Diya Abdo - American Refuge: True Stories of the Refugee Experience

RADICAL HOSPITALITY

When human beings find themselves compelled to move, who are we to tell them they must stop?

Human beings have always moved and they have done so largely to survive. The story of human migration is twin to the story of humanity. In search of food, water, pliable and arable land, safety and security, job opportunities, love and companionship, freedom humans have gathered their disparate selves (within them and without them, their torn souls and their families) and left for destinations both known and unknown.

I come from a people for whom movement is perpetual. As Bedouins, movement was a staple of our past existence, and as Palestinians, it is a staple of our present. In the former, much like the latter, this movement was not by choice. The land around my people dried out, their cattle diminished and disappeared, the sky burned hot. So they tightened for travel a serious business meant only for serious worship and they struck out in search of the wet and the cool.

They found it on one of the Mounts of Jerusalem, of which there are four. Theirs is called Jabal Al-Mukaber: the Mountain of the Caller of Allahs Greatness. Now our whole tribe lives there the Sawahreh the travelers, the tourists. Many of them were made travelers and tourists again when our land burned hot, this time under Israeli occupation. My grandmother tightened for travel, reliving an age-old performance of her people, and gathered herself and her two children walked with them across the River Jordan to the urban refugee camps of Jordans Al-Zarqaa the Blue City.

Arid, dusty, and impoverished, Al-Zarqaa is named after what the travelers hoped to find again the wetter, the cooler, the greener. They named neighboring hills the Green Mountain and the White Mountain (Al-Jabal Al-Akhdar and Al-Jabal Al-Abyad) but in truth, they were neither green nor white.

The human desire to name places after that which travelers have left behind is all around us; it inscribes the story of human movement into the very cities and states we find ourselves in right now, generations out from our moving predecessors. To rename is real, as real as taking ownership of a land from which one has expelled others, as real as forcing the already-there human bodies into their own displacement, their own migration.

Those who now become the bad refugees, the bad immigrants.

Migration is a human right. When human beings find themselves compelled to move, who are we to tell them they must stop? But when human migration turns into imperialism, colonialism, occupation, genocide, then it is no longer just migration. It is cannibalism: the consumption of the qualities and possessions of the already-there human bodies, what is left of them now regurgitated in another form the bad refugees, the bad immigrants.

I was born in Jordan in 1976, the child of Palestinian refugees who were displaced in 1967. My grandmother and mother initially lived in, and then managed to escape, the drudgeries of the refugee camps. Both my paternal and maternal grandparents lived the rest of their lives outside Palestine. Their children gave birth to children who gave birth to children. Many of these children stayed in Jordan, and many others their identities, their sense of belonging, fractured by the inherited loss of the initial great displacement tightened for travel and scattered all over the globe.

My cousins currently live in Canada, in South America, in Europe, and in various countries in the Arab world. Like many of my cousins the children of the displaced my siblings and I similarly emigrated. My sister lives in Saudi Arabia. My brothers and I live in the United States.

In Arabic, we call an emigrant muhajir, the root of which means to abandon, or mughtarib, the root of which means both strange and west the estranging direction into which many moving Arab bodies disappear.

Many Palestinians, children of the displaced, have wested. Their children, like mine and my siblings, are born in these new countries thrice removed from Palestine. The initial great displacement reverberates through generations.

In 1996, I came to the US as a graduate student on an international visa. I returned to Jordan when life in the US after September 11 became too complicated, too hard, for Arabs and Muslims. The terrorist attacks of September 11 ended so many lives, and they fundamentally changed the trajectory of so many others. As a graduate student, I had initially specialized in twentieth-century American literature. When the attacks happened, I found myself being called upon by many in the community (especially the university where I studied and taught and other communities connected to the university) to explain Arab and Muslim culture, especially Arab and Muslim womens lives and experiences. My interests shifted from American literature to Arab and Islamic feminisms and Arab women writers, and I returned to Jordan to live and teach. It was this new specialization, and one particular publication, that got me in trouble at the Jordanian university where I was teaching at the time. Although I won the battle against the university, this painful violation of my freedom of speech made it too complicated, too hard for me to stay in Jordan. I returned to the US for a teaching position in the South.

In 2015, I was a tenured professor of English at Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina. The Syrian refugee crisis was at its zenith, and like the rest of the world, I was shattered by the picture of Alan Kurdi the three-year-old Syrian boy who drowned, along with his mother and younger brother, when their boat from Turkey to Greece capsized. At the time, Alan was close to the age of my youngest daughter, and many parents I knew saw the bodies of our own children in his waterlogged body.