review of Syrian literature that speaks to Syrian identity as well as some of the Palestinian works that have informed my knowledge on the experience of displacement and exile. One of the limitations that I faced in my attempt to write about the Syrian Diasporic experience since the war is the scarcity of literature written by

Syrians; the Syrian Diaspora affected by the war is a topic that is only a few years old and is in its infancy stages where Syrian voices have been, for the most part, contextualized in news articles, opinion columns, video clips, or by way of social media. To provide context, the first protests took place in Syria on March 15, 2011; November 4, 2015, marks the first arrival date of Syrians affected by the war to Canadian land (Citizenship and Immigration Canada, 2017).

In my literature review, I first situated and contextualized the Syrian Diaspora within a

Canadian landscape and brought to the discussion some of the Western sentiments on this topic by reading through articles, government documents and media conversations that have come to constitute our knowledge on the topic. I also evoked the celebratory moments as well as the tensions and struggles that reside within our Canadian communities, addressed the surfacing implications, and critically thought through how these moments come to speak to and construct the experience of the Syrian Diaspora in Canada today. Second, I introduced Syrian identities through looking at what was written before the Syrian war erupted in 2011 where, historically,

Syrians have always written and spoken about exile in their literature, long before this destructive war began in March of 2011. As mentioned earlier, the Syrian Diasporic experience

since the recent Syrian war remains in its early stages where there exists a gap that is yet to be filled by post-war Syrian writers. To deliver a sense of Syrian identities and their experience to my readers, I brought into my discussion the voices of pre-Syrian-war writers and poets including Nizar Kabbani, Muhammad al-Maghut, Zakaria Tamer, Mamduh Adwan, Adonis and

Nasib Arida. Lastly, to capture a post-war written sentiment, I evoked the voice of Syrian

Novelist Najat Abdul Samad as she writes her narratives from within the national borders of a war-torn Syrian where she currently resides today.

Moreover, in my attempt to better understand the lived experience of the displaced Syrian people, I also resorted to Palestinian literature written by and on exiles and refugees. Within the context of recent Arab history, the Palestinian struggle has become a poignant representation of what it means to have lost a homeland. Palestinian writers have conceptualized the meaning of displacement in their narratives for over half a century, and therefore the literature on the topic is abundant on the topic. In fact, Palestinian literature is taught in Arab schools across the Arab world, including Syrian schools, and it stands as the symbol of a national Arab struggle; it is a literature written through and saturated with themes of homelessness, loss, exile and displacement. Hence, in my search for meaning on the experience of exiles and refugees, I engaged narratives written on or by Diasporic peoples themselves, including the works of

Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and Palestinian-American theorist Edward Said.

Furthermore, as will be discussed in close detail in the Methodology section of this dissertation, I engaged autoethnography as a research methodology and as a method for I found that it allowed me the space to write from within, from “an empathetic insidedness” (Relph,

1976, p. 17), and from my own personal experience as a Syrian immigrant, so that I can better understand the Syrian refugee’s human experience. I held three open-ended, unstructured,

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interactive interviews with three Syrian refugee families in Calgary as an autoethnographic method in which I engaged my participants’ voices and stories in co-constructing knowledge on my research topic (Ellis, Adams, & Bochner, 2011). As I interpreted my research, I reflected on and analyzed the stories of my participants by way of narrative analysis (Chase, 2000; De Fina &

Georgakopoulou, 2008; Ollerenshaw & Crewsell, 2016; Peräkylä & Ruusuvuori, 2000). Also, as will be discussed in detail later in this dissertation, I employed reflexivity as an approach to reflect on myself as a researcher in order to understand the cultural experience of others, where reflexivity becomes a “conscious experiencing of the self as both inquirer and respondent, as teacher and learner, as the one coming to know the self within the process of research itself”

(Lincoln & Guba, 2000, p. 183).

Throughout my research process, I sought to be critically mindful of my ontological, epistemological and axiological stances, and of how they align within theoretical frameworks and methodological traditions, and I located myself in my research, and examined and wrote through the ethical considerations, limitations, and issues of validity, reliability, and commensurability. I sought to offer alternative ways of knowing the Arab-Syrian Diasporic identity, ways that are different than what has been epistemologically and ontologically deemed as knowledge and truth, and ways that disrupt hegemonic patterns of representations entangled in a “web of racism, cultural stereotypes, political imperialism, dehumanizing ideology holding in the Arab or the Muslim . . . and in a sense obliterating him [or her] as a human being” (Said,

1979, p. 27).

Moreover, in my research, I engaged the notion of a “cultural verstehen of others,” or an empathetic understanding of others, and reflected on how it can act as an important tool in a process of “cross-cultural pollination” (Chang, 2008, pp. 27-29) between Syrian newcomers and

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Canadian hosts and as one method to understanding the human condition of Syrian refugees.

In Chapter 4, 5, 6 and 7 of this dissertation, I autoethnographically analyzed, presented, and interpreted the stories as told by the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora. Throughout the process of writing these chapters, I was mindful of the critical need of allowing for a space in which “the stories constitute the data” (Chase, 2000, p. 422). I identified and autoethnographically thought through the following emergent themes (as discussed in Chapter 4, 5, 6 and 7):

Theme 1: On the meanings and feelings of the lived experience of the Syrian

Diasporic realities.

Finding 1.1. On the meaning of homeland.

Finding 1.2. On the meaning and feeling of being refugee.

Finding 1.3. On forced displacement.

Theme 2: On issues of identity.

Finding 2.1. On cultural identity.

Finding 2.2. On negotiating difference.

Finding 2.3. On the fact of difference—Orientalism and beyond.

Finding 2.4. On resilience.

Theme 3: On creating new possibilities: Activating and actualizing the third space.

Finding 3.1. On issues of language.

Finding 3.2. On finding cultural intersections and “third spaces.”

Finding 3.3. On how Canadians can be of help: Activating and actualizing the third space.

My ultimate hope in this dissertation was to engender an empathetic understanding of the

Other through engaging narratives that spoke to the lived experiences of peoples of the Syrian

Diaspora imbued and narrated by their voices. The purpose of this study was to qualitatively conjure up dynamic ways that may facilitate the integration and resettlement of Syrian newcomers in their new unfamiliar Canadian landscape, as well as suggest pedagogical possibilities that may help facilitate their integration process so that the outcomes are positive for both refugees and host country. I engaged a language of hope and a pedagogy of possibilities with the goal of adding a deeper understanding of the human experience of Syrian refugees.

Acknowledgements

Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish writes “I have hope, it comes and goes, but I will never bid it farewell” (Darwish, 2009). Like Darwish, I too will continue to hold onto hope in our humanity, and I will all the more tighten my grip in the stormy and dark moments. I will help in mending what has been broken and in opening ways for the building of bridges between human hearts. With each day in my doctoral journey, I am finding more tools with which to mend, build, and hold onto hope. On the way, I have met, and learned from, a number of people to whom I am deeply thankful.

I would like to thank my supervisor, Professor Rahat Zaidi, for the valuable guidance and support she has generously provided since the first day of my doctoral journey; your encouragement has been my reassurance and a driving force.

I would like to thank Professor Greg Lowan-Trudeau for guiding me to visit the deepest places in my work as a researcher, to excavate and to reflect, while keeping in mind that our goal is to become more human and to make a difference for others in our humanity.

I would like to thank Professor Marlon Simmons for teaching me to speak and write in a language of hope and possibilities, and to be mindful of every act and of every word as I travel this complex terrain towards the higher place of social justice.

I would also like to thank each of my professors in the Werklund School of Education for teaching me to question a hegemonic discourse and to present the voices of the silenced and misrepresented in our humanity.

Also, I am deeply grateful for the funding and support of the department of Graduate

Programs in Education. Without this support, my road would have been very difficult to travel.

To my friends—I thank a very generous fate for bringing you into my life. Each of you know your special place in my heart. I have in you hearts from which I continue to draw endless love, hands to hold when I feel cold or weary, and minds that help me think through the big and small issues in this life.

To my family—my late father Dr. Jabr Alatrash, my mother Faiha, my brothers Gheath and Ghayth, my sisters Kristin and Vaishalli, and to Ehsan: Thank you for being there for me all the time.

And, to my children, Selma, Aamer and Marcel, I would like to say: mothering you is the highest honour and privilege I have been granted in life. Thank you for continuing to teach me that life is a wonderful place of learning and possibilities, and because of you especially, it is so worth living; I am eternally grateful for every moment I am in your presence.

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Dedication

To the healing of the millions of wounded Syrian souls.

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Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii Preface ...... iv Acknowledgements ...... xi Dedication ...... xiii Table of Contents ...... xiv Chapter 1: Overview of Research Design ...... 1 1.1 Research Problem and Purpose ...... 1 1.2 Research Questions ...... 2 1.3 Rationale and Significance ...... 2 1.4 Locating Myself in My Research ...... 4 1.5 Researcher Assumptions ...... 6 1.6 On the Organization of this Dissertation ...... 8 Chapter 2: Literature Review ...... 9 2.1 Introduction: Acting as a Bricoleur ...... 9 2.2 Situating the Syrian Diaspora within the Canadian Context ...... 11 2.3 On the Experience of the Syrian Diaspora in Canada ...... 12 2.4 “The Canada Experiment: Is this the World’s First ‘Postnational’ Country?” ...... 13 2.5 On Some of the Anti-Immigrant Sentiments in Canada ...... 19 2.6 A Vietnamese Refugee’s Experience in Canada ...... 23 2.7 Locating Theoretical Framework: Edward Said’s Orientalism ...... 26 2.8 Re-presenting, Re-telling, Re-storying, and Re-narrativizing ...... 31 2.9 On Syrian Identity ...... 34 2.10 Pre-War Syrian Literature ...... 38 2.11 Post-War Syrian Literature ...... 52 2.12 On the Difference between Exiles and Refugees ...... 56 2.13 Evoking Palestinian Poetry for Understanding the Experience of Displacement . 60 2.14 On the Idea of Home-lessness ...... 65 2.15 On Trees as Tokens and Cultural Memories of Homelands ...... 68 2.16 Conclusion ...... 71 Chapter 3: Methodology ...... 73 3.1 Autoethnography as a Research Methodology ...... 73 3.2 Autoethnography as a Research Method ...... 76 3.3 Interactive Interviews as a Research Method ...... 77 3.4 Interviews ...... 79 3.5 Reflexivity as an Interpretive Approach ...... 81 3.6 Narrative Analysis as an Interpretive Approach ...... 83 3.7 Reflecting on Ethical Considerations ...... 84 3.8 Limitations ...... 88 3.9 Conclusion ...... 88 Chapter 4: Findings: The Stories ...... 90

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4.1 Introduction ...... 90 4.2 Collection of Stories ...... 91 4.3 Research Participants ...... 92 Family 1 ...... 93 Family 2 ...... 93 Family 3 ...... 93 Myself ...... 93 4.4 The Interviews ...... 94 4.5 On the Process of Translating my Stories ...... 98 4.6 The Stories in the Appendix ...... 99 4.7 On How I Came to My findings ...... 100 4.8 Presentation of Findings ...... 102 Theme 1: On the meanings and feelings of the lived experiences of the Syrian Diasporic realities ...... 103 Finding 1.1 On the meaning of homelands ...... 103 Finding 1.2 On the meaning and feeling of being refugee ...... 107 Finding 1.3 On forced displacement ...... 111 Theme 2: On issues of identity ...... 116 Finding 2.1 On cultural identity ...... 116 Finding 2.2 On negotiating difference ...... 118 Finding 2.3 On the fact of difference—Orientalism and beyond ...... 119 Finding 2.4 On resilience ...... 122 Theme 3: On creating new possibilities: Activating and actualizing the third space ...... 125 Finding 3.1 On issues of language ...... 125 Finding 3.2 On finding cultural intersections and “third spaces” ...... 128 Finding 3.3 On how Canadians can be of help: Activating and actualizing the third space ...... 129 4.9 Conclusion ...... 132

Chapter 5: On the Meanings and Feelings of the Lived Experience of the Syrian Diasporic Realities—An Autoethnographic Interpretation ...... 134 5.1 Introduction ...... 134 5.2 Why Am I Doing All this? ...... 135 5.3 On Affect and Standing in the Shoe of the Other ...... 136 5.4 On Interpreting the Stories ...... 139 5.5 Presentation of Findings ...... 141 Theme 1: On the meanings and feelings of the lived experiences of the Syrian Diasporic realities ...... 141 Finding 1.1 On the meaning of homelands ...... 141 Finding 1.2 On the meaning and feeling of being refugee ...... 152 Finding 1.3 On forced displacement ...... 155 5.6 Conclusion ...... 159

Chapter 6: On Issues of Identity—An Autoethnographic Interpretation ...... 160 6.1 Introduction ...... 160 6.2 Presentation of Findings ...... 160 Theme 2: On issues of identity ...... 160 Finding 2.1 On cultural identity ...... 160 Looking for resemblances and avoiding differences ...... 160 On the differences between immigrants and refugees ...... 165 Finding 2.2 On negotiating difference ...... 168 Finding 2.3 On the fact of difference—Orientalism and beyond ...... 170 Finding 2.4 On resilience ...... 182 6.3 Conclusion ...... 188

Chapter 7: On Creating New Possibilities: Activating and Actualizing the Third Space—An Autoethnographic Interpretation ...... 190 7.1 Introduction ...... 190 7.2 Presentation of Findings ...... 190 Theme 3: On creating new possibilities: Activating and actualizing the third space ...... 190 Finding 3.1 On issues of language ...... 190 Finding 3.2 On finding cultural intersections and “third spaces” ...... 201 Finding 3.3 On how Canadians can be of help: Activating and actualizing the third space ...... 208 To recycle knowledge ...... 208 To be open to other ways of knowing the world ...... 212 To engage empathy as an act ...... 214 7.3 Conclusion ...... 216

Chapter 8: Conclusion ...... 217 8.1 Introduction ...... 217 8.2 Summary of Themes and Findings ...... 218 8.3 On Third Spaces: My Final Thoughts ...... 222

References ...... 229

Appendix ...... 249

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Chapter 1

Overview of Research Design

1.1 Research Problem and Purpose

As mentioned earlier in the Preface, as of January 29, 2017, a total of 58,600 Syrian refugees have arrived in Canada (Government of Canada, 2018). While there have been numerous government documents, news articles and media reports that address the topic of the recent Syrian Diaspora in Canada, few research studies have spoken to the experience of resettlement for Syrian refugees within the context of a rapidly changing Calgary.

The purpose of my research was to fill in this gap by seeking to understand, as fellow humans and Canadian hosts (educators, employers, community organizations, policymakers), what it means for the Syrian Diasporic subjects to have lost a home and a homeland. My work sought to qualitatively conjure up dynamic ways, through their active participation in the process, that may help them as they try to make meaning of family and home in their newfound land of Canada. I held three open-ended, unstructured, interactive interviews in which I interviewed three Syrian refugee families in Calgary. I sought a heterogeneous representation in my participants by seeking diversity in religion/ethnicity, in educational and socio-economic backgrounds, in political affiliations, as well as in their routes of immigration. I strongly believe that we can come to a better understanding of the human and cultural experiences of the Syrian newcomers by offering them the space and agency to speak for themselves, to tell their stories, and to co-construct and co-create knowledge that is reflective of their lived reality and faced challenges; based on this new knowledge, we ought to be able to develop proposed actions and pedagogical possibilities that may help facilitate their integration process and, as importantly, find ways in which we can provide them with some sense of belonging and feeling at home.

1.2 Research Questions

Throughout this study, my research was driven by the following questions:

• How do Syrian newcomers come to make sense of what it means to have lost a home

and a homeland as it relates to the Syrian Diasporic experience?

§ What stories can Syrian newcomers share with us about their experiences in

Syria since the eruption of the war and after their arrival to their newfound

city of Calgary?

§ What do Syrian newcomers believe are ways in which Canadians (educators,

employers, community organizations, policymakers) can help as they try to

make meaning of family and home in their new homeland, and as they

negotiate and remediate their identities?

1.3 Rationale and Significance

Edward Said (2000) writes, “There is also a particular sense of achievement in acting as if one were at home wherever one happens to be” (p. 186). I will build on Said’s profound thought and add—there is an even greater sense of achievement in making others feel at home wherever they may be from. But in order to do so, I believe that we must first look for ways to understand the human condition of the Syrian Diasporic peoples, one that is saturated with incommensurable moments that speak to memories of home and the experience of dislocation, displacement, loss, exile, and the desire for belonging.

The Syrian Diaspora today encompasses a complex heterogeneity of Syrian subjects who come from diverse socioeconomic, religious and educational backgrounds, and who are deeply divided in their political affiliations (pro-Assad-regime or anti-Assad-regime). The recent political ideologies and sentiments of Syrians have come to define, in great part, the identity of

the Syrian peoples, as well as their ontological and epistemological stances based on very different conceptualizations of what they suggest as political truth. I suggest that this complex notion of heterogeneity ought to yield different implications as it relates to the resettlement of

Syrians in Canada, and is also an important element in understanding the Syrian peoples who have become part of our Canadian make-up today. As will be discussed in my Methodology section later in this dissertation, I represented this heterogeneity in my research as I recruited my research participants.

By way of listening to and writing the stories of the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora, I hope to present a knowledge that could help with better understanding their complex human condition, and subsequently use this knowledge in ways that can help facilitate their integration process as they negotiate and remediate their identities in their new homeland of Canada, and, ultimately, so that the outcomes and implications are positive for both the newcomers and the host country. Patricia Enciso (2011) writes, “Walls, once built, have an appearance of permanence, a blinding effect that makes movement through their space seem impossible. It is difficult to imagine storytelling as a force capable of toppling walls, but I believe this is possible” (p. 38). I too deeply believe this is possible where stories can give way to emerged empathetic understanding with the power to dismantle the walls that separates “us” from “them,” and ideally create what Chang (2008) calls “an extended community … [that] redefines the division of ‘us’ and ‘them’ and expands the boundaries to treat former others of difference as new others of similarity” (p. 29). I suggest that understanding the identity and lived conditions of Syrian refugees, by way of their stories, becomes a critical and a pivotal first step towards helping resettle the Syrian refugees in their new Canadian society, whether for teachers, schools, educational boards, resettlement agencies, or policymakers.

As a Syrian-Canadian citizen and researcher, I have taken up this subject as my cause in life where it has become part of my identity as a researcher and as a human, and I will look for all opportunities to disseminate my research outcomes in educational conferences as well as in schools and different policy-making and community organizations directly impacted by the arrival of Syrian refugees, both on a local and national level.

1.4 Locating Myself in My Research

My Syrian-Canadian nationality allowed me to autoethnographically claim an insider’s position in both Syrian and Canadian spaces which happens to be of great importance to my role as a researcher trying to understand the complex identity of Syrian refugees as they try to find ways to make meaning of home in their newfound homeland. I believe that my “closeness” to my research subjects and topic helped me with “gaining their trust in me and their interest in the project” (Innes, 2009). I discuss my autoethnographic approach as a research methodology and method in more detail in the Methodology section of this dissertation, where I engage autoethnography as “an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyze (graphy) personal experience (auto) in order to understand cultural experience (ethno)” (Ellis et al., 2011, para. 1).

As a researcher, I also understood the importance of walking into the room with emotional competence and a democratic mindset (Lincoln, Lynham, & Guba, 2011, p. 101); however, this was not by any means an easy task for me, as the topic was very close to my heart for the war in Syria has had personal and direct effects on my family and friends. My first cousin in Syria lost her son to the war last year (January 2017); he was 21 years old and married for only two and a half months. I was sent photos of his wedding by Facebook Messenger in

November, 2016; two months later, photos of his funeral appeared on my Facebook newsfeed

where his body was laid in a casket wrapped with the old Syrian flag. On March 31, 2017, the dead groom’s brother posted on Facebook that the wedding photos had finally arrived, and he tagged their mother (my first cousin) in the post. The pain is immense. My heart aches as I write these words at this moment; I cannot begin to imagine the pain that will eternally dwell and burn in my cousin’s heart. And so, I am mindful of the fact that my research topic is charged with emotions for me, and to try to detach oneself emotionally is indeed a task that requires great focus and mindful training. Having said this, I believe that my emotions are also my drive and the force behind my insistence on engaging research to conjure up possibilities that may help with alleviating the pain of Syrians today.

I am also a writer and a storyteller, and I accept every opportunity to read and share my stories (in Calgary and beyond) so that I can attempt to shed light on what is hegemonically dimmed, and also for the same reasons as Indigenous American-Canadian Professor Thomas

King (2003): “[so that you] don’t say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story” (p. 29). My published collection of fictional short stories Stripped to the Bone: Portraits of Syrian Women (Alatrash, 2016) has been my way of disrupting the hegemonic representations on Syrians and delivering other ways of knowing the

Syrian peoples. In my fictional short stories, I explore, through my own experience, the issue of identity as a Syrian citizen, as a Canadian national, as a woman, and as a human. I visit the complex and explosive grounds of religion and politics; I force myself into the darkest and heartless pits of war; I hold the hands of a Syrian refugee and his wife and help carry the pieces of their shattered hearts on a heart-wrenching exodus from Aleppo, Syria to Houston, Texas.

However, as will be discussed later in the next section of this dissertation (Researcher

Assumptions), I am deeply cognizant of the fact that my identity and my experience as a Syrian

immigrant is very different from that of a Syrian refugee’s experience, and most importantly, I strongly believe that it is only them, the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora, who can truly speak to their incommensurable lived human condition.

I am also the Co-Chair of the Syrian Women’s Club of Calgary, and with this position I feel a sense of responsibility to continue to serve members of the Syrian Diaspora in Calgary and to be a candle in their times of darkness. As part of the Syrian Women’s Club of Calgary, I have worked with Syrian refugees on an individual level, and I have come to hear the stories behind the numbers—stories that embody the incommensurable melancholic lived experience of having lost a home and a homeland. I suggest that it is critical that we find a place for these stories, narrated by Syrian refugees themselves, in order to help them become integrated within the citizenry of Canada.

1.5 Researcher Assumptions

As a researcher, I continue to understand the importance of reflecting on the influences of my cultural, social and political positions as they relate to my research topic and participants. I am cognizant of how ethical intricacies are heavily intertwined with my epistemological, ontological and axiological positions within my research. I am also mindful of the underlying assumptions that I am bringing into my research and of the ethical and moral considerations attached, and I will discuss my approach to ethics in Chapter 3 of this dissertation.

My identity reflects, in incommensurable ways, how pieces of my heart are scattered all over the world’s map, some left in Syria, some in the U.S. where my family currently lives and where I once grew up, some here in Canada, and some along the way, here and there. In reflexively thinking about my own lived experience, I am also aware of the fact that, despite the mentioned commonalities, I stand in a privileged position where my lived experience as an

immigrant is quite different from that of a refugee. “Reflections on Exile” comes in very helpful in trying to understand this difference. Said (2002) writes, “Exile is . . . the unhealable rift forced between a human being and native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted.” He adds, “Exiles are cut off from their roots, their land, their past . . .

Exiles feel, therefore, an urgent need to reconstitute their broken lives” (p. 171-177). Said diagnoses the situation as “unhealable” and writes, “like death but without death’s ultimate mercy, it [exile] has torn people from the nourishment of tradition, family, and geography” (Said,

2002, p. 174). In his Politics of Diaspora, Simmons (2012) speaks on the Caribbean Diaspora in the West and of their experience of race and describes it as “a painful site of spiritual injury . . . a painful site of ungrievable loss (Butler, 1997), a place, a memory of suffering” (p. 63). It is important to keep mindful of the fact that these incommensurable yet profoundly felt human conditions of an “unhealable” sadness, of “spiritual injury,” of “ungrievable loss,” come from real lived human experiences and embody the most complex of emotional moments. It is also of importance to note that incommensurability, as put by Kuhn (1982) , is the assumption that “no language . . . neutral or otherwise, can be translated without residue or loss” (p. 670), and that as researchers our observations are influenced by differing theoretical perspectives and are shaped by our prior beliefs an experiences (Kuhn, 1996). My challenge was to make sense of and consequently interpret those moments into knowledge that could add to the epistemology on understanding the condition of the Syrian Diaspora as well as help others to also come to make sense of this complex human experience.

My doctoral journey has also brought me to profoundly reflect on the ways I ought to navigate through the hegemonic, paradigmatic and political influences on research, and most importantly, to always be critically mindful of “truth” systems. I continue to be more cognizant

of the questions of subjectivity and objectivity and of how they are far more complex than a simple assumed binary between qualitative and quantitative research, and furthermore, that they are deeply steeped in the ontological, epistemological and axiological stances within a wide continuum of research communities. Through my reflexive writing and continued dialogue with my research participant, I make every effort to mindfully re-examine my own views as a researcher, the way I communicate those views, what I believe is truth and knowledge, where my knowledge comes from, and what I believe merits further understanding. I have also come to reexamine my own perspective and political stance, how they align within the research communities, and the implications they will have on my research. I have become acutely cognizant of the fact that my worldview is in a constant state of flux, as well as my knowledge and interpretations, and most importantly, that epistemology is indeed a never-finished project.

As importantly, I am, as a researcher, also mindful of the ethical obligation of giving way to my participants’ critical subjectivity to emerge from their lived experiences and acknowledge their subjective political perspectives regardless of whether or not they align with mine, for as

Lincoln et al. (2011) explain, “a [participatory] facilitator/researcher requires emotional competence, democratic personality and skills” (p. 101). It is with this understanding, and ethical obligations, that I wrote this dissertation.

1.6 On the Organization of this Dissertation

In this chapter, I have endeavored to provide an overview of this study, the research questions, the significance of the proposed research, and where I situate myself as a researcher.

In Chapter 2, I write as a bricoleur and engage with a selection of literature to review the current discussions on the topic of the Syrian Diaspora in Canada; I also present the Syrian identity through pre-war and post-war literature written by Syrian poets and writers; I locate the

theoretical framework of this study as anti-colonial and anti-“Orientalist;” and I include

Palestinian and other literatures written on the lived experience of displacement and exile. In

Chapter 3, I present autoethnography as my research methodology and method, and I speak to approaches of data collection, analysis and interpretation. In Chapter 4, I present the stories as told by my research participants, and I introduce the themes and findings that have emerged as a result of this study. In Chapters 5, 6, and 7, I autoethnographically think through and consider my personal lived experience as it relates to the stories of my research participants, and I engage an autoethnographic analysis, interpretation and synthesis of each of the presented themes and findings. And in Chapter 8, I conclude with my final thoughts on what I have learned and what I hope for as I think of the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora in Canada and of their stories.

Chapter 2

Literature Review

2.1 Introduction: Acting as a Bricoleur

Given the newness of the movement of the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora whose arrival to Canada was first marked on November 4, 2015 (Citizenship and Immigration Canada, 2017), I have faced the limitation of the scarcity of literature written by the displaced Syrian people. In turn, in trying to make sense of what it means to have lost a home and a homeland as it relates to the Syrian Diasporic experience today, I found myself acting as a bricoleur, where as suggested by Berry (2006), I worked with "‘bits and pieces’” (p. 102) drawn from data and documents, media sources, as well as theoretical and scholarly literature that spoke to my research. I then wove the “pieces” into this chapter as they were needed “in the unfolding context of the research situation” (Steinberg, 2006, p. 119).

As I engaged with bricolage as an approach to writing this chapter, I first strove to situate and contextualize the Syrian Diaspora within a Canadian context and present some of what has

come to constitute our knowledge on the topic by reading through articles, government documents and media conversations. I wrote about the celebratory moments as well as the tensions and struggles that reside within our Canadian communities, addressed the surfacing implications, and critically thought through how these moments come to speak to and construct the experience of the Syrian Diaspora in Canada today. I then moved on to locate my theoretical framework as anti-colonial and anti-Orientalist and I considered some of what underpins our epistemological and ontological stances on the topic. Next, I introduced Syrian identities through looking at what was written before the Syrian war had erupted in 2011, for, as mentioned earlier, the Syrian Diasporic experience since the recent Syrian war remains in its early stages where there exists a gap that is yet to be filled by post-war Syrian writers and members of the Syrian diasporic community. Also, as I sought to deliver a sense of Syrian identities and their experience, I brought into this discussion the voices of pre-Syrian-war writers and poets including Nizar Kabbani, Muhammad al-Maghut, Zakaria Tamer, Mamduh Adwan,

Adonis and Nasib Arida. And, to capture a post-war written sentiment, I evoked the voice of

Syrian Novelist Najat Abdul Samad who continues to live today within the national borders of a war-torn Syria. Moreover, in my attempt to better understand the lived experience of the displaced Syrian people, I resorted to Palestinian literature written by and on exiles and refugees where the Palestinian struggle has become a poignant representation of what it means to have lost a homeland; I presented some of the Palestinian literature written on the topic, one saturated with related themes of homelessness, loss, exile and displacement. I also addressed the importance of recognizing the difference between exiles and refugees as presented by

Said. Lastly, I thought through and wrote about the idea of “home-lessness” as expressed by

humans who have lost a homeland, and I brought into the discussion the sentiments and attachments to cultural memories and a homeland.

2.2 Situating the Syrian Diaspora within the Canadian Context

I will begin by presenting data provided by Immigration and Citizenship of the

Government of Canada to conceptualize the routes of immigration travelled by the peoples of

Syrian Diaspora and to situate these numbers within a Canadian landscape.

As mentioned earlier, 58,600 Syrians have arrived in Canada. Of this number, 27,100

Syrians are Government Assisted Refugees (GAR), 26,590 are Privately Sponsored Refugees, and 4,910 as Blended Visa Office-Referred Refugees(BVOR) (Government of Canada, 2018).

Under the GAR Program, refugees are referred to Canada for resettlement by the United Nations

Refugee Agency (UNHCR) or another referral organization; individuals cannot apply directly to their government of refuge, and the majority of Syrians sponsored under this program come directly from refugee camps and onto Canadian grounds. Through the Private Sponsorship of

Refugees Program, Canadians may be able to help sponsor refugees from abroad who qualify to come to Canada; those refugees may have been displaced within or out of Syria, but were not necessarily placed in a refugee camp. The BVOR Program matches refugees identified for resettlement by the UNHCR with private sponsors in Canada. Here, it is important to note that depending on the sponsoring program, the conditions of the people of the Syrian Diaspora who arrive to Canada are complexly varied, embody different moments and lived experiences, and subsequently they ought to also yield different implications—some Syrians may speak to a life lived in a refugee camp and others to a life within a war-torn ground. But regardless of contexts, and from my own personal interactions with peoples of the Syrian Diaspora in our community of

Calgary, I have come to feel how these experiences are intensely charged with emotions and speak to the most poignant, profound, and incommensurable of human feelings.

2.3 On the Experience of the Syrian Diaspora in Canada

I believe it is also important to consider the Syrian Diasporic experience within a

Canadian landscape and to read through the nuances of some of the Western articles, government documents and media conversations that have been inundated with news on Syria’s war and its displaced refugees and have come to constitute our knowledge on the topic. In this section of my dissertation, I would like to bring to surface the celebratory moments as well as the tensions and struggles that reside within our Canadian communities, and critically examine how these moments come to speak to and construct the experience of the Syrian Diaspora in Canada today.

During the holiday season of 2016 and after a year since their arrival to Calgary, several

Syrian newcomers “hosted a special Christmas dinner near the Calgary Drop-In Centre with dozens of homeless Calgarians lining up for a taste of Syria . . . The idea was about giving back to the city that's made them feel so welcome and sharing similarities rather than differences”

(McGarvey, 2016, para. 2). The organizer of the event was Syrian newcomer Rita Khanchet

Kallas who happens to be one of the women with whom I have had close contact as part of the

Syrian Women’s Club of Calgary. She has taught me a great deal about the resilience of a human soul and how to continue to find reasons to smile. Rita came to Canada from Syria with a pained body and a wounded soul; she is a human who had to witness the death of her father as their Red Crescent team of volunteers was hit by a shell while volunteering on Syrian grounds.

Rita’s story has been published in different Calgarian and national Canadian newspapers. I have asked Rita’s permission to share and retell some of what has been published of her story in hopes

of offering alternative and new ways of knowing and understanding the Syrian Diasporic experience in Canada; she happily gave me the permission to do so.

As she stood outdoors to serve dinner on a cold day in December, her 4-year-old son waited for her in a heated car and watched with smiling eyes as witness to the examples set by his parents. Rita arrived to Calgary in December of 2015. Soon after her arrival, she was eager to show gratitude to a Canada that welcomed her and provided her family with refuge. During the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfires, she organized Syrian refugees to donate and provide hampers to evacuees, and was chosen as the recipient of Calgary’s 2016 People’s Choice Peace and

Human Rights Award “for mobilizing Calgary’s Syrian newcomers to assist victims of the Fort

McMurray wildfires, and became the first Syrian refugee in Calgary to acquire a business licence

[sic]” (Rumbolt, 2016).

Rita Khanchet Kallas’ story embodies one human lived experience of the Syrian newcomers in Canada. While there have been numerous studies by Citizenship and Immigration

Canada in the context of refugees, few research studies have addressed the human lived experience of the Syrian Diaspora in their newfound land. The topic of Diaspora, as will be discussed in the next sections of this chapter, presents a complex terrain. I have visited this space throughout the past few year as I worked with Syrian newcomers, and indeed it is a space drenched in human emotion where “much of the exile’s life is taken up with compensating for disorienting loss by creating a new world . . . a new world that somewhat resembles an old one left behind” (Said, 2000, p. 181).

2.4 “The Canada Experiment: Is this the World’s First ‘Postnational’ Country?”

While reading through the experience of immigrants in Canada, I came across an article in January of this year published in the Guardian (2017) with the headline: “The Canada

experiment: is this the world’s first ‘postnational’ country?” I was struck by the title and quite troubled by its rhetoric. I re-read the words to try and make sense of the meaning. Often, the term “experiment” implies a scientific connotation, where an “experiment” is in most cases undertaken in scientific labs to make a discovery and perhaps test a hypothesis frequently using rodents as subjects. Yet the word “post-national” in the title was also suggestive of a political dimension inferring that the subjects of the experiment are humans. As I began to read, it became clear that the word “experiment” in this article is indeed referring to people, to humans, and particularly to immigrants. My sense of uneasiness continued to escalate. The article opens with the following paragraph:

As 2017 begins, Canada may be the last immigrant nation left standing. Our government

believes in the value of immigration, as does the majority of the population. We took in

an estimated 300,000 newcomers in 2016, including 48,000 refugees, and we want them

to become citizens; around 85% of permanent residents eventually do. Recently there

have been concerns about bringing in single Arab men, but otherwise Canada welcomes

people from all faiths and corners. (Foran, 2017, para. 1)

This paragraph left me deeply troubled. I asked my eighteen-year-old daughter, a first-year student at the University of Calgary, to critically read this paragraph and share her analysis. She offered a positive critique applauding the Canadian spirit and its efforts to help in a dire reality; she was not certain as to what I found “offensive” (I have quoted her with her permission). This grounded my fear deeper; we re-read the paragraph together, and I went on to suggest how and why I found this paragraph hegemonically dangerous. For example, I pointed to where the author claims that Canada is possibly “the last immigrant nation left standing,” a statement, in my opinion, that heedlessly dismisses the many other countries around the globe who have

extended substantial international resettlements in very recent times. Within the context of the

Syrian crisis alone, a report provided by Amnesty International (2016) (and updated on

December 20, 2016) shares some key facts that challenge the declaration made in Foran’s article:

In total, 224,694 resettlement and other admission pathways have been pledged globally

since the start of the Syria crisis . . .

• Germany has pledged 43,431 places for Syrian refugees via resettlement and other

admission pathways; about 46% of the combined EU total.

• Excluding Germany, the remaining 27 EU countries have pledged around 51,205

places via resettlement and other admission pathways, or around 1% of the Syrian

refugee population in the main host countries

• Germany and Sweden together have received 64% of Syrian asylum applications

in Europe between April 2011 and October 2016. (para. 8-10)

I believe that the numbers above represent a considerable response by other nations in our humanity, and they also embody a consciousness of hope and a language of possibility in the midst of a dismal reality and despondent rhetoric.

Returning to Foran’s article, I further found that his opening paragraph is centered in a binary division of “us” and “them” where the author writes, “We [us] want them [refugees and immigrants] to become citizens.” As a reader, I can’t help but ask: who is “we”—does the word refer to all Canadians whether Indigenous, Canadian passport-holders, and other immigrants who have arrived before the 2016 inflow? Is it possible that such unanimity and homogeneity of opinion exists under the Canadian umbrella especially when the country’s pride is often embodied in the notion of its multi-cultural and heterogeneous mosaic? Most concerning was the passive, generalizing and all-encompassing mention of “single Arab men” as a group of

peoples insinuating alarm while others “from all faiths and all corners” are welcomed to

Canadian grounds. I am deeply concerned with the circulation of such discourse, one that is epistemologically and ontologically underpinned with racism and bias. As I reflect on the word

“Arab” in the statement above, I feel troubled. There are twenty-two Arab countries in the world with very diverse heterogeneous backgrounds. I am an Arab, and until last year my brother would have been classified as a “single Arab man” as he was married in May 2015. To think of my own brother being filtered through such a hegemonic racist grid is quite upsetting; even more troubling is the tacit construction of this grid in the consciousness of the Western readers as they become passively conditioned to read such narrative as commonsense, a narrative that is tangled in a web of racist, colonial, and Orientalist discursive frameworks as will be addressed later in this dissertation.

My questions to the author of this article, Charles Foran (a novelist and the CEO of the

Institute for Canadian Citizenship), are: How would a Western reader’s interpretation of this statement, when taken out of context and inserted into an opening paragraph, as is the case in the aforementioned article, impact the many Arab single immigrants in Canada today, particularly when this statement becomes proliferated into Western culture? How is such a statement contextualized in the midst of all the uncertainties on immigrants today, and for the purposes of my studies, within the Syrian Diasporic body in Canada?

Foran (2017) continues to write on the benefits of immigration for Canada, and claims that “The economic benefits are also self-evident, especially if full citizenship is the agreed goal.

All that ‘settlers’ – i.e., Canadians who are not indigenous to the land – need do is look in the mirror to recognize the generally happy ending of an immigrant saga” (para. 5). Only a day prior to Foran’s article, I listened to an episode of Ana Maria Tremonti’s The Current. The episode is

titled: “Lack of jobs, housing: why some of Canada’s Syrian refugees are relocating.” Lina

Arafeh, a Syrian refugee, who first landed in Halifax is interviewed by Tremonti and explains that she is planning to move to Toronto for better job opportunities. The episode further reveals that “About five per cent of Syrian refugees who have settled in New Brunswick this year . . . are hoping to find job opportunities” (para. 14) and “since last January, settlement agencies estimate that 500 families to have moved to Windsor, Ont., from other parts of Canada—the majority are

Syrian” (para. 11). These statements alone, not to mention all the other stories and lived experiences by other Syrians and non-Syrian refugees and immigrants might argue against

Foran’s conclusion suggesting that “all ‘settlers’ need [to] do is look in the mirror to recognize the generally happy ending of an immigrant saga.”

Moreover, Foran imports into his article the statement of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau who “articulated . . . [to] the New York Times Magazine that Canada could be the ‘first postnational state’ [and that] ‘There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada’” (para. 6). On a parallel note, Mahmoud Darwish, an exiled Palestinian national poet also dreamt of a similar

“no-core” identity and wrote, “All human hearts are my nationality / so rid me of my passport”

[my translation] (Darwish, "Jawaaz Safar"). To the reader, Foran’s article and Trudeau’s statement might indeed embody a materialization of Darwish’s dreams; but is it so, I ask? Do all the human experiences of the peoples of Diasporas, immigrants and exiles, in Canada echo this imagined dream?

As mentioned earlier, I was part of the homeless dinner hosted by Syrian newcomers in downtown Calgary on December 22, 2016 where there were “dozens of homeless Calgarians lining up for a taste of Syria, breaking down barriers with food and some small talk” (CBC News

Calgary, 2016; McGarvey, 2016, para. 2). What did not make it to CBC’s report is that a

homeless man approached us (some of the Syrian newcomers and I) while serving dinner and asked the details of the event. As we began to explain that it was hosted by Syrians, he interrupted and blatantly expressed that he did not care to eat our food, turned his back and left.

This was a very sad moment for me, but it was also a moment in which I had to remind myself and others around me that this incident is not representative of the sentiment of a heterogeneous

Canadian society. The same applies to Foran’s article, I might add. I think it is of great importance to continue to offer other ways of knowing and to challenge any sort of representation that sets itself as a homogenous “truth,” for knowledge is always partial in a terrain of subjective epistemes and narratives. In his Politics of Diaspora, Simmons (2012) speaks of how, within the public sphere of the West, “stories come to be told/written in ways whereby the nation-state maintains ownership of the narrative. [Where] For far too long, nation- state has been masquerading as neutral, free of bias, as being impartial, as being without a politic” (p. 46). Simmons (2012) further encourages the conjuring of ways in which “the high theorizing of one’s lived experience can be re/presented/written/for/and from the everyday context, where local voices ought not find themselves in the audience being spoken about, instead the local voice becomes an active participant within the writing” (p. 46). This is precisely the objective of this study—to present the voices and narratives of the Diasporic peoples, Syrian and others, and to offer them agency to speak for themselves and to partake in the construction of knowledge about their lived experiences so that we can come to better understand their human condition.

The image above also happens to be part of Foran’s (2017) article (illustrated by Jacqui

Oakley). Canada, in this image, is depicted as nothing short of a utopic nation of immigrants, but I ask—aren’t we in this image ignoring, and even muting, some of the uncomfortable realities and occurrences that are also a part our nation’s make-up and identity? I would like to suggest that this portrait fails to deliver a number of significant incidents in which some

Canadians explicitly express their disapproval of the country’s response to hosting the recent refugee influx. We need to address these uncomfortable but important issues and engage them in our discourse. Jürgen Habermas (1992) speaks to the importance of how discourse within the public sphere is a means by which communicative action becomes reflective, self-critical and transformative along post-national lines, and how collective interests can be articulated in a context of democratic participation through a “praxis of citizens who actively exercise their civil rights” (p. 3). In my attempt to actively take part in this discourse as a Canadian citizen and to unmute what has been dismissed in Foran’s article, I would like to discuss and bring into the next section of this dissertation some of the anti-immigrant sentiments in our Canadian terrain.

2.5 On Some of the Anti-Immigrant Sentiments in Canada

As a first example, “The disturbing movement against Syrian refugees in Canada” was a title for an article published in the Toronto Star on March 10, 2016 where “anti-immigrant activism” is the main theme expressed in the article. Kanji (2016) writes,

An online Care2 petition asking the government to “stop resettling 25,000 Syrian

refugees in Canada” has garnered almost 50,000 signatures, accompanied by comments

such as “terrists [sic]” and “If the Liberal Government wishes to increase the number of

refugee's [sic] to Canada, BRING IN THE CHRISTIANS. I don't think Mr. Trudeau will

as he seems to be dedicated to the Muslim Brotherhood.” Calgary schools have been

defaced by anti-Muslim graffiti, most recently two weeks ago. In January, a group of

Syrian refugees attending a welcome event in Vancouver were attacked with pepper

spray. Anti-immigrant groups have organized demonstrations in Canada; Pegida [Pegida

is the German acronym for Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West]

Quebec’s march in Montreal on Feb. 6 was shut down by activists. (para. 3)

As mentioned in the above paragraph, our own city of Calgary has been no exception where more than one incident that has taken place in which dissent and hatefulness are expressed toward the Syrian newcomers. Anti-Muslim racist graffiti was spray-painted on the walls of

Queensland junior high school with some of the following statements written in black on the brick walls of the school: “Syrians Go home and DIE,” “Kill the traitor trudea [sic],” and “Burn all MOSQUES!” (Ivanov, 2016). At the University of Calgary, on October 5, 2016, “Anti-

Muslim posters “were plastered around the campus. . . about 40 posters . . . [that] included wording such as ‘Dear Muslims … F—k your Quran’ and ‘go back to the monstrous s—t holes you came from” (Fletcher, 2016, para. 2, 8). The University of Calgary’s incident took place a few weeks after University of Alberta posters were also found on campus expressing hatred

toward the Sikh faith. One of the posters pictured a turbaned man and above his photograph “in bold letters, it read “F—k your Turban . . . If you’re so obsessed with your third world culture go the f—k back where you came from!” (Snowdon, 2016, para. 2).

In the community in which I personally happen to live—Tuscany, Calgary—there was yet another incident where racist graffiti was sprayed on a Calgary LRT station in December of

2016 with “often misspelled messages [that] included swastikas and white-power symbols and some urged readers to ‘kill’ Muslims and Syrians, making the incident a cut-and-dried hate crime in the eyes of investigators” (Grant, 2016, para. 15). And most recently, the tragic shooting in the Quebec Islamic Cultural Centre, executed by a French-Canadian political science and anthropology student Alexandre Bissonnette, left six Muslims dead; Prime Minister Justin

Trudeau called the attack a “‘terrorist attack on Muslims’” (Osborne, 2017, para. 1).

My argument here is by no means intended to dismiss the fact that Canada has been “a land of immigration” where “since Confederation in 1867, more than 17 million immigrants have come to Canada” (Statistics Canada, 2016, para. 1). In fact, this tradition predates Confederation, extending all the way back to First Contact and the beginning of colonization when Indigenous peoples were generally welcoming of Europeans. In a very moving statement broadcast on

APTN (Aboriginal Peoples Television Network) National News in the late stages of federal

Conservative rule, Indigenous Mi’kmaq hereditary chief and scholar Stephen Augustine reminded Indigenous and non-Indigenous leaders alike of this history in exhorting them to act on the Syrian refugee crisis. To Syrian refugees, he said, “You are welcome; the food is here; shelter is here . . . we will show you how to do it” (Roache, 2015). Chief Augustine spoke at a rally for Syrian refugees in Cape Breton and reminded his audience that Canada is a nation that has always welcomed immigrants from the early days of colonization; he called for Indigenous

and non-Indigenous leaders to extend this invitation to Syrian refugees seeking shelter.

Moreover, a report by Statistics Canada (2016) shows that in the latter part of the 20th Century,

Canada has extended refuge to many humans:

world events. . . led to the massive movement of refugees and migrants from different

parts of the world to Canada. Examples include the arrival of 60,000 boat people from

Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in the late 1970s; 85,000 immigrants from the Caribbean

and Bermuda (for example, Jamaica, Haiti, and Trinidad and Tobago) in the 1980s;

225,000 immigrants from Hong Kong over the 10 years leading up to its return to China

by the United Kingdom in 1997; and 800,000 immigrants from the People's Republic of

China, India and the Philippines in the 2000s. (Statistics Canada, 2016, para. 20)

These numbers, in my opinion, are an embodiment of the Canadian spirit. But I am interested in going beyond the numbers and of thinking of the tens of millions of individual lived experiences that dwell in these numbers, ones that tell stories of defeat, loss, hope, and dreams, ones that need to be heard and brought to life with human voices, and ones that might help us as

Canadians better understand the comforts and challenges, and the solace and pain, encountered in the daily lived experiences of our newcomers. The stories are not homogenously happy.

Much suffering and pain dwells within the lived experience of the Diasporic peoples.

I hope that the stories and literature provided in this dissertation on the human condition of the displaced subjects can evoke an empathetic understanding and help dismantle the walls that separates “us” from “them”, walls that continue to Otherize, divide and foster hatred, judgements, violence, and misunderstanding. I deeply believe that an emerged understanding will also help in the building of cultural bridges and will open up new and more inclusive spaces in our communities. Chang (2008) speaks of the notion of “cross-cultural expansion,” where she

believes that “through genuine dialogues with others,” a community can also expand its boundaries to include others of difference (p. 29). Citing Greene (2000), she writes, “Greene refers to such an inclusive community as an ‘extended community.’ This community is characterized as ‘attentive to difference, open to the idea of plurality . . . and grounded on the desire to extend the reference of ‘us’ as far as we can” (Chang, 2008, p. 29). I believe that in order to partake in the building of Greene’s extended community and in our effort to expand cultural boundaries and dismantle walls of divisions, we must first come to empathetically understand the Other (the Syrian Diaspora within the context of this dissertation). To try and arrive at this understanding, I suggest that we first critically examine our preexisting epistemological and ontological stances on the topic through an anti-colonial and an anti-

Orientalist lens, as will be discussed in the next section; but before I do so, I would like to first narrate the experience of a Vietnamese Canadian man who was once a refugee in an attempt to highlight the similarities shared in the experiences lived by displaced humans in our humanity.

2.6 A Vietnamese Refugee’s Experience in Canada

I once met a member of the Vietnamese Diaspora who currently lives in Westminster,

BC. His name is Tam Tran. My conversations with Tam are drawn from memory and personal conversations and are not part of my research interviews, but I find them important to my discussion. I have been given permission by Tam to include his thoughts in this dissertation

(personal communication, January 11, 2017).

