The closest I have come to seeing Syria is in photographs and family stories and in my relationships with the people I love who are there. Home has never been a place. Home, the feeling of being a thread perfectly sewn into pattern, has always been in the people who love me.
I am a stranger everywhere. America often does not feel like home. My family has not always felt like home. My marriage proved not to be a home. I was born in Manhattan in the Syrian diaspora to an Arab father and a white mother, an unruly thread come loose from the tapestry of my ancestors on both sides of my family.
If you ask me where home is, if you ask me to draw you a map, I will draw you a spider’s web of aunties I have never met and cousins I have only met twice, a grandmother for whom I am named who never held me and who died with my picture under her pillow, a father who wanted a son, chosen family who took me into their homes when I had nowhere else to go, a goofy cuddle-loving cat who was my best friend for ten years and who died of a heart attack in my arms. I will draw you a map of heartbreak and heart mending. I will draw you a map of a city on an island, a five-block crossword puzzle grid: the Upper East Side studio apartment I shared with my parents and sister growing up, my red-doored magnet school, the Chase Bank where I first imagined eternity as a never-ending trip with my father to deposit a check. And I will draw you a map of a country that does not exist, has never existed anywhere but in photographs, in family legends, in other people’s memories and in my own mind. I will draw you the map I made of home when I went looking for it and could not find it.
This is the wound my father left in me: in pushing his children to assimilate and discouraging a solid connection to our Syrian heritage, he sought safety for himself and for us, but he also made it impossible to put down healthy roots. My father could not have known this. He could not have known that, despite being born in America, my adopted country would never fully adopt me. Sometimes the country you claim as your own has no desire to claim you back. This is also the wound of being a survivor of violence, of being a person of color in America, and of being a queer person in a world that would prefer that you not exist: even in the body that is and always will be my first home, I was taught that this place does not belong to me. Even in my own skin, I was taught that I did not belong.
Until you are free to claim yourself, it is impossible to go home.
*
I picked up Arabic through hearing my father speak it on the phone or to the few relatives who were able to visit us in New York before America decided it did not like visitors with names like ours. My father refused to teach my sister and me Arabic and, for reasons likely born of his own trauma that he would not live long enough to tell, never took us to visit the country where he was born.
Yet when my ex-husband and I separated, my family in Syria were some of the first relatives I told. Even from thousands of miles away, theirs was the love I tried to remember when I thought I had lost everything. Theirs was the love that had made me believe it was possible to love myself: the love of my Grandma Zeynab who passed away with our pictures under her pillow, who made dua for us five times a day. The love of my cousin who played with me and smiled at my childish artwork when he came to visit us in New York and Connecticut, whose presence for a few weeks was enough to keep my family’s dysfunction at bay.
Even when I couldn’t get to them, even though I had never met most of them, I always hoped that someday I would hug them and know what, exactly, it meant to belong with my family.
*
Stories were my first and best home because the home I grew up in was not safe. My father was violent; I have since forgiven him for this. He lost his own father at a young age and was forced to grow up long before he was ready. He was an imperfect human being.
Growing up, though we rarely spoke of it, I have no doubt that some of my white relatives believed my father to be violent because he was Arab, because he was Muslim. If you are white and Christian, this is a comforting narrative because it blames victims of domestic violence and absolves non-Arab and non-Muslim men from blame. But it is a lie. You can find endless examples of violent misogyny in white, middle class, Christian, suburban American families. My father hurt me not because he was brown or because he was Muslim, but because he was born and raised a man in a world that punishes men for being soft and then wonders why they learn to be violent. But I did not know how to refute these racist, Islamophobic narratives as a child when I was warned not to marry an Arab man, when the seeds of self-hate were planted in me.
There is a photo of my father, my mother, my newborn sister and me, taken in our studio apartment in Manhattan in the winter of 1990. My mother is wearing an elegant Syrian abaya, black with gold silk embroidery. My parents are grinning, even my father, who was so often stern. He was proud to finally be a father, twice over, at the age of fifty-one.
