Cast out of heaven you thirst wine and bread
But when will your home be your homeland instead?
An extract from a poem by the Bosnian Mak Dizdar, written in 1966 in his book Stone Sleeper, which also speaks to the feelings of refugees in Europe in the aftermath of the Syrian revolution.
Nawras
Today in A Kind of Solution I introduce two Syrians whom I first met when they sought safety in Europe in 2015. Nawras and Marah’s relationship to their adopted German homeland has changed since the fall of the Assad regime. As well-integrated German citizens, Nawras in Berlin, Marah in Aachen have unexpectedly got back their original homeland, Syria. Today they face the dilemma: if and when to go home, to a country in ruins, but in thrall to new hopes and fears. Here’s Nawras:
And Marah:
Marah, at graduation.
In an age of migration, and the political weaponisation of migration, our conversations touch on questions of belonging and assimilation, of disappointment and gratitude. The refugee wave of 2015 profoundly changed Europe. If they ever leave, what are we going to do without them? They were, in Cavafy’s words, a kind of solution.
The conversations were conducted before the horrific attack by a crazed Saudi-born psychiatrist on the Christmas market in Magdeburg on 20 December. That attack has fuelled hatred in Germany towards all refugees, and is cited by opponents of immigration as proof that Germany’s welcome for refugees in 2015 was a tragic mistake.
The phrase ‘uncontrolled migration’ is thrown around, but there was nothing uncontrolled about it. It was carefully controlled, in a rather bureaucratic, German sort of way. A bold political decision at the top, followed by years of hard work, understandings and misunderstandings, goodwill and bad will, which continues to this day. The attack in Magdeburg was rather a tragic failure of the German police and intelligence agencies, who ignored multiple warnings by the Saudi authorities, and by refugees living in Germany, about the perpetrator.
Frank Gardner's BBC article on Saudi warnings
‘What would you do,’ I asked Tariq, a Moroccan asylum seeker in Cologne in 2018, ‘if you overheard people discussing a terror attack?’ ‘First I would tell them not to be so stupid. Then if they didn’t listen, I would go straight to the police,’ he replied - even if that meant risking his own, semi-legal status in Germany.
Former refugees contribute much to German society, including the 6,000 Syrian doctors on which its health service partially depends. Germany’s welcome to refugees was itself an act of contrition - for the horrors inflicted by Germany on Europe in two world wars.
AP: Refugees arrive in Germany, Frankfurt September 2015. Nawras speaks at 00:15
If I want to make a single point with today’s post, it is this:
we all need a home, and a homeland, whoever we vote for. Like us, migrants and refugees would mostly love to ‘go home’ one day, if they could. Well-managed or ‘circular’ migration keeps that option open, or builds it in from the beginning.
‘I do not believe in the word integration any more,' Nawras told me, a while back. ‘it is just a term used to classify people as insiders and outsiders.’
‘The best way to have a functioning society is to stop trying to "integrate" people, and just simply see them for who they are, as human beings, no more, no less; if there is no enemy, there is no one to beat.’
I first met him outside Keleti, the East railway station in Budapest, in August 2015, when he was organising a peaceful protest, with fellow Syrian, Afghan and other refugees, against the Hungarian government’s decision to stop people trying to leave Hungary by boarding trains to Austria and Germany.
Nawras and his friends won that particular battle, Viktor Orban’s government caved in, and even laid on buses to get rid of all these people whose need to flee their homelands they refused to even try and understand. Nawras, a poet and translator at home in Damascus, made it to Berlin where he has thrived ever since. He works for Facebook, in sales, and is now a German citizen. He has also published two novels, in Arabic, links to which can be found at the end of this post.
Today, he feels he has just got his motherland, and therefore a part of himself back. And that has changed his feelings towards Germany.
I miss feeling like…a genuine human being. You have this deep sense that you are not complete. There was something missing in my heart, like the sunset.
When we last met, in September, he was disappointed with Germany, because of what he saw as its failure to understand the plight of Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, and the way many Germans treat Arabs. Now he’s disappointed again - by how quick some politicians and commentators in Germany have been, to expect all Syrians to immediately disappear. I spoke to him by phone on 10 December, just after the liberation of Syria. Yet he still believes in Germany, and its power, together with the rest of the West, to have a benign influence on what happens next in Syria.
Marah, on the left, and her family in Bruchsal, September 2017
‘Germany gave me everything that Syria didn’t give me. But Syria is my homeland.’
Marah lives in Aachen with her Syrian husband Mohammed. Both are originally from Aleppo. She is doing a masters degree in power engineering, while her husband studies to be a cardiologist.
I asked Marah whether she believes refugees have changed Germany. ‘There are a lot of things that have changed positively, not just negatively…’ she said. On the positive side, all the Syrian health care workers, and bus drivers, for example.
In her 9 years in Germany, Marah misses most the coziness she used to feel in Syria, in German, ‘Gemütlichkeit.’
‘Home was the centre of the world because it was the place where a vertical line crossed with a horizontal one,’ wrote the British author and artist, John Berger.
‘The vertical line was a path leading upwards to the sky and downwards to the underworld. The horizontal line represented the traffic of the world, all the possible roads leading across the earth to other places. Thus, at home, one was nearest to the gods in the sky and to the dead of the underworld. This nearness promised access to both. And at the same time, one was at the starting point and, hopefully, the returning point of all terrestrial journeys.’
Wishing all my readers, at home or abroad, on the high roads or low roads, the high seas or low seas, a Happy Christmas and a Peaceful New Year! Nick
Refugee children stranded at the East station in Budapest in early September 2015 were given paper and crayons by volunteers. This boy drew a new Syrian flag, with hearts instead of stars. Inside the hearts, are tears.
Here are links to Nawras’s novels (in Arabic):
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45447675
https://www.samawy.com/i/1004161/%D9%85%D9%88%D8%AA-%D9%88%D8%B3%D9%83%D8%B1