Over a phone conversation, I learned that Tam arrived to the shores of Canada in 1985; I also came to find out that Tam is a writer and that his memories are recorded in pdf files on his computer, some even published. He emailed some of his work to me, and I asked his permission to share excerpts of his tale; he was thrilled. In his stories, Tam narrates his lived

experience as he fled in “a long and harrowing voyage from Vietnam in search of bread and freedom;” he writes,

One rainy night fifteen years ago Mom and Dad silently wept as they agreed to let us go,

all four of us. My older brother and a couple other boys his age didn't want to be cannon

fodder in border skirmishes with China, and I assured the little ones that in foreign lands

we could chew bubble gum, visit the next town, and chant a couple prayers out loud

without a permit. We set out on a friend’s bamboo-plated dinghy. Ten boys and two

girls. A bag of yams, two cans of water, three tanks of gas. Enough provisions, a

fisherman said, for a trip to the far sea. We left in the darkness of night, believing that

foreign ships in international waters would throw us a rescuing rope. (personal

communication, January 12, 2017)

But reality was heartless. There were no ropes and no international saviors. Reality did not consider the age or the condition of the escapees. I learned from Tam that monsoon storms purged their desperate horrified young bodies onto the Hainan Island of China where they were only thrown back into the next storm by a Chinese government that did not welcome them. The dinghy was tossed amidst the waves of the sea and landed them in Chinese prison; soon after, they were purged back into the sea, ended up in Hong Kong refugee camps, praying to be adopted by a Western country and Western parents. Their prayers were one day finally answered; Tam writes,

Canada welcomed my brothers and me with open arms. We picked berries, mowed

lawns, ran paper routes after school to supplement our welfare cheque, and our

neighbours gave us their embrace. Don and Sue and Ron, and numerous others, accepted

us as members of their families. Yes – our settlement here in Canada has been a gift box

of joy. Acquaintances exclaim on how often we all smile. Living here, we often remind

one another, is a privilege that deserves a grin stretching from ear-to-ear. We have been

given this gift – this land we call home – and we will never forget that. (personal

communication, January 12, 2017)

Tam wrote the above memoir during a time that the Chinese influx of refugees were arriving in the mid-90s to the shores of Vancouver, the place where he also now lives. The arrival of the

Chinese refugees was a moment that triggered memories of his own lived experience. He continues,

I don't doubt that the Chinese migrants also have such a dream. I wish them well, though

I have some reservations about their chance of having my luck. In television newscasts, I

see little migrant children in handcuffs, I see angry crowds calling them and their parents

criminals. In the newspapers, I read about a courtroom where people wear masks.

Images of the dilapidated ships on which the migrants came appear. I look, and I

remember the high school lessons of history. I remember the derided Komagata Maru

and the ill-fated ships carrying asylum-seeking Jews – the pages of shame. I turn more

pages and see our boatloads of British and Italians and Ukrainians, of Scandinavians and

of all ethnicities from all corners of Europe. None had come invited by people of First

Nations. We are all immigrants – why do we forget? (personal communication, January

12, 2017)

I truly believe that a narrative like Tam’s can only emerge from a human experience, an experience that can only dwell in the hearts of those who have lived it. Tam’s words are spoken in a universal human language, one that, as I would like to believe, ought to strike an empathetic chord in any human heart that reads it. In my work with members of the Syrian Diaspora, I have

heard similar feelings echoed in their stories, where indeed, Tam’s words bring to surface many more similarities than differences of what it means to be a refugee, regardless of one’s nationality. I asked Tam his feelings on the influx of Syrian refugees; he replied by email:

My children did not receive any presents from Santa this Christmas [2016]. In the

morning, they found dangling on the tree a letter from the jolly giftbearer saying that he

was devoting his resources to the Syrian children in the rubbles of war and in the barren

fields of Middle East and in the makeshift shelters on the edge of Europe’s cities.

(personal communication, January 11, 2017)

Tam’s email opened another window of promising possibilities in what can be a very despondent and dark humanity. Reading Tam Tran’s writing was a form of healing for me. His narrative is penned with a language of hope; it dismantles divisions and borders, reminding us that “all hearts are of the blood color,” as he says (T. Tran, personal communication, January, 11, 2017).

2.7 Locating Theoretical Framework: Edward Said’s Orientalism

“Is it true ladies and gentlemen that the earth of man is for all human beings.” (Darwish, 2013, p. 13)

“no race possesses the monopoly of beauty, of intelligence, of force, and there is a place for all at the rendez-vous of victory.” (Césaire, 1995)

Tam’s question “Why do we forget?” is certainly thought provoking and has triggered several other questions for me: Is it that we, as humans, are forgetful, or is our forgetfulness a complex product of what is imparted to us as knowledge and, as importantly, what is subjugated of knowledge, a knowledge that is embedded within histories of colonial narratives and political contingencies? Is it possible for any human heart to read about Tam’s heart-wrenching lived experience, written in a language that elevates human suffering to the universal, and not to feel a

sense of empathy, and, as importantly, a desire to act towards improving such dire living conditions? I would like to believe that it is not possible.

Returning to my primary research question:

• How do Syrian newcomers come to make sense of what it means to have lost a home

and a homeland as it relates to the Syrian Diasporic experience?

§ What stories can Syrian newcomers share with us about their experiences in

Syria since the eruption of the war and after their arrival to their newfound

city of Calgary?

§ What do Syrian newcomers believe are ways in which Canadians (educators,

employers, community organizations, policymakers) can help as they try to

make meaning of family and home in their new homeland, and as they

negotiate and remediate their identities?

Here, I propose that in order to come to better understand this complex human experience, we ought to first consider what underpins our epistemological and ontological stances on the topic and critically reflect on the assumptions that we may have as individuals, citizens, parents, educators, policymakers, politicians, and most importantly, as humans, and to shed light on what has been dismissed. To try and arrive at an understanding, I suggest broaching the Syrian diasporic subject by first thinking through an anti-Orientalist, anti-colonial framework. I want to think about the ontological underpinnings of the Arab/Middle Eastern subject as historically presented within the framework of colonialism, and to challenge the underlying assumptions and ways of knowing that have been presented about the Arab/Middle Eastern subject, ones laden with political motives and entangled in a web of Euro-centric representations, and ones that have engendered a great deal of misunderstanding and misrepresentations.

Edward Said’s (1979) Orientalism offers tremendous insight on the Western (British

French, and later American) production of the “Oriental” subject (the Arab living in places of

Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa) in which “Orientalism expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imaginary, doctrines, and even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles . . . Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the occident’” (p. 2). Before I continue to engage Said’s notion on Orientalism in this dissertation, I would like to share with my readers that I was recently brought to critically consider how the word “Oriental” may be offensive to some. I am always grateful for this sort of critique and I will hence resort to using the term

East/Eastern in my attempt to highlight and refer to the binary that exists between the East (the

Arab/Syrian/Middle Eastern subjects within the context of this dissertation) and the West and what it has produced of colonial representations. I would also like to point out that I am acutely mindful of the fact that the West (Europe, the U.S. and Canada) is made up of a very heterogeneous society that should not be summed up as a homogeneous entity, and is represented by a multitude of epistemological and ontological stances; otherwise, I would also be engaging an unfair and misleading representation of the West. For, as Treacher (2003) discusses,

The terms the West, Islam, Arab region, and America obfuscate more than they reveal.

These nations terms/states obscure complexity, flatten differences within and across

nations, and risk obliterating the possibility of locating differences as well as similarities

between Islamic societies and the West. (p. 59)

In his Orientalism, Said(1979) further goes on to point out that “a large mass of writers, among whom are poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial

administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning the

Orient, its people, customs, ‘mind,’ destiny, and so on” (p. 2-3). Marlon Simmons (2012) points to the importance of reminding ourselves of how “this knowledge comes to reside within publication houses, [and] to remember what is deemed knowledge and how this knowledge comes to be positioned/classified hierarchically through publications, keeping in mind that anti- racism/anti-colonial knowledge is augured in and through the human experience” (p. 61). And

Lincoln and Guba (2000) write,

. . . we stand at the threshold of a history marked by multivocaliry, contested meanings,

paradigmatic controversies, and new textual forms. At some distance down this

conjectural path, when its history is written, we will find that this has been the era of

emancipation: emancipation from what Hannah Arendt calls "the coerciveness of Truth,"

emancipation from hearing only the voices of Western Europe, emancipation from

generations of silence, and emancipation from seeing the world in one color. (p. 185)

More than ever before, I believe in the critical need for disrupting a tenacious production of knowledge on the East, one “that is based on the Orient’s special place in European experience”

(Said, 1979, p. 1) where the East is always presented as an Other of a difference. We ought to look at those representations and “events with complex historical processes that are difficult to sum up in words, those with technological mutations, those which include social transformations, those that locate themselves within political institutions, those projects of rationalization of knowledge and practices” (Foucault, 2007, p. 111).

In his essay, “The Politics of knowledge,” Said speaks of the importance of reintegrating

“people and cultures, once confined and reduced to peripheral status, with the rest of the human

race . . . By linking works to each other we bring them out of the neglect and secondariness to which for all kinds of political and ideological reasons they had previously been condemned”

(2002, pp. 379-382). He continues, “we are still in the era of large narratives, of horrendous cultural clashes, and of appalling destructive war—as witness the recent conflagration in the

Gulf—and to say that we are against theory, or beyond literature, is to be blind and trivial” (Said,

2002, p. 383). Today, fifteen years later, the clashes, the wars, and the destruction continue, and have perhaps even worsened. I deeply believe in the desperate need for an empathetic understanding in order to come up with any sort of solutions for the divisions and tribulations in a humanity made up of countless humans living the harshest and most merciless of human conditions.

Said’s experience of living as an Arab in the West, specifically in the United States of

America, poignantly contextualizes an Arab’s struggle to be understood in the West. I too have lived in the United States for a total of 18 years and I fully share Said’s sentiments as he articulates his experience as an Arab in the West:

The life of an Arab Palestinian in the West, particularly in America, is disheartening. . .

There exists here an almost unanimous consensus that politically he does not exist, and

when it is allowed that he does, it is either a nuisance or as an Oriental. The web of

racism, cultural stereotypes, political imperialism, dehumanizing ideology holding in the

Arab or the Muslim is very strong indeed, and it is the web which every Palestinian has

come to feel as his uniquely punishing destiny. . . The nexus of knowledge and power

creating ‘the Oriental’ and in a sense obliterating him as a human being . . . (p. 27)

Indeed, it is often the case that relationships between the East and the West are based on power, woven in a very complex web of hegemonic, colonial, political, imperialistic frameworks. To

undo the mis-representations would indeed be an overwhelming task but here it becomes of critical importance to offer a re-presentation and to invite a cultural position and a cultural reading by way of evoking individual accounts and personal narratives in order to fill in an

“almost total absence of any cultural position making it possible either to identity with or dispassionately to discuss the Arabs or Islam” (Said, 1979, p. 27).

2.8 Re-presenting, Re-telling, Re-storying, and Re-narrativizing

I believe that as researchers and educators, we ought to continue to look for new pedagogical sites for learning by offering counter-representations and alternative ways of knowing that disrupt what has been ontologically presented as a mysterious and threatening

Other, specifically by offering the Other (the East/the Arabs/ the Syrian Diasporic subjects within the context of this dissertation) the agency to narrate their lived experience. We must come to find ways to present the voices of those spoken-about and extend to them the agency to speak for themselves. In their article “Restorying the Self: Bending toward textual justice,”

Thomas and Stornaiuolo (2016) speak of the “process of restorying, of reshaping narratives to better reflect a diversity of perspectives and experiences, [where it] is an act of asserting the importance of one’s existence in a world that tries to silence subaltern voices” (p. 313).

Restorying becomes a practice in which “people reshape narratives to represent a diversity of perspectives and experiences that are often missing or silenced in mainstream texts, media, and popular discourse” (Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016, p. 313). Post-colonial theorist Shaobo Xie

(1999) writes: “to speak from an other’s thought is to redefine and renarrativize the world” (p. 1).

By offering ways to engage this notion of “restorying” and “renarrativization,” I too hope to present a counter-narrative and bring balance to the stories that have been historically written through a fixed colonial lens. Along similar lines, Lincoln and Guba (2000) also write,

One way to confront the dangerous illusions (and their underlying ideologies) that texts

may foster is through the creation of new texts that break boundaries; that move from the

center to the margins to comment upon and decenter the center; that forgo closed,

bounded worlds for those more open-ended and less conveniently encompassed; that

transgress the boundaries of conventional social science; and that seek to create a social

science about human life rather than on subjects. (p. 184)

Also along the same lines, in her TEDx Talk “The danger of a single story,” Nigerian author

Chimamanda Nogzi Adichie (2009) speaks to the importance of disrupting the dominant narratives that lock people into a single story and explains,

This single story of Africa ultimately comes, I think, from Western literature. Now, here

is a quote from the writing of a London merchant called John Lok, who sailed to west

Africa in 1561 and kept a fascinating account of his voyage. After referring to the black

Africans as ‘beasts who have no houses,’ he writes, ‘They are also people without heads,

having their mouth and eyes in their breasts.’ Now, I've laughed every time I've read this.

. . But what is important about his writing is that it represents the beginning of a tradition

of telling African stories in the West: A tradition of Sub-Saharan Africa as a place of

negatives, of difference, of darkness, of people who, in the words of the wonderful poet

Rudyard Kipling, are ‘half devil, half child.’ . . . The single story creates stereotypes, and

the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.

They make one story become the only story.

In his Politics of Diaspora, Simmons (2012) further points to the importance of Foucault’s

(1980) notion of the insurrection of subjugated knowledge and poses some critical questions with regards to the concept of “dismissed knowledge” within the context of personal narratives of the

Diaspora; he asks, “how is qualitative research constituted through story, personal narratives, folklore and proverbs? That is, through bodies of knowledge placed tangentially to standardized educational philosophies? This also leads to the question, what body of knowledge constitutes research? Or, put it another way, how do we come to know a particular piece of writing as knowledge?” (p. 38). I believe that it is by triggering such questions that we are concomitantly disrupting the notion of knowledge being held as one truth and simultaneously giving way to originality and individuality.

Within the context of the Syrian Diaspora in the Canadian-multi-cultural frame, it is important to work through the epistemological uncertainties on the Syrian diasporic subject and allow for their stories to constitute our knowledge by way of engaging their individual voices as oblique tangents that depart from a linear knowledge and as countervailing ways of knowing

(Simmons, 2012, p. 73) for “histories are bringing a fixed homogenous reading onto the

Diasporic body, for within these histories, heterogeneity is very much central to the experiences of the Diasporic subject” (Simmons, 2012, p. 141). Simmons (2012) adds, “the Diaspora is constituted through different bodies, different identities, different experiences, that the Diaspora is constituted through difference” (pp. 145-146). Simmons’ experience as a Diasporic identity in the West reminds me as an Arab that more commonalities exist amongst humans located in different diasporic bodies, that the task ahead of us is indeed tangled and complex, and that we, as Othered, are working towards the same task “of freeing up the Diasporic subject from the historical essentialized narratives of colonialism, which inevitably opens possibilities for the human condition,” so that we may ultimately come to make sense of what it means for the Other to be human (Simmons, 2012, pp. 104, 105).

I suggest that in order to think against the forces of hegemonic ways of knowing, we must come to engage ethnic and local voices (of exiles, of refugees, and of Syrians within the context of the Syrian Diaspora) so they can re-tell the narratives that have been written about them by others. It is these sorts of personal and lived accounts that will help undo a dominant hegemonic, homogenous Western narrative by shedding light on the fact that the

Eastern/Middle-Eastern/Arab/Syrian identity is made up of multiple subjectivities in and of themselves. I deeply believe that the dominant epistemologies have yielded great harm, and I hope that the literature provided throughout this dissertation will help challenge a colonially inscribed epistemology and open different possibilities and ways of thinking of the Syrian subject of my research by way of a “cultural verstehen of Others” or an empathetic understanding (Chang, 2008).

2.9 On Syrian Identity

Over a year since the arrival of the Syrian newcomers into Canada, the Syrian Diaspora has settled in Canadian neighborhoods and has become part of our schools and workforce. But who are we speaking about when we speak of the Syrian Diaspora? Again, how do we come to make sense of their lived experience of having lost a home and a homeland? What cultural similarities, and what differences, do they bring with them? What are the ontological and epistemological underpinnings that have defined our body of knowledge on the Syrian peoples?

How can we come to evaluate what has been ethically and morally constituted as knowledge on the Syrian subject? Who are the subjects of the Syrian Diaspora?

The answer simply is that there is not one answer as I hope to demonstrate in this section of my dissertation. Syrians come from a heterogeneous Syrian society and belong to diverse socioeconomic, religious and educational backgrounds. Perhaps the shared similarity amongst

the Syrian Diaspora in Canada is that it is made up of humans who have been uprooted from their homelands and forced to leave. They are defeated bodies. They are tired and pained bodies. Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish (2013) has written about the experience of the

Palestinian Diaspora:

Earth is pressing against us, trapping us in the final passage.

To pass through, we pull off our limbs.

Earth is squeezing us. If only we were its wheat, we might die and yet live.

. . . Where should we go after the last border? Where should birds fly after the last sky?

(p. 9)

Like the Palestinians before them, earth is also closing in on Syrians today, and all other nationals who have had to endure the fate of being a refugee, leaving them with no other choice and with no place for escape. Here, I would to look take a closer look at the lived experience of the Syrian citizen within the borders of Syria and beyond.

As a Syrian-Arab living in the West for over thirty years, I have continued to struggle with the endless misrepresentations that have encapsulated all Middle

Easterners/Arabs/Muslims/Non-Muslims into a binary of Us (the West) and them (the East), where, as in the words of Said (1980),

So far as the United States seems to be concerned, it is only a slight overstatement to say

that Moslems and Arabs are essentially seen as either oil suppliers or potential terrorists.

Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab–Moslem life has entered

the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Arab world. What

we have, instead, is a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world,

presented in such a way as to make that world vulnerable to military aggression. (para.

11)

I believe that the need for a counter narrative is dire, one that disrupts the notion of a homogenous and singular understanding of what is summed up as Arab identity for the Arab identity made is up of twenty-two heterogeneous countries spread across North-Eastern Africa, the Middle East, and the Arab Gulf Region. This heterogeneity does not only exist between the different countries but also within the national borders of each of those countries which are made up of hundreds of millions of different human identities who come from a myriad of religious affiliations, socioeconomic, educational, and historical backgrounds and political allegiances.

Professor Mohja Kahf (2001) of the University of Arkansas further explains,

Syria has not, historically speaking, had a great deal of ethnic homogeneity; a vast

number of ethnic groups have comprised this region's population. Syria has also been a

place where many religions and religious sects have been born and have flourished,

skirmished, and lived as neighbors. The majority of the people of Syria today are Arab; a

Syrian may also be Kurdish, Armenian, Circassian, Chechen, Daghestani, Turkish,

Jewish, Assyrian. Sunni Islam is the majority religion, and Syrians are also Christian

(Greek Orthodox, Catholic, Maronite, Church of the East, and others), Druze, Ismaili,

Alawi, and Jewish. (pp. 225-226)

Today, the Syrian war has added to the complexity of what it means to be Syrian. Historically,

Syrians have always been divided in an “ideological battle between Arab nationalism (endorsed by the Baath Regime [of the Assad ruling family] and Islamism in the seventies and eighties”, a binary through which Syrian identity is positioned (Díaz, 2016, p. 86). However, more so today than ever before and since the Arab Spring in 2011, Syrians are deeply divided in their political

views and opinions about the war in Syria and on who they believe is criminal and who is victim.

Syrians today stand on polar sides of this debate, to the point that they no longer recognize one flag for their shared country. Since the revolution, two Syrian flags have been waived by divided

Syrians—one that represents allegiance to the incumbent government led by Bashar al-Assad and the Ba’ath Party and “the green, white and black flag of the former Syrian Republic, which existed before the Baath Party and the Assad family came to power [which] has been officially adopted by the main opposition coalition, the Syrian National Council, and the Free Syrian

Army, an armed rebel group that has vowed to overthrow Mr. Assad by force” (Mahmud, 2012, para. 1-2). Today, the Syrian flag is an immediate indication of whether a Syrian citizen/refugee is pro-regime or anti-regime, and it ultimately defines a Syrian’s ontological and epistemological stances based on very different conceptualizations of what they believe to be the truth; today, the

Syrian flag has become an identity card for Syrians.

There are also Syrians, like novelist Abdul Samad, who are simply no longer concerned with matters of “truth,” and are only looking for ways to live or stay alive. I have recently translated Abdul Samad’s voice (with permission) as she appeals to humanity,

I don’t care about being pro or anti [regime]. All I want is for my only brother to find

food. He is seven years-old and is as thin as a shadow and has not been able to go to

school for a day. My fourteen-year-old sister is also about to collapse from lack of food.

And we, the older daughters, have been displaced, each with her husband in a different

country. (Abdul Samad, 2016, p. 276)

The opposing voices of Syrians today deeply embody the notion of multiple truths. Each voice, whether pro, anti, or simply doesn’t care to be either, becomes an added subjective thread to an extended epistemology on our understanding of the Syrian conflict today. As explained in the

words of Díaz (2016), “in any conflict, the concept of identity comes to the forefront as an element of cohesion and differentiation from others; however, such differentiation becomes more difficult when it comes to people claiming the same identity” (p. 85), as is the case with

Syrian identity today, and as Simmons (2012) adds, “identity involves more than just naming the respective body. Identity concerns a myriad of historical processes of coming into being. Identity involves positionality, location, constitutive of agency. Identity is not evenly formed. Identity is always already a work in progress, and unfinished and incomplete in its being” (p. 98).

2.10 Pre-War Syrian Literature

As mentioned earlier in this dissertation, a limitation to this study is that the post-war literature on the Syrian Diaspora today is scarce and is new to research; however, historically,

Syrians have always written and spoken about exile in their literature, long before the revolution, or, in my opinion, this destructive war began in March of 2011.

The names of Syrian authors, poets and scholars are abundant. Their narratives, like in other native local narratives, speak to a national substance and sentiment. For the purpose of my research, I have selected excerpts that speak to two different topics: political dissent and the longing for return to a homeland. Once again, I find it important to emphasize to the reader my limitation of not being able to cover the mass of materials written by Syrians on their experiences of displacement, Syrians who were forced out of their homeland for a myriad of reasons ranging from the basic need to find work to being subjects of political sentences that expelled them away from Syria’s national borders; hence, my selection is far from a complete account of the multitude of Syrian narratives on political dissent and displacement.

In the political realm, I hope that the narratives I have selected can deliver to the reader a sense of the Syrian sentiment and of the conditions under which the Syrian Diaspora lived prior

to being displaced. For long, Syrians have voiced their pleas and anger to their government, protesting the state of their living conditions under the rule of a stern political dictatorship. In

2001, ten years before the current war, Kahf (2001) wrote an article titled “The silence of contemporary Syrian literature.” In her article, she poses an important question,

. . . despite the suspicious eye of the government on them, these sorts of initiatives from

below are increasing. Perhaps a new spirit is moving in the land. Will Syrians begin to

converse in these new cultural spaces, and will they be unafraid to let their voices rise?

Or, like Rappacini's daughter in Hawthorne's tale, has the Syrian body become so

accustomed to the poison -- silence -- that the antidote would kill? (p. 236)

Today, more than fifteen years after, I believe that an answer to Kahf’s question is: Yes, the

Syrian people have indeed shed the wall of fear and they have risen, but the consequences have been disastrous as Syria lies in ruins today while the blood bath continues.

Of what has been written prior to the Syrian war, I bring into my research the important and major voices of Nizar Kabbani (1923-1998), a poet known for both his poetry of love as well as his defiant poems of political protest; Muhammad al-Mahgut (b. 1934-2006), political prose poem and short story writer whose famous work I will betray my homeland is an embodiment of the struggle of the Syrian citizen, and as importantly, the Arab citizen; Zakaria Tamer (b. 1931), an influential master of Arabic short stories and political satirist; Mamduh Adwan (b. 1941-

2004), a poet and a dramatist who was “ferocious in his denunciation of corruption and despotism” (Clark, 2005, para. 5); Adonis (b. 1930), a prolific poet once imprisoned for his political activities in 1955 and left for Lebanon thereafter; Nasib Arida (1887-1946) who wrote from the Arab mahjar [Diaspora] in New York in a continuous nostalgic longing for return to his homeland. Some of the other figures that I ought to mention as notable Syrian names, aside from

those who are discussed in this dissertation are Badawi al-Jabal, Umar Abu Risha, Salim

Barakat, Muhyiddin al-Ladhiqani, Nuri Jarah, Lina Tibi, Abdal-Salam al-Ujayli, Sa’id

Horaniyeh, Faris Zarzur, George Salem, Ghada Samman, Hanna Mina, Ulfat al-Idilbi, Haidar

Haidar amongst others. These are writers whose narratives embody a heterogonous representation of the Syrian identity and speak to different themes and perspectives on the Syrian lived experience.

In 1963, the Ba’th Party took rule of Syria. Hafez al-Assad was part of this party and became president of Syria in 1971. In 2000, he was succeeded by his son, Bashar al-Assad, who continues to be the incumbent President of a war-torn Syria today. The Ba’th regime has always been known for its censorship, where, as explained by Kahf (2001),

Article 4b of the state of emergency [of Syria’s Emergency Law] straightforwardly

permits the state ‘to control newspapers, books, broadcasting, advertising, and visual arts

-- in other words, all forms of expression and announcements before publication. It may

also stop, confiscate, and destroy any work deemed to threaten state security, or close

down offices and places of printing’ (Human Rights Watch, 109). (p. 228)

Also as explained by Kahf (2001), “Paradoxically, the heaviness of censorship in Syria spurs some writers to new levels of creative development,” although often at a heavy price as was the case "in 1985, [where] novelist Hani al-Rahib was arrested, not for anything he wrote, but just for saying at a Writers Union lecture in Damascus that individual freedoms were greater in Egypt than in Syria . . . [he was] fired from his job at the University of Damascus, not allowed to travel out of the country for two years, and beaten by the state police” (p. 230). Kahf adds, “Among all

Arab cultures, Syrian culture has become the one most associated with the posture of paranoia

stemming from a realistic fear of a police state with a vast surveillance apparatus and great demands of public shows of allegiance” (p. 233).

Nizar Kabbani’s works are famous for their explicit political dissent. In his collection

“Works that are frowned upon,” Kabbani writes a poem titled “A top-secret report from the countries of Supress-stan” where “stan” is the Urdu or Persian for place, land, or country. In this poem, the poet’s words embody an explosion of sentiments suffocated by political suppression.

He writes,

Do you know who I am?

I am a citizen of the nation of “Supress-stan”

… and most important of its exports

are leather bags

made of human skin

. . . a citizen whose utmost dream

is to rise to the rank of an animal. [My translation] (Kabbani, 1992, pp. 29-31)

The defiance in Kabbani’s words never fails to amaze me. I am in awe of the courage that it takes to speak in the face of oppression. Kabbani felt oppressed, felt like an animal not a human, but was not afraid to write and to stand against the injustices. His writing was an act of resistance. This dialectic relationship between oppressor and oppressed ought to play a significant role in coming to understand the courageous, defiant and resistant spirit of Syrian identities, and as importantly, it is one that ought to evoke an empathetic understanding of an oppressed peoples whose dissent against the political regime found them in a painful state of displacement today. In another widely known poem titled “Balqis” (the name of Kabbani’s wife), Kabbani mourns his massacred wife and writes, “They've killed you, Balqis / What kind

of an Arab world is this / . . . one that chokes canaries?" (Kabbani as cited in Kahf, 2000, para.

50). Then the poet’s sentiments are quickly transformed into anger as he vows to take revenge and writes,

I swear by your eyes

that draw millions of planets into them

that I shall speak infamies

about the Arabs

I shall say: Our chastity is harlotry

our piety is filth

and I shall say: Our struggle is a lie

and there is no difference

between our politics

and prostitution. (Kabbani as cited in Kahf, 2000, para. 51).

Here, the poet speaks of a human heart mourning the loss of a beloved wife. The words are saturated with pain, a sentiment that springs from the intimate depths of human experiences and one that ought to be understood by every human heart on earth. They speak a language of human suffering voicing a plea for a desire to live like humans not as oppressed animals, and importantly, a sentiment that was also once experienced by many of today’s people of the Syrian

Diaspora, for as explained earlier by Professor Wendy Pearlman (2017), “they [the Syrian

Diaspora] would prefer to live with safety and dignity in their own country if they could. But they cannot” (para. 3).

Muhammad al-Maghut’s works are just as explicit. Deep political messages of dissent and resistance are interwoven throughout his narratives. I will betray my homeland: Ravings of

terror and freedom is one of the works in which al-Maghut expresses his outright repulsion for the wretched living conditions endured by the Syrian/Arab citizen; his writings are cynical and often blended with bitterness and anger. al-Maghut’s boldness also never ceases to amaze me— to announce that he will “betray” his homeland on the cover of his book is indeed a representation of a Syrian spirit who had come to no longer fear death. I have selected his poem

“Roof” as a poignant representation of the Syrian/Arab sentiment in which the most complex of human emotions are transformed into fierce lines of defiance and criticism. He writes,

Had I known

that foolishness would surpass genius,

and swivel-chairs would triumph over eagles’ wings,

and monkeys over gazelles

and wheat bran over Lenin

nylon stockings over Mao Tse Tung,

the stock exchange’s clamor over Chopin’s fingers,

. . . and that when all is said and done, an Arab would never be able to confront

anything or escape from anything,

and that among the ranks of this generation, the exploding of minds would become

a daily event like the blowout of car tires,

Had I known all this, it would have been impossible for all the international emergency

forces to pull me out of my struggle with the midwife who delivered me. [my translation]

(al-Maghut, 1987, pp. 234-235)

In this excerpt, the peoples of Syria (whose coat of arms is imprinted with an eagle), Russia

(under Lenin’s communism), China (under Mao Tse Tung’s communist revolutionary

leadership), and Poland (where Chopin’s music becomes an embodiment of the Polish uprising) are all united in their lived experiences under oppressive political structures. They also become united in their revolutionary oppositions against the forces of oppression. al-Maghut continues,

But now that I have experienced all of this and have learned all these things, what am I to

do?

If write, I’ll die of fear.

If I don’t write, I’ll die of hunger.

They say that climbing to the mountaintops requires some stooped backs,

and so I stoop, not out of subjugation, but of exhaustion. (p. 235) al-Maghut’s language is interwoven with a dismal lived experience of an Arab citizen, and it is in and of itself revolutionary. Encoded in his message is a defiant outcry against unjust, wretched, petty and oppressive living conditions. He makes clear that in his country (the country that was also once home to the Syrian Diaspora) all roads lead to death, for whether or not he writes, he predicts that he will die. However, writing becomes a revolutionary act, a means to fulfilling a gnawing hunger, and an embodiment of Syrian courage and a resistant spirit in the face of death.

Another important defiant Syrian author known for his political dissent is Zakaria Tamer.

Kahf (2001) writes on Tamer: “In story after unsettling story, terrible things happen, crimes are committed, but the bizarre, hallucinatory quality of the narrative numbs us, forces us to watch people go on acting normally in the midst of horror, as if nothing were wrong” (p. 233). In his story "Tigers on the Tenth Day," Tamer tells of “a trainer [who] uses hunger to makes a wild caged tiger submit to the whip, and even, eventually, to like submitting to the whip, against the very nature of its being as a tiger. The tiger is fully ‘trained’ by the end of the short, terse story:

‘On the tenth day the trainer, the pupils, the tiger, and the cage disappeared; the tiger became a citizen and the cage a city’” (Kahf, 2001, p. 233). The message conveyed in this story, by evoking animal figures, speaks to the destructive, and equally important, petty and miserable end of the subjugated human. Tamer alludes to how a subjugated human is deliberately “trained” and “numbed” into accepting an imprisoned reality “as if nothing were wrong.” Within his story is a call to be awakened to a reality of horror that numbs the senses and the mind, and ultimately beguiles a subject into acquiescing to a miserable life-time imprisonment in a cage (a country).

After the eruption of the Syrian war, an article written in 2012 on Syrian Zakaria Tamer offers a new dimension to his writing. I find the following excerpt especially relevant to our discussion on the Syrian Diaspora; it is titled “Who are you?” Tamer writes,

Who is the Syrian?

The Syrian is an unknown citizen, he did not become famous for having chosen death,

prison, and endurance over suffering and self-abasement as the path to freedom. The

Syrian is a citizen living outside Syria and a citizen living within its borders readying

himself to leave as soon as he is able, and what unites Syrians inside and outside Syria is

a loathing of tyrants and their regimes from A to Z. (Hacker, 2012, para. 1)

When juxtaposed to “Tigers on the tenth day,” we ought to note how Zakaria’s post-war writing is transformed from implicit hints by way of evoking animal figures (a style noted in his writing) into bold accusations pointed at “tyrant and regimes from A to Z.” In the latter excerpt, the voice of the poet embodies an evident sense of fearlessness representing a revolutionary Syrian spirit no longer threatened by “tyrants,” a spirit that has chosen to walk the paths of imprisonment and death in search of freedom. Tamer’s narrative speaks to a becoming and transforming Syrian

identity. His language is resolute; it is a language that has emerged from the ashes, a language that was once subjugated and has now broken free from the chains of fear.

Syrian Mamdouh Adwan is another poet known for engaging his pre-war poetry to express defiance against what had become intolerable Syrian living conditions. In his poem

“Misyaf” (named after the poet’s hometown), Adwan writes,

We’ve learned to live on the least

and each one has accepted to live as a body without a soul.

Loneliness circulates in our blood flow. [My translation] (Adwan, 2009"Misyaf")

And in an excerpt from the same poem implicitly addressing the dictator who happens to be of the same Alawite religious sect as is the poet, Adwan writes,

He [the dictator] sat to untie his bundle

and he began to drop the faces of my beloved one by one in my heart:

‘Here’s a friend who had once disappeared in prison

and this one died of oppression

and this one wandered in exile

and another lost in a war’

… we are strangers in our homeland without a home. [my translation] (Adwan,

2009"Misyaf")

Here, it is important to point to the fact that Syrians have always felt a sense of alienation and estrangement, living like strangers in a “homeland without a home.” Syrians are peoples who have always yearned to belong, as humans, to their homeland. Syrian literature has often expressed a deep sense of suffering where a Syrian citizen has been depicted like “a body without a soul,” and they have acted “as metaphors for everything that human beings aspire to”

(Darwish, 2000a, p. 29). Importantly, the discussed narratives represent a life once lived by many people of the Syrian Diaspora, a life of loneliness and oppression, and a life in which a

Syrian national felt homeless even within the borders of a homeland.

But what does it mean to not find belonging in one’s own homeland? In 2009, Syrian author Najat Abdul Samad wrote a novel titled Lands of Exile. In the first page of the book

Abdul Samad writes addressing her homeland of Syria, “Our pleas have become hoarse / Love us and put an end to our exile” (Alatrash, 2016, p. 126). Abdul Samad’s words yet again act as another voice for a national Syrian sentiment, an outcry of anguish addressed to a country whose children have been expelled to all corners of the world. Abdul Samad’s novel was also another pre-war work in which she wrote about the lands to which Syrians have been exiled in search of bread and opportunities; she tells of their lived experiences, ones deeply interwoven with feelings of estrangement, pain and longing to belong.

Yet despite all the pain and suffering, the humiliation and the anger, exiled Syrians continued to write love letters to their homeland. Syria remained to be their mother and their first beloved. For Syrians, there seems to be a clear distinction between Syria as a beloved mother(land) and Syria as an oppressive political regime. Kabbani, mentioned earlier in this dissertation, lived in exile for many years, some of which were spent in Britain. While in Britain he wrote about Damascus in utter longing:

My voice rings out this time from Damascus.

It rings out from the house of my mother and father.

In Damascus, the geography of my body changes;

my blood cells become green

and my alphabet becomes green.

In Damascus, a new mouth sprouts from my mouth,

a new voice sprouts from my voice;

and my fingers become a tribe of fingers.

. . . I return after sixty years

in search of my umbilical cord,

… I return to the womb in which I was formed

and to the first woman who taught me

the geography of love

and the geography of women.

I return after my pieces have been scattered

in all continents,

and my cough dispersed in all hotels;

for since my mother’s laurel-soap scented bed sheets,

I have found no bed on which to sleep. [My translation] (Alatrash, 2016, pp. 6-7)

Likewise, Syrian poet Adonis, an influential poet of the twentieth century who lived his career largely in Lebanon and France after suffering from political consequences, also wrote in desperate longing for Damascus:

When will we die, Damascus, when will we find ease?

And last night, in dream, Damascus,

I shaped a statue of clay.

In her white curves, I planted your history, Damascus,

and I began in terror and in joy

to fall like a quake on the hill of Jilliq.

I embraced her, stroked her and sang

mmm mmm crescent moon.

And I said, No, you’ll remain in longing, Damascus

in my blood. (Adonis, 2010, p. 70)

Both poets speak to the deepest sense of longing and homesickness. They voice a sentiment that speaks to the painful lived experience within the estrangement of exile. The words in their poems are drawn from and constructed with memories of a homeland; they are words narrated by human hearts and speak of a human experience that goes beyond the confines of all other discourses. I find that these poems embody a relationship between the human mind and the human heart, between the past and the present, one that poignantly speaks to and offers new ways of understanding the experience of the Diasporic identity. Despite the most oppressive of lived condition, a motherland remained sacred in the eyes of the two poets.

Along the same lines, Syrian Nasib Arida (1887-1946) who was part of the Syrian

American Diaspora (mahjar) in the U.S., wrote of his birth city Homs. Ironically, today Homs happens to be one of the cities most severely affected by the Syrian civil war where much of it has been destroyed by one side or another (regime or opposition). In 1905, Arida emigrated to

New York and was also one of the founding members of the New York Pen League along with

Lebanese-American Kahlil Gibran. Arida is known to have been “a poet of the dark side of life—his verse characterized by pain, tears and separation, by nostalgia for his country of birth, and by bewilderment” (Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature, 1998, p. 103). His poem on his home city of Homs is what I have selected for the discussion of this paper as an embodiment of what it means to live in exile, in the Diaspora. He once wrote,

Oh fate, it’s been far too long from my homeland

. . . Take me back to Homs, even if stuffed in a coffin

and chant, “I’ve brought back someone who’s gone astray.”

And build my grave with black stones [basalt].

Oh you [Homs], neighbor of the Asi [river],

my hopes end in seeing you.

You are my desire and my yearning.

. . . Oh Homs of the black stones. (Arida, N.d.)

As I reflect on this poem and on what has become of the city of Homs today, I can’t imagine the magnitude of the heartbreak that would have been felt by the poet had he been alive today.

Today, many residents of the city of Homs have become subjects of the Syrian Diaspora, displaced within and outside of Syrian borders. The poem was written long before the Syrian war, but it speaks a city that is home to the poet and to many displaced Syrians today, of the Asi

River that runs through the city, of the black Basalt stones with which the older homes of the city were built. I have chosen two images to capture the feel of the city of Homs. The first photo

(Demeter, 2014) captures the black-stone Basalt homes known to Homs, and the second photo

(Eid, 2016) is one of several images published by the Huffington Post in 2016, five years after the eruption of the Syrian war.

Once again, Homs happens to be home to many of the people of the Syrian Diaspora, and I deeply believe that it remains to be the place where many Syrian hearts continue to live apart from their Diasporized bodies.

I hope that the narratives I have selected in this section may have delivered to the reader a deeper understanding of the Syrian sentiment and of the conditions under which the Syrian

Diaspora once lived prior to being displaced. In the following section, I will examine some of the literature written after the eruption of the Syrian war.

2.11 Post-War Syrian Literature

From within a war-torn Syria, Najat Abdul Samad’s voice is one of the post-war prolific voices published in newspapers and magazines across the Arab world. I have translated excerpts of an article she wrote in An-Nahar Lebanese newspaper. The article is titled: “Then, You are

Alive!” Abdul Samad writes,

You are alive then!

. . . You may be wounded or ill-fated or disabled or bereaved or abandoned, but you are

alive, and you are still in your country, in your house specifically, gazing at the straw

plate that you had inherited from your grandmother as it still hung in its place on the wall

and was not stolen nor dragged by a shell to the hills of heaps that have become the

topography of your country.

You are embarrassed but thankful for being completely safe in a mass destruction called

war, while you realize that your safety implies the death of others whom you do not

know, whose hands could have written these words on your behalf.

. . . You carry on with your mind and your pick, and you continue your journey into the

remaining chance of living, a chance that is nearly lost--

Your chance to own a heart and for your feelings not to die;

Your chance to disperse beauty amidst the onslaught of pain, to understand the afflicted

and empathize with them to the extent of the grief and injustice that had overtaken them;

Your chance to swallow patience as a means for survival, without sacrificing dignity; to

cling onto the “need for dignity” and the need for your own share of personal dignity.

Your chance for an opportunity to an independent opinion, to work the mind and

safeguard it from being confiscated, to conserve conscience, and to be dedicated to your

work.

Your chance to search for the small joys, to create the desire to live, and to shape for

yourself a full life amid the madness of death.

Your chance to not allow them to assassinate your dreams or take away from your

pleasure, from the vastness of imagination, or from the amazement that comes with the

search for knowledge.

Your chance to know your identity as a human, and to not destroy it with power

ideologies and politicized religions.

. . .

This is his chance to say to tyranny: No! Here amidst the flames of our homeland and not

in the cold of exile. [My translation] (Abdul Samad, 2015)

I believe that such knowledge can only reside within a human lived experience, and most importantly, it is raw knowledge, one that is stripped from the political and the colonial, and is compacted with human feelings that are driven by the basic desire to live. Abdul Samad (2014) further writes about the different layers of displacement within the Syrian Diaspora and how the word “Displacement” takes on not one but a myriad of meanings that embody “degrees and

levels” of pain and loss (para. 1). She explains that within the context of the Syrian war,

“displacement” may refer to a temporary movement of a person (and his family) from one’s own home to a safe building where they take refuge while waiting for the shelling to end—a temporary state that usually lasts a few hours. She then moves on to speak about the displacement that comes to be after loud speakers begin to sound off in the city warning for residents to clear out of their homes for their own safety, where people frantically head in search of a city within their country’s border in which they can take refuge, a city that may home some relative and friends, “where you [as Syrians] thank God that you are still living in your own country . . . [where] your children area able to continue their education in their new schools with the same school curriculum that they had begun [earlier in the year]” (para. 5). She then goes on to discuss yet another meaning of displacement, the one in which masses of Syrians look for refuge in a neighboring Arab country that speaks the same Arabic language (Lebanon, Egypt,

Jordan or Iraq), unless the borders had become closed for entry—a displacement that teaches you

“the art of smuggling human beings” (para. 6). And that is not all. Abdul Samad adds yet another layer to the meaning of displacement, one that represents the bodies of Syrian Diaspora who have taken refuge in Turkey where “you [as Syrians] are shocked” by a Turkish Latin language and “if you address them [the Turks] in Arabic or another language, they answer, ‘No

English’” (para. 9), and “where you [as a Syrian] find yourself placed in a refugee camp pleading

“to a God in his sky: God, please do not send us rain here, or cold” (para. 12). The layers of meaning of displacement in Abdul Samad’s short article seem to have no end. Dignity for her

Diasporic Syrian people is also a matter that she touches on and asks why is it that all governments—her country’s as well as other host countries—continue to reject Syrians as if they were some sort of an insult. She then ends her article, as she began it, and again speaks of the

meaning of displacement, writing,

Even the dictionary seems to mumble the meaning of ‘Displacement’ but is unable to

disclose it fully. Displacement is: ‘An absence from home for a long period of time.’

The Displaced is: ‘The faraway.’

[Abdul Samad exclaims] Indeed, it is the ‘faraway!’ And it is the silence in all

explanations and interpretations. As for ‘refuge,’ its definition is a predictor of its horror:

It is the “fleeing out the country for political or other reasons.” And for this is yet

another level. (para. 21-22)

Trying to make sense of the feelings and emotions that are weaved into Abdul Samad’s article is a very difficult task, and, in my opinion, could not fully be understood unless lived as an experience. However, Abdul Samad’s narrative does offer an insight that, I feel, evokes the empathy in our hearts as humans. It is an understanding that could not be delivered by any other lens but that of those living the Diasporic experience, an experience that speak about a “painful site of spiritual injury . . . a painful site of ungrievable loss (Butler, 1997), a place, a memory of suffering” (Simmons, 2012, p. 63).

It is my hope that the selected authors have offered new ways in which we may better know and understand what it means to be Syrian, and have come to challenge some of the ontological and epistemological underpinnings that have historically defined Syrians. The complex human experiences in the discussed narratives speak to many of the lived experiences of the Syrian Diaspora before and after the war. I find that such narratives are often dismissed, and perhaps at times are silenced, in our Western discourses.

In the next section of this dissertation, I am interested in delving deeper into what it means to be exiled and how an exile’s experience differs from that of a refugee, specifically as

we try to understand the condition and the lived experience of the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora in their new homelands of Canada.

2.12 On the Difference between Exiles and Refugees

O love, how bitterly you tortured us and estranged us from our very self! You have stripped us even of our names, O love! . . . Longing is the place of exile. Our love is a place of exile. Our wine is place of exile and a place of exile is the history of this heart. How many times have we told the fragrance of the place to be still so we can rest and sleep? . . . A place of exile is the soul that distances us from our land and takes us to our love. . . . The past is place of exile . . . Thought is a place of exile . . . Poetry is a place of exile . . . (Darwish, 2013, pp. 42-43)

An exile’s love and longing for a homeland, as expressed by Palestinian poet Mahmoud

Darwish, is a condition that consumes an exiled human’s beingness, is “the history of … [a heart]” and “is the soul.” It is a bitter and torturous feeling of estrangement from one’s “very self.” Syrian newcomer Rita Khanchet Kallas, a refugee living the condition of exile in Calgary, tells the Calgary Herald: “refugees come to Canada with ‘a lot of hurt in our soul’” (Calgary

Herald, 2016, para. 4). She explains that she arrived in Canada through Private Sponsorship where each member of her family of three was allowed to travel with one bag that weighed no more than 22-kilograms; she says, “We left many things behind but we filled one bag with my son’s toys. They are his history” (Livingstone, 2017, para. 11, 12). Said (2002) also speaks on the condition lived by refugees and explains that it is one “produced by human beings for other human beings; and that, like death but without death’s ultimate mercy, it has torn millions of people from the nourishment of traditions, family, and geography?” (p. 173). Said further goes on to highlight the difference between refugees and exiles, and writes,

Although it is true that anyone prevented from returning home is an exile, some

distinction can be made among exiles, refugees, expatriates and émigrés. Exile

originated in the age-old practice of banishment. Once banished, the exile lives an

anomalous and miserable life, with the stigma of being an outsider. Refugees, on the

other hand, are a creation of the twentieth-century state. The word ‘refugee’ has become

a political one, suggesting large herds of innocent and bewildered people requiring urgent

international assistance. . . (p. 181).

As I continue and try to make sense of the experience of the peoples of the Syrian

Diaspora who came to Canada seeking refuge, I also turn to the words of Palestinian National poet Mahmoud Darwish who offers a definition of this complex word and writes,

You ask: What is the meaning of “refugee”?

They will say: One who is uprooted from his homeland.

You ask: What is the meaning of “homeland”?

They will say: The house, the mulberry tree, the chicken coop, the beehive, the smell of

bread, and the first sky. (Darwish, 2010, p. 38)

And in another poem titled “I belong there,” he writes,

I belong there. I have memories. I was born as everyone is born.

I have a mother, a house with many windows, brothers, friends, and a prison cell with a

chilly window!

. . . To break the rules, I have learned all the words needed for a trial by blood.

I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a single word:

Homeland. (Darwish, 2013, p. 7)

The words in the poems above embody an incommensurable human experience. They speak of moments that are only intrinsic to the experience of a Diasporic body. They are moments that are rooted in the experiences of the Diaspora. They speak of the experience of homelessness and of a burning desire for belonging. They are words expressed by the pained bodies and souls of those who have lived such experiences. Homeland in English is made up of eight letters. The

Arabic for homeland is made up of three letters: w-ṭ-n, and pronounced waṭan. Those three letters, according to the poet, embody the endless and incommensurable meaning of a homeland.

To him, the three-word-letter represents the deepest sense of belonging, his birthplace, mother, house, brothers, friends, and even his prison cell, and it also embodies the author’s tears of longing and his acute desire to belong. As Arabs who speak the same language as Palestinians,

Syrians also employ the Arabic word w-ṭ-n as they refer their homeland of Syria.

“Reflections on Exile” again comes in very helpful in trying to understand this poignant human condition and its lived experience in exile. Said (2002) writes, “Exile is . . . the unhealable rift forced between a human being and native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted.” He adds, “Exiles are cut off from their roots, their land, their past . . . Exiles feel, therefore, an urgent need to reconstitute their broken lives” (p. 171-177). Said (2002) diagnoses the situation as “unhealable, and “[is] like death but without death’s ultimate mercy” (p. 174). In his Politics of Diaspora, Simmons speaks of the

Caribbean Diaspora in the West, and of their experience of race, and describes it as “a painful site of spiritual injury . . . a painful site of ungrievable loss (Butler, 1997), a place, a memory of suffering” (Simmons, 2012, p. 63). These incommensurable yet profoundly felt human conditions of an “unhealable” sadness, of “spiritual injury,” of “ungrievable loss,” come from real lived experiences. They embody true human feelings that ought to be interpreted and

included as valuable knowledge in our understanding of the human condition of exiles and displaced peoples as we try to make sense of this complex human experience.

