This piece is inspired from the poem “Home” by the brilliant Warsan Shire. The poem is one that speaks on trauma and the sacrifices refugees have made throughout the world. While growing up, I remember turning on the television and witnessing my first real exposure to war. I remember the feeling of being terrified. However, as I grew up, these feelings faded, I found myself becoming numb to it, for me it was just something that existed in a distant place somewhere. I could never fully comprehend the dept of it, until now. Until I read Home, a poem written from the daughter of refugee survivors. The truth is war is something we always hear of and often forget the reality of it. Another difficult truth is that illusions are easier to accept than reality, and yet reality is the one thing that helps us heal. I wrote this piece in the form of an open letter from the perspective of a refugee. She talks about her childhood and being completely infatuated by her home. Then watching it brutally perish in front of her eyes. Also touching on the burden that comes along with never fully gaining a true sense of belonging, which is something Shire struggled with herself. As I researched the soft-spoken poet, I became drawn into more of her poetry. I even encorporated one of her famous lines into the last sentence of this piece.
An open letter to those who carry me like a burden:
I know you.
Perhaps even better than you know yourself.
You have a fear of the unknown. It terrifies you when you can not understand something- someone.
Because that is the only reason you can hate me without knowing me.
You don’t even know my name, and yet I know something so intimate about you.
But I’ll tell you so maybe one day you can open your heart to me.
Please open your heart to me.
The world I knew taught me hope. And love. And gratitude.
I grew up learning to love and falling love. With my mother. My mother, she used to braid my hair before I begged her to let me run off to catch up with the rest of the neighbourhood kids. There was a designated hill, we would all meet up there to catch the last glimpse of sunlight. Watching the vibrant yellows fade into soft hues of orange; something so subtle that we would barely notice the shift.
I guess it’s funny how the human brain becomes so accustomed to something that we barely notice the exact moment it changes.
And yet, somehow in the blink of an eye everything is different.
I walk there with my red shoes, the ones my father bought me from the market down the street.
I named every bird on the way.
Asad. Yasmine. Abdullah. Jamilah.
This was my home.
My home told stories of hope. Hope is something that seems so far out of my reach now. Almost as if it is buried somewhere deep inside of me and yet I can no longer pinpoint it’s exact location. The older boys teased me when I told them about my hope,
“the good things never last”,
they would say while falling on the ground in fits of laughter. I told them that maybe their “good things” were just poisons in disguise. Something slowly rotting their insides. That is the only reason it is so quickly snatched from their grasp.
March 15th, when the first bomb hit, I questioned my hope for the first time.
Maybe the boys were right.
For there were more birds in the sky than there were kids on the street, and it seemed as if with every brush stroke my mothers smiled faded more and more.
“Hurry back” she would say before I left,
“The world isn’t as safe as it used to be”.
She was right.
The walk to the hill was no longer as joyful as it used to be, the laughter was now replaced with a distant melancholy.
And when I looked up for comfort, I noticed that there were more birds in the sky than there were kids on the streets. For the birds were not birds anymore, but rather drones, and the missing kids were sleeping, but no longer in their beds. They were sleeping six feet below the ground because the world is not as safe as it used to be.
Home wasn’t home.
But rather a feeling.
And perhaps if I were to meet this feeling on the street somewhere I would no longer recognize it.
For this home shattered hope. And my home would never do that.
When my mother brought up the idea to leave, I no longer begged her to stay. The truth is I had my bags packed for years but could not find the courage to carry them. I guess the weight of my past held too much value.
My mother had always been a lot braver than I.
Escaping had been the hardest challenge of my life, I spent days staring out the window, my eyes as lifeless as the wilting roses in the backyard. I would often purposely miss a few steps while walking down the stairs or shower in scalding hot water for hours at a time, simply to remind myself that I was still alive. Something most of the kids I grew up with were not fortunate enough to be.
I thought it was over.
But as I walked down the street, searching for a hill high enough to reunite me with the sun, a certain murmur in my heart told me that I had walked from a sharks mouth into a pit of gasoline.
Because how can it be over when you’re living in the home of the enemy.
The kids in my elementary would poke fun at my dark features, for having facial hair in places a girl shouldn’t. It managed to make my heart quiver more than the war ever did.
“You make the world feel unsafe”,
they would say. As if I had carried the entire warzone across the pacific ocean with me. The truth is I never fully understood why. Because my mother told me that my skin reminded her of incandescent gold and the tangles in my hair looked like vines from the deepest jungles. Something not everyone could understand. And besides, what would you know about the world unsafe.
Has it ever hit you in way where your alarm clock was the scream of roaring bombs.
Where you woke up in desperate hopes that your mother was still alive.
And going to bed was equivalent to laying at the bottom of the swimming pool for the rest of the night.
In the mornings when you walked outside you could no longer tell the difference between the grass on the ground from the blood on the cement.
Because they both were the same shade of crimson red.
Yet my teeth stayed gritted at the remarks and I held my pen so tight that I feared the ink would permanently tattoo itself into my skin. Like a constant reminder that I am still in the country of the enemy.
My gold skin, the one that you have dirted with your words, still glistens in the sun.
In its vibrant yellows and soft hues of orange.
And as much as I want to hate you I can no longer collect the feelings to do so. The only emotion I can comprehend to feel for you is one of truth; first and lastly, sympathy.
Your reality is made up of a delusion.
You do not understand realism.
You are terrified.
Someone once crawled beneath your skin and planted a poison that runs so deeply through your veins that no medicine can cure it. It has long mixed with your blood. You were poisoned with hatred, not love.
Because nobody is born to hate.
It is simply taught.
Because hate builds bridges while love builds character and only love can fill the empty space in your heart.
I guess in some ways, you are more broken than me.
And if I were to ever see you I would no longer scream
Or yell
Or hurt
but instead I would say,
“I forgive you.”
Because you have a whole in your heart and I am tired of hurting.
and so I forgive you and
“I’m sorry you were not truly loved and that it made you cruel.”
