Pop 89: Safely at home
By Madonna Hamel
madonnahamel@hotmail.com
The word refugee first appears in 1680 and is defined as “one who flees to a refuge or shelter or place of safety; one who in times of persecution or political disorder flees to another country for safety,” It comes from the Old French refuge “hiding place.” In English, the word was first applied to French Huguenots, also known as Protestants, who fled persecution in their home country. The word meant “one seeking asylum” until 1914 when it evolved to mean “one fleeing home.” It was first applied in this sense to civilians in Flanders heading west to escape fighting in World War I.
I am sitting here reading about natives of Ukraine running away from home. I think about how I have always known, my entire life, that my parents and my siblings would be happy to see me if I ran back home to nurse my wounds. My sisters would have a clean towel, laying nicely folded on the end of a warm bed with clean sheets. My brother would set me up in his library to sleep among his books. Maybe even a mason jar full of lilacs, if it were Spring, on a shelf next to my cot. I can still feel the ache of my shoulders from an all-night drive, my jaw clenched, or my eyes burning from tears. I remember lamps by the bed and extra blankets on the chair. “Would you like the window left open,” they would say to me, tucking me in, as I’d be drifting off safe in the arms of home. I’d wake to the scent of coffee in the morning.
In his touching narrative poem “Death of a Hired Man,” Robert Frost writes about a hired farm worker who appears for a while to help with the haying, makes just enough money for pocket money, and tobacco then disappears. The situation is a familiar one around here. Although the hired men here are not the aged fellow in Frost’s poem, but hale and hearty young fellows, often from Europe, who are saving to bring wives and children to Canada.
In the poem the wife of the farmer informs her husband, just returned from town, that Silas, last year’s hired man, has returned, looking for help. And we are not turning him away, she warns her husband. Yes, I know, he says: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, /They have to take you in.” To which the wife replies: “I should have called it/Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”
One year, I left my apartment in Quebec and moved to Toronto to be closer to my beau living in Michigan. I was working freelance, making documentaries for Inside the Music, a music show on Radio2. I would make just enough money then drive down to be with my man. At one point in those crazy days, I toured with him as a backup singer in his blues band. It was life without a net. I had, in effect, been living hand-to-mouth, moment by moment. If it weren’t for my sister opening up her home to me, letting me sleep in her loft, I would not have been able to maintain my lifestyle. She homed me, fed me, took me to concerts and made space for me whenever I landed back in TO.
And I had friends too, who cleared spaces for me, welcomed me in on a moment’s notice when they certainly didn’t have to. But, like the farmer’s wife says: home is not something you “deserve” or “earn”; it is our birth right.
For all the vaunting of the benefits of globalism, all the talk about being global citizens sharing the same planet, it’s baffling how, when it comes to giving refuge to our fellow one-world inhabitants, we seem to think we have the right to reject their pleas. And yet, these are not people who wanted to leave their homes; these are people running for their lives, with a few things thrown in a bag and no hope at all except what they’ve placed in the rest of humanity, in us.
Pogroms - violent mob attacks on Jewish neighbourhoods involving rape, injury, murder, looting and destruction - began in the Russian Empire in 1881. At that time, Jews fled Eastern Europe to many places, including Saskatchewan. The myth of the hardy pioneer forging a new life on the prairie denies the truth about displacement. Many of Canada’s new settlers were running for their lives; they were not striking out for new adventures on farms of their own as much as looking for safety. And in doing so, the refugees were displacing indigenous Canadians who were removed years earlier from their homes.
As I write this in the comfort of my home, 82.4 million people around the world have been forced to flee their homes. Among them are 26.4 million refugees, around 42 per cent of whom are under the age of 18. There are also millions of stateless people who have been denied a nationality and lack access to basic rights such as education, healthcare, employment and freedom of movement. (UN)
The truth is we are all easily displaced. It’s been suggested to me, more than once, that the building in which I live may be up for sale, which would mean I would not be able to live here any longer. That may be why I had a dream last night I was sleeping on a couch in a hotel lobby. Or perhaps I had looked at another of thousands of photographs of Ukrainian refugees as they stare in shock at their homes in ruins. I look out my window with the late afternoon light streaming in and try to imagine the room suddenly crashing in and the floor sprayed with glass. While we get caught up in political debates, children sit crying on curbs, traumatized for life, incapable of understanding how their world came to an end. We can offer something, anything, to remind them - and ourselves - that they belong. That this world is their home.