People especially don't understand the violence of displacement, refugeehood, and diaspora. Like the deaths of these wars are so brutal and horrific but being displaced isn't safety or without its own horrors.
Imagine someone like my dad. He was 6 years old when the six day war happened. He remembers it well even. He remembers being shot at. He remembers hiding in the caves. He remembers running out of food and not being sure if they would be able to get more. Now that alone is a horror and a trauma that lives on your bones.
Now imagine that the only home he has ever known is not home anymore. Might never be again. This place is where your family has lived for at least 12 generations and have family legends of Saladin. His parents decided it was safer to come to the US. A place where he doesn't speak the language, none of them do really. A place that's different entirely: a rural town in Palestine to a bustling American city is a big transition. And he just has to be okay with that because it's a *blessing* at least you are *safe.*
But safety isn't in the day to day as his family struggles to feed all of them. Safety isn't the word I would use to describe figuring out what place to put on your passport as country of origin when your country can't be your birthplace. Safety isn't the word I would use to describe the myriad of ways racism appears in the day to day, both mundane and horrifying. He loses whatever abilities he has to read and write in Arabic.
But, he eventually gets to a place where he and other parts of his family can go back to home. It's wonderful although brief each time and getting briefer. Then things get worse back home and he won't know the next time it will be safe to see his home. He tries to preserve his culture to his kids with his wife who is also Palestinian. They know some basic words in Arabic, but they are toddlers, they will learn more.
Then 9/11 happens. The world is more dangerous for him and his kids than he thought it could get. Even in the "safe" place that they fled to. Hate crimes are increasingly a problem and what is going to happen to his kids. He and his wife stop speaking Arabic in public. Not on purpose, not even consciously, but their kids slowly lose their tenuous grasp of his language. They can't even speak to his parents really and the language barrier between the two generations is a new kind of horror. A rupture that echoes the lack of his literacy in Arabic but this time he can hear it.
He doesn't visit home again for over 2 decades. But he gets back home. And it is beautiful. Two of his adult kids come for the first time. They get to see what they have been missing their whole lives. The parts of them that were lost to time or hatred are here. He even wants to move back. He tries to start the process of getting his parents home in his and his siblings names. It's all they he adores, the food is just as good as he remembers. His kid gorges herself on figs so much she gets ill. They have tea every morning on the patio.
He doesn't get a chance to go back. Not yet at least. The pandemic and then the genocide have prevented him. His kid now lives within a few miles of where the first hate crime in the US that took place after 9/11. He has spent the last 2 years watching horrors beyond even the traumas he already held. He watches the place he loves and desparately wants to return to get turned into rubble over and over again.
Being in the US has meant my family is alive. I am privileged to be here, but it is a horror onto itself. And this is a story of displacement to a Western country, many other stories are far worse than his, far worse than mine. But even in ideal circumstances, diaspora has been a horror. A rupture in space and time on our culture and our identity happening concurrently to the physical destruction of people that look like us. Do you know how often I donate to people with the names of my cousins? How often I see bloodied faces of kids that look like my niblings? How if we were from just a few miles southwest from where we are, we would be there too?
Getting out is important and you should keep funding people to flee, but you have to understand, they aren't fleeing to safety. They are fleeing to a better chance at life, but that life, as it stands, will never be safe.
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