Said (1986) further captures the poignancy of displacement as he writes on the identity of refugees. “Identity—who we are, where we come from, what are we—is difficult to maintain in exile… we are the ‘other,’ an opposite, a flaw in geometry of resettlement, an exodus” (p. 16-

17), and he states, “an exile is always out of place” (Said, 2002, p. 180). Historically and until today, the East and those who come from the East have repeatedly “signified danger and threat”

(Said, 1979, p. 26), a threatening Other. To undo this sort of colonial knowledge and to deliver an empathetic understanding, I believe one must come to hear the stories of these peoples

(people: not herds but humans), their individual stories—stories that disrupt the hegemonic, imperialistic, colonial representation of a threatening East, and, as importantly, act as ways to universalize human suffering. As I have suggested earlier in this chapter on “re-representing, restorying ad re-narrativizing,” we ought to continue to look for alternate ways of knowing through narratives that represent diverse perspectives and experiences (Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016) and to create “new texts that break boundaries; that move from the center to the margins to comment upon and decenter the center . . . and that seek to create a social science about human life rather than on subjects” (Lincoln & Guba, 2000, p. 184). It is by way of engaging the stories of the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora that I too hope to challenge confining social discourses and

“participate in meaning-making” (Enciso, 2011, p. 34).

In my search for meaning, I examine literature produced by refugees and exiles in this section of my dissertation. I will preface my discussions with the note that I am conscious of the delimitation of not being able to cover the mass of materials on refugees forced out of their national borders, and hence my selection is far from a complete account. I draw from Palestinian

poetry and literature to make sense of what it means to be a refugee and a Diasporic subject. As mentioned earlier, within the context of recent Arab history, the Palestinian struggle has been for over half a century a representation of what it means to have lost a homeland. Palestinian writers have conceptualized the poignancy of their lived experience in their literature, and their poetry and stories continue to be taught in Arab schools across the Arab world today. Many of their poems make up the lyrics of songs sung by Arab nationals across the Arab world. Syrian and

Palestinian refugees also speak the same Arab language and have a very similar Arab history, culture, and set of traditions.

2.13 Evoking Palestinian Poetry for Understanding the Experience of Displacement

In my attempt to find meaning, I particularly resort to poetry in order to understand the emotions behind the words. In his article “Ecopoetic Practice: Writing the Wounded Land,”

Brian Wattchow (2012) employs Relph’s (1976) phrase “empathetic insidedness” (17) and expresses that poetic writing, as a form of autoethnographic practice “more than other textual forms, offers a considerable potential to represent the journey toward ‘empathetic insidedness’ between author, culture, and a sense of place” (15). Martin Heidegger (1971) writes, “. . . poetry first causes dwelling to be dwelling. Poetry is what really lets us dwell” (215). To understand poetry is to find that place in which one can dwell, reflect, feel, understand, and then move on to build.

Palestinian poetry offers me an insight into the plight of Palestinians, one that is narrated by exiles and refugees, and, importantly, one that moves beyond the confines of political, colonial discourses. I wish to invite my readers to read other ways of knowing, ones that are contextualized through narrative and stories narrated by exiles and refugee with the ultimate goal of delivering an empathetic understanding to my readers.

As mentioned earlier, Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (2008a) has become a representation of the voice of the Palestinian people. In an article published in The Guardian,

Darwish is referred to (in the title of the article) as “Poet of the Arab world.” American poet

Adrienne Rich “sees him as a poet of world stature” (Jaggi, 2002, para. 7). Within the context of my research, it is important to also take into account the context in which Darwish wrote, one that was made up of “years of exilic wandering and survival” (Darwish, 2013, p. xvi). Former

Suffolk University Professor Syrian-American Munir Akash writes on Darwish, “Darwish’s very life is a never-ending quest for this lost realm, whether as a homeland or poetic form, or simply as a metaphor for everything human beings most deeply aspire to” (Darwish, 2000a, p. 29).

Darwish’s journey as a refugee began in 1948 when he was six years old; his hometown of Birwe in Palestine was destroyed and his family was amongst the Palestinian exodus in 1948.

The poet titles one of his works “Unfortunately, it was paradise” where the word paradise refers to his hometown of Birwe, although “Birwe was erased from land and map, but remained intact in memory, the mirage of a lost paradise” (Darwish, 2013, p. xvi).

On poetry, Darwish writes, "Poetry and beauty are always making peace. When you read something beautiful you find coexistence; it breaks walls down... I always humanize the other. I even humanised [sic] the Israeli soldier” (Jaggi, 2002, para. 17). In a poem titled “And we love life,” Darwish (2008a) writes,

And we love life if we find a way to it.

We dance in between martyrs and raise a minaret for violet or palm trees.

For we also love life if we find a way to it.

And we steal from the silkworm a thread to build a sky and fence in this departure.

We open the garden gate for the jasmine to step out on the streets as a beautiful day.

We love life if we find a way to it… (para. 1)

The excerpt above gives voice to Palestinians to tell us in their own voices that, like all other humans, like all of us, that they also love life and want to live, and they desperately want to belong and to end their departure. Their ultimate desire is to find a way to life and to belonging.

In another poem, he writes,

But I am the exile.

Seal me with your eyes.

Take me wherever you are—

Take me whatever you are.

Restore to me the colour of face

And the warmth of body

The light of heart and eye,

The salt of bread and rhythm,

The taste of earth . . . the Motherland.

Shield me with your eyes.

Take me as a relic from the mansion of sorrow.

Take me as a verse from my tragedy;

Take me as a toy, a brick form the house

So that our children will remember to return. (Said, 2002, p. 179)

I interpret Darwish’s words as a plea to humanity; a plea for warmth, for light, for salt and bread; a plea for shelter; a plea for the basic of human needs. His metaphors are drawn from his daily experience while living in his homeland; his language transcends his exiled reality and takes him back to his motherland. As in the words of Mounir Akash, “Darwish’s poetry elevates the

intensification of local tragedy to the level of the universal. It gives voice to sentiments dear to our very beings” (Darwish, 2000a, p. 25). Also encoded in Darwish’s words is the hope for return; a hope that his children will revisit a past left behind. But the poet, in another poem, expresses his awareness of the probability that his wish for return is only a dream, a dream that is far from reach, for, as he writes,

We are captives of what we love, what we desire, what we are.

We are not basil returning in spring to our small windows.

We were not leaves for the wind to blow us back to our shores.

We are not birds able to fly. (Darwish, 2013, p. 31)

The poet is deeply mindful of the fact that he is likely to be captive to a permanent state of longing, one that is incurable, and as per Said’s words, a “crippling sorrow of estrangement” and a “condition of terminal loss” (Said, 2002, p. 173). Simmons (2012) writes, “Presently, part and parcel of being human is about belonging/identifying with a particular nation-state” (p. 168). To think of belonging is to also think of what it means not to belong, and it is to broach the most complex themes of dislocation, exile, home and loss (p. 66). Said (2000) reminds us to think of

“the uncountable masses for whom UN agencies have been created,” and writes,

You must think of the refugee-peasants with no prospects of ever returning home, armed

only with a ration card and an agency number . . . [where] Nationalism is an assertion of

belonging in and to a place, a people, a heritage. It affirms the home created by a

community of language, culture, and customs; and, by so doing it fends off exile, fight to

prevent its ravages . . . thus all nationalisms have their founding fathers, their basic, quasi

religious texts, their rhetoric of belonging, their historical and geographical landmarks,

their official enemies and heroes . . . exile, unlike nationalism, is fundamentally a

discontinuous state of being. Exiles are cut off from their roots, their land, their past. . .

Exiles feel, therefore, an urgent need to reconstitute their broken lives. . . (p. 175-177)

Here, many questions come to mind: When a refugee is looking for shelter and refuge but at the same time is hoping for return one day, and when reality, more often than not, constitutes a terminal loss, how does this reality translate into the daily lived experience of refugees, and what are its implications on their human condition? How can these Diasporic bodies find belonging in a new land? Does this prognosis of crippling sorrow hold any promise or hope of healing that may translate one day into belonging to a new homeland? What are the implications of Said’s statement: “Exile is sometimes better than staying behind or not getting out: but only sometimes.

Because nothing is secure” (p. 178)? How can we as Canadians help alleviate the sorrow? How can we make sense of and negotiate Darwish’s (2007) statement “but home is home!” (p. 196) when according to Said (2002) “homecoming is out of the question” (p. 179)? Is it true that people can die of home-lessness as “I. F. Stone would later write that Rashid had ‘died of homelessness’”(Hoffman, 2009, p. 276)? One of the ways to find answers to these sort of complex questions is, in my opinion, by way of engaging lived experiences told by those who have lived, and are living, such conditions (as is also presented in Chapters 4, 5, 6, and 7 of the dissertation as well as in the Appendix). Within the context of my research, and as I try to make sense of the experience of the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora, I find that the discussed themes in this section, as narrated by the peoples of the Palestinians Diaspora, to be of great importance to my research and an added insight informed by the lived experience of another displaced Arab population; both Palestinians and Syrians today are Arab peoples who have share a lived experience of having been yanked out of a homeland and who continue to live the complex emotions of homelessness, loss, exile, and displacement.

2.14 On the Idea of Home-lessness

Said (2002) narrates a poignant story, one that depicts the permanency of loss in an exile’s heart. His story speaks to the human condition of never feeling a complete sense of belonging except when with peoples from one’s native land, people who share a common habitus, as in the words of Pierre Bourdieu (1977), where habitus is referring to the way of living, characteristics, tendencies, histories, and where it is neither a result of free will, nor determined by structures, but created by a kind of interplay between these two over time that also consequently produces a rhetoric of belonging. Said writes about an incident when he is with poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz, the greatest of contemporary Urdu poets who was exiled from his native

Pakistan by Zia’s military regime and who had found refuge in Beirut. Said explains that it was natural that Faiz’s closest friends were Palestinians who shared a similar destiny of being stripped away from a homeland, but he also notes that he “sensed that, although there was an affinity of spirit between them, nothing quite matched—language, poetic conventions, or life- history” (p. 175). It was only when another poet, Eqbal Ahmad, a Pakistani friend, also from native Pakistan, and fellow-exile came to Beirut “did Faiz seem to overcome his sense of constant estrangement” (Said, 2002, p. 175). As he joined them, Said (2002) speaks of how the poets first began reciting and translating their poetry to him as a gesture of inclusion, but as time passed throughout the evening, the translation stopped while the meaning of belonging became clearer to Said without having had to understand the language in which the words of the poems were recited. The notion of belonging for the two poets is manifested through speaking a shared native language; and it is also through language that they are able to transcend their place of exile and revisit their longed-for pasts in their homelands. Language becomes their medium to return to a native homeland.

This idea of feeling “home-less” and dying because of “home-lessness” is contextualized through different literatures around the world. Joseph Conrad writes on this state of despair as a cause of death. In fact, Said seems to believe that Joseph Conrad’s tale “Amy Foster” “is perhaps the most uncompromising representation of exile ever written” (Said, 2000, p. 179). I was intrigued by Said’s testimony, and so in my continued effort to try to understand more about what it meant to be an exile and a refugee, I read Conrad’s tale for the first time.

“Conrad thought of himself as an exile from Poland, and nearly all his work (as well as his life) carries the unmistakable mark of sensitive émigré’s obsession with his own fate and with his hopeless attempts to make satisfying contact with his new surroundings,” writes (Said, 2000, p. 179). The exile in Conrad’s Amy Foster is a character named Yanko Goorall, an Eastern

European peasant from the Carpathian Mountains who, en route to America, is shipwrecked off the British coast and finds “himself a lost stranger, helpless, incomprehensible, and of a mysterious origin, in some obscure corner of the earth” (Conrad, 1901, p. 7). It is explained that

Yanko’s condition was like that of “a man transplanted into another planet, was separated by an immense space from his past and by an immense ignorance from his future” (p. 19).

The story narrates how the English saw Yanko, who spoke no English, as a dangerous man, frightened of his strange foreign language. They saw him as a “madman” who spoke “in an incomprehensible tongue” and referred to him as an “excitable devil” (Conrad, 1901, pp. 14,

19). Yanko was deemed an Other of difference through a blatant and unconcealed colonial lens.

With time, Yanko gradually learns English and marries Amy Foster, a servant girl who had shown him kindness. They have a son in their marriage, but with the passing of time, Amy becomes more troubled by Yanko’s behavior with their son, especially as he begins to teach him to pray in his native language, “a language that to our [English] ears sounded so disturbing, so

passionate, so bizarre” says the narrator (Conrad, 1901, p. 22). Several months later, Yanko falls severely ill; while under the influence of a fever, he begins raving in his native language which drives Amy to flee with her child. By the end of the tale, Yanko “perish[es] in the supreme disaster of loneliness and despair” (p. 26).

The story depicts the deepest sense of pitifulness and wretchedness attached to being a stranger to a new community, an inferior to the familiar, a non-English to the English, a dislocated body in a cultural location of Englishness and in a history that is ontologically and epistemologically embedded in colonialism. I believe that these sort of moments, of interaction with an Other of difference, can contribute a great deal to our understanding of the condition of exiles and displaced peoples. My hope is that these moments will engender empathy and understanding in our construction of the Other. Yanko recalls that he “had approached them [the

English residents] as a beggar, it is true, he said; but in his country, even if they gave nothing, they spoke gently to beggars. The children in his country were not taught to throw stones at those who asked for compassion” (Conrad, 1901, p. 13).

But amidst the piles of stones and the heaps of ashes of his destroyed soul, Yanko is presented with an empathic act of kindness when Amy Foster approaches him and extends to him a loaf of bread. It was "through this act of impulsive pity he was brought back again within the pale of human relations with his new surroundings. He never forgot it – never” (Conrad,

1901, p. 14). Amy’s gesture of empathy became Yanko’s solace where,

At night, when he could not sleep, he kept on thinking of the girl who gave him the first

piece of bread he had eaten in this foreign land. She had been neither fierce nor angry,

nor frightened. Her face he remembered as the only comprehensible face amongst all

these faces that were as closed, as mysterious, and as mute as the faces of the dead who

are possessed of a knowledge beyond the comprehension of the living. I wonder whether

the memory of her compassion prevented him from cutting his throat. (p. 17)

Empathy to Yanko was a language of hope. Empathy is what drove him to continue to desire to live. Borrowing from Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish’s metaphors, Yanko’s longing for empathy was “Like a hungry man’s love to a loaf of bread / Like grass growing among the joints of a rock” (Masoud, 2010, para. 11). Yanko’s story embodies the sense of despair that resides in the experience of the Diasporic subject in a humanity constructed and governed by an ethic of colonialism and by an ideology that has divided us into Others of similarities and Others of difference, an ideology where empathy is deactivated and often suspended.

2.15 On Trees as Tokens and Cultural Memories of Homelands

On a final note, I can’t help but also bring to this discussion how the meaning of homeland for the Diasporic peoples is often embodied in trees, and how an exile looks for trees to plant memories from a homeland within the terrains of his/her newfound land. We are told that in the darkness of his estrangement, Yanko desperately looks for connection with the new land and finds this connection in trees. Conrad narrates, “The very grass was different, and the trees. All the trees but the three old Norway pines on the bit of lawn before Swaffer's house, and these reminded him of his country” (1901, p. 17). I also have come across this connection between homelands and trees often. For me, jasmine trees capture the essence and perfume of

Syria, its streets and neighborhoods. The aroma of Jasmine happens to be nested in the lines of

Syrian poetry and literature. Nizar Kabbani’s renowned poem “A Damascene moon” is one of hundreds (or perhaps thousands) of poems that speak of the Jasmine in Damascus. He writes,

“From Damascus, jasmine begins its whiteness and fragrances perfume themselves with her scent” (Alnounou, 2012, para. 8).

Marlon Simmons (2012) also writes about the memory of trees in his homeland of

Trinidad. The trees for Simmons embody a cultural memory and a rootedness to a homeland; he writes,

Coming from the Caribbean, Canada was quite a change. Trinidad was home. I still

remember climbing the mango tree in our yard to pick fresh mangoes . . . In my village,

in the Southern part of the country, planting the land was very much a way of life. It was

part of the community. I did not realize how close I was to the mango tree until I moved

to Canada. In my newly found home, I have always been looking for this mango tree. I

soon came to learn that I did not mean mango tree in some physical sense. But it was

more so of what this tree represented, of what this tree meant, of the memories it conjured

. . . I think it is a question of how one comes to know a place as home through cultural

memory and the cultural artifacts that allow for place and time to come to be known as

home. (p. 12-13)

Palestinian Naomi Shihab Nye (1995), daughter of a Palestinian refugee who had settled in

Texas also writes of the meaning of a tree for a Palestinian and how the fig tree is used by her father to construct a world to somewhat resemble an old one left behind. Naomi’s poem “My

Father and the Fig Tree” reflects a universal sentiment shared by immigrants. It goes like this:

For other fruits, my father was indifferent.

He'd point at the cherry trees and say,

"See those? I wish they were figs."

In the evening he sat by my bed

weaving folktales like vivid little scarves.

They always involved a fig tree.

. . . Years passed, we lived in many houses,

none had fig trees.

. . . He tended garden half-heartedly, forgot to water,

let the okra get too big.

. . . The last time he moved, I got a phone call,

my father, in Arabic, chanting a song

I'd never heard. "What's that?"

He took me out back to the new yard.

There, in the middle of Dallas, Texas,

a tree with the largest, fattest,

sweetest fig in the world.

"It's a fig tree song!" he said,

plucking his fruits like ripe tokens,

emblems, assurance

of a world that was always his own. (p. 20-21)

This poem powerfully embodies the significance of one’s past. The poet’s father is Palestinian-

American. He was looking to find a fig tree in Dallas, Texas, to bring the old into the new and to compensate for what was left behind in a lost homeland. Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish (2013) cries, “Where is our palm tree so we can identify our hearts by its dates?” (p. 36). Conrad’s

East-European Yanko looks for a Norway pine, Caribbean Simmons looks for a mango tree, and

I have planted a Jasmine tree in my home in Calgary so that I can breathe in the scent of my homeland each time my longing is awakened. For many immigrants and exiles, trees become that transcultural element that speaks of a past while in the present, evoked as a medium to flow

back and forth from a lived reality in a new land to a memory of a native homeland. For an immigrant to find a tree that once was part of the geography of homeland is perhaps to have also found a lost part of an identity, for like trees, as per the words of Simone Weil, “to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul” (as cited in Said, 2002, p. 183). The trees for an exile and a refugee represent memories that can be planted in a new land, memories of the past that can be touched, smelt and felt in the present. For these sort of memories many exiles are thankful. As in the case of Syrian Abdul Samad, they are thankful for

“a memory that continues to deliver its white packages to . . . [their] dark todays [My translation]” (2013, para. 1). By way of evoking memories, diasporic bodies are able to revisit their past in their native homelands; and it is also through memories that an image of a faraway native-land may be preserved.

2.16 Conclusion

Kincheloe (2004) writes,

The French word bricoleur describes a handyman or handywoman who makes use of the

tools available to complete a task. . . Indeed, the bricoleur is aware of deep social

structures and the complex ways they play out in everyday life, the importance of social,

cultural, and historical analysis, the ways discursive practices influence both what goes

on in the research process and the consciousness of the researcher, the complex

dimensions of what we mean when we talk about ‘understanding.’ (p. 1-4)

As a bricoleur trying to make sense of what it means to have lost a home and a homeland as it relates to the Syrian Diasporic experience today, I have attempted in this chapter to “make use of” and work with the different bits and pieces drawn from a variety of sources including data and documents, media sources, as well as theoretical and scholarly literature that I thought may

be helpful in understanding the complex human condition and identity of the people of the

Syrian Diaspora and of the topics of displacement and exile. I hope that what I have presented in this section of my dissertation will help in opening different possibilities and ways of knowing the Syrian peoples as we came to hear the stories as narrated by Diasporic peoples. I also hope that this chapter has added another layer of meaning to the complex diasporic themes of homelessness, loss, exile, displacement, and belonging. The Syrian Diasporic peoples have become part of our Canadian make-up and citizenry today, and I deeply feel that an informed understanding of their identities and lived experiences is essential as we (Canadian hosts: educators, employers, community organizations, policymakers) look for ways to help them negotiate their new identities in a new homeland.

In the following chapter, I will discuss the methodology and methods I engaged as I sought to present the stories of the Syrian Diasporic peoples in Canada, and as I looked for ways to provide them with the agency to co-construct our understanding on the topic.

Chapter 3

Methodology

3.1 Autoethnography as a Research Methodology

Autoethnography is defined as “an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyze (graphy) personal experience (auto) in order to understand cultural experience (ethno)” (Ellis et al., 2011, para. 1). I engaged autoethnography as both an overarching research methodology and as a research method. I will first speak to autoethnography as a research methodology.

I employed autoethnography as a lens through which I investigated and analyzed my personal lived experience as a Syrian immigrant who carries the same Syrian passport as a refugee in a Western landscape (albeit under much different lived experiences) in order to come to better understand the Syrian refugees’ cultural and human experience, and most importantly, to bring forth an empathetic cultural understanding of the Syrian Diaspora today. In other words, I employed my personal connection to the topic and my lived experience as a Syrian immigrant as a “springboard” (Chang, 2008, p. 66) to my research as I sought to understand the

Syrian Diasporic experience. Heewon Chang (2008) did not only more deeply ground my wish to pursue autoethnography as a research methodology, but has also left me profoundly moved with her suggestion of engaging autoethnographic research as a “cultural verstehen of Others,” where she delves into German philosopher Max Weber’s idea of engendering a cultural

“verstehen”—an empathetic understanding. Chang (2008) explains, “Although perfect verstehen is beyond our human capacity, attempts to empathize can reduce incorrect judgments about others and enhance rich understanding of strangers,” and she adds that it is through this empathetic understanding that a rich contextual understanding of others’ culture is grounded (p.

27). Reading Chang helped conceptualize my research inquiry; what was once an incommensurable thought has been transformed into Weber’s “cultural verstehen of others,” perhaps still difficult to measure but at least now part of my vocabulary and a wonderful embodiment of the language of possibility and a pedagogy of hope in which I chose to speak and write, a language that disrupts the hegemonic and shifts our structures of knowledge to make space for alternate and empathetic ways of knowing. Moreover, this notion of a “cultural verstehen of others” conceptualizes my role as a researcher and defines my highest aspiration:

To deliver, as a researcher, a “cultural verstehen” of the Syrian refugee experience so that, as mentioned earlier in this dissertation and as suggested by Chang (2008), I can turn the “former others of difference into others of similarity by reducing strangeness in others and expanding their cultural boundaries” where this “transformational process . . . [of] cross-cultural pollination affects both parties” (p. 29). Similar to Chang (2008), Ellis et al. (2011) also speak of an empathetic understanding evoked by way of autoethnography and write,

Many of these scholars turned to autoethnography because . . . they wanted to

concentrate on ways of producing meaningful, accessible, and evocative research

grounded in personal experience, research that would sensitize readers to issues of

identity politics, to experiences shrouded in silence, and to forms of representation that

deepen our capacity to empathize with people who are different from us. (para. 3)

Moreover, in his Politics of Diaspora, Simmons (2012) explains, “Writing through autoethnography means writing through deep concerns, deep emotions of pain, suffering, melancholy, loss, rage, anger, joy, happiness, disappointment and sorrow” (p. 29). Indeed, this is precisely what I wished to be able to do: To write through those incommensurable but real human feelings to arrive at a place where empathy dwells. I saw autoethnography as a

therapeutic form of meditation, a vehicle that takes us on a journey to an innerness that we seldom take the time to visit in our fast-paced lives, and a powerful tool with which we can explore and excavate the treasures buried in our inner depths. Gramsci (1971) writes, “the starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical processes to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces without leaving an inventory” (p. 324). For me, autoethnography became the vehicle I used to journey into my history and past (my inventory), looked for traces, unearthed a hidden ontology, epistemology and axiology, and related it to, and, ultimately made sense of, my present experience and the experience of others in my research. I too, like Lincoln and Guba (2000), believe in “exploring the ways in which our inquiries are both tied and untied, as a means of finding, where our interests cross and where we can both be and promote others’ being, as whole human beings” (p. 185).

By engaging autoethnography as a methodology in my research, I continued to dialogue with myself in the process and wrote and thought through my Syrian experience in the West— my experience of knowing my reality—and through my participants’ Diasporic experience and stories, so that we can come to better understand the Syrian Diasporic human experience in

Canada; as Simmons (2012) writes, “Autoethnography is about coming to know and understand the humanism of the particular lived subject . . . Ultimately, autoethnography is affirming of local ways of understanding the Diasporic experience embodied through personal memories/histories” (p. 32).

Before I move on to discuss my research methods, I wish to make it also clear that throughout my research I was cognizant of what Heewon Chang (2008) calls the “pitfalls” that one might encounter while engaging autoethnography, and she names five of them:

(1) excessive focus on self in isolation from others; (2) overemphasis on narration rather

than analysis and cultural interpretation; (3) exclusive reliance on personal memory and

recalling as a data source; (4) negligence of ethical standards regarding others in self-

narratives; and (5) inappropriate application of the label ‘autoethnography.’ (p. 54)

With this, I continued to try and actively be aware of my moral and ethical responsibility as a researcher, of the act of writing “knowledge as entangled through a complex web of emotions and concerns” (Simmons, 2012, p. 29), and of making a rigorous effort to engage autoethnography as a research methodology and a cultural interpretation, and not as a descriptive self-narrative.

3.2 Autoethnography as a Research Method

Ellis et al. (2011) explain:

As a method, autoethnography combines characteristics of autobiography and

ethnography . . . when researchers do ethnography, they study a culture’s relational

practices, common values and beliefs, and shared experiences for the purpose of helping

insiders (cultural members) and outsiders (cultural strangers) better understand the

culture. (para. 5-7)

As part of the ethnographic “process” of autoethnography, I became a “participant observer”

(Ellis et al., 2011, para. 6) wherein I could “capture . . . [my] behaviors, thoughts, emotions, and interactions as they occur” (Chang, 2008, p. 89), and as they are juxtaposed with the experiences of Syrian newcomers, in order to understand the cultural experience of the Syrian Diaspora.

Hence, as a research method, autoethnography also became my tool in the “process” of analyzing and writing “retrospectively and selectively . . . about epiphanies that stem from, or are made possible by, being part of a culture and/or by processing a particular cultural identity” (Ellis et

al., 2011, para. 6-7).

In her book Autoethnography as Method, Chang (2008) explains that the researcher becomes a participant observer “[and] collects data from naturally occurring environments while participating in activities . . . where self-observational data record your [the researcher’s] actual behaviors as they occur in their natural contexts” (p. 88-89). In other words, by way of employing autoethnography as a method of data collection, I engaged my “personal experience to illustrate facets of cultural experience” (Ellis et al., 2011, para. 8), where, as a participant observer, I too engaged and captured my evoked feelings and experiences as they surfaced within the process of my conversations with my participants.

3.3 Interactive Interviews as a Research Method

Also as an autoethnographic research method, I held open-ended, unstructured, interactive interviews in which I engaged my participants’ voices and stories in co-constructing knowledge on my research topic (Ellis et al., 2011). As discussed by Ellis and Berger (2001), interactive interviewing is an autoethnographic method that “offer[s] opportunities for self- conscious reflection by researchers as well as respondents” (p. 6). It is a process in which I engaged and listened to the voices and stories of Syrian refugees in order to come to better understand their human condition in their newfound home of Calgary where each story may add

“another textured layer to the approach” (Ellis & Berger, 2001, p. 13). My interviews were

“unstructured” to “allow flexibility in questioning and responding” (Chang, 2008, p. 105). Each session began with a first question and lead me to “formulate follow-up [open-ended] questions on the basis of interviewee responses during the interview” (Chang, 2008, p. 105). My interviews were direct and face-to-face as I sought to give my interviewees the agency to co-

construct and co-create knowledge that is reflective of their lived reality where “power is shared” between me and the interviewees (Chang, 2008, p. 105).

I believe that holding unstructured interactive interviews was an autoethnographic approach that informed my research with an "in-depth and intimate understanding of people's experiences with emotionally charged and sensitive topics" (Ellis, Kiesinger, & Tillmann-Healy,

1997, p. 121), and where the interviews become collaborative endeavors between researchers and participants as they “probe together about issues that transpire, in conversation, about particular topics” (Ellis et al., 2011, para. 22). As Ellis and Berger (2001) further explain,

[T]he feelings, insights, and stories that the primary researcher brings to the interactive

session are as important as those of other participants; the understandings that emerge

among all parties during interaction what they learn together are as compelling as the

stories each brings to the session. (p. 12)

Moreover, as Comstock (1982) explains, as a critical researcher, my task was to bring my participants into “a self-sustaining process of critical analysis and enlightened action” (p. 387); I found this to be closely aligned with my research objective as I unpacked the lived daily experiences of Syrian refugees before and since their arrival to Canada by way of evoking their voices and listening to their stories. By autoethnographically thinking through their stories, I sought to understand their human condition and offer them the agency to co-construct knowledge on this topic as they were extended the agency to speak to their lived reality, their human condition, and what they faced of challenges in their newfound land of Canada. The emphasis in my research context was on what can be learned from the interaction within the interview setting as well as on the stories that each participant brought to the research (Ellis et al., 2011), including my own story.

3.4 Interviewees

My research participants were three Syrian refugee families who live in Calgary. In my recruitment letter, I made it clear to my potential participants that they were free to choose not to participate in my research, and I reinforced this in my oral conversation with them before any decisions were made. I visited each family in their homes in Calgary and held 90-120 minute interviews. I was sensitive to the nature of the topic and its emotional intensity, and, I offered to break the interviews into different sessions. All three interviews were held with the adults in the family (three husbands and three wives); in my future research, I plan to also engage newcomer

Syrian children, to hear their stories and to present their voices, but for the purposes of my current research, I sought to understand the perspective and experience of the adults and to write their stories, their challenges, and their dreams. From my personal dealings with the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora in Calgary, and from my interaction with both adults and children through personal encounters and as a research assistant and translator in multiple focus groups organized by a professor at the University of Calgary, I can confidently say that the experiences of the parents are significantly different than those of the younger newcomer generations, and hence I believe that research should address each group separately as we try to conjure up ways to help them find belonging in their newfound land of Canada.

I engaged a heterogeneous representation in my participants by seeking diversity in religion/ethnicity (a Sunni-Muslim family, a Druze family, and a Christian family), in educational and socio-economic backgrounds, and, as importantly, in political affiliations (pro- regime and anti-regime), as well as in their routes of immigration (private and government sponsored). As mentioned earlier in this dissertation, Syrians today are deeply divided in their political views and opinions about the war in Syria and on who they believe is criminal and who

is victim. The opposing voices of Syrians today indeed deeply embody the notion of multiple truths where each is deeply convinced that he/she is representative of the truth. I firmly believe that in order to meet ethical considerations, any research that engages Syrians as participants must engage a heterogeneity of Syrian voices in political allegiances, religious affiliations, and lived experiences, or else it is bound to deliver an incomplete and partial representation of the experience of the Syrian peoples today.

As for religious and sectarian differences between Syrians, Syria is made up of a majority of Sunni Muslims, where “Sunni Muslims are so named because they follow the Sunna, or traditional teachings and sayings of Muhammad and accept the four caliphs, leaders, as legitimate successors to Muhammad,” whereas Shiite Muslims “(also known as Shi’a-t-Ali, or the party of Ali) began with the death of Muhammad in 632. The dispute [between the two religious sects] is centered on who should follow Muhammad as the political leader of the

Muslim community and was not related any theological differences as that time” (Brown, 2009;

Lewis & Churchill, 2009; as cited in Moore, 2015, p. 229). As for the Druze sect, they trace their historical origins to 11th-century Fatimi Egypt. The Fatimis are Ismailis, and the Ismailis are Shiites, and therefore, historically, the Druze are an Ismaili Fatimi branch of Shiites (Swayd,

2009). Sunni Muslims make up about 70 percent of the population in Syria. The Alawties, who are the ruling party and identify as Shiite Muslims, make up about 12 percent of Syria’s population. Christians make up about 13 percent of the population (Khazan, 2012); and as of

2010, “the last year for which reliable census figures are available [since the eruption of the war], around 700,000 Druze were living in Syria comprising 3 percent of the general population”

(Balanche, 2016, para. 2).

My knowledge of Arabic provided my participants with the choice of speaking in their native tongue, adding another element of comfort to the conversation. All recruitment materials were presented in both Arabic and English, and I gave my participants the choice to hold the interviews in Arabic or English, or both languages. I translated all Arabic transcripts into

English after the interviewing process, and I should add that I hold my valid license as translator from Arabic to English by the Society of Translators and Interpreters of British Columbia. To ensure rigor, I audio recorded the interviews and used the transcripts of my recordings as records of my interactions and as authentic sources from which to extract my findings, interpret, and write the stories.

3.5 Reflexivity as an Interpretive Approach

My ultimate aim is that my research embodies an inquiry that “reflects ecological values.

. . that respects communal forms of living that are not Western. . . [an] inquiry involving intense reflexivity regarding how our inquiries are shaped by our own historical and gendered locations”

(Lincoln & Guba, 2000, p. 185). Altheide and Johnson (2011) explain that “to grasp the importance of the values, emotions, beliefs, and other meanings of cultural members, it is imperative to embrace an interpretivist approach in our scientific and theoretical work . . . and especially for understanding conflicts or differences in meaning for actors located in the same situation and context” (p. 583). Hence, I engaged interpretivist and constructivist paradigms

“assuming a relativist ontology (there are multiple realities), [and] a subjectivist epistemology

(knower and respondent co-create understandings)” (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011, p. 13). My role as a researcher became a co-constructor of knowledge through an understanding and interpretation of the meaning of lived experiences (Lincoln & Guba, 2000, p. 196), but while keeping mindful of the fact that “a central challenge to the interpretive paradigm is to recognize that reality is

more than negotiated accounts — that we are both shaped by and shapers of our world . . . [and that the] key issue revolves around this central challenge: how to maximize the researcher's mediation between people's self-understandings . . . and transformative social action without becoming impositional” (Lather, 1986, p. 269). Along the same lines, Denzin and Lincoln

(1994) write, “The processes of analysis, evaluation, and interpretation are neither terminal nor mechanical. They are always emergent, unpredictable and unfinished” (p. 479). Also as Ellis

(2008) puts it, the “telling [of] stories about our relationships, stories that are co-constructed continuously . . . in that sense, are always unfinished. Each person’s views and actions affect the other’s and the joint activity and mutual identification that result (or fail to develop) become part of the relationship” (p. 85).

As a researcher, I attempted to keep an activated sense of awareness of my ultimate aspiration of conceptualizing the human condition of Syrian refugees into an epistemological frame of reference, one that I hope to have written in a language of hope and possibility with the goal of delivering an empathetic cultural understanding of the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora.

In my process of interpretation by way of autoethnography, I engaged the notion of reflexivity to come to a deeper understanding of my research topic on the Syrian Diasporic subject. Reflexivity allowed me to locate myself in my research as it is a process that “demands that we interrogate each of ourselves regarding the ways in which research efforts are shaped and staged around the binaries, contradictions, and paradoxes that form our own lives” (Lincoln &

Guba, 2000, p. 183). Finlay (2002) further speaks to how engaging in a reflexive interpretation speaks to and appreciates the complexity of the inquiry process and writes:

[R]eflexivity can be defined as thoughtful, conscious self-awareness. Reflexive analysis

in research encompasses continual evaluation of subjective responses, intersubjective

dynamics, and the research process itself. It involves a shift in our understanding of data

collection from something objective that is accomplished through detached scrutiny of

“what I know and how I know it”, to recognizing how we actively construct our

knowledge. (p. 532)

Rogers (2012) further adds, “For Finlay, reflexivity can be defined as thoughtful, conscious self- awareness” (p. 4). Greg Lowan-Trudeau (2012) also employs reflexivity in his research and writes, “A reflexive researcher examines their role in the research process, reflecting on their experiences throughout the research journey, the influence of their cultural and social positioning, and their interpersonal interactions with research participants. Explicit reflexivity is also a tool for demonstrating the learning experienced by the researcher, a key criteria for quality interpretive research” (p. 122). Indeed, reflexivity has been a medium that has allowed me to dwell deeper, to search for meaning within the ashes of spirits and emotions, and to journey into that “empathetic insidedness” (Relph, 1976, p. 17) as mentioned earlier in this essay.

3.6 Narrative Analysis an Interpretive Approach

As I interpreted my research, I reflected on each story by way of narrative analysis where the focus was on “narratives as practice within social interaction rather than as text with an identifiable structure,” an approach that “investigates stories and storytelling as they operate within society” (Peräkylä & Ruusuvuori, 2000, p. 530). I was interested in studying the narratives and stories of my participants “as lived experience . . . [where] narration is the practice of constructing meaningful selves, identities, and realities” (Chase, 2000, p. 422). “The stories constitute[d] the data” as I analyzed and re-storied where re-storying was “the process of gathering stories, analyzing them for key elements of the story (e.g., time, place, plot and scene), and then rewriting the story to place it within chronological sequence” (Ollerenshaw & Crewsell,

2016, pp. 331-332). Also, as explained by De Fina and Georgakopoulou (2008), narrative analysis “requires a careful examination of the way narrative tellings function as social practices and also within other social practices . . . It indicates the need to be open to variability in narrative and to abandon pre-defined ideas about what narrative is . . . It places emphasis on reflexivity in processes of data collection and analysis” (384-385).

One strategy that I also found helpful in understanding the process of data analysis and interpretation is provided by Chang (2008) in which she suggests to “contextualize broadly. . .

[where] through this strategy, one attempts to explain and interpret certain behaviors and events in connection with the sociocultural, political, economical, religious, historical, ideological, and geographical environment in which they took place and in which data were recorded” (p. 136).

Hence, as I reflected on and analytically interpreted my interviewees’ stories, I ultimately sought to, as a researcher, contextualize and place the stories of my participants in their present and future context of Canada, while engaging an autoethnographic interpretation that shifted my attention “back and forth between self and others, the personal and the social context” (Chang,

2008, p. 125).

3.7 Reflecting on Ethical Considerations

As I considered issues of ethics, I was cognizant of how ethical intricacies are heavily intertwined with my epistemological, ontological and axiological positions within my research. I was critically aware that constructivist and interpretivist frameworks are subjective in nature, and that this subjectivity is shaped by and is steeped in epistemological, ontological and axiological series of practices, all of which are hegemonically constituted. As I thought of issues of validity,

I continued to revisit Lincoln and Guba’s (2000) question:

How do we know when we have specific social inquiries that are faithful enough to some

human construction that we may feel safe in acting on them, or, more important, that

members of the community in which the research is conducted may act on them? (p. 180)

The answers to these questions were major considerations and responsibilities that I held upon myself as a researcher interpreting a human phenomenon and imparting knowledge on human issues and human conditions. With this, the goal of my research was to deliver authenticity, through which I conveyed a fair representation where “all stakeholder views, perspectives, claims, concerns, and voices should be apparent in the text” (Lincoln & Guba, 2000, p. 180). In my research, as stated earlier, I was mindful of the importance of including families who come from different religious, political and socio-economic backgrounds so that I could produce an inclusive representation of a heterogeneous Syrian society, and so that my research may be considered a fair and “balanced representation of the multiple realities in, and constructions of, a situation” (Cohen, Manion, & Morrison, 2011, p. 136).

I was mindful of the need to constantly reassess my own interpretive framework and to reexamine its implications on my research. Creswell (2005) acknowledges how the researcher’s practices, personal experiences, and beliefs affect every aspect of the research, whether in collecting data, analyzing them, or interpreting them. I understood that what I valued and what in my opinion merits further understanding was naturally subjective, and may be subsequently biased, and so that my research is authentic, I made deliberate attempts to “prevent marginalization, to act affirmatively with respect to inclusion, and to act with energy to ensure that all voices in the inquiry effort had a chance to be represented in ay texts and to have their stories treated fairly and with balance” (Lincoln & Guba, 2000, p. 180). Also as mentioned

earlier, in my selection of participants, I engage a Sunni-Muslim family, a Druze family, and a

Christian family, as well as both anti- and pro-Syrian regime representations.

As my topic was of sensitive nature both politically and religiously, my interviews were held separately with each family so that I could create comfortable and safe settings in which we, as researcher and participants, could “search together collaboratively for more comprehensible, true, authentic, and morally right and appropriate ways of understanding and acting in the world”

(Kemmis & McTaggart, 2007, p. 297). To ensure validity, and to avoid subjective interpretation of my data (Cohen et al., 2011, p. 145), all my interviews were recorded and transcribed word for word for the purposes of my data analysis; then, during the stage of drafting my research, all interviewees had the choice to verify the produced information to ensure validity in my representation and interpretation of their stories through “member checks / respondent validations” forms (Cohen & Morrison, 2011, p. 77) where they were given “the opportunity to voice agreement or disagreement with the research as reported” (Davis, 2008, p. 756). As explained by Sandelowski (2008), member checks are most often used to optimize the validity of qualitative research findings where research participants are asked to evaluate one or more of the followings:

whether (a) researchers accurately rendered their experiences that were the target of study, in

the service of what Joseph Maxwell described as descriptive validity; (b) researchers fully

captured the meaning those experiences had for them, in the service of what Maxwell called

interpretive validity; or whether (c) researchers’ final interpretive (e.g., ethnographic,

phenomenological) accounts of those experiences do justice to them, in the service of what

Maxwell called theoretical validity. (p. 501)

Guba (1981) also advises that in order to achieve trustworthiness, a researcher may present

his/her research to source groups before publishing; and so, I discussed my transcriptions with my participants, and I gave them the opportunity to evaluate accuracy, correct erroneous information, and authenticate the findings of the study to achieve trustworthiness. All participants also had the choice to obtain copies of my final published research manuscript.

My participants were extended an informed consent and voluntary participation form in which I explained the purpose of the study and made certain that “the participants fully understand the nature of the research project” (Cohen & Morrison, 2011, p. 53), that their participation is voluntary where “they freely choose to take part (or not)” (Cohen & Morrison,

2011, p. 52) , that they are given the choice to being tape recorded, that their confidentiality would be guaranteed, and that they have the option to abstain from answering any question they do not feel comfortable with and can terminate the interview at any time. My participants were also assigned pseudonyms of their own choosing to guarantee full confidentiality in the interviews.

Furthermore, I sought to bring my research to be praxis-oriented by engaging Lather’s

(1986) notion of catalytic validity which “represents the degree to which the research process reorients, focuses, and energizes participants toward knowing reality in order to transform it, a process Freire (1973) terms conscientization” (p. 272). As I worked toward this notion of praxis- oriented research, I realized that my objective ought to, as Lather (1986) writes, “involve the researched in a democratized process of inquiry characterized by negotiation, reciprocity, empowerment — research as praxis” (p. 257). Lather leaves us with the idea that when research resonates “with people's lived concerns, fears, aspirations,” then it also plays a catalytic role in the process (pp. 266-267).

Ethics approval was obtained from the Conjoint Faculties Research Ethics Board

(CFREB) as per the guidelines of the University of Calgary. I also attained my certificate of completion—the Tri Council Policy Statement: Ethical conduct for Research Involving Humans

Course on Research Ethics (TCPS2: CORE)—on October 26, 2016.

3.8 Limitations

It was of critical importance that I made clear that my research did not represent the experience of all Syrian refugees; instead, it served as a space, one space, where individual voices of Syrian refugees were presented, each steeped in an epistemology shaped by his/her subjectivity. As discussed earlier in this dissertation, Syrians come from a very heterogeneous

Syrian society and belong to diverse socioeconomic, religious, and educational backgrounds, and hence they also bring along different, and at times conflicting, epistemological and ontological stances. However, in mindfully seeking to identify and recruit families who come from different socio-economic, religious and political backgrounds, I hope to have relayed, to the best of my ability, a more inclusive representation of a heterogeneous Syrian society and contributed to a more comprehensive understanding of the diverse identities that make up the Syrian Diaspora in

Canada today. I have also made all possible attempts at assuring that “there should be holism in the research” (Cohen et al., 2011, p. 134), while also recognizing that “there is no single

‘truth’—that all truths are but partial truths” (Lincoln & Guba, 2000, p. 185). Having said this, the number of interviewees included in my research was restricted due to limitations related to time constraints, personal visits to my participants’ homes, and translation of the Arabic dialogue in our conversations.

3.9 Conclusion

In this chapter, I have discussed how I employed autoethnography as a research methodology and as a method, and of how I engaged reflexivity to think through and write from my own personal experience as a Syrian immigrant so that I can better understand the Syrian refugee’s human experience. In my open-ended, unstructured interactive interviews, I sought to open the space for my research participants’ voices and stories to co-construct knowledge on my research topic. I invited a heterogeneous representation in my participants by seeking diversity in religion/ethnicity, in educational and socio-economic backgrounds, in political affiliations, as well as in their routes of immigration. I contemplated the ethical considerations and moral implications attached to my research. My ultimate goal in this dissertation and beyond was to engage in praxis-oriented research and to contribute to transformative practices and social change.

Chapter 4

Findings: The Stories

4.1 Introduction

In this chapter, I share the stories of the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora. The data, or what I wish to call the stories, in this chapter were gathered for the purpose of presenting the voices, and the feelings, of my research participants, so that we may come to co-construct a deeper understanding of their human condition and lived experiences. In my interviews, I sought to offer my research participants the space and agency to speak for themselves, to tell their stories, and to co-construct and co-create a knowledge that is reflective of their lived reality and faced challenges.

To recap, the purpose of my research was to understand, as fellow humans and Canadian hosts (educators, employers, community organizations, policymakers), what it means for the

Syrian Diasporic subjects to have lost a home and a homeland, and to qualitatively conjure up dynamic ways, through their active participation in the process, that may help them as they try to make meaning of family and home in their newfound land of Canada. My research was driven by the following questions:

• How do Syrian newcomers come to make sense of what it means to have lost a home

and a homeland as it relates to the Syrian Diasporic experience?

§ What stories can Syrian newcomers share with us about their experiences in

Syria since the eruption of the war and after their arrival to their newfound

city of Calgary?

§ What do Syrian newcomers believe are ways in which Canadians (educators,

employers, community organizations, policymakers) can help as they try to

make meaning of family and home in their new homeland, and as they

negotiate and remediate their identities?

4.2 Collection of Stories

As mentioned earlier, I refer to my research data as “stories” for the remainder of this dissertation. I collected the stories of my participants through the course of three open-ended, unstructured and interactive interviews (Ellis et al., 2011) by way of an autoethnographic approach that allowed a space for both my participants and I to “probe together” (Ellis et al.,

2011, para. 22) as we searched for meaning in their stories and in mine.

As I walked into each interview, I had expected that the space would be charged with emotions (Ellis et al., 1997, p. 121). My expectations proved true, for the roads of dislocation, displacement, loss and exile that my participants and I journeyed together were indeed paved with the most intense and poignant of emotions. Each interview was scheduled to last 90-120 minutes in total; however, my participants were not able to unload the weight from their hearts within the allotted time, and so the interviews spanned from one hour and five minutes to two hours and twenty minutes. After each interview, I was left with a “thick description” (Denzin, 2001; Ellis et al., 2011; Geertz, 1973) of stories narrated with a mix of words and emotions.

Denzin (2001) writes, thick description “captures the interpretations persons bring to the events that have been recorded. It reports these interpretations as they unfold during the interaction . . . It takes the reader to the heart of the experience that is being interpreted” (p. 30).

He further adds, “Thick description rescues the meanings, experiences, and effects that have occurred in problematic situations. It captures the interpretations that persons bring to the events that have been recorded. It reports those interpretations as they unfold during the interaction. It

establishes the grounds for thick interpretation” (Denzin, 2001, p. 21). It is my hope that the stories engaged in this chapter take my readers into the hearts of the displaced peoples of the

Syrian Diaspora and onto the paths they walked as they lived their particular Diasporic experiences. As for me and my autoethnographic relationship with the stories, and as I came to hear and to know the stories, transcribe and translate them, and re-story and re-narrativize them

(Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016; Xie, 1999), I have indeed felt like I too have visited the hearts of the Syrian Diasporic peoples—hearts that have come to inform my research throughout this transformational journey of learning.

4.3 Research Participants

As discussed in the previous chapter, to ensure that my research included a heterogeneous representation of the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora, my interviewees were made up of three

Syrian families (husbands and wives—all parents) with a diversity in religious and ethnic backgrounds (a Syrian-Christian family, a Syrian-Shiite-Druze family, and a Syrian-Sunni-

Muslim family), in educational and socio-economic backgrounds, in political affiliations (pro- regime and anti-regime), as well as in their routes of immigration (private and government sponsored). The following is an overview of my participants. All names used are pseudonyms.

Family 1. Antoine and Mary—a husband and a wife in their mid-forties with one child.

They are a Syrian-Christian family and are privately sponsored refugees by a local church

in Calgary. They both hold university degrees from the University of Damascus. They

were both employed by the Syrian government. They were displaced within Syria before

arriving to Canada. Their interview was held on October 12, 2017 in their home in

Calgary.

Family 2. Daniel and Miral—a husband and a wife in their late-twenties with one child.

They are a Syrian-Shiite-Druze family privately sponsored refugee by a Canadian Group of Five (G5). They arrived from Lebanon after having left a war-torn Syria. They both hold university degrees from the University of Damascus in Syria and they were both employed in Syria. Their interview was held on October 13, 2017 in their home in

Calgary.

Family 3. Adam and Brianna—a husband and wife in their mid-forties with five children. They are a Syrian-Sunni-Muslim family sponsored as Government Assisted

Refugees (GAR). They arrived from a refugee camp in Jordan. The husband has a university degree and the wife is a house-wife. In Syria, they lived on a land that they farmed before seeking refuge in Jordan. Their interview was held on December 10, 2017 in their home in Calgary.

