The readings for this week reminded of my own experience growing up in New York Cit. There’s a stretch of Fifth Avenue in Bay Ridge where the signs are in Arabic and the bakery windows are stacked with trays of baklava. I spent a lot of my childhood on that block. Abu Sami, who ran the place, gave me free knafeh whenever my mother sent me for bread, and I knew in the vague way you know things at twelve that he had come from somewhere and that the somewhere had gone badly. I never asked. Not asking felt like manners. Reading Kingsley this week brought me back to those memories.
The detail that got me was the key. Hashem al-Souki leaves Damascus in April 2012 and all that’s left of his house is the key in his pocket, because the Syrian army blew up the door it opened. Kingsley drops it into a paragraph and keeps moving. A key is an object that assumes a future; you keep one because you expect to come back and use it. Hashem is carrying a promise the war already broke, and he carries it across the Mediterranean anyway, in a boat where everyone ends up covered in each other’s vomit.
Kingsley also wrecked a word I’ve used my whole life without examining. He notes that the 850,000 people who left Turkish shores in 2015 are about 0.2 percent of the EU’s population, and that Lebanon was then holding close to 1.2 million Syrians in a country of roughly 4.5 million — one in five people. The infrastructure genuinely buckling was never European. Nobody wrote about a Lebanese refugee crisis. This is very similar to the Bay Ridge neighborhood. Before Arabic signs it was traditional Chinese characters, before that Italian and Polish. But with each wave of migrants, the issue is never immirgation itself or the now established migrant populations inability to provide the say empathy they recieved, just a racial, religious, or other issue. I’ve seen what that discrimination can do in my own communities, and reading the articles this week brought it back to meecause I watched New York run it a few years ago, when the story on the news was never really about the families arriving, it was about what their arrival was doing to us.
The Washington Post’s doctors are where I got uncomfortable in a way I’m still sitting with. Rania Kadib Alban named her children Stefan and Ella Sofie after reading about racism in the German workforce. My friend Yasmine was Jasmine from first grade through graduation, and at the time I thought that was just a thing, maybe even a smart thing. It never occurred to me that it was a fee. Alban also says doctors are a little safer because the German health system needs them, and then refuses the safety outright: if her family and friends can’t stay, she doesn’t want to either. She sees the bargain and says it out loud, which is more than anyone on my block ever did in front of me.
The New Arab piece strips the bargain of its manners. Jens Spahn floats chartered planes and 1,000 euros within about two days of Assad falling. Joachim Herrmann sorts Syrians into the superbly integrated, cordially welcome, and the ones without jobs, for whom return is suddenly “right.” Deservingness measured in labor. Which is why Yamn Molhem’s line stuck — Syrians don’t just sleep here — delivered from a restaurant on Sonnenallee, a street I have never seen but can picture exactly, because I grew up on its cousin, and because I grew up thinking that kind of self-defense was a success story.
