The Boy on the Beach

by Tima Kurdi

  Until then, all my refugee siblings continue to dream of returning home, but as time passes, memories of home become foggier. Adaptation is a blessing and a curse. The younger kids in my family barely even recall their country of origin. On the one hand, it’s important for kids to adjust healthily to life in their places of refuge, to feel safe, and to feel that they belong in their new communities. On the other hand, they are forgetting their roots. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why my siblings and I so often talk about the past.

  It’s Eid once again, and once again, we are celebrating by living in our memories.

  “For the last six years, we’ve said the same thing every Eid,” Hivron observed recently.

  “Inshallah, next Eid we will finally be together again,” we replied in unison.

  If the war in Syria ever ends, will my nieces and nephews, along with so many Syrian children, want to go back? Whatever happens, my family will be torn, perhaps even before they have recovered from the trauma of being uprooted in the first place.

  We have an Arabic saying: “Trees often transplanted never prosper.” I hope that’s not true for people. So much depends on the richness of the soil. My nephew Shergo wrote a beautiful poem about his experience of coming to Canada, comparing himself to an uprooted plant. His words are a reminder: everyone, everything, needs soil and water to grow.

  In the first six months of 2017, more than eighty thousand refugees risked the Mediterranean crossing; almost two thousand people perished. With each of those deaths, Abdullah’s heart breaks a little more.

  “The clay pot is shattered into pieces,” Abdullah said recently. “How are we going to fix it? Even if we do, there will always be scars. Inshallah, the pot can be fixed one day. But how can we sit by and watch people drown in that sea? Why do we keep letting the sea swallow them whole?”

  The writing of this book has been a monumental challenge for Abdullah. For the past year, I have nagged him weekly and sometimes daily for details about his life before the tragedy.

  “You planted the seed,” I remind him. “You said we should write this book.”

  “My story is no more important than anyone else’s.”

  “But people want to know our family’s story. They want to know about Rehanna and Ghalib and Alan. And we want to keep their voices alive. We want to fill the silence left from too many senseless deaths. We want to do what we can to stop the war.”

  “Fatima, we were just like millions of other refugees.”

  “Yes, you were. You are. But if you talk about the tragedy that you endured, it might stop more people from drowning in that sea.”

  “Okay, sister. What I have learned is that it doesn’t matter if you have no money and you live in a shed eating lentils. All that matters is that your family is there, that you have love. Love gives us strength and power to forget the suffering and pain. Tell the people. Tell them nothing else matters. We don’t thank God enough for all the things we have. We want more and more things. I would trade anything to be with my family again, even in a refugee camp.”

  That conversation with Abdullah, like so many others, is a revelation to me. It reminds me of an old Arabic proverb: “Children are buttons that hold their parents together.” I don’t think I realized it at the time, but I know now that when Baba said that war changes people, he wasn’t just referring to my brother, he was also referring to me. I realize that since Adbullah’s family set out to make the crossing, I’ve been living in a siege state, hoping for the best, thinking the worst. In many ways, I’ve put my own family’s life on hold. I haven’t appreciated them enough. My living nieces and nephews are growing up fast, and I’ve already missed so much. You can lose everything in the blink of an eye. I need to make the most of my time with all of them. I need to live in the present as much as possible. I’m going to try harder to be the wife and mother and aunt that my family deserves. I’m going to try to be the person that I never got the chance to be for Ghalib and Alan.

  I’m not sure if writing this book has helped me find the answers to the many questions that have haunted me since the tragedy. But I hope that by reading my family’s story, you will be able to see that we are all essentially the same: we all dream of healthy, peaceful, safe lives for the ones we love. People are more important than money or power. We are more similar than we are different, and we are stronger when united.

  With the second anniversary of the tragedy looming, our futures are precarious. All of us are still lost at sea, with no clue where we will end up. But we are alive.

  “I hate September. Everything terrible happens in September,” my brother Abdullah says. The terrorists invaded Kobani in September, forcing Rehanna and the boys to flee for their lives. The following September, they were dead. That’s one of the many reasons why it’s still so difficult for my brother and my entire family to look at that photograph of the boy on the beach, of Alan. Many well-intentioned people post that photo, sharing it in the spirit of helping refugees. We are willing to swallow the heartache that photo causes in the hopes that it will prevent more suffering and deaths. But many others help themselves to the photograph to support their own political agendas. We are powerless to stop that because we don’t own the photograph of the boy on the beach, yet for Abdullah, it is a literal reminder of the horrible moment when his wife and sons slipped from his grasp.

  I don’t want Abdullah to be alone for another anniversary. I can’t forget my long-ago pledge to my mother: to find Abdullah a wife. It’s a promise that my brother might call meddling, but it comes from a place of hope and love.

  “We need to find Abdullah a wife,” I said to Maha a while back.

  “I’ll start asking around,” she replied. Through the Kobani grapevine, Maha and her friends heard about a woman from Kobani now living as a refugee in Turkey. Ghamzeh is her name. Maha didn’t know many details about this woman, but my dad heard about her parents from Kobani; her mom died when she was three years old, just like my baba’s had. My dad and sisters convinced Abdullah to meet her during one of his trips to the dentist in Turkey. We said to him, “Life must go on.”

  After he met Ghamzeh, Abdullah texted me a picture.

  “Where did you get this picture of Rehanna?” I asked him.

  “It’s Ghamzeh.”

  I could hardly believe it. “She’s like Rehanna’s twin.”

  “I know. Her voice is like Rehanna’s too.”

  Both of my sisters liked Ghamzeh instantly. “She’s so sweet and down-to-earth,” Shireen said. “Even when we call her Rehanna by mistake, she understands.”

  A few months later, they got married. The night before their small wedding, Abdullah called Maha in a panic, saying, “Why did you push me into this? I can’t breathe.” He’d just awoken from a dream. Alan had come running into his bedroom and started to dance in a circle, clapping his hands. Rehanna appeared and stood in the doorway, watching Abdullah. Then she smiled, turned her back, and walked away.

  “, Yimkin za’lanin minni. Maybe they are upset?” he wondered. “Maybe they don’t want me to get married? , Sho ’milt ana? What have I done, Maha? I can’t go through with this.”

  Maha calmed him down. “It’ll take time to adjust. You like Ghamzeh. She likes you. You might fall in love one day.”

  Abdullah and Ghamzeh were married the next day. Maha and Shireen were there for the ceremony. I hope it works out for those two. I hope that one day, Abdullah will be ready to have more kids.

  If Abdullah can survive and still grasp on to hope, I have to tell myself that I can too. Recently I’ve allowed myself to think that maybe the war can also change us for the better. We can’t rewrite history, no matter how much we want to. But we can find a new purpose in life. Before the war, I was an average, middle-class, middle-aged suburban woman—a mother, a wife, and a hairdresser who loved to cook, socialize with friends, and travel to interesting places. When terrible things happened to other people, I empathized with them. But I didn’t understand them the way I do
now. I would write a cheque to support a charity, donate to food banks, and do all the things that are easy. Then I would go right back to living my life. After the war, and especially after the tragedy, I changed.

  I still have no regrets about my crossing to Canada twenty-six years ago. Because I had my son, Alan. Because I met Rocco. Because by living in North America and learning to speak English, I have been able to be the voice for my family and one of the voices of advocacy for the Syrian people. I still find it very strange that the public and the media want me, a nobody hairdresser, to answer the same very big questions that I continue to ask the world. They want to know whether Alan’s photograph woke up the world to the plight of the Syrian people. I think it did: I see the millions of people around the world, all the grandparents and parents and aunties and uncles and kids, who continue to say, “Enough is enough,” and continue to open their hearts and their doors to needy refugees and victims of war. If I thanked each of them—each of you—a thousand times, it wouldn’t be enough to convey my gratitude.

  But I don’t think that photograph of Alan woke up the politicians and heads of state. I think many of those giants are still sleeping. I think their hearts are still blind. I will do my best to keep helping my family and refugees everywhere—to be a voice for the people who can’t speak. I am constantly reminded of something that many of them have said to me: “The world is talking about us. But no one talks to us.”

  In the hopes that Abdullah and I can continue to talk to refugees—and most importantly, to help bring about change that will truly benefit them—we have started a charitable organization, the Kurdi Foundation. Helping refugees is Abdullah’s one and only dream now. I will do whatever I can to repeat my father’s appeal to the world’s leaders, to invite all the stakeholders to sit down together and negotiate a peaceful future for my country. Why not? They are mothers and fathers and aunties and uncles just like us. As my father says, “The cure for bad times is patience.”

  I have to be patient. Syria is my homeland. It’s the place where I took root and blossomed. I have to believe that one day it will recover and I will be able to return home. Until then, I will keep dreaming of the day when I can once again walk down the streets of Damascus and breathe in its jasmine-scented air.

  Author’s Note

  I have tried my best to translate select Arabic expressions into English, but there are certain sayings and words for which there is no direct translation. In each case, I have given the most accurate translation possible that still retains the essence of the original phrase, but there may be other variations.

  I have also used the particular Arabic dialect that my family speaks in Damascus. Arabic dialects differ widely across the world, so the words and spellings I have used may differ from how they are spoken and written elsewhere.

  My baba, my mama, my sister Hivron, and my uncle Khalid on Mother’s Day with a cake that Uncle Khalid made.

  Me (left), Maha, my uncle Mahmoud, baby Abdullah, and my baba gathered in our family living room. Maha and I are wearing matching dresses that my mama made for us.

  Shireen, Hivron, and Mama at a park in Damascus.

  Blowing out the candles on my birthday cake during a party at my family’s home in Damascus. My favourite song at the time was “Rasputin” by Boney M.

  My mama and I celebrate New Year’s at my uncle Mahmoud’s house. Singing and dancing with family at home was typical on so many of my nights growing up.

  Here I am visiting Maha’s house in Kobani. My hair says it’s the 1980s.

  Taking a break at Lina’s hair salon in Damascus in 1990. The salon was called Sandra—Lina’s favourite Western name.

  I was pregnant with Alan when I posed for this photo by the waterfront in Vancouver in January 1993. My son was born just three months later.

  My first job in Vancouver was working the overnight shift on the local newspaper’s printing press. Many of my co-workers were also immigrants, from the Philippines, India, and Pakistan.

  From left to right: My sisters Shireen and Hivron; my son, Alan; and Baba and Mama gathered on the rooftop of our house in Damascus in 1994. It was my first trip back to Syria after leaving, and I couldn’t wait for my son, Alan, to meet his family.

  My brother Abdullah and my son, Alan, visit for the first time in our parents’ living room in Damascus in 1994.

  My brother Abdullah horsing around with our family in 2011. From left to right: Yasser and Maleek (on shoulders), Abdullah and Maya (on shoulders), and Abdulrahman and Noor (on shoulders).

  I got to visit with so much of my family in 2011, my last trip back to Damascus. Front row, from left to right: Ghoufran, Maya, and Maleek. Second row, from left to right: Abdulrahman and Yasser. Third row, from left to right: Hivron, me, Shireen, and Rehanna. Top row, from left to right: Noor, Rawan, and Heveen.

  Rehanna and Abdullah took this photo with Ghalib for Eid in 2011.

  Abdullah standing with Alan and Ghalib in front of their house in Istanbul in July 2015. Alan was always smiling.

  Top: Alan (left) and Ghalib (right) on their couch at home in Istanbul, cuddling one of their favourite toys.

  Alan in Istanbul during Eid in July 2015.

  Ghalib and Alan crossing the Bosphorus in Turkey on a ferry during Eid in July 2015.

  Much had changed when Abdullah returned to Kobani in October 2015, forty days after the tragedy. Here he is standing in front of the remains of his neighbour’s home.

  Abdullah, in his house in Erbil, is holding a pair of Alan’s shoes. The toys that Abdullah managed to save are on the bed around him.

  This welcome sign for refugees was on display in Brussels just a few days after the tragedy. It was a sign of things to come—I later delivered a petition to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees with one million signatures from people who welcomed refugees.

  Abdullah and I handing out donations at a refugee camp in Kurdistan in 2016. Helping children in the refugee camps was the only thing that could bring Abdullah joy after the tragedy.

  Abdullah and I on an overlook above a refugee camp in Kurdistan.

  My baba resting at home in Damascus in 2016. Beside him is the framed photo of my mama that kept us company after she died. We would sometimes talk to her during our meals to remind ourselves of her presence.

  I was invited to a town hall in Vancouver in December 2015, where I asked Prime Minister Justin Trudeau what Canada could do to help bring about a peaceful solution that would end the war in Syria.

  I was so proud when my nephew Rezan and my niece Ranim started at their new school in Vancouver.

  KURDISTAN REGIONAL GOVERNMENT

  After Abdullah moved to Erbil, Kurdistan, in 2015, he was greeted by Masoud Barzani, the president of Kurdistan.

  OFFICE OF CONGRESSWOMAN TULSI GABBARD

  In February 2017, Representative Tulsi Gabbard (right) invited me to Washington, DC, where I spoke to reporters about my family’s experiences and tried to convey the hardships that refugees face around the world. Representative Tom Garrett, Jr. (far left), and Representative Peter Welch (second from left) also attended the speech.

  ALAN KURDI

  June 6, 2013–September 2, 2015

  Allah yerhamo

  Rest in peace

  Acknowledgements

  There are so many people I must thank for helping me write this book and share my message. I could not have done any of it alone.

  First and foremost, I must thank my parents, who helped me understand how to love and care for others. My baba taught me to stand up for those who are struggling. Even when he was enduring his own tragedies, my baba always encouraged me to continue with my life and to never lose hope. Without my father, I don’t know where I would be right now; my journey is not finished, and I will always need him. My mama was a beautiful, caring mother. She taught us how to be strong and be one family, and she always kept me going. They are both my inspiration in this world.

  I will never forget my family members
who I’ve lost. Rehanna, your beautiful smile and happy soul always warmed my heart. Ghalib and Alan, you are angels watching over us. I will miss you each and every day.

  Abdullah, your compassion and your work to improve the lives of refugee children everywhere have shown me the true meaning of strength. I could not have told this story without you. Thank you for your courage in turning your tragedy into hope.

  To my other sisters and brothers—Mohammad, Maha, Shireen, and Hivron—even though we separated and you are finding a new path forward in your lives, your belief in this book and its message has never wavered. You motivate me to keep going each and every day. I love and miss you all.

  Rocco, you have always stood beside me and given me the strength to keep going throughout this process. You have encouraged me to keep speaking for those who are suffering, and you have helped my family at every turn. You understand that we all come from one family and need to be strong together. I am so grateful to have you in my life.

  Alan, my son, you are the most good-hearted person I know. Every time we talk, you empower me and remind me not to give up. Your encouragement means the world to me.

  To my sister-in-law Anna, thank you for helping me navigate the difficult refugee process and for your tireless efforts to find a way to help my family.