New Beginnings and Other Falsehoods

Diya Abdo 

When we find out that we are about to welcome our newest guests on Guilford’s campus, we move fast. Usually, we only have two weeks to prepare. On some occasions, it is even shorter than that—a matter of three or four days. Over the years, we have refined our process. Through much trial and, happily, very little error, we always manage to get to the airport with our welcome signs and (if there are children in the newly arriving family) balloons after everything in the house has been put right: the wall paint touched up, the toothbrushes laid out, and everything in between—the furniture, the toys, the kitchenware, the sheets and pillows—neatly arranged.

Over the last ten years at Guilford College, we have become adept at this—the work of creating a welcoming home for a newly arriving refugee family trying to find a fresh start, a new beginning in Greensboro, North Carolina. In this particular case, in early April 2024, it was a young Afghan family of three—a mom, dad, and their little girl. Upon entering the three-bedroom house at the edge of campus that would be their home for the next few months, the father said that he had been dreaming of this—somewhere quiet and safe and beautiful to live. And the house certainly is beautiful: brick solid, long-standing, surrounded by mature trees and a spacious yard. Here, they will stay rent- and utilities-free until they find their mooring. Our campus and community volunteers will provide them with the kinds of support the family needs and asks for. And if the family chooses, they can access campus facilities and amenities—the library, the gym, the cafeteria, the career services center, and various events and activities. Like the many families that have stayed in that house before them, they will form long-lasting bonds with the students who come to tutor their kids, or have a cup of tea with the mom when she’s lonely, or call Medicaid to sort out some thorny issue. And those students, many of them also trying to make their way in a new community, a new city, will empathize deeply; and very importantly, they will learn what it means to be forced away from your home—and what new beginnings are really like for refugees—in ways more effective than any book or film can teach or show them.

***

Nearly ten years ago, in 2015, I decided I had had enough with just teaching about displacement and alienation. In Guilford’s Department of English and Creative Writing where I was, and still am, a professor, my usual course rotations were World Literature, Twentieth-Century American Literature, Refugee and Immigrant Literature, Arab Women Writers, and Arab and Islamic Feminisms—a good measure of life and of hope and of inspiration, of course, but also heaping pagefuls of disconnect and loss.

At some point in each semester, regardless of the course in question or the text at hand, I would almost always find myself asking my students the following question: What is the role of literature in a world streaming with rivers of blood?

It was a question I had heard a Moroccan woman writer ask in an interview, and I was struck by its simplicity, the challenge it presented. There was no dissembling, no obfuscation there. Just simply: what is the purpose of writing when people are dying? This is not a pessimistic question, nor is it a rhetorical one. She did not intend it that way, and when I pose it to my students, neither do I. Rather, and at a time when my own people are being killed by the thousands in Gaza, this is an important question—what do we do other than watch? How do we take what we read, what we see, and design a better world? How does literature spur an architecture of hope?

***

I was born and raised in Jordan to a Palestinian refugee family. Displaced to Jordan in 1967, my grandmother and her two children—both teenagers at the time—lived in various refugee camps and ghettoized housing for several years, struggling to make ends meet. My grandmother, divorced and refusing to remarry so as not to lose her children, was largely alone and completely illiterate; but she valued education more than anything else. She knit loofahs so that her children wouldn’t have to work; so she could put them in school instead. Realizing that an education was her only way out of the misery of an unmoored life in Jordan, her daughter—my mother—excelled at school and worked hard to receive a scholarship to attend university. She got a BA and then an MA in Arabic from the biggest and best university in Jordan at the time—the University of Jordan.

When my mother started university, she was married and pregnant. She gave birth to me in the early months of the academic year, so she would leave me with teita, my grandmother, who raised me and taught me everything I know about home—both Palestine as a physical place as well as the feeling of belonging—and the endless unrequited hope for it. I certainly felt like I belonged with her, but it was very clear to me that teita felt like she belonged nowhere but in Jabal Al-Mukabber—the Jerusalem mount she left in 1967 when she crossed the river Jordan one way and never crossed it back the other.

I have never forgotten that new beginnings for refugees don’t always mean happy endings. My grandmother died in Jordan in her seventies after a life of never-belonging, wishing every day that, instead of in Jordan, she was at home with her family in Palestine.