Myself. As discussed in Chapter 3 of this paper, I engaged autoethnography as a research method where I became a “participant observer” (Ellis, 2004, para. 6; Lichtman,

2010, pp. 168-170). My autoethnographic engagement and autoethnographic analysis and interpretation is presented in Chapters 5, 6, and 7 of this study. However, it is important to note here that, as a participant observer, my analysis of the stories indeed began while observing and interviewing my research participants. It was then when I first started to autoethnographically think through their conversations and of the raw emotions and dormant memories they have awakened in me, where “the object of study is the emergent experiences of both parties [my three families and I]” (Ellis, 1991, p. 30) and where “each person’s views and actions affect the other’s” (Ellis, 2008, p. 85).

These autoethnographic moments, thoughts, and interpretations are written in Chapters 5,

6, and 7 of this dissertation in an attempt to “describe the conscious experience of both

subject [the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora] and researcher [myself]” (Ellis, 1991, p. 30).

4.4 The Interviews

My first interview took place in Calgary on the evening of Thursday October 12, 2017 and it lasted 2 hours and 20 minutes. It was an intense experience and one that left me emotionally drained. As the interview came to an end, I was grateful to walk out and breathe in

Canada’s cold October air, hoping that it would soothe my burning heart. I then stepped into my car and cried a river of tears.

My second interview had already been planned for the next morning (October 13, 2017);

I hoped and prayed that the night’s rest would help me muster up my energy for the next morning. I thought about the incommensurable weight of emotions that sat on my heart as a result of having heard the stories as a participant observer, and I thought of how much heavier it must have been for my research participants to have lived this experience. As I located myself and my experience within the context of the stories and lived experiences of my interviewees, my load seemed trivial when compared to theirs, and so I drove to the home of my second family the next morning and proceeded with the interview; this one lasted two hours and four minutes.

After leaving my second interview, I promised myself that I would not schedule the third one until I had given myself a bit of time to breathe. The weight of my emotions on my heart felt suffocating.

My third interview was scheduled to take place almost a month after, on December 3,

2017. As I was driving to my interview, at around 1.15 p.m. on a cold Sunday afternoon, I received a phone call from my sister-in-law informing me of the passing of my mother-in-law in

Syria. I stopped the car and cried another river of tears. I called my third participant family,

apologized for having to cancel the interview at the last minute, and explained that I had to return to my home and inform my children and my ex-husband (the son of the deceased) of the sad news. My sister-in-law had expressed that she didn’t have the strength to call family members in

Canada and the U.S. and inform them of the news. My third participant family was very understanding, expressed their condolences, and reassured me that I could reschedule whenever was comfortable for me.

Because of the war, I had not seen my mother-in-law, the grandmother of my children, for seven years. Before the war had erupted, and for thirteen consecutive years, I spent the summers with my children in the home of my mother-in-law in Syria. She was very dear to my heart. I informed my children and their father of her death. My children cried for their grandmother, and my ex-husband and his brothers, who were gathered together at the time, wept and wailed for the passing of a mother who was oceans away; they cried because they were unable to carry her coffin on their shoulders nor bid her a final farewell. This painful incident brought me to feel a profound connection with my research participants. In an autoethnographic way, I was able to put myself in the shoes of the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora whose fate would have also denied them an opportunity to attend funerals of family members. I understood their pain on a deeper level.

As I lived this experience, I autoethnographically thought of one of the short stories that I had written a few years earlier in which I described a Syrian funeral:

In a Syrian funeral, people were separated into two different rooms, one with men and

another with women. Regardless of whether or not it was part of their religious practice,

women wore some sort of cover on their hair, as it was a sign of paying respect. The

family of the deceased always sat closest to the coffin, some crying silently, and others

weeping. At times the wailing voices were so shrill that they not only pierced the hearts

of those present but must have also cut through the soul of the deceased . . . To hear a

woman wailing was distressing, and at times deafening, but to hear a man wailing was

excruciatingly painful. (Alatrash, 2016, p. 90)

Death was so final. It was painful. I thought of my aunt who continues to live in Syria and whose words I quoted in a newspaper article I titled “Letter from Syria: Cry the Beloved

Country” as she said: “People [in Syria] are living because they have not yet died” (Alatrash,

2014a, p. 12). I thought of the sad implications of my mother-in-law’s death on my family, and I thought of my participants for whom death had become a daily reality and whose hopes had now become, as in the words of Mary, “to try and save their lives and to preserve what has remained of their lives.” More than ever before, I too felt how death is an incommensurably painful experience.

I allowed myself a week of grieving. As part of my grieving and as an elegy to my mother-in-law, on December 4th I posted the below words on my Facebook page:

Yesterday my mother-in-law, and the grandmother of my children, passed away. I loved

her like a mother… She was one of the most beautiful souls I have ever come across, and

the most beautiful of mothers…

I am so very honored to have known her...

She has taught me, by her example, how to be human and how to be a mother…

May your soul rest in peace....

To the most beautiful of mothers, I wish peace upon your] ﻟﺮوﺣﻚ اﻟﺴﻼم ﯾﺎ أﺟﻤﻞ اﻻﻣﮭﺎت

soul].

I took the photo above in the summer of 2010, a year before the Syrian war erupted (I have asked the permission of the family to use the photo in this dissertation). In this photo, my mother-in- law was preparing her home-grown tomatoes to be dried under the sun. I was never able to bring any of her sun-dried tomatoes into Canada as it was against immigration and boarder security policy to allow fruits or vegetables into the country. Some of my research participants also informed me in my interviews that they tended their gardens and ate fruits and vegetables from their land while living in Syria and before coming to Canada. I understood the meaning of their

words on a deeper level, and I was able to imagine the sweetness of their fruits as I thought of my mother-in-law’s tomatoes; I understood their feelings in an autoethnographic way.

The memorial service was held in Calgary on Tuesday, December 5, 2017. I rescheduled my interview and ended up meeting with my third family on Sunday, December 10th, 2017; their interview lasted one hour and five minutes.

4.5 On the Process of Translating My Stories

It is important to note that all interviewees were given the choice to hold their interviews in either Arabic or English (whichever was more comfortable to them); however, every participant opted to speak in Arabic. Some attempted to speak in English during parts of the interviews, but each time their emotions surfaced, they reverted to their native language and chose to express their feeling in Arabic. Unless noted otherwise, the English text in the stories presented in the remainder of this dissertation as well as in the Appendix is my own translation of the original spoken Arabic conversations.

I believe that the initial steps in my analysis and interpretation of the stories first took place as I sat to translate (from Arabic to English) and transcribe the interviews. It was especially then, and more than ever before, that I felt the heaviness of the weight of responsibility that was on my shoulders not only as researcher but also as a translator.

Throughout the entire process, and perhaps it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say almost word by word, I was acutely aware of the ethical responsibility that was attached to my role as a translator and of delivering a product that was faithful and true to the original Arabic. Benjamin Walter

(1996) summarizes this responsibility and writes, “The task of the translator consists in finding the particular intention toward the target language which produces in that language the echo of the original . . . where the echo is able to give, in its own language, the reverberation of the work

in the alien one” (p. 258); he also adds, “A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully” (Walter, 1996, p. 260). It is my hope that the stories I have translated echo and present the voices and emotions of my participant in a

“transparent” way and that they may give way to “a new level of understanding the lived experience of emotions” (Ellis, 1991, p. 45) as it relates to the human condition of the Syrian

Diasporic people in Canada.

4.6 The Stories in the Appendix

Before I begin to present my research findings, I would like to first point my readers to the Appendix in this dissertation. The Appendix is a space that I created for the stories to be presented as narrated and told by my research participants, in what I hoped to be a holistic and uninterrupted manner, and without my voice, thoughts or interpretations. I seek for the

Appendix to be a space in which “the stories constitute the data” (Chase, 2000, p. 422), one that

“privileges and centers the voices of the research participants” and “move[s] away from the traditional, fragmented thematic representation to a more holistic portrayal of the participants’ words” (Johnson-Bailey & Ray, 2011, p. 229).

Within this context, I am particularly mindful of the agency of voice. I see the voices of my participants “as shaped, informed and mediated by [their] social and cultural factors”

(Sperling & Appleman, 2011, p. 73) and as mediums that constitute the truest reflection of their lived experiences. Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) writes, “[voice] is the speaking personality, the speaking consciousness” (p. 434), and he brings us to consider the Bakhtinian question, “Who is doing the talking?” I created the Appendix as an answer to this question—as a space in which my participants’ voices are doing the talking. My voice in this Appendix is only heard as I pose

questions so that it is not a source of contamination or a perpetrator of any degree of “epistemic violence” (Spivak, 1988). Having said this, I am also acutely mindful of how my selection of the presented stories is also guided by my own underlying assumptions as they relate to my research topic and participants, and how my stories are presented from one of the many angles through which we may come to know the experiences of the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora. Also, as I write and present the findings in this chapter, I am deeply cognizant of my role as a researcher and of my own history and the political positions that I bring along, and as importantly, of the ethical and moral considerations attached. It is with this consciousness and heavy sense of responsibility that I present the following sections.

4.7 On How I Came to My Findings

As discussed earlier in this dissertation, my aim in holding open-ended, unstructured, and interactive interviews (Ellis et al., 2011) was to offer my research participants the space and agency to speak for themselves, to tell their stories, and to co-construct and co-create a knowledge that is reflective of their lived reality and faced challenges.

Once the interviews were completed, I sat to reflexively (Altheide & Johnson, 2011;

Denzin & Lincoln, 1994; Lincoln & Guba, 2000) investigate (Peräkylä & Ruusuvuori, 2000) the stories of my participant. It was at this stage, and particularly as I translated and transcribed the stories, that I felt an intimate interactive relationship with the words, and with the emotions, of my research participants, word by word and feeling by feeling. After hearing the Arabic word, and before transcribing it, I also paid careful attention to how it was expressed and to its tone, and then began to consider its best counterpart in English. Next, I had to decide on what I thought may be a more truthful representation of my translation and of the ethical considerations

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attached to my choice. By the end of this process, I came to feel a deep emotional relationship with each word in each story. As explained by van Manen (1990), it was a process of

reaching for something beyond, restoring a forgotten or broken wholeness by recollecting

something lost, past, or eroded, and by reconciling it in our experience of the present with

a vision of what should be . . . To present research by way of reflective text is not to

present findings, but to do a reading (as a poet would) of a text that shows what it

teaches. One must meet with it, go through it, encounter it, suffer it, consume it and, as

well, be consumed by it. (p. 153)

As I analyzed the transcribed stories, and as I looked for emerging ideas, concepts and themes, I performed a “line-by-line” reading, and re-reading, of the collected stories (Benaquisto,

2008; van den Hoonaard & van den Hoonaard, 2008). I continued to revisit my research questions while keeping “an open mind for other issues that might arise” (Benaquisto, 2008, p.

87). The categories began to emerge broadly. I carefully considered the categories and themes and their relevance to the research questions and to the stories as a whole for the purpose of

“keeping the developing analysis integrated” (Ayres, 2008, p. 868). With a continuous and

“iterative” (van den Hoonaard & van den Hoonaard, 2008) systematic analysis and by reading the materials presented by the participants multiple times while using constant comparisons among the ideas presented throughout the interviews (Firmin, 2008), I came to group my findings under three major themes as shown below: the first spoke to making sense of meanings and feelings as they relate to the lived experience of the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora, the second engaged issues of identity, and the third addressed creating and actualizing new possibilities and a “third space” that may help Syrian newcomers as they negotiate and remediate

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their identities in their new homeland of Canada. Below is an outline of the themes and findings of my research as presented in the remainder of this dissertation.

Theme 1: On the meanings and feelings of the lived experience of the Syrian

Diasporic realities.

Finding 1.1. On the meaning of homeland.

Finding 1.2. On the meaning and feeling of being refugee.

Finding 1.3. On forced displacement.

Theme 2: On issues of identity.

Finding 2.1. On cultural identity.

Finding 2.2. On negotiating difference.

Finding 2.3. On the fact of difference—Orientalism and beyond.

Finding 2.4. On resilience.

Theme 3: On creating new possibilities: Activating and actualizing the third space.

Finding 3.1. On issues of language.

Finding 3.2. On finding cultural intersections and “third spaces.”

Finding 3.3. On how Canadians can be of help: Activating and actualizing the third space.

In the next sections of this chapter I present the stories of the Syrian Diaspora in Calgary by way of restorying, where “restorying” is a process of “reading the transcript, analyzing the stories to understand the lived experiences and then retelling the stories” (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000;

Ollerenshaw & Crewsell, 2016). As mentioned earlier, the Appendix presents the original narratives as told by the Syrian Diasporic peoples, from which all the re-stories came.

4.8 Presentation of Findings

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Theme 1: On the meanings and feelings of the lived experiences of the Syrian

Diasporic realities.

Finding 1.1. On the meaning of homeland. As I drove to my first interview, I thought of Syria, of my motherland “who was now pleading mercy at the feet of a cold-hearted callous fate” (Alatrash, 2016). I thought of the song “Mawṭinee” [my homeland] and of how its lyrics are likely memorized by most Syrians as well as by my research participants. The topic of homelands has always been a common theme within Syrian conversations, and it was with this familiar and comfortable understanding that I asked my participants a first expected question:

What is the meaning of homeland for you? The replies of my participants, who spoke from the position of having been displaced in a far-away Canada, were much more painful than I had expected.

Mary was the first interviewee to answer this question. Holding back her tears, she said,

“When we were in Syria, we didn’t think of the answer . . . there was no reason to find answer for it [my question].” But as Mary looked for an answer, there were not one but innumerable answers, each made up of incommensurable moments rooted within her lived experience. To

Mary, a homeland was her mother, father, brothers, sisters, the neighborhoods in which she played, the church, her university, the stories she heard as a child, her mother’s excitement as she returned home after a long day at school or work, her friends in the neighborhood, the places she loved very much, and “all of these things.” As she spoke, she cried. She explained that a homeland “is the memories and the people you love,” and concluded her answer with “I still don’t know how to express the meaning of homeland.” I couldn’t hold back the tears as I listened to Mary’s choked-up words; I thought of Mahmoud Darwish’s words, “I have learned

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and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a single word: / Homeland” (Darwish,

2013, p. 7).

Antoine, Mary’s husband, sat silently across from Mary. After respectfully allowing for the tears to ebb, Antoine said, “Building on what Mary has said . . . a homeland is one’s character; it’s when one can say: I am Syrian (anā sūrī). My homeland is Syria.” Emphasizing the “I am,” he continued, “I mean—I am Syrian.” As I listened to Antoine’s last statement, I felt an intense response in my heart and my tears began to flow again. His words were powerfully moving. He reiterated what Mary had said and explained that, for him, a homeland meant the love of a mother, the hard work of a father, and the excitement of siblings. He then moved on to speak about the meaning of place in a homeland and reminisced about the old “streets” in his homeland, the “stones” that he passed by as he walked to work or to school, and the familiarity that is developed with the place and all that belongs to it. The thoughts and memories lead

Antoine to the same conclusion as he said,

It [a homeland]is everything; in other words, a homeland is the life of a person . . . This is our country; this is the pride of Syrians—their homeland of Syria. This is what a homeland is. It is everything; it is the character of a person, the character of a human; this is how I think.

Then later in the interview, Antoine came up with an answer that I found the most complex of all answers as he said, “I am my homeland.”

Antoine and Mary’s visit was on a Thursday evening. The morning after, on Friday, I visited Miral and Daniel in their home. Fayruz, a Lebanese singer whose songs are familiar to all Arabs across the Arab world, was singing on their TV screen. Ever since I can remember,

Fayruz was part of my father’s morning routine as he played her songs every day before we went to school, and today she continues to be part of my morning regimen here in Canada. And so it was familiarly heartwarming to hear her voice as I walked into Miral and Daniel’s home. Their

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baby, who was about one year old, was happy to see me and to sit in my lap as I began the conversation with her parents. I asked the same question to Daniel and Miral: What is the meaning of homeland for you? Their answers echoed Antoine and Mary’s.

Daniel explained that a “homeland for a person is his memories,” and the place where he was born; he expressed that to him a homeland is the memories of the people and the place.

Miral, Daniel’s wife, compared a homeland to a mother’s womb, a place that provides a human being with all the conditions to live, “and without this, he/she would not be.” Then she went on to speak of her family in her homeland as “the second womb” for a human being, “the first reference,” “the first cradle,” “the first spring,” “the soil” on which they were planted, and “the first seed”—all of which were, according to her, the conditions needed for “a whole and healthy human being.” She then added, “a homeland is the period in your life that cannot be repeated . . . a homeland is all those people,” and concluded,

And it [a homeland] is the place where you do not need a luggage. It is your ground and your world. But some people have had to pack up their homeland in a luggage. This is the most difficult of experiences, and we are now one of those experiences. At least up until a specific point—until we can create another or a new homeland. But Syria is the place that cannot be repeated.

A few weeks later, I visited Adam and Brianna. As is the usual case in Canada, the days in December are shorter and colder. But Adam and Brianna’s home was filled with warmth.

They are parents to five children who were also in the house at the time with their friends from the neighborhood. I was invited to sit a spacious living room that reminded me of the way our homes looked in Syria where the couches were arranged side-by-side against the four walls in the room. I learned later in the conversation that the arrangement was made in such a way so as to accommodate the large numbers of visitors from the Syrian newcomer community who are often gathered in someone’s home when an occasion took place.

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Once again, I began my interview with the question: What is the meaning of homeland for you? There was a moment of silence. Then, Adam answered:

A homeland is the land, and the land is our honor, as we say. And we are attached to the land . . . We love the land. We were born in the land. It gave us birth. We were planted in it, and we were born in it, and we played on its swings.

Adam’s reply to my question reflected his deep sense of attachment to the land, a feeling of inseparableness, and an interconnectedness between his identity and the land (H. Y. Ahmed,

Hashim, Lazim, & Vengadasamy, 2012, p. 10). The land, for Adam, was a place laden with emotions. A homeland, to him, was the land and the place he called home, and Syria was

Adam’s home-land. He was separated from his homeland and I felt a deep sense of sadness in his voice.

But I also recall how during each interview, I awaited and looked for moments of relief where a joyful smile emerged on the faces of my participants or a lighthearted joke was told.

One of these moments was when Antoine smiled as he recited verses from a song for Syrian

Mahrous Alshagri. It was my first time to hear the words to this song, and I too smiled; Antoine recited the lyrics in Arabic and hummed the tune in part:

Look up the history of Arabs and see how many poets have sung and paid tribute to Syria, my tapster Syria is dignity and her people are the most generous … and its soil is our bed and her stones are the most beautiful of pillows … Syria has quenched us with dignity, in sweet, bitter, and plain cups … Syria is our mother, and thousands of times God has asked that we take care of our mothers.

He fell silent for a few seconds and then reflexively said, “It’s true that we struggled, but this

[Syria] is our mother.” Miral too described a homeland as a mother and says,

. . . a homeland naturally provides you with the ingredients, and plants in you all the details, that creates your make-up. So basically, this is the similarity--I mean a mother, or perhaps a homeland, is the first chef . . . for example, a mother—when you ask the meaning of mother, you are told that a mother is the aroma of bread; a mother is a warm

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lap; a mother is the source of security . . . I see the world through the eyes of my mother . . . a mother who has brought us up and has nurtured us with these details.

This notion of a homeland resembling a mother is familiar to us as Syrians and as Arabs in general. Ever since I remember, whether at school or within social conversations, comparing a homeland to a mother was our way of expressing our feelings of love and attachment to our homelands. The replies of my participants were not surprising, but as contextualized within their experience as displaced members of the Syrian Diaspora, they were sadder than I had ever imagined them to be and were laden with feelings of melancholy and longing.

And so I came to find that for the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora, the definition of homeland is “everything” embodied in the memories of the place and the social space it occupies, and it also captures the same sort of meanings and feelings they hold for their mothers.

Finding 1.2. On the meaning and feeling of being refugee. The words of Palestinian

Mahmoud Darwish accompanied me in each interview as I asked my participants: How does it feel to be refugee? Darwish writes, “You ask: What is the meaning of ‘refugee’? / They will say: One who is uprooted from his homeland” (Darwish, 2010, p. 38). Within the context of my research, the “They” in Darwish’s lines represented my participants, the peoples of the Syrian

Diaspora.

For Antoine, being a refugee meant finding oneself amidst a society that does not

“resemble” him. Antoine associated the word refugee with a feeling of deep longing for things of the past, for his old table. As he answered this particular question, Antoine became emotional.

He cried. I cried too. The feeling of longing was suffocating. The words came to a stop and the silence was deafening. He took a deep breath, sighed and said, “It is difficult. To come to someone who is 45 and tell him to start all over. Wallah [by God] it is a big catastrophe.” For

Antoine, being refugee, as he put it, meant longing for “everything.”

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Antoine then went on to narrate a story he lived while in Syria. It was about a poor woman who had once approached him for help as she was looking for ways to get her son out of prison. The nature of Antoine’s job allowed him to intervene. He said, “long-story-short, I gave it my all to get her son out,” and he did succeed in doing so. Here, he smiled and continued to tell me that she asked what he wanted in return for his help. His reply to her was, “Wallah [by

God] I don’t want anything, just pray for me ya ḥajjeh [my elder].” After two or three days had passed, Antoine recalled how this woman returned with a gift. He asked me to guess what she was carrying in her hands. I replied, “Bread that she’d baked.” My guess was not too far from being correct; she brought him half a kilo of ground Arabic coffee. I cried and laughed at once.

He talked about how the coffee was hot and fresh and how its aroma had filled the place. I could smell the aroma as Antoine spoke. He continued to tell me that he had framed the empty coffee package and hung it on the wall, next to his university degree. Antoine concluded “So, what can

I say to you, Ghada? I had seen so many tears in front of me and I was not easily affected, but when the story is now mine as well—for God’s sake, it’s bitter. It’s bitter.”

As for Mary, she explained that the feeling of being a refugee is lived and experienced differently depending on which “stage” is being crossed by the displaced person. She called the first stage “the stage of travelling and pre-travel.” During this stage, Mary had felt as if she were in the midst of a whirlwind, where “it’s like your feelings are put on hold and postponed.” She explained that it felt like “as if you are running and running and running away and then you arrive here [in Canada].” She then described the next stage as one made up of “a time of horrible longing accompanied by regret.” She suggested that the feeling of regret was likely due to the fact that they (the three of them) had escaped while those whom they loved were left behind in a war-torn homeland. Mary’s words reminded me of Syrian Abdul Samad’s (2015), as mentioned

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earlier in Chapter 2, where she similarly expresses, “You are embarrassed but thankful for being completely safe in a mass destruction called war, while you realize that your safety implies the death of others whom you do not know, whose hands could have written these words on your behalf.” Mary felt that this was the most difficult of stages, one that spoke to the most painful of feelings that could face a human being. She then continued to speak about the stage after arrival where one is able to sleep better after having adapted to the time difference, but explained that it is also a stage when one is hit hard with the realization that he/she is “now very far from Syria.”

Here Mary cried. She described this stage to be made up of deep feelings of longing; she told me that she spent her entire time crying throughout this stage. She continued to cry as she spoke.

She recalled how her son woke up every night in the first week after their arrival and begged and pleaded that his parents would take him back to Syria. “It [this stage] took days; it was a very difficult period,” she expressed. However, shortly after, Mary explained, one comes to accept the need to adapt and added, “this stage is not an easy one and this decision—that I am going to adapt—is not an easy decision.”

Additionally, Mary described her feeling of being a refugee as a state of imbalance. She said,

… on so many occasions I would tell Antoine that I don’t feel balanced; I mean in Syria, despite the war, I used to truly feel that when I walked, I knew where each step was going to be placed, even though I was aware that in the next step a shell might approach me and kill me, but I knew that I was walking solid steps on the land; this was my land and I knew it inch by inch; at the beginning here [in Canada], I did not feel balanced, truly Ghada, it was like the feeling of being an astronaut who is unable to walk on ground and is looking for anything to hold onto—this is how I felt, that I needed anything to hold onto.

She ascribed this feeling to many factors including the fact that they, the peoples of the Syrian

Diaspora, had arrived exhausted carrying many burdens, and that they had witnessed many

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terrible and sad experiences—“true catastrophes.” But with a spirit of resilience she stated, “. . . then you realize that at the end, you must stand again and truly adapt.”

As I listened to Mary, Najat Abdul Samad’s words came to mind once again: “When I am overcome with weakness, I bandage my heart with Syrian women’s patience in adversity”

(Alatrash, 2016, p. 28). Mary was strong. She realized that, with time, she would be able to find balance in her new homeland of Canada. She further spoke to how immigrants who make the decision to migrate to Canada are emotionally well-prepared beforehand and are aware of what is to come “which would have been much easier,” she said. But for a refugee, as in her case, she felt “yanked, yanked from your homeland and placed in another land, and as you are already in an unbalanced state, you will definitely come to find it difficult.” She explained that being a refugee is about feeling that she was forcibly taken to a ground where she had not trodden before.

She went on to speak about her feeling of being imbalanced and compared it to how it may possibly feel to be an astronaut—“you feel like you are . . . floating in space . . . that you don’t have weight.” She described it as a feeling of “weightlessness.” She resorted to the Arabic word “al-hayūlā” to elaborate on this feeling. I was not familiar with the word. I asked her to explain it. Antoine repeated: “al-hayūlā,” as if I should know the word. I told them that this was my first time to hear the word in Arabic. I came to understand from them that al-hayūlā refers to a primordial state of being, and within the context of our conversation, it speaks to their feeling of spiritlessness as a result of having left behind their spirits in a homeland. They explained that they had felt as if they had regressed to a primordial state of being. Antoine then resorted to the word “bewilderment” to further clarify their feelings. Said (2002) once used this word as he

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wrote, “The word ‘refugee’ has become a political one, suggesting large herds of innocent and bewildered people requiring urgent international assistance” (p. 181, my emphasis).

Later in the interview, Mary also expressed that being a refugee is about having to “start all over . . . not from zero but from below zero,” and she added, “[it] is exhausting me and wearing me out and will consume years from my life, aside from all the years that have already passed.” She also felt that her self-worth is also valued at zero or below.

As for Miral, she expressed that the most difficult part of how it feels to be refugee, and what came as “a shock” for her, is the severity of the sense of loneliness she lived. She compared it to the pain she felt as she gave birth to her daughter and described it as the most difficult of experiences. She associated loneliness with loss. Miral’s baby was crying in the background. She thanked her daughter for being patient, and then continued,

So, if I want to compare between Syria and here, in Syria my family would have been more present after this sort of an experience [delivery] and I would have had more help and I would have had more support. But here [in Canada] it was about the feeling of loneliness; this was one of the difficulties I experienced.

And so, I came to find that the feeling of being a refugee as told by the peoples of the

Syrian Diaspora is to feel and to visit the most extreme depths of longing, loneliness and loss.

They described their feelings to be as difficult and as excruciatingly painful as giving birth to a child. They also explained that to be a refugee is to be reminded of their sense of estrangement, to taste bitterness, to feel crippled and disabled, to feel exhausted and worn out, to feel a sense of weightlessness and bewilderment, and to live a feeling of self-worthlessness where one’s worth is valued at zero or less than zero.

Finding 1.3. On forced displacement. As discussed earlier, Said (2002) makes a distinction between “exiles, refugees, expatriates and émigrés” and points to the fact the “word

‘refugee’ has become a political one, suggesting large herds of innocent and bewildered people

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requiring urgent international assistance” (p. 181). Said’s words theoretically informed my understanding of forced displacement, but to hear about this topic as narrated by the people of the Syrian Diaspora added great depths to the story.

On forced displacement, Antoine explained,

From another standpoint, it’s not only about having been yanked, but about the fact that you no longer have options; I mean you no longer have options, and you only have one option; and something is pushing you, saying Go! [loudly] Don’t stay! Go! in all shapes and from all directions.

Mary agreed, “True; from all directions.” Then Antoine continued to describe how in having been subjected to forced displacement, one actually feels that forces are “pushing, pushing” a human being to leave. He explained that although the word “war” is a “small word,” it is one that carries severe implications: “a bad life, a costly life, and shortage of security,” and it is a place where, in the midst of explosions, gun powder, and smoke, even the air one breaths becomes toxic. I reflected on the fact that the word war is indeed made up of three letters in both

Arabic and English. The Arabic word for war is: ḥ.r.b. I had not thought about this before. As I was trying to understand all that had been said by Antoine, he stopped to ask,

Do you understand my idea? Do you understand what I mean, my lady? Reality was bad in every direction on Syrian land, one that pushed the people to try and save their lives and to preserve what has remained of their lives, and to leave the country.

I did not know how to answer. I felt overwhelmingly emotional. I nodded. I then asked my participants if they had ever considered leaving Syria before the eruption of the war. Mary told me that they were happy in Syria and explained that never in their lifetime would they have thought to leave Syria, “despite all.” She was aware that Syria was not “the Utopian village” and she acknowledged her homeland’s “mistakes”—the trash on its streets, the lack of order, and its bribed-policemen. But she resolved that “at the end of the day, when you love, you forgive the mistakes of those whom you love. . .” She explained that they forgave Syria’s mistakes because

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they “loved Syria.” With certainty she added that they would have never exchanged Syria for the most beautiful countries in the world; Syria was their homeland and they thought they would always stay in it no matter the circumstance. But war forced them to leave.

Daniel’s words echoed Mary’s. When asked, in a separate interview, of his thoughts on forced displacement and what it means to be refugee, he said,

If it were up to us, no one would choose change. Here, for example, try and tell someone who lives in Calgary to go to a place in which he would lose the advantages he has here; why would he go?

I thought of Daniel’s words and of the multitude of reasons of why I too would not choose change. But Daniel had no choice.

As for Brianna and Adam, their story of how they were forced out of their hometown of

Dar’aa was intensely painful. Dar’aa happens to the be the city where the events leading to the war had begun. Brianna explained that when the war began, they remained in Dar’aa and refused to leave. However, “after a while, and after tasting the bitterness of hardships,” they fled

Dar’aa and sought refuge in Swaida, a town in the southwestern part of Syria (which also happens to my hometown). Both Brianna and Adam expressed that they left Dar’aa crying.

They did not wish to leave. But they had no other choice. Brianna narrated, “After we saw the massacre and after youths and children were killed, we were very frightened for our children.

[Sighs].” She told me that even doctors in mosques were being killed.

However, after a year of being internally displaced in Swaida, Adam and Brianna decided to return to their hometown of Dar’aa. But they were unable to stay for long. Brianna recounted,

. . . the shelling intensified again, and we couldn’t bear it; we were scared for our children—that one’s hand or leg may be amputated because of how many children we had seen like this; a massacre also took place in Dar’aa, and so then we left for Jordan.

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I asked about how they made it to Jordan, and Brianna explained that because they didn’t have passports, they were smuggled in. She then narrated, as presented in Chapter 4, how as they were being smuggled, “the regime” noticed them and began to shoot bullets at the car in which they were being transported. Her husband interrupted in English and said, “were shooting at us and target [sic]” and then he switched back to Arabic and explained that the bullets punctured the tires of the car and how they began to recite their final prayers as they thought that they were going to die “as martyrs.” Brianna said that they didn’t think they would make it to Jordan.

Adam then thanked God for the fact that the bullets had only shot the “metal part of the wheels.”

Brianna recalled how the driver proceeded to drive on what was left of the wheels and tires, despite the heavy load of children, women and men in the car. She continued to explain that they had no option but to return to Taybeh, a Syrian town neighboring the Jordanian border, to escape the bullets. On the next day, the smugglers took another route and “God facilitated” their way, narrated Brianna.

They made it to Jordan on the second try. In Jordan, the family of seven were placed in the Zaatari refugee camp. I had heard of the conditions of the camp through media and news channels, but Adam and Brianna were the first people I had known to have lived in that camp.

From what I had seen on media channels, I was aware of the dire state of conditions in the camp; however, what was narrated by my participants far exceeded my imagination. Adam described the camp as “very bad; very hot.” Both Adam and Brianna told me that all seven of them lived in one tent; that their entire family was handed only one blanket; that the washroom was far away and dirty; that they were thirsty and forced to drink dirty water; that all their kids got sick with diarrhea and vomiting; and that they had to pay money for smuggling their children to visit a doctor in the city. Brianna then summed it up and said, “I mean we tasted a lot of bitterness.”

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Adam then spoke of the conditions that forced them to leave their homeland and into their displaced diasporic reality. He explained how at one point, after the war erupted, the shelling intensified in his hometown; he said, “there were random rockets falling on us, and I mean there was a lot.” He recalled a time when he was standing in one room while a shell penetrated the wall in an adjacent room. He explained that they didn’t know when to expect the rockets as the noise of the shelling was continuously resounding outside of their home. He also narrated how he once found his refrigerator perforated by a stray shell. It was these sort of lived conditions, he explained, that forced Syrians in his hometown of Dar’aa to leave. He said,

Everyone had to leave. Everyone left. But I was connected to my land. I didn’t want to leave the country at all. I would have never thought that one day I would leave. I was a businessman in the city. I didn’t ever think to obtain a passport. I never thought I would leave. Alhamdulillah [praise be to God] we were living and happy.

He explained that the peoples of the city of Dar’aa realized that things may escalate but never to the extent that a massacre would take place. He felt that being alive today was miraculous. He then re-narrated the incident of when they were smuggled into Jordan, and of how they did not think they could escape death and began to recite the Shahaadah (A Muslim’s declaration of faith and one of the five pillars of Islam); they thought this would be their last prayer. “Praise be to God. We returned and slept after having gone through this horror. We thought we were going to be martyrs. The car was full of holes,” Adam sighed.

Then, after two and a half years of having had to bear the worst of living conditions in

Jordan, the long-awaited phone call from the Canadian Government came inviting them to

Canada; Adam and Brianna’s family were on the first plane of refugees that arrived to Calgary.

On the topic of forced displacement, Brianna concluded, “We left against our wishes because we were forced to. Wallahi [by God] by force.” Adam added, “We left Wallahi [by

God] by force against our wishes while my tears were falling.” Brianna continued, “We were

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crying. We were wishing to return back to our home even for one second.” “To return, just to return, and to hold onto the land and our home, a home we were raised in and in which our children grew up,” said Adam.

However, Adam and Brianna’s “circumstance were stronger” than them and forced them out. They explained that their decision was made for their children’s sake and felt that they would have been committing a sin by keeping their children in the face of danger. Brianna couldn’t imagine having to bear the sight of one of her children with an amputated leg. Along the same lines, Adam did not want to live with the possibility that one of his children would become crippled and would ask him one day, “ya baba [daddy], why didn’t you take us out of here to another place that is safer?” Brianna asked if I could imagine their circumstances. I said

I couldn’t. “In the beginning we wouldn’t accept our departure and we didn’t leave until the shelling got very bad and we could no longer bear it,” said Brianna.

After having heard these most painful stories, I came to the understanding that forced displacement, as told by the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora, is about the state of having been forced to leave a beloved homeland, a land that was once an extension of their souls; that it is about having no choice but to run away (at times from massacres) and to seek refuge, and to bear living under the most horrific of conditions; that it is about having no choice but to run away in tears, and possibly be smuggled across borders, in an attempt of escaping death; and that it is about the feeling of having lost “everything.”

Theme 2: On issues of identity.

Finding 2.1. On cultural identity. The notion of identity is indeed complicated. As mentioned earlier in Finding 1.1, Antoine said,

A homeland is one’s character; it’s when one can say: I am Syrian (anā sūrī). My homeland is Syria. I mean—I am Syrian [emphasizes the “I am”].

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To Antoine, Syria is his identity. His wife Mary explained that what brings her, as well as other

Syrians she knows, to hold on tightly to their Syrian identity, has to do with what they know and what they are familiar with. She expressed,

We arrived here in our forties. I mean, how capable are we of adapting and starting all over, and of trusting anew, and of loving anew, and of getting to know anew, and of opening up anew? I think this is the problem for most Syrians and this is what brings you to intrinsically belong to your Syrian identity even when you are in Canada, and you feel a true belonging towards them [Syrians] because they understand you.

She explained how these feelings have implications on her daily conversations. She described how with her Syrian neighbor, she feels like they can understand one another in one word; that there is no need for explanations; that an understanding naturally surfaces as they both had lived the same circumstance in and outside of their homelands. “. . . so I don’t need to explain things every time,” Mary stated. She then compared her conversations with Syrians to those with a

Canadian,

For example, with our Canadian friend who is closer [in distance] than my Syrian neighbor X; she lives here; our conversation is very limited; “Hi. How are you?” and not more than this. And then you begin to consider the third sentence that you want to articulate and think about whether or not it is appropriate; is it suitable? Will she understand it in the way I express it . . . and is the natural case for human being, one always looks for what is more comfortable for him/her, and it is more comfortable for you not to have to have to start over and explain yourself again every time, and your culture, and your environment and the thing that resembles you. And this is what leads you to naturally look for the people who resemble you.

Also, as mentioned earlier in Finding 1.2, Mary felt a sense of confidence, certainty and rootedness as a Syrian, where this even impacted the solidity of her footsteps as she walked. She felt balanced in Syria and she felt whole. For Antoine, it was about the “familiarity” between him and the stones he passed as he walked the streets of his homeland. Syria to Antoine “is the character of a person; the character of a human.” “I am my homeland,” he affirmed.

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As for Miral, she felt that one’s identity is a product of the pieces deposited through the experience of a life lived in a homeland, and that it is those pieces that make up her identity today. She said that leaving a homeland was “to have lost a piece of ourselves; and [that] we have lost pieces from our soul; it is to have lost a side of our personality and character. . . you are losing something that had been deposited in your soul; it’s like this thing has been lost from your soul. . . this is how it is to me personally.”

From the above conversations, in addition to the stories narrated in the first findings of this chapter, I have come to understand that the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora are deeply connected to their homeland where a Syrian equates his identity to Syria. The displaced peoples of the Syrian Diaspora are looking for that which is familiar and “resembles” their cultural identities and for the similarities they share with other Syrians so that they can feel some sort of balance and wholeness.

Finding 2.2. On negotiating difference. My participants were also mindfully aware of the differences that existed between them, as Syrians, and their new Canadian society in which they have come to live. Miral said,

A person who has the ability to adapt, wherever he may be planted, in a fertile ground, should be able to produce. But a homeland is the period in your life that cannot be repeated . . . it is indeed Syria . . . Syria that has given me something that cannot be given by any other place.

She reflected on the differences that contributed a uniqueness to her Syrian identity. She reminisced on the shape of neighborhoods in Syria and the aroma of rain, all of which, she believed, contributed to the make-up of her identity. She even went on to discuss the details of the differences in the architecture between the Syrian and Canadian homes; she recalled how in her home in Syria the basement was where the year’s supplies of food were stored and how the second floor was their living space. She said, “So our home is different than any other home in

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the neighborhood and any place in Syria; no home resembles the other.” As she spoke, I thought of Canada and of the architecture of its homes, of how indeed most houses do generally resemble one another in outer shape and structure, and of how this sort of difference constitutes a Syrian uniqueness that may not “be repeated” in Miral’s newfound land of Canada. However, Miral also recognized that to look for similarities and for “a shared mindset and a way of thinking” was important in spite of the reality that her homeland’s “people and place are not repeatable.” This idea will be further discussed in Finding 3.2 as my participants speak to finding cultural intersections and “third spaces.”

As for Mary, she understood that as she left her homeland, she was bound for change and towards a transformed identity; she explained,

As for me, I remember the second in which we placed our feet on the way to the plane; in this place, you ask yourself a question— is this the place of no return? Or at least, will it be a long time for you before you return? And because of the way you leave, you know that if you were to return one day, you will not return as yourself; you will return as a changed person; and at this moment you realize that the decision will influence your destiny; truly, when they say that this is a decision of destiny, it truly is . . . But we didn’t possess many options; or actually, we didn’t have anything but this option; for our sake and for our son’s sake . . . it’s truly about “love knows not its depth until the hour of separation” as Kahlil Gibran says. It’s true that you don’t know the worth of your homeland until you are forced to leave it.

There was great pain in Mary’s voice as she spoke these words.

From the above stories, in addition to what will be discussed in the next section and the following Chapters, I have found that, as they negotiate their cultural identities alongside the differences, the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora are aware of their differences within the context of their new Canadian homeland, but also that their identities are continuously emerging and evolving, that they cannot be fixed in the past of a homeland and that they are fluid and becoming within moments of continuity (Hall, 1994).

Finding 2.3. On the fact of difference—Orientalism and beyond. I asked about

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challenges that may have been faced by my participants. Mary talked about the underlying

Western assumptions that are attached to Middle Easterners. She explained how she found that it is assumed that “everyone who is coming from the Middle East is cocooned within her hijab as a female or in his kufiyah [a male headdress] as a male.” She tells of how she has been asked if there are Christmas trees in Syria and whether or not Syrians put up Christmas trees. It is important to note here that Mary is Syrian-Christian; she is proud to narrate how, as a Christian family, it was part of their tradition to decorate a Christmas tree every year in their home, ever since she could remember. She said that she was also asked if they knew of Santa Claus and was shocked at such questions and mindsets. She told me about an incident in Canada when she prepared a Western Canadian dinner for her Canadian friends who surprisingly asked, “Oh do you cook Western food?” She laughingly described how some Canadians assumed that Syrians eat with their hands, tie their camels outside their homes, and that camels are a method of transportation in Syria. “Yes, these are big misrepresentations,” she said, but she also recognized that the responsibility falls on the shoulders of Syrians to break free from the cocoons built by

Western media and to counter the endless misrepresentations.

Daniel’s thoughts were in sync with Mary’s. He said, “This is the idea, that here there remains these presumptions and assumptions; that as soon as they see that you are Syrian, they immediately assume that you are this and this. They impose on you built-in presumptions and assumptions.” However, he also admitted that Syrians do come with their own assumptions and that this is not an easy task to resolve. Like Mary, he pointed to Western media as one perpetrator of the problem and blamed it in large for the dissemination of misrepresentations.

Daniel believed that because of the misrepresentations, he had been treated as a potential terrorist in airports, while someone else’s “piece of paper,” as in a Western passport, brings him or her to

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be considered and treated as a first-class citizen. He expressed his frustration with a world that

“classif[ies]” people based on nationalities and citizenships and suggested, “if you want to organize and classify people, every person is about his own lived experience, and as I said earlier, about the memories he is making.”

On the fact of difference, when it came to Brianna who is a visible Muslim woman wearing the hijab, she was faced with a particular set of struggles. Brianna explained that as she first arrived in Canada, she constantly felt the stares of people. She attributed this to her religious wear and identity. She said, “I don’t know if they liked the hijab or found it strange to see someone wearing the hijab.” She told me that she admitted to her husband how she “felt embarrassed to go out in front of people. You [addressing me] know, the ways we dress is different and it is all long, in addition to the hijab.”

Brianna then moved on to narrate the story of her 9th grade son and spoke of the challenges he faced as a Muslim student in a Canadian school. She first explained that as

Muslims, they are to pray five times a day but that one of the calls to prayer happened to fall during the noon hour while her son was attending school. And so, her son began to pray in the playground or outside of the school building. She then narrated an incident where her son, after finishing his noon prayer, was approached by a group of Canadian students who hit him and said,

“What brought you to this country? You must leave; this country is for White people.” As I heard this story, I was profoundly saddened to hear of such an experience for I had hoped that the spirits of our children were not also contaminated by hegemonic ideologies and colonial ways of knowing. Within this conversation, Adam interjected and countered the misunderstandings on Islam by quoting Prophet Muhammad: “There is no difference between an

Arab or Ajami (non-Arab), or for a non-Arab over an Arab. Neither is the white superior over

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the black, nor is the black superior over the white—except by piety.” Additionally, he recited

Al-Qur'an al-Kareem (Surah Al-Hujurat 49:13): “O mankind! We created you from a single

(pair) of a male and a female, and made you into nations and tribes, that ye may know each other

(not that ye may despise each other). Verily the most honoured of you in the sight of Allah is (he who is) the most righteous of you.” Adam explained that “righteous” within this context referred to truth and honesty. He went on to say that, as Muslims, they are taught not to look at people as white or black, nor are they allowed to cut a tree, and that they are to care for their neighbors.

From the stories above, I have come to understand that Syrians are faced with a lived reality in which media misrepresentations underpin the West’s understandings of the East, and they subsequently feel different and Otherized. Moreover, Syrian Muslim women are particularly aware of their difference through a hijab that signifies their religious identity, and their Muslim children are facing discrimination in Canadian schools and are consequently suffering adverse implications.

Finding 2.4. On resilience. It seems to be that it is often the case, as will be discussed in depth in Chapter 6, that refugees are seen as “vulnerable, desperate and in need of saving”

(Tyyska, Blower, DeBoer, Kawai, & Walcott, 2017, p. 7). There is an ontology that seems to underpin the topic of refugees; however, after hearing the stories of the peoples of the Syrian

Diaspora, I have come to learn otherwise.

Antoine asserts with unshaken willpower:

. . . based on the skill of adaptation that we had acquired as a result of war, and as a result of the many difficulties that we had faced, I think—and I will give myself permission to speak in the name of the majority of Syrians—I think that they have acquired adaptation skills to deal with their [Canadian] new reality.

What was said by Antoine was not easy to unpack. I was stunned by his words, and he must have noted this; so, he provided me with what he called “a small example.” He explained that

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adaptation is about the ability to continue to think of tomorrow and of how to protect one’s family while enduring the loss of a beloved person who had died because of “a shell or a rocket or a stray bullet or a car bomb,” and that it is about not having the choice to “stop” despite the suffering, loss and deprivation. Living war for Antoine meant having to ask the questions, “How may I continue to stay alive? How may I find for myself a safe escape in case something was to take place so that I may preserve my life and continue in this life?” Yet with unbending determination he continued,

Despite the fact that we came here and had to begin from zero in Canada, we will try to continue; no, we will not only try but we will continue, we will continue; and based on what we have already acquired of flexibility in our society, and on the fact that we are stronger as a product of the circumstances of war, I think we will continue and we will remain and we will succeed. This is what I think.

Mary, Antoine’s wife agreed. She explained that although the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora arrived “exhausted” and weighed down, they also realized that “at the end you must stand again and truly adapt.” Antoine elaborated further and said that even though they are not yet “in a full state of balance,” they are “so much better than last year.” Laughingly, he told me, “Much better than five months ago; much better than three months ago. . .” Mary nodded in agreement and continued,

This is what we are trying to say to you. As Antoine has said, we are certainly better now than before and certainly better than last year. We now know more. I mean, like little children, you first crawl, and then your movements become faster; and then you walk; and then you have the ability to reply. We are the same as this. At first, our steps were very short, frightened, and imbalanced, especially because we too were not balanced, but after a little while, you adapt more, you know more, and you know better where to place your foot.

Daniel was no less resilient. He has also found that the “general idea held about refugees is that they are weak people coming from a state of need . . . [that] the word ‘refugee’ implies weakness referring to someone who had escaped.” He admitted that perhaps becoming refugee

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was indeed a process of escape for him, but he also indicated that it was also a decision driven by courage and explained,

At times, when you are in a place of oppression, your escape becomes a sign of courage and to stay is to accept humiliation. This is what happens. So as for us, when we came here, we didn’t come as people who did not have a life and came to create a life here; we came as people who have our history and our successes and we came to create success here; so as for us, we came to make something here; because we have a goal.

He further explained that it may be the case that for those who did not live the displaced

Diasporic realities, the word refugee might infer “misery and sadness and something very tragic.” However, as for Daniel, he deeply believed that “everything that happens to a person is something that increases his knowledge and experience in life.” He pointed to other historical lived realities of war and oppression, and how they ended and are now, in retrospect, but a short period of human history. He then concluded,

If we can go back to the idea that if we are going to think about what we may have lost, we would end up being people with great losses; but if we can think about what we are creating, we are always creating something new; so this is the idea; we are not going to allow our history, and the things we love—our memories—to be part of our upcoming lives; our memories are beautiful because we lived them and we are finished with them, and we are now doing something new; this is the idea; if a person is going to continue to think about his past, his head will be turned backwards looking back at memories; but when your head is turned forward, you will see something new.

Daniel’s wife, Miral, also determinedly declared, “A person who has the ability to adapt, wherever he may be planted, in a fertile ground, should be able to produce.” She then explained how, for example, the act of denial in a state of sickness may slow down the process of healing, and how as soon as one acknowledges that he/she is sick and begins to take medicine, the process of healing begins. Contextualizing this idea within her displaced reality, she said,

So if I want to think that having been uprooted from Syria and from my roots is the sickness, and if I continue to deny and not accept this big occurrence in my life, then I am slowing my process of integration here and I am writing off years of my life, and I am also slowing the process of my progress.

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As I sat and listened to my participants’ unbending resolve despite all the struggles and the unfathomable pain, I was deeply inspired. There was hope and there was healing. My participants, the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora, are indeed resilient. They described their presence in Canada as a process of adaptation and healing; they believed that resilience is a product of war, is the will to survive despite the worst of lived circumstances, and is about insisting to remain, to continue and to succeed.

Theme 3: On creating new possibilities: Activating and actualizing the third space.

