The Pain that Bonds Us

The Arabic words silat or irtibat are the two of the closest translations to the English word bonding. Bonds that reflect blood ties are silat al-rahem (the bond of the womb). Rana’s words are an example of silat al-rahem as expressed to us by newcomer mothers from Syria. Her words also reflect one of their biggest fears: losing the bond they have with their children. Like many others before them, Syrian Canadian newcomers want to preserve and reinforce their home language and traditions, the thread that keeps them bonded.

Rana is a mother we met through a team-based research project in Mississauga and Toronto called Refugee Integration, Stress, and Equity, or RISE. RISE began in late 2016 as a one-year pilot study to shed light on Syrian newcomer mothers’ wellness as they worked to resettle their children and families during their first year in Canada.11Neda Maghbouleh, Laila Omar, Melissa A. Milkie, and Ito Peng, “Listening in Arabic: Feminist Research with Syrian Refugee Mothers,” Meridians 18, no. 2 (2019): 482–507.The pilot project was expanded into a longitudinal study where we followed, observed, and conducted in-depth interviews with the same participants—mothers, teenage children, and a few grandmothers—for three consecutive years between 2018 and 2021. Fifteen out of twenty RISE Team members are native Arabic speakers. Rula and Laila were part of the research assistant (RA) team that conducted interviews in Arabic. Neda is the primary faculty investigator (PI) of the project.

Arabic is our (Rula’s and Laila’s) native language, used to communicate with the project’s participants. Conducting research in Arabic was informed by the feminist approach taken by the project’s co-investigators, who include Ito Peng, Professor of Sociology and Public Policy, and Melissa Milkie, Professor of Sociology, both at UofT. Inherent in this feminist approach is the importance of foregrounding the participants’ voices and centering their empowerment, while also creating the trust and familiarity necessary for collaboration. With this comes the responsibility to seek linguistic and cultural expertise, meaning that this collaborative work could only be done in Arabic. Hiring research assistants with Arab heritage who share “geographic, cultural, linguistic, and religious commonalities”22Rawan Arar, “Bearing Witness to the Refugee Crisis: Western Audiences and Jordanian Humanitarian Workers,” Middle East Institute, Washington, DC: https://www.mei.edu/publications/bearing-witness-refugee-crisis-western-audiences-and-jordanian-humanitarian-workers.with project participants was necessary in order to do justice to the mothers’ narratives. 

Our first introduction to mothers like Rana was at the Dixie Bloor Neighbourhood Centre (DBNC) in Mississauga, where newcomers gain English language skills. Our cultural background and ability to communicate in Arabic with the mothers in their earliest days of resettlement helped create a strong bond between us. Our participants were able to freely express painful stories of war and displacement witnessed and felt by each one of us, the researchers, in a trusting and accepting environment. We felt the participants’ anguish as we listened to their stories in one language, and we felt anguish once again as we shared our experiences with RISE Team in another.

Below, we elaborate on the strong and distinctive connections we were able to build with our project’s participants as well as with each other within RISE Team. Such connections are informed by the unique positionalities and identities we bring with us to the project.

Like our project participants, I came to Canada from the Middle East. Similarly, I’ve lived through a civil war, left my home country at a mature age, and struggled with displacement and longing for family members left behind. Sharing a migrant identity with the women I interviewed placed me in an “insider” position and helped build a stronger bond and sense of affinity and similarity between us. Here are a couple of examples from our mothers’ interviews that show this bond.

When discussing her departure from her parents who still reside in Syria, Salma cried: “You know departure is very difficult, you must know how very hard it is.” When sharing her concerns about her family expenses in Canada, Ashwaq laughed: “You know us Arabs, the biggest expense we have, as well, is on food.”

I am a mother, and my son was one of the RAs who interviewed teen boys. Sometimes, we would head out together to interview a mother and her son. Introducing our connection to the participating families placed us as “insiders,” creating a bond and a sense of kinship between us, and a space of empowerment for the mothers. Many showcased their maternal skills by offering us advice. For example, Fawzia, who was an Arabic language teacher in Syria, lovingly reprimanded my son and I for mixing Arabic and English together in our conversation. She took the chance to share her expertise, advising me to only speak in Arabic to my children as “Arabic is our heritage and culture.”

Zainab is a gentle and calm Syrian newcomer mother who welcomed me to her modest two-bedroom apartment in Mississauga. As soon as I introduced myself, she asked if I wanted to meet her twenty-four-year-old daughter who has Wilson disease, which prevents her from interacting with others. “I hope you can see her and talk to her,” Zainab told me, wishing for me to bond with her daughter—even though our project involved only adolescents between the ages of thirteen and nineteen.

As a young woman in my mid-twenties, I am close in age to many of the young mothers and some of the older children who are struggling but also have big goals for the future. As a daughter of immigrants who left Egypt in 2013 during unsettled times, my journey in Canada is of interest to participants. As a PhD candidate who is proficient in English and went to university in Canada, I get asked curious questions about how I learned English, how I experienced the Canadian education system, and why I am part of RISE Team. Interviewing newcomer mothers and teenagers is always a beautiful, yet heartbreaking experience for me. I, too, appreciate the ability to bond in Arabic with others living fil ghurba “in estrangement.”33Ramy M. K. Aly, Becoming Arab in London: Performativity and the Undoing of Identity. London: Pluto Press, 2015: 14. But I am also reminded every day of their painful and traumatic resettlement experiences.

After sharing her story, struggles, and fears, Zainab ends each interview by praying for me in Arabic: that I succeed in school, that I stay healthy and safe, and that God blesses me in life. And in those last few minutes, I cannot help but remember my grandmother back home, who always shares the same prayers with me before ending every phone call.

Unlike Rula and Laila, I have only been face-to-face with a fraction of the fifty-three families enrolled in our study. Instead, the people with whom I spent the most time were the project’s skillful and sensitive RAs, who numbered between eight and twelve at any given time. Our Friday meetings in the basement of the Sociology department at UofT, or on Zoom during the COVID-19 pandemic, often moved me to tears, only some of which I cried in front of them.

Sometimes I cried because of the stories that RAs relayed from our participants—not only about Syria or refugee camps, but also about the deprivation, violence, and poverty they’ve faced since resettlement in Mississauga and Toronto. Sometimes I cried because I struggled to find the right resources or words to comfort team members as they laboriously transcribed and translated interviews from Arabic to English. I was moved to tears of gratitude, too, when RAs helped the teenagers apply for jobs or university, when they translated for Syrian elders at doctors’ visits, and when their phones would explode with Ramadan messages and well-wishes from the families enrolled in our project. Many times, this project has felt like it belongs more authentically to the RAs, and to our research participants, than to me.

The study reflects my research interests in migration and identity; it also reflects my evolution as the child of newcomer immigrants who became a new mother during the period of the study too. But neither perspective is sufficient for a project like this, which requires an ethical and sustained commitment to the newcomers who entrusted us with their participation. And I am not, in fact, the executor of this last commitment to our participants; I have depended on Rula, Laila, and the other RAs to be the needle and the thread that stitches our collective work into existence.

As RISE Team members, we continue to assume our responsibility through working together in our academic capacity: publishing, presenting, and highlighting our participants’ narratives as newcomers to Canada. Most significantly, witnessing and holding the pain others entrusted us with will always keep us bonded together.