Opinion | Refugees look out on both past and present

August 13, 2024

Matteo Pericoli is an architect, illustrator and writer. He was born in Milan, lived in New York from 1995 to 2008 and lives in Turin, Italy. These drawings and essays are taken from “Windows on Elsewhere: 60 Refugees, 60 Views,” a project he conceived and executed with Bill Shipsey between 2018 and 2021. The essays were edited for style and clarity.

In 2004, as my wife and I were moving out of our New York City apartment, I was overtaken by a rush of panic. I was leaving behind something important: the view from our window. My attempts to photograph it failed. The photos were too literal, showing either a bunch of buildings or a window frame. What I was looking for was a mix of objective substance and intangible reality, of concreteness and memory. So, I decided to draw the view on a piece of brown paper — almost as large as the window itself. Once finished, I rolled it up and took it with me to our new home.

I’ve been drawing window views ever since, and over the years, I’ve come to realize that looking out a window doesn’t just reveal a cityscape or landscape — it can prompt you to reflect inward, compel you to retrace the steps that have brought you to that particular threshold at that precise moment in your life.

In 2017, I met Bill Shipsey, founder of Art for Human Rights (formerly Art for Amnesty) an artist-engagement program he created to support Amnesty International. Together we conceived “Windows on Elsewhere: 60 Refugees 60 Views,” a project in which we would collect window views from a diverse range of refugees from around the world. The drawings I’d make from their photographs would depict their views from “elsewhere,” the places they had moved to. Their accompanying essays would reflect on their journeys, on stories left behind. Past would fuse with present.

We looked for refugee contributors from around the world, people who had been in exile for long and short periods of time. The process started with their sending me many photographs, which helped me reconstruct the views in my mind, and feel as though I was standing in front of their windows. After I completed the drawings, we shared them with the contributors — and the subsequent stories they sent back would explode in my mind, inevitably blending with and informing, almost impossibly after the fact, the very lines I had already drawn.

Seeing is not a straightforward process. Memory and our experiences actively affect what we perceive and how we perceive it. A window frame offers an objective point of view of a physical place and a metaphorical “frame” of a moment in time. For people who have been displaced, who left their homes involuntarily, this has special resonance. As the accompanying texts make clear, a refugee’s inner journey never ends. The emotional mark left by the original impulse to flee continuously shapes how they see their world.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

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 in San Jose, Calif.. I gazed often out that window, wondering where those cars were going, wanting with all my being to one day go somewhere far from home.

And yet the room I gazed from was the master bedroom, which my parents had given to me. They worked constantly and perhaps felt they would make little use of a large bedroom. And maybe they felt that this room, where I could play and fantasize about all kinds of scenarios, might make up for the time they could not spend with me. But they never said these things, even after I left home. These were the costs and trade-offs of refugee life, of inarticulate silences and articulate sacrifices.

This history frames my current window, overlooking a Los Angeles garden as it frames any view and any observer. The window is in the second home I have owned. My parents helped me buy my first house, where the master bedroom overlooked downtown Los Angeles, although I wrote “The Sympathizer” in the back bedroom, facing a wall. The novel’s success allowed me to sell that first house and buy the second. It was my own achievement, but would that achievement have been possible without the sacrifice and love of my parents?

I look through this window from my writing office, the first one I 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 my good fortune, I think inevitably of my mother and how she never had a view as serene as this one.

Her grave is under the shade of a pine tree, in the middle of a 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 the author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Sympathizer,” and, most recently, of “A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial.” Born in Buon Ma Thuot, Vietnam, in 1971, he fled to the United States with his family after the fall of Saigon.

Jimmy Javier Gómez Rivera

My window faces a quiet and empty street in a Spanish city in Andalusia that opened its doors to me. From this window, I remember the view I left behind, which faced a quiet street where carefree children played, and which also saw me grow into an adult. I always thought I would grow to see a free country, but that wasn’t 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 I read as a child always seemed epic to me, with heroic characters who embarked on great journeys to reach promised lands. I never imagined that one day I would embark on my own odyssey. Now I see that those fictional journeys were not extraordinary at all — they were 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 was the aftermath, the routine that takes form after the dust has settled. This routine splits you in half and forces you to live two concurrent lives. The first exists beyond your new 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 — finding a balance between adapting to your new reality, while still looking over your shoulder to recapture 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 born in Nicaragua. As a result of his involvement in social, educational and intercultural programs as well as the civil protests of 2018, he and his family were forced to flee and seek asylum in Spain.

Sepideh Jodeyri

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 but not in the same way that I love my Tehran.

The window here talks to me about city life. And I love city life because I used to live in Tehran. But in Tehran, everyone was speaking in my mother tongue — and that 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, even with strangers. I miss the whole country, except for the government that forced me to flee my beloved homeland and become an involuntary exile. One thing I love about Washington is that the people here consider me a local 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 won the 2015 Jovellanos International Poetry Prize for “best poem in the world” for her poem “Chãk.” Her translations of foreign poetry books into Persian resulted in the ban of her work in Iran, forcing her to flee first to the Czech Republic and then to the United States.

Zlata Filipović

I was born into a home with a view of a park. It had the most lush trees, seesaws and a slide. I went to play there with friends from my neighborhood in the center of Sarajevo nearly every day. But then the war came. The glass on our windows was broken, replaced by plastic sheeting provided by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees through which I could hardly catch a view of the park. In any case, getting close to the window always risked exposure to stray bullets and shrapnel, so I stayed back.

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One day, my friends went to the park to play. A shell fell straight into it and killed or wounded some of them. I narrowly missed being there. Then the lush trees were cut for firewood. The birds had nowhere to land. There was silence. Our 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 were full and lush. I could hear the birds. And now I have a 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 gunfire 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 be forced to leave or lose the beautiful view out of their own window.

Zlata Filipović is a Bosnian writer and the author of “Zlata’s Diary,” which she wrote as she lived through the siege of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War. She and her family fled to Paris and from there to Dublin, where she now works as a documentary film maker.

Rahi Al Suhail

Here I am, overlooking Brussels, the base of the European Union, 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 in the plane on my way to Belgium, confused about where this journey would take me. As an Iraqi refugee in Jordan, I had initially figured Amman would be my new home. A place where people looked like me and understood my language. And yet, there I was, 6 years old and queuing to be accepted into a country that felt so foreign.

In my life, I’ve looked through many windows, reflecting on what the future would hold for me. And 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, it has become the city where I managed to turn my mother tongue into my occupation. As a translator, I now encounter many refugees going through the same struggles 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 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 nest 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 Baghdad. After the Hussein regime placed a death order on his father, his family obtained political asylum in Belgium in 1996. He works as a freelance interpreter for the Belgian Federal Judicial Police.

Suzanne Kanj

I look out my New York 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 one death. I remember the demise of the stars. They leave behind them 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 passed throughout my life and how the rain that they were holding bloomed all the dead flowers on my land in Syria.

I look out my window, I do not see an ocean of possibilities, for oceans have limits — I see a universe full of possibilities. Suddenly, I remember each voice telling me, “You cannot do it. You are so dreamy.” Then I also remember those who said, “Humans cannot fly as the birds do, humans cannot dive inside of the oceans the way fish do, and humans cannot go to space, for Earth is our only home.” I then secretly laugh at them because I know that every single day of my life I fly like birds 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 laughs of the people I love.

Yes, I might sound very dreamy, but that is how I see life. In addition, I believe that I can make a change in this life — not because I was gifted. On the contrary, I do not believe in gifts. However, my past has polished me in a way that I could have never 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 like the way the Earth looks from outer space, a blue and green planet in the middle of darkness.

Suzanne Kanj is a Kurdish-Syrian refugee. In 2012, at age 17, she fled Syria with her mother and initially lived in Turkey before moving to the United States. She is a pre-med student and works as a medical assistant.

Ma Jian

Looking out from my London study, I see the back garden that has healed the wounds of my exile. In spring, the branches of the tall poplar tree turn green, a few days after the large acacia behind it. The poplar is over 200 years old. Like me, all it wants is to extend its roots into the earth and survive. As the days grow warmer, the blue sky becomes shrouded by its green leaves and the white flowers of the acacia. When the wind blows, its heavy branches sway and rustle.

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 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 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 for the pro-democratic movement in Tiananmen Square in 1989 forced him to flee to Germany and then the United Kingdom.

Usumain Baraka

The tree outside my window in Israel reminds 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 neighbors. 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 fulfill 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 14. He became the first Darfuri refugee to study in an Israeli university in Hebrew. He is a long time activist for improving the lives of the African community living in Israel and refugees around the word.

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