Finding 3.1. On issues of language. As mentioned in the previous chapter, I offered my participants the choice of speaking in either Arabic or English. Their replies were unanimously:

“Arabic.” Some even laughed at my offer; Daniel said, “If I were to tell you what I’ve told you in English, they [the words] would not come out with me—you would think that I am a little child trying to express something.”

Language, for my participants, represented a key struggle. Antoine first explained,

“Language is our principle difference as it is the key to dealing with others in this society.” In a separate interview, Daniel’s reply echoed Antoine’s as he said, “The most difficult thing for me was and still is the barrier of language . . . Because language is the door to many matters.” By way of an example, he elaborated on how his struggle with language is about his inability to express and relay his thoughts and what he may have in mind. “So language for many people is a big barrier,” he believed. He continued to talk about the LINC [Language Instruction for

Newcomers to Canada] classes that he is currently taking and expressed, “I am not seeing that it is of much help to me.” Daniel was frustrated with his classes because, he explained, he was being taught basic phrases on how to “how to buy things from the restaurant, how you eat, how you get your shopping needs, how you go to a physician, these basic things.” But he was

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looking for “bigger ideas.” The current classes, in his opinion, did not ignite a drive for adults to learn the language. He believed that just as children are taught language through topics that were interesting to them, adults should also be offered ways to learn a language through subjects that are also of interest to them.

Here, I asked Daniel, “If you were able to design a class, what would you recommend as a curriculum for the class?” He answered,

As for me, for example, I am following YouTube videos for learning English called English Central—what’s nice about it, is that it offers you a depth to language; for example, I like to use the language of philosophy; others may choose to learn the language of their field; so they offer you deeper subjects while in the form of conversation, and so we are able to learn the language in which we need to express ourselves; we are not only about being people who may need to go to a doctor or eat or buy groceries from the store and consume I mean. It is not only about these things. We need some diversity in subjects from this standpoint; so that one feels that what he is learning is of value.

Laughingly, he concluded, “. . . maybe if I wanted to say all this in English, maybe I will die before I can learn how to say it all; maybe, depending on one’s reality.”

On the other hand, Daniel’s wife, Miral, felt that she was “progressing a great deal” in her acquisition of the English language. “… so language to me is not a challenge or a hindrance at all. Language is undoubtedly an attainable goal,” she said with confidence and added, “One day, I will be able to speak fluently [she pronounces the word ‘fluently’ in English and laughs], and so this with time will be accomplished.” However, Miral pointed to the need for opportunities to put their English learning to practice and suggested, “. . . if only I am presented with an opportunity in the community, a real departure place, I am sure I will no longer encounter the difficulties I am now facing.” She further connected such an opportunity to attaining some sort of self-worth and explained,

… because when I feel needed, I feel my self-worth because I would be a source of help for someone else; I would feel that I am offering him/her something that helps him/her

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continue as well this was one of the difficulties; another difficulty was the feeling of being disabled—that you are someone who has the full ability to achieve great accomplishments in your own homeland to a person who now feels that his wings and abilities are cut and that his abilities are downsized in a new place. These are battles that take place within you until you become a balanced person able to express himself/herself in this new place through their [English] language and customs and work and environment . . . [Here in Canada] you become nothing.

Miral’s words, especially her last words, have stayed with me ever since that day I sat with her; she felt no different than Antoine and Mary, that their self-worth, based on their Syrian education and qualification, was “equivalent to zero . . . and perhaps less than zero” here in Canada.

Moreover, Antoine expressed that he felt “uncomfortable, embarrassed, self-conscious.” He laughed, “So many times at work, when I feel like saying something, I quieten myself as I am worried that my statements may be misunderstood.”

However, like Miral, Brianna also felt that she was making progress when it came to her

English-acquisition skills. She narrated how during the beginning stages of her life in Canada, she was not able to understand “anything” her neighbor said except “hi, how are you?” She laughed and Adam her husband also laughed. She then went on to say, “Yes, now when you understand them [Canadians], things are different.” Her husband added, “We now understand them better. We understand their character better.” Then Brianna began to speak English and said, “He [her neighbor] now tells me, ‘Before don’t understand. Now I understand.’” She continued to laugh.

And so, it became apparent from the stories presented by my participants that their lack of knowledge of English is identified as a key struggle as they try to negotiate their new identities in Canada. Moreover, it was expressed that the current LINC classes in which they are currently placed as language learners are only equipping them with simple language skills that have not proven helpful in relaying their complex emotional lived experiences and are further

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“taking away from their drive of learning.” Also, the English language happens to constitute a principle difference for Syrian newcomers in Canada. The issue of language, they suggested, has had negative implications on their feelings of self-worth and self-efficacy.

Finding 3.2. On finding cultural intersections and “third spaces.” As I heard about the lived experiences of my research participants, and while trying to make sense of their complex stories and unfathomable human conditions, I also sought to find spaces of hope and possibilities.

Antoine was struggling with the idea of finding a space in which he could find belonging in Canada. He said, “At the end of the day, there are no intersections [between the Syrian culture and the Canadian culture]. There are no intersections whatsoever.” His words were difficult to hear. I thought to myself—but there must be a way. Antoine continued to explain that it’s not that he was “rejecting the Canadian community,” nor was it about wishing to live “amidst those who [only] resemble” him, for not all Syrians resemble one another he reminded me. But, he told me, it is about being able to visit someone’s house without feeling “uncomfortable,” “self- conscious” and strange to a culture. However, he does end on a hopeful note,

[Canadians] are very comfortable to deal with and they call me by a nickname (A), and they encourage me to talk to them about whatever I wish and to be direct without worrying about expressing things in their way of expression; and thank God, I have made beautiful relationships within a few months, and I speak with everyone.

As for Adam and Brianna, as well as for Miral, they saw things differently. Adam and

Brianna explained they do feel like that they are progressing in English, and that they are coming to better understand their neighbors (as mentioned earlier) and are now exchanging visits with one another. Brianna told me that on the days she cooks a Syrian meal, she accounts for her neighbors and delivers food to them. Adam and Brianna seem to be finding a more

“comfortable” place for themselves as they build their new lives in Canada.

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As for Miral, she compared her lived experience in Canada to that of marriage where, she said, “you bring together two different worlds and you bring them to live in this partnership, and no one should efface the characteristics of the other or conquer the other person so that they can live in a state of understanding and peace.” She went on to point to the need to look for “a third space” in which the two cultures intersect, “a shared space in which this connection could be made.” She insisted that this third space is not one in which they (the newcomers) are to be amalgamated into the host culture. She further pointed to what’s happening today in Europe, where for example with the influxes of Syrians, “there is now a renewal in music and new musical additions, and they are making a new history of new music that is a way to connect between East and West.”

Here, I thought of how Miral’s words align with Homi Bhabha’s (1988) notion of “third space” as will be discussed in depth in Chapter 7, and of the “inter,” “in-between,” and “hybrid spaces.” I thought of where I, too, position myself today, as a Syrian-Canadian, on the hyphen in-between my two nationalities. In the next chapters, I will autoethnographically think through these notions; however, as I come to summarize this finding, I have learned that the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora, in their search for a comfortable space, continue to look for the intersections, in-between, and third spaces—spaces in which their old Syrian cultural identities may be preserved while their new and always-becoming identities are celebrated.

Finding 3.3: On how Canadians can be of help: Activating and actualizing the third space. As I looked for ways to activate and actualize possibilities so that we may be of help to the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora, I asked my research participants: What do you believe are ways in which Canadians can help as you try to make meaning of family and home in your new homeland, and as you negotiate and remediate your identities?

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Mary was quick to answer and explained how she believed that both Canadians and

Syrian newcomers “are scared.” She suggested that “the key [to resolving this problem] is knowledge.” She quoted an Arabic saying: “A human’s enemy is the unknown,” and insisted:

Knowledge is the key and it is the bridge, and it is what makes things easier. It’s about knowledge. Knowledge is an explanation. It is an explanation about yourself . . . There is nothing more beautiful, easier, and more comfortable.

She recalled an incident when one of their Canadian friends came to visit them for the first time; she described how he came with a million questions. And she also admitted that when she learned of his visit, she too had a million questions. However, as they came to know their new friend, Mary and Antoine’s fears were put to rest. “Knowledge helps you overcome fear,” she affirmed.

Daniel’s thoughts were aligned with Mary’s. He explained that in order to build bridges, we (both Canadians and Syrians) must expand our awareness and our perceptions, for “the more we expand our horizons and perceptions, the more we are able to take in more people.” He added that our awareness has to be stretched beyond what is transmitted by today’s media, where

“the more awareness, the more the borders and boundaries are expanded.” I asked Daniel for a tool and he replied, “connecting, talking, talking one to one, not sympathizing.” He believed that sympathizing does not yield results and does not build bridges. I was stunned to hear Antoine and Mary also articulate very similar thoughts on empathy one day earlier while in a separate interview. They too explained that “sympathy referred to helplessness . . . that you feel sorry, feel sympathy, for this person and that’s it. You feel sorry for him, and it’s like you are cocooned with him in his state, but you don’t do anything about it . . . sympathy does not possess any power at all.” However, they go on to point to empathy as a way of activating sympathy.

Mary suggested, “empathy means that you feel sympathy and you then actually do something

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about it. Perhaps you can offer advice to that person; perhaps you don’t do anything but listen.

Empathy. Let me tell you what the difference is—empathy has power, sympathy does not.”

On a different note, Mary added that, in order to help the Syrian newcomers become a part of their new Canadian culture, Canadians must at one point find ways to “recycle” the knowledge that is part of a Syrian newcomer’s education and experience. She expressed how they (Syrians) too have worked very hard to obtain their education and qualifications but that

“the Canadian government does not acknowledge them.” Mary deeply believed that 100% of the people who have come to Canada are struggling with this issue. She was not blind to the fact that there is work to be done by both Syrians and Canadians, and she believed one solution to be

“that each individual is assessed on an individual basis; that committees are created—for example, one for assessing engineers and according to Canadian standards and in accordance with international standards in a way that suits the Canadian society.” She added,

But we are talking about the obstacles that are faced by those who have university qualifications, and how these qualifications are assessed. Perhaps there could be an exam; I am here in front of you, and I consider myself very qualified in my domain. Come and examine me and with your standards, but don’t assume that my degree is always zero and ask me to adjust it. Don’t assume that my qualifications are always zero and ask me to recycle. Examine me with your standards of measurements . . . When you bring these people to this country and you are already aware of their university qualifications, we are very shocked to have to start over, not from zero but from below zero, and this is often causing us depression.

As I write this dissertation, one that has taken years of education in the making, I cannot begin to imagine how it must feel to stand in Mary’s place today as she said, “No one has acknowledged my 18 years of studies—12 years until I obtained my high school baccalaureate degree . . . [and] 6 years of university. These are 18 years of my life that are equivalent to zero here, and perhaps less than zero.”

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Along the same lines, Daniel also told me that he worked professionally in marketing in

Syria; he said,

. . . and so as a skill, I have what any Canadian has in his language but because of our weakness in language, people don’t have the courage to employ us in our fields. But as for language, you might find later that it is the simplest thing . . . if they dare to depart from this scientific way of thinking, like a machine—what has become like a robot who doesn’t look at you or who you are but looks at what is written only, the human dimension that’s behind this person doesn’t exist; his presence is like a machine; what concerns me [a Canadian employer/assessor/etc.] is 1, 2, 3, and if these are not present, I don’t care what is present; and the more the law, the less creativity that can take place; the person has to abide.

As for Antoine, he believed that no one can do anything on their own. He expressed, on behalf of the Syrian peoples, that all they needed is “for their hands to be held and that they are guided in the right direction,” until they are able to walk again on their own.

And so, as we look for ways to help, and to activate and actualize possibilities, the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora suggest that Canadians ought to look for ways to recycle their knowledge, education and experience. They also proposed that they ought to be assessed individually in their respective domains based on the assumption of a funds in knowledge model instead of intellectual deficiency. Furthermore, they invited Canadians to be open to other ways of knowing the world and insisted that knowledge is the key to understanding one another and to building bridges. Displaced Syrians in Canada further expressed that, for them, sympathy is powerless whereas empathy is driven by a desire to actively help with making change. They explained that sympathy is a feeling whereas empathy is an act, and they suggested that empathy meant to hold a Syrian’s hand and guide him/her to find the road to success in an unfamiliar

Canadian terrain.

4.9 Conclusion

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I hope that the stories I have presented in this chapter have offered alternate ways of knowing and understanding the human condition of the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora as they negotiate and remediate their new and becoming identities in Canada.

In the following three chapters, I hope to make sense of these stories by way of an autoethnographic interpretation where I engage with the following three main themes: On the meanings and feelings of the lived experience of the Syrian Diasporic realities; on issues of identity; and on creating new possibilities: Activating and actualizing the third spaces.

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Chapter 5

On the Meanings and Feelings of the Lived Experiences of the Syrian Diasporic Realities— An Autoethnographic Interpretation

5.1 Introduction

It is my hope that the stories, as told by the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora in the previous chapter, have engaged new ways of knowing and understanding the displaced Syrian Diasporic subjects. In this chapter, my goal is to autoethnographically make sense of the stories and of my research findings. I deeply believe that, “stories are the way humans make sense of their worlds and are essential to human understanding” (Ellis, 2004, p. 32).

As discussed in Chapter 3, I engaged an “interpretive paradigm” (Denzin, 2001, pp. 28-

29) where, as a researcher, I may become a co-constructor of knowledge through an interpretation of the meaning of lived experiences (Lincoln & Guba, 2000, p. 196) while keeping in mind that my interpretations are but one subjective lens to “reading the word and the world”

(Freire & Macedo, 1987). In this chapter, and for the remainder of this dissertation, I seek to interpret the stories of the people of the Syrian Diaspora through an “anti-Orientalist” and anti- colonial framework, and to question the epistemological and ontological underpinnings of the

Arab/Middle Eastern subject as historically presented within the framework of colonialism, a project by which “the European culture was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively” (Said,

1979, p. 3). I hope that the chapters to come may bring us to identify some of the similarities we share as humans with the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora as we hear their stories, stories narrated through their own voices, and to challenge the underlying assumptions and ways of knowing that have defined the displaced Syrian peoples. I seek for my interpretations to give way to a knowledge that may have been dismissed in Orientalist and colonial narratives. As for the

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autoethnographic element in my interpretations, as put by Said (1979), this dissertation “in many ways . . . [is] an attempt to inventory the traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals” (p. 25).

As I sat and listened to the stories told by my research participants, I continued to think through the following questions:

§ What pre-existing knowledge do we hold on the Arab/Middle Eastern subjects,

and what are its limitations; and could a shift in our knowledge allow for new

possibilities of knowing to emerge?

§ How have colonial Orientalist epistemological impositions come to shape our

ontological views on this subject, and how do narratives written by peoples of the

Diasporas come to create new possibilities on knowing the Syrian Diasporic

subject?

I hope that my interpretation may help in the “decolonization” and “dis/mantling” (Tiffin, 1987) of what has been presented on the Syrian subjects in dominant colonial, political and imperial frameworks. In my attempt to offer “counter-discursive” narratives, I seek to offer a “reading and exposing of its [the dominant discourse] underlying assumptions and the dis/mantling of these assumptions from the cross-cultural standpoint of the imperially subjectified ‘local’”

(Tiffin, 1987, p. 23) which, in my research, happens to be the new displaced Syrian Diasporic subject in Canada.

5.2 Why Am I Doing All This?

Frantz Fanon (1963) writes,

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It is through the effort to recapture the self and to scrutinize the self, it is through the

lasting tension of their freedom that men will be able to create the ideal conditions of

existence for a human world.

Superiority? Inferiority?

Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other

to myself? Was my freedom not given to me then to build the world of the You? (p. 180-

181)

This passage words my deepest aspiration. To begin with myself so that I can come to understand the other, to touch and feel the other, and to use my freedom as a tool in the building of our humanity—a humanity made up of humans with the same color of red hearts. Like Fanon

(1963), “I find myself suddenly in the world and I recognize that I have one right alone: That of demanding human behavior from the other” (p. 179, my emphasis). In the words of Stanley

Witkins (2014), “What I am [also] trying to do is to reflect in the present on how I experienced this event in the past,” on how I can “understand my feelings, thoughts, and reactions at that time from my current vantage point” (p. 14), and on how I can bring this understanding to help make sense of the experience of others.

5.3 On Affect and Standing in the Shoe of the Other

In November 2017, I presented a TEDx Calgary Talk. When I first received an email inviting me to be a speaker, I remember closing it and thinking that it must be a hoax; but I did not delete it as I wanted to check its validity when I had a free minute. Before I had a chance to go back and inspect the suspicious email, and while driving back from work the next day, I received a call with the words TEDx Calgary printed on my iPhone screen. I quickly pulled off to the side of the road and found myself speaking to one of the founders of TEDx Calgary. My

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thoughts were racing and getting far ahead of me—the email was indeed legitimate; this was my opportunity to disrupt the hegemonic narratives, to tell my stories, and to plant another seed for an empathetic cultural understanding.

On November 4, 2017, I delivered what turned out to be a 16 minute and 46 seconds

TEDx Talk. I remember walking on stage determined to give it my all—my heart and soul. I wholeheartedly hoped, and prayed, that my words would find their way into the hearts of my audience. After my Talk, TEDx Calgary quoted me on their website and on different social media outlets as I said,

Today I hope to highlight the similarities that we share as humans, and I hope to do this

by way of stories. I hope that my stories allow you to put yourselves in the place of the

Other, to try to understand, and to feel and listen to their hearts.

As I re-read my words as selected by TEDx Calgary, I felt a spark of hope ignited again in my sad heart. Sadness has a way of dimming and blackening our realities, but hope, like the light of a candle in darkness, no matter how faint, relights our worlds in powerful ways.

About a month or so later, I ran into one of my professors in the hallway and she invited me into her office; she is someone whom I seem to connect with on a deeper human level. We talked about my mother-in-law who just passed away in Syria, about the importance of getting published, and about my TEDx Talk. I expressed to her my hopes of having engaged my Talk as a way to bring people to be in the place of others, to stand in the shoe of others. She smiled, turned her chair, and pulled out of her purse a number of articles she had been reading, one of which was by Anwaruddin (2016) titled, “Why critical literacy should turn to the ‘affective turn’:

Making a case for critical affective literacy.” She apologized for her handwritten notes

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throughout the article—I told her that, for me, her notes were a pair of lenses that allowed me to see and live things through her eyes, and that I felt very fortunate to have this lens.

The article spoke to issues on critical literacy education and it engaged different approaches to critical literacy, one of which interrogates multiple viewpoints and invites us “to imagine standing in the shoes of others—to understand experience and texts from our own perspective and the viewpoints of others and to consider these various perspectives concurrently”

(van Sluys, Lewison, & Seely Flint, 2006, p. 383). As my professor pointed to this part of the article, I smiled and was deeply touched by the timing of these words for they echoed my highest aspirations as a pedagogue, as a researcher, and as a human. It was also then that I felt that perhaps things were finally coming together and making sense on a deeper level.

My conversation with this professor also brought me to reflect deeper on the importance of affect and emotions as I engaged and interpreted narratives of the Syrian Diaspora. On affective literacy, Anwaruddin (2016) writes, “Historically, language and literacy education have focused on the reading and writing of texts, without paying sufficient attention to how texts and various approaches to reading and writing them position the subject” (p. 383). Sarah S. Ahmed

(2004) further suggests, “It is through emotions, or how we respond to objects and others, that surfaces or boundaries are made: the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ are shaped by, and even take the shape of, contact with others’’ (p. 10). Within the context of affective literacy, I hope that the engaged narratives and interpretations in this chapter, and the readings of these narratives, may contribute to an “affective turn” (Cloug, 2007) and may open up the possibilities, as in the words of Mairi

McDermott (2015), for a “counter-hegemonic epistemology” (p. 186). McDermott writes,

“Affect is sticky, it sticks to particular bodies and creates communities or allows us to distance ourselves from some Others . . . The affects stuck to these bodies contaminate reason and

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rationality” (p. 184). I hope that my interpretations may act as a counter-narrative that re-shapes how we feel about the other, as a reading that brings us, through emotions, closer to the heart of the other, and as a discourse that de-contaminates reason and rationality and re-situates our subjectivity through a better understanding of the other.

5.4 On Interpreting Stories

As Norman K. Denzin (2001) writes:

Close inspection reveals that emotionality is everywhere present in interpretive research.

It is present in the moods and feelings individuals bring to a study. It is present in the

lives of those who are studied. It is present in the interactions that go on between

researchers and subjects. (p. 28)

Emotions, in incommensurable terms, are bottomlessly endless in their depth—this is what I have come to discover as I wrote and interpreted the stories of my research participants. As mentioned in the previous chapter, before walking into my interviews, I was acutely aware that my topic—On the Lived Experience of the Syrian Diaspora in Canada—is charged with emotions. Despite my preparedness, I was overwhelmed. The emotions that dwelled in the hearts of my participants were not only expressed in words but also in tears, tears that burnt my heart. They were emotions that spoke to sadness, pain, loneliness, estrangement, longing, fear, and also to resilience and hope as will be discussed throughout the next chapters.

As mentioned earlier, my interviews provided me with a “thick description” (Denzin,

2001; Ellis et al., 2011; Geertz, 1973), one that was packed with stories of lived experiences and raw emotions. In this chapter, I autoethnographically unpack these stories and begin with the first theme: On the meanings and feelings of the lived experiences of the Syrian Diasporic realities. Under the Theme 1, I present three findings:

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Finding 1.1. On the meaning of homeland.

Finding 1.2. On the meaning and feeling of being refugee.

Finding 1.3. On forced displacement.

I seek to write a “[t]hick interpretation [that] constructs a system of analysis and understanding that is meaningful within the worlds of lived experience” (Denzin, 2001, p. 20) whereas, as

Denzin (2001) goes on to explains, “Thick interpretation attempts to unravel and record these multiple meaning structures that flow from interactional experience” (p. 20). I am mindful that

“[a] good interpretation of anything—a poem, a person, a history, a ritual, an institution, a society—takes us into the heart of that of which it is the interpretation” (Geertz, 1973, p. 30). As

I sat and listened to my interviewees, and as I began to analyze and interpret their stories, I did indeed feel, in incommensurable ways (as is always the case with emotions), that my heart also journeyed into the hearts of my research participants. It is my hope that my interpretation may also have a meaningful affect on my readers and bring them closer to the hearts of the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora.

As I began to interpret my stories, I continued to think through the following research questions:

• How do Syrian newcomers come to make sense of what it means to have lost a home

and a homeland as it relates to the Syrian Diasporic experience?

§ What stories can Syrian newcomers share with us about their experiences in

Syria since the eruption of the war and after their arrival to their newfound

city of Calgary?

§ What do Syrian newcomers believe are ways in which Canadians (educators,

employers, community organizations, policymakers) can help as they try to

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make meaning of family and home in their new homeland, and as they

negotiate and remediate their identities?

In the next sections of this paper, I hope that my interpretations of the presented stories in

Chapter 4 will bring forth a deeper understanding of the lived experience and human condition of the displaced peoples of the Syrian Diaspora in Canada.

5.5 Presentation of Findings: Theme 1

Theme 1: On the meanings and feelings of the lived experiences of the Syrian

Diasporic realities.

Finding 1.1. On the meaning of homeland. Earlier in this dissertation, I spoke to the meaning of homeland, and what it means to have lost a homeland, through the lens of Palestinian

Mahmoud Darwish. Here, I think it is appropriate to begin with his Darwish’s (2010) words once again:

You ask: What is the meaning of ‘refugee’?

They will say: One who is uprooted from his homeland.

You ask: What is the meaning of ‘homeland’?

They will say: The house, the mulberry tree, the chicken coop, the beehive, the smell of

bread, and the first sky. (p. 38)

And in his poem “I belong there,” he writes,

I belong there. I have memories. I was born as everyone is born.

I have a mother, a house with many windows, brothers, friends, and a prison cell with a

chilly window!

. . . To break the rules, I have learned all the words needed for a trial by blood.

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I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a single word:

Homeland. (p. 7)

To the poet, a homeland represents the memories of a space and a social place of belonging from its sky to its houses and even to its prison cell. Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin (1995) write:

“Place is thus the concomitant of difference, the continual reminder of the separation” (p. 391).

Said (1999) calls it geography and writes, “along with language, it is geography—especially in the displaced form of departures, arrivals, farewells, exile, nostalgia, homesickness, belonging, and travel itself—that is at the core of my memories of those early years. Each of them . . . has a complicated, dense web of valences that was very much a part of growing up, gaining an identity, forming my consciousness of myself and of others” (preface). I will speak to language issues later in this dissertation, but for now I would like to think of geography and of the memories that are attached to spaces and places.

For my research participant Daniel, the definition of homeland also embodies his memories of the place to which he belonged, as well as memories of the people who were part of that place. A homeland to Daniel is the physical place and the social space it occupies. He explains that the memories of his past in Syria constitute the pieces that make-up his identity. As

I spoke to Daniel, Fayrouz (a Lebanese singer) sang on their T.V. screen and the space of the living room was filled with memories of his past as well as of my past in Syria. I remember how my father played songs of Fayrouz every morning throughout my childhood; hearing Fayrouz’s voice on that day bridged the geographical distance I felt with my homeland and the spiritual distance I felt with my late father.

As for Mary, as she thought of Syria, she cried with a longing heart. She explains that, for her, a homeland represents memories of her mother, father, brothers and sisters, the

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neighborhoods, the church and the places she “used to love,” her friends, the excitement of her mother as she awaited her children’s return, her tired father as he returned from work, and “all of these things.”

For Miral, a homeland is “the aroma of rain” on her windows and the “shape” of her home, “the first seed . . . [the place] where you were born and how you grow up as a child with people who are the first reference for you and who are the first school for you.” She also adds,

“it [a homeland] is the place where you do not need a luggage. It is your ground and your world.

But some people have had to pack up their homeland in a luggage. This is the most difficult of experiences, and we are now one of those experiences.” To Antoine, a homeland is also his father and his siblings and the familiarity with the streets and the stones. He says “a homeland is the life of a person . . . it is everything” (my emphasis).

The statements above embody incommensurable moments that are steeped in personal lived experiences and speak to the essence of a homeland, and to the place and the memories it conjures. Both Palestinian and Syrian exiles echo similar definitions of a homeland—for all, a homeland embodies “everything” attached to the memories of the place and its social space, from family members to beehives and chicken coops, to the smell of bread and the aroma of rain, to the shape of a home and a mother’s excitement as her children return home.

The replies of my participants are laden with emotions. The intensity of the emotions in their replies, as explained by Salman Rushdie (1991), is possibly due to the fact that when one

“is out-of-country and even out-of-language, [he/she] may experience this loss in an intensified form. It is made more concrete for him [/her] by the physical fact of discontinuity, of his present being in a different place from his past, of his being ‘elsewhere’” (p. 12). Today, peoples of the

Syrian Diaspora are indeed “out-of-country” (Rushdie, 1991) and “out-of-place” (Said, 1999).

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I, too, long to be on the soil of and in my homeland. Since the war erupted, I have not been able to visit Syria. My last visit to its sacred soil was in the summer of 2011, a few months after the war erupted. Before the war, the arrival of the summer meant that I would pack up my suitcases and travel with my children to spend our summer vacations in our homeland. For me, summers carry the scent of a homeland; they smell of jasmine and of my mother-in-law’s freshly baked bread at dawn. I, too, profoundly believe that the meaning of homeland is indeed embodied in the memories of the place and in the social space it occupies. My longing has intensified as a result of the physical “fact of discontinuity” that I have had no choice but to accept for the past seven years of continuous war in Syria; however, I am also aware of the fact that my loss is compensated in part with a Canada that I call a second homeland, a place for which I have come to feel a deep sense of belonging. Geographically speaking, as a Canadian, I am, and I feel, in-place, but members of the Syrian Diaspora have not yet come to know this sort of feeling. I am hopeful that they too will come to feel a sense of belonging with time. I identify myself as a Syrian-Canadian today, but they identify themselves as Syrians not only because they do not carry a passport that labels them as Canadians, but also because, I believe, they have not yet come to feel in-place.

As I consider the notion of place as contextualized within the space of a homeland, I am brought to think of the color of the land in my hometown of Syria. It was red, a dark deep red.

My father would repeat, at every chance while we lived in the U.S., the story behind the color of the soil—he told us that it was red because our hometown of Swaida (as captured in the photo below taken in 2011) is located on volcanic land and its soil contains a high concentration of iron, and he also always expressed how much he missed it. Until today, I think of my father’s words and of the red color of Swaida’s soil each time I think of the land.

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Red also represents the color of blood that has taken over and colonized the map and the space of my homeland. Soon after the Syrian war erupted, I wrote a poem on Syria and titled it

“Red.” I wrote this poem as a reaction to a photo posted on Facebook of a dead Syrian family. I remember the excruciating pain I felt as a mother when I saw the photo; I remember the burning sadness; and I remember the suffocating feeling of helplessness. I also remember how my words were mixed with tears as they came to create this poem. I wrote:

Black, olive, yellow, blue, and different shades of red

were the colours in a photo tossed around on Facebook today.

A dismal coal black (mixed with red) was the colour of his hair.

A pallid light olive (mixed with red) was the colour of his skin.

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An ill queasy yellow (mixed with red) was the colour of his shirt.

A nauseating sick green (mixed with red) was the colour of the soccer ball on his shirt.

A washed-out faded blue (mixed with red) was the colour of his jeans.

There was no white, only whiter shades of pale, but no white.

And, the red...

A ravenous, unquenchable, and predatory red was the colour of his splattered blood, and the colour of his nearby mother’s blood and of his little brother, and tiny sister

— all four, next to one another, mute like the grey cement on which they lay, not in an embrace, but apart; all four drenched in red blood...

Red:

Wine of kings, rubies of presidents’ wives, greed, shame, slaughter, massacres, blood, explosions,

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fire,

sirens,

carnage,

death,

a martyr,

a poppy,

the heart of a mother,

a kiss to a beloved,

a rose next to a grave

and Syria is red. (Alatrash, 2014b)

I wrote this poem as a Syrian desperately voicing a plea to a silent humanity. I wrote this poem to humanize the suffering, to try to disrupt the recurring and desensitizing news on Syria, and I wrote this poem as a way to try “to imagine standing in the shoes of others—to understand experience . . . from our own perspective and the viewpoints of others” (van Sluys et al., 2006, p.

383). I am a mother; I have three children; I live and breathe them; to try to imagine myself lying on the floor with them, drenched in red blood, is beyond painful; it is incommensurably suffocating. This happens to be the doom of many Syrian families today. Syria is the red place from where the Syrian Diasporic peoples have come in search of life. It is a deeply wounded place. As I write these words, I hope and I pray that the white in Canada’s snowy land may alleviate the burning pain of the bleeding Syrian hearts.

My participants also think of their homeland as a mother. Antoine says, “This [Syria] is our mother.” He then laughingly recalls a traditional song from Aleppo by Syrian Mahrous

Alshaghri and recites its verses in Arabic:

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Look up the history of Arabs and see how many poets have sung and paid tribute to

Syria, my tapster.

Syria is dignity and her people are the most generous… and its soil is our bed and her

stones are the most beautiful of pillows…

Syria has quenched us with dignity, in sweet, bitter, and plain cups…

Syria is our mother, and a thousand times God has asked that we take care of our

mothers. [my translation]

He then expresses, “It’s true that we struggled, but . . . [Syria] is our mother.” Miral also speaks of Syria as a mother and says, “a mother, or perhaps a homeland, is the first chef.” To Miral,

Syria is a mother, the chef in whose hands were the “ingredients” that went into her make-up and the “data” that shaped her character. Miral says that she sees the world through the eyes of her mother. A mother to Miral also embodies the smell of bread, a warm lap, and a sanctuary. She explains that just as the womb provides the ideal environment with all the necessary conditions for an infant to grow, so does a motherland for its people. Without the womb, “this being would not be,” she insists, and then she extends the metaphor of the womb to represent “family,” where, she says, “[family] is the second womb . . . [and] family is the soil on which we were planted and became trees.”

In Mary and Antoine’s home, as we visited, Mary was peeking her head from the kitchen and answering my questions while brewing Arabic coffee. The way Syrians, as well as other

Middle Easterners, make their coffee is different from how coffee is brewed in the West. We

Syrians (I am intensely feeling the Syrian in my identity at this moment) heat water on a stove top in a specific coffee pot called rakweh. Once the water is at a boiling point, we stir in the very finely ground Arabic coffee (mixed with cardamom). Then, in what almost looks like a dance,

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we move the rakweh away from and back to the heat while the coffee rises and settles again and again. My mother has told me that this process helps dissolve the coffee and smoothens the final product. After a minute or so of performing this dance, we allow the coffee to settle for another few minutes before pouring it into the intricate tiny cups. As Mary walked into the room, the aroma of the cardamom coffee along with our conversation on homelands and motherlands brought to mind Darwish’s poem “To my mother” sung by Lebanese Marcel Khalifeh and one that I have sung in Arabic ever since I can remember as a little girl: “I yearn for my mother’s bread / my mother’s coffee / my mother’s touch” [my translation]. The smell of Arabic coffee, the image of a mother and the conversations on homelands adds new layers to my understanding of the notion of a homeland. I am autoethnographically thinking of what motherhood means to me as I relate it to my own mother, to my mother-in-law, to myself as a mother, and to Syria as a mother-land, and I indeed now see new depths to the meaning of homelands.

As I reflect on mothers and mother-lands, and on Syrian mothers and all mothers in our humanity, I am also thinking of a poem that I once wrote also after the war first erupted and as I was trying to conceptualize and make meaning of the human condition of Syrian mothers today, and of what it may possibly feel like to be standing in their shoes. I titled the poem “Um [mother of] Muhannad.”

5 a.m. The first day of exams at the University of Aleppo. She prepares breakfast for her son Muhannad who stayed up until 2:00 a.m. studying to the light of a candle for his architecture exam;

the electricity was out yet again. She brews his coffee

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with extra cardamom and two overfull teaspoons of sugar-- very sweet, just like him. She prepares mint tea, just in case. By 5 a.m. on the table is a bowl of her homemade labneh [condensed yogurt] with olive oil and dry mint sprinkled on top, a plate of cucumbers, the reddest tomatoes she could find, a bowl of green and black olives with pieces of lemon and stems of thyme, her hand-made pickled makdous [eggplants], and Saj bread she baked this week. She doesn’t have eggs but Um Nabil (the neighbor) will deliver some later today. Tomorrow, she will scramble them with parsley and onions, just as he likes them, for there is always tomorrow. 5 a.m. “It’s five ḥabeeby [my beloved]. Your coffee is ready and so is your breakfast.” She doesn’t eat but watches his hands as they move from one plate to another to the light of a candle. He holds her two hands, kisses them one by one, and says “Yumma ḥabeebty [mama, my beloved], pray for me. I will be back by 5 inshallah [God willing].”

1 p.m. Two Explosions. 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. Um Muhannad praying to an Allah deafened by the noise of praying mothers. 3 p.m.

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Banging at the door; Um Nabil weeping wailing howling pulling her hair screaming: “They bombed the University of Aleppo’s Faculty of Architecture; Muhannad, Muhannad. Muhannad.” 5 p.m.: Muhannad. 6 p.m. 7 p.m. 8 p.m. 9 p.m. 10 p.m. 11 p.m. 12 a.m. 1 a.m. 2 a.m. 3 a.m. 4 a.m.: waiting. 5 a.m. Breakfast is ready, a plate of scrambled eggs. (Alatrash, 2016, pp. 68-72)

A few months ago, at the University of Alberta, I was invited to speak on my stories as part of their “Equity Diversity Inclusion Week” on March 23, 2018. I recited the above poem as one of the pieces that spoke to the experience and human condition of the Syrian Diaspora. The following paragraph was shared with me by the professor who invited me to speak, and it was written by one of his students. I was humbled and honoured to have touched this one student’s heart in the way she describes:

The audience was very respectful, attentive, and moved. After one piece in particular [the above poem of Um Muhannad], the room was filled with quiet weeping— instead of applauding as we had for all the other poems — that was soaked in an unprompted, sorrowful silence as in memorials. There was a collective mourning that created a great sense of community in the room . . . Needless to say, I did a lot of crying over the course of that day. I will treasure this gift. Thank you for inviting her to speak with us. (personal communication, April 2, 2018)

For me, this student’s words exemplify what it means to have engaged an empathetic understanding of human lived experiences, one that powerfully expands boundaries and dismantles cultural walls that separate us as humans.

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To summarize, in this section I have autoethnographically come to understand, through the stories of the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora, that to them a homeland embodies the same sort of meanings and feelings they hold for their mothers, and it is also “everything” embodied in the memories of the place and the social space it occupies.

Finding 1.2. On the meaning and feeling of being refugee. Said (1994) writes, “For surely it is one of the unhappiest characteristics of the age to have produced more refugees, migrants, displaced persons, and exiles than ever before in history” (p. 332). I asked my participants this question: How does it feel to be a refugee? Their replies spoke to endless depths of feelings and emotions. As I contextualize my question within the lived experiences of the peoples of the Diasporas, I find myself thinking of the many poets and writers who have spoken to this topic through their sentiments of estrangement, loneliness and feeling “out of place” (Said, 1999) where “once banished, the exile lives an anomalous and miserable life, with the stigma of being an outsider” (Said, 2002, p. 181). As mentioned earlier in this dissertation,

Said (2002) characterizes a refugee’s condition as a “crippling sorrow of estrangement” and a

“condition of terminal loss” (p. 173). Also, as recited earlier in Chapter 2, Darwish’s (2013) poetry speaks to the complex feeling experienced by a refugee who comes to feel an estrangement from one’s “very self” (pp. 42-43).

My research participants also speak to similar feelings. Miral narrates her experience as a new mother who had delivered her baby in Canada soon after having arrived as a refugee. She explains that the experience of giving birth is one of the harshest and most difficult of lived experiences, despite its beautiful product; however, she says, “The most difficult thing for me, and a shock for me . . . is the feeling of loneliness . . . the sense of loss.” As I listened to Miral’s words, I thought of how I too am a mother who has given birth to three children. I recall how I

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refused to take any anesthetics during my deliveries fearing that the medication might seep into my babies’ bodies. I am speaking from my experience as a mother, and I know very well the pain of giving birth. I remember being in so much pain that I wished death’s mercy. The pain was truly unbearable. And so, for Miral to say that even more painful than giving birth are the feelings of loneliness and the sense of loss as they relate to her Diasporic experience is indeed to take the meaning of how it feels to be refugee to the most painful of extremes.

Antoine also speaks to his feeling of being an outsider. He narrates a story in which his neighbor, an Eastern European, “forbids” her son to enter their home. He and his wife “don’t have reasons” or an explanation for their neighbor’s actions. Antoine reasons that had their neighbor felt unsafe with them, she would have completely forbidden her son to play with theirs, but this was not the case. Mary explains that perhaps her neighbour’s fear is due to their lack of knowledge of one another. Then Antoine moves on to reflect on his past in Syria and on his counter experiences in his homeland and narrates, “[I]n Syria, we are not like this; our door-to- door neighbors usually come into our home and we go into theirs, and with very small degree of reservations, not much.” In his new Canadian environment, Antoine is faced with “a chastening reminder of . . . being an outsider” (Said, 1999, p. 173) “of always being out of place” (Said,

1999, p. 166). The question here becomes: How may we bring Antoine’s to feel in place?

Antoine feels that having to start over as a 45-year-old refugee is “a big catastrophe.”

One of the most difficult lived moments in my interviews was to witness Antoine crying.

Antoine is a well-built man. In my family, like in many other families in both East and West, men are not to cry because of the all the spoken and unspoken rules about masculinity, but

Antoine’s tears disrupted the hegemonic narratives on Arab (and Syrian) men. Antoine cried; he

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cried tears of longing for his past and for all the things it housed, including his old table. His tears fell silently, and their silence was piercing.

Antoine describes the situation as “bitter” as he soulfully says, “I had seen so many tears in front of me and I was not easily affected, but when the story is now mine as well—for God’s sake, it’s bitter. It’s bitter.” Here, his words bring me to reflect once again on the notion of affect, and on how Antoine recognizes that he might have not been “easily affected” had he not lived the experience himself, or as in his words, “the story.” I also deeply believe that it is

Antoine’s story, and similar stories, that may affectively allow for new spaces of understanding to emerge. Zembylas (2016) writes, “at the heart of pedagogy is the provocation of emotion and affect” (p. 540) and Ahmed (2004) writes, “emotions do things” (p. 119). In Antoine’s case, his tears and emotions triggered not only a deep sense of empathy for me as a researcher, but also an understanding that brought me to connect with Antoine on a deeper level, on a human level, and to experience reality through his eyes. It is my hope that my research will also trigger similar emotions and an empathetic understanding of the live experience of the Syrian Diaspora.

Also on the feeling of being refugees, a number of participants expressed their feelings of self-worthlessness. According to Covington (1992), self-worth theory “assumes that the search for self-acceptance is the highest human priority” (p. 74). Mary explains that she gains a sense of self-worthiness through giving and helping others, but as a refugee who lacks the linguistic and cultural skills to assimilate in the society, she feels like she has become “nothing,”

“crippled,” “disabled,” and that her “wings and abilities are cut and that his/[her] abilities are downsized in a new place.” Mary explains that she feels that her self-worth and her 18 years of education (including her university degree) as contextualized within a Canadian system is

“equivalent to zero here, and perhaps less than zero.” She says that this is causing many Syrians

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to be depressed and to simply give up their dream of finding ways to work in their original fields of education and expertise.

In summary, to be a refugee as told by the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora, is to feel the most extreme feelings of loneliness and loss, ones that are as excruciatingly painful as childbirth, to be reminded of their outside-ness and out-of-place-ness, to taste bitterness, to feel crippled and disabled, and to live a feeling of self-worthlessness where one’s worth feels equivalent to zero or less than zero.

Finding 1.3. On forced displacement. Antoine speaks about the meaning of forced displacement as embodied through his lived experience. He explains that forced displacement is the condition when, as a human being, “you no longer have options and you only have one option, and something is pushing you, saying, Go! [loudly] Don’t stay! Go! in all shapes and from all directions.” Forced displacement for Antoine and Mary is about human beings forced to flee everything, from the electricity shortages across the country to the war-contaminated toxic air they breathe, in an effort “to try and save their lives and to preserve what has remained of their lives.” With the experience of forced displacement comes immense pain, a feeling that

Mary tries to describe through a quote from Kahlil Gibran (1923): “. . . love knows not its depth until the hour of separation” (p. 8). She says in a voice drenched in pain, “It’s true that you don’t know the worth of your homeland until you are forced to leave it.”

Mary and Antoine tell us that forced displacement is also about the feeling of having lost

“everything.” Mary explains that it is only after having lived the experience of being displaced that she could describe it in words: “which is to lose everything.” Antoine echoes her words and says, “War comes in one shape—everything is lost.” Mary and Antoine explain that they were

“happy” in Syria; that they “loved” Syria; that it was “Utopian” in their eyes despite the trash in

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the streets and the chaos and the bribes, they said. They would have not exchanged Syria for the most beautiful country in the world, they expressed. They forgave Syria’s mistakes because, as they remind us, “you forgive the mistakes of those whom you love even if they were perhaps repeated a million times.” As for Daniel, he believes that no one would chose “change” if they had a choice and says, “for example, try and tell someone who lives in Calgary to go to a place in which he would lose the advantages he has here; why would he go?”

I thought of my participants’ words and feelings. Of my six participants, no one would have left Syria by choice. They were forced to leave. Yet, long before the war, in her novel

Lands of Exile Syrian Najat Abdul Samad addressing her homeland of Syria writes, “Our pleas have become hoarse / Love us and put an end to our exile” (Alatrash, 2016, p. 126)—an outcry voiced to a Syria whose children had been expelled to all corners of the world since long ago.

As I autoethnographically try to make sense of this, I am thinking of my father’s choice of immigrating to the West in 1986; I do not believe that my father would have chosen to live “out- of-country” and “out-of-language” (Rushdie, 1991, p. 12) had he found in Syria “the advantages” referred to by Daniel. Here, a number of questions come to mind: Does the experience of finding oneself out-of-place (Said, 1999) turn a Syria who “expelled its own children and watched them from afar as they begged for refuge in all corners of the world” (Alatrash, 2016) into an “imaginary homeland” (Rushdie, 1991) where life, despite all of the lived injustices in a homeland, remains longed for and desired? Or is it, as in the words Anderson (1991),

“imagined” because “regardless of the actual inequality that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship”? (p. 7). Or is it because, as suggested by

Said (1994), “Exile is predicated on the existence of, love for, and a real bond with one’s native

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place; the universal truth of exile is not that one has lost that love or home, but that inherent in each is an unexpected, unwelcome loss” (p. 336).

Returning to the notion of forced displacement, for Brianna and Adam forced displacement meant to run away from massacres. It meant looking for ways to spare their children from losing an arm or a leg. It meant having to load up their children in a back of truck and surrendering to having to be smuggled into Jordan. It meant praying that the fired bullets would hit the tires of the truck instead of their children. It meant seeking shelter in one tent that hosted seven members of their family. It meant tasting “a lot of bitterness.” Forced displacement, as put by Adam and Brianna, is having to leave a land they loved, “crying . . . wishing to return for even one second . . . to return, just to return, and to hold onto the land and our home that we were raised in and in which our children grew up.” Forced displacement, as in the words of Said (1999), is to be “swept out of place” (p. 116) and it is “the overriding sensation

. . . of always being out of place” (p. 1).

As Adam talked about the land he owned, I cried for I heard his heart speaking these words:

A homeland is the land, and the land is our honor, as we say. And we are attached to the land . . . We love the land . . . We didn’t know anything but happiness. We didn’t know anything about the outside world. We didn’t know what was outside. Everything came from our emotions. We didn’t learn from the outside . . . Our olive tree, our apple tree, our grape tree—we used to pick them and were nurtured from them.

I too remember how the land, as well as the number of trees planted in it, signified a history for my family and embodied my family’s honor and reputation. My father-in-law would always boast the number of lands he owned and the number of trees he planted. His land was planted with apple trees, olive trees, pear, cherries, berries, pecan—the list is endless. The land was his pride.

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As an Arab, I too was always taught, through the stories of my father as well as in poetry and literature, that it is through the land that we may come to make sense of the meaning of a homeland. Land is a theme that is voiced particularly in the poetry of Palestinians. Darwish

(2000b) writes, “We and our land are one flesh and bone / We are its salt and water / We are its wound” (p. 165). In his poem “To our land,” he writes, “To our land, and it is the one near the word of God . . . and it is the one far from the adjectives of nouns . . . an identity wound”

(Darwish, 2008b). The land—and a homeland—to the poet, is holy; it is sacred. There is a feeling of inseparableness between the poet and the land, or what Sylvain (2009) calls a twinning representation of identity (p. 138). The poet and the land are one and are extensions of one another through a feeling of interconnectedness in which identity is tied to the land (H. Y.

Ahmed et al., 2012, p. 10). The poet writes that he is the flesh and bone of the land, and he also describes himself as its wound whose “blood will plant olive trees.” He asks,

What good is a man

Without a homeland

Without a flag

Without an address?

What good is a man? (Darwish & Bennani, 1980, p. 206)

In addition to a representation of identity, the land for the Diasporic Palestinian is a representation of a man’s (and a woman’s) worth. In an akin way, and as a Syrian Diasporic body, Adam also describes the land as an extension of oneself and an embodiment of one’s honor. He insists, “a homeland is the land . . . the land is our honor . . . we are attached to the land,” and he explains that to leave a homeland also means to leave one’s honor behind. The words of both Darwish and Adam speak to yet another depth and sense of attachment to the land

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and to a homeland. For me, their words act as a window into their worlds, as a step in their shoes, and as a lens for reading and understanding the meaning of a homeland and what it means for peoples of the Diasporas to have been forced out of a homeland, and out of their lands, whether Palestinian, Syrian, or possibly of any other homelands.

In summary, forced displacement, as told by the displaced peoples of the Syrian

Diaspora, is about being forced out of a homeland, a land that was an extension of their souls, with no other choice but to run away in tears (at times from massacres), to seek refuge and endure the most horrific of living conditions, and to possibly be smuggled along with one’s children across borders—all in their attempt to escape death. My participants’ stories tell us that forced displacement is about the feeling of having lost “everything.”

5.6 Conclusion

In this chapter, I have autoethnographically thought through the first theme in my findings: On the meanings and feelings of the lived experience of the Syrian Diasporic realities.

I have come to understand that, for the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora, the meaning of homeland represents “everything” that is embodied in the memories of a place and the social space it occupies; that the feeling of being refugee speaks to the incommensurable and most painful feelings of longing, loneliness, estrangement, exhaustion, helplessness, bitterness, loss and self- worthlessness; that forced displacement is about being forced to leave and to run away from death, and it is about the feeling of having lost “everything.” In the next chapter, I look at issues of identity as they relate to the Syrian Diasporic peoples in Canada.

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Chapter 6

On Issues of Identity—An Autoethnographic Interpretation

6.1 Introduction

As mentioned earlier, I have organized the findings in my stories under three main themes:

Theme 1: On the meanings and feelings of the lived experience of the Syrian Diasporic

realities.

Theme 2: On issue of identity.

Theme 3: On creating new possibilities: Activating and actualizing the third space.