***

By 2015, I had made what might perhaps be considered a series of false starts, delayed beginnings. In 1996, I came to the US as an international student to complete my graduate studies in twentieth-century American literature. After September 11, 2001, however, I changed my focus to Arab women writers and Arab and Islamic feminisms because I felt an immense responsibility to go back to a time before the beginning, a time before I was interested in American literature, to the roots of my identity. And then I just couldn’t stay in America. I felt disconnected and both hyper visible and unseen. When I returned to Jordan, I stayed for five years, after which I came back to the US because my academic freedom at the Jordanian university where I was teaching at the time was violated. My decision to return to my identity, to focus on Arab women and their desires, had gotten me in trouble at this very conservative institution. Because of an article I wrote on the literary uses of queer sexualities in political conflict, I was accused of being anti-Islamic, and a call for my resignation by the university’s administration was made. Even though the university rescinded both the accusation and the call for my resignation after I challenged them, I decided to leave Jordan where I felt unseen and painfully scrutinized.

In all these moves, especially the second one back to Jordan, I had really been trying to settle, to make roots; and in both cases, I felt forced to leave—and to leave behind whatever I had seeded. I will confess that the disruption itself, the act of moving, did not really bother me as much as I feel now, in retrospect, it should have. In fact, I believe it felt normal to me, part of the story I had heard about so many people around me, especially the Palestinians in Jordan and elsewhere in the diaspora. Until I came to the US the first time, I didn’t realize it was normal for people to stay where they are. I was shocked to meet people who were born in the same town that they now lived in as adults. Doesn’t everybody move—even if they don’t have to? Isn’t that what people do—move?

But by 2015, I did feel settled. Settled in Greensboro, one of North Carolina’s, and indeed the nation’s, refugee resettlement hubs. I had children, a mortgage, and as permanent a job as one can get (a tenured professorship). And I was asking students that question about what we do with the things we are reading when the world is burning. And in 2015, the world was burning. The Syrian refugee crisis was on full display for all of humanity to see. We witnessed thousands of men, women, and children (in strollers, on shoulders, on backs) walking on long highways stretching away from danger, seeking safety wherever they could find it. We watched—birdlike—thin-framed boats bobbing in the water, human heads closely arranged like the tips of matches in a box about to spark and set the whole thing on a quick, self-contained fire. Then we saw the aftermath—drowned bodies or the bright orange flame of vests strewn on the beaches of arrival—of new and terrifying beginnings.

Including that arrival. The beachgoers must have wondered at its impossibility—is it a child? Is he sleeping there, where, just there, on the edge of the water? Alan was two years old when the boat he was taking with his mother and brother to get to Greece overturned. His flame extinguished in the sea, carrying his body softly to the shores of Bodrum, Turkey. There he rested, fully dressed, until they took his body away and his picture across all of our screens.

I am a parent of two girls. When I saw Alan’s image, he looked like my youngest daughter who was his age at the time. The same skin color, the same slight frame, but very different luck—she the granddaughter of Palestinians who managed to make it out. I felt ashamed and angry and didn’t know what to do with my helplessness until a few days later when I read that Pope Francis had called on every parish in Europe to host a refugee family.

A profoundly simple and hopeful question occurred to me: “Could Guilford do that, too?”

***

A parish is a village or a small town. The people in that village or small town constitute a community, not only because of their proximity to each other, but also because they are all under the care of one church or one priest. In other words, a parish is a group of people bound to each other by place and ethos. To me, that sounded exactly like what a college or university is—a group of people who inhabit the same space and are connected to each other by similar values and goals. And if the pope was calling on small communities to do the work of welcome and hospitality, so that we can mitigate in any small way the enormity of the displacement and the terror of home-leaving and new arrivals, why can’t we expect the same of colleges and universities—the quintessential small communities that possess all the resources needed, human and material, to do that work and do it well?

When I suggested we respond to the pope’s call by carrying out his vision on campus, everyone I brought this to felt that it was the most natural thing in the world to do. Not only because we lived in a refugee resettlement hub where nearly every day refugees were arriving, looking for a softer landing and a stronger beginning, but also because of what colleges and universities actually are—places where our future generations, the newest contributors to our community, come to begin new lives and grow in safety.

The Arabic word for a college or university “campus” is “haram” (حرم), which translates to “sanctuary,” “refuge.”

And that’s what we called our hopeful effort—Every Campus A Refuge.

***

“It takes a village” (or a parish or a campus in this case) is an overused expression. That doesn’t make it any less true. When we began this work in 2015, we got everybody involved. After the college president gave her quick approval to use a campus house that was typically occupied by faculty but was sitting empty at the time, we started canvassing for interested faculty, staff, and students to join our initiative to welcome a newly arriving Syrian refugee family on our campus and provide them with support for several months. The response was heartwarming—from the first-year students who understood what it meant to be away from home, to the seniors who knew how important it was to have a support system when you embark on new beginnings, to the music and geology and language professors and the husband of the president and my colleagues in the English department who gave of their time, their expertise, and their belongings. They all saw Guilford as a place for, with, and in the community—a part of it rather than apart from it. And more importantly, the community also got involved. We founded new partnerships with the local resettlement agencies and refugee supporting organizations and deepened existing ones with our local faith communities, our local businesses, and our neighbors.

