| Drawing
Out Displacement
By
Catherine Hamel
Being anchored by
a sense of loss and longing is common for those who have experienced
forced displacement. They live an unresolved existence, oscillating
between the dangerously manipulative memories of a lost place
and the difficulty of adaptation to new cultures and their
accompanying space. It is a rich existence that defies stale
comfort. Nothing is clearly understood.
Life relentlessly demands
to be reinterpreted from a different point of view, often
in a different language. Observed carelessly, the story of
forced displacement is ubiquitous, a common trajectory of
being deracinated, blown by the wind of politics, until the
weeds are grafted on to new stems. It is an experiment, a
novelty that reveals patterns of new growth. Whether memory
is productive or destructive, whether the place one is uprooted
from is ideal or flawed, longed for or forgotten, it is the
violence of the movement that leaves its mark.
Beirut has been a city
of departures. It is a city that I have experienced, but not
a city that I have known. The first ten years it enveloped
me, I was too young to navigate my own destiny. Intimate pockets
of space formed my knowledge of it. War brought segregation,
and I was too young to challenge the boundaries imposed by
the conflict. Displaced to other countries, I became the eternal
tourist whenever I returned, interlacing the space of other
cities and other lives into its fabric, shadowed by the foreignness
that would never leave me.
My bond to Beirut is
akin to that of a face intimately known, the knowledge of
a look in the eyes, a faint and mocking smile that lingers.
But no, I could not describe that face to you, not with the
clarity that would give it common and recognizable features.
Such is the space of Beirut that bewilders me, a memory of
an intimate look that haunts and is never regained. With the
continuing destruction, the theft of war dulled the shine
in those longed-for eyes. Age alone could have done the same.
Experience changed the glances cast by my own eyes. All that
remains is a pen that defiantly and single-mindedly traces
and retraces the features of this elusive face.
The persistent line
of my pen endures as a deliberate act of constantly searching
the boundaries of my identity . The images formed from these
lines are not meant to be representational. They are a device,
a thinking tool, a foil. Images are extruded to evoke, provoke,
remember, often with the hope to forget. The pen initially
began to flow with the act of copying the eloquent words of
writers who described their own numerous experiences of Beirut
over the last 20 years. The words and their meaning would
seep into my body through the act of duplication. As the hand
records, the body is awakened to recall its own marks of memory
buried deep within. Marks that were never visible scars and,
therefore, never given recognition. The order of the alphabet
was soon deformed and the marks of the pen began to record
my own muted life of spaces witnessed, of spaces imagined,
of spaces never told.
Initially, the flow
of the pen combined with the untrained hand expressed chaos,
as well as the recognizable stories that needed to be released.
From chaos often emerges order. The more the pen drew, an
extension of the body within, the more the longing and disorientation
dissolved. Renewed interpretations surfaced with each retracing.
Courage was summoned to dissect the features. Exposed for
observation, reflections were confronted. The density of the
experience emerged, with each retracing a new story to be
told, emphasizing a different variable. Each retelling allowed
for new understanding.
There is something
ubiquitous about the lamentation of displacement. Yet the
common trajectory does not diminish from its need to be told.
The need to be heard. Although discovering and hearing unique
experiences is overwhelming to many, there is unbearable cruelty
in reducing millions of individual stories to their lowest
common denominator. Some try to unravel the thread of their
own story in a fabric woven of overwhelming grief; it is not
easy to find listening ears. Maybe there is solace in finding
willing eyes. Eyes willing to look through the eyes of one
who is grafted, one who draws on the ink that flows in her
veins.
Vol. 10/ nos. 46/47
(Winter/Spring 2004).
Copyright (c) 2004
by Al Jadid
|