In this chapter, I write my autoethnographic interpretation as I think through the second theme on issues of identity. Four findings have emerged under this theme: “On cultural identity;” “On negotiating difference;” “On the fact of difference—Orientalism and beyond;” and “On resilience.” In the following sections, I will present my interpretations as I autoethnographically engaged with these findings from my own personal experience as a Syrian immigrant so that I can better understand the Syrian refugee’s human experience.

6.2 Presentation of Findings

Theme 2: On Issues of identity

Finding 2.1. On Cultural identity.

Looking for resemblances and avoiding differences. Antoine says, “a homeland is one’s character; it’s when one can say: I am Syrian [anā sūrī] . . . I am my homeland.” Syria, to

Antoine, is his identity. Syria is a Syrian’s cultural identity. For me, as an autoethnographic researcher, Syria occupies a major part of my cultural identity. Hall (1994) speaks about cultural identity and explains,

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[C]ultural identity is not a mere phantasm either. It is something - not a mere trick of the

imagination. It has its histories - and histories have their real, material and symbolic

effects. The past continues to speak to us . . . It is always constructed through memory,

fantasy, narrative and myth. Cultural identities are the points of identification, the

unstable points of identification or suture, which are made, within the discourses of

history and culture. Not an essence but a positioning. (p. 395)

Indeed, although incommensurable and boundless like a phantasm, my cultural identity is by no means an imagined characteristic. It is the place in which I position myself as a Syrian and as a

Canadian, depending on the context of representation, and for me, it has been a notion underpinned with the idea of fluidity and continuity. My identity is constructed through historical moments that find their way into my present and it is continuously emerging and transforming through lived experience.

As a woman in her mid-forties, Mary narrates her struggle of “adapting and starting all over, and of trusting anew, and of loving anew, and of getting to know anew, and of opening up anew;” she further explains that it is only natural for a human being to choose to be in a space that is familiar and comfortable and that “resembles” his/her own identity. She is exhausted and her spirit is worn out, so she looks for a conversation, for a relationship, where she does not feel the need to have to explain herself. With a Canadian national who does not come from Syria nor one who shares her native language, she explains that her conversation is very limited, “‘Hi.

How are you?’ . . . And then you begin to consider the third sentence that you want to articulate and think about whether or not it is appropriate, is it suitable, will she [or he] understand it in the way I express it.” I understood Mary. Isn’t the “third sentence” naturally awkward for any two strangers even when they share a common language and culture? How about when we consider

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that between Mary and her Canadian neighbor exists a gap made up of incommensurable years of history and of culture and traditions, years that have brought their cultural identities into different spaces of identification? Here, I turn to Stuart Hall to try and understand Mary’s complex search for something that “resembles” her identity. Hall (1994) suggests that

identity is not as transparent or unproblematic as we think. Perhaps instead of thinking of

identity as an already accomplished fact, which the new cultural practices then represent,

we should think instead of identity as a 'production', which is never complete, always in

process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation. This view

problematises the very authority and authenticity to which the term, 'cultural identity' lays

claim. (p. 222)

He also explains that there are two ways of thinking about cultural identity,

The first position defines 'cultural identity' in terms of one, shared culture, a sort of

collective 'one true self', hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially

imposed 'selves', which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common.

Within the terms of this definition, our cultural identities reflect the common historical

experiences and shared cultural codes which provide us, as 'one people', with stable,

unchanging and continuous frames of reference and meaning, beneath the shifting

divisions and vicissitudes of our actual history. This 'oneness', underlying all the other,

more superficial differences, is the truth, the essence . . . There is, however, a second,

related but different view of cultural identity. This second position recognises that, as

well as the many points of similarity, there are also critical points of deep and significant

difference which constitute 'what we really are'; or rather- since history has intervened -

'what we have become'. We cannot speak for very long, with any exactness, about 'one

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experience, one identity', without acknowledging its other side . . . [where] difference,

therefore, persists – in alongside continuity.” (p. 223-225)

It is in Hall’s second definition that I find a space for new possibilities to emerge, where difference, or non-resemblance, may exist without hindering/delaying continuity. However, before we consider this notion of continuity, I would like to reflect deeper on Mary’s words;

Mary is tired, and her words reflect an exhausted spirit, a spirit that did not look for change or newness in the first place, and a spirit that lacks the drive to speak a “third sentence.” As a refugee, Mary was forced into her new circumstances and came to find herself in a place in which more differences exist for her. It is indeed “unsettling” (Hall, 1994, p. 226) for Mary, and it is problematic. She no longer feels a “oneness” with her surroundings. She no longer

“resembles” (in her words) her surroundings and her surroundings no longer resemble her. The weight of this “difference” is incommensurably heavy and is weighing down her spirit; difference positions Mary, and her cultural identity, in a state of imbalance. Mary tells her husband, “I don’t feel balanced [in Canada]” whereas in Syria, despite the war, as she walked the grounds of her homeland, Mary “knew where each step was going to be placed” even as she was aware that “in the next step a shell might approach” and kill her. Yet she was not afraid and walked “solid steps” on a land she knew “inch by inch.” She felt grounded in her past, in her history, and in her homeland. In contrast, she describes her presence in Canada as a feeling of

“weightlessness,” like that of an “astronaut . . . floating in space . . . unable to walk on the ground and is looking for anything to hold onto.” She says, “this is how I felt; that I needed anything to hold onto.” In this conversation, Antoine engages the Arabic word “hayūlā” to describe Mary’s feeling. As mentioned in Chapter 4, the word was new to me. I had an iPhone in my hand and could have resorted to Google Translate as I might have done on any other

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occasion, but this was my opportunity to give Antoine and Mary pedagogic agency through difference as it is situated in their native linguistic and cultural knowledge. Antoine repeated the word in Arabic as if it were obvious to understand. I still did not recognize the Arabic word and

I felt the affect of this deficiency in my knowledge—I was not embarrassed but relieved. I happily and explicitly shifted into a position of a learner and gave way to a valuable epistemology that was available to my research participant through difference. At this moment,

Antione and Mary were no longer in a position of linguistic deficiency but were equipped with funds of knowledge (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzales, 1992) constituted through their particular cultural identity and linguistic knowledge. As discussed earlier, Mary and Antoine explained that the Arabic word—al-hayūlā—refers to a primordial state of being, and within the context of our conversation, it depicted their feeling of spiritlessness as a result of having left behind their spirits in a homeland. They felt as if they had regressed to a primordial state of being.

Antoine then resorted to the word “bewilderment” to further clarify their feelings. I thought about the word bewilderment and how it is a word that is indeed steeped in lived experience. I thought about language and epistemology and about when Antoine might have come to learn and know this word in English—was it before he had arrived in Canada, or did he need to look up the English translation of hayūlā as a result of needing to articulate his thoughts and express his emotions to a Canadian? I thought of my father and wished I could ask him about whether or not he had felt a sense of weightlessness as he first arrived tin Abilene, Texas

(as a man in his 60s), and of the suggestions he might have had on how to deal with this sort of experience in life? I wished I could have asked him, “Baba [Daddy] what did you hold onto?”

I wrote a story about Abu [father of] Maryam and Um [mother of] Maryam, a husband and a wife who were forced by the war to leave Aleppo, Syria, and to seek refuge in Houston,

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Texas where their daughter lives. When I wrote this story, I was thinking of my father. As I thought of him and how of he spent his last years of life in small town Abilene, Texas, and as I tried to make meaning of his experience. I wrote: “To leave a homeland was to leave a piece of one’s heart and soul behind” (Alatrash, 2016, p. 126). I vividly recall how, after leaving Syria, my father was never whole again. Hall (1994) writes, “The inner expropriation of cultural identity cripples and deforms” (p. 395). The sculpture below is by Bruno Catalano and it represents how I conceptualize my father’s cultural identity after years of having left a homeland.

http://brunocatalano.com

On the differences between immigrants and refugees. Miral speaks of what it means to have lost a homeland. She believes that “the experience of every immigrant is in what he has lost . . . Because a homeland is what has deposited in us all the pieces that make us up today in

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our current state.” She too believes that to have lost a homeland is to have lost a piece of one’s soul, a side of one’s character; she describes this as an experience of “losing something that had been deposited in your soul.”

Perhaps baba (my father) did not feel a state of hayūlā, for, as Mary explains, unlike a refugee, an immigrant is “thoroughly prepared . . . expecting” what is awaiting him/her; that things are “much easier” for an immigrant, whereas as for a refugee, “you feel like you have been yanked, yanked from your land and placed on another land, and as you are already in an unbalanced state, you will definitely come to find it difficult . . . The idea is that you have taken me to a ground that I have not treaded before.” In a recently published book Working with immigrants and refugees: Issues, theories, and approaches for social work and human service practice, Yan and Anucha (2017) write,

In general, the term ‘immigrant’ is used to denote individuals who voluntarily migrate

from one country to another. Very often, their move is planned and they make

preparations before leaving for the new country . . . However, most of the global stock of

migrants are forced to leave (or to flee) their home country because of natural catastrophe

(e.g., famines or flooding) or human-made disasters (e.g., wars and political persecution).

These migrants are called refugees. Most of the time, their departure from the home

country is sudden and involves no well thought out plan or preparation. . . while most

refugees have little choice about where to settle, immigrants tend to take the initiative and

choose a destination. Very often they have some prior knowledge of that destination.

(p. 9-10)

In the above passage, there are a number of parallels between Mary’s words and Yan and

Anucha’s. I autoethnographically understood Mary’s words. Mary is right—I was not a refugee,

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nor was my father; our lived experience and human condition (as Syrians) ought to not be compared with hers. Simmons (2012) writes, “Autoethnography . . . is about understanding the relationship of freedoms and unfreedoms . . . which come to entangle and envelope what it means to be human through the web of local histories. Ultimately, autoethnography is affirming local ways of understanding the Diasporic experience embodied through personal memories / histories” (p. 33). My father had the freedom to choose to immigrate to the U.S. It was not a forced choice; he spoke English, had a cousin in Texas awaiting him, and had a university post assigned to him on a work visa prior to arriving; he chose to come so that we, his three children, may live the life that we are living today. My point is: my father and mother were prepared to come as immigrants to the U.S., socio-economically, mentally, and spiritually; Antoine and

Mary, Adam and Brianna, and Daniel and Miral were not.

As I was reflecting on Mary’s thoughts and trying to make meaning of the Diasporic experience, I turned back to Said. The process of interpretation was continuously unfolding. As mentioned earlier, I was moved by the fact that Said (2002) also uses the word bewildered in his definition on refugees and explains how he word ‘refugee’ has come to politically suggest “large herds of innocent and bewildered people requiring urgent international assistance” (p. 181, my emphasis). Today, I have come to autoethnographically understand the depth of this word through the state of weightlessness embodied in its meaning. I also noted that Said (2002) as well as Yan and Anucha (2017) refer to refugees as “herds” and “stock.” In their conditions as refugees, these disasporic subjects are ontologically dehumanized. The words “herds” and

“stock” are constitutive of a de-humanizing condition. Today I have come to understand these words on a deeper level imbued in the most difficult of lived experiences. Indeed, the human conditions and the lived experiences of refugees are different than those of immigrants, and in

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turn, the process of negotiating their new cultural identities ought to be considered as positioned within this complex framework of understanding.

In summary, for the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora, cultural identity speaks to a deep connection with a homeland, where they feel a oneness with their homelands. Moreover, as they try to negotiate their new identities in their newfound land of Canada and as they look for balance and wholeness, displaced Syrians search for that which resembles their cultural identities and for the cultural similarities they share with other Syrians. They steer away from cultural differences that position them, as they tell us, in a state of bewilderment and outsideness.

Finding 2.2. On negotiating difference. Hall (1994) speaks of different views of cultural identity, where identity is also about becoming and being. He writes,

[A]s well as the many points of similarity, there are also critical points of deep and

significant difference which constitute 'what we really are'; or rather - since history has

intervened - 'what we have become' . . . Cultural identity, in this second sense, is a matter

of 'becoming' as well as of 'being'. (p. 394)

Hall (1994) further suggests that cultural identity “belongs to the future as much as to the past,” that is it is not fixed in a place, time or history, and that it “undergo[es] constant transformation”

(p. 394). He also importantly insists that cultural identity is “far from mere ‘recovery’ of the past” (p. 394).

I find Hall’s suggestions to be very helpful as I try to make meaning and interpret the words and feelings of the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora in my research. Adam says, “A homeland stays with you,” and Miral says, "But a homeland is the period in your life that cannot be repeated; for me, a homeland is the experience that cannot be relived . . . it is indeed Syria . . .

Syria that has given me something that cannot be given by any other place.” She insists that the

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past is an experience that cannot be re-lived or re-covered. Moreover, Mary speaks of her awareness of the cultural transformation onto which she was bound. Before even setting foot on the plane, she realized that an unavoidable change of the self—the becoming of the identity—is destined to happen. She understood that she could not be fixed in her past, that identity is continuous and emerging, and that when she returns one day, she will return as “a changed person.”

Here, I ask: How does Mary negotiate her cultural identity alongside the differences, while grounded in the past and living a moment of continuity? How does one balance the absence of an un-recoverable past in a new present surrounding? Can the new also bring balance, not by way of replacing the old, but by situating itself as part of an evolving and transforming cultural identity?

For Miral, the aroma of rain, the shape of her home, the uniqueness of her home, the food and pickled eggplants and cracked wheat—these are all cultural elements that constitute differences for her in a Canadian culture; they are also her ways of knowing and defining her unique Syrian cultural identity. Cabral (1973) writes, “Whatever may be the ideological or idealistic characteristics of cultural expression, culture is an essential element of the history of a people. Culture is, perhaps, the product of this history just as the flower is the product of a plant”

(p. 42). Miral says, “culture is the hindrance. . . to find the similarities . . . to share a mindset and a way of thinking;” she adds, “I told you that the people and places are not repeatable and this is the hindrance for me.”

The questions become: In what ways could the Syrian Diasporic peoples negotiate difference as part of their becoming cultural identity and as situated in their newfound land of

Canada, while keeping in mind that difference is a product of a history underpinned by colonial

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narratives and hegemonic discourses? How may Syrians come to engage difference in alongside continuity? I hope that the following section may provide some possible answers to these questions.

Finding 2.3. On the fact of difference—Orientalism and beyond. As an Arab woman wearing the hijab, Brianna is acutely conscious of her body and of her hijab and says, “I felt stares… the stares of people riding the train.” She is worried about how people in her surroundings felt about her hijab and whether they “like the hijab or found it strange.” She explains that as a result, she begins to feel embarrassed and does not wish to leave her home.

Brianna is living a state of “this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others” (Du Bois, 2012, para. 4). She identifies herself as “different than them” (emphasis mine). Brianna is conscious of her difference and of her Otherness. She feels uncomfortable in her own body. She is embarrassed. She prefers to stay at home in hiding.

However, she explained that her voice of reassurance was her husband’s, who continued to tell her that there are many people like her and that she is “no different than them,” and that in

Canada people do not get into each other’s business. Brianna ends this conversation with the words, “And until now, alhamdullilah [Praise be to God], we have not faced any challenges.”

I was struck by Brianna’s final sentence. I wanted to say, but how then do you classify

“the stares?” Are stares not also a form of violation? Is the silence and “non-interaction” not loaded with meaning and is it not also an act of Othering? Are things truly well and challenge- free? In my view, Brianna is Otherized and her feelings of Otherness are justified within this context. The silence leaves things unresolved and ambivalent. There is no communication about the significance of the hijab, no understanding exchanged, no empathy engendered; there is only a sense of Othering, a feeling of being Othered, and an acceptance of a reality that is un-

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acceptingly, and hegemonically divisive. Hall (1994) writes, “This 'look', from - so to speak - the place of the Other, fixes us, not only in its violence, hostility and aggression, but in the ambivalence of its desire” (p. 233)—a lived experience that seems to fix us in the position of the

Other. As I listened to Brianna, I wanted to shout—no, this is not okay; the stares and the looks are not okay; being Otherized is not okay. Indeed, I deeply believe that these are also acts of

“violence, hostility and aggression.” Borrowing from Frantz Fanon’s (2008) notion of “The Fact of Blackness,” I also believe that for members of the Syrian Diaspora, and particularly for the

Muslim Syrian women wearing the hijab (for not all Syrian women are Muslim nor do all

Muslim women wear the hijab), there is a fact of difference. On his experience as a black man in a colonized Africa, Fanon (2008), writes about “The Fact of Blackness”:

And then the occasion arose when I had to meet the white man’s eyes. An unfamiliar

weight burdened me. The real world challenged my claims. In the white world the man

of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. Consciousness

of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third person consciousness. The body is

surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty. . . My body was given back to me

sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning in that white winter day. The Negro

is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly; look, a nigger, it’s

cold, the nigger is shivering, the nigger is shivering because he is cold, the little boy is

trembling because he is afraid of the nigger, the nigger is shivering with cold, that cold

that goes through your bones, the handsome little boy is trembling because he thinks that

the nigger is quivering with rage, the little white boy throws himself into his mother’s

arms: Mama, the nigger’s going to eat me up. (p.85-86)

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Fanon, as a black man, and Brianna, as a Syrian Muslim woman wearing the hijab, are both subjugated to an acute feeling through their difference. Their “consciousness” of their bodies in the midst of whiteness or Canadianness is burdening and unsettling. It is Otherizing. It is that feeling of “being dissected under white eyes” (Fanon, 2008, pp. 86-87).

Brianna further shares the severe implications of being Muslim in Canada as contextualized in the lived experience of her ninth-grade son. As Brianna told her story, I sat and felt my heart aching for today I too am a mother of a son in the ninth grade. Brianna narrates the negative experiences that her son lived in a local school in Calgary. His Muslimness was his fact of difference. He was not only bullied and hit by his schoolmates for praying in public, but as Brianna shares, the young man who hit her son said, “what has brought you [Brianna’s son] to this country; you have to leave; this country is for White people.” I felt piercing pain in my heart.

It was very difficult and painful to “imagine standing in the shoes” (van Sluys et al., 2006, p.

383) of Brianna and her son. The implications of a hegemonic colonial narratives had clearly found their way into even the minds and ways of thinking of our children. Fanon (2008) writes,

“I was told to stay within bounds, to go back where I belonged” (p. 86-87)—indeed, what a painful lived reality it is to be living in our humanity. As I reflexively think of my own experiences and of others’, I am reminded of a passage that I wrote long before embarking on my interviews:

Indeed, it is a pity how we humans, consciously, insistently, and persistently, continue to

create divisions amongst ourselves, and even more disturbing, we seem to find comfort

and a sense of understanding in alienating one another. We mindfully allow these

divisions to stand between us without any resistance, labeling us according to differences

in nationality, religions, colour and ideologies. (Alatrash, 2016, p. 145)

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Today, the boundaries remain, and they continue to divide, but I will also continue to insist on a language of hope and of possibilities. I ask: How may we come to find solutions for these recurring problems? How do we disrupt a narrative that continues to divide, “encase” (Fanon,

2008, p. 180) and subordinate people as us and them, as Others of difference? How do we undo this fact of difference?

Mary explains that in her experience of living in Canada, she has found that “it is assumed” that everyone coming from the Middle East is “cocooned with her hijab as a female or in his kufiya [a male headdress] as a male.” She explains, however, that Syrian Christians, like herself, wear neither hijabs nor kufiyas. As she thinks of the traditional kufiya that none of her family members (or my family members for that matter) wear, she finds such an assumption comical. She narrates how she was also once asked about whether there are Christmas trees in

Syria, if Syrians have heard of Santa Clause, about how have they come to know how to cook

Western food, whether they eat with their hands, and if camels are a mode of transportation in

Syria.

Daniel feels that he too is faced with a reality built on presumptions and assumptions but, importantly, admits that Syrians on the same hand come with their own presumptions and assumptions on the West, on peoples of the West, and on Canadians in general. Mary also points to the fact that media misrepresentations underpin the West’s understandings of the East but as importantly she mindfully reminds us that “the West is not only to blame because we

[Syrians/Arabs] are also at fault of not representing ourselves in a true way.” In his article,

“Islam through Western eyes,” Said (1980) also writes on a lack of effort on the part of the

“Orient” to counter the hegemonic narratives. He says,

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There is no longer any excuse for bewailing the hostility of the “West” toward the Arabs

and Islam and then sitting back in outraged righteousness . . . To dispel the myths and

stereotypes of Orientalism, the world as a whole has to be given an opportunity to see

Moslems and Orientals producing a different form of history, a new kind of sociology, a

new cultural awareness: in short, the relatively modest goal of writing a new form of

history, investigating the Islamicate world and its many different societies with a genuine

seriousness of purpose and a love of truth. But, alas, we must recognize that even with

vast sums of money easily available, the Islamic world as a whole does not seem

interested in promoting learning, building libraries, establishing research institutes whose

main purpose would be modern scientific attention to Islamic realities . . . (para. 16)

I, too, deeply believe like Said, and also like Mary and Daniel, that we as Arabs can only dispel the misrepresentations by “writing” a different form of history, and that we must do this in our own words. Our own voices and our own narratives must tell our stories and speak about our own cultures and religions, and we must counter what Antoine calls “a politics of the herds.”

Indeed, we must do it for ourselves. Frantz Fanon (2008) writes, “When I should have been begged, implored, I was denied the slightest recognition? I resolved, since it was impossible for me to get away from an inborn complex, to assert myself as a BLACK MAN. Since the other hesitated to recognize me, there remained only one solution: to make myself known” (p. 87, my emphasis). Whether as black men and women, as Arab men and women, as Muslims/non-

Muslim, as marginalized or Otherized, making ourselves known and asserting ourselves is also how I believe that we may open spaces for other ways of knowing. To let ourselves be known is also to let our story be known, our lived experience be known and, most importantly, told by us.

I will not sit back and bewail a Western hostility, but I will continue to look for ways to trigger

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“a cultural awareness” and an empathetic cultural understanding. Whether as part of this dissertation or as a cause I have taken up in my life, I research, I write, and I teach so that I, and my people, the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora, may be heard, and so that I can take part in the

“writing of a new form of history.”

I am happy that I can present the voices of my research participants through writing this dissertation. Every so often, I come across a petition on anti-immigration and/or anti-Islam asking for supporting signatures. A petition last signed in 2017 titled “Stop Islamic immigration to Canada” was addressed to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and it read as follows:

This petition is calling on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to end Islamic Immigration to

Canada. Immigration is not the issue, Canada is a country built by immigrants, and a

majority of those who come to Canada from abroad like Sikh, Hindu, Buddhists,

Christians, Jews, Kurds, Asians, Europeans etc. are good, honest people. The problem is

the immigration of large numbers of improperly vetted people from regions where violent

Islamic unrest is endemic. We're all for immigration and helping those in need, but

statistics are demonstrating that Islamic migrant invaders are masquerading as refugees,

only to bring the very hatred with them to the West that they claim to be escaping. We do

not want to see an influx of this in Canada, as we are currently seeing in Europe. The

attacks in Paris along with the daily attacks in Israel by Islamists is the last straw. We

cannot risk an epidemic of such savagery on Canadian soil. (change.org, 2016)

The words of this petition are indeed troubling on so many fronts, yet it is a petition that was signed by 41,013 Canadian supporters. I was very saddened to read such divisive and hateful discourses. According to this petition, the peoples in our humanity are divided into “good, honest people” (based on a jumbled-up classification that confuses between religions and

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nationalities) and “Islamic migrant invaders masquerading as refugees.” Here I am brought to think of this question: What if the 41,013 peoples were able to read and hear the voices of my research participants? What if I were to deliver to them the words of Syrian Muslim refugee

Adam? Would this other way of knowing a refugee and a Muslim create a language of possibility and hope? Adam asserts his Arab identity and proudly makes known his principles as an Arab. He tells of how as an Arab and as part of his Arab values, he will “serve” Canada as it has served him and will “defend” it as he would his own homeland of Syria. He is grateful for the opportunities that are now available for his children who, he believes, might have been part of a lost generation otherwise. “Canada is in our heart,” he expresses. Adam also makes known his beliefs and values as an Arab-Muslim through reciting Prophet Muhammad and the Koran and says,

[Reciting Prophet Muhammad] “There is no difference between an Arab or Ajami (non-

Arab), or for a non-Arab over an Arab. Neither is the white superior over the black, nor

is the lack superior over the white—except by piety” . . . and [quoting Surah Al-Hujurat

49:13, Al-Qur'an al-Kareem] “O mankind! We created you from a single (pair) of a male

and a female, and made you into nations and tribes, that ye may know each other not that

ye may despise (each other). Verily the most honoured of you in the sight of Allah is (he

who is) the most righteous of you.”

Adam ties his religious practices to his life in Canada and explains that it is his duty as a Muslim following God’s command to take care of his neighbors. He explains, “When your neighbor is well, then you are well.” I wonder if Adam’s narrative would cause any change of heart for those who may have signed the above petition. I deeply believe that what is needed for an

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empathetic cultural understanding to emerge are the voices of the likes of Adam to make known their stories, their principles, and their foundations as humans in one humanity.

Daniel further speaks to media being part of the hegemonic influences on people’s ideologies and ways of thinking. He speaks to how he believes the media “steers” the masses in this direction, transforming normal cultural practices into extremes. He points to the fact that the world seems to divide and designate us according to our nationalities, where we, as Arabs, have become in the eyes of some to be identified as “terrorists,” and how with a “piece of paper”

(referring to a Canadian Permanent Residence Card and passport) we become “first-class citizen[s].” He is cynical and poignant in his reflections. He suggests that it is our “lived experience” that should define our story. As Daniel spoke, I was very moved. I nodded my head in approval. I thought of my own story as a Syrian woman judged on the basis of my nationality.

In an article that I titled “Letter to U.S. Border and Security Facilitation,” I wrote of my frustration, my humiliation, of being stripped of my dignity, all because of my nationality (an

Arab/Syrian crossing U.S. borders from Canada). My letter was published in The Daily

Townsman, a newspaper based in Cranbrook, BC. Below is an excerpt of what I wrote:

Dear Executive Director of Border and Security Facilitation of the United States of America, . . . on my last exit from the Roosville/U.S. border in Montana on January 6, 2009 . . . I was subjected to a degrading body search— I was ordered to pose with both hands spread apart on a metal bar, legs spread apart, body leaning forward, and tolerated the hands of the female officer as she scanned and violated every inch of my body, pressing wherever necessary in order to make certain that I did not carry weapons or whatever else she was searching for! It was indirectly explained that this degradation was inflicted upon me because of my Syrian passport. When I expressed the absurdity of the situation, I was asked verbally “not to flinch” and to cooperate with what was deemed U.S. law. . . . Upon my return to Canada, I insisted on learning more about the legitimacy of your actions, and my research revealed the following: As of September 12, 2002 (one year after the 9-11 terrorist bombing), the United States’ Department of Justice declared a notice titled: Registration and Monitoring of Certain

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Non-immigrants from Designated Countries. . . . I have learned that as a Syrian citizen, I am categorized under Call-in Group 1, as labeled by U.S. immigration. Other categories include: Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Egypt, Eritrea, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, North Korea, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. The war on terrorism, as explained by President Bush, is a war that was launched as a result of the 9-11 attacks. However, it is important to note that 15 of the 19 hijackers who were on the airplanes on September 11th were from Saudi Arabia. None were from the countries classified as Group I which include Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan or Syria. According to Bush, my country is blamed for “harboring terrorism.” Yet, dear Sir, I find it important to highlight that fact that my country has never been involved in any terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, whereas the opposite holds true in the case of the U.S., when on October 26, 2008, the U.S. Army carried out a preemptive raid inside a Syrian village near the Iraqi border, killing at least eight . . . Dear Sir, my father who loved his country as much as you love yours, migrated to the United States of America in 1986, and left behind his beloved people, culture, language, and all that was loved by his 70-year-old broken heart. He sacrificed it all so that he could spare his family from undergoing biased discrimination and degradation—an expectation promised by your country’s ideals and principles. Had my father been alive today, he would have shamed you for the way you disgraced his daughter in the name of your country! I lived on your soil for twenty-plus years. My first high school homecoming, my first love, my first day in an American university, my brother’s wedding, my father’s funeral, my wedding, the birth of two of my children, my graduation from a Master’s program . . . are all memories that I experienced while living on your soil. I would also like to add that I adhered legally to your immigration law for as long as I lived in the United States, a reason for not obtaining U.S. citizenship after 20 years of residence in your country. My daughter and my son are American citizens, a privilege that I will teach them never to take for granted. My brother is a U.S. citizen and a Hematologist/Oncologist in one of your most reputable cancer centers, and he was one of the people whom, when one of the hurricanes hit Houston, took on the decision of remaining next to his patients’ bedside (your fellow U.S. citizens) while his family evacuated the area . . . (Alatrash, 2009b)

Perhaps the letter did not make a difference back then in my lived experience as a Syrian entering the United States until I had obtained my Canadian citizenship and passport, but it was my agency, my way of making myself known; it was my exercise in asserting myself. Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe (1973) writes, “At the university I read some appalling novels about

Africa . . . and decided that the story we had to tell could not be told for us by anyone else no

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matter how gifted or well-intentioned” (p. 193). For the same reason as Achebe, as Fanon, as

Said and many others, I tell my own story.

Years after this incident, I wrote the story of Um Maryam in my collection of short stories Stripped to the Bone. In this story, Um Maryam, a Syrian woman from Aleppo is forced to seek refuge in the U.S. along with her husband. As mentioned earlier in this essay, in the story, Um Maryam is carrying a bag of herbs that she picked, not only with her hands but also with her heart, from her garden in Aleppo. The American immigration officer informed her and her husband that no herbs are allowed into the U.S., and that “these are the rules . . . this is the law” (Alatrash, 2016, pp. 133-134). Um Maryam pleaded. She turned to Abu Maryam (her husband) in Arabic and said, “Tell him that they are the only piece of our homeland that I brought with me. Tell him that they are its smell and taste, and I can’t find this anywhere in the

U.S.” (p. 134). The officer, as I had often also experienced in my own journeys to the U.S., seemed unbent. I recall how when I was writing this story, that the power was in my hand—that

I had the choice of either moving the officer’s hands to throw away the herbs or of moving his heart closer to feel Um Maryam’s. Um Maryam was desperate and so she resorted to her broken

English and begged,

“For Jesus, the Son of God [she was Syrian-Christian], let me. Please. I always pray for

you. Please I may no visit my home country again, please. I have no home now. My

home destroyed, my garden destroyed, my heart destroyed. I pray for your homeland

America. I will plant this is in my garden in Texas, and you come and visit me anytime.

Please.” Her tears sprung from a burnt heart and they also burned the officer’s heart. (p.

134)

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Following the example of Fanon, as I wrote the ending of Um Maryam’s story, it was my chance to also write in a language of love. It was my chance to forgive the officer that also exercised his power over me. It was my chance to exercise a rhetoric of hope and possibilities. As a man who has felt the deepest implications of colonial discourses, Fanon (2008) writes,

No attempt must be made to encase man, for it is his destiny to be set free. The body of

history does not determine a single one of my actions. I [Frantz Fanon] am my own

foundation. And it is by going beyond the historical, instrumental hypothesis that I will

initiate the cycle of my freedom . . . That it be possible for me to discover and to love

man, wherever he may be. The Negro is not. Any more than the white man. Both must

turn their backs on the inhuman voices which were those of their respective ancestors in

order that authentic communication be possible. Before it can adopt a positive voice,

freedom requires an effort at desalination. (pp. 180-181)

To insist on the possibility and continuity of love within the most painful and suffocating of human conditions is, in my opinion, a most breathtaking manifestation of hope. Fanon’s language embodies a language of hope and possibilities, and I too will insist on finding a love that is bound to reside in every human heart. And so, I ended the story of Um Maryam with the following lines:

“Please, Ma’am [said in a Texas accent]. Stop Crying. I am very sorry for your pain,”

said the officer as he closed the passports, stamped the date of entry—January 23, 2014—

and said, “Welcome to the United States of America.”

“Abous- rouḥak,” she [Um Maryam] cried.

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[Footnote] Abous-rouḥak is an endearing expression used especially in Aleppo (Syria),

and it is applied in its figurative sense of the meaning. It is Arabic for I am Kissing Your

Soul; the female form is Abous-rouḥik. (p. 134)

During my visit to the University of Alberta on March 23, 2018, I spoke as a guest lecturer in an

English writing class. The students were pre-assigned the story of Um Maryam and were asked to write their thoughts and feedback. Their words also triggered great hope for me, and I would like to end this section with their words:

It always fascinates me how often people forget that people who leave their war-torn countries don't always choose to come; it is out of desperation and survival. The way media projects different ethnic groups in a negative light makes me question why did people come to a country who treats them so poorly? And then when I read stories like "Um Maryam," I realize that it's because it was life or death.

I thought this story was very well written. It offered a perspective on refugees that I have not read before, and the part about the spices in the airport was very touching . . . I also liked the inclusion of the customs form for entering the US. It's a small thing, but I can understand how it would be quite upsetting to have to fill out, if you were coming there after leaving your homeland never to return again.

The short story Um Maryam was very touching. I think a lot of the time people tend to think that refugees are leaving their countries because they want to, not because they need to. I really think that is one of the key issues in today's society which is unfortunately so unaccepting of refugees . . . I really think that if everyone who supported conservative and right sided politics read this story, they would have a different perspective on the issue. This was a great piece because it enlightened me on an issue that is close to my heart, as my own grandmother was forced to leave her home in Manchuria and flee to Japan as a refugee.

The story "Um Maryam" is extremely touching, and sad. I think it is one of the best things we have read this semester. An experience of pain that I can only imagine. I thought the style through the piece was very collected and cool -- nothing fancy or unnecessary was there, it was very concise and easy to read. I think the idea of one's homeland and the ties to it are important. I am thankful that the bag of herbs was allowed into the United States . . . I love the quote from Darwish in the middle of that piece, "You ask: can a word of eight letters be big enough for all of these components, yet too small for us?" (personal communication, Ouzgane, 2017)

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Finding 2.4. On resilience. In a working paper titled “The Syrian Refugee Crisis in

Canadian Media” and published by Ryerson University’s Centre for Immigration and Settlement, it is found that “[t]he theme of Syrian refugees as vulnerable, desperate and in need of saving emerged in 23 of the 94 Globe and Mail articles. Although the media’s intent may have been to show the depth of the humanitarian crisis, the articles in essence removed the agency and resilience of Syrian refugees by always portraying them as desperate and vulnerable” (Tyyska et al., 2017, p. 7). The authors of the paper also go on to explain that in comparison with the

“generous Canadian subjects,” within the coverage of the media, refugees are portrayed as

“helpless, voiceless, and vulnerable” (p. 7). The authors further note that “amidst the plethora of homogenizing the Syrian refugees as passive and needy – only one article stands out as being from a more critical perspective” (p. 7) and it was written by Nicholas Keung (2015) in which he quotes Debra Stein, co-head of the migration team at the Hincks-Dellcrest Centre for mental health service in Toronto saying: “[t]hey came out of war, conflicts and atrocities. We need to promote their resilience and offer them proper post migration support. The big message here is resilience, not pathology” (para. 13). In the same article, Aseefa Sarang of a Toronto health agency titled “Across Boundaries” states, “We often position refugees as lacking, as a burden.

Instead of recognizing their resilience, we are assuming their deficiencies and that we are doing them a favour” (para. 22).

It is during moments like these, whether as part of my research or in any conversation about the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora, that I believe in the critical importance of stories narrated as experienced by the subjects spoken about. I strongly suggest that the only way to disrupt an ontology that pins the Syrian Diaspora in positions of either vulnerability or resilience is to invite them to speak for themselves and tell us where they stand and how they feel.

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Here, I will first begin with Daniel’s thoughts. Daniel explains that to him resilience embodies the courage to escape war and oppression. He agrees that the word “refugee” may suggest a weakness in that it also relates to the act of having to escape; however, he quickly counters this understanding by situating the act of escaping oppression as “a product of a decision” and as “a sign of courage . . . [where] to stay is to accept humiliation.” He goes on further to say that although some might understand the state of being refugees as a state of

“misery and sadness and something very tragic,” he sees it as “something that increases his knowledge and experience in life.”

I interpret Daniel’s words as an essence of the meaning of resilience and as evidence of the resiliency of the spirits of the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora. Many definitions speak to the notion, and experience, of resilience. Resilience is often associated with a person’s ability to bounce back “following adversity and challenge and connotes inner strength, competence, optimism, flexibility and the ability to cope effectively when faced with adversity” (Wagnild &

Collins, 2009, p. 1). “Research on the resiliency of refugees emphasizes that it is a process rather than an individual trait” write Pearce, McMurray, Walsh, and Malek (2017, p. 370). As I reflect on Mary’s narratives in our interview, I find that her words in particular speak to this idea of resilience as a process. Mary explains that the journey of refugees is a process of “crossing different stages,” and she further believes it to be the case for all Syrians in Canada. Antoine, her husband, explains the they are “much better [today] than 5 months ago; much better than 3 months.” Mary suggests that this process is constituted through different stage. The first she describes as the pre-travelling stage in which feelings seem to be thrown into a state of a whirlwind. The following stage is one of “running and running and running away.” Then after arriving to Canada, she explains, a refugee goes through another process composed of a number

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of stages and says, “then you arrive here [in Canada], and the first stage is basically a time of horrible longing, accompanied by regret—questioning the decision you made and also accompanied by the feeling of guilt, that I came here and I had left other people behind in Syria, people whom I love; you feel that this is of the most difficult stage that can face a human being.” She also speaks about the stages related to everyday details from a desperate need for sleep because of the time difference to the realization “that you are now very far from Syria.”

Here Mary cries. She recalls how her husband and son spent their nights crying during this stage. She achingly recalls how her son would wake up crying and demanding that they take him back to Syria. Continuing to cry, she says, “I recall that this period of time took days; it was a very difficult period,” but suddenly in the interview, Mary’s sadness is disrupted; the tears transform into a resolve of resilience. With absolute determination she says, “Then [days after] you get to a point when you decide, that’s it, I will have to adapt; this stage is not an easy one and this decision—that I am going to adapt—is not an easy decision.”

Antoine is also resilient. He suggests that resilience is a product of war—he explains that resilience, in war, is the will to survive and to remain. He believes that the most “adaptable person in history is the one who encounters many obstacles,” including the death of loved ones and the loss of a homeland. He also believes that this sort of a person becomes “skilled” in how to deal with difficulties, and that, in turn, this brings him to become adaptable in different situations. Antoine then suggests that all Syrians would attest to this idea, and that because of having lived their experiences, they have acquired the skill of “adaptation” to deal with their new reality. He defines adaptation by providing this example: “when one loses a person and a dear one as a result of a shell or a rocket or a stray bullet or a car bomb or any cause of death because of war, and at the same he is thinking about tomorrow and how will he protect his children—this

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is adaptation.” As a translator, and specifically as a Syrian translator whose spirit speaks the same language as Antoine’s, I strongly feel that within the context of this conversation the word adaptation and resilience are one and the same. As part of my ethical obligations as a translator, and also due to the fact that I am a Syrian who did not live a war experience comparable to my research participants, I felt the obligation to delve deeper into the different definitions on resiliency before making any assumptions. I had a feeling that there must be a place for the word

“adaptation” amongst the variant definitions on resiliency. My feelings proved true. In an article on resilience and survival, Pulviarenti and Mason (2011) bring together many definition into one and write: “Resilience is associated with ‘positive adaptation’ (Luther, Cicchetti, & Becker,

2000), the ability to ‘bounce back’ (Sossou & Craig, 2008) or ‘rebound’ (Chan, 2006) within the context of significant adversity or threat” (p. 39, my emphasis). In other words, adaptation, in its positive shape, implies resilience. Mary also resorts to the notion of adaptation as she narrates how although she and her family arrived “exhausted,” “carrying many burdens” after having lived “many terrible, sad experiences, true catastrophes,” they nonetheless came to “realize that at the end you must stand again and truly adapt.” Mary further compares her experience to that of an infant learning to walk where he/she first crawls and then gradually learns to walk. She says, “We are the same [like infants] . . . At first, our steps were very short, frightened, and imbalanced, especially because we too were not balanced, but after a little while, you adapt more, you know more, and you know better where to place your foot.” Also on the idea of adaptation, Miral says, “A person who has the ability to adapt, and wherever he may be planted, in a fertile ground, should be able to produce.” She further compares the process of adaption to that of healing. She diagnoses herself with a sickness that she believes is contracted as a result of having been uprooted from a homeland. She then asserts that as a first step towards healing,

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one must acknowledge his/her state of sickness as part of the healing process. She suggests, “So if I want to think that having been uprooted from Syria and uprooted from my roots is the sickness, and if I continue to deny and not accept this big occurrence in my life, then I am slowing my process of integration here and I am writing off years of my life, and I am also slowing the process of my progress.” Lastly, and on a most resilient and determined of notes,

Antoine concludes,

Despite the fact that we came here and had to begin from zero in Canada, we will try to

continue; no, we will not only try but we will continue, we will continue; and based on

what we have already acquired of flexibility in our society, and on the fact that we are

stronger as a product of the circumstances of war, I think we will continue and we will

remain and we will succeed. This is what I think.

Here, I ask—if the voices of my participants are not the deepest embodiment of the notion of resilience, then what is? I firmly conclude that the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora, despite their pain and illness, are indeed resilient.

There also dwells hope in Antoine’s words. As I write this word, hope, I find myself crying. My tears, at this moment, are also an expression of hope. “Searching for tomorrow” are some of the words that make up the title for an article written by Pearce et al. (2017), one that speaks to reconstructing resilience within the context of South Sudanese refugee women who have settled in our city of Calgary. In this article, the authors describe resilience as a process that enables participants to “survive their past, foster support in the present and harness hope for the future” (p. 369). Here, I found that Daniel’s words powerfully embody this definition; he says,

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lives; our memories are beautiful because we lived them and we are finished with them, and we are now doing something new; this is the idea; if a person is going to continue to think about his past, his head will be turned to the back looking at memories; but when your head is turned forward, you will see something new.

Hope is about looking forward. Hope is indeed “a search for tomorrow.” Engaging hope, in my opinion, is of the most exalted acts of resilience, especially when standing in the shoes of my research participants. The words of Syrian sculptor and artist Rabea Alakhrass who lives in exile in Saudi Arabia also come to mind as I think of hope. I had not thought of his words for quite a while. In an interview I held with him in 2015, Syrian Alakhrass says, with great conviction,

There must be hope! Perhaps Syria will never be what it once was. There is a whole lost

generation of Syrians today, a defected generation that has been denied a childhood, a

home, an education, and one that has been stripped of its dignity. Syrians have been

humiliated whether on borders or in their homeland; they are not welcomed anywhere in

the world. There seems to be a war against the Syrian people today, against thousands of

years of civilisation. My hope is that this war is defeated. (Alatrash, 2015para. 21)

To find hope amidst all the ashes is indeed a true manifestation of the notion of resilience. I can only begin to imagine what this means.

I will end this section with a painting. The painting was presented to me as a gift by a

Syrian newcomer in Calgary, Aya Mhana; I named the painting “Resilience.”

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6.3 Conclusion

In this chapter, I have autoethnographically thought through issues of identity as they relate to the Syrian Diasporic realities, and I have come to find that the displaced Syrian peoples continue to look for ways to negotiate their differences within the context of their new Canadian homeland. They are cognizant that their identities are continuously emerging and evolving, are not fixed in the past of a homeland, and are fluid and becoming within moments of continuity

(Hall, 1994). I have also found that displaced Syrian newcomers are faced with what has been presented by Western media as epistemology on the Arab subject, one that is underpinned by colonial narratives and hegemonic discourses, and through which they have felt different and

Otherized. Moreover, Syrian Muslim women wearing the hijab are especially aware of their

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difference, and their children are facing discrimination in their Canadian schools. However, despite the challenges, the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora are resilient; they are determined to remain, to continue and to succeed; and they see their presence in Canada as a process of adaptation and healing.

In the following chapter I will engage the third theme of my findings as I look at how we, as Canadians, can create new possibilities for the displaced peoples of the Syrian Diaspora.

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Chapter 7

On Creating New Possibilities: Activating and Actualizing the Third Space—An

Autoethnographic Interpretation

7.1 Introduction

I have come to my final theme in this chapter: On creating new possibilities: Activating and actualizing the third space. In writing this chapter, I engage a language of hope, one that may bring us to an empathetic understanding of the Syrian Diasporic realities, and, as importantly, to look for and identify new possibilities, and in turn find ways to activate and actualize these possibilities as they relate to the Diasporic experience. I have divided my findings into three subthemes: On issues of language; on finding cultural intersections and third spaces; and on how Canadians be of help. For the remainder of this chapter, I autoethnographically think through and discuss these themes.

7.2 Presentation of Findings: Theme 3

Theme 3: On creating new possibilities: Activating and actualizing the third space.

Finding 3.1. On issues of language. Paulo Freire and Macedo (1987) explain that

“language should never be understood as mere tool of communication; language is packed with ideology” (p. 203). And, in his memoir Out of Place, Said (1999) writes,

More interesting for me as an author was the sense I had of trying always to translate

experiences that I had not only in a remote environment but also in a different

language. Everyone lives life in a given language; everyone’s experiences therefore

are had, absorbed, and recalled in that language. The basic split in my life was the

one between Arabic, my native language, and English, the language of my education

and subsequent expression as a scholar and teacher, and so trying to produce a

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narrative of one in the language of the other—to say nothing of the numerous ways in

which the languages were mixed up for me and crossed over from one realm to the

other—has been a complicated task. (preface)

As I sat and read Said’s words, I caught myself nodding in agreement throughout the passage. I too deeply believe that experiences are lived and constituted in the language they are had. As a

Syrian woman, and as I autoethnographically think through the experience of the peoples of the

Syrian Diaspora, I understand on a deeper level how language can be a key struggle, for there are certain nuances that are in my opinion untranslatable. Here, I am reminded of an article I wrote on May 15, 2009, more than nine years ago which I titled “The deeper meaning of the Arabic word ‘ghurba [ḡurba].’” I began the article with, “I have found that there are certain words in a language that are simply untranslatable” (Alatrash, 2009a). I explained in this article that the word ḡurba in Arabic is a derivative from the verb ḡaraba: to go away, and is related to the word

ḡarīb: stranger—where all meanings embody the experience of living life as a stranger in a far- off land. I further explained how I found that in Arabic-English dictionaries the word ḡurba is defined with phrases and not in one word, for the lack of one analogous word in English. Its definition according to the Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic is: “absence from the homeland; separation from one’s native country, banishment, exile; life or place away from home.” I also found that the word is often translated as Diaspora. In my article, I go on to explain,

But it [ḡurba] is much more than that. The word ḡurba also carries an intense feeling

along with it, a melancholic feeling of longing, of nostalgia, of homesickness and

separation, of a severe patriotic yearning for a place where one’s heart was not only

living, but also dancing to the beat of a father’s or a mother’s voice, to the words in a

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grandmother’s tale, to a melody from a native instrument, to the pounding of feet

stamping in a group dance, to a merchant’s voice shouting out the name of his

merchandise in the streets of neighborhoods, or simply, to a place where one’s heart

danced to the silence of a homeland’s soil. (Alatrash, 2009a)

Back in 2009, as a translator reflecting on this word and trying to make sense of its meaning, I was interested in understanding the reason behind the lack of an English counterpart for the word. I thought perhaps it is because Canadians and Americans are fortunate to live in a wealthy land where it is either by choice or for reasons of pleasure that one leaves a homeland and immigrates (with the exception of soldiers). I also explained in my article that this may be the reason behind the absence of “intense melancholy” in the English definition of the word. When I wrote this article, I was thinking of my father’s feelings of longing, of mine as an immigrant who is continuously living here and there (between a native homeland and a new homeland), and also of my role as a translator. But today, within the context of my research, the word has taken on yet another depth. I could have never imagined back then that I would be sitting today with my participants and trying to make sense of what it means to have lost a homeland, my homeland, for the people of the Syrian Diaspora, my people, who have been dispersed in all parts of the world and are in desperate need of a remedy that may alleviate their burning and charred souls.

With this in mind, as I began each of my interviews, I gave my Syrian participants the option to speak and express themselves in the language of their preference, whether Arabic or

English. As discussed earlier, they chose to speak in Arabic. Five of the six participants spoke solely in Arabic. Adam tried to speak in English during parts of the interview but switched quickly back to Arabic, especially as emotions that spoke to his lived experiences began to

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surface. Daniel explained, “maybe if I wanted to say all this in English, maybe I will die before I can learn how to say it all; maybe, depending on one’s reality,” and later added,

. . . if I were to tell you what I’ve told you in English, they [the words] would not come

out with me—you would think that I am a little child trying to express something . . . The

most difficult thing for me was and still is the barrier of language . . . Because language is

the door to many matters. For example, if I needed to tell you something but couldn’t

explain it to you; I have the idea in my mind but unable to express it; so language for

many people is a big barrier.

And so, in addition to the idea that each experience is lived in the language in which it “is had,” my participants’ positions, as beginner English learners, have an added difficulty of not having the fluency to express themselves and relay their complex emotional lived experiences in a new language they are only beginning to grasp.

