An Unbelievable Week
Making this choice you die anyway, but only deeply inside, and so not so many people can guess that you are not alive anymore.
Googling the exact dates of the Refugee Week 2024 that took place recently, I bumped into a tweet “What an unbelievable week it has been!” (speaking of the Refugee Week) and sat frozen for a minute or two, staring into my monitor. I’m safe, have a cozy place to live and right to work, my child goes to preschool, birthday parties, ballet lessons, and pony rides, I’m able to travel, speak up, volunteer, take care of myself, and still, being a refugee is a most awful experience I’ve ever been through. It doesn’t feel too bad every exact moment of my life, I’m quite cheerful and sometimes even happy, but if I look back to these 2,5 years I can clearly see that I’m cheerful and sometimes even happy in hell. The Refugee Week, quite big and presented into different informational channels, was difficult for me. Reading, talking, and watching about the various experiences of being refugees brought up a lot of questions and thoughts that I, as a refugee, have been avoiding for a long time. It was a week of mourning, uncomfortable answers, and remembering all that is now lost and gone from my life forever. It was, too, a week of feeling for millions of people, who have their refugee experiences worse than mine, and of the frightening acceptance of the fact, that every day there are new and new people to become refugees, and this is impossible, unfair, painful, but, I’m afraid, can’t be fixed.
It shocked me that someone called this “an unbelievable week” and that some other people had spoken of the events of Refugee Week as a celebration. Maybe, I’m too new of a refugee, but I honestly think there’s nothing to celebrate. Attracting attention, making people and problems visible, supporting an important social dialogue, and simply encouraging people to know and help – yes. Celebrating – excuse me.
People have been migrating and moving to better places since they existed, but there is something terrible and terribly unfair in being endangered by other human beings to the point when you just leave your life, belongings, home, and community to stay alive at least physically, because making this choice you die anyway, only inside and so not so many people can guess that you are not alive anymore. For me, for instance, it was clearly a choice between two things, I’d never wish to choose any of them: 1) I endanger my daughter’s life and most likely ruin her feeling of basic safety, emotional contour, and educational potential forever 2) I ruin my own life, lose the language, the community and a big part of my writer’s ability due to the huge experience and context gap. There just was not a good option, so I’ve chosen one of the non-good. For me, it was easy and smooth, a lot of people lose their lives trying to get to safe places, or they are not accepted legally there. There are awful refugee camps and even more unlivable jungles, where some people, and children, have to stay as they lose their homes to wars. This is what Refugee Week is about for me.
I wanted to write about my reflections on being a refugee (I used to avoid this word for the first two years, saying “a person under temporary protection” or some bshit like that, but I’m just too tired to pronounce so many words to hide the truth; I also can’t fool myself anymore that this is a kind of adventure, new possibility or temporal complication that will soon pass and be forgotten), but this “unbelievable week” thing confused me absolutely. All the thoughts and jokes are gone now. What’s left – that my experience doesn't even matter. What matters is that refugees exist and they should not. The world should be a safe place where people move because they want to and not because someone else came to kill them.
June 17-24 to me was a hard week when I couldn't forget that the world is not safe and that people are failing day by day to make it safer. It’s a reality, nothing unbelievable.