I still remember the tilt of his head, one spring evening in 1996, when he beckoned me over to his sickbed, his voice hoarse from lung cancer, and said, “I love you.” He would pass away in that bed soon after, two days before my eighth birthday. It was the last time he would tell me he loved me. The words were not easy for him to say; he was a man who had long ago learned to equate tenderness with weakness. But he did not want to pass away without me knowing that he loved me. We have different versions of what it means to love someone, but his words are still a gift.
Sometimes I dream about my father. I dream that he comes accompanied by restraining angels. Sometimes he is in chains. Sometimes the house comes down around our ears. Sometimes I tell him I love him and that I forgive him, and he tells me he is sorry. Once, in a dream, I hugged him, and he wept.
If my dad were still alive, he probably wouldn’t approve of my choices. Over the years, I’ve learned to unravel that hurt so I can breathe. I’ve learned to love my father, but his approval isn’t important to me anymore. I seek my own approval now.
*
Last May, I visited the Spanish city of Ceuta as part of my research for "The Map of Salt and Stars." It was a place I had read about but never seen, a place I felt I knew intimately despite never having set foot there. Living in the West, it was easy for me to feel this false intimacy. It was harder to admit that most of what I knew as a child were the shadows of places that exist in America’s collective imagination. Growing up in the States, I had been spoonfed Orientalism, a flattening of all cultures outside of the West, stripping them of nuance and the ability to represent themselves just as they were stripped of resources and autonomy by Western colonial and imperialist powers.
Ceuta lies across the Strait of Gibraltar from Algeciras, a ferry ride away from mainland Spain. It is the city where one of the characters in "The Map of Salt and Stars," the real twelfth-century Muslim mapmaker Abu Abd Allah Muhammad al-Idrisi, was born in 1100. Ceuta was an autonomous city for many years, a free port until 1986. Spanish is its official language, but it’s a city with a strong Arab influence, geographically divided from continental Europe and enveloped by the green foothills of Morocco’s Atlas mountain chain.
In Andalucía, I reveled in the fact that people looked more like me than anywhere else I had been, certainly far more than in southern Connecticut or Massachusetts or Pennsylvania: most Andaluces were darker complected than white northern Europeans, black-haired and dark-eyed. In Ceuta, this was even more pronounced. In Ceuta, I was the one who fit in, and my white husband was the one who looked like he did not belong.
I had initially wanted to make a short trip to visit Morocco while we were in Spain, but that didn’t happen. I remember my then-husband feeling anxious about what it would mean to return to the United States with a Moroccan stamp in our passports. Islamophobic American narratives told us we should be afraid. I recall that he was worried that I didn’t speak enough Arabic to keep us safe in an emergency.
Shame rose in my throat, choking me: of the four languages I spoke, the German I had learned from him was stronger than my Arabic. Then came sadness, stone in my stomach.
True, I am not from Morocco. I had never been there. I had no family or friends there. But the idea of being surrounded by other Arabs for the first time in my life filled me with an ache. I wanted to claim for myself the feeling I saw on my then-husband’s face every time we landed in Germany: that first breath of German air he took that seemed to taste so sweet to him, the blissful grin he got on his face when everyone in the airport looked like him and spoke the language of his grandparents.
I did not know how to tell him this, but I wanted to know how that felt.
*
My debut novel grew out of a question that bred more questions: how do you make a map of a place you’ve never been to? It was a question I’d been asking myself since I was a child, growing up Syrian American, a biracial Arab who had never been to Syria, afraid that my link to my Syrian heritage and my family had died with my father. I grew up in a family and a town that reinforced and rewarded my proximity to whiteness. To look back to Syria was to look behind, rather than looking ahead to the future I was expected to strive for: an American college and a higher degree, preferably in the sciences; a coveted place in the white-dominated American upper-middle class; a heterosexual marriage, house and children in a “nice” (read: white) American suburb. To be adjacent to whiteness meant career stability, wealth and safety. To admit that there was a part of me that needed to know who I was in the context of Syria, of the Levant, of my Arabness, of Islam, represented a turning away from the future that had been laid out for me.
