Living abroad means having time stand still in one place while it speeds up somewhere else. It isn’t the effect of jet lag or of different time zones. A capricious, subjective internal sense of time stirs up emotions and changes priorities. Who do we belong to? Where do we belong? Psychologists and sociologists who have considered the matter in depth would speak of it with more authority, but it would be terribly boring to take the intuitions that a new life can give us and sum them up in a scientific headline, wouldn’t it?<\/p>\n
I have found myself moving abroad three times, all told. I’m referring to the kind of move that makes you feel as though you were leaving a stretch of your life behind to open up a new one. And I don’t remember any negative feelings. There may have been the occasional knot in the stomach, uncertainties and language barriers, but not much more. In retrospect, I suppose it makes sense, because I was leaving of my own accord with a backpack full of hopes on my shoulders. The only thing I was really concerned about was knowing how to come back – knowing how to readjust to the same old place, the same old life, the same people, realizing that I was no longer the same person myself. Over time I understood that if I had been forced to leave my home, my country, and leave my family behind without its having been my choice, my feelings would have been entirely different. Of anger and impotence at the very least; probably of immense sadness as well.<\/p>\n
The news stories that have taught me the most profound lessons in life have been about the people we label as \u2018refugees and displaced persons.\u2019 Everybody’s talking about them now, but I came upon the issue about thirteen years ago, in the Near East, in the second and most decisive of the three experiences of rupture I mentioned at the beginning. Understanding the lamentation of an eighty-year-old man in the Dheisheh refugee camp in Bethlehem as he showed us the keys to what had been his house in Dayr Aban, an Arab village in present-day Israel, just twenty kilometres away, is not something you achieve in a second or a minute. Truly understanding him and being capable of conveying a claim that at first glance may seem only symbolic or even absurd takes time, lots of time: it requires certain experience, an effort of empathy stripped bare of do-goodism and saccharin sentimentality. \u2018Because deep down, it\u2019s harder to have your object of desire nearby than at a great distance, many kilometres and borders away,\u2019 I thought at the time, trying to explain it to myself.<\/p>\n
But in the end, the point that man wanted to make was that History had been unfair to him and that, despite his having managed to survive, it continued to be so. Because all that is left of his village, of his house, is a pile of ruins, stone walls that he may want to be able to rebuild some day, some day that will never come. In this respect, it was interesting to accompany the artist Dom\u00e8nec and Sagar Mal\u00e9 on the production of 48_Nakba<\/em>. There, a simple gaze and a poster encapsulate this entire context.<\/p>\n