Between two camps...and solitude

an abstract painting of a tent in a refugee camp. Artwork by Haisam Al Saiegh — Artwork by Haisam Al Saiegh

Bissan spent around a month in the first camp in a rectangular elongated caravan, with barely enough space for a bed, a small cupboard and an even smaller table.

“Camp life is hard enough, so imagine how it is for a separated single mother with her son. Once people hear the word ‘separated’, they think I am someone who is ready to open her legs to anyone who flicks his finger to her.” This doesn’t happen from the people in the camp only, Bissan said, but it extends to the manager, supervisor and even the kitchen staff members, beside the self-appointed managers to any woman walking alone without a man.

– Aljumhuriya *

On the way to “here”

Belgium was not always the first choice, but it became the best one available after Germany and the Scandinavian countries tightened asylum policies, especially after the waves of Arab immigration since 2011.

Bissan remembers five days in cold Poland, not understanding what happened then. Contrary to what she had heard from her friends, the Poles did not seem so kind to her. In the hotel room next door, a Polish woman was staying with her child. Sajid crying in the room, and the Polish woman’s son is screaming in the next room. Every now and then, the Polish woman storms into the room, screams at her and leaves, without Bissan understanding anything from her words except anger. She had no choice but to escape to the street and endure the cold, snowy city weather, which was difficult for a person who had just come from a city on the Mediterranean coast.

After five days in Poland, she flew to Brussels, followed by two months of seeing lawyers and bearing the costs of their exorbitant consultations, with the aim of reaching a sound decision for the next step. Requests for the extradition of immigrants and refugees between European countries are conducted according to the Dublin Agreement. If your first fingerprint was at a German airport, for example, and you applied for asylum in Belgium, according to the agreement, the actor responsible for your file is the Immigration Department in Germany, and therefore, the Germans must determine whether they want you or not. Most countries do not respond to these requests, and if they do, they are delayed, which did not happen with Bissan.

In the days before Christmas, Bissan turned herself in to the Immigration Department, applied for political asylum and was sent to a camp. After only five days, she was surprised to receive a Polish request to take her back from Belgium. Everything changed after that in the camp. They gave her less than ten days’ notice to vacate the room and leave. Now, she must submit a new asylum application in Belgium, but after she leaves the camp and disappears for six months in order to break away from the Polish fingerprints. During this period, she rents a house at her expense on “the black market” – as they call the illegal sublease – and without any right to healthcare, education, insurance or any rights whatsoever.

an illustration of two hanging lamps Artwork: Haytham Al-Sayegh

“Even God cannot untangle your internal destruction”

“The heavy days accompanied by doubled responsibilities left her staring at the meaning of her freedom as a woman, at the meaning of her suffering and at the meaning of calling herself ‘a feminist in a certain sense’: How do you eat? How do you express yourself? How do you tell things? How do you curse? How do you scream and get angry? How do you cry and laugh? The questions of ‘femininity’ also returned to her again: “Now, I began to rediscover that I am a woman. I was always the one who played the role of a mother and a sister to everyone, but come to tell me that I am sweet, that you admire me, and I simply don’t know how to deal with that. Should I be happy? Or should I curse you?”

“After this long life, how can you want to preserve the right to life for yourself? You are already destroyed, even God cannot untangle your internal destruction.”

Marriage, pregnancy, childbirth and separation, thwarting the experience of civil work, motherhood and its ghosts, Gaza, in which you were brought up with nothing but pain and worry, the journey out, refugee camps in Belgium, the alienation of homes you pass by and the negotiations of intimacy with a new place. They are all experiences from which one does not come out as light as she entered. “I lost many things on the way that were among the most important things that I worked hard on to form my personality. I lost a part of my soul. I stopped seeing happiness. You make an effort to be happy, and you laugh at yourself. Nothing makes you happy. Everything you reach, you reach when you are on the brink of death, and you are thoroughly exhausted, and everything loses its meaning.”

“Apparently, when life decides to be heavy and cruel, nothing on the planet can be useful against that. How can new beginnings fix what time has spoiled? What if we start in a thousand new countries, and they give us everything we can imagine; can this erase what was left in us by a place that only gives sorrow and weakness?

“Why does it have to be a choice between two sufferings? Between distorted lives?”

– Aljumhuriya *

An abstract painting of a woman being harassed by a man Artwork by Haisam Al Saiegh

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an illustration of a woman looking concerned while trying to use a toilet under a tarp Artwork: Haytham Al-Sayegh

Next: Tarps flies away with the first gust of wind

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XwhY is a reader of gender and sexuality related-content that represents the problems and challenges faced by women and LGBTQIA+ communities in Syria and the region.

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Introduction XwhY

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