Child refugees and the children of refugees experience a unique longing for a place they never knew. But they also long for a place that does not exist. Our parents in exile create an elaborate fantasy of what their homeland could have been and make it real with the strength of their desires. Because when we are forced to leave our homes, the only thing we want is to return, but the only way to return is for our homeland to transform into a place that has the capacity to be hospitable to our continued life and dignity. A place then, that in reality, would be nothing at all like the one you left.
I was born in Iraq during the tail end of the Iran-Iraq war, and my family fled to Iran shortly after my birth. I was taught in school that there are push and pull factors for migration, and even for refugees this is true, though we are pushed far more strongly than we are pulled. In addition to fearing for their lives, my parents, and my father’s family, were attracted to the Islamist post-revolutionary Iran. The fascists in power and on the street had told them that’s where “they were really from” anyway – they hoped that in Iran their faith would be accepted and they would find a home.
But post-revolutionary Iran offered no hospitality to our family. It was a less violent autocracy than the one Saddam led, but it too saw us as foreigners. According to Iran we weren’t “really from there” either. There would be no path to citizenship, and every generation would pass on this lack to the next, along with its many restrictions. Among the harshest brutalities of fascism is that, for certain human beings, accidents of birth and cruelty render them stateless, a Nowhere person. We were unlucky in this way.
And so, we once more packed up our bags and headed to “the West.” We arrived in England just short of my fourth birthday. I remained stateless until I was fourteen, a teenager in London. I didn’t know there was a name for my condition until I was much older. A UN campaign was a revelation, it was the first time I saw the word: Stateless.
For a while my answer to where I was from was of course Iraq. As children our identity is easily constructed around the identity of our parents. In adulthood it becomes more complex.
The Iraqi Sociologist Ali al-Wardi famously said “given the choice, arabs choose religious rule but flee to secular.” That quote gets bandied about a lot in the Arab world whenever the Islamists gain political ground. Ali al-Wardi was also from Baghdad, also from a Shia family and so this quote is inflected for me with the comfort of recognition.
On its surface this critique seems aimed at the hypocrisy of the Islamists or at the very least their foolishness. But I think it gestures also towards the fascism that has pervaded our region for the past century. Islamism, pan-arabism, communism, nationalism, and Ba’athism. Each has presented itself as an answer to the injustices of imperialism, of the regime du jour, of the enemy nation. And yet injustice persists, each time replacing one brand of fascism with another, and decade after decade we flee to the Western nations that represent everything being fought against. Former colonizers, capitalists, secularists. What hypocrites, right? What fools.
All over the world today we can see how easy it is for fascists to win with lies. Imagine then, when the fascists have truth on their side. In Iraq, the Americans really did commit war crimes. The west really did supply Saddam with weapons. The British really did colonize our country. Is it any wonder these “anti-imperialists” keep winning popular support? And yet in the end it is the failures of a liberal alternative that have kept us trapped in this cycle.
In England, my adopted home, the fascist drums have been getting louder. The recent riots are the latest example of a swelling hatred. After the Brexit vote, the country remained unsatisfied with merely halting free movement in Europe and has shifted its focus to the real enemy: non-white immigrants. (American readers can surely relate.) As a result, the previous government spent the last five years desperate to stop a tiny number of the most vulnerable immigrants: refugees. The plan to “stop the boats,” a chant which filled British streets during this year’s riots, involved sending these vulnerable people to Rwanda, leaving the European convention of human rights and blaming traitorous judges, human rights lawyers, and civil servants for denying the will of the people. To put it simply: our heroes were cast as the enemy. How little we deserve them. The problem was not just in the government rhetoric and the policy of the ‘Illegal Immigration Bill’ but the inability of our institutions to call a fascist spade a fascist spade. And with recent events, social media misinformation has proven itself to be a convenient scapegoat. No self-reflection necessary.
Being both Iraqi and English, it is easy to recognize the pattern: the swing from liberalism’s failures straight to fascism’s victories. The contexts and results are not the same but human nature is. In Iraq, liberal values and institutions never had the chance to take root. In Britain, and the rest of Europe they are in obvious decline. And yet for all of us, if we want a home with the capacity to be hospitable to our continued life and dignity, we need to protect the ideals and (re)build the institutions that make this possible. Because societies are always being transformed for better or worse, and each of us must play a part in forcing the future towards justice.