Years later, after obtaining a PhD in Medical Sciences and then leaving my scientific career behind to write, I began to draft "The Map of Salt and Stars." I still asked myself the same questions: how do we bring the places we come from with us? Can I return to the place my ancestors were forced to leave behind?
I am striving to reconcile myself, to claim myself. I return time after time to writing about Syria or writing around Syria or writing Syria back into me. My father’s leaving is in my blood somehow. It is embroidered under my skin like a scar.
*
This past winter, I lived in the old medina of Fes, a place I’d researched and written about but had never seen in person before I moved there for a two-month writing residency. I had reclaimed my identity as a Muslim, left behind my marriage and my apartment in Pennsylvania and turned my back on the safe future that was expected of me.
I spent my first few weeks in Morocco in a sort of rapturous suffering. It was the illusion of a homecoming, my first time in an Arab and Muslim country, my first time waking up at dawn to the sound of the adhan breaking the darkness. So much of me felt accepted, comfortable, free. I was able to walk the streets entirely invisible. For once, no one looked at my face or heard my name and immediately assumed I was from somewhere else. I could have almost sworn that this was what it meant to feel “at home.”
But what does it mean that I have learned to equate home with invisibility?
Within a week, I discovered that once I opened my mouth, I gave myself away. I spoke none of the local dialect, Darija, and the fusḥa and Syrian Arabic I knew a little of only got me so far in the market or in a taxi or in conversations with the friends I made. I found myself constantly frustrated those first few weeks. Simple trips to buy fruit or eggs inspired anxiety and a frustration that I did not know what I felt I should.
Yes, hearing my father speak Arabic on the phone or to family friends as a child had lodged the sound, the music of the language in me. The words and phrases I remembered shook themselves free from my mouth with my father’s accent, full and soft as peonies. But though I could understand more than I could speak, my father had never spoken Arabic with me directly, and too many overheard words had run through the sieve of my memory. I forced myself to begin again—to allow myself to make mistakes and to allow others to see the broken place of missing language I had tried so hard to hide.
Years earlier, I’d attended an epigenetics conference with a fellow doctoral student from Egypt, and he had blinked at my last name. “Joukhadar,” he’d said, confused. “But you don’t look Arab.” A month before I moved to Fes, an Arab poet and a dear friend of mine had joked that Arabs are defined by their ability to speak Arabic. “You’re not Arab,” he’d said to me then, tongue-in-cheek. But there was a part of me, deep, wounded, and rootless, that believed him.
*
While I was in Morocco, I was invited to attend a wedding. The friends I had made there invited me into their homes to get ready, generously lent me a Moroccan kaftan to wear, and invited me to dance and to celebrate. I felt elegant in the velvet emerald kaftan with its gold embroidery. The patterns reminded me of the Syrian abaya my mother had brought back with her from my parents’ honeymoon, the one she’d worn in that family photo 28 years before. As I child, I would run my fingers over those embroidered flourishes, turning the fabric inside out to touch the painstaking stitching, wondering how a person could learn to make something so beautiful with their hands.
In fourth grade, our teacher had instructed us to bring in food and wear clothing traditional to our cultural and ethnic backgrounds for a kind of “world cultures night.” These kinds of '90s pro-diversity initiatives were soaked in the Western gaze and a paternalistic view of non-Western cultures; the memory still makes me cringe. My teachers seemed to think that everyone in the Levant wore a thobe or an abaya — not that they knew what these items were called. Of course, they did not realize that the West had been exporting and violently promoting its culture and fashion for hundreds of years. I could not expect them to know that, under Western colonial rule, the Levant and North Africa had forcibly come to revere European fashion as the height of urbanity and their own traditional clothing as backward, even as white New Yorkers flocked to photography studios in lower Manhattan’s Little Syria to have pictures taken wearing “exotic” Syrian outfits.
