A SAFE HAVEN?

By Nada Awar Jarrar

When I sit quietly like this – I have arrived early for my appointment and am having a cup of tea in the hospital café – I find myself thinking stories in my head, wisps of ideas that will escape if I don’t write them down. But I have no pen on me, nor paper, and I sense that my perspective, no matter how lucid now, will change in a few moments and I’ll no longer be a writer then, only someone trying to find her way.

Two and a half years on and Adelaide has taken on a semblance of home. We are settled in a small house in the southern suburbs that has a large back garden where our dog, Timmie, chases his beloved yellow ball and Bassem and I sit in the sun drinking our morning coffee, the hum of trains going to and from the City in the background, and on our faces the satisfaction that comes with companionship and profound love. On weekdays, I work as an interpreter, mostly for refugees: Syrians, Palestinians, Lebanese, Iraqis, Egyptians and Sudanese, among others. It is dispiriting to know that so many people from our part of the world continue to be displaced, and more still to come among those lucky enough to survive the genocide in Gaza. But it is work that I enjoy, encounters that I would not have otherwise had, connections made that make me feel somewhat useful when so much in this world seems out of our control.  

If I have not found absolute stability, I know that the kind of upheaval that regularly befalls Lebanon is unlikely to occur here. This, I continue to tell myself, is where my mother and her siblings grew up and knew the world; this is where immigrants created a country on the lands of a 60-thousand-year old indigenous population unable to stop the deluge; this is the British colony my grandfather and his brothers arrived in as young men, unfamiliar and daunting but not impenetrable, a haven of sorts once they met its conditions and chose to embrace it. And embrace it they did. I have cousins who are second-generation Aussies, their children another generation further away from Lebanon, memories that were once cherished of the old country slowly fading as our elders pass on.

So where do I fit in this manifold history? There are times when I like to think of myself as a link between here and there, a nameless space where the two identities meet and no questions need be asked about belonging. Then I am reminded, as I am today, that uncertainty waits to strike wherever I go, until that one moment when all perceived realities collide and I am here, amazed at this unity that is ours when we stop and welcome it, the breathing, moving world finally at our feet.