Gallery of Human Migration Literary Award
2025 Inaugural Grand Prize
Awarded to the story
Reclaiming My Name
Mohamed Hammoud
Total Reading Time: 11 minutes
The Beckoning
Beirut, Lebanon (1976)
It was late afternoon on a hot summer day. The sun baked the streets of Beirut until the pavement glowed, and the air weighed heavily on me. The dust clung to everything: hands, windows, the hem of my shorts. Even the oleander trees looked weary, their pink and white blossoms drooping toward the cracked sidewalks. I was seven years old, and the war hadn’t yet
arrived at our doorstep, but it was coming.
My mother had sent me out for something simple. Parsley, maybe. Or salt. I don’t remember what, only that she kissed the top of my head before I left and told me, “Yalla, habibi, go quickly before the shops close.” Her voice always wrapped around me like shade in the heat. I walked down from our apartment near the Basta district, the working-class neighbourhood on a rise just west of downtown. Storefronts pulled their metal grates halfway for siesta. The streets murmured with a familiar rhythm: the chatter of neighbours, the slam of taxi doors. The air smelled of warm bread, sweat hanging thick.
That’s when I heard it: cutting through the heaviness like a holy wind. Surat al-Shams rose from a nearby mosque in the voice of AbdulBasit AbdulSamad as I passed a small grocer’s stall in Al-Khandaq. The voice travelled through concrete alleys, its textured melody weaving like incense. For a moment, the whole city seemed to pause and listen. The sun cast golden angles over balconies. Children skipped stones across open gutters. Cardamom and car horns mingled. It was an ordinary day.
And then the siren came, a long, high-pitched wail sliced the day open. Everything stopped. Without thinking, I ran into the nearest alley, a crack where the light barely reached. I crouched against the wall, knees to my chest, the drone still ringing long after it stopped. Time became syrup, heavy, slow, endless. The smell of gasoline in the air. Dust slanting like ghosts. I didn’t cry. I didn’t call out. I waited.
When the world returned to motion, something had shifted. The warmth was gone. The laughter didn’t come back. I walked home in silence. My mother didn’t need to ask. One look at my dirt-smudged face and trembling hands, and she understood. She placed warm bread in my hand and smoothed my hair. Her touch said, You are safe now. But I wasn’t.
The war began for me not with an explosion or a bullet, but with a sound, and the silence that followed. That silence lodged in my chest and came with us when we fled by night, months later. But before we fled, we tried to stay.
I remember the unravelling. April 13, 1975. A bus carrying Palestinian passengers ambushed in a Christian neighbourhood in Beirut. Dozen killed. A lit match on dry grass. Riots, shootings, checkpoints. Gunmen on rooftops. Stores looted and pillaged. A pharmacy shattered to glitter.
At night, we slithered beneath the corridor window, shadows against the floor, evading snipers stationed in an unfinished building not far away. My father stopped going to work. We lived in a half-life, waiting for gunfire, praying for silence.
“The war began for me not with an explosion or a bullet, but with a sound, and the silence that followed.”
Eventually, my parents decided it was no longer safe. We fled south to the Jnoub, to my father’s village of Tebnine, quieter, slower, steeped in earth and stone, terraced hills lined with olive and pine, the ruins of a Crusader castle watching over minaret and church tower. We stayed in a friend’s home that also served as a schoolhouse. Chalkboards on the walls. The scent of ink and old textbooks. Time stretched: long days under fig trees, nights of whispered stories and restless dreams.
I was supposed to attend school with the village children. I went once, maybe twice, but something in me resisted. While others gathered for lessons, I wandered. I slipped into the pine forest, followed sunlit paths through olive groves and wild thickets, pretending I was on a quest. I climbed the tallest trees to see Mount Hermon on the horizon, to find a trace of where we came from or where we might go next. Near a still pond, a cave welcomed me for hours, where I whispered to shadows I conjured into ghosts, old men with rifles, mothers in black, boys who never made it out. At the watering place, I traced ancient drawings with my fingers as if they were my history.
Even then, I sensed something fragile: we might never return. The night before we left, the house filled not with furniture but with the weight of parting. Friends arrived with trays of fruit, neighbours with warm bread and words of hope. An old woman from the sūq pressed her palms to my head and whispered a blessing in a voice cracked with years. The village streamed through my grandmother’s green gate, some smiling, others already mourning, Write. Remember. Come back. I didn’t know what lay ahead, but I knew what I was leaving: fig trees and pines, cousins’ laughter, the smell of zaʿatar and olives, the only version of home I had known.
I was excited and afraid, a hum in my chest that felt like both sorrow and wonder. This wasn’t just a departure. It was a farewell to a way of being. Not a new chapter, but a new book, one I hadn’t chosen to write, one that would write me.
We began the journey of exile. Damascus received us for days while papers were gathered, familiar like Beirut, bigger, older, quieter, as if time were catching its breath. Alexandria was only an airport, air thick and salty as the Mediterranean brushed the edges of
our exile. Paris was a single night behind