Though my we have been back and forth to Lebanon many times since, this double journey remains etched in my memory as a symbol of my family’s displacement and my on-going sense of dislocation and rootlessness. Wherever we were, my siblings and I always felt out of place. In Canada, my brother and I looked different from the other children in our school. Similarly, my sister’s mental and physical disability further stressed how different we truly were. Despite our best efforts to adapt, with our brown skins and accents, we were often the targets of teasing, bullying and juvenile racism. But, our return to Lebanon left our situation no better. Though we now looked like our neighbours, we were still different. We spoke Arabic with a foreign accent, we dressed differently and, having spent seven years in Canada, our values were different too. It was then that I realised I would never be at home . Home was a place forever left behind. In January 2005, I began to probe our family history in order to better understand our place within the Lebanese diaspora. With my parents refusing to speak in depth of the experience, I got nowhere until in May, my father finally broke his silence. During one of our many interviews he handed me a log documenting our return ‘home’. Among certified citizen documents, photocopies of insurance records, police reports and airline receipts, I found a list my parents had made of all our possessions, along with what they felt would be necessary for each of us to survive back ‘home’ in Lebanon.
I was fixated by that list. Many items were purchased specifically for our journey back with the intent to soften the shock of our return. For instance, the bicycles that my brother and I had grown to love over three years in Canada, and a symbol of our freedom – were replaced with newer shinier mountain bikes that were better suited, we were told, for the Lebanese topography. I showed the list to my parents hoping it would let them open up about the double journey but it did not seem to help. I had to find another way of understanding this pivotal moment in our family history. I decided to interrogate the objects on the container list and to make them speak instead. Each of these objects was a link between two different cultures, a symbolic map of my feelings of rootlessness. As I began to transcribe the contents of the 40’ shipping container from conversations with my parents it struck me that they had deliberately packed the container in a way beyond simply making everything fit inside it. There were priorities for the packed contents based not just monetary value, but also sentimental value, placing them in special locations inside the container.
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