It has been a long time away. One could think of it as a kind of voyage, but it's really more a case of distraction, of not fully being present in any way.
I've been trying to follow the stories coming from the Middle East; my own awareness started with a Facebook post, a plea from a friend who asked, why was no American media reporting about Egypt? And, then, in a day, that changed, as every day began with DATELINE, CAIRO.
Last week, I was transfixed with the story about the ferry that had been chartered by the United States to take its citizens and other foreigners to Malta. People had been fleeing all week; the airports were jammed. Tens of thousands of workers were boarding flights out of Libya. And yet, for me, it was the rough sea voyage that seemed to capture all that was mythic and horrifying.
Two days waiting at port for the waters to calm down. An eight-hour journey across rough waters. Hundreds disembarking at a distant port, dragging their luggage, exhausted and triumphant and heartbroken. Each American interviewed said they would return to Libya as soon as possible.
There are so many other migrations, mostly undocumented, likely more dangerous. We only tend to hear about the Americans who lived and died; all others slip into history unknown.
For me, the whole concept of flight, of fleeing, is deeply impressed upon me. It's an inheritance; it feels like a part of my body, like the particular shape of my fingers or the nature of my gait. Tao nan. To flee a calamity or a burden. I have friends who fled their homes, usually at night, often as children. Bundled into cars and then ships and then planes to faraway places that were not home when they woke up. My mother fled within her own country, which was vast enough to be another continent when she woke up one day and had stopped moving.
So the notion of a ferry sailing from a port in Tripoli--which instead sounds so poetic, like embarking on a love affair--is really another print made from a long-ago negative. People fleeing from madness and a firestorm, people setting off in the night into an unknown because all other, probably preferable, choices have been exhausted. Unlike most people who flee, the ones on the ferry from Tripoli will have options, and the place from which they fled was not their ancestral homeland. That landscape does not quite have the same imprint on the heart, and its vanishing does not evoke the same loss.
