From the box room on a rainless day
A friend writes, “Every time I see Damascus in the eyes of an expatriate, I become more attached to her.” She doesn’t know that if she really were to see Damascus in the eyes of an immigrant, she would crawl out escaping to Beirut, to the Mediterranean to the death borders in Turkey or Greece. She doesn’t know that Damascus in our eyes, we who’d left, is a just huge cage. A cemetery of a life that hasn’t breathed yet, in order to rotten.
In Damascus, it rains on the muddy asphalt. The rain wears a uniform of an old janitor in Almujtahed public hospital where he was forced to work one more, one last shift. In Damascus, people dance for the rain, they pray God to bring “him.” Everyone writes about the long wait for him.
Here, the rain is the city, the broken umbrellas on the unlimited pavements’ corners. The rain ignores our presence, exactly as we do with him. He has never been waited for; he doesn’t expect us to wait for him anyway. Exile is to adapt to the silliness of the rain, is the implicit acknowledgment of our dullness when we attempt a small talk about the weather’s mood in an elevator.
Exile is alienating my name’s meaning from rain. My name which doesn’t mean as much to me as my father thought it would.
Every time she sees Damascus in an eye of an expatriate, she becomes more attached to it. I try to indulge myself in all the details that may have inspired her to write the city in one simple sentence. Personally, I tried to condense Damascus in few final photographs with intended artificial colors. It was when I was saying Goodbyes in my last day there. I visited the beloved places out of commitment to the past not for any emotional drama. I waited for the long bath in Berlin where I would cry of homesickness. I left Berlin and I never did.
In a long dinner this evening with a Swiss friend visiting from Hamburg, we spoke about Palestine and Israel, all the repeated and hidden discourses and the narrations of the “other.” Earlier in the afternoon, my foreign policy professor, the one who emphasizes on using PLO as an example of a “traditional terrorist organization”, told me that although he appreciated my emotions when I pushed back on his story of the American war on Iraq, I should admit that there were other stories of everything. He finished the talk.
That evening, before the dinner, I agreed with a Syrian friend to pull out her past in Aleppo, Idlib and Barzeh in Damascus to record it on my cellphone for a whole hour. After two years living in New York, Loubna learned how to present her life story in smooth leaps. “A long story short,” she repeated, before casually mentioning that she witnessed the murder of her friend, under the table, in Alzebdieh neighborhood in Aleppo. “Home is where I feel comfortable,” she concluded.
Friday morning here. Another coffee, a list of unfinished errand that I won’t get through. Tens of book rowing in my box corner exactly as my guilt is jamming in my throat that I haven’t read any of them.
“Home is that none of this should have happened,” I summarize Ghassan Kanafani for Mathieu, in a metro from Brooklyn to Manhattan.
