many years ago, my mother would send me down the steps of our house to snip away

lemon verbena or clambering rosemary – or show me the restrained way to cut the fatter and older

spring onions so they’d grow again, hollowed and dewy and cold because our home is always cold. I’d

bring them over to her chopping board, under the hanging lavender

under the crockery dotted with tiny flowers, window facing the Leith Valley
            I remember the violence of life uprooted without secateurs. the nail or the pull …

            to limp on by extended simile, displacement and its elaborations can be unpredictable:

            refugee camps were set up at the border crossing for hugely over-projected numbers of

            Syrian and Iraqi refugees in 2003. post-invasion, Anglo-American strategists assumed uproots

            without offshoots: Iraqi and Syrian peoples would flee, then return when security was

            reimposed.

                        but staying could mean guarding. leaving could mean never returning, like Palestinian

                        Arabs 50 years earlier. neighbouring countries could provide refuge over refugee

                        status
my mother spent two months after my father emigrated to sort out visas and

to bring a short-haired, two-year-old girl out of No Longer Home. she uncoupled

the defining of person to place. she is braver than me: at school, I wrote

a fairy-tale about a princess moving castle. it has taken me weeks to

take down flat hangings, to admit I can’t take paints on moving day
            even in 1860, refugees were not collected in internment camps. the Ottoman state integrated

            refugees, exiles, and migrants by way of self-settlement. there were provisions to articulate

            themselves: seeds, draft animals, a stretch of 17 acres where they would build their own

            house, land holdings held for 15 years to protect against local investors
there is a lot to spin out from ‘camps’ of temporariness: the earth

as tent of mortality swallowed up by life. how saving something

according to Heidegger doesn’t mean snatching it from danger, but setting it

free into its own being. guest, stranger, person in need – the huge need

beyond shelter: for education, for sustainable livelihood …
            perhaps I have been host and migrant. perhaps my mother dwells in

            -longing, even after 20+ years of belonging. if local hospitality fits uneasy into

            international protection, how can I meet a people not as passive, pliable – easily

            managed – how can I be reshaped by them? 



 Dawn Chatty, ‘The duty to be generous (karam): Alternatives to rights-based asylum in the Middle East,’

Journal of the British Academy, no. 5 (2017): 185. ↩
 Martin Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking,’ in Basic Writings (1993), 351. ↩