Antoine asserts, “Language is our principle difference as it is the key to dealing with others in this society; we accepted this challenge and we are trying to be as adaptable as possible in order to integrate into the Canadian society and to live in a way.” However, Daniel expresses that the current English language classes have not been of much help to him. He specifically speaks of his experience in the Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada (LINC). He finds that the skills he is taught are ones that speak to basics like “how to buy things from the restaurant, how you eat, how you get your shopping needs, how you go to a physician, these basic things.” Daniel further adds that the way in which language is being taught takes away from his drive to learn, specifically as an adult learner who is interested in talking about, he says,

“a subject I love.” Through his experience with LINC classes in Calgary, he finds that language is taught in a “stiff way” where as a student he feels as if he is “mimic[ing] language like a

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parrot.” He insists, “what really drives me to learn a language as an adult is to learn about a subject that I love.” He goes on to explain that he resorts to YouTube videos such as English

Central to find depth in his language learning process, and visits sites that speaks to his interest in philosophy, for example. On this idea Ray McDermott (1993) writes,

Language and culture are no longer scripts to be acquired, as much they are conversations

in which people can participate. The question who is learning what and how much is

essentially a question of conversations they are part of, and this question is a subset of the

powerful question of what conversations are around to be had in a given culture. (295)

Cummins (2014) further suggests that “student engagement is likely to increase dramatically when instruction enables them to co-construct knowledge with their teachers and to develop the critical literacy skills necessary to understand and act on the world around them” (p. 153).

Daniel’s process of learning English lacks cultural conversations in English, seems to abide by a

“stiff” script, and is ultimately disengaging. Norton and Toohey (2001) argue to that “good language learning requires attention to social practices in the contexts in which individuals learn

L2s [second languages]” where a space is made for them to “participate more actively in the social and verbal activities” of their community (p. 315-318). Daniel and other participants in my research seem to have not yet found this social space or community in which they can practice their target language and improve their English skills. As discussed later in this chapter,

Cervatiuc (2009) suggests that a solution perhaps lies in a “two-fold social action paradigm” in which both host country as well as newcomers and second language learners take an active approach in finding and creating these spaces.

As I continue to reflect on Daniel’s thoughts and as I think of my own experience of learning English, I am acutely aware of the fact that I came to the U.S. at a young age and that

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my adult research participants are situated in much different experiences. When I arrived in the

U.S., I was in the seventh grade and the process of second language acquisition as a young teenager came easy for me. My research participants however are adults and “second language acquisition of adults is difficult and complicated . . . a long, painful process, and it will encounter many setbacks” (Deng & Zou, 2016, pp. 779-780). But despite their awareness of this difficulty, they are hopeful. Miral says, “language to me is not a challenge or a hindrance at all. Language is undoubtedly an attainable goal.” Brianna also boasts her progress in English since their arrival over two years ago and explains how at first, after their arrival to Canada, she was unable to understand her neighbor except for the “hi, how are you?” However, she finds that things are different for her now as she is better able to understand his English and his “nature.” Laughingly

Brianna quotes her neighbor in English saying, “before don’t understand,” implying that things are different today with regards to her English comprehension. As put by Thomas Ricento

(2005), “One’s linguistic competence in a new culture reflects a process of transformation rather than one of replacement, in which the ultimate outcome represents an identity that is not exclusively anchored in one culture/language or other” (p. 904). There was hope embodied in

Brianna’s laughter, and indeed there was also transformation and resilience.

As I think of language within the context of my research, I also turn to Plamentaz (1973) as he writes, “A human being becomes an individual, a rational and a moral person capable of thinking and acting for himself, in the process of acquiring the language and the culture of his people. He becomes a person distinct from others, in his own eyes and in theirs, by developing potentialities which can only be developed in assimilating a culture and learning to belong to a community” (p. 28). I thought of my family and friends who are members of the Syrian

Diaspora, Syrian immigrants who came long before the war began in 2011, and who until this

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day avoid interaction with natives of Canada as language constitutes a barrier, and a difference, for them. In her study “Identity, good language learning and adult immigrants in Canada,”

Cervatiuc (2009) suggests a “twofold social action paradigm” for newcomer and second language learners in which

[o]n the one hand, it is necessary to raise the level of awareness of people who were born

or grew up in Canada about the hardships and realities of marginalization that immigrants

experience and their challenges in learning the target language and accessing social

networks so that those who were born or grew up in Canada can become more inclusive

toward newcomers and extend them more opportunities for communication. On the other

hand, L2 learners may gain in the long run by claiming their internal power in order to

get greater access to external power and by deploying some strategies extrapolated from

the experiences of immigrants who have reached high L2 [second language]

communicative competence and achieved their career goals in the new country. (p. 268)

Here, as I reflexively think of my research participants, I ask: Will they gradually come to speak better English? I deeply believe that the answer to this question is yes. But will they come to a point where they can voice their inner emotions in English? —Although pragmatic, my answer is: I hope they do. Indian Raja Rao (1963) explains that English may be/become the language of

“our intellectual make-up . . . but not of our emotional make-up” (vii)—I can attest this to statement personally, for after 30 years of having lived in the West, as I told Antoine and Mary, the Arabic language for me is about

. . . the Syrian in me, the things that are connected to my dad, that things that are connected to my history and my memories; it’s about what moves my soul; no matter how many songs I hear for Michael Bublé [my 20-year-old daughter’s favorite Western artist], my emotions are not moved in the same way as when I hear my Arabic music . . . And God bless my babies, but when they leave in the morning, and while I am getting ready, I put on Arabic music.

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In his poem “A Rhyme for the Odes,” Mahmoud Darwish (2013)writes,

Who am I? This is a question that

others ask, but has no answer.

I am my language.

I am an ode, two odes, ten.

This is my language

I am words’ writ:

Be! Be my body!

No land on earth bears me. Only my

words bear me,

This is my language, a necklace of stars

around the necks

of my loved ones. They emigrated.

They carried the place and emigrated.

They carried time and emigrated. (p. 91)

Like Darwish, I too feel like I am my language. I feel that Arabic is the language of my soul and

English is the language of my heart. What I mean by this is that English is the language in which

I articulate my thoughts on an academic level and it is also the language in which my heart speaks today as I live with my children in Canada. As for Arabic, it is the language that captures the language to which my soul was born. Arabic is the language that brings me closer to my father’s spirit and to the sound of my grandmother’s prayers. Perhaps after all, it is all about

“language and spirit” (Ashcroft et al., 1995, p. 296). Hall (1994) articulates it perfectly: “We all

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write and speak from a particular place and time, from a history and a culture which is specific”

(p. 392).

Also, on language, Antoine adds, “I still consider myself a visitor in the Canadian society; I am uncomfortable, embarrassed, self-conscious [laughs]. So many times at work, when I feel like saying something, I quieten myself as I am worried that my statement may be misunderstood, although they [Canadians] are very comforting, and they call me by nickname

[A’s original name shortened], and they encourage me to talk to them about whatever I wish and to be direct without worrying about expressing things in their way of expression.” Antoine’s inability to express himself in English triggers a discouraging affect and brings him to “quieten” himself and resort to silence. Bielska, Gabryś, and Bielska (2013) describe the affective component as, "The experience of being a foreigner and using a new language is linked by the students to a variety of emotions: homesickness, loneliness and alienation in the new world, embarrassment of being the object of evaluative gaze, anxiety, stress and frustration at the inability to make yourself understood and anger sparked by rejection and marginalization" (p.

21). Here, language also impacts Antoine’s “motivational energy” (Méndez López & Aguilar,

2013, p. 113). In their article “Emotions as learning enhancers of foreign language learning motivation,” Méndez López and Aguilar (2013) speak of the role of emotions in language learning motivation and look at how self-efficacy shapes the language learning process. They engage Bandura’s (1994) notion on self-efficacy as it refers to “. . . people’s beliefs about their capabilities to produce designated levels of performance that exercise influence over events that affect their lives” (p. 71). Méndez López and Aguilar (2013) further explain that

these beliefs are the ones that shape how people feel, think, motivate themselves and

behave. According to this theory, people with a high level of self-efficacy engage in

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tasks with the conviction that they possess the capabilities needed to succeed in them. In

contrast, a person with a low level of self-efficacy avoids difficult tasks and resorts to

their personal weaknesses to justify their lack of effort to pursue certain goals. (p. 111)

As I contextualize Antoine’s words within the notion of self-efficacy, I come to better see and understand how he is experiencing negative self-efficacy as he tries to negotiate his new identity within a terrain that speaks a different language. Language becomes a barrier and a limitation, and it has a negative impact on Antoine’s motivational energy and behavior. It is both unsettling and discouraging for Antoine, for as explained by Méndez López & Aguilar, “[e]motional experiences play a significant role since behind the reasons for deciding to study a foreign language or keep up with the task, emotions and feelings are involved” (2013, p. 112). For

Antoine, language comes to shape how he feels, thinks, motivates himself and behaves (Méndez

López & Aguilar, 2013, p. 111).

Moreover, I have found that not having a good command of English positions the speaker in a disempowered position, and perhaps at times, leaves them with a feeling of being crippled. I deeply believe the truth of the matter is that, as in the words of Braj Kachru (1986), “The English language is a tool of power, domination and elitist identity, and of communication across continents . . . Whatever the limitations of English, it has been perceived as the language of power and opportunity, free of the limitation that the ambitious attribute to the native languages”

(p. 4). I have always struggled with English as a dominant language and I have taken every measure and at every occasion to disrupt its dominance by speaking my native Arabic language.

Whether in my class presentations or on community stages, I insistently begin with a poem or a line of Arabic as a way to allow for other languages and for other ways of knowing to be heard.

My audience has now come to expect that I recite my poetry in both Arabic and English.

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Furthermore, I would also like to reflect deeper on the fact, as mentioned by Antoine, that his original Arabic name is converted in his Canadian place of work into an English nickname.

Although for ethical considerations and for the protection of Antoine’s identity I am unable to mention his real name, the truth of the matter is that all of the letters in Antoine’s true Arabic name are ones that are also part of the English alphabet. Unlike my name where the Gh in

Ghada is pronounced gutturally (and sounds similar to the French R), all letters in Antoine’s original Arabic name can indeed be easily pronounced by English speakers as they are also part of the English alphabet. However, his name is Canadianized and shortened, sort of like how

Arabs are called “Sam” in place of the Arabic Sameer, Samer, Husaam, and even Ehsan (I have friends who can attest to this). But the question is, why do we do this? Why is it necessary to change one’s name to fit into a dominant Western culture? Why is it not possible to preserve the original shape of one’s name no matter where he goes?

I grew up in the Southern part of the United States. My name, “Ghada” was poked fun more often than not—when Americanized, it reads in the same way as the slang American

“Gotta,” and so each time I introduced myself to my classmates, they would cynically say, “oh, as in gotta go!” I used to often laugh this off; as a matter of fact, I enjoyed the attention that my name brought me as I was looking for ways to “fit in” and to belong. But as I began to critically think this topic in my graduate years at the University of Oklahoma, I quickly realized that by pronouncing my name the American way, I too had fallen prey to the influences of a hegemony of culture that was inclusive to particular forms of knowledge and suppressive to others. It was then that I began to introduce myself in the way my name, Ghada, is pronounced by my Arab father and mother. Until this moment, as I live in Canada, I insist on pronouncing my name authentically. I reject any form of “Anglicization” (Said, 1999, p. 4) that may take away from

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the shape or sound of my name. I now smile for different reasons—when an English speaker attempts to correctly pronounce my name, I feel joy and pride in my Syrian identity and in teaching the other [the Canadian or the American or any other non-Arab] how to pronounce the

Gh in Arabic and how differences are as beautiful, in their uniqueness, as our similarities. I too hope that Antoine can insist on having his Arabic name pronounced authentically and holistically, without any erosions or omits, whether in Canada or in any other corner in our world. To allow an “Anglicization” of my name is to also allow the authority of colonial discourse to redefine and rearticulate my identity and to alienate it from its essence (Bhabha,

1984).

Finding 3.2. On Finding Cultural Inter-sections and “Third Spaces.” Although some of my interviewees felt, after a year of their presence in Canada, that “there are no intersections whatsoever” with the Canadian culture, as was the case of Antoine, Miral on the other hand suggests that like in marriage, people of “different worlds” are brought to live together in a space of “a partnership;” she continues to call this space a “third space in which the connection could be made.” By way of example, she refers to the recent European music that has emerged as a result of the Syrian refugee crisis in which displaced Syrian musicians today are performing new pieces alongside European musicians. She believes that the new pieces embody a third dimension engendered by the inter-section of East and West. As I sat and listened to Miral,

Homi Bhabha’s (1988) notion of “third space” naturally came to surface in our conversation and within the context of my research. I later asked her if she has read Bhabha’s works and she said that she had not; I was surprised to hear her suggestion of a “third space.” Bhabha (1988) speaks to the idea of looking for a space that “may open the way to conceptualizing an inter-national culture, based not on the exoticism or multi-culturalism of the diversity of cultures, but on the

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inscription and articulation of the culture’s hybridity. To that end we should remember that it is the ‘inter’. . . the in-between . . . that carries the burden of culture” (p. 22), and he names this the

“Third Space.” He explains that, “It is in this space that we will find those words with which we can speak of Ourselves and Others. And by exploring this hybridity, this 'Third Space', we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves” (p. 22). He also refers to the third space as a situation that enables other positions to emerge” (Bhabha, 1990, p. 216), to be reexamined, reconsidered and extended. I find this notion of third space to helpful in offering us a space to draw on multiple discourses to make sense of the world (Bhabha, 1994) where third spaces bring together “traces of certain meanings or discourse” giving “rise to something different, a new area of negotiation of meaning and representation” (p. 211).

As I think of Bhabha’s words and of Miral’s, I also think of my life as a third space in which I live in the in-betweenness of both worlds of East and West, Syria and Canada; it is this space, in my opinion, that truly embodies that inter-connectedness in which both my children and

I dwell. For me, as I consider myself an inter-national human where my soul is a product of hybridity between East and West, I find that this Third Space is a territory in which the boundaries are blurred; it is where epistemology and knowledge are inter-changed. As importantly, this Third Space is not where identities are “amalgamated” into one or where

“characteristics of one efface . . . or conquer the other person’s” as suggested by Miral, but it is where we may look for ways to “preserve . . . traditions and customs . . . in one land.” As put by

Bhabha (1988), “Cultural diversity . . . [becomes] the recognition of pre-given cultural 'contents' and customs, held in a time-frame of relativism; it gives rise to anodyne liberal notions of multiculturalism, cultural exchange, or the culture of humanity” (p. 18). As discussed by Rahat

Naqvi (2015), the goal becomes “not an assimilation of culture, but an integration of ideas,

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values and viewpoints” (p. 51). Following Giroux (1992), Naqvi cautions that “assimilation entails nothing less than the annihilation of the ‘Other’” (p. 53), where ultimately, as put by Yan

(2013), an “internalization of an assimilationist mentality supports the supremacy of white,

Eurocentric norms and behaviours” (p. 34).

Hall (1994) further speaks to the idea of hybridity and writes,

The diaspora experience as I intend it here is defined, not by essence or purity, but by the

recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of 'identity' which

lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity. Diaspora identities are those

which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through

transformation and difference. (p. 401-402)

As member of the Syrian Diaspora, I often introduce myself as: “I am Syrian hyphen Canadian,” and I locate my identity on the hyphen between the Syrian and Canadian. I have come to feel that the hyphen embodies this Third Space, this hybrid space in which I live with and through difference. It is the space in which I believe my identity is located today, for like Said, I too feel that I “belong to both words, without being completely of either one or the other” (1994, p. xxvi).

Here, I am also aware of the fact that, as discussed by Mahtani (2002), the “nature of the hyphen” may also be problematic where “these hyphens of multiculturalism in effect operate to produce spaces of distance, in which ethnicity is positioned outside Canadianness—as an addition to it, but also as an exclusion from it” (p. 78). But despite this notion of “outsideness,” I continue to believe that the hyphen is an accurate representation of my positionality, for I find that it allows me “to see and recognise the different parts and histories of ourselves, to construct those points of identification, those positionalities we call in retrospect our 'cultural identities'”

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(Hall, 1994, p. 402). Recognizing and living with the differences have come to position my cultural identity as the hybrid Syrian-Canadian woman I am today.

As I think of my research participants as representations of the peoples of the Syrian

Diaspora, and as we search for the inter-section in the differences of cultures, perhaps we, natives and newcomers, can both look for third spaces where we may invite one another. I suggest that it is in this third space that we may make way for a third culture. And it is in this third culture that I too deeply believe that we may “elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the Others of our selves” (Bhabha, 1988, p. 22) where a Syrian may come to see the Canadian other in him/her self and where the Canadian can also identify the Syrian in him/herself, and where we can celebrate our similarities rather than our differences in a space that is “‘attentive to difference, open to the idea of plurality . . . and grounded on ‘the desire to extend the reference of ‘us’ as far as we can” (Chang, 2008, p. 29). I think of the third space as a space in which cultural exchange is at work and where cultural growth is a product. As mentioned earlier in this dissertation, my ultimate aim is to turn “former others of difference into others of similarity by reducing strangeness in others and expanding their cultural boundaries” where this

“transformational process . . . [of] cross-cultural pollination affects both parties” (p. 29). Naqvi

(2015) grounds my thoughts as she writes,

Clearly, to be part of the subordinate is to find within oneself a duality of culture; the

roots of one’s own traditions and values, alongside the new, foreign entities of the culture

into which one is entering. The goal is to maintain awareness of this dual consciousness,

but in a way that integrates the selves. Personal cultural integration leads to integration on

a larger community level. A projection of this successful dual consciousness can be

shared in such a way that people cannot help but notice the unique contributions

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presented by the existence of diverse cultures and languages. Immigrant culture may be

defined by its duality, however in this multicultural, postcolonial age perhaps duality of

culture is the path to be taken since, after all, we all have a story; it is simply how we live

that story that defines who we are. (p. 59)

In my short stories, I write about Lama and Kristian. Lama is a second-generation Syrian immigrant who fell in love with a South African young man. In my story, I wrote,

Between them were a thousand and one stories.

Between them there were Arabian deserts and African Safaris.

Between them was cardamom Arabic coffee and Rooibos tea.

Between them was Asmahan and Laurika Rauch.

Between them was a day of absence and a burning longing.

Between them were amorous whispers and passionate kisses.

Between them were sleepless nights under the light of a moon that shone on all.

(Alatrash, 2016, p. 59)

No Westerner with whom I crossed paths had heard the heavenly voice of a Syrian Asmahan and no Syrian I knew had heard of the music of South African Laurika Rauch. I deeply believe that

“difference matters,” that difference “challenges the fixed binaries which stabilise meaning and representation,” and that it is difference that shows “how meaning is never finished or completed, but keeps on moving to encompass other, additional or supplementary meanings”

(Hall, 1994, pp. 396-397).

As part of writing this autoethnography, I am also thinking through my own lived experiences and of how I continue to negotiate the differences in my Syrian-Canadian cultural identity in the West. I am thinking through my history and my past lived experiences and how

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they have come to constitute my present-day cultural identity. I am dialoguing with myself and looking for traces that may help me better understand and articulate my life’s trajectory. Today,

Facebook reminded me of a passage I had written on March 9, 2015. It read:

Artichokes, eggplants [ardee shokee, beetinjan] . . . is a line that still echoes in my heart

from distant childhood memories in Damascus. I remember waking up to these words in

the morning as the merchants strolled the streets of neighborhoods calling out to sell the

ripest of produce neatly arranged on their wagons.

There may be very little uses for eggplants in the Canadian cuisine, but eggplants are what my

Canadian friends ask me to cook when they are invited to my home. Cooking eggplants is my way of engaging a continuity of my cultural identity, and of celebrating the old in the new, the past in the present, my Syrianness in Canada. I spoke earlier of my short story on Abu [father of]

Maryam and Um [mother of] Maryam who left Aleppo, Syria and sought refuge with their daughter, Maryam in Houston. Within the notion of a third space in which they came to negotiate a third culture, I write,

She [Um Maryam] carried in her hands a bag full with stems of herbs—basil, mint,

tarragon, thyme, and anything else her hands could grab from the garden before departing

to the airport. She also cut off a shoot of white jasmine and a yellow one and placed

them in the same white bag. She wrapped the roots with wet paper towels so that they

could survive the duration of the 40-hour trip they were about to embark upon. (Alatrash,

2016, p. 123)

After a long trip that seemed to have taken them to “the last border . . . [and] the last sky”

(Darwish, 2013, p. 9), and after an exhausting interrogation with an American officer concerning the herbs they had brought from Syria and how they are not to be allowed into the U.S., and after

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a flood of tears mixed with Um Maryam’s hoarse pleas begging in the name of “Jesus, the Son of

God” that the herbs are allowed into the U.S., I wrote this postscript to my story:

Abu Maryam and Um Maryam live the dream of returning to their beloved homeland of

Syria. But until this dream comes true, both of them wake up every morning to their

herbs and nourish their little garden in Houston, wholeheartedly. They continue to invite

the neighbors to taste their Syrian dishes cooked with herbs form Syrian soil, while

narrating stories about a homeland that awaits their return. (Alatrash, 2016, p. 135)

Today, as I autoethnographically reflect on this passage, I feel that the story of Abu Maryam and

Um Maryam may be considered as one attempt for engaging Hall’s second definition of cultural identity, where difference, as constituted by a historical past, can come to exist and to continue as part of our boundlessly transforming and becoming cultural identities. This story is my way of celebrating differences when differences are indeed our reality; it is my way to finding healing. Hall (1994) writes, “No one who looks at these textural images now, in the light of the history of transportation, slavery and migration, can fail to understand how the rift of separation, the 'loss of identity' . . . only begins to be healed when these forgotten connections are once more set in place. Such texts restore an imaginary fullness or plentitude, to set against the broken rubric of our past. They are resources of resistance and identity” (p. 394). The shoots of basil, mint, tarragon, thyme, yellow and white jasmines—these are my forgotten connections that I have now planted and set in my present-day lived experience and as part of my continuously transforming cultural identity.

Two years ago, I bought two jasmine trees (different types) that I found at a local greenhouse in Calgary, and I planted them in my home so that the aroma of their white flowers can alleviate the burning sensation of longing I feel when I think of my homeland of Syria, and

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so that I can return to the days when my father held my hand as we walked the streets of

Damascus where jasmine trees climbed through the black iron railings on Syrian balconies and stroked each passerby with their charming fragrance. I can still feel my late father’s fingers planting a jasmine flower in my hair each time we walked with one another. Spring 2018 has now arrived and my jasmine has budded white flowers and its aroma has filled my heart with hope and possibilities for my homeland, and as importantly, it has grounded the fact that a Syrian jasmine tree can continue to flower in Canada.; the photo below is taken today, April 8, 2018, in my home in Calgary, Canada.

Finding 3.3. On how Canadians can be of help: Activating and actualizing the third space.

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To recycle knowledge. I asked Miral what she thought would make this land of Canada a fertile place in which she may grow roots, feel grounded, and feel a sense of self-worth. Her reply made sense in its practicality. She said,

A human being can become fulfilled under certain conditions—if he/she has stability, an income, a ground on which he/she stands; and so what may facilitate our integration here is to find the basic conditions of living. For me, to find a suitable job; I am not saying the job of my dreams, for that may be a long road ahead, but to find the basics that might help establish my self-balance, like a specific job, a ground—so that people would know you, respect you, appreciate you, and at a later stage, so that you may feel needed by people, because when I feel needed, I feel my self-worth because I would be a source of help for someone else, I would feel that I am offering him/her something that helps him/her continue as well, and so imagine how big and sacred is this—to be able to give something to someone.

The question here becomes—what bridges then may we possibly build for both Syrians and

Canadians to cross in order to help them meet in a “third space” (Moje et al., 2004) between the two? Drawing from the works of several scholars (Bhabha, 1994; Gutiérrez, Baquedano-López,

Tejeda, & Rivera, 1999; Soja, 1996), Moje et al. (2004) suggest

an integration of knowledge and Discourses drawn from different spaces [calling it] the

construction of ‘third space’ that merges the ‘first space’ of people’s home, community,

and peer networks with the ‘second space’ of the discourses they encounter in more

formalized institutions such as work, school, or church . . . where these spaces can be

reconstructed to form a third, different or alternative, space of knowledge and Discourses.

(p. 41)

Mary suggests that we look for ways to “recycle” the newcomers’ education, knowledge, and experience. She believes that “[in] order to be able to adapt to and to fit in the Canadian culture, you will need at one point recycle some things in your life, your university degree, your education, or your experience.” She also points to the idea that when recycled in the second space, the “first” knowledge may consequently remain present as an acknowledged element in

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this “merged” third space. Along these lines, Yan Y. Guo (2013) writes, “It is not just the newcomers who need to adapt to the Canadian culture. The receiving society also needs to change in order to recognize cultural, linguistic and economic contributions of immigrants to

Canada” (p. 37). As a newcomer, Rita recognizes that there has to be an effort made on their part in which their qualifications ought to also be developed into something that is fit to function within the Canadian system (whether in language or skill), but also suggests that there should be individual exams that take into consideration a newcomer’s past experience and knowledge in their respective domains and assess him/her based on the assumption of a funds of knowledge model instead of intellectual deficiency (Moll et al., 1992).

Furthermore, I find Rita’s suggestion to be empirical in that it brings us to consider new possibilities, based on her individual experience and observations, in which we may find ways to exchange knowledge and experience between the old and new spaces, the “first” and “second,” and recycle it in a third space that preserves, celebrates and reuses the old in the new space. She even goes on to recommend how to put her theory into practice by suggesting that an exam is prepared, individualistically, for each candidate—an exam that allows for each person to be evaluated on a personal and individual level and not as done by current exams that do not allow space for unique individual merit to emerge. Daniel characterizes the current standardized ways of assessment as robotic and machine-like where, he finds, that the current methods in place do not “look at you or who you are but looks at what is written only, the human dimension that’s behind this person doesn’t exist; his presence is like a machine; what concerns me is 1, 2, 3, and if these are not present, I [the assessor] don’t care what is present; and the more the law, the less creativity that can take place.” Daniel, like Mary, also believes in the strength of his skills and qualifications and considers his “weakness in language” to be his only deficiency. This

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sentiment is echoed by every research participant in my study. Each arrived from Syria to

Canada with a different level of English proficiency, depending on their educational backgrounds, but none seemed confident in their ability to relay their knowledge or their work experiences in English. Echoing Mary’s words, Daniel too finds that the solution lies in finding ways to assess people individually and to humanize the numbers (or the scores) by allowing for experience, manifested in individual voice and narratives, to speak to their funds of knowledge

(Moll et al., 1992). Within this context, Yan Guo (2013) and Shibao Guo (2010) call for a framework that rejects the current deficit model, which seeks to assimilate immigrants to the norms of the dominant social, cultural and educational norms of the host society, and propose a framework that calls for “pluralist citizenship” that recognizes immigrants’ multiple attachments to specific languages, cultures and values, and aims to affirm cultural difference and diversity as positive and desirable assets.

In Syria recycling is not a practice built into our daily life practices. In addition to an absence in policies and supporting infrastructures that may give way to encouraging this practice as part of our Syrian society (at this moment, I am thinking of myself as a Syrian citizen who ought to look for ways to encourage better waste-management in our humanity), I also believe that Syrians are not afforded the space to think of recycling practices as their minds are consumed with trying to find ways to secure basic needs of life that are scarcely afforded to them. But Rita, who had lived in Canada for less than two years, quickly learned the importance of recycling and of reusing materials that might have gone to waste otherwise. Applying this notion of recycling her knowledge as Syrian in Canada is indeed innovative and empirical, and I suggest that it may provide for one solution in helping Syrian newcomers as they try to find a

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place for, and reposition, their knowledge and past experiences within the framework of a new homeland.

To be open to other ways of knowing the world. As discussed earlier, my goal in writing this dissertation is to engender an empathetic cultural understanding (Chang, 2008) of the

Other through engaging narratives that speak to the lived experiences of peoples of the Syrian

Diaspora imbued and narrated by their voices so that we can qualitatively conjure up, through their active participation in the process, dynamic ways that may facilitate their integration and resettlement in their new unfamiliar Canadian landscape.

Throughout the process of interviewing, it has been my hope to engage a language of hope with the goal of adding a deeper understanding of the human experience of Syrian refugees.

Frantz Fanon (1963) writes, “I find myself—I, a man—in a world where words wrap themselves in silence; in a world where the other endlessly hardens himself” (p. 178). Mary believes that the lack of engagement and the silence between Syrians and Canadians is due to their lack of knowledge about one another; it is, she believes, about fearing to approach the unknown. She insists that “[k]nowledge is the key and it is the bridge . . . It’s about knowledge. Knowledge is an explanation. It is an explanation about yourself.” She also believes that is it the easiest and shortest road to meeting the Other. “When things are put forward, discussed, and explained, then you gain knowledge and your fear is decreased. Knowledge slowly helps you overcome fear.”

Mary’s words speak to the importance of coming to know the Other through breaking silence and looking for other ways of knowing, ways that are different from what has been historically produced as knowledge on the Other. Knowledge then becomes a product of engaging with one another in meaningful conversations, discussions, and stories. Along the same lines, Daniel further suggests that in order to build bridges of acceptance and understanding, we must first

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“expand our awareness and our perceptions.” I asked, “Give me a tool.” Daniel immediately replies, “For example, something that is really important as I said is connecting, talking, talking one to one, not sympathizing. Sympathizing does not yield results.” Daniel is strongly convinced that sympathy alone cannot build bridges of understanding. He insists, “the more awareness, the more the borders and boundaries are expanded.”

One of the questions that has guided my research is: What do Syrian newcomers believe are ways in which Canadians can help as they try to make meaning of family and home in their new homeland, and as they negotiate and remediate their identities? I believe that Mary’s and

Daniel’s words provide some answers where coming to know the other through engaging with one another is key to understanding one another. I further believe that this sort of knowledge dwells in the stories of human experiences. As I was reading Carolyn Ellis’ (2004) The

Ethnographic I, I came across a quote that she writes in her book for Dorothy Allison (1994):

“stories are the one sure way I know to touch the heart and change the world.” I have since printed these words and framed them on my wall.

It is important here for me to express that by sharing what is imparted by my research participants, I am seeking to counter an “Orientalist” and colonial epistemology and ontology on the Arab subject for as explained by Hall (1994): “Europe was a case of that which is endlessly speaking—and endlessly speaking us” (p. 399). I too deeply believe that colonial and imperial discourses have spoken me, and they continue to speak us. As an Arab woman, I have battled throughout my life with Western misrepresentations and the assumptions. My reaction has been to find my voice so that I can disrupt a hegemonic narrative, deconstruct, reconstruct and represent my image as an Arab woman. Today, I am acutely aware of the fact that when standing in a Western space, everything I do and everything I say is attached in one way or another to

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presenting my identity as an Arab woman. I voice my opinions not only to express my convictions but also so that I can show the Westerner that I too have a voice. I speak to announce, as in the words of Antoine, that “I am Syrian [with emphasis on the I].” I write to counter the prevailing “knowledge” on Syrians, on Arabs, on Muslims, and on the Other. I buy clothes that may upset dominant misrepresentations. It is my way of expressing resistance. It is my way of not internalizing the Other that I have been said to be. It is my way to show that I am not the “Other” that seems to have been engraved in Western minds, where, as explained by

Mary, it is assumed that everyone coming from the Middle East is “cocooned within her hijab as a female and in his kufiya [a male headdress] as a male.” And, it is my way to share my story and to contribute to the epistemology on Syrian Arab women, for as Hall (1994) writes,

Not only, in Said's 'Orientalist' sense, were we constructed as different and other within

the categories of knowledge of the West by those regimes. They had the power to make

us see and experience ourselves as 'Other'. Every regime of representation is a regime of

power formed, as Foucault reminds us, by the fatal couplet, 'power/knowledge'. But this

kind of knowledge is internal, not external. It is one thing to position a subject or set of

peoples as the Other of a dominant discourse. It is quite another thing to subject them to

that 'knowledge', not only as a matter of imposed will and domination, by the power of

inner compulsion and subjective con-formation to the norm. (pp. 394-395)

To engage empathy as an act. But beyond countering the misrepresentations, I also hope that an empathetic cultural understanding surfaces through the stories, another way of seeing the world. In my interviews, we discussed the notion of empathy. Mary was eager to speak about this topic. She explains that it is important to distinguish between empathy and sympathy. She suggests that to sympathize is to feel helplessly sorry for another person and she says, “you feel

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sorry for this person and that’s it.” She further adds, “Sympathy does not possess any power. At all.” However, Mary believes that empathy is a feeling triggered and driven by a desire for action and by a sense of responsibility to help with making change. Empathy, as expressed by my participants, is an act, whereas sympathy stops at a feeling. To Mary, an empathetic act can range from the act of listening to giving advice to a person to being an active part of the becoming change. Daniel is more specific and explains, “It’s not about feeling sympathy; it’s about knowing what he [a newcomer] needs and how he may fulfill his needs; for example, if I see someone who has a specific skill, if I want to help him; it’s not about giving him money, but

I would direct him to the right road—a road where he might find success.”

Gladkova (2010) engages a semantic analysis of the terms and speaks to the difference between sympathy and empathy, and she adds the feeling of compassion as a layer in between the two. She defines sympathy as “an emotion caused by the realization that something bad has happened to another person” (p. 271). She then suggests that “compassion, like sympathy, is evoked when something bad happens to another person and one feels something bad because of this . . . A significant difference between sympathy and compassion lies in the fact that compassion implies a more ‘active’ response to the bad state of another person” (p. 272). She further goes on to explain that compassion does not result in a helping action but implies at least

“a desire” to help. Finally, Gladkova (2010) defines empathy as “a conscious attention to the feeling of another person. . . The essence of empathy is knowing and understanding the emotional state of another person” (p. 273). And Guiora et al. (1975) write, “Empathy, perhaps most simply described as the ability to put oneself in another’s shoes . . . it is to step into a new and perhaps unfamiliar shoes” (p. 45-48). As I come to write this final sentence, I feel like I

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have come a full circle in my dissertation—to what it might mean as I hope to engender an empathetic cultural understanding: empathy is the ability to put oneself in another’s shoe.

7.3 Conclusion

My aim in this chapter was to suggest ways in which Canadians can be of help to the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora as they remediate their identities in Canada. Through personal stories on their lived experience since their arrival to Canada, we learn that: language presents a key struggle for the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora, a principle difference, and a limitation that has had negative implications on their self-efficacy and has brought them to feel less empowered; that they are positive and hopeful about their continuous progress as they learn the

English language; that they are looking for “third spaces” and “in-between” spaces—hybrid spaces in which their old cultural identity may be preserved and the new celebrated, and a space in which continuity is engaged as part of their always-becoming cultural identity. As Bhabha explains, the third space speaks to living “between cultures and countries” and “what it means to survive, to produce, to labor, to create, within a world-system whose major economic impulses and cultural investments are pointed away from, your country or your people” (Bhabha, 1994, p. xi). Displaced Syrians suggest that as we look for ways to activate and actualize third spaces, we ought to consider “recycling” their education and experience in a third space where they are assessed individually in their respective domains based on the assumption of a funds of knowledge model instead of intellectual deficiency, a “space of intervention emerging in the cultural interstices that introduces creative intervention into existence” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 12).

They also invite Canadians to be open to other empathetic ways of knowing the world and insist that knowledge is key to understanding one another.

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Chapter 8

Conclusion

8.1 Introduction

This autoethnographic dissertation has become much more than a requirement for the

Degree of Doctor of Philosophy for me. It has been a spiritual journey that has taken me into the hearts of the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora and has allowed me the experience of attempting to walk in their shoes. As I set out to write this dissertation, I hoped to highlight the similarities we share as humans with the displaced peoples of the Syrian Diaspora as we hear their stories, stories narrated through their own voices, and to come to challenge the underlying assumptions and colonial ways of knowing that have defined them. It is my hope that a reading of this dissertation may bring about an empathetic cultural understanding of the peoples of the Syrian

Diaspora and that it conjures up dynamic ways, through their active participation in the process, that may help them as they re-negotiate and re-mediate their identities in Canada.

As I reflect on my research as a Syrian-Canadian, and while being mindful of my privileged position as Syrian and as a researcher, I hope that the connections I hold with my

Syrian research participant through language, cultural identity, and a shared homeland have contributed a uniqueness to my findings. For example, in speaking Arabic to my participants, it was possible to open the space for the metaphorical linguistic and cultural nuances to surface.

When Miral speaks of her home in Syria, she says,

In our home—downstairs is where we store food (byūt il mūneh), the ones where my mother stores makdūs (pickled eggplant stuffed with pecans and pepper in olive oil); we make kishk; we make burghul (cooked wheat) year round; we prepare food for the year; maybe we are peoples who think about tomorrow a lot but we live today more; so downstairs is where we store food; and the second floor is where the rooms are, the living room, and bedrooms; so our home is very different than any other home in the neighborhood and any place in Syria; no home resembles the other.

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I understood Miral by way of a shared Arabic language and a Syrian cultural identity. My grandmother and my late mother-in-law both stored food in byūt il mūneh, and the makūs and burghul are Syrian dishes that I know well and are ones that I often serve on my dinner table.

These moments speak to the production of a shared Syrian cultural identity that is unique and understood by all Syrians regardless of our heterogeneous backgrounds and lived experiences.

Having said this, perhaps some of the stories told by the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora may also resonate with other Diasporic peoples despite a heterogeneity of homelands, nationalities, and lived experiences for I deeply believe that as humans, and as put by Vietnamese refugee Tam

Tran earlier in chapter two of this dissertation, “all hearts are of the [same] blood color” (T. Tran, personal communication, January, 11, 2017).

8.2 Summary of Themes and Findings

The purpose of this study was to qualitatively conjure up dynamic ways that may facilitate the integration and resettlement of the displaced people of the Syrian Diaspora in their new unfamiliar Canadian landscape, as well as suggest pedagogical possibilities that may help facilitate their integration process so that the outcomes are positive for both refugees and the host country. I engaged a language of hope and a pedagogy of possibilities with the goal of adding to a deeper understanding of the human experience of Syrian refugees. As I thought through the complex Syrian Diasporic realities, my study was driven by the following research questions:

• How do Syrian newcomers come to make sense of what it means to have lost a home

and a homeland as it relates to the Syrian Diasporic experience?

§ What stories can Syrian newcomers share with us about their experiences in

Syria since the eruption of the war and after their arrival to their newfound

city of Calgary?

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§ What do Syrian newcomers believe are ways in which Canadians (educators,

employers, community organizations, policymakers) can help as they try to

make meaning of family and home in their new homeland, and as they

negotiate and remediate their identities?

By way of summarizing this dissertation, and as I autoethnographically and reflexively grappled with these questions, as well as with the stories as told by the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora, I have identified the following findings and recommendations:

Theme 1: On the meanings and feelings of the lived experience of the Syrian

Diasporic realities.

Finding 1.1. On the meaning of homeland. To the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora, the definition of a homeland is “everything” embodied in the memories of the place and the social space it occupies; the word “homeland,” to the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora, also captures the same sort of meanings and feelings they hold toward their mothers.

Finding 1.2. On the meaning and feeling of being refugee. The feeling of being a refugee, as described by the displaced peoples of the Syrian Diaspora, is to feel and to visit the most extreme depths of longing, loneliness and loss. They describe their feelings within the context of their Diasporic reality to be as difficult and as excruciatingly painful as the pain a mother experiences in childbirth. They explain that to be a refugee is to be reminded of their outside-ness and out-of-place-ness (Said, 1999), to taste bitterness, to feel crippled and disabled, to feel exhausted and worn out, and to live a feeling of self-worthlessness where one’s worth feels equivalent to zero or less than zero.

Finding 1.3. On forced displacement. Forced displacement, as told by the displaced peoples of the Syrian Diaspora, is about being forced out of their homeland, a land that was an

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extension of their souls, and having no other choice but to run away in tears (at times from massacres), to seek refuge and endure the most horrific of living conditions, and to possibly be smuggled along with one’s children across borders—all in an attempt to escape death. The stories of my participants tell us that forced displacement is about the feeling of having lost

“everything.”

Theme 2: On issues of identity.

Finding 2.1. On cultural identity. For the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora, cultural identity speaks to a deep connection with a homeland, where they feel a oneness with their homeland. Morevoer, as they try to negotiate their new identities in their new foundland of

Canada and as they look for balance and wholeness, displaced Syrians are looking for what

“resembles” their cultural identity, for the similarities, and for that which is familiar. They steer away from cultural differences that position them, as they tell us, in a state of bewilderment and outsideness.

Finding 2.2. On negotiating difference. As they negotiate their cultural identity alongside the differences, peoples of the Syrian Diaspora are aware that their identity within the context of their new Canadian homeland is continuously emerging and evolving and cannot be fixed in the past of a homeland but is fluid and is becoming within moments of continuity.

Finding 2.3. On the fact of difference—Orientalism and beyond. Syrian Muslim women are especially aware of their difference through their hijab. Muslim children are facing discrimination in Canadian schools and are suffering negative implications as a consequence of praying in schools. Moreover, the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora are faced with a reality in which hegemonic media misrepresentations underpin the West’s understandings of the East and transform normal Syrian cultural practices into extremes.

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Finding 2.4. On resilience. The peoples of the Syrian describe their presence in Canada as a process of adaptation and healing; they believe that resilience is a product of war, is the will to survive despite the pain, and that it is about insisting to remain, to continue and to succeed.

Despite the pain and struggles, the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora are resilient and unbendingly resolved to find spaces of hope and possibilities.

Theme 3: On creating new possibilities: Activating and actualizing the “third

space.”

Finding 3.1. On issues of language. For the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora, language is identified as key struggle as they find themselves in their newfound land of Canada. The current

English LINC classes offered to them, they explain, are equipping them with simple language skills that have not proven helpful in relaying their complex emotional lived experiences, and that such English classes are further “taking away from their drive of learning.” Furthermore, the English language also happens to constitute a principle difference for Syrian newcomers in

Canada. Language, as they express, has had negative implications on their feelings of self- efficacy and has brought them to feel less empowered.

3.2 On finding cultural inter-sections and “Third Spaces.” To find inter-sections between the two cultures, the Syrian and the Canadian, people of the Syrian Diaspora look for

“third spaces” and an “in-between” space—a hybrid space in which their old cultural identity may be preserved and the new celebrated, and a space in which difference, as part of their cultural identity, may challenge fixed binaries and persist in alongside continuity

Finding 3.3. On how Canadians can be of help: Activating and actualizing possibilities. Based on their experience, the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora suggest that

Canadians ought to look for ways to “recycle” their knowledge, education and experience in a

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third space that merges the first space of people’s home knowledge with the second space of what they encounter as formalized and localized knowledge. They also suggest looking for ways to assess newcomers individually in their respective domains based on the assumption of a funds of knowledge model instead of intellectual deficiency. They invite Canadians to be open to other ways of knowing the world and insist that knowledge is the key to understanding one another and is the bridge to each other’s hearts, and further believe that this knowledge ought to be constituted by the stories told by the peoples themselves, stories that may come to disrupt the hegemonic dominant and prevailing narratives. Displaced Syrians in Calgary express that, for them, sympathy is powerless while empathy is driven by the desire for action and by the responsibility to actively help with making change; they suggest that empathy means to hold a displaced Syrian’s hand and guide him/her to find the road to success in an unfamiliar Canadian terrain.

8.3 On Third Spaces: My Final Thoughts

On a final note, I asked a friend who currently lives in Syria to design in Arabic an image that may be representative of my study and that would include these three words: homeland,

Syria and Canada. I asked that the word homeland is positioned in-between the two, Syria and

Canada, in an artistic way so that both countries may be representative of a homeland, as happens to be the case for me and for my participants albeit in different ways. In a voice message, I explained to my friend, as briefly as I could, that the topic of my dissertation speaks to the lived experience of the Syrian Diaspora in Canada. I mentioned Bhabha’s (1988) “third space,” and I spoke about the importance of the notion of a dual consciousness, as discussed earlier in this chapter, “in such a way that people cannot help but notice the unique contributions presented by the existence of diverse cultures and languages” (Naqvi, 2015, p. 59). I engaged

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the idea of finding an “in-between” (Bhabha, 1988, p. 22) space— a space of an interconnectedness, and as put by Miral, a space in which characteristics of one’s identity is not amalgamated, effaced or conquered by the other. I also talked about my vision of an image that may embody a space that is “attentive to difference, open to the idea of plurality . . . and grounded on the desire to extend the reference of ‘us’ as far as we can” (Chang, 2008, p. 29).

I recorded and sent my message to him on the morning of Sunday May 21, 2018 at 10 a.m. (Calgary time). There is a nine-hour time difference between Syria and Canada, and so it was 7:00 p.m. his local time. A few hours later and before he slept, he sent me a hand-sketched draft of the image below. I was stunned. I had but one request—to produce the image in a format that I may use in this dissertation. The next day (which happens to be today the 22nd of

May), after visiting a graphic designer in Syria, my friend presented me with the image below as final product. He asked that his name is not mentioned in this dissertation, but he sent an email giving me the permission and full copyrights to publish it.

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This image is made up of three words: Syria-Homeland-Canada. From right to left, the first four characters in red and black are the Arabic word for Syria [s-ū-r-y-ā]. The three centered and larger black letters/characters are the Arabic word for homeland [w-ṭ-n]. The last four characters in red and black are the Arabic word for Canada [k-n-d-ā]. The image artistically engages the shared letters between the three words to spell out from right to left: Syria-Homeland-Canada.

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For me, this image is another way by which we may imagine the idea of building on common shared characteristics while keeping each character/letter in each word whole and uneffaced.

I once visited the Butchart Gardens in Victoria, British Columbia. The Garden is divided into sub-gardens on the grounds of an evergreen Victoria, with natural ponds scattered along the way—there is the Japanese Garden, the Rose Garden, the Sunken Garden, the Italian Garden, the

Mediterranean Garden, and they are all spectacular and so very dazzling in the uniqueness of identities. They coexist serenely but take great pride in their own individual identities. I even wrote about the Butchart Gardens in my collection of short stories and planted on the page of my book “blushing Camellias, rosy Magnolias, white Daffodils, pink Cherry Trees, and the endless fields of the red, orange, yellow, green blue and violet tulips” (Alatrash, 2016, p. 108). A

Japanese Canadian professor, Ted Aoki, also plants the sakura and the rose in his narrative as he walks the Nitobe Memorial Garden, a traditional Japanese garden located at the University of

British Columbia. In his essay “Experiencing Ethnicity as a Japanese Canadian Teacher:

Reflections on a Personal Curriculum,” Aoki (1983) explains that, to him, flowers symbolize different ways of seeing life. He plants his Japanese Sakura (the stunning pink cherry blossom tree) next to the Western rose in his essay and adds a dash of his own unique Japanese identity to the narrative. Instead of seeing his surroundings through one lens, he says, “I know that what I see and how I see it is because of who I am. I am what I see. I am how I see” (p. 335). He elaborates on the metaphor of the sakura and the rose and sees, in their togetherness, “two life- styles, two ways of knowing”(Aoki, 1983, p. 332), two different ways of interpreting life, in a world that could often be a “mono-vision” place (p. 334).

Aoki (1983) narrates his ethnic experience as a Japanese-Canadian teacher in British

Columbia and Alberta, and despite the hurdles he encountered on an arduous road, he writes,

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“This kind of opportunity for probing does not come easily to a person flowing within the mainstream. It comes more readily to one who lives at the margin—to one who lives in a tension situation. It is, I believe, a condition that makes possible deeper understanding of human acts that can transform both self and world, not in an instrumental way, but in a human way” (325).

Aoki saw in his experience, in his dual nationalities, a cultural capital that he carried forward in his writing as part of investing in and contributing to his humanity.

Achebe (1973) says, “We lived at the crossroads of cultures. We still do today . . . What

I do remember was a fascination for the ritual and the life on the other arm of the crossroads.

And I believe two things were in my favor – that curiosity and the little distance imposed between me and it by the accident of my birth. The distance becomes not a separation but a bringing together like the necessary backward step which a judicious viewer may take in order to see a canvas steadily and fully” (p. 22-23). In his work Culture and Imperialism, Said (1994) tells us that he continues to find himself “returning again and again to a hauntingly beautiful passage by Hugo of St. Victor, a twelfth-century monk from Saxony.” It reads:

It is therefore, a source of great virtue for the practiced mind to learn, bit by bit, first to

change about in visible and transitory things, so that afterwards it may be able to leave

them behind altogether. The person who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender

beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to

whom the entire world is as a foreign place. The tender soul has fixed his love on one

spot in the world; the strong person has extended his love to all places; the perfect man

has extinguished his. (p. 335)

Said (1994) also writes, “Survival is a fact about the connections between things . . . It is more rewarding—and more difficult—to think concretely and sympathetically, contrapuntally, about

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others than only about ‘us’” (p. 336). I too deeply believe in the connections and in thinking of others.

Today, as a Syrian-Canadian citizen, I personally think of both Syria and Canada as two countries I am able to wholeheartedly call my homelands; and, as I listen to the song “Home, sweet home”, I do sing and dedicate it to both countries:

Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam

Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home

A charm from the skies seems to hallow us there

Which seek thro' the world, is ne'er met elsewhere

Home! Home!

Sweet, sweet home!

There's no place like home

There's no place like home!

An exile from home splendor dazzles in vain

Oh give me my lowly thatched cottage again

The birds singing gaily that came at my call

And gave me the peace of mind dearer than all

Home, home, sweet, sweet home

There's no place like home, there's no place like home! (Payne, 1882, pp. 21-25)

Perhaps one day the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora can also come to sing this song to both homelands, Syria and Canada.

