Even If I Explain It To You, Word By Word…

Note: This article was originally published on my previous blog on May 24, 2025.

This is basically my follow up post to the essay I wrote last year, "...And Where Are You From?". I didn't really expect I'd be writing a follow up, but last night as I was walking home after an evening at a bar, I came across a TikTok of the song "Deslocado" by NAPA, from this year's Eurovision; it was talking about just how heartbreaking the song really is when you read the translation; about how it feels to be a stranger in your home country, and to emigrate and still be seen as a stranger in your new country. To have to leave home in search of better opportunities but to be greeted with an inexplicable sense of solitude and loneliness amongst concrete hills and a sea of people that pass you by.

I started thinking about the things I talked about with a friend that night, about the idea of "home" and my family, and although back then I could only laugh about it, the moment I got back home and really started listening to the song I couldn't help but cry at just how messed up it all was, and how unfair it is. In the comments of a similar TikTok using the same song, some people were saying how they've forgotten how to even speak their mother language after they emigrated. Funnily enough, last month, I had to handwrite something in Arabic, my mother language, and at that time I had also forgotten how to write in it. Although I thought it was funny at the time ("why can't I write the ه correctly?!" and "why did I forget how to write the number 2???" and "why do we even have two ways to write the number two?!"), in the context of that TikTok, I also couldn't help but feel a chill, that my home is so far away from me now, such a long time ago that I've even forgotten how to write in my own language. One of the few root words shared across nearly all Semitic languages: K-T-B, having to do with writing, is ironically, at least partially lost to me. Most alphabets and scripts used in the world derive from Phoenician, also a Semitic language. What does it mean when writing, something so fundamental to nearly all languages' identities, the very thing that binds speech and memory together, is slowly starting to slip from my grasp?

I've already talked a lot about my reasons for leaving home, and how my idea of home was twisted by my upbringing and my circumstances. I know that returning is not an option and that I'm gone for good. But still, I can't help but feel homesick for an idea of home that may have never really existed. Where NAPA takes solace in being able to return to their home island of Madeira, I know that that is not an option for me. The feeling they talk about throughout the song, the feeling of never belonging in the place you now live, is one that I am burdened to carry along with me for the rest of my life.

To this day, a year later after my first post, I still struggle with the question "where are you from". Such a simple and common question never fails to stir up a storm of emotions in me, ironically, also captured by the Portuguese word saudade. Perhaps I feel saudade only for the idea of home, rather than the reality. I would much rather prefer if people just asked me for my nationality, as that is much easier to answer, or even more ideally, if people only asked me what city I live in. "Where are you from," on the other hand, is a loaded enough question that every time I am asked it, I can hear the click of a safety being released; subtle, but unmistakable. It lands like a silenced gun in a quiet room: innocent only to those who have never been on the receiving end of the gun.

Sometimes I wonder if I am forgetting my mother tongue, my roots and my heritage, or if they are forgetting me. The erosion is gradual and unintentional, like the sea slowly reclaiming a coastline without apology. I myself don't notice it, until I try to reach for a word in Arabic and come up empty, using the English word instead, or having to use Google Translate and trying my hardest to translate Google Translate to our dialect, or recording a voice note for a relative and having to redo it because I made a mistake conjugating a word. Or when I reach for a memory and realize it exists in English, I have to translate it into Arabic, like a dream dubbed in the wrong voice.

Although I still speak mostly Arabic with my family and relatives, it's clear that it's now full of gaps and stumbles, one that, in the Netherlands, is enough proof of a lack of fluency to get people to switch to English with me. There's a hollowness in my Arabic that didn't used to be there. But to my relatives, who only speak Arabic and little English, I wonder, do they see code switching, this marvelous linguistic quirk, a Swiss Army knife of survival, as an exotic status symbol, a proof of being well educated, or a silent betrayal?

And maybe that's the hardest part of it. That even survival demands small betrayals. I take no pleasure in it; I'm not jumping with glee that I'm slowly forgetting my language, nor am I doing it on purpose. To the people who ask me where I'm really from and what my life in Syria or the Emirates was like, as if I were a puzzle waiting to be pieced together, I wonder if they know that I am now likely more fluent in Dutch after only living here for 5 years, than I am in Arabic, which I regularly used for 20 years. I wonder if that’s even something socially acceptable to bring up, even if it means being able to piece that puzzle. The more I try to belong here, the more I am being peeled away from something older and deeper, one that never wanted me in the first place.

Although I've already talked about how I feel like an outsider even in the Middle East and among Arabs, I don't want to lose my heritage or culture. But I have to ask myself, how do I preserve a language, heritage or a self when my entire life has been built on continuously leaving things behind, never staying in one place for too long, never making any lifelong friends, never having a place I could call "home"?

If my idea of "home" was ever real, it only exists as a mosaic I piece together in decade-old memories of visiting the Syrian countryside before the war, listening to the music of Fairouz, old photos of my late grandmother and me as a child, and the smell of food I wish I knew how to cook like she did. Framing the mosaic is the shame that comes with leaving all this behind so I could live life the way that makes me happy, free of familial expectations and restrictive rules. Ironically, no part of this mosaic includes the Emirates in it, even though as I've mentioned in my previous post, Syria was only a place I'd visit in the summer vacation with my family, rather than a place I ever lived in. What do you call it anyway, when you miss something that never fully belonged to you? Not just a home, but a version of yourself you never got to be?

