It is a big deal. — A block from bliss street

by Anna Sophia Habib

I am working on memory. The work of memory. How memory works. I am learning to remember because I’m afraid I’ve forgotten. To forget is a defense mechanism, a way to cope from experiences that trigger the red hot amygdala’s fight, fight or freeze instinct. And, I think that years of fighting or holding it together can feel like a type of dismembering. A breaking apart of wholeness.

I am learning to say this:

I am a refugee.

Yes, my family and I fled a war on a boat to an island. Yes, the images I see today on news channels and social media sites are my implicit memories. Yes, it is a big deal.

Sure, those of us who fled the Lebanese civil war in the eighties can minimize the experience. Those of us who were able to get away were not the children with dusty knees and foreheads, the mothers weeping at the loss of it all, the men carrying stretchers in crowds to the nearest make-shift hospital that we see on our Facebook feeds. The pathos of absolute grief. But, the truth is that many of us, especially those of us who lived in West Beirut, did experience bombs and bomb shelters, fleeing across sniper-occupied territory, living with the legacy of kidnapped or killed relatives, schools under siege...

Sure, many of us did flee to an island that welcomed refugees. But, we lived with the constantly shifting timeline of returning home. Maybe next week, or the week after, or maybe in a couple of months, it will all settle down. After 11 years, the old Greek village house where we settled became the next best thing to home. Today, I think of how Trudeau and Canadian citizens welcomed the Syrian refugees and I feel gratitude and relief for the warmth and security they were folded into.

Still, even with that safer, gentle landing, bodies and brains of trauma and displacement tire over time. It’s not the kind of tired you feel after a marathon or an all-nighter. It’s when your nerve endings are sizzled—a buzzing in the ears, the bones, the eyes. Too much noise exacerbates the buzzing. Molasses in your legs, in your skull, in your chest cavity. So, you find distractions and become a workaholic or another –aholic, something where your self-care is deflected. The fatigue is invisible to the world, but it can calcify.

In a powerful interview with Krista Tippett on her On Being podcast, leading trauma psychologist, Bessel Van Der Kolk, tells us how us the body keeps the score: it rewires your brain and shakes up how you engage with the world, your need for control, your sense of trust, twists up your experience of pleasure. You can get through life, do well, get terminal degrees, start careers, start initiatives, start families, start blogs. But, there is a hidden realm you carry: the paradox of vacuum and burden.

To carry on is not easy. In her biting essay, “We Refugees,” Hannah Arendt, German-Jewish political theorist, who escaped the Holocaust and eventually became a U.S. citizen (and who I’m becoming more and more curious about and drawn to) laments:

Once we were somebodies about whom people cared, we were loved by friends, and even known by landlords as paying our rent regularly. Once we could buy our food and ride the subway without being told we were undesirable. We have become a little hysterical since newspapermen started detecting us and telling us publicly to stop being disagreeable when shopping for milk and bread. We wonder how it can be done; we already are so damnably careful in every moment of our daily lives to avoid anybody guessing who we are, what kind of passport we have, where our birth certificates were filled out—and that Hitler didn’t like us. We try the best we can to fit into a world where you have to be sort of politically minded when you buy food.

We don’t talk enough about that hidden realm. In our private lives, we compartmentalize the past, package it up and keep moving forward because our brains know survival very well. In the public, images of “trauma” surface and saturate. And, I wonder what happens to us all psychologically when the public displays our private? What happens when the private and the public converge and the resulting image or story is just one particle in a vast network of emotions and truths? There is risk in this publicity because it can pathologize and sediment perception and response. It can frame individuals as “the superfluous ones” as pitiable, and pity only reinforces the existing power dynamic (drawing from Arendt here, “The Origins of Totalitarianism”):

This is what refugee looks like and needs.
This is what veteran looks like and needs.
This is what victim of verbal, emotional, sexual abuse looks like and needs.
This is what a child from the foster care systems looks like and needs.
This is what a cancer survivor looks like and needs.
This is what someone with mental illness looks like and needs.

But, that doesn’t look like me. And I don’t look like her. She is losing so much and I lost so much. And, over time, she might look like me, moving through her life in a suburban Canadian town and she will carry that hidden realm in her body and her brain. And, she might wonder how it all came to be and who she might have been had she not become a refugee. There will be signs of her past in small corners of her house, in the way she responds to certain triggers, in the loss of more recent post-war memories that she wasn’t able to hold on to. Look for those signs because we all know a warm coat and a social security card aren’t enough. They do help temper it all, certainly. But, as she moves in the world, my big wish for her is that she maintain the activity of hope. And, my big wish for us all is that we practice the activity of kindness.

KINDNESS
Naomi Shihab Nye, 1952

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.