I wore one of the embroidered Syrian abayat my mother had bought on honeymoon to world cultures night. We made hummus or tabbouleh to share. One of the white kids’ mothers asked us, with a patronizing smile, if this was what we wore at home. I stared down into my plate of sauerkraut, Irish soda bread and lasagna. “No,” I said. I don’t remember whether she was listening.
*
As a child, I built up Syria in my mind, bolstered by my family’s stories and photographs and maps. The one map I did not have was of the place inside me where all my roads led, that place in the center of me that was supposed to tell me where I came from. But a city or a country is a living thing. It took me years to realize that my imagined Syria was an embalmed version of an ancestral home, a preserved picture of a place that existed only in someone else’s memory.
At the same time, I was never allowed to forget that the West has its own idea of the place my family comes from, of what I should miss and what I should appreciate. European colonizers were the ones who invented the term “Middle East,” a term relative only to the West that denotes nothing: Middle of what? East of what? I have lost count of the white people who have told me they are surprised that Syria has a rich culinary tradition; they thought Syria must be too poor to have its own cultural cuisine. White Americans have frequently told me, over the course of the war, that they are under the impression that every corner of the country is destroyed, that there is not a shred of normalcy left. White folks in America are often surprised to learn that people do their best to go on living normal lives even when there is war, oppression or violence. Perhaps they have not been paying attention to what is happening in America.
In remaining connected to my family’s place of origin, I often find myself occupying an in-between place, aware of the misconceptions of the West and uncomfortable with the way I am constantly assumed to be something I am not. People are often less interested in my lived experience than they are in assigning to me the experiences they expect me to have. I often find myself being made a token, a poster child, a blank canvas onto which Western narratives of resilience, assimilation and gratitude can be projected.
It is true that the place that is embroidered in my blood is undergoing its own period of upheaval and change and suffering, so I continue to seek out other places that can teach me more about myself. For me, traveling to North Africa and someday soon, insha’Allah, to the Levant means replacing inheritance with experience. It means facing an old and deep-seated fear: that once I arrive in this place where I had imagined I would finally fit, I will discover not that the place itself is different than I had imagined it, but that I am different in this place than I had imagined myself to be. In this place, just as in every other place I have ever been, I may very well still be a stranger. I will have dreamt all my life of belonging, only to arrive and discover that even here, I still do not belong.
Even if I could go to Syria and visit the city where my father was born, this would still be true. I have to let these places live and breathe and exist on their own terms. I have to make my own memories and form my own relationships with these places. I have to let myself exist in these spaces the way I am in this moment, as prepared or unprepared as I may be, as of this place or not of this place as I may be. I arrived in Ceuta and discovered that speaking Central American Spanish is not the same as speaking castellano; I arrived in Fes and discovered that my Shaami dialect was not so similar to Darija; I wore a Moroccan kaftan and danced at a wedding, but when people addressed me in Darija and I could only respond in a halting mix of fusḥa and Shaami, I was still ashamed at what had been lost between my father and me.
Until the day I can see the city where my father was born, I will seek out other interactions and make other memories. I will treasure the joy of dancing at that wedding in Fes. I will remember the hours I’ve spent over the last three decades chatting with my cousins, watching them grow up from afar, grateful that the internet allows us to exchange book recommendations and complaints about homework and the weather and, sometimes, briefly comfort each other about darker things. I will think of how my father must have felt arriving in America, that first twinge of unbelonging, of not-home-ness, that would bury itself so deep in his bones that it would lodge its shards in the bodies of his children.
In my own way, I am fighting to bridge that distance. My father was far from a perfect father, but he is the door I must walk through to understand where I come from. Maybe I am returning something that was lost a long time ago, repairing stitches that have come loose and cannot be repaired, embroidering new patterns with heirloom thread. I cannot say whether I will have something beautiful when it is finished. I will only be able to say that I continued the work of those who came before me with my own two hands.
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