This grief I carry is quiet; it doesn't scream, it hums in the background, in every song that reminds me of summers in Damascus and in every dish I try to recreate with ingredients that never taste quite right here. It’s grief for a language I can still understand but am starting to lose the rhythm of. It’s grief for a country I can never return to, and even if I did, I know it wouldn’t recognize me as an equal, not now or ever. It's not that something ended. It’s that it never began the way it was supposed to. There’s no funeral for a life one might’ve had. You just keep going, and hope that no one notices how heavy it is to carry something that has no name. Grief without closure is a kind of permanent echo, and sometimes I wonder if I’m mourning the place, or the version of me that might’ve felt whole there.

I used to think this alienation would just be a phase. I could just learn Dutch and move on with my life and everything will be okay. I could just find my community of queer people, my chosen family, settle here long enough, and I'd be rid of the feeling of alienation. Simple enough, but as it turns out, things are never that simple. For some of us, alienation is a state of being; not a transition, but a condition.

It creeps into everything, the language I speak, the places I go, the food I cook, the way I exist in a room with other people, the things I can talk about with them, how much I am allowed to talk positively about my "home" (or at least, the romanticized mosaic I've constructed of my home), and so on. In the Netherlands, I'm Syrian; in Syria, I'm too westernized. Among Arabs, I'm too queer. Among queer people, I'm too Arab. It’s very rare, if it’s ever happened, to have all these parts of me co-exist in the same place. And somewhere along the way, the in-between stopped being a bridge and became the place I live in. It's like standing in the hallway between two doors; you can lean in, eavesdrop on what is being said, sometimes you can even make yourself useful and join in the conversation. But no matter what, you'll never be fully let into either door, you'll always be standing just outside the door frame, separated by an invisible barrier to either room.

Even in the rare moments when I feel like I belong here in the Netherlands: when I laugh with my Dutch friends who indeed do see me as belonging here, when I give directions to a tourist, when I feel proud of myself for how far I've come, the illusion is nothing if not fragile. A single glance that lingers a bit too long if I dare to send a voice note to my parents or my relatives in Arabic in the train or on the street. A single word, mispronounced, that makes me hyper-aware of my accent as I fumble trying to fix it. A single question: “Maar waar kom je eigenlijk vandaan, wat is je afkomst?” — “but where are you really from?" that is less of a silenced gun and more like standing in the epicenter of an atomic bomb. Sometimes it's a news headline, a new proposal from our far-right cabinet, a tweet by someone either my age or twice that, who thinks they should Make The Netherlands White Again, sometimes it's a politician debating whether people like me ought to have human rights. All this is enough to remind me: I am still on borrowed ground. No matter how well I "integrate" (because People Like Us have to "integrate", yet another loaded term), this place can still decide for me that I don't belong here. Some people can just think that regardless of what I do or who I am, I am either never welcome here to begin with, or that I will never be seen as their equal.

It's a strange kind of instability, not chaos, but the quiet dislocation of always needing to be ready to prove yourself, to prove you are good enough, better than the rest, to prove that you are One Of The Good Ones. The sense that everything you build is only provisional, existing in a limbo as you transition to the next state of being. The sense that your life story is written with a pencil, whereas everyone else's is written with a pen. And when I think about this enough, I realize that maybe I’ve spent all these years trying to earn a kind of belonging that was never meant for me, but one that I’ve been rather desperately chasing all the same.

Maybe alienation isn’t something to be solved, but something to be lived with; not a wound, but scar tissue I have to learn to move with. Maybe the question shouldn’t be “where are you from?” but “what did you have to lose in order to be here?”

I think about this stuff more than I care to admit. Maybe I do think about this stuff too much and it's really not that deep, like a couple friends of mine say to make me feel less bad about it all. But to me, it is that deep, because this is me. Or at least part of me, whether I want it to be or not. I think not just about what I’ve lost: language, geography, familiarity, warmth, but what parts of myself I had to bury over the years just to be the acceptable foreigner, the “well-integrated immigrant”, right after having to bury the most fundamental and core parts of me to be accepted in the Emirates and amongst my Syrian relatives. To not have to do this stuff, or even think about it, is a privilege. Maybe that’s what my friends don’t realize. I’ve learned to play the part perfectly, but some days I look at myself and wonder how much of me is still real and how much is performance. And if I were to stop performing, who would remain?

So: even if I explain it to you, word by word, I don’t think I can ever really make you feel or understand the kind of homesickness I carry; a pain that silences me, not for a country, a nation, a people or a place on the map, but for a self that might’ve felt whole somewhere. The few who will understand exactly what I am talking about are those who carry the exact same burden as I do, those who grew up just like me, never knowing what "home" meant to them.

I don’t have a neat ending for this. Maybe there isn’t one. Maybe I’ll always be translating myself, even in languages I know fluently. Maybe the best I can hope for is to be legible to myself.