![]() ![]() Still, accepting America’s status as her new 'home’ felt like a betrayal. “We knew of America only from TV and maybe they knew of Arabs only from front-page headlines.” The “real struggle,” she says, began two years later in 2008 when the family relocated to the US. It was the beginning of what she describes as “the unravelling of me.” Unavoidable references to her near-yet-distant homeland in class and during small talk served as a cruel reminder of her dislocation. Unable to suppress the anguish of ‘Ghasa’ which in Arabic describes a propulsive pain that lodges itself in the throat, Noor returned to Iraq in 2018" "Even after finding solace in the US, Iraq’s legacy still dominated Noor’s thinking. ![]() “When they spoke to me in their dialect I felt excluded from the conversation, and yet Iraq was always brought up.” They crossed the Rubicon, the point of no return, into Syria as Iraq’s civil war raged on.ĭespite the cultural and linguistic ties the two neighbours share, in Syria Noor experienced homesickness and her first culture shock. ![]() “It was my sweet sixteenth birthday,” Noor said, recounting the day that she and her family escaped Iraq. ![]()
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