alltägliche grenzerfahrungen
Estrangement, longing and pain, are words of both bitter and painful taste. These harsh words reflect the difficult experience endured by many of us in different ways and for multiple reasons. Some of us were born to find themselves in a country where their parents had emigrated to in search of a better job opportunity, while some others found themselves forced to leave their warm homes in which they grew up for the sake of studying or to escape the imminent death that attacked their country and its people.
Estrangement can be fun for a few months as you reach your hopes to travel and to live a new life that has been your dream, but with the passage of time while being away from your warm roots, a lethal feeling of loneliness away from friends and family starts to ignite inside, the feeling of dissociation from the loved ones, the fear that your heart may get used to their absence.
It is this painful stage when your feelings and emotions start to be truly affected by estrangement. It is the cruelty of every day longing to the streets and places where you left a lot of beautiful memories. Estrangement is not only to be far from homeland but feeling of dissociation from the loved ones, the fear that your heart may get used to their absence.
Unfortunately, when you find someone of your own people in expatriation, you cannot express such feelings of longing and nostalgia that you feel simple because they may suffer the same or more.
Nevertheless, estrangement teaches you the meaning of human dignity and the dignity of the homeland despite all its problems and difficulties. Estrangement teaches us that homeland is just like the mother, whom you cannot deny nor desert. Oh, my small heart and my wandering mind cannot forget that moment when I packed my bags and headed towards an unknown. My heart is still clinging to the sun of my homeland, to its plains and hills. My emotions are still wandering between a broken heart living safely now in the country of expatriation, and the heart full of love and hope in my country which is suffering from murder, devastation and destruction. So, when will my heart and mind unfailingly agree together?
Kawkab Algaith is a translator from Damascus in Syria. Since February she lives in Vienna.
