The Syrian refugee crisis has split up families and forced many to relocate in neighboring countries, Europe, and the USA. The severed ties with home put more burden on these families to reestablish the idea of home in their new setting. Belonging and assimilation into the new community are tasks that the families had to undertake for the first time. About 21,567 Syrian refugees were resettled in the US between 3/15/2011 to 11/8/2019. Of those, about 1100 were resettled in Connecticut from 2015 to 2019. This paper will discuss the reconstruction of “home” on the part of those refugees. It is the outcome of interviews that I conducted with Syrian refugee families in Connecticut in 2019. Despite the relatively small number of Syrian refugees relocated to Connecticut as well as the language barrier, most of the interviewed refugees succeeded in creating significant and intimate social connections, which lessened the feelings of alienation and estrangement. This paper will lay out the processes that those Syrian refugee families in Connecticut went through and applied in the new communities that enabled them to experience “home” again. It answers questions such as: what does home means to them? In what ways were they self-aware of their presence as refugees? How was their self-awareness a driving force for integration? What were the challenges that they overcame in that process? How did their displacement impact their sentiments about losing “home” and contribute to their assimilation in the new one? In addition, the paper will reflect on the social, religious and cultural practices that these families implemented in order to facilitate their integration. It argues that in addition to the cultural background of the refugees, it is their strong will for recreating “home” that incentivized them to connect, interact and build relationships with the community that successfully alleviated their feelings of estrangement.

What is home? While of universal significance, this question presents a multi-layered challenge for refugees. The violent dislodging of persons from their established moorings brings to light dynamics that are obscured in more settled circumstances. Syria is an especially illustrative case due to the staggering scope of displacement of millions of people, as well as the unparalleled variety of experiences that they are having in nearly every country across the globe. This paper explores their experiences of losing home, searching for home, finding home, or not finding home paper based on 450 original interviews conducted since 2012 with displaced Syrians now residing on five continents. It interprets these narratives as showing how home, like identity itself, is not something that we have, but something that we live. It is not an entity to be possessed, but a process, practice, and problem to be resolved continually throughout one’s life. Syrians’ narratives also point to the role of story-telling in the process of home-making. If home is where we can express ourselves, than home is crucially located in the ways that we give expression to our lives. Home is the story we tell about how we became the people we are and who we still seek to become. In this way, story-telling does more than simply provide a window into the meaning of home. It is itself a process of searching for home and can even be a way of finding it.

In the wake of the Syrian war, camps appeared both in the Middle East and in Europe to house refugees from Syria. Among those refugees were Palestinian Syrians, most of whom had been living in spaces recognized as “camps” in Syria. The camp is a space that continues to have close association to Palestinian refugee identity. Existing studies have shown that the Palestinian refugee camps in the Middle East need to be understood not just spatially and infrastructurally, but also politically, and emotionally. They also show that despite the constraints and hardships associated with them, Palestinian inhabitants have been able to turn their camps into homes and into spaces of political agency. This paper further examines the relationship between “camp” and “home” by focusing on the housing and homemaking experiences of Palestinian Syrians displaced to other parts of the Middle East and to Europe by the war in Syria. It draws on two complementary field sites, Turkey and Germany, and focuses on the 2015-2017 period, a period that coincides with Europe’s “Refugee Crisis” and the appearance of camps on the European continent in response to this “crisis.” In contrast to Germany, where most refugees from Syria had to live in initial reception centers, also known as “camps” upon arrival, Turkey has only hosted about 10% of refugees from Syria in camps, with the rest self-settled in urban areas. Drawing on fieldwork conducted with Palestinian Syrians who were self-settled in urban areas in Turkey and Palestinian Syrians who experienced encampment in Germany, I reflect how the experiences of secondary displacement of Palestinian refugees impact our understanding of encampment, home, and homemaking.

In the memoir that traces her experiences of incarceration in Iran and her arrival in the US, Shahla Talebi, articulates how this process oscillates between and through the experiences of both living and dying. While the U.S. becomes a refuge for her, she recognizes how the location is complicated by its continued racial injustice and inequities. Rather than the comfort of a sanctuary, Talebi narrates how it is precisely the discomfort she is made to feel in the U.S. that keep her memories of her incarceration accessible to the point of repetition. It is through the persistent unease of being othered both temporally and linguistically that pushes her to write. In this paper, I argue that Talebi disavows the US as an imagined home free of persecution and instead speaks to the layers and legacies of injustice. I draw from Talebi’s memoir as a point of entry to trace larger questions that echo throughout my engagement with memoirs written by refugees living in the US. Among these questions are: What does it mean to come from a particular history of state-sponsored violence and incarceration and also be situated within a specific historical and racialized context that perpetuates similar violence? Put differently, as structures of state-violence persist, what will this mean for the MENA diaspora within the US as we are positioned in a space of mass incarceration, white supremacy, police violence, and surveillance? In their own writing, how do refugees reconcile with this? Lastly, in what ways can we cultivate a diasporic community that is positioned in solidarity with other marginalized and racialized communities in working towards dismantling systems of violence and oppression?