We worked for months getting everything ready for our first guest, who arrived in January 2016. Although we had started the initiative in response to the Syrian refugee crisis, we knew that whatever we built should be used by any newcomer from anywhere. Cheps was in Kenya, having escaped there from Uganda. He first lived in Kakuma, one of Kenya’s largest refugee camps, and then in Nairobi. When he arrived in the US in January 2016, he landed in Chicago. There was a rare blizzard in Greensboro and his final leg from Chicago to Greensboro was delayed. He arrived to a house covered in snow surrounded by bare woods. He wondered why they were all dead, the trees. Unused to deciduous plants, Cheps, like me and many others forced from home, learned that in America what might first look like death could be the pain of a new life. While Cheps was on our campus, we welcomed a Syrian family of three who had been living as refugees in Jordan—a mom, dad, and their teenage son. They stayed in another house on campus that was also available at the time.

That was in 2016. Here we are in 2024. We have hosted nearly ninety refugees on campus. They have come from all over the world—Burundi, Uganda, Rwanda, Syria, Iraq, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Venezuela, Colombia, Sudan, and Afghanistan—all looking for a fresh start.

And they find it, such as it is.

Take, for example, Ali, the Iraqi calligraphist who escaped two assassination attempts in Iraq. He arrived here with his wife and three boys a week before the “Muslim Ban” in 2017. On campus, he had access to art supplies, an art studio, and a gallery to exhibit his work. But while he does work by commission, it’s not enough to pay the bills. Ali’s limited English and his need for work means that he uses his delicate hands to cut chicken on the line at the Tyson Chicken Factory.

Another example is Blaise, the singer-songwriter from Burundi and the DRC. It took seventeen years for Blaise’s case to be processed before he resettled in Greensboro. On Guilford’s campus, he loved playing with the music students, borrowing a guitar, and performing at our events. This, too, is not enough to pay the bills, so Blaise, who speaks seven languages, takes interpretation work where and when he can find it. He is currently conducting oral history interviews for a project that aims to document the history of Every Campus A Refuge from the hosted refugees’ perspective.

Another refugee, Um Fihmi, is the matriarch in a large Syrian family. She arrived with only one of her children in 2016—a teenage boy who was young enough to have his asylum case attached to his parents’. Another son joined them a couple of years later. The rest of her many children, married and with their own kids, are still living in refugee camps in Jordan—without work and their children without an education. Um Fihmi has moved to Buffalo, New York, and every day, she wishes she is with her children in Jordan—or dreams that they were all back in Syria in a time before she experienced the pain of these new beginnings.

But it’s not only the newcomers who experience new lives. Perhaps what undergoes a bigger transformation is the community into which these newcomers are received. When Oklahoma State University and Washington State University took on this initiative, their respective cities of Stillwater and Pullman—small towns with no refugee resettlement history—changed fundamentally, irrevocably. Imagine what it must be like—all of a sudden, a town that has never had to accommodate newcomers, finds itself working hard to change in ways that make people feel welcomed and supported. It means new systems, new languages at the DMV, new service providers. It means that Stillwater and Pullman will never be the same again.

***

I want to tell the full story about that April 2024 arrival. We had actually gone to the airport five days prior, also to welcome an Afghan family—also a mom, dad, and their little girl. As is our practice, we went to the airport with welcome signs and balloons. Everything in the campus house had been put right: the wall paint touched up, the toothbrushes laid out, and everything in between neatly arranged. The memories of the many families who had lived in that house before them tucked in the corners. The students were ready to volunteer, the community members ready to support.

The first thing the family told us when they arrived at the airport was that they were not planning to stay—they were immediately moving to be with family members in another state. This was a false start; their new beginning had to be delayed a few days. We were honored to be part of their journey, and we hope that they felt loved and supported on our campus during the five days they stayed before they took a bus out of North Carolina.

A few days after they left, the other family arrived. We went to the airport with welcome signs and balloons. Everything in the campus house had been put right: the wall paint touched up, the toothbrushes laid out, and everything in between neatly arranged. The memories of the many families who had lived in that house before them, including the one that had just stayed with us for a mere five days, tucked in the corners.

They arrive in springtime. The trees are a gentle green, many blooming pink, and white, and purple. It feels like new life, not death.

If only all new beginnings were as easy to color with hope as the trees’ awakening after the winter’s long slumber.