This page displays the 60 stories, in alphabetical order by author, that accompany Matteo Pericoli’s drawings on exhibit.
What pushed me as a child to interrupt my childish occupations to approach one of the large windows of our house and sneak a peek out at the backyard, was the desire to find out if, in the winter, the snow had fallen and whitened the fields, if a bird had perched on one of the branches of our apple trees, if a guest would come to visit us, or simply if the weather was nice enough to go play outside.
In those days there weren’t many distractions, yet my brother and I loved to run around the fields, climb mountains, dive into a nearby river, and collect as many coloured pebbles as scrapes on our knees.
Then, one ordinary day, I stopped being a kid. The landscape out my window started to change, the visits from our guests grew more and more sporadic, and a gloomy air crept over our village. With each passing day, my mother became increasingly nervous. One day she looked me in the eyes and grabbing me firmly said, ‘They [the Taliban] are here. You have to leave.’ I immediately understood the seriousness of the situation and the only thing I asked her was when I could return. She answered my question with these simple laconic words, ‘When the clovers blossom.’
I remember that this conversation took place on a hot summer’s day and the sun was shining high in the sky. In that moment I hated that light and its heat. In that moment, I remember, I hated the sun. How could it continue to shine when inside me there was nothing but a storm?
The clovers blossomed in 2001 when the coalition forces entered Afghanistan. And when the Taliban’s obscurantist regime fell I was finally able to return home. Unfortunately, it didn’t last long because a few years later the war came back to devastate the country. Today, as I write these words, I look out a window that is very distant from the one where I used to wait with trepidation for the change of seasons, the arrival of a robin, or an unexpected guest. And yet today, like then, I find myself looking out the window on a hot summer’s day waiting for the clovers to blossom a second time.
Basir Ahang is an Italian-Hazara poet, journalist and actor. He played the lead role in Costanza Quatriglio’s film Sembra mio figlio, (Just Like My Son), screened at Locarno Film Festival in 2018. In 2015, he released his first book of poetry Sogni di tregua (Gilgamesh Editions). His poems have been translated into Italian, English, Chinese, and Spanish. He has also worked with the UNHCR.
From my window I see that sky so immense, so wide, so protective that it does not allow me, thank God, to forget my roots. The same sky that I looked at in my country when I played imagining silhouettes in the clouds I now perceive next to me, it has not abandoned me. And contemplating it, I am rescuing memories from a sea of my own experiences that I thought were forgotten. That sky that houses the sun, that embraces me every day and wakes me up, illuminating me like my mother did with her beautiful smile next to her morning cup of coffee with cardamom. Other times, stormy and cold, it shows me that sometimes changes are necessary; nature is wise and then everything stabilises for a better future. At the same time, what’s beyond my framed window and the wall that surrounds it and limits it in a certain way, gives me the pleasure of observing the coloured birds that, with their flight, draw their freedom in the air. Through it I look at the city, the people, nature, the moon, the stars, the horizon, my future, and my present, full of dreams that drive me to continue. Here is my window, mirror of my soul.
Ahmed Ahjam was born in Aleppo, Syria. He was detained in Pakistan in 2002, handed over to U.S. forces in Kandahar, Afghanistan and incarcerated in Guantanamo where he remained for twelve years without charge or trial. Under an accord between Uruguay and the U.S., he was transferred to Uruguay where he now runs an Arabic pastry shop in Montevideo’s farmers market.
At home I have this door window that works like magic binoculars. It allows me to see very far away, far beyond what I can actually see. That is, a courtyard and, beyond the courtyard, a building that was renovated years ago and immediately abandoned. My door window is able to carry me to places light years away, inside and outside of me. It is a kind of border. It separates my inner world – my individual one – from the outside one, which belongs to everybody and should be shared the moment we step outside our front door. A world in which we should be taking care of ourselves collectively, just like how I try, sometimes struggling, to take care every day of my individual world. This is what happens: as soon as I wake up I go into the kitchen, I prepare tea and sit down to sip it in front of my door window (two or three cups usually, I’m a big tea drinker). I like to drink it when it’s hot. The warmth of the cup between my hands and of the liquid in my stomach warms my inner world just like the rising morning sun will warm everything including a persimmon tree and an avocado that I keep on my balcony, including my old neighbours and my new ones, including the trams that pass by with people inside, and the people who instead walk or ride their bicycles, which is what I usually do. If I want to understand what the weather is like in the outside world, if it is raining or if there is pollen in the air, I look out my door window. And if I want to see what the weather is like inside of me I do the same thing. I slowly slide into a state of meditation. I transform myself into a cat.
Enaiatollah Akbari is an Afghan political refugee of the Hazara ethnic group. To save him from threats resulting from a supposed debt owed by his father, Enaiatollah’s mother accompanied him out of the country when he was just ten years old and left him in Quetta, Pakistan. He arrived in Italy alone at the age of fourteen, after having crossed Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and Greece. His story is told in the book In the Sea There Are Crocodiles. Today he lives in Turin, Italy where he obtained a degree in political science.
Outside my window serenity reigns under a turquoise sky framed by the Pyrenees. A rare moment of silence. I remember another sunny spring morning, under a similar sky, framed by the snow-capped Caucasus. That day started with a feeling of agitation. The night before was uneasy too. I spent it reflecting on my dawning new reality. The symbolic ‘Judas Kiss’ had already occurred and the ‘hunt’ had started. Fortunately, I escaped the huntsmen before they put red flags around my perimeter. My sack was quickly packed. I looked outside my window in search of suspicious vehicles. I said goodbye to my family. I was not sure if I would ever see them again. I teared up during the hurried hugs. Only when I crossed the border would it become clear that the past was gone. That my previous life with its meanings, goals, and connections, was gone. If my deal with the traffickers was successful and I managed to flee the country I would have to start my new life. If not, and the border was closed, the challenges would be much harsher. It was probably the springtime sun that helped fight back these fears. I searched for something positive in the situation. Like how convenient it was that Ingushetia was just beyond Russia and that it bordered Georgia; that I had previously restarted my life twenty years ago, after the war in Chechnya. All this made me confident that I could do it again. Everything worked out. I escaped. Amnesty International helped reunite my family. I got asylum, a sense of safety. Step by step bad memories faded away and the past seemed less real. Wounds heal. But we should remember that right now, somewhere in Chechnya, lives are still in danger. I wish that everything works out for them too. And the world outside my window, like a blank sheet of paper, calls me to write a new life.
Batyr Akhilgov is a lawyer from Ingushetia (Russia) and former president of the Bar Association of the Republic of Ingushetia. In April 2017, after an attempt to fabricate a criminal case against him by the Russian Federal Security Service, he fled Russia and received asylum in France.
I keep the window open every day waiting for the closed window inside of me to open. After repeated asylum trips, I left Syria in 2011. I carried my bag on my back, which helped me to believe that I would be back in seven days.
Seven days turned into seven years in Lebanon. And now that you are reading this, nine years have passed and it still has not ended.
Fate led me to close the window again after I was forcibly deported from Lebanon to Switzerland in 2018 and threatened to be sent back not to the first window in my country, but to the prisons of oppression.
Despite the biting cold in Switzerland, for eighteen months I have always kept the window open in the refugee camp where I live. Maybe this is the only window I can open willingly. Every day I sit, eat, dream, fear, study, talk to my family, and hear the stories of my country in front of this open window.
At this window, seven of my ‘friends’ are standing, eating, and talking together in a language they invented. We talk silently and feel some kinship. These friends have not limited their lives to this place. They go where they want. They are not, and never will be, refugees.
They are pigeons and birds that fly outside the window. Their voices remind me of my home in Damascus where many of them used to stand at my mother’s bedroom window. My mother, may God have mercy on her, used to tell me that they love me and told me to give thanks to God.
Come on, we are hungry, spread some breadcrumbs for breakfast; both females and males, competing among themselves and the little birds for survival. I talk to them for hours about everything that bothers me so that they can take my worries away with them and spread them over the rooftops and city streets.
Every day they knock on the window with their beaks to say, ‘Wake up, wake up, don’t be late, life goes on, and one day you will return to your mother’s first window.’
Ashraf Alhafny is a Syrian activist and founder of the Lamsat Ward charity providing psychological support to Syrian refugees. Fearing governmental reprisals for his civil activism and support of popular movements in the wake of the Syrian revolution, he first moved to Lebanon and then was forced to flee to Switzerland. He has been working in a Swiss reception center for asylum seekers ever since.
In my apartment in Ljubljana there is a wide and open view from my window. However, memory casts its shadow on the view since the buildings in the foreground remind me of the buildings in Damascus. The far mountain, despite its permanent whiteness, reminds me of Mount Qassioun, which surrounds the city of Damascus as a bracelet surrounds the wrist of a hand. This is both nostalgia and the cruelty of being a refugee.
I have made friends here. I like to leave my apartment and its window view to join my friends in the local falafel restaurant. It reminds me of home. I see the outside world, what’s outside that window. I am in Slovenia now, learning, settling, and enjoying the traditional potica dessert.
Abeer Al-Jundi was born in Damascus in 1975 and is a mother of four children. She worked in the field of pharmaceutical advertising for fifteen years. She lived in the city of Aleppo until the end of 2015 and then moved with her children to another city in Syria where it was safer. After two years apart, Abeer’s family was finally reunited in Slovenia at the end of 2017.
Two years ago I made the radical decision to apply for political asylum in Switzerland to ‘safeguard my mother’s life and my own’, leaving behind an entire life. Today, I am blessed to be able to sit in front of my living room window, read a book, and reflect on the past, the present and the future. I think about the price I’ve had to pay to be able to think that today, my life expectancy is higher than thirty-five years of age, which is how long most people in my country, and in South America, can expect to live.
It is never an easy task to start from scratch in a new country, with language barriers playing against you, with no money, and no friends. I have been denied the right to work, I have been denied access to education, healthcare, and free transit. I have been dragged down by wave after wave of emotions: from depression to solitude to the anguish of not knowing what will become of you.
This window in my small studio apartment is my source of fresh air; it rescues me from those moments of angst when I feel as if I am drawing my last breath. During the day it drenches not just my room, but my life itself, in sunlight. At nighttime it lets in a soft summer breeze that grazes my skin as the darkness of night envelopes my entire body like a blanket.
It reminds me how important it is to be free, free to make decisions and take opportunities regardless of conditions, gender, creed, political affiliation, sexual preference, or any other identity we have been designated.Today, after what feels to me like an eternity, I can finally say that I feel alive, safe, privileged, and grateful for this life because, as hard as it has been at times, it is worth living and enjoying.
Karla Avelar is a Salvadoran transgender rights activist. She is the Executive Director of Comcavis Trans. Before fleeing to Switzerland where she now lives, she received several death threats and survived assassination attempts.The first assassination attempt was in 1992, when she was just a teen. In 2017, she was a finalist for the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders.
This window is a freedom window for me. I sit on the couch and look at the trees. The wind gently touches the leaves, the leaves are so happy. As the cool breeze goes through them, they dance. What I see in front of me is a great moment of company. This is my life of freedom. I love the sound of the birds. They remind me of Kurdistan. I see myself in the forest there. In the city, I could not imagine seeing all this life through my window. This window is full of life and I love the trees, flowers, birds, bees, butterflies in the park in the background. It relaxes me.
I could not have had the experience of looking out the window from my room at the Mantra hotel where I was imprisoned by the Australian government for nine months. The windows were completely closed. We could not get fresh air nor sunshine! I complained a lot about how the government locked us up in hotel rooms and we were denied our rights as human beings. After three months they opened the windows ten centimetres.
Those windows remind me of two things: looking at people, friends and waving at them, and not being able to touch that freedom, get sunshine, fresh air or go for a walk!
The freedom window is a new life that I can see, feel, and talk to. I can have a glass of red wine, read poetry, and listen to the birds. This is my window now.
Farhad Bandesh is a Kurdish guitar maker, musician, and artist. In 2013, he fled Iran and sought asylum in Australia. He was detained on Manus Island for six years. In 2019, he was transferred to Australia (under the Medevac law) where he was detained for two additional years. Whilst in detention he recorded several songs and produced countless artworks. He now works at an Australian winery.
The tree outside my window reminds me of the big tamarind tree (koonjí in my language of Masalit) next to the house I grew up in. I loved sitting and playing in the tree’s shade, collecting its fruits to eat and give to the neighbours. I liked climbing it as well, and even fell a few times, but it never hurt much. When I would fall from other trees it would always hurt a little more.
The tree outside my window today varies with the seasons: in the spring and summer it is green, in the autumn its leaves begin to fall, and in the winter it is bare. The koonjí instead was always green and its leaves never seemed to fall. The koonjí reminds me of my mother; like her, it was there before I was born. When I look out the window today, my thoughts jump back to the koonjí. Why am I here? Why can’t I live there, by my tree? If I were still in my village, I would be looking out the window of a house I built myself, not this apartment I rent. All I want is to return to my country, to my land, and to my tree. The koonjí raised me, and I yearn to return to sit in its shade and eat its fruits.
When I look out the window, I remember my childhood and where I came from, but also of the long journey I endured and the journey that still lies ahead. Will I continue to remember my village from afar or will I fulfill my dream and return home, where I can build a window through which to look onto the koonjí? To achieve my dream, I must become a leader who looks far beyond the window and inspires others to fulfil their own goals. To do so, we must give each other small gifts of wide smiles. Smiles demand nothing in return, just as the koonjí tree gives us its fruits and its shade without expecting anything in return.
Originally from Darfur, Sudan, Usumain Baraka fled to Israel in 2008 at age fourteen. He became the first Darfuri refugee to study in an Israeli university in Hebrew. He founded and is the CEO of the non-profit African Students Organization in Israel (ASO) whose aim is to assist fellow African refugees to gain access to higher education in Israel. Usumain’s active involvement in protecting refugee rights led him to become the leader and representative of the Darfuri community in Israel.
I came to London in 1997 with a broken heart. I wanted to find myself and redeem my spaces, for I had forgotten how to inhabit them for years. It was difficult for me to start again. As I look through this window, pale memories of a past left behind struggle to claw their way out of the dungeon of my soul. They awaken to be given a fair trial and pay their sentence of oblivion once and for all. These memories have fed on my dreams, they still linger in my laughter and tears. I’ve walked this path carried by my spirituality with the certainty that someone was above all of this madness, watching. Through this faith I’ve dedicated my life to helping others; it was what I knew how to do and I liked it. Eventually, the search bore fruits, and I found Jesus in a different way. I had always known of Him, but this new encounter was more personal, as if he and I were convening to make sense of everything. Since I began my process with the Anglican Church, I have walked with steady feet knowing that the search has ended.
Twenty-four years since fleeing into exile, this window still evokes painful memories, but also the scent of fresh coastal air from my native city, Cartagena. I have made peace with my past and have grown to love my new home in London and everything that it has brought to my life. Here I reconnected with God and I met the people who became my family. Here, I began my married life with Carlos, and I connected with Diaspora Woman. Knowing them has allowed me to feel close to my country once again, as if a window into my past has reopened, making a reencounter with those whom I love tangible.
As I sip my coffee this cold morning, I let the London breeze sweep my sorrows, announcing the change of seasons on the surface of my skin. After all that I’ve lived, I can smile now knowing that I am safe.
Ana Victoria Bastidas is a Colombian bacteriologist who sought refuge in the U.K. after being kidnapped by armed traffickers in the Colombian jungle in the late 1990s. She helped establish the initiative and support network Truth, Memory and Reconciliation Commission of Colombian Women in the Diaspora (TMRC) in London. In 2017, she became the first female Colombian priest in the Anglican Church.
My window view, like many of the children still on the move from war, wasn’t like that of most Americans whose families know nothing of war. War for them is a news report, a magazine article, or a newspaper headline. For me war is up close and personal. War dwelled in my nostrils and filled my eyes with death. War was a weather forecast and you never knew upon whom the grey clouds would fall. War claimed my father and uncles. War claimed aunts and countless cousins and friends. War claimed total strangers who will forever remain unknown. War isn’t just about the casualties, it also usurps and disrupts lives. But the most abominable aspect of war is that it is manmade. War is the most vicious poison that spits from the hearts of men. It is easier to deal with acts of God, i.e., tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, and monsoons because natural phenomena aren’t vindictive and murderous. Yes, storms kill but not out of malice, hate, or political and economic greed.
As a refugee from Sudan – now South Sudan – whose parents fled the war-torn country in the 80s to where I was born, in a refugee camp in Ethiopia, my window and view were narrow, shortsighted, and only saw war, death, and displacement. Not until strangers in the United States of America opened their hearts did my window frame and view not only change, but my life was forever changed as well. The world is still in turmoil and children are still on the move from war and climate change. The metaphorical window that I now look through is one that sees hope, dreams, and the possibilities of a better tomorrow. Now I can advocate to widen a child’s perspectives and opportunities, to change both their window frame and view, until people in safer countries open up their hearts wide enough to welcome and fight for them – as I once was welcomed – and ultimately change their world view.
Born in Ethiopia, Nyamal Biel and her family, originally from South Sudan, sought refuge in the U.S. as a result of the civil war. As an advocate for displaced communities and a certified mediator, she co-founded in 2014, along with humans rights activist Kuoth Wiel, the NyaEden Foundation, an NGO that empowers women, children, and displaced people in refugee camps in war-torn African countries.
Just beyond the idyllic white picket fence and the manicured front yard of my Southern Californian home is a bonbast – the Persian word for cul-de-sac – emblematic of the impasse that sent my family into exile from our beloved Iran in my infancy. Just out of sight, but never out of mind, the bonbast evokes the existential dead end caused by an authoritarian regime that forced countless Iranians to leave their homeland following the 1979 revolution – with a one-way ticket. I find myself a world away from the bonbast of my mother’s Narmak childhood home, albeit under the same sky. Hers offered a respite from the hustle of the city where her soul belonged; mine provides refuge while my soul wanders. Yet our minds cannot be exiled and this metaphorical bonbast cannot prevail where freedom reigns. So, my bonbast is less the end of a road and more a u-turn into a better tomorrow. For what good is belonging without freedom? And what good is freedom if not used to ensure we all belong everywhere?
Nazanin Boniadi is an Iranian-British actress and human rights activist. Born in Tehran at the height of the Islamic Revolution her parents fled to London with her when she was less than a month old. She has appeared in numerous acclaimed films and TV series including Homeland and is an active member and spokesperson of Amnesty International focusing on the unjust conviction and treatment of Iranian youth, women, and prisoners of conscience. She lives in Los Angeles.
From my window in Paris the glorious dome of Les Invalides, flooded by dusk’s ochre light, emerges. The emotion triggered by this splendid view feels like the emotion I felt when, at the age of twenty, I was looking at the turquoise dome of the Chahar Bagh Madrasa mosque flooded by the same dusk ochre light in my native city of Esfahan, Iran. Between two very different yet gloriously beautiful cities, between now and then, and between the sameness of the aesthetic emotion and the total otherness of time and space, the confusing notion of exile.
‘Exile’ can mean being expulsed, fleeing persecution, or going forward. As an adolescent immersed in Hafiz poetry, ‘exile’ was not an alien notion to me. Our body and the material world in which we lived were the prison where our soul was in exile separated from eternal Love. Each definition of exile I have experienced constitutes a thread that, together with the others, weaves the fabric of my two domes’ tale.
The view of the turquoise dome had ignited in me a mystical quest for Love based on the disdain for worldly realities; a quest informed by the ignorance of those who surged from under its vaults onto history’s stage in 1979 to redefine our identity with violence and replace my God of Love with their God of Hate. Whereas the view of the dome of Les Invalides leads me to the heart of history: Who built it? Why did they build it? Who is resting under its vault?
The view connects me through unending questions to human beings as agents of history. It reconciles me with reality without illusion, but with hope. My journey from one dome to the other has been a quest for dignity, freedom, and intelligibility of the world. The Iran I left is not the Iran I long for. My Iran is the land of human rights and dignity, of hope, love, and poetry. I told you this story is all about the confusing notion of exile; mine was a blessing.
Ladan Boroumand is the co-founder (together with her sister Roya) of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for the Promotion of Human Rights and Democracy in Iran, an NGO that promotes human rights awareness through education and information dissemination. She lives between Paris and Washington D.C.
A quiet alley. Between places and in both places, a torn world, continuity.
The disruption and losses that came along with the revolution have had obvious and less obvious impacts on our lives. They have informed my decisions, my priorities, and relationships. I look at the alley from my kitchen where I eat, too often standing and in a rush, and also where I cook to bring people together hosting other refugees, those whose families were left behind, in order to create a sense of home for myself and others.
The view from my window represents in some ways my own life. Two half houses, neither here nor there, and in both places. In a life that has been overwhelmed with duty and a cause with its thousands of losses, tragedies, and personal sacrifices, there is little room for routine and normalcy. The alley gives me a sense of stability and the crucial continuity that I have been deprived of and crave. The view is a window to normalcy; a connection with people, neighbours and friends, familiar faces, and those who are just passing by. Adults, children, and of course cherished and always cheerful dogs who are grateful for being out, and happy to get attention. They all remind me of happy, though unreachable, past and undisrupted lives. They also give me a sense of belonging. But most importantly, they give me hope for the future and faith in mankind’s ability to recover from tragedies and disasters, slavery, and wars.
Roya Boroumand is the Executive Director and co-founder of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Foundation, which she founded with her sister Ladan after their father was murdered in Paris in 1991 on the orders of the Islamic Republic. Since 2001, she has focused on promoting human rights and democracy in Iran through truth telling, memory, and human rights education.
On the wings of the wind horse,
I send my prayers I smell the eucalyptus but in my memories
arises the scent of juniper I have left
and moved to the ocean’s beyond.
I am where I was, waiting.
I have never permanently left you
I shall come back.
On the wings of the wind horse,
I send my prayers. I hear the birds singing a different song
in a different place I have never permanently left.
I shall come back to sing with you once more.
On the wings of the wind horse, I send my prayers. I see my prayer flags dancing to the breeze they catch now.
I have never permanently left you
I shall come back to hoist you once more on your waist.
On the wings of the wind horse, I send my prayers. I am left staring into the blue skies,
drifting clouds with lingering taste of momos
cooked by my mother I am where I was, waiting.
I have never permanently left you
I shall come back.
Artist, composer, activist and cultural ambassador from Tibet, Tenzin Choegyal was forced into exile in India as his family was facing repression under the Chinese occupation of Tibet in early 1970s. He moved to Australia in 1997 and became an internationally recognised musician, incorporating traditional Tibetan sounds whilst also touching on the contemporary challenges of the Tibetan people. In 2013, he founded the Himalayan Film Festival in Brisbane.
In 1968 I was a very American in Paris studying French as part of a church program that was to send me to Africa. Instead, out of opposition to the Vietnam War, I renounced my religious deferment, returned my draft card, and received refugee status from the French government. That simple act of conscience, committed by tens of thousands of others, changed my life forever. The windows it opened on to the world, transformed it.
My most immediate window was in the mansard roof of the small maid’s room I occupied. It revealed an ancient paved street and a small patisserie that sold me too many of the most delicious eclairs on earth. The view was of a seemingly charming world. What I could not see, but increasingly sensed, was a deep discontent that in May would fill Parisian streets with an eruption of students and workers demanding a different world. 1968 was a year of war, assassinations, and repression, but what I saw in those months from every window was an explosion of hope, poetry, endless dialogue, and a vision of a radically better world.
That vision led me back to the United States to organise against the war from within the army and to decades of work for human rights. Today, the view from my window in the Hudson Valley reveals the charm of trees and flowers, birds, squirrels, and deer. Around it is the same rapacious economic system that filled the streets of Paris in 1968 and now, via climate change, threatens the very existence of the beauty I wake up to every morning. There is no refugee. There is only once again the hope of people seeking change. I am looking out a very different window, but I am still seeing Paris in 1968.
Larry Cox has been working for peace, justice, and human rights around the world for more than four decades. He was a resister to the Vietnam War and was granted refugee status as such in France in 1968. He has held senior roles at Amnesty International including Deputy Secretary General of the International Secretariat and Executive Director of AIUSA. He lives in Tivoli, New York.
The mountains are missing.
It is the recurring grief for what is not there, of what is faraway and gone, that invades me as I look from the window of my study, at the home my wife Angélica and I have created for ourselves here in Durham, North Carolina.
For many years the Andes of Chile anchored my life, a massive cordillera that loomed protectively over me in Santiago, afforded a mooring for an existence riddled with ancestral and personal losses, grandparents fleeing Europe, parents fleeing the Argentina where I was born and then being uprooted from the States, victims of McCarthyism. No wonder that I invested those gigantic elevations of stone and snow with a solidity and lastingness that I desperately desired, a metaphor for the land I had adopted as the bedrock of my identity, the people whose search for justice and freedom I had made my own.
The coup of 1973 and the next seventeen years of exile deprived me of that center, and yet, when we finally managed to return to Chile, we did not stay there, choosing, instead, an expatriation that led me to this room in Durham where I have learned that this cannot merely be a story of absence. Look at that tree, the willow that blesses my view. Planted before I was born, it will remain after I have ceased to breathe. Under its permanence we have hosted our growing family, the compass of our friends, the song of many birds. It has presided over my recalcitrant struggle for a better world that the Andes once harboured, that tree’s compassionate shade and roots and soil have accompanied every word of refuge that I write. Reminding me that it does not matter if I am persistently elsewhere on an Earth that, after all, still promises to someday be a home for us all.
Ariel Dorfman is an Argentine-Chilean-American novelist, playwright, essayist, academic, and human rights activist. He has been a professor of literature and Latin American Studies at Duke University since 1985. He is an exile from the Pinochet regime in Chile and the child of holocaust refugees. He has written several plays about repression and dictatorship including Death and the Maiden.
My gaze falls involuntarily on the window in front of my room. An apartment similar to mine with a few lights and thin net curtains. A young woman holding her baby and doing the daily chores at home. A little later, a young man comes and takes the baby from her and gently kisses her cheek. Life is going on. It is heartwarming to see such a beautiful scene on a cold rainy night. For more than ten months I have been imprisoned in my own home. Covid-related restrictions do not allow any social interactions. Very rarely I go out. Only once a week I go to the nearest supermarket for grocery shopping. The rest of the time I make myself busy with books, TV, and the Internet. Yes, it is lonely, but seeing a young baby adored by affectionate parents generates a sense of hope in my heart. As I watched that pleasant scene, I wondered about my old home where I brought up my own children. At that moment I had an even deeper longing for my country. I wished I was at home, I wished the policies of my government had not forced me to emigrate.
Shirin Ebadi is an Iranian political activist, lawyer, a former judge, and human rights activist, and founder of Defenders of Human Rights Center in Iran. On 10 October 2003, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her significant and pioneering efforts for democracy and human rights, especially those of women, children, and refugees.
When I look out of my window in Norway I see nature in all its glory. I now live in an idyllic place, not far from the city centre, close to the sea, forests, lakes, and small rivers. I can often see a deer or two in addition to magpies and various types of tits that live in nearby trees.
Ever since I moved to Norway, I have always wanted to live in this part of the country because it reminded me of my native city Istanbul, even though it is hard to pinpoint why.
In this Northern climate, whenever the cold gets to me and I feel the heaviness of darkness, I look out my window and remember the window of my cell in the maximum-security prison in Istanbul and think of all the people I met there who still languish there.
During my over three months of detention, the only thing I could see from my cell window was the high concrete wall surrounding the prison yard. Prisoners there are not even allowed to have an uninterrupted view of the sky – the only evidence of nature available. The top of the wall was covered with chicken wire, and prisoners could count themselves lucky if they were to see birds flying by from time to time.
When I look at the trees and hear the sound of the birds, I also remember a scene from the Bakırköy Women’s Prison when the prisoners gathered and almost hugged the leaves that were carried into the yard by the wind-driven torrential rain. These leaves were precious mementos of life and nature. Here I can see and appreciate nature and life in full once again, replenishing my internal reserves for the human rights struggles to come.
İdil Eser is a Turkish human rights activist and former director of Amnesty International Turkey. On 5 July 2017 she was arrested along with nine other human rights activists attending an Amnesty workshop on digital security and information management and was detained for over three months. On 3 July2020, she was sentenced to two years in prison in Istanbul for her human rights work. She fled to Norway and was granted asylum in 2020.
I was born into a home with a view of a park. It had the most lush trees, seesaws, and a slide. I used to play there with friends from my neighbourhood in the centre of Sarajevo nearly every day.
But then the war came. The glass on our windows was broken and replaced with UNHCR reinforced plastic tarpaulin through which I could hardly catch a view of the park. In any case, getting close to the window was always potential exposure to stray bullets and shrapnel, so I stayed back. One day, my friends went to the park to play. A shell fell straight into it killing some and wounding the others. I narrowly missed it.
Then the lush trees were cut for firewood. The birds had nowhere to land. There was silence. The window was now looking onto a carcass of a park, and the war went on.
I was fortunate enough to survive and eventually escape that war. I moved to Dublin and into a new apartment that looked onto some newly planted trees. Twenty-four years later, the trees are full and lush again. I can hear the birds. And now I have my own daughter, who I look forward to taking to play in this beautiful park. It has seesaws and slides.
I wish for her a childhood never tainted by the sound of gun fire or the loss of those she loves and plays with. I wish for her views of beautiful trees and sounds of birdsong. I wish this for every child. May no child ever forcibly leave or lose the beautiful view out their own window.
Zlata Filipović is a Bosnian writer and the author of Zlata’s Diary, which she wrote as a child between 1991 and 1993 about the horrors of the siege of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War through which she lived. She and her family escaped to Paris and from there to Dublin where she now lives working as a documentary film maker.
I see freedom and captivity at the same time. Freedom because I know I am safe now. I can see everyone safe in front of me. A landscape of people who are safe in front of me. I am totally safe to go out. But I also feel I am captive because I became exiled against my will. A strange feeling between feeling lucky to be here and wanting to go home. It’s a mix between the two. Emotionally, sometimes one wins, sometimes the other. Sometimes I feel so lucky to be here, standing in front of my window in Paris, standing like a human being, with all my rights. I even recently became French, after being stateless all my life as a Palestinian.
My last view of Damascus wasn’t good. It was during detention and it felt as if everything had changed. The security forces at the door can get you any time. They detained me for more than a year and a half.
Before that my view of Damascus was that the world was mine, but I was mistaken. I was living inside my bubble. I didn’t know how many people were in jail. I wasn’t thinking about them. But when I was imprisoned, I realised that we all were living in a big prison, just so one person could stay in power.
I do miss my street in Damascus. It was very busy, inside a market place. Compared to that, living in Paris is very, very quiet. I miss the noise in my old neighbourhood. But when I was complaining about this to a friend in Damascus, she told me that everything had changed now. So even if I go back, I won’t like it. She told me it was better to forget about it. And even though I know it’s gone, even if I never go back, I will keep the good memory alive. To keep some warmth inside me, to keep joy inside me. My heart hasn’t fully moved here yet. It is still connected.
Born in Damascus of Palestinian descent, Mohammad Ghannam is a political refugee in Paris working with Médecins Sans Frontières as an audiovisual officer since 2015. He fled after being jailed for over a year by the Syrian regime for delivering aid in besieged areas and for his journalistic activities. He has previously worked for the New York Times, National Public Radio, and the UNHCR.
My window faces a quiet and empty street in Andalucía, the city that opened its doors to me. From this window I remember the view that I left behind, facing a quiet street where carefree children played, and which also saw me grow into an adult. I always thought that I would grow up to see a free country, but that hasn’t been the case. Today I am here, with that dream of freedom still tucked away among the scarce belongings that I packed as I fled into exile.
The books that I read as a child always seemed so epic to me, with heroic characters that embarked on great journeys to reach a promised land. I would have never imagined that one day I would embark on my very own odyssey. Now I see that those journeys were not extraordinary at all, they told the stories of so many of us. The authors had found a way to embody the feelings of angst, despair, and hope that mark every refugee’s path.
What they didn’t write about is the aftermath, the routine that takes form after the dust has settled. This routine splits you in half and forces you to live two parallel lives. The first exists beyond your window and is waiting for you to step outside. The other is the life you left behind and the landscape you once took for granted. The daily struggle of holding on to the life that was taken away from you while trying to dig roots in new soil is exhausting.
We try to weave the dreams we packed with threads that seem foreign. We try to adjust our sight to this new landscape, knowing that – at least for some time – we will feel immensely misplaced.
Therein lies the challenge: to find a balance between adapting and waking to your new reality while still looking back for a sense of belonging. I hope that someday I will open this window and feel that this view also belongs to me.
Jimmy Javier Gómez Rivera is a social anthropologist and activist within the Articulación de Movimientos Sociales Nicaragua (a coalition of Nicaraguan social movements). His active involvement in social, educational, and intercultural programs as well as his support of the 2018 civil protests made him subject to persecution by the Nicaraguan government. As a result, he and his family were forced to flee and seek exile in Andalucía, Spain.
Lately, when I look outside this window, I no longer see frontiers. I no longer recognise this place, which, although beloved, has also become foreign to me. The more I contemplate it, the more I am invaded by the certainty that, in the words of the great Carlos Castañeda, ‘No one returns to the Ixtlán from which they left’.
The wall facing my window becomes a blank canvas upon which I paint my daydreams. I access memories of past wanderings – sometimes escaping from the prison of self, and other times from some uncertain yet all-pervading threat.
My gaze falls upon distant horizons, and I go back to a hazy past. I travel to the mountains that once served to shelter me. I maraud their crevices, lean over cliffs, and retrace the path that brought me to where I am today. Sometimes I dwell on that unexpected fork in the road that coaxed me out of my quiet childhood town and led me to the big city. Here, I would glimpse the vastness of this world and the complexity of our social evolution – right at that moment when juvenile momentum pushed me over the brink of revolution.
In one of those time-lapses that life sometimes offers, I found myself far from home. It’s a hazy memory, something that was once so present but has now faded into the background. I dive into this strange nostalgia, and in this way feel closer to those adventurous times.
Sometimes life was hard, merciless – you learn from the punches, from the sheer terror of being reached by that which you fear most. That angst that lies deep inside you, taunting you, and which the world just outside my window simply mirrors back – a projected illusion of some sort. You can also call it an everlasting dread that keeps humming in the background. But today, the sound of the wind as I lean outside has muffled the dread and filled my landscape with fresh air.
Tito Hasbun is a Salvadorian self-proclaimed dilettante. An ex-cameraman for German television, he covered the civil war in El Salvador and fled to Canada in 1981 after being persecuted, imprisoned, and tortured by military forces. He returned to El Salvador after decades in exile and now works as a cultural promotor for the Art Center for Peace in Suchitoto.
Outside my window in Amsterdam I see the Paulownia tomentosa tree I planted in memory of my grandmother Pauline. The tree originally came from China to Europe in the thirteenth century and took root in Holland.
My grandmother was ‘transplanted’ to Suriname at eighteen, not voluntarily, but as an economic migrant. After the abolition of slavery in Suriname, Chinese workers were ‘recruited’ from the southern part of China to work on plantations. Granma was ‘married off’ and settled in St. Laurent, at the time a French penal colony. She opened a bakery just outside the prison walls (Papillion might have been one of her clients).
I came to the Netherlands from Suriname with my infant daughter Valerie in 1983, not voluntarily, but as a refugee. In 1980 a coup d’état ended our idyllic life there. My husband Kenneth, a lawyer and dean of the Bar Association, resisted the military regime in a peaceful manner by writing letters. With like-minded lawyers, journalists, union leaders, and religious organisations they founded the Association for Democracy.
On 8 December 1982 the military rounded up fifteen men, including my husband. They were taken to Fort Zeelandia, tortured, and summarily executed.
I remember our lovely house and garden in Suriname with a flamboyant palm tree where I played with Valérie in the afternoons amidst the faja lobis and orchids.
When we arrived in the Netherlands it was winter, grey, and damp and our new garden was bare.
There was, however, a magnificent old chestnut tree, which I could see from my window. Even without leaves it radiated strength and reminded me of the tree in my Suriname garden. I was very sad, but the tree’s vigour and the large blossoms that arrived in spring gave me hope.
After the chestnut tree died, I planted my ‘grandmother’ in the garden. She inspires hope that home is where you take root.
Lilian Gonçalves-Ho Kang You is a Suriname-Dutch lawyer and jurist. Following the 1980 coup in Suriname, she became an outspoken critic of the government. Her husband’s assassination during the ‘December Murders’ in 1982 forced her to flee to Amsterdam. She became a member of the Dutch Council of State and is the former Chair of both the Dutch Section of Amnesty International and its International Board.
‘What a wide window and what a beautiful view’, I thought of my new window and its view, while holding my traditional Uyghur tea and feeling the warm steam on my face. ‘Is he looking out from a window like me? What could be the view he is seeing?’ I wondered for a second, then shook my head and answered my own question. No, nothing, he cannot.
Of course, the Chinese government would not treat him nice enough to allow a window in his prison cell. Of course, the only view he is seeing every day is a grey wall. A view he has been seeing for the past seven years, a wall that he has been condemned to see for the rest of his life. Or maybe they were ‘merciful’ enough to put a mini TV in his prison room and play communist propaganda videos 24/7?
Yes of course, that’s what they would do to my father. A life sentence, a grey wall, and a mini TV.
For what crime though? They say it’s because he is a separatist. They say, it’s because he is an extremist. They say, it’s because he is someone who advocates violence. This is what the Chinese government says about him.
They say that about a man who dedicated his life to helping, to understanding, to listening to people who are in need, and who are in pain. They say that about a man who only used one sort of weapon his entire life: a pen. They say that about a man who tried so hard to make peaceful co-existence come true in a country, even though he knew all too well that his efforts and actions would lead to prison.
My father Ilham Tohti. An honorable man. The rock of our family. The hope for the Uyghur community.
Jewher Ilham is the daughter of imprisoned Uyghur scholar Ilham Tohti, an internationally noted moderate voice who dedicated himself to bridging the gap between the Uyghur people and the Han Chinese. Jewher arrived in the United States in 2013, following the detention of her father at Beijing airport as both were preparing to travel to Indiana University for Professor Tohti’s fellowship.
Through my window I look across at two brightly coloured cakes decorated with cherubs of icing and whipped cream. The façade has just been painted and every bit of the cornice and balustrade has been made safe against pigeons and swallows. It really wouldn’t do to have them breaking their journey here or – heaven forbid – settling here for good. All the houses in my street have the same sugary coating. And sometimes the whole city seems sickly sweet to me; as if Prague were the old-fashioned sweet shop of European capitals, the one that the old ladies go to for their cake and eggnog.
I’m sure my parents never dreamed that one day I would live in Prague. It didn’t occur to me either, although I spent my childhood longing for something to happen. Something that would send my life spinning off in a different direction or turn everything upside down as if on a big wheel. Then my parents decided to leave Kiev. In the hope of being further from Chernobyl and closer to a better life, they moved to a little Czech town, and I got what I had been waiting for. At the time I didn’t realise that this meant the end of my childhood and that the gap between childhood and adulthood would be filled by a very long and very dark period, which was only to end once I got onto my own two feet.
All the windows in my flat face the street. But the shared balcony at the back offers a different view: from there I look over a large courtyard, broken up by lots of little walls, with mature trees, roosting pigeons, living their own courtyard life. I see a mosaic of paving stones between which grass has been growing undisturbed for decades. And among all this I spot the little courtyard where my beloved granny lived, not far from Kiev’s Central Botanical Garden. And when I raise my eyes, I see a mass of green on the horizon, with the blocks of flats of the estate across the river emerging from it.
It was in such a block of flats that I grew up, except that they were much higher. And the Dnieper, much wider than the Vltava, spilled out into endless meanders. The houses stood on sand, with arms of the river stretching round them, and their six-sided forms were defined by the logic of bees. This is a game I play: when I look through my window to the street, I’m in Prague; when I look from the balcony to the estate beyond the Vltava, I see the house where I was born. Sometimes I even go to watch the sun setting over it. And I remember lines I wrote in a poem about Odysseus: My house even before my birth looked like a hive / all was imprinted on me as on wax / I thought I would live your lives / but I just became myself.
Marie Iljasenko is a poet who defies categorisation. She was born in Kiev into a family with both Ukrainian and Polish roots. She fled Ukraine to live in the Czech Republic when she was nine.
But it is the acacia I love most, as it reminds me of the old locust tree that grew behind my one-room shack in Beijing. Last year, I built myself a wooden shed beneath the tree, just like that old shack in Beijing. At last I felt like a leaf returning to its roots.
The view from my window gives me the sense of peace that I need in order to write, and to search for words that might help others understand misfortune and find solace.
Ma Jian was born in 1953 in China. He worked as a painter of propaganda boards and as a photojournalist. The Chinese government eventually banned his works. He left Beijing for Hong Kong in 1987 as a dissident, but continued to travel to China. His support of the pro-democratic movement in Tiananmen Square (1989) forced him to flee to Germany and then to London, where he now lives.
Sometimes the window talks to you, but you cannot talk back to it. I mean it can talk to you about the people whom you meet every day in the streets of the country that is now your new home. But how can you talk about how much you miss your homeland to people who don’t know where Iran is or what it looks like?
This itself is a source of pain. But you cannot talk about such pain to people who think that it is a privilege for you to have the amazing opportunity to live in the United States.
I love living in Washington D.C., I love its people. I cannot deny that. But it has not been an amazing opportunity for me to live so far away from my homeland. I love Washington D.C., but not in the same way that I love my Tehran.
The window here talks to me about city life. And I love to live a ‘city life’ because I used to live one in Tehran. But the city life I experienced in Tehran was totally different where everyone was speaking in my mother tongue.
And it is not the only thing I miss about my country.
I miss every single memory and connection I made with the places, with my friends, and even with the strangers. I miss the whole country except for the government which forced me to flee my beloved homeland and become an involuntary exile.
What I love about Washington D.C. is that the people here consider me a local citizen as they themselves are, though I still cannot consider myself anything other than an exile. This is the way I miss my country; it is not the fault of the Washingtonians.
Sepideh Jodeyri is an Iranian poet, literary critic, translator, and journalist. She was nominated for the Jovellanos International Poetry Prize and won the 2015 Best Poem in the World for her poem ‘Chãk’. Her translation of Blue is the Warmest Colour into Persian resulted in the banning of her work in Iran and forced her and her family to flee.
I look outside my window, I do not see only stars. I see the future, for I know that stars are nothing but a reflection from the past. I remember death, yet not any death. I remember the demise of the stars; they leave behind the most alluring view you could ever see. I imagine myself leaving an imprint the way the stars do, and I see myself shine like them. I see my own reflection from the past and the evolution of the clouds that have passed throughout my life and how the rain that they held made all the dead flowers on my land blossom.
I look outside my window, I do not see an ocean of possibilities, for oceans have limits, but I see a universe full of possibilities. Suddenly, I remember each voice telling me, ‘You cannot do it. You are such a dreamer’. Then I also remember those who said, ‘Humans cannot fly as birds do, humans cannot dive in the oceans the way fish do, and humans cannot go to space for Earth is our only home’. I then laugh at them secretly for I know that every single day of my life I fly like a bird when I see a child smiling, I dive in the oceans whenever I see lovers holding hands, and I go to space every single night when I hear the laughter of the people I love.
Yes, I might sound like a dreamer, but that is how I see life. In addition, I believe that I can make a change in this life. Not because I am gifted; on the contrary, I do not believe in gifts. However, my past has polished me in a way that I could never have imagined. And not only that, every day and every minute refines me and shows me a new world of possibilities. A hope for a better world where there are no borders, just the way the Earth appears from outer space: a blue and green planet in the middle of darkness.
Suzanne Kanj is a Kurdish-Syrian refugee. In 2012, at age seventeen, she fled Syria with her mother and siblings arriving illegally in Turkey. She applied to the ICMC through the United Nations and, after almost three years of waiting, moved with her family to the United States. She currently works in a bakery in Brooklyn and as a pharmacist’s technician. She plans to apply to medical school after completing her biology studies.
Here I am, five years after leaving Syria, sitting with pen and paper trying to write some ideas down, planning what I need to do next. My view has changed. My country has changed. My whole life has changed, but somehow, I’m still the same person.
Career-wise, I need to learn about licensing, digital rights, maybe I should brush up on my Japanese? I’m sure that all of this will help advance my career, and for sure guarantee more travel.
Next? Family-wise, I want to get married, someone special and different, who has to accept my mom living with us since I’m an only child and I can’t leave my elderly mother with a chronic heart condition to live on her own. Kids? Yes, maybe two max!
A lot has changed since I left my family home. Got married? Check! Advanced in my career? Smaller check. The war? Running away (alone)? Refugee? Learning French? Administrative process? Huge unchecked box! Reunited with mother and wife in France? Yes, a small but substantial victory. Changing careers to become a chef in the capital of gastronomy. Meeting the President in the Élysée! Here we move forward again. Divorce from wife, sadness, but a big relief for everyone. Mom gets older and weaker. Oh my god, she dies, the only person I’ve lived with my whole life.
But I’m not single anymore; I’ve met an amazing, loving, caring woman. We are living together, seeing the beautiful Parisian rooftops from this window. I am now who I want to be; I’m now a chef planning my own business.
It’s a new reality, a reality I never ever imagined even in my wildest dreams.
Maybe the plans I made looking out my window in Damascus have changed, but the whole scheme is the same. Happy moments, fears, victories, and disappointments. A human life story.
Haitham Karajay is a Syrian refugee in Paris since 2015. In France, he discovered his passion for cooking, learning and working his way up to becoming an independent chef. Today, he is finalising his new project ‘Syrian Food Experience’, a unique and sustainable take on time-tested Syrian recipes. Haitham has been interviewed by many media outlets including France 24, and NHK, and was most notably featured with a full spread in Le Parisien Week-End.
As I look outside my window, so far from my homeland, I see a view that has been familiar to me even before I moved here as a refugee. In Afghanistan, the very act of looking out my window both reinforced my sense of being imprisoned and, by allowing the light to enter my room, brought hope and a promise of freedom. Life in Afghanistan meant being encaged and framed by an extreme patriarchal society. As a woman, religion wanted to relegate me to the kitchen and confine my role to wife and mother.
Being able to express myself through my art gave me the strength to break free and move beyond the narrow window-frame afforded to women in order to control their bodies and minds: a calculated and strategic way of imprisoning them. Through art I was able to reflect upon and criticise the culture and society in which I was raised and lived. The more I represented female identity through my art, the more I was pushing against political injustice in my country. And thus the more I felt free, free to imagine a view exactly like the one I now have.
As a contemporary Afghan woman artist, the mediums I use make my expression correspond and connect to a much wider ‘window’ – looking at issues within Afghan culture and society. I have never limited myself to a specific place; the view I see looks out at the whole world through a window framed by a critique of patriarchal Afghan perspectives.
Perhaps because this view has always been mine, the simple act of looking out still brings back a sense of being trapped, a touch of nostalgia but also of light and hope. Kabul is not ‘here’ anymore. But still I firmly belong to that piece of the earth called Afghanistan.
Born in Afghanistan in 1989, artist Kubra Khademi was forced to flee to Paris as a result of her nude drawings of women and her 2015 live performance, L’Armure, denouncing the Afghan patriarchal society. Member of the Atelier des Artistes en Exil, she received the Panthéon’s Bourse MFA in 2016 and the prestigious Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Looking out my window, I see the long and painful journey I have faced since my exile. An exile imposed on me by my country’s dictatorship. I had to leave everything behind. My family, my home, my life. Without knowing when I would see them again, and if I was endangering them by fleeing. For six years, I doubted if my choice to leave was really worthwhile.
I arrived in France in 1983 with no expectations whatsoever. I knew that it was up to me to take action and rebuild my life from the ground up. I found the artistic and personal freedom that I had so desperately longed for. I started a new life. My adult life.
As a child, I would look out the window and see my father standing in front of me, talking. He would always have all the answers to my questions. He would share his values, thoughts, and advice. Today, looking through my new window, I can still see him standing there as I listen to him. And I have understood that what is outside my window is a reflection; a window turned towards the future, towards a world of social justice and equality. This window still travels with me, following me everywhere I go. My window is no longer one of anxiety or sadness. Instead, I see a window of hope and dialogue. A window that shows me the resilience and strength of others.
My window is also a constant reminder that the freedom that I cherish so profoundly needs to be looked after daily. I am lucky to have had a father who told me ‘THINK’. It helped me rebuild my life. I wish everyone had my window. It is that window of reflection that opens up to the future and better world.
Angélique Kidjo is a world-renowned Beninese singer-songwriter, actress, and human rights activist of Nigerian descent who is noted for her diverse musical influences and creative music videos. In 2007, Time magazine called her ‘Africa’s premier diva’. She fled Benin in 1983 and now lives in Paris. She is the recipient of numerous awards including Amnesty’s Ambassador of Conscience Award in 2016.
The view from my window is rather gloomy. It’s restricted. It stifles me, upsets me. Nothing in it reminds me that I’m in one of the most desirable and free cities of the world. Porridge coloured walls and windows with bars across the way. Not a single blade of grass, or a bird. Only bare concrete. I see nothing but three walls, and neighbouring roofs and windows.
Psychologically, this is exactly how I feel after five years in exile: locked up, stuck, confined. I exist and I don’t. It’s very strange because I do all I can to adapt to a new life, but my window today totally contradicts the other: a window on to Russia and the city of Ozersk, where I was born and lived for forty-five years. In my previous life, from the window to one side of my world there were lakes, and to the other, forests and mountains. It was a closed city, but my soul was free. I made a decision to be free in a country that is not, to protect the rights of innocent people, harmed by radiation pollution and state secrets.
I escaped state prosecution and prison; I am safe and grateful. But I’m trapped in the misery of losing everything. My people, my land, what I was doing. I feel powerless. The landscape outside my window has changed. No vast expanse, only walls. I’ve been trying desperately to clamber out of this well for five years, to find an exit – I have to find a way out! Sometimes it seems that my sense of values was lost along with the view from my former window. I’m captive in a free country.
Only the sky. The sky in my window gives me hope! Where I lived in my past life and now in my present one. ‘Look at the sky: it’s the same always and everywhere, even from a different window,’ I whisper to myself in troubling moments. What difference does it make where you are? Even if you see only three walls today, take care of them. Search for the sky in the window. You’ll manage. Nadezhda means HOPE.
Nadezhda Kutepova is a Russian environmentalist, sociologist, and lawyer born in Ozersk, one of Russia’s secret cities. As the founder and director of the NGO Planeta Nadezhd (Planet of Hope), she was actively involved in the protection of both human and ecological rights of the people of the Chelyabinsk region suffering from nuclear pollution. She fled to Paris in 2015 after receiving multiple death threats.
Loneliness makes me look at other people’s lives through the window. Every time I open it, I feel like I am looking at a life I would like to have but do not yet have access to. People work, go for walks with their families, drive, go about their business freely in a daily life that seems ordinary to them but that makes me dream… Simple happiness that is still inaccessible to me.
Hérve Lenga was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Owing to the political violence there he had to flee in 2016. He spent three years of exile in Congo Brazzaville before arriving in France in 2019. Thanks to assistance from the LIMBO association, he enrolled in the department of economics at the Sorbonne University.
Standing at the window, just as winter begins to roll in, I am transported home. It isn’t the view – though the constant flow of traffic on the street below reminds me of the taxis and trucks I’d watch from the window as a boy. Rather, it’s the act of lining the edges of the window with cotton balls – insulating the space between the two panes of glass. It’s what my father would do each year as the weather turned.
Inside, it was never cold. We always had wood to keep the stove burning – a gift from the lumberjacks who worked in the forests surrounding our town and for whom my father, a tailor, made uniforms. The fire’s heat stretched to reach each corner of that ever busy apartment. The apartment had two rooms. The largest had my father’s workshop on one end and the kitchen on the other. In the kitchen, we would keep a deep tub filled with water from the well out back. The well must have been thirty feet deep. Sometimes I would climb down it, never telling my parents. The bottom was sandy and the water was so cold, even in the summer, that my teeth would sting as I brought it in cupped hands to my mouth.
For years, I didn’t think about that apartment – the sound of the sewing machines, my mother in the kitchen, my sisters playing, my grandmother and my cousins in the apartments next door. In the camps, my brother and I kept our minds blank, our bodies propelled forward like water through a stream. But when we came to New York and the winter arrived, I could feel the chill seeping through the window overlooking the noisy street. As I lined the space between the windowpanes, I thought of my father and the warmth of our home.
Siegmund Listwa was fourteen in 1940 when he was sent to the Posen concentration camp as a slave labourer and then two years later to Birkenau. From there he and his brother, Berek, were sent to Auschwitz and, in 1945, were forced on a death march. They were liberated by American soldiers and went to the U.S. together. Siegmund’s wife Marlene’s family fled Poland to Russia and was sent to a Siberian labour camp, later escaping to Uzbekistan and from there to the U.S.
Indeed, experience affects our perception and different people look at the same things in different ways. For me, this window on the opposite edge of Eurasia serves as a reminder of change every morning. It is not the window in the roof of my new workshop, through which the light for new drawings pours, but the window I look out each morning to see the light of a new day. This window brazenly demonstrates with its smug look how beautiful it is and how lucky I am that it has no bars and that it is just a window and I’m not facing a two-metre upholstered horizontal board. In my past life, each morning from October to May outside my Russian window there would be several cubic meters of snow from under which I had to dig out various items that were a little more useful than snow. Instead from May to October, I hoped that all that landscape of dangerous hopelessness would soon be covered with snow again. To no longer see a car of an enemy with binoculars outside the window waiting for me to exit the house. All my dreams have come true over time, but everything good in this world has a painfully high price. From my new window it is impossible to see the arrival of loved ones, the separation from whom desperately poisons every day. But sometimes here, behind a flowering camellia bush, the cars of new friends are parked. And not once until now have I had to urgently run out with a shovel.
Denis Lopatin is a cartoonist and illustrator born in Belarus in 1977. He has received many awards for his art, including the Marco Soldi Prize at the Moscow International Comic Festival in 2007. In 2018, facing criminal charges and up to eight years in prison for his satirical cartoons, he fled Russia where he had been living since 2002 and found refuge in France, working as a concept artist and live caricature artist.
As I look out my apartment window in Berlin, I try to forget that I am only out on bail. In 2015 I fled Syria with my sister on a tiny, overcrowded dinghy with eighteen other refugees. While crossing the Mediterranean the boat started to sink. My sister and I and two men jumped into the water and towed the boat to safety. A month later I made it to Berlin and obtained asylum. The story of our dramatic sea crossing got out and we were hailed as heroes. But my story didn’t end there.
In 2016, I returned to Lesbos to volunteer as a search and rescue swimmer for a Greek NGO for two weeks. Two weeks became two and a half years. In August 2018 I was about to fly back to Berlin from Lesbos when I was arrested by Greek police and charged with ‘espionage’, ‘money laundering’, and ‘human trafficking’. I was in total shock. After two weeks in a cell on Lesbos, I was transferred to a high-security prison in Athens. On the ferry to the mainland I was handcuffed like a criminal. I spent most of my time reading in prison. But every night I would think about my family and friends and wonder if I would see any of them again. I spent three and a half months in jail until I was bailed out in December 2018.
The arrest and time in prison changed my whole life and I’m still suffering from it. I don’t feel free, I have this terrible thing hanging over me. Imagine if you faced arrest for giving spare change to a homeless person or providing shelter for someone escaping domestic violence. My ‘crime’ was standing on the shore giving water and blankets to people who, like me before them, were fleeing persecution in search of safety. A crime?
Sarah Mardini, a Syrian competitive swimmer, made headlines in 2015 when she and her sister towed a sinking boat of refugees to the Greek shore, saving eighteen fellow passengers. She settled in Germany but came back to Lesbos, Greece, as a volunteer to rescue other migrants arriving onshore where, in 2018, she was arrested and imprisoned on human-smuggling charges and is facing 25 years in prison.
When I look out my window, the first things that come to mind are all the memories of my country, of my past, the moment when I had to leave everything to go to a place where I didn’t know what to expect. Just like this window that looks out without knowing what is beyond the trees.
I almost always think of a special person who left a memory inside of me that I will never forget. A person who made me understand how life is not easy and that you need lots of patience to be able to fulfil your dreams; exactly like these trees that, with every passing season, change the colour of their leaves. In winter, just like us when we sometimes don’t feel like doing anything or we’re too tired to go on, they remain without leaves. In summer, the leaves turn green again, as when we feel the need to try again. In autumn, the leaves turn orange or yellow. In life there are times when we feel disappointed and we just want to stay away from everyone.
The only place where I feel sure of myself is in front of this window while I look without speaking, and when the silence is loud enough to make me feel better.
Douaa Mohammad Alokla is a Syrian refugee. In 2013, at age thirteen, she fled Damascus with her family and arrived in Lebanon where she stayed until 2016. She then moved to Camini, in the province of Reggio Calabria in Italy where she learned Italian and went back to school. With a supportive community and the help of the Jungi Mundu organisation, she has found her second home.
As I look out my window at the knotted branches of trees and brick buildings, I feel a deep sense of gratitude. I am lucky to live in a place where my life is marked by peace and safety, grateful to have been able to escape the slavery and violence that ISIS inflicted on my people during their genocidal destruction of Yazidis and our homeland of Sinjar. But this gratitude, this peace, is continuously interrupted by a feeling of homesickness and disappointment.
These trees, roads, and buildings look nothing like the beautiful landscapes of my childhood where generations of my people before me thrived. Sinjar may be far away, but I still feel the aftermath of the Yazidi persecution and the destruction of our homeland every day. Although it is easy to reason that, since ISIS has largely been defeated, the Yazidi genocide is over, this logic is a grave mistake. Genocide is a process, not an isolated event. To this day, the Yazidi people continue to suffer from its aftermath. Instability threatens the safety of each Yazidi man, woman, and child who is brave enough to return to their ancestral homeland.
When I look out my window at a life that is so different from the one I once knew, I also feel determination. I am determined to devote myself to the restoration of Sinjar – a necessary step towards ending the Yazidi genocide once and for all. I am determined to fight for justice for the Yazidi people, as well as survivors of sexual violence globally. Most of all, I am determined to work towards the equality and safety of all peoples. The only way to truly put an end to genocide, sexual violence, religious persecution, and all crimes fuelled by hate is to achieve a global equality that is built on a foundation of understanding, compassion, and mutual respect.
Nadia Murad is an Iraqi Yazadi human rights activist living in Germany. In 2014, she was kidnapped from her hometown in Iraq and held by the Islamic State for three months. She is the founder of Nadia’s Initiative, an organization dedicated to helping women and children victimised by genocide, mass atrocities, and human trafficking. In 2018, she was jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
I hated this apartment at first sight, despite its elegant bones. It was old, the furniture dingy. In one corner, a tape player with no tapes. In another, records with no record player. Curtains thinned to tissue paper.
That first morning, I sat at the dining table with a full coffee press, waiting for it to steep. My three-year-old daughter Elena ran shirtless to the window. ‘Wow!’ She leaned out. In her bright blue skirt, backdropped by a Parisian boulevard, she belonged in a storybook. I told her to be careful. ‘Never open the window; you might fall out.’
‘If I fall,’ she said alarmed, ‘will I have blood?’ I had intruded into her private wonder, the pleasure of her first look onto the boulevard, the sun kissing her bare shoulders.
All morning, I refilled and leaned down on the coffee press, listening to the water bubble. I pushed back the flimsy curtains. The window frame had its charms. What pretty carvings in the iron grate behind the latch. Vines, curlicued with leaves. An escargot-like Paris.
The next day, I saw a woman smoke three cigarettes and eat a croissant on her balcony. She wiped her eyes with her sleeve. Did something begin or end inside her house just now? At precisely five o’clock, a man stepped out for his smoke break.
Children squealed clear across the boulevard.
An old woman came out now and then to look at the street, thin grey curls hanging down, childlike, as if considering how much it would hurt to fall. Will I have blood? Sometimes when my imagination stalls, I transport myself into the lives behind those windows. I write their clothes, their hair, their small tics into my stories. Sometimes I return to my childhood refugee camp: how we helped each other, how we passed the time. For a while the people across the boulevard are transformed in my mind – the Iranian soldier who taught me soccer, the Afghan grandmother who collected bricks for her shower.
In solitary hours, this window connects me to others. Before long, it will join the many I’ve left behind. I like that it was mine for this one magical, dreamy year where all I did was watch smokers breathe out, battle a stubborn coffee press, write many stories, and marvel as the grey filter fell from my eyes, and the window’s beauties emerged, one by one, leaf by leaf.
Dina Nayeri is an Iranian-American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. She fled Iran as a child with her mother and brother in 1988 after her mother had converted to Christianity and was threatened with execution. Her bestselling nonfiction book, The Ungrateful Refugee, confronts issues that are key to understanding the refugee experience. She currently resides in France.
This is the most beautiful view from a home that I have ever had. It far surpasses the worst view, from my childhood window, of the highway entrance ramp that soared over our backyard. I gazed often out that window, wondering where those cars were going, wanting with all of my being to one day go somewhere far from home.
And yet the room from which I gazed was the master bedroom, which my parents had given to me. They worked constantly and perhaps felt that they would make little use of a large bedroom. And perhaps they felt that this room, where I could play and fantasize about all kinds of scenarios, including leaving home, might make up for all the time that they could not spend with me. But they never said these things. These were the costs and tradeoffs of refugee life, of inarticulate silences, and articulate sacrifices.
This history frames this window, as it frames any view and any observer. The window is in my second house. My parents helped me buy my first house, where the master bedroom overlooked downtown Los Angeles, although I wrote my novel The Sympathizer in the back bedroom, facing a wall. The novel’s success allowed me to sell this first house and buy the second one. My own work made that possible, but would my work have happened without the sacrifice and love of my parents?
I look through this window from my writing office, the first one I have ever had. I was not yet used to writing here, gazing out this window, when my mother died. Now, sitting here and looking at the garden, pondering the beauty and how fortunate I am, I think inevitably of my mother and how she never had a view as serene as this one, until she died.
Her grave is under the shade of a pine tree, in the middle of a serene park where deer roam. The last time I visited her I lay down next to her plot, listening to birdsong and staring at the clear blue sky. The grass was warm under my neck as I shared, for a few moments, her view.
Viet Thanh Nguyen is a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, the Aerol Arnold Chair of English at the University of Southern California, a cultural critic-at-large for The Los Angeles Times and is a regular op-ed contributor to the New York Times. Born in Buon Ma Thuot, Vietnam in 1971, he fled to the United States after the fall of Saigon.
‘Close the window, we don’t want mosquitoes or thieves’, says any Venezuelan mother. We protect ourselves from the mosquitoes and the thieves, not from the cold or the heat.
Our homes don’t have thermal insulation but they do have systems of security. Metal bars that protect you from intruders. We know well what padlocks, chains, security bars, alarms, barbed wire, and security cameras are from a young age. ‘Let me know when you get home’ is the most spoken phrase. We get used to living in fear. When we look out our windows there aren’t just the beautiful views with El Avila in the background and macaws arriving to eat from your hand that typically show up on a Google Images search for ‘Caracas’, we could also be witnesses to children eating out of trashcans, a kidnapping or a murder.
My new window protects me from the cold, it is double glazed, and has no metal bars. When I look out my window I see drunk men in the summer, policemen on horseback, tourists, food vendors, and my neighbour taking in the sun. At dawn I frequently wake up in a panic not knowing where I am. I look it up on the internet and it says that it’s normal when you’re an immigrant. I feel dumb. I feel foolish. Nobody understands me and I don’t understand them. I have a phobia of French stares when they don’t understand me. My accent is thick, but they say, ‘petit accent’. I am an artist, I will do something with this, I won’t let language build a barrier. I’ve created a collection of close friends. They’re well selected and they’re now ‘family’. But they are not. They aren’t really. My family stayed behind, in the chaos.
Born in Venezuela in 1986, Cristóbal Ochoa is an artist whose work has been exhibited in numerous solo and collective shows worldwide. His photography, installations, and public performances denounce his country’s dictatorship and economic instability. Persecuted by the government for his work, he obtained political refuge in France in 2017. He is now based in Paris and is a member of the Atelier des artistes en exile.
The windows on my mother’s side of the house had louvres. As an older child, one of my chores was to clean the louvres in the sitting room and kitchen every Saturday. This chore took a significant amount of my time as there was always something going on in the street: someone interesting passing by, friends playing in the neighbouring compounds, hawkers, or one of my parents driving in or out.
Then my mother had netting installed in the windows to keep out the mosquitoes, and as if that was not enough, she further obstructed my view by putting iron bars behind the netting, this time, to keep out burglars.
With the demarcations that the louvres created on the window, the netting, and the iron bars, my view to the outside world of my street became completely obscured to the extent that I could no longer tell the shape of the electric pole opposite our house from that of hawkers who sometimes set their wares down to rest against the pole.
My windows now are wider, two panes of glass. I could throw them wide open, could put my head or even my whole body through them if I wanted to, but there is nothing to see. Most times I hear voices and can sense unseen eyes watching, but when I look out, there is rarely ever anyone outside.
If it were possible, I would swap the two windows. I’d have the wider windows I have now in the place where the air is free of mosquitoes moved to the place where the people love to smile and wave and be seen; and have the louvered windows with the netting and iron bars moved to the place where people lay in the shadows to observe others.
Melatu Uche Okorie is a Nigerian-born writer and scholar. She arrived in Ireland in 2006 and lived in the Direct Provision System which inspired her to write This Hostel Life, a compilation of stories of migrant women in Ireland, shortlisted at the Irish Book Awards for the 2018 Sunday Independent Newcomer of the Year Award. She became a member of the Arts Council of Ireland in 2019.
le.
From my window you see the mountain and, under the balcony, the river. The mountain now inspires tranquility in me, something that didn’t happen when I arrived. In Guinea I lived a five-minute walk from the sea. I was not used to the mountains and here I saw a landscape that was completely new to me. At first the mountains made me feel very closed-in. I had the impression of having a limited view, but over time I got used to it.
Now the sound of the river reminds me of the waves of the sea from my home in Guinea. Especially when I close my eyes and when, during the summer, I sleep with the window open. In winter I look at the snow, which is still something new for me. The winter here is very long, and it is very cold; and inside me, in my head, it was very difficult to deal with the abrupt change of life, from under the coconut trees to snow in the mountains. An inevitable, fateful change. But I had no choice in the nature that I would encounter, and I was pleased with the nice view and the nice days with snow. However, I still prefer the mountains in the summer. The view from a window can not only define the weather, but it is also a view onto the environment in which we live. Because the first glance of the morning, when you wake up, is always towards the window and defines your day.
Elhadj Oumar Sow is a political refugee from Mamou, Guinea. In 2016, after obtaining his bachelor’s degree in computer science, he was forced to flee due to his political activities opposing the dictatorial regime and corruption, leaving his entire family behind. He arrived in Italy, where he obtained political asylum. He currently works for Lo Spaccio di Cultura, a community and cultural center in Turin.
I find myself sitting alone with my thoughts. I lift my gaze up towards my window view and the images I see are filled with nostalgia. Memories of times past.
My battle has been long and filled with countless experiences – the university, an internship in that one place far from home, near the ocean. The heart of a young man needs love and, like a fawn, jumps from valley to valley until it finds the perfect place to rest. Today I have a family: a wife and two children.
The storm of human ambitions that brings with it destruction and misery has catapulted me, like so many others, towards unknown horizons in search of new opportunities to make a living. Other lands, different people, strange laws, it’s the path of uncertainty. But the spirit of resistance stays strong, the strength of love and the hope of overcoming do not forsake me.
A window of hope opens into the future, I can almost touch it with my fingers. Freedom, peace, and progress will be the pillars sustaining a good motherland – faithful and welcoming. A homeland where justice and values reign, where we can live as brothers and sisters, where the memory of exile will no longer haunt us. The ghosts of deserted neighbourhoods will come back to life, families will reconvene; our youth will have a fertile ground to grow dreams and reap projects. Our health will benefit from reopening our borders to the latest medical advances. Our children will grow, play, and learn with values and ethics.
I like what I see when I look outside. I almost jumped to finally get to where I am now, but everything comes at the right time: the joy, the peace, the freedom. Someday this will also come to my home – Venezuela and I, two more soldiers in this struggle for life. This time will come and it will be very soon.
Leonardo Perez is an obstetrician-gynaecologist and surgeon from Maracaibo, Venezuela. Due to escalating conflicts and a nation-wide economic collapse, he was forced to close his practice and flee to Colombia in 2017. He is now working in a hospital in Maicao, a small town close to the border where he attends incoming refugees. He still goes to Venezuela frequently to visit his wife and two sons.
The window is the eye that opens and floods with the tumultuous waters of a sea both unknown to me and belonging to my distant adolescence. This eye is open to the tide of the places and times that I have since traveled.
Perhaps, the retina retains old images and resonances that the currents have not yet swept away remain intact. Perhaps, years later, they can be recovered although they are no longer the same, and perhaps life itself is made from the familiar echoes and layers of all those memories that have piled, one on top of the other, like sediments on the ocean floor.
Yet the life that I remember is not my own. The eye that looks through this window of memories has changed. It stares, attentive and deeply moved, through multiple open windows, at the trees swaying in a wind that blows today but was quiet yesterday – among distant and dear walls, that pushed me towards the vertigo of paths walked by many.
The image that now unfolds before my eyes in different planes – untidy pastures and bushes closed by a bare brick wall, a mass of trees with large canopies that reach for the sky, yet more walls and windows and, in the distant background, a mountainous horizon of violet hues – this image may represent, in its various depths, the journey through strange geographies that gradually became familiar, the astounding, painful, gleeful journey through life, the excavation and growth of something intangible yet certain within me.
The window is the eye that allows me to look near and far into the distance, and into my own gaze, how everything that has been given to me and everything that I am has come into being. I am thankful.
María Soledad Quiroga is a Bolivian poet and author born in Chile in 1957. Inspired by her father, a writer and a social justice advocate who disappeared and was murdered in Bolivia in 1980, she views education as the key to achieving a profound change in society. She is involved with the Fundación UNIR working towards the construction of a culture of peace in Bolivia.
I’m looking out my apartment, the window is open. The sky is cloudless and the autumn sun is shining. I see life in the windows of my neighbours. Flowers on the balconies are coloured in bright tones. I can feel the fresh air on my cheeks. The calm outside calms me down.
I live on the ground floor. That’s why the window is barred. The bars are supposed to protect me, to protect my property, to protect me from danger outside. To prevent anyone else from entering the apartment without permission. In the refugee camp where I lived for several years, I also had bars on the windows. But for a different reason. The bars were meant to protect those outside from me and my family. They were supposed to prevent me from getting out without permission.
It’s been sixteen years. But I still remember the feelings I experienced as a child. I was often bored. I sat by the window and watched life outside. I watched people who could move freely. I couldn’t.
In the refugee camp, my family lived in a single room. Nobody had privacy. Someone was always inside. Yet I often felt alone. The feeling of loneliness accompanied me throughout my stay in the camp.
I don’t feel alone now. And if I want, I can leave the apartment. I no longer need the permission of the office and the police. I feel free.
Fatima Rahimi is a young journalist exploring social issues, education, migration, and women’s rights in the Czech Republic and Afghanistan. Originally from Herat, Afghanistan, Fatima and her family were forced to flee and moved to the Czech Republic in 2000, after a six-month journey and years living in refugee camps.
I wake up in the morning, brew some coffee, and get ready for another day.
It was not a good night, those nightmares came back again.
Sometimes reality makes no sense, sometimes I forget where am I.
I need to wake up, I drink my coffee anxiously, then I feed my cat.
I look around again, I wonder if this is still a blurry dream,
I walk in front of my window, I open my curtains, Then the light enters with generosity to my room.
I ground myself, I breathe, I close my eyes, I remember where am I.
I open my eyes again, I breathe the smell of freedom, slowly, and once again peace shines in my heart.
Those dark memories fade slowly like therapy with the increasing energy of the morning light.
The smell of the morning and my coffee intensifies, My cat sits close to me, she appears more interested in those birds in the water fountain.
One of my neighbours looks at me from his window with a kind smile, I raise my hand, then I say kia ora!
I see some rainbows dancing with the light, I feel joy, I feel more peace, that static picture in my dreams now gently moves.
The light enters with more potency,
I am here, I am safe, I am at home.
Born in Colombia, Eliana Golberstein Rubashkyn was the first male-at-birth intersex person to be recognised officially as female under the international refugee status. She was granted citizenship in New Zealand in April 2018, after being stateless for six years. She is a pharmacist, chemist, and interpreter now working for a pharmaceutical company. She campaigns for LGBTQI asylum seekers, refugees, and intersex persons.
Placing this oblique window high up in our seaside Cape Town bungalow was a beautiful and cheeky architectural gift from my wife Vanessa September. The beauty part of her gesture could not have been more obvious. By framing a soaring upward view of the peak known as Lion’s Head, she reminded me of a vow I had taken every day of my twenty-four years as an exile: I will, I said to myself, I will, I will, return one day to the city I love the most and hate the most in whole world, I’ll step off the plane and I’ll climb Table Mountain, right next to Lion’s Head, and celebrate my freedom.
And lo and behold, in 1990 when Mandela was freed, I did fly back to Cape Town, and, minus an arm and sight in one eye from a car bomb, I did take a long walk to my freedom celebration on top of Table Mountain.
The cheekiness of Vanessa’s design was more subtle. Before flying back home, I had a last holiday in a country with lots of sun where I could have a good cry. I went to Chile and visited the home of Pablo Neruda. It was high up on a hill. Contrary to all its neighbours, instead of facing down the hill with a spectacular view of the city, its windows faced up the hill with a gentle view of bush and rocks. Like all homes on the slopes of Lions Head we have floor to ceiling glass doors and windows with gorgeous views of the Atlantic Ocean. But unlike our neighbours, we also have this contrarian Neruda-esque window that enables us to lift up our eyes unto the hill. Thank you, Pablo. Thank you Vanessa.
Albie Sachs is an author and former judge on the Constitutional Court of South Africa. A prominent figure in the legal, political, and cultural life of South Africa and anti-apartheid activist, he was forced to flee to the United States after losing an arm and the sight in one of his eyes in a car bombing in Mozambique. He later returned to South Africa and currently resides in Cape Town.
Ramy and I lived in a very cozy flat in Cairo. The only thing I didn’t like about it was the view: a brown, dusty wall from the building next to us used to almost completely hide the sunlight, making me feel oppressed. In this disorganised city of twenty-two million inhabitants, this was a very common thing, and it contrasted starkly with what I’d been used to while growing up in France. Eventually though, I did get used to it. I still complained at times, but it was our home, the place where, together, we would escape the daily tumult of the city.
On the night of 4 July 2019, a dozen hooded, armed, and black-clad Egyptian State Security men stormed into our house and turned our world upside down. No warrant, no legal documentation, no explanation. They didn’t need one. Ramy is a political activist and a human rights defender. In the darkness of the night, we knew they were coming to take him away and deport me back to France.
As they were walking us out of our home, I took a mental snapshot of this place where we had spent so many beautiful moments, not knowing if and when I would see it again. I did the same with Ramy’s face as I kissed him for the last time before they pushed him into a van and me into a second one. I haven’t seen Ramy since that night and I don’t know when I’ll see him again.
Back in my hometown in Paris, I realised that it is possible to feel like an exile in your own country. Today, when I look out of my window from my parents’ house, I see an open view and our beautiful garden. And yet, I would give anything to contemplate that brown, dusty wall, the backdrop behind my husband Ramy’s smile.
Céline Lebrun Shaath grew up in Paris. In 2012, she moved to Cairo where she worked as a political researcher, history teacher, and activist. Since the arrest of her husband, a well-known Egyptian political figure and Human Rights defender, in July 2019, she has been leading an international campaign for his release from France where she was deported to at the time of his arrest.
Looking at bricks can bring back so many memories. Brick walls on the border. Brick walls everywhere. Our house in Prague used to be a gate of the Prague Castle. It was on a street full of cobblestones and, in the time after 1968, also full of police. So we tried to excavate below it, in order to enlarge the space from within the house. We found an old stone wall with a window. Was the window leading to some magical place? Once we dug out the window, we just found a brick wall. It became my window. I used to stare at the brick wall, trying to visualise what might be behind it. I drew many pictures and made many animated films just trying to imagine. Then I painted my own window to put on the brick wall. It became part of my film. My film took me to America.
And this is where I am. Here, I have had many windows – looking at oceans, at the skyline with the Twin Towers, at the streets of downtown New York City, and later at the green fields outside the city, where my children grew up.
I have a simple window now – I can see grass, the sunrise and the ruby sunset over the Hudson River, an ancient oak tree, birches, and a Japanese maple. A lilac bush blooming in October. Butterflies and falcons, rabbits, woodchucks, deer, and turkeys. And, just for good measure, a bit of a brick wall at the entrance to the house on the horizon.
Peter Sís is an internationally acclaimed illustrator, author, and filmmaker born in Brno, Czechoslovakia. He successfully sought asylum in the U.S. in 1984. He is the winner of the Hans Christian Andersen Award, a MacArthur Foundation Genius Award, eight New York Times Book Review Best Illustrated Book of the Year awards, and three Caldecott Children’s Book Medals. He lives in Irvington, New York.
I arrived in Israel over ten years ago today. I left Adikeih, just a few weeks before my eighteenth birthday, knowing that if I stayed any longer, I would be forced to join the military and abandon my bachelor’s in anthropology.
The view from my home in the outskirts of Tel Aviv is covered by emerald vines, and beyond these I see rows of tall glass buildings fading into the distance. Sometimes I imagine the people living inside these tall buildings – going about their lives, maybe even looking back at me on occasion. These buildings are within my eye’s range but I know I could never go there; I do not belong here, just as I didn’t belong in Eritrea. These vines blocking my view resemble the worry I feel every morning when I get up and send my kids to school, not knowing what tomorrow will bring. Will I be able to work tomorrow and pay rent? The day after tomorrow is always a mystery to me. Will this home still be my own when the sun comes out over these buildings again come dawn? Will this view still be mine or will I be forced to abandon it and start anew?
I still recall the view from my family’s house in Adikeih at the fresh age of seventeen. I would often see soldiers patrolling the streets in search of dissidents, and every Sunday the elderly would walk over to Church dressed from head to toe in white – they would pray for our country, and for the lives of our young men and women, the same ones that I would see patrolling the streets at nightfall.
Just like the vines covering my view today, back then I saw through a lens of fear as well. I feared for my future as I pictured myself joining the military files – clad in military attire, gun in hand. A mix of fear and hope pushed me to pack up my belongings and cross the desert to reach Israel in search of peace. Fear and hope are still what drive me today. I wake up each morning and feed my children, and I pray for their peace just like the elders used to pray for mine.
Samrawit Solomon was born in Adikeih, Eritrea in 1992. She was studying for her bachelor’s degree in anthropology when she had to flee into exile at the age of eighteen to avoid forced military service. Samrawit arrived in Israel in 2010 and is now the mother of four children. She currently works at a daycare center in Tel Aviv.
‘This is a table, this is a chair, this is a wall, this is a window.’
I’m five years old. The teacher, a strict Soviet teacher, makes us repeat these phrases after her. I’m in a good kindergarten, a prestigious kindergarten with English classes. It never helped me, never made me speak English, till I found myself in the outskirts of Dublin, in a reception center for asylum seekers, as they call us, for people seeking asylum, as I insist, they should call us.
This is a window.
How many landscapes will I see through my windows? Immense Central Asian steppes, the always grey Baltic sky, the always green Basque mountains, the square yard of a refugee camp in Ireland.
‘Here is the window again, where again no one sleeps. Are they drinking wine, are they just sitting? … There is a window like that in every house, my friend.’ I remember the poem of Marina Tsvetaeva.
I look at this window. This is a window of my refuge, a window in the living room of the flat that my most intimate Irish friend is renting. A flat where I was hiding from my worst thoughts, where I was finding relief from the ugly direct provision hostel I was living in (the Irish system that accommodates people in need of international protection). The house that John Malcolm so generously shared with me, the window of a peaceful gaze inside myself.
This is a window. A window to some infinite daydreaming. Daydreaming about freedom, about another possible world, about a past, a present, and a future that has been stolen from me. A future that will be able to include people like me, people that belong to the world and not to a particular territory, divided by borders and controlled by bureaucrats.
I am gay, a foreign agent, a stateless person.
This is my window.
Evgeny Shtorn is a writer, activist, and researcher from St. Petersburg. Due to his involvement in civil society work he was forced to leave Russia in 2018 and was granted international protection in Ireland. He currently works as a Social and Cultural Diversity Consultant, collaborating with universities as well as cultural and civil society organisations. He has also been involved in human rights and LGBT advocacy for almost two decades and co-founded Queer Diaspora Ireland. In 2020, Shtorn was awarded the GALAS Person of the Year by the National LGBT Federation of Ireland.
Here I am, overlooking the capital of Europe through a window in the skyscraper where I work.
These skyscrapers once represented the ‘dream’. Being a young refugee in a foreign country, all I wanted was to end up in a skyscraper one day.
I remember looking through the window on the plane on my way to Belgium, confused of where this journey would take me.
As an Iraqi refugee in Jordan, I initially figured Amman would be my new home. A place where people looked like me and understood my language. And yet, there I was, six years old and queuing up to be recognised in a country that felt so foreign.
Throughout my life I’ve looked through many windows, reflecting on what the future would hold for me. And those skyscrapers, they represented the dream. I knew that one day,I would end up working in one.
Here I am today, in a city I once hated because it reminded me of a forced new home, of queues and uncertainties. Twenty-five years later, the city I hated has become the city where I have managed to turn my mother tongue into my occupation. As a sworn translator, I now encounter many refugees going through the same struggles as I once did, hoping to call this place their home.
Coincidentally, from my present-day window I can see those very immigration queues I used to dread. It is as if my past is constantly being played out right in front of me. However, when I look at these people right now, I can see their future. I know that they will be able to turn their current struggles into their blessings, and their past into their story. They will find a house and will eventually be able to settle into their second home – hopefully with windows that will allow them to reflect, as I have the privilege of doing now.
Rahi Al Suhail was born in 1989 in Bagdad, Iraq. His family obtained political asylum in Belgium in 1996 after the Hussein regime placed a death order on Rahi’s father. In 2016, during the European refugee crisis, he served as an interpreter in refugee arrival hotspots in Greece. He currently works as an interpreter for the Belgian government.
I spend more time in my kitchen than in any other room of the house. This is true of every dwelling that I’ve called home from the age of six onward. To call a place your home is not the same as being at home. I learned that from the age of six as well, when my country of birth was no longer my country.
As an adult, I always set up the kitchen first whenever I’ve picked up and moved. With a hotplate and a single thrift-store pot or, more recently, a new gas range and a set of enamelled, cast-iron pans, whose impressive heft suggests permanence. I’ve assembled my wares and cooked in New Haven, San Francisco, New York, Annandale-on-Hudson, Princeton, Helsinki, and Tokyo. In these kitchens, I live with the possibility of comfort, resurrection, revival, gathering, and feast. All are metaphorical and sometimes also literal.
As when I write, I need a window in order to cook well. A breeze, an egress for the smoke and steam, the promise of sunlight, and birdsongs, I create best under these conditions. I look out and beyond for stretches of time before I can begin. To the left are the branches of a fig tree, still dormant, with last year’s unripened fruits withered, clinging; to the right a forsythia, its arching branches bouncing up and down with the hubris of being the first to bloom. I rescued that forsythia as a root ball, dug up and left in a paper bag on the sidewalk. Every spring it blazes yellow, like a meteor tail on a clear night, and reminds me of what is yet to come. I think of a flavour, how it makes my body feel, and then I begin.
Monique Truong is a novelist. She came to the U.S. as a refugee from South Vietnam in 1975. Her first novel, The Book of Salt, was a New York Times Notable Book and a national bestseller. She is the recipient of the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
This window is incredibly different from my window back home in Afghanistan. When I was a child I, along with my other siblings, wouldn’t even sit beside our home windows because we were told by our parents that the Russian’s aerial bombardments or one of the Mujahideen’s tracer bullets might break the windows and we could be injured or killed. Through my window I saw many children being maimed by the land mines of the Russian-Mujahideen conflict who would have to have their legs amputated.
Living there was scary and joyful at the same time. As kids we would count the number of pigeons and other birds flying in the clear sky of my village where my parents, siblings, and other relatives lived together.
My current window in Ireland gives me a sense of peace and security; I wake up early in the morning with no fear whatsoever of bombardments or suicide attacks. I feel safe and secure looking onto the beautiful greenery. It’s a window of opportunity where you can do whatever you want to do, where my children can go to school without fear on my part that they will not return home, be kidnapped, or killed in suicide attacks or aerial strikes. This window also brings you closer to a diverse society and different cultures, where each and every day you learn new things from different people across the world.
But at the same time, when I look outside this window I sometimes feel sad and heartbroken thinking of going to work and encountering one or two customers passing some racist remarks about either me, my nationality or my religion.
Ubdar (for safety he wishes to use only his first name) is an Afghan refugee of Pashtun ethnic background. He fled Afghanistan to avoid forced recruitment into the fight against the foreign invasion, arriving in Ireland at the age of twenty-four. He lives there with his family and works in the transport sector.
A little bit of sun is very exciting to my now people, the Irish. Growing up in sunny Zimbabwe myself, it has taken me four years to appreciate this precious star. Each morning when I wake up, I don’t open the curtains of my bedroom, I go to my lounge and draw the curtains apart. The view is amazing. Through the windows I see a beautiful garden with green benches and a fountain that no longer functions. As I lean against the wall, holding a cup of my favourite blackcurrant herbal tea, watching the world outside transform from cloudy to sunny, rainy to windy. Yes! Hard to believe, I am still holding that one cup of tea, watching this erratic Irish weather outside my window, four seasons in twenty minutes.
Wowed at this wonder of a climate, my mind is triggered to write a piece about a person with rapid mood swings; a woman with a frame of mind that escalates from A to Z and back to A in a short space of time. While some see changing weather patterns, I see a woman with an Irish weather personality. Looking outside my window, that sun I am seeing is not warm when you go out the smile you saw on her face a minute ago is no longer a smile but a Pan Am smile, inside her the weather has changed into sunny cold winter.
The transformation I grew up seeing in Zimbabwe happened over a period of twelve months. In Ireland, it only takes twenty minutes or even less. Seven men come with seven different moods, but one woman can bring you all seven moods at once in a short space of time. As I look through my window, I get an epiphany as to why there are more women than men on earth.
Nqobizitha Vella is a feminist from Zimbabwe who, together with her young son, left her country a few years ago due to social persecution. She arrived in Ireland where, for the first time, she has been able to live without worrying about her identity and beliefs. Ireland gave Nqobizitha a voice to raise awareness of the injustices of her culture in relation to young girls and women through her writings. She has published Umendo So, a book written in her native language IsiNdebele, and several short stories for magazines.
My view has changed over the years both physically and emotionally. The olive tree outside my window was deliberately planted as a reminder of nature. My first view looked out at the vast green landscape of western Ethiopia and today the olive tree reminds me that, if I ever want to be transported to the past, I only need to look at nature.
My next view was from the shelter of a tent in a refugee camp in Gambella. Oftentimes we moved back to Sudan, and my occupation became running in the hallways of the hospital where my father worked. The light would glisten through the large window.
When we moved to Addis Ababa, my world expanded with modern cars and, for the first time, I slept in a room that had a window. The sun was my first reminder that it was time to wake up.
Through my childhood, I knew three countries to be home and felt at home in each of them. In Minnesota, I had a small beautiful room with walls filled with various fashion photos and band posters. I had a window facing a wooded area in the back of our townhouse. For that moment in time, it kept me at ease. My view changed again when I moved to Los Angeles. The abundance of nature took me back to Ethiopia with palm trees, hibiscus, and the mountainous landscape.
I am humbled by the idea that no matter where I go or how much my view changes there will be a constant reminder of who I am and where I come from.
Kuoth Wiel is a South Sudanese/American model and actress best known for her role in the film The Good Lie (2014), which portrayed four child refugees from war-torn Sudan. Born in a refugee camp in Itang, Ethiopia, Wiel lived between Nasir in South Sudan, where her father was a doctor, and Gambella in Ethiopia. In 1998, Wiel and her mother immigrated to the United States.
The view from the window of my Taipei apartment is nice. It’s serene and rather static. The sounds from the outside world – the constant chirping of birds and, from the other side of the apartment, the school bells chiming every hour, plus, for about thirty minutes in the afternoon, the noise of high school girls and boys being let out of class – are quite pleasant.
I didn’t like the window bars when I first moved in, and asked my landlord if I could have them removed. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I understand if you don’t like them. They’re from an earlier time, from my older generation, when the neighbourhood was less safe. I didn’t want them in the beginning either, but I grew to like them, especially in the afternoon when the sun casts a unique shadow of the bars on the curtains.’
I kept the bars. I wouldn’t say I love them, but I too started to grow into the idea – or it just didn’t matter much. Plus, it is insanely expensive to have them removed.
The serenity, I love.
There was another window, back in China, back in 1989: the window of my dorm at Beijing Normal University.
I was very lucky to have that corner room, and from the window of that third-story dorm room I could see the sky, the trees, and a good portion of a courtyard with a monument in the center. That monument was dedicated to three alumni of my university who were killed during a protest in 1926. Sixty-three years later, I gave my first speech right at the foot of that monument, and started another student protest, known to the world as the Tiananmen student movement.
I didn’t get a chance to see from that window how the student movement evolved because I was in the thick of it. I didn’t get to see from that window when the government put the movement down with bloodshed, because I was on the run. I don’t know how the view was, but I bet it was not at all serene.
Of Uyghur origin, Wu’er KaiXi gained prominence as a hunger striker while studying at Beijing Normal University, rebuking Chinese Premier Li Peng on national television. A fervent supporter of the Beijing Students’ Autonomous Federation, he played a leading role during the 1989 Tiananmen protests and negotiations with public officials. When the protests were crushed, he fled to Taiwan, where he now works as a political commentator.
My window opens out to a tree-lined street bustling with families of new immigrants. Often I see kids going to and from school, sometimes escorted by their parents. The tree outside the front window stands out with its outreaching branches in the winter and comforting shade in the summer. In the morning, birds chirp to wake up to a new day. Sometimes squirrels jump around among the wires and branches.
When I park my car near the tree, I see the snarling roots of the tree above ground, a sign of its age and strength. The tree reminds me of the Chinese idiom 落地生根, or to put down roots wherever a seed or a sapling touches the ground. To me, this is new ground from the San Francisco Bay Area where I spent almost twenty years. Now I need to adjust to the snow and darkness of winter, aside from enjoying the cherry trees blooming in the spring.
This is an improving neighbourhood with lingering issues, for example, ubiquitous garbage on the streets and even in the nearby beautiful Branch Brook Park, famous for more than 5,000 cherry trees, the largest collection in the world. Sometimes I would bring garbage bags with me when I’d go for a stroll. Meanwhile, under the tree, the pride of the resident is evident through a whimsical little garden decorated with used tools, toys, figurines and plants. Right outside the light rail train station minutes away, there is a free neighbourhood book exchange that brightens the whole area.
When I think about China, the human rights situation is like an ever darkening night since the Tiananmen Massacre thirty years ago. But even in this domain, light will overcome. One of the best features of my residence is when, in the deep winter, the glow of the morning sun penetrates from the front window to the back one, no matter how cold it is outside.
Fengsuo Zhou is a Chinese human rights activist and former student leader during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. He was listed number five on the government’s most wanted list and forced into exile in the United States over his role in the student movement. He is now the president of Humanitarian China and co-founder of the China Human Rights Accountability Center.