As final words to this dissertation, I have chosen Mary’s; it is my hope that they may they be engaged in an act of “reading the words and reading the world” (Shor & Freire, 1987, p. 135):

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. . . truly, I hope that all Syrians, in general, who have come to Canada, are given a chance, and believed in. I am certain that inside each of them is a dream, a goal, and a true desire to do something. I hope that they are given a chance; I am sure that Syrians can offer something beautiful; and perhaps they can contribute to building the bridges that we have talked about. And that’s all.

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APPENDIX

The Stories as Told by the Peoples of the Syrian Diaspora

Below are the stories as told by the peoples of the Syrian Diaspora [[I have translated all excerpts below from Arabic to English unless otherwise indicated]:

On the meaning of homeland. I asked: What is the meaning of homeland for you?

Mary: When we were in Syria, we didn’t think of the answer; we didn’t look for this answer; because it was something that we were living; so there was no reason to find an answer for it or find a name for it; but when we came here and we lost how we had been living in Syria, it became necessary to find a name for the feeling that you are living and feeling—which is to lose everything; if you ask me what is Syria, I would answer my mom and dad and my brothers and sisters [crying]; and I remember the neighborhood in which we played, and I remember the church and the places that I used to love very much in Syria; I remember my university [still crying and choking on her words] . . . perhaps a homeland is all of these things; it is memories and the people you love; perhaps it is the stories you heard as a child; perhaps it’s my mother’s excitement when I would return home and find her waiting for me at the door; maybe it is when my father would return from work tired; perhaps it’s all of these things; it is my friends in the neighborhood with whom I played and would return home. . . I am certain it is all of these things; And even with all this, I still don’t know how to express the meaning of homeland.

Antoine: Building on what Mary has said, and within the same context, perhaps with a different approach but with the same ideas, a homeland is one’s character; it’s when one can say: I am Syrian (anā sūrī). My homeland is Syria. I mean—I am Syrian [emphasizes the “I am”] . . . It is as she [Mary] said, it’s the love of a mother; the hard work of a father and the appreciation of the father; the excitement from siblings; the excitement to see a street; friends; the familiarity between you and the stones you pass by daily, the stones of the building as you go to work or school; a familiarity is developed with this street, you miss it, and when time passes by and you haven’t passed by this street, we say in Syria—oh how long it’s been since we have passed by here; so we miss it, we miss it [homeland]; it is everything; in other words, a homeland is the life of a person . . . This is our country; this is the pride of Syrians—their homeland of Syria. This is what a homeland is. It is everything; it is the character of a person, the character of a human; this is how I think. [Later in the interview Antoine returns to my question and continues]. . . . we return to “homeland” [laughs]. I am my homeland. What does the traditional song from Aleppo say?—[laughs] . . . [Antoine recites verses from the song below for Syrian Mahrous Alshaghri.] “Look up the history of Arabs and see how many poets have sung and paid tribute to Syria, my tapster / Syria is dignity and her people are the most generous… and its soil is our bed and her stones are the most beautiful of pillows… Syria has quenched us with dignity, in sweet, bitter, and plain cups… Syria is our mother, and thousands of times God has asked that we take care of our mothers.” It’s true that we struggled, but this [Syria] is our mother.

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Daniel: For me, the most important meaning is memories—to start with, a homeland for a person is his memories, it is the place where he was born in . . . my memories in the place, of the people, yes . . . The memories at the beginning are of one in his home; in between the people he was born with; these, as Miral [his wife] says, are not people we chose in life . . . there are many things in life that simply come with us; and there are some things that we create for ourselves. So as for memories, it is what has come with us and what we loved and didn’t come to us by our choice; this is what is important. As for me, at one point, it [memories] was the place; not only the people. Memories were no longer only the people but also the places in which I lived a specific state of being and I was a person who perhaps does not resemble me much today [my character today].

Miral: The infant develops in the environment of a womb and this gives him all the requirements and conditions to live. And without this, he/she being would not be. And perhaps scientific advances are trying to create some environments that may provide the basic conditions for this egg and sperm, but there remain specific inabilities to accomplish this. A family is the second womb for a human being. As I told you, they are the first reference; they are the school; there are many people who might have paved their ways on their own and have become amazing people, but imagine how beautiful it is to have the first lap/cradle that can provide you with all the things that you may need and advances you into life in a way that is much easier than if you were to pave it on your own . . . a human being is still in need for this first source, for this first spring, that provided him/her with all the conditions to become a balanced human being, and a whole and healthy human being; he/she was in need for this spring that has provided him/her with all these details . . . I don’t know if I have delivered the idea to you, but in very short terms, it [family] is the second womb. Some people may see a family as a shackling force; but notice, for a tree to become a tree, it needs soil and a ground on which it can be planted . . . Family is the soil on which we were planted and became trees . . . In short, and without any introductions—it [a homeland] is the experience that cannot be repeated. A person who has the ability to adapt, wherever he may be planted, in a fertile ground, should be able to produce. But a homeland is the period in your life that cannot be repeated; it’s the first seed; it is about where you were born and how you grow up as a child with people who are the first reference for you and who are the first school for you; wherever you go in the world, your individual experiences are what teaches you, but in this place [the homeland], there was something readily available and given to you; so a homeland is those people—and when you are far from them, you may be able to create a suitable environment for yourself in the new place; some may be fulfilled by material things; some by ideas [philosophies]; some are fulfilled with things like music, literature, work; or by different types of things in life; so they may be able to find themselves wherever they go, but they cannot find this reference that they have left behind. So, for me, a homeland is the experience that cannot be relived; it is indeed Syria; a Syria that has given me something that cannot be given by any other place; sometimes, someone with a different mindset can say to you—‘you can find a homeland in Canada because Canada will provide you with a better life, will give you a respected job, and will provide you with humane excellence.” Syria indeed was very weak on this side of things, but Syria has an abundance of emotions and has an abundance of social

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life, and has an abundance of love; and even here, if you ask Canadians, they would say we need these things [found in Syria], and because of the ways life here in Canada, we are far from these details, but we need them. And it [a homeland] is the place where you do not need luggage. It is your ground and your world. But some people have had to pack up their homeland in luggage. This is the most difficult of experiences, and we are now one of those experiences. At least up until a specific point—until we can create another or a new homeland. But Syria is the place that cannot be repeated.

Adam: A homeland is the land, and the land is our honor, as we say. And we are attached to the land . . . We love the land. We were born in the land. It gave us birth. We were planted in it, and we were born in it, and we played on its swings. We were on it as children and in schools and in happiness . . . In our hands, we would eat. We knew what we were eating, not artificial things.

Miral: The idea, Ghada, is that we are, or human beings are, attainments and data and information; I mean how can you make a dish if you don’t include its ingredients; for a mother, we are her recipe, a recipe that she mixes together that makes us into our form; afterwards, we can then, after we have the maturity to pave our own way, to choose our identity and character and the location in which we wish to be; but this is afterwards; it’s is a later stage; and so this is where the similarity is—a homeland naturally provides you with the ingredients and plants in you all the details that creates your make-up. So basically, this is the similarity--I mean a mother, or perhaps a homeland, is the first chef. . . for example, a mother—when you ask the meaning of mother, you are told that a mother is the aroma of bread; a mother is a warm lap; a mother is the source of security; so this is taken from a lived experience of what it means to have a mother; but this is not the general rule; for example, if you ask me what is a mother—I say, she is someone who tends the land; who picks olives; who prepares the storage house; and who bakes bread; who allows us to live those experiences that are not found in any other place . . . I mean, the sacredness of this position, like a mother for example, can be born from a lived experience one may live; but it’s not experience that can be generalized to include all people, although, for me, I see the world through the eyes of my mother . . . a mother who has brought us up and has nurtured us with these details.

Antoine: As Omar al-Farra says, what does he say: “A homeland is a mother . . .” Yes, he says that a homeland is a mother.

On what it means to have lost a homeland. I asked: What does it mean to have lost a homeland?

Mary: When we came here, after we lost what how we had been living in Syria, it became necessary to find a name for the feeling that you are living and feeling—which is to lose everything.

Antoine: War comes in one shape—everything is lost.

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Miral: I don’t know from where the meaning of life comes for us, but it is what we have grown up with and what has been molded into our being of emotions. Truly. Notice that the experience of every immigrant is in what he has lost; the experience of a mother is represented in her love for her children [Miral’s baby complaining] . . . Because a homeland is what has deposited in us all the pieces that make us up today in our current state--to have lost a homeland means to have lost a piece of ourselves, and we have lost pieces from our soul; it’s to have lost a side of our personality and character; you may be able to repeat memories and you can remake a present that will become a past, a past that you long for in another place, but no, you are losing something that had been deposited in your soul; it’s like this thing has been lost from your soul; this is how it is to me personally.

On forced displacement. I asked: What does it mean to be a refugee?

Antoine: From another standpoint, it’s not only about having been yanked, but about the fact that you no longer have options; I mean you no longer have options, and you only have one option; and something is pushing you, saying Go! [loudly] Don’t stay! Go! in all shapes and from all directions. Mary: True; from all directions. Antoine: . . . in a forced displacement, there are forces that are pushing, pushing—war first of all; war is a small word but what are its implications—a bad life, a costly life, and shortage of security . . . and even the environment and the air you breathe have become toxic and unnatural as a product of the explosions and gunpowder and the smoke that it spreads in the air; all of these are factors . . . Do you understand my idea? Do you understand what I mean, my lady? Reality was bad in every direction on Syrian land, one that pushed the people to try and save their lives and to preserve what has remained of their lives, and to leave the country. Mary: As for me, I remember the second in which we placed our feet on the way to the plane; in this place, you ask yourself a question—is this the place of no return? Or at least, will it be a long time for you before you return? And because of the way you leave, you know that if you were to return one day, you will not return as yourself; you will return as a changed person; and at this moment you realize that the decision will influence your destiny; truly, when they say that this is a decision of destiny, it truly is . . . But we didn’t possess many options; or actually we didn’t have anything but this option; for our sake and for our son’s sake . . . it’s truly about “love knows not its depth until the hour of separation” as Kahlil Gibran says. It’s true that you don’t know the worth of your homeland until you are forced to leave it. [There was great pain in Mary’s voice]

Mary: Never in our lifetime [would we have thought to leave Syria], despite all. I will speak for myself, and I believe Antoine agrees with me in opinion; we were very happy in Syria. It was not the Utopian village; there were mistakes; there was trash on the street; there was no order; there were bribes—policemen were bribed; but at the end of the day, when you love, you forgive the mistakes of those whom you love even if they were perhaps repeated a million times; when we were in Syria, we forgave the mistakes because we loved Syria. We would have never considered exchanging Syria for even the most beautiful country in the world, had they asked us to choose between Syria and the

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most beautiful country of the world. This topic was not open for discussion, because as I had told you, we forgave. We forgave because we loved. This country was our homeland and we were going to stay in it no matter what. We used to believe—truly we believed that we would stay in this country no matter what. When the war erupted, you were brought to feel that all of your priorities had changed.

Daniel: If it were up to us, no one would choose change. Here, for example, try and tell someone who lives in Calgary to go to a place in which he would lose the advantages he has here; why would he go?

Brianna: In Syria, when the war began, we remained in Syria, we didn’t leave, but after a while, and after tasting the bitterness of hardships, we went to Swaida [from their hometown of Dar’aa] and stayed there for a year . . . We lived in Swaida for a year; we stayed for a year to teach our children [in schools] because there was no school in Dar’aa. After leaving Swaida, we returned to Al-ḥraak in Dar’aa, but the shelling intensified again, and we couldn’t bear it; we were scared for our children--that one’s hand or leg may be amputated because of how many children we had seen like this; a massacre also took place in Dar’aa, and so then we left to Jordan. We faced hardships on the way for Jordan. Myself: How did you get to Jordan? Brianna: Because we didn’t have passports, we were smuggled . . . First there was a region called al Taybeh; we first went to Taybeh. Then we went from Taybeh to Jordan. The regime noticed us and started shooting at the cars that transported us. Adam: [in English] were shooting at us and target [switched to Arabic] and puncture the wheels of the car. And so, we began to say our final prayers as we thought that we might die as martyrs. Brianna: We didn’t expect that we would arrive to Jordan. Adam: Thank God, we drove on the metal part of the wheel. Brianna: The chauffer drove on metal, even though the load was heavy—children, women, youth, men; very heavy; I mean a very heavy load on the car. And then they returned us to the Taybeh, where we had been. And then they told us the next day in the evening they would take us via Nasib road, another road, and God facilitated our way from Nasib. Adam: [switches to English] Then the Jordanian government/police receive us . . . They took us to camp. I lived in camp one, a couple one month [sic]. The camp is very bad; very hot; Brianna: [in English] ya, my kids all sick Adam: [in English] Just tent for seven persons. Myself: One tent for seven people? Adam: [in English] One tent Brianna: Ya Adam: [in English] And the utilities is very bad. Like washroom. Very far. So far. And very Distry [sic - dirty]. Adam: After that my kids to had some disease, like X [mentions name of older son], when I to take me to doctor, they cannot to create is good; and to take out he camp like [smuggling] and to pay money for someone to see him

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Brianna: . . . [in Arabic] I mean we tasted a lot of bitterness. Adam: . . . [back to Arabic] And even when the war intensified between us and the regime and there were random rockets falling on us, and I mean there was a lot. In my house, while I would be in one room, a shell had gone through the wall in the other room. We wouldn’t feel it; we thought the shelling was outside . . . We would find the refrigerator perforated; all of it . . . In Dar’aa. The whole town left. The Free Syrian Army they did not allow any civilians to stay in the city. Everyone had to leave. Everyone left. But I was connected to my land. I didn’t want to leave the country at all. I would have never thought that one day I would leave. I was a businessman in the city. I didn’t ever think to obtain a passport. I never thought I would leave. Alhamdulillah [Praise be to God] we were living and happy . . . We didn’t have any relations/interactions with the government, like the mid regions [in Syria] like Hama or Hums. Adam: There were revolutions, but we didn’t intervene. We were only after our daily bread. Brianna: We would partake peacefully. Adam: We knew things might escalate and trouble might happen, and we wanted to remain peaceful. But things escalated a great deal. A lot happened. A massacre happened. Adam: . . . I mean, how we God helped us survived, I don’t know. It’s meant to be that we live and come here. Subḥaan Allah [Praise be to God]. I swear we were saying the Shahaadah [A Muslim’s declaration of faith and one of the five pillars of Islam]. . . Praise be to God. We returned and slept after having gone through this horror. We thought we were going to be martyrs. The car was full of holes. Brianna: . . . Thank God that the bullets did not hit anyone. That they did not hit the youths or anyone else. That they hit the wheels of the car. Adam: . . . I swear one tent. I swear. And they gave us one blanket. We were shaking. Brianna: It was cold! When we arrived, we had a little bit of money, and he went to buy some more. My daughter was much younger. She was much younger than now. Her body became quickly sick. As soon as we arrived to Jordan, sickness began. [Both husband and wife were talking together]. Adam: The children had diarrhea and vomiting. Brianna: My oldest son couldn’t bear it. He was drinking water, and as you know, the water was not clean. But you have no choice but to drink. I mean, one would be thirsty. Adam: water was not clean nor filtered. Brianna: His face turned yellow and even the white in his eyes. Brianna: Wallahi [by God] we would cry but we had no choice but to bear a little. And when the Canadian government called us, my husband said, by God, I want to leave Jordan and everything in it. Myself: This is after two and a half years that you stayed in Jordan, and then they called you and you left after two and a half years in Jordan to Canada directly. Adam: Yes. Myself: You were in the first plane that arrived in Calgary. Adam: Yes. Myself: . . . And so, from the time that you had left Syria and until now, it’s been 4 1/2 years.

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Brianna: About five years. Adam: Yes, 4 ½ years. Brianna: 4 ½ years yes. Brianna: We left in 2013 in May . . . We left crying. I swear. We didn’t want to leave. We were wishing the situation was better so that we would stay in our homes. Adam: We left crying. Brianna: Because those who left to Jordan would tell us that things were not good there. But after we saw the massacre and after youths and children were killed, we were very frightened for our children. [Sighs] . . . It was the siege of Al-ḥraak. Al-ḥraak is next to Dar’aa . . . This is where it started. And they called for the siege to be lifted from the mosque . . . They had sieged it. They entered it and they killed the doctors in it. It had doctors in it. . . . We love the land. We were born in the land. It gave us birth. We were planted in it, and we were born in it, and we played on it in the swings. We were raised in it as children and in schools and in happiness. We didn’t know anything but happiness. We didn’t know anything about the outside world. We didn’t know what was outside. Everything came from our emotions. We didn’t learn from the outside. People learned from us. Brianna: We left against our wishes, because we were forced to. Wallahi [by God] by force. Adam: We left Wallahi [by God] by force against our wishes while my tears were falling. Brianna: We were crying. We were wishing to return to our home even for one second. Adam: To return, just to return, and to hold onto the land and our home, a home we were raised in and in which our children grew up. Brianna: But the circumstances were stronger than us. It’s about your children. You look for what’s safer for your children, otherwise it would be like committing a sin. Imagine that one of the children’s leg is amputated. What would we say to him when he is older? Wallahi. In the beginning, we wouldn’t accept our departure, and we didn’t leave until the shelling got very bad and we could no longer bear it. Adam: We didn’t accept to leave. But God forbid, if something were to happen to one of my children, what would he say to me—my father, everyone left, why did you leave me here to stay? Brianna: This is our land and our honor. Adam: God forbid, if he [one child] were to die, it’s one thing, but if God forbid, one of our children is to have become crippled, what would happen to them? They might look at me and ask, ya baba [daddy], why didn’t you take us out of here to another place that is safer?

On the feeling of being a refugee. I asked: How does it feel to be a refugee?

Antoine: You know, sometimes, it is difficult for me to express myself when it comes to longing, but yesterday as I found myself sitting amidst a society that does not resemble me, I don’t know why, but I longed for my old table [Antoine is silent; he cries]. [I cry]. [Antoine Sighs]. It is difficult. To come to someone who is 45 and tell him to start all over. Wallah [by God] it is a big catastrophe. Regardless, my lady. So, I felt a sense of

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longing. I longed for my old table, to everything. Let me present you with another poetic note. I recall . . . how a poor woman whose son was in prison came to me asking for help, and long-story-short, I gave it my all to get her son out of prison. Do you know what she brought me? She asked me, “What do you want in return?” I told her nothing. She said, “No way sir, you’ve worked hard with us.” What can I ask of her? I knew her situation, and I told her, Wallah I don’t want anything, just pray for me ya ḥajjeh [my elder]. After two or three days, she returned. Guess what she brought back. [I answered: bread that she had baked]. She brought half a kilo of ground Arabic coffee. [I cried and laughed at once]. She said to me, Sir, I really didn’t know what to bring you; God bless you . . . and she placed the bag on the table and left. She brought it [the ground coffee] fresh and hot and its smell filled the room. Because I was very proud of this, I framed the bag of coffee; I put it in a frame and hung it on the wall immediately next to my degree . . . the frame is no longer there; the “revolutionaries” have stolen it [cynically he said and laughed]; the bulls as there is no better name for them [in Arabic the word bulls and revolutionaries is close in the way they sound]; so, what can I say to you, Ghada? I had seen so many tears in front of me and I was not easily affected, but when the story is now mine as well—for God’s sake, it’s bitter. It’s bitter.

Mary: When you bring someone Syrian to Canada, it is as if he/she is crossing different stages and those stages are shared by all Syrians; and this stage, the stage of travelling and pre-travel, it’s like you are in the midst of a whirlwind; it’s like even your feelings are put on hold and postponed; you feel as if you are running and running and running away; then you arrive here [in Canada], and the first stage is basically a time of horrible longing, accompanied by regret—questioning the decision you made and also accompanied by the feeling of guilt, that I came here and I had left other people behind in Syria, people whom I love; you feel that this is of the most difficult stages that a human being can face; then is the stage when you leave the airplane, get your needed sleep, adapt to the time difference, and you then realize that you are now very far from Syria. [Crying] This stage is made up of longing where all the three of us [Antoine, Mary, and their son] spent it crying; our son would wake up every day, we had been here for five or six days [addressing Antoine she asks if he recalls, and Antoine replies: of course] and would ask us to take him back to Syria. . . [Mary continues, still crying] I recall that this period of time it took days; it was a very difficult period. Then you get to a point when you decide, that’s it, I will have to adapt; this stage is not an easy one and this decision— that I am going to adapt—is not an easy decision. … on so many occasions I would tell Antoine that I don’t feel balanced; I mean in Syria, despite the war, I used to truly feel that when I walked, I knew where each step was going to be placed, even though I was aware that in the next step a shell might approach me and kill me, but I knew that I was walking solid steps on the land; this was my land and I knew it inch by inch; at the beginning here [Canada], I did not feel balanced, truly Ghada, it was like the feeling of being an astronaut who is unable to walk on ground and is looking for anything to hold onto—this is how I felt, that I needed anything to hold onto; this was a product to many factors—from the start, we arrived exhausted, we came carrying many burdens within us, and we had experienced many terrible, sad experiences; true catastrophes; and then you realize that at the end you must stand again and truly adapt; now, how much do I feel that Canada is my land and a place where I may walk

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with balance, I think this will require more time. And perhaps this is the idea we are discussing—if I had come here as an immigrant, and have thoroughly prepared myself before I had come, knowing what was awaiting me, and expecting what was awaiting me, things would have been much easier. But when all of the sudden, you feel like you have been yanked, yanked from your land and placed on another land, and as you are already in an unbalanced state, you will definitely come to find it difficult . . . The idea is that you have taken me to a ground that I have not treaded before. . . you feel like an astronaut; that you are floating in space . . . that you don’t have weight; but when you find those people who can help you, hold your hand, give you strength, help you, add weight onto you. And then you feel like you too have a place; your footstep begins to leave a mark; we were first walking, as they say in Arabic, in a state of al-hayūlā Antoine: hayūlā; I don’t know what the English is for this word. Myself [uncertain of the meaning of the word] Can you explain the word in Arabic? Antoine: al-hayūlā. Mary: weightlessness. Antoine: al-hayūlā—Arabic language scholars have spoken about the subject of weightlessness. Myself: so it’s weightlessness. This is the first time I hear this word in Arabic. Antoine: al-hayūlā is the state of weightlessness. Do you call it bewilderment in English? Mary: . . . What is it called? Antoine and myself: Bewilderment.

Miral: The most difficult thing for me, and a shock for me, and something that I have expressed in writing and I don’t know if this will serve you in your work, is the feeling of loneliness. [baby interrupts]; for example, my experience of delivery, I feel that it was the harshest, or actually the most difficult, not harshest, as it is also beautiful because the product is to have a human being, but it is one of the most difficult experiences because you are molding a soul, and taking care of the needs of a soul, so you are not able to neglect anything no matter how difficult your circumstances; so loneliness and my feeling of loneliness at that time, in addition to other circumstances, was causing me this sense of loss; [baby crying, taking care of baby and putting on TV] [Miral thanks the baby for being patient] . . . I think even if I had been here for a while in Canada, I don’t think that this side that I had lost would have been restored because it is part of the nature and culture of a country. So, if I want to compare between Syria and here, in Syria my family would have been more present after this sort of an experience [delivery] and I would have had more help and I would have had more support. But here [in Canada] it was about the feeling of loneliness; this was one of the difficulties I experienced.

Antoine: Here is a small example—here in Canada, each home carries a culture that is different than the culture of the home that is immediately next to it. We are here, and our neighbor is here [pointing to the neighboring townhome]; she has a baby who still breastfeeds, and she has a son who is as old and the same size as our son, and he even looks like him. Mary: It’s true. Cameron [a pseudonym for the neighbor’s child] Antoine: Yes, Cameron. I am not sure where she is from, I think Czech Republic?

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Mary: Romania Antoine: Yes, she is Romanian. We are Syrian; she is Romanian. We are both Eastern. But we are Arab and she is European. Many times, she has told her child, as Mary has informed me, not to eat with us. Mary: Not to enter our home Antoine: She forbids him to enter our home. To play in our front yard is okay. Myself: Why? Antoine: We don’t have reasons. Mary: We don’t know. Antoine: We don’t know. Why? We don’t know. If she had felt unsafe with us, she would have completely forbidden her son to come. But he is not allowed to come into our home, is not allowed to eat, not allowed, and these are the two taboos that she has enforced and that I have fully witnessed—I saw him a little bit ago as I was coming back from school and invited him to eat, and he said, no, I don’t eat at your home, with the innocence found in every child . . . And so look at this child—in Syria, we are not like this; our door to door neighbors usually come into our home and we go into theirs, and with very small degree of reservations, not much.

On being in Canada. I asked: How do you feel today as you live in Canada?

Mary: And this is the natural course of things. We arrived here in our forties. We arrived here in our forties. I mean, how capable are we of adapting and starting all over, and of trusting anew, and of loving anew, and of getting to know anew, and of opening up anew? I think this is the problem for most Syrians and this is what brings you to intrinsically belong to your Syrian identity even when you are in Canada, and you feel a true belonging towards them [Syrians] because they understand you. I mean, for example, when I go to my Syrian neighbor X, I feel like she understands me with one word. I don’t have the need to explain myself. She understands. She understands not because she is highly intelligent or because I am highly intelligent. She understands because we both have both lived the same circumstances, and so I don’t need to explain things every time. For example, with our Canadian friend who is closer [in distance] than my Syrian neighbor X; she lives here; our conversation is very limited; “Hi. How are you?” and not more than this. And then you begin to consider the third sentence that you want to articulate and think about whether or not it is appropriate; is it suitable? Will she understand it in the way I express it . . . and is the natural case for human being, one always looks for what is more comfortable for him/her, and it is more comfortable for you not to have to have to start over and explain yourself again every time, and your culture, and your environment and the thing that resembles you. And this is what leads you to naturally look for the people who resemble you.

Miral: The aroma of rain on my window when it rains--I don’t know if these detail mean the same to others; but for me, it is part of my identity; it makes up my characteristics; it makes up my nature; it makes up my soul; my soul is a mix of these details, details like the shape of our neighborhoods; the differences in homes; in our environment [Syria], there is uniqueness to each place. Here, inside the houses there are differences, but the general outer look project is one mold, a routine, something classic, and so you work

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harder to find the differences. The shape of my neighborhood is something that means a lot to me; the design of the neighborhood; how we enter it; how we get out of it; the shape of our home, for example, a home that represents a different identity than the other homes . . . In our home—downstairs is where we store food (byūt il mūneh), the ones where my mother stores makdūs (pickled eggplant stuffed with pecans and pepper in olive oil); we make kishk; we make burghul (cooked wheat) year round; we prepare food for the year; maybe we are peoples who think about tomorrow a lot but we live today more; so downstairs is where we store food; and the second floor is where the rooms are, the living room, and bedrooms; so our home is different than any other home in the neighborhood and any place in Syria; no home resembles the other.

Antoine: At the end of the day, there are no intersections [between the Syrian culture and the Canadian culture]. There are no intersections whatsoever. However, if there were Syrians around us, I would say that things would be possible. It would be possible . . . What I would like to say that I am not rejecting the Canadian community, and it’s not that I like to live amidst those who resemble me—who told you that in Syria we all resemble one another; the environment in which we all lived resembles us, but we [Syrians] do not all resemble one another. We don’t resemble one another; but our attitudes towards one another are beautiful . . . in Syria it is the same thing, no one resembles the other, but the environment that is ruling us has established how we should go about dealing with one another; when we have a visitor, we welcome him/her with one hundred welcomes and we respect them; but here when we go as visitors to someone’s house, we feel uncomfortable and self-conscious, and especially when one is a stranger to our culture. I still consider myself as a visitor in the Canadian society; I am uncomfortable, embarrassed, and self-conscious. [Laughs]. So many times at work when I feel like saying something, I quieten myself as I am worried that my statement may be misunderstood, although they [Canadians] are very comfortable to deal with and they call me by a nickname (A), and they encourage me to talk to them about whatever I wish and to be direct without worrying about expressing things in their way of expression; and thank God, I have made beautiful relationships within a few months, and I speak with everyone.

Miral: In marriage, you bring together two different worlds and you bring them to live in this partnership, and no one should efface the characteristics of the other or conquer the other person so that they can live in a state of understanding and peace. They should both look for a third space in which the two intersect, a shared space in which this connection could be made. So, just because we are on their land, it does not mean that we must become amalgamated with them. The beautiful thing about Canada is that they try to look for ways to preserve your traditions and customs but on one land . . . For example, when it comes to food let’s say, they now have as part of their daily routines food types that are not traditional to their country or made in their country; perhaps, like is happening now in Europe, there is now a renewal in music, and new musical additions, and they are making a new history of new music that is a way to connect between East and West.

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On barriers and struggles. I asked: What are the challenges you have faced after your arrival to Canada?

Antoine: Language is our principle difference as it is the key to dealing with others in this society; we accepted this challenge and we are trying to be as adaptable as possible to integrate within the Canadian society and to live in one way or another—I mean, I am not going to ask that we live in the same way we lived in Syria; certainly not; because all of our loved ones are in Syria—but now we can name people as our friends here in Canada, and so will try to be as flexible as possible to establish ourselves despite our advanced age.

Daniel: If I were to tell you what I’ve told you in English, they would not come out with me—you would think that I am a little child trying to express something . . . The most difficult thing for me was and still is the barrier of language . . . Because language is the door to many matters. For example, it’s about needing to tell you something but not being able to explain it to you; it’s about having the idea in mind but not being able to express it; so language for many people is a big barrier. . . I have begun classes for language. I am not seeing that it is of much help to me. Myself: LINC [Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada]? Daniel: Yes, LINC. But here we return to the same idea, I am attending the class and I am amongst the best in my class, but you find that they are teaching you things like— how to buy things from the restaurant, how you eat, how you get your shopping needs, how you go to a physician, these basic things; but as for us, we have bigger ideas, but they don’t consider these things naturally because they have to teach us the basics, but this does not create a drive for us as adults. For example, when you teach a language to a child, you teach it through the things he likes, and that’s how he learns the language; but LINC teaches language in a very stiff way, but I am not really in need of these matters; maybe if I now go to a doctor, I know what to say, and now I can mimic language like a parrot, but what really drives me to learn as an adult is to learn a language about a subject that I love—they ought to know this about adults. Myself: If you were able to design a class, what would you recommend as a curriculum for the class? Daniel: As for me, for example, I am following YouTube videos for learning English called English Central—what’s nice about it, is that it offers you a depth to language; for example, I like to use the language of philosophy; others may choose to learn the language of their field; so they offer you deeper subjects while in the form of conversation, and so we are able to learn the language in which we need to express ourselves; we are not only about being people who may need to go to a doctor or eat or buy groceries from the store and consume I mean. It is not only about these things. We need some diversity in subjects from this standpoint; so that one feels that what he is learning is of value; not that he learns it and then forgets about it; and this is the case with schools everywhere—even with us when we were younger, ¾ of what we learned in our school is not something we needed in life—it was something that we had to recite like parrots and then eventually forgot, and at the end it was our experience that we remember and what we love, and that’s why when two are in the same curriculum, one finishes and doesn’t understand a thing you say, and the other ends up being a philosopher or an

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author or a scientist . . . maybe if I wanted to say all this in English, maybe I will die before I can learn how to say it all; maybe, depending on one’s reality. [Laughs]

Miral: I am progressing a great deal, and if only I am presented with an opportunity in the community, a real departure place, I am sure I will no longer encounter the difficulties I am now facing; and so language to me is not a challenge or a hindrance at all. Language is undoubtedly an attainable goal; the matters that you attain from learning and experiences can easily be self-fulfilling for yourself.

Brianna: In the beginning, I was not able to understand him [the neighbor]. He would stand, and I would not understand anything; except hi, how are you? [laughter] And then as I began to learn (at the beginning I was not able to go to school as I told you because my daughter was not in school and stayed home for a year; I would take her to the Newcomer Center just so that she would adapt before she went into school). Adam: Now, we exchange visits. When his wife got sick, we went and visited them. Brianna: He would keep on talking to me. Adam: And we would joke. And his wife thinks she is young [laughter]. Brianna: It’s so nice. Brianna: . . . Yes, now when you understand them, things are different. Adam: We now understand them better. We understand their nature better. Brianna: He now tells me, “Before don’t understand [said in English]; now I understand.”

Antoine: [The generalizations] present you with the politics of the herds. Because people are following directions; I am also following the same direction. What are your reasons [for following]? Because people are going that direction. Really? Is this enough reason? Why are you going. Because everyone is doing so, and so am I.

Miral: But for me, the culture is the hindrance, for example, to find the similarities; to share a mindset and a way of thinking; I told you that the people and places are not repeatable, and this is the hindrance for me. But as for language, it will undoubtedly be attained. One day, I will be able to speak fluently [she pronounces the word “fluently” in English and laughs], and so this with time will be accomplished.

Miral:… because when I feel needed, I feel my self-worth because I would be a source of help for someone else; I would feel that I am offering him/her something that helps him/her continue as well . . . this was one of the difficulties; another difficulty was the feeling of being disabled—that you are someone who has the full ability to achieve great accomplishments in your own homeland to a person who now feels that his wings and abilities are cut and that his abilities are downsized in a new place. It is a matter of time that this person will be able to accomplish new things, but the question is—during this time, what is happening to this person? . . . So, imagine the difficulty of this challenge. These are battles that take place within you until you become a balanced person able to express himself/herself in this new place through their [English] language and customs and work and environment . . . [Here in Canada] you become nothing.

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Mary: But we are talking about the obstacles that are faced by those who have university qualifications, and how these qualifications are assessed. Perhaps there could be an exam; I am here in front of you, and I consider myself very qualified in my domain. Come and examine me and with your standards, but don’t assume that my degree is always zero and ask me to adjust it. Don’t assume that my qualifications are always zero and ask me to recycle. Examine me with your standards of measurements . . . When you bring these people to this country and you are already aware of their university qualifications, we are very shocked to have to start over, not from zero but from below zero, and this is often causing us depression; many people are getting to a point that they give up on bringing their degree to be acknowledged, and they go to look for any quick job, like fast food. To start all over is exhausting me and wearing me out and will consume years from my life, aside from all the years that have already passed. No one has acknowledged my 18 years of studies—12 years until I obtained my high school baccalaureate degree and five years of university (I failed a year), so six years of university. These are 18 years of my life that are equivalent to zero here, and perhaps less than zero.

Mary: And it is assumed that everyone who is coming from the Middle East is cocooned within her hijab as a female or in his kufiyah [a male headdress] as a male. And they assume—for example we were once asked—do you have Christmas trees in Syria? Do you put up a Christmas tree? For us, and for me now at 41 years-old, I recall how when I was 10 years-old, my parents would put up a Christmas tree in our home, imagine! This memory dates back 30 years ago . . . We used to celebrate Christmas; we used to have a Santa Clause. Imagine, we were once also asked, do you know Santa Clause? Santa used to bring gifts for me! When I was five or six years old. I have photos of when I was five and six years-old taking a photo with Santa; we used to know him; sometimes, when I prepare a Western dish, Canadians here ask me, oh do you cook Western food? They still assume that we eat with our hands, that we have big feasts and we eat with our hands; and that we are going to tie our camels outside of our homes and that this is our method of transportation. Yes, these are big misrepresentations, but the West is not only to blame because we are also at fault of no representing ourselves in a true way. We have been in our cocoons for a long time and we have not worked on media. The media.

Daniel: This is the idea, that here there remains these presumption and assumptions; that as soon as they see that you are Syrian, they immediately assume that you are this and this. They impose on you built in presumptions and assumptions. Likewise when we see a Canadian, we also impose on him our own assumption—this and that, and assume that perhaps he is not like this or that; but wherever you go, you can find people who understand, those who have abilities—a distinguished person, a person who finds himself . . . In my opinion, it is not an easy task for us as people to resolve; but we can solve our own problems; but in general, it is a societal problem, it is a problem of how the media steers things wherever you go; some of the things that we may see as natural for us may be extreme to others. When I speak about my belonging—if I think of the word, then I may think of my specific religion—this is extreme; I have chosen this small group and left the group to which I belong; whereas if I, for example, I am placed within a group, a person might not see that this that I have a distinct feature that points to a specific

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religion or belonging to something specific; he knows me as soon as I speak; so this is belonging, but this is what also does not exist; today the world classifies us according to our nationality; perhaps today if I wish to travel to another country, they might consider me as a terrorist; but as soon as I carry a piece of paper from another place, I become a first-class citizen; what has changed in me? Have my skills, morals, religion, or attitude changed? Nothing has changed. The only things that have changed are the laws that judge; I mean today the world is not following what it means to be human but instead adhering to classifications of humans—they consider people as numbers and that we should classify/organize them as this, this and this; they divide them up and the last thing they take into consideration is the person himself; but this is not a precise way; if you want to organize and classify people, every person is about his own lived experience, and as I said earlier, about the memories that he is making.

Adam: But it [Canada] has done us a favor, and we will not forget this favor. And we are Arab, and we believe that when one does a favor for us and grants us a service, we must return this favor multiplied; we will give this country as it has given us, and we will serve it as it has served us. Canada is in our hearts. And we will defend it as we defended Syria. It [Canada] is giving opportunities to our children, and to build the next generation, the future generation that we would have lost if it were not for Canada and for God. Canada is a dream for the whole world.

Adam: [reciting prophet Muhammad], “There is no difference between an Arab or Ajami (non-Arab), or for a non-Arab over an Arab. Neither is the white superior over the black, nor is the black superior over the white—except by piety.” And [quoting Surah Al- Hujurat 49:13, Al-Qur'an al-Kareem] he says, “O mankind! We created you from a single (pair) of a male and a female, and made you into nations and tribes, that ye may know each other not that ye may despise (each other). Verily the most honoured of you in the sight of Allah is (he who is) the most righteous of you.” Righteousness is referring to truth and honesty. This is good. You can’t look at people as white or black. This is what prophet Mohammad has taught us. We are not allowed to cut a tree. We have to take care of things. We have to look out for our neighbors. I visit my neighbors here [in Canada]. They are an older man and woman. My wife visits them. We are extending to them traditions of our country . . . In our religion, God commands that we take care of our neighbours. When your neighbor is well, then you are well.

Brianna: At the beginning, I felt the stares of the people because a large flux of Muslims had arrived—the stares of the people as you are riding the train; they would look at you, but they didn’t harm you. I don’t know if they liked the hijab or found it strange to see someone wearing the hijab. I began to tell my husband that I felt embarrassed to go out in front of people. You know, the way we dress is different and it is all long, in addition to the hijab. He would tell me that there are many people like me, and I am no different than them. And no one here interacts with the other. And until now, alhamdullilah [thank God], we have not faced any challenges.

Brianna: When my son was in the 9th grade, and as you know, for us Muslims, we must perform five prayers. During the call of prayer at noon, he is usually in school . . . And

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so my son went to the playground (I think) to pray; he stayed outside; and when he finished his prayer, or as he began to pray, he was approached by Canadian students; one young man hit my son, but my son did not allow himself to hit back; he later told me, “I don’t know how I controlled myself;” I told him, “no don’t hit him.” But alhamdulillah, there were cameras that captured all of this and proved that the students were in the wrong, not my son; the school and the principal’s office brought them altogether and discussed the situation with all; they asked for apologies. He [the young man who hit Brianna’s son] had said, what brought you to this country? You must leave; this country is for white people, and I don’t know what else. My son told them that we are here to learn and study; we didn’t come to make trouble or anything like this; the other kid wasn’t convinced and there was a little bit of a fight; but thank God, the principal’s office resolved it and all went well.

On negotiating and navigating a new identity in Canada. I asked: How are you, or how do you plan, to negotiate and navigate your new identity in Canada?

Antoine: It seems that the most adaptable person in history is the one who encounters many obstacles; this brings him to become adaptable in different situation; he becomes skilled in dealing with difficulties; and the most difficult challenge one may face is death, the loss of someone dear, and we have lost many dear ones in Syria, and we have lost many loved ones as a result of the ugly war; and little by little, we have come to feel that we have lost a homeland. We return to the idea of a homeland; we came to Canada; of course in Canada, everything was strange, everything was new, everything was new to us I mean; we didn’t know the ways to deal with them—you may say it’s the Canadian culture, and some may say the Canadian requirements for work, some say the Canadian ways of living; of course we must respect all of this because we came as visitors at the beginning, before we thought about continuing to become citizens, and so we must respect these things; and based on the skill of adaptation that we had acquired as a result of war and as a result of the many difficulties that we had faced, I think—and I will give myself permission to speak in the name of the majority of Syrians—I think that they have acquired adaptation skills to deal with their [Canadian] new reality. As a small example, and I will not dwell much on emotions, but when one loses a person and a dear one as a result of a shell or a rocket or a stray bullet or a car bomb or any cause of death because of war, and at the same he is thinking about tomorrow and how will he protect his children—this is adaptation; it’s not about what we lost and then “Stop” and we are finished, but it’s about having no choice but to think this way; and most of Syrians have suffered from very big issues in Syria, issues that speak to loss, deprivation, and although it may be strange for someone to hear this if he had not lived war, but the question is: How may I continue to stay alive? How may I find for myself a safe escape in case something was to take place so that I may preserve my life and continue in this life? Despite the fact that we came here and had to begin from zero in Canada, we will try to continue; no, we will not only try but we will continue, we will continue; and based on what we have already acquired of flexibility in our society, and on the fact that we are stronger as a product of the circumstances of war, I think we will continue and we will remain and we will succeed. This is what I think.

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Mary: From the start, we arrived exhausted, we came carrying many burdens within us, and we had experienced many terrible, sad experiences, true catastrophes; and then you realize that at the end you must stand again and truly adapt.

Antoine: And so the idea, Ghada, is not that we want everything to be as we wish so that we are content; but we are talking about a struggle. I am not saying that someone has to meet my conditions in order for me to like him. No, I am going to like someone for who he is; [laughs] I will have to accept him as he is; and I am accepting people, but there is a struggle as a product of this acceptance. Things do not happen with a click of a button where I accept without struggling. It’s normal; I am of the human race; I am a human being; I have feelings and emotions and hence I struggle [laughs]; other living beings may not suffer/struggle because they have less feelings and emotions than a human being. So, I respect the Canadian society, but we are still fresh; we’re very new; So, the struggle still exists. And we are not in a full state of balance yet. But we are so much better than last year [laughs]. Mary: Of course. Antoine: Much better than five months ago; much better than three months ago after we moved from the basement in which we lived for a long time, and we moved to our new home and we saw the sun in the summer; and aside from Mary and I, what matters most is our son—his summer was fun-filled.

Mary: This is what we are trying to say to you. As Antoine has said, we are certainly better now than before and certainly better than last year. We now know more. I mean, like little children, you first crawl, and then your movements become faster; and then you walk; and then you have the ability to reply. We are the same as this. At first, our steps were very short, frightened, and imbalanced, especially because we too were not balanced, but after a little while, you adapt more, you know more, and you know better where to place your foot.

Miral: A person who has the ability to adapt, wherever he may be planted, in a fertile ground, should be able to produce.

Daniel: The general idea held about refugees is that they are weak people coming from a state of need; but as for me, becoming a refugee was an inner feeling, that it was a product of a decision. Perhaps for many people here, the word “refugee” implies weakness referring to someone who had escaped; perhaps we have escaped, but this is our life; this is our reality. At times, when you are in a place of oppression, your escape becomes a sign of courage and to stay is to accept humiliation. This is what happens; so as for us, when we came here, we didn’t come as people who did not have a life and came to create a life here; we came as people who have our history and our successes and we came to create success here; so as for us, we came to make something here; because we have a goal . . . so, as I said again, the point here is because we came here as refugees, as well as many other people, perhaps for someone who is not living within the reality in which we exist, perhaps he might think that this reality is such a big deal and might see it as misery and sadness and something very tragic; but as for me personally, I don’t see it as such, but I see that everything that happens to a person is something that increases his

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knowledge and experience in life, and if we look back at our history as people, this will become a very short period, for I don’t think there has been a period of 20 years that has passed on this world without war, oppression, killing, or bad news; so this is the true reality.

Daniel: If we can go back to the idea that if we are going to think about what we may have lost, we would end up being people with great losses; but if we can think about what we are creating, we are always creating something new; so this is the idea; we are not going to allow our history, and the things we love—our memories—to be part of our upcoming lives; our memories are beautiful because we lived them and we are finished with them, and we are now doing something new; this is the idea; if a person is going to continue to think about his past, his head will be turned backwards looking back at memories; but when your head is turned forward, you will see something new.

Miral: They say sometimes that in order to heal from a sickness, being in denial slows down the process of healing. As soon as you acknowledge that you are sick, and begin to take medicine, then you can begin the healing process and to feel that you are a healthy person. So, if I want to think that having been uprooted from Syria and from my roots is the sickness, and if I continue to deny and not accept this big occurrence in my life, then I am slowing my process of integration here and I am writing off years of my life, and I am also slowing the process of my progress.

On how Canadians can be of help. I asked: What do you believe are ways in which Canadians can help as you try to make meaning of family and home in your new homeland, and as you negotiate and remediate your identities?

Mary: They [Canadians] are scared and we [Syrian refugees] are scared. As you said, the key is knowledge. There is a saying in Arabic that says, “A human’s enemy is the unknown.” Knowledge is the key and it is the bridge, and it is what makes things easier. It’s about knowledge. Knowledge is an explanation. It is an explanation about yourself. The shortest road is the straight line. And you have talked about this idea already, and it is about direct connections. There is nothing more beautiful, easier, and more comfortable. I am certain that when X (our Canadian mentor) came to our home the first time, he had a million questions. And when Antoine called me to tell me that X is coming, it was a Saturday and I was studying at Columbia College, and we didn’t know X and I asked Antoine a million questions before he came and I asked him just as many questions after X had left because we didn’t have knowledge. But when things are put forward, discussed, and explained, then you gain knowledge and fear is decreased. Knowledge slowly helps you to overcome fear.

Mary and Antoine: [in Arabic] ta’aatuf Mary: It means an active and affective empathy. It is completely different than sympathy [looks for the word in English/guesses pity] Pity? Pe? Pethy? . . . But is completely different than sympathy. Sympathy refers to helplessness . . . that you feel sorry, feel sympathy, for this person and that’s it. You feel sorry for him, and it’s like you are cocooned with him in his state, but you don’t do anything about it . . . but

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empathy means that you feel sympathy and you actually do something about it. Perhaps you can offer advice to that person; perhaps you don’t do anything but listen. Empathy. Let me tell you what the difference is—empathy has power, sympathy does not. Myself: yes, it’s true Mary. What you are saying is very beautiful; very beautiful. Yes. It’s true. Mary: Sympathy does not possess any power at all.

Antoine: This is also a positive feature; and I know that you are established on the fact that you are Syrian, but I don’t think you are only working with Syrians, but all different nationalities of newcomers and with those who have undergone defeating circumstances; and so this is basically about the idea that we are not champions/winners and no one can do anything on their own; all they need is for their hands to be held and that they are guided in the right direction; first point the way and when they get to it and begin walking, then say God be with you.

Daniel: As for me, and as for our new reality, what’s natural and normal is for people to accept one another; what is needed first to truly build these bridges is to expand our awareness and our perceptions; the more we expand our horizons and perceptions, the more we are able to take in more people. Myself: Give me a tool. Daniel: For example, something that is really important as I said is connecting, talking, talking one to one, not sympathizing. Sympathizing does not yield results; what does it mean if I sympathize with people . . . we are not saying that sympathizing is bad; but it is not what a person needs; this is not what can build many bridges; another thing is to try and understand each other’s cultures . . . So this is the idea—and I say it again—to increase our awareness so that we are building these connection on true foundations; if we truly want to solve this, there must be a true will/desire, a media that transmits this, not media that transmits the news of leaders or the news of killing and the news of violence; media today is directing you like a machine, charging you until you run out of charge and does the same the next day. So this is the idea; it is not easy; it is easier said than done, and for someone else, if you go near a belief and a conviction, he might tell you that he is not able to take in more than this; perhaps if you say to someone that his religion is wrong or his political affiliation is wrong, you might have then put a boundary between you and him; so the more awareness, the more the borders and boundaries are expanded.

Mary: In order to be able to adapt and to fit in the Canadian culture, you will need to, at one point, recycle some things in your life—your university degree, your education, or your experience. When it comes to this notion of recycling, our qualifications are still present and are of high quality, and we worked very hard to obtain them, but in simplest terms, the Canadian government does not acknowledge them. We are not asking of the Canadian government to be the Utopian City that accepts all . . . And the solution, in my opinion, is that each individual is assessed on an individual basis; that committees are created—for example, one for assessing engineers and according to Canadian standards and in accordance with international standards in a way that suits the Canadian society.

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100% of the people who have come here with educational qualifications are struggling with this issue.

Daniel: If I could get an opportunity in my field—for example, in my field I was professional in marketing and able, and I had almost my own private business; and so, as a skill, I have what any Canadian has in his language but because of our weakness in language, people don’t have the courage to employ us in our fields. But as for language, you might find later that it is the simplest thing . . . if they dare to depart from this scientific way of thinking, like a machine—what has become like a robot who doesn’t look at you or who you are but looks at what is written only, the human dimension that’s behind this person doesn’t exist; his presence is like a machine; what concerns me [a Canadian employer/assessor/etc.] is 1, 2, 3, and if these are not present, I don’t care what is present; and the more the law, the less creativity that can take place; the person has to abide.

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