SARA ABOU RASHED
Tamara Izmirli, I was told, was a short and beautiful woman. She had high cheekbones and silky hair that never grew past her shoulders. She was slender but mighty, with emerald eyes. Her father was a Turk from Izmir, hence her last name. But her mother was Russian, Jewish Russian. Together, they lived somewhere in southeast Russia and were believed to have spoken Hebrew with one another.
In the early 1940s, the project of Israel was in the making. When Tamara was in her teens, she and her family were among many others to flee Europe for Palestine, dreaming of a peaceful Jewish state. To Tamara’s luck, or lack thereof, the neighbor’s son in her new homeland was a curious, charming fellow. He was both Palestinian and Muslim, but they fell in love nonetheless. Of course, their families did not approve of this teenage nonsense, especially in a time of war, and when it involved the enemy. But Tamara and Hassan did not surrender; they married and lived in Haifa for a few years before settlers forced them out, to the borders of Dara’a, Syria in the summer of 1948.
Tamara was my great-grandmother.
It is true I’ve never seen her, and it is true I’ve yet to see Palestine. But I’ve claimed Tamara and Palestine my entire life, as if I’ve seen nowhere and no one but them, as my own name, my own eyes, making sense of the vast, inexplicable world. My grandmother was only three years old when her family had to escape Haifa, which, by extension, makes me the third generation of my family of Palestinian refugees to live in exile.
Like my mother, I was born in Syria and grew up in Al-Yarmouk Camp. Though it was, at first, indeed a camp for displaced Palestinians, it didn’t take long for it to prosper into a city of its own, where Palestine redrew itself on Syrian streets, in the aroma of homemade meals, in embroidered clothing, in the faces of innocent children, guilty of being from a land so seductive to others—a city nourished by us, Palestinian-hyphen-Syrians—yet haunted by our dreams of going back home.
Like my mother, I speak an Arabic that’s too aggressively Palestinian for a true Syrian, an Arabic too delicately Syrian for an authentic Palestinian. It’s a mix of remains. “It makes us who we are,” my mother says. At least we lived in a neighborhood where everyone spoke what we spoke, cooked what we cooked, learned what we learned. But, as children, it didn’t take us long to realize we were different.
We’re not really Syrian, though we were born there. They told us that even at schools, our UNRWA schools. They also told us education is the only weapon, the only way we can dream of ever having a homeland. So we studied. And studied. And studied. By middle school, every one of my classmates had vowed to be the most successful they could be, whatever that meant—not for themselves but for us all, for our people, for our Palestine that we willed to die for but never knew.
In 2011, a civil war broke out in Syria. I was twelve. At first, it wasn’t even a war. There were peaceful protests every Friday where people chanted for freedom. They wanted to overthrow the regime, to live free and honorable lives. We Palestinians remained neutral. It wasn’t exactly our fight, or so we thought. Sure, we lived in the country, but as far as we were concerned, we were treated well, at least close to, or as well as, any Syrian. Soon the peaceful protests were challenged and dispersed. Gunshots and teargas became regular responses, and with that, violence spread across Syria like wildfire.
The war was getting closer by the hour. One morning, I was walking to school in Damascus, and I felt uneasy. I got to the school gate, then pulled out and wore my metal ID—an ID made of metal—mandated by rulers more concerned with identifying our dead bodies than keeping us alive. That morning, first period, math class, we were studying angles. At 8:02 a.m., I heard the most horrifying sound of my thirteen years of life.
A bomb so loud, I thought it hit my friend right next to me. We all started screaming, we hid in corners, under chairs, covering our eyes. All I could think was, if I make it home, I’ll find my family dead. Our math teacher only managed to say one thing: “You bet we’ll finish this lesson, even in hell.” Three minutes later, at 8:05 a.m., we heard an even louder sound. We didn’t wait for what came next; we grabbed our things and ran for the door. People got pushed, people fell on the stairs, but we just kept going; we ran as fast as we could into the streets. I was with my best friend, Rasha. We were holding hands and shaking and ran to her grandparents’ house by the school. We broke down the goddamn door, knocking. We got in and collapsed on the brown leather couch, crying for hours. I called my mom and asked if anyone had died. She said, “No, Sara, it was far away … you should just breathe.”
After that day, many of my classmates stopped coming to school altogether. It was the first and last bomb scare of its kind, but it made clear how deadly any place could become. I remember the next few days, when my mom and I pushed the beds away from the windows. Sometimes we slept on only the mattresses on the ground. Our shopping trips got shorter, our showers only a few minutes long. This became our life.
We knew we couldn’t stay there for long. Our American passports guaranteed easy and safe travel by plane. We were lucky, really lucky. Around the time we left, my grandmother’s sister and her family, along with a million others, walked across Europe on foot. Weeks it took them to catch their breath, marching on muddy soil, between trees, under water. They finally made it to Germany, and we made it to the United States.
It’s been six years since we left Syria. Columbus, Ohio, has been the place we’re trying to make home, knowing well that it may never be. This is what it means to be Palestinian: never where you belong, always searching. I started high school here in the United States with absolutely no English, and now I’ve become a poet. Perhaps language is the only way I’ve learned to mourn what’s eternally lost to me, the security of being somewhere familiar.
Being a foreigner means constantly being asked questions: good questions, bad questions, stupid questions, clarifying questions, offensive questions, unaskable questions, unanswerable questions. My favorite was during an interview for a local paper. The journalist asked me, “Where do you think you live?” It almost made me laugh, how rhetorical it sounded. Really, what he was wondering is, Do I think I live in the America everyone around me lives in?
“Of course not,” I answered. “I live in a small Palestine, inside a smaller Syria, in a big and wide America.”
That’s where I live, that’s what my family and I carried in our suitcases. Counting Tamara’s, this is the third immigration my family has known and I have reason to believe it won’t be the last. We are Palestinians, after all. Not belonging is what we do. And I suppose, since, unlike Tamara’s, my last name isn’t indicative of any city, it is only natural for me to be of many places at once. But never, ever, enough of any.