Refugees Dropped in a Fantastic Terrain

I’ve been thinking a lot about the bloody repression underway in Syria as Bashar al-Assad proves to be as brutal as his father.  Refugees are pouring out of the country, reminding me of a poem I encountered years ago in the anthology The Poetry of Arab Women (Interlink, 2001).  One of these women, Mohja Kahf, describes the experience of her family fleeing the elder Assad in 1971.  She was four when they arrived in America.

The Roc

By Mohja Kahf.

Here’s my mom and dad leaving
all familiar signposts: Damascus, the streets they knew
measurement of time in mosque sounds,
the regular scrape of heavy wooden shutters,
the daily boiling and cooling of fresh milk.
Anyone back home who had no phone fell off
the disk of their new world; tomato cart man,
schoolchildren in skittish flocks. Crazy Fat’na
the Goatwoman, all the newly married cousins,
the porter at the door
they left behind

Here they are crossing the world,
hoisting up all they know like a sail,
landing in Utah. The time is march
1971. They know nothing
about America: how to grocery
shop, how to open a bank account,
how the milk comes, thin glass bottles
on tin chinking them awake,
what “you bet” or “sure thing” meant
in real spoken English, outside
the London grammar books so creased,
so carefully underlined. It was
my mother said, as if a monstrous bird
had seized them up and dropped
them in a fantastic terrain

Here’s my mother
studying the instructions on the coin-
box of a laundry machine,
enrolling us in kindergarten,
tape recording her college lectures so
that she could play, replay, decode
the stream of alien phonemes into words
That’s her refolding foil, stretching
the ten-cent toys
our treasures of Sinbad

Here’s my father staking
his life’s savings on one semester
He works hard and at the end of the term,
on the day before the last dollar
of the life’s savings is gone,
he walks into the Chair’s office
and the Chair gives him a job teaching
Other friendly natives explain
subsidized student housing,
coupons and the good places to find
bargain basement merchandise

The pilgrims were so happy
at being shown how to survive here
after the first long winter,
they had a feast. That’s mom
laughing at the strange loaf of bread
There’s dad holding up the new world coffee
in its funny striped boxes. That’s us,
small, weightless, wobbly
with the vertigo of the newly landed
voyager

Here they are, mom and dad,
telephoning back home, where the folks
gather around the transmission
as it if was from the moon
The phone call to Syria was
for epic events only. The line pulsates
as if with the beating of enormous wings.
They shout and shout into the receiver
as if the other end were ages
and ages away. Spiny talon
digs into rock.

In these days, when popular revolts are facilitated by Facebook, twitter, and cell phones, the idea of shouting into a receiver seems itself to be “ages and ages away.” But the feelings of cultural dislocation are always present.  Pray for those thrown into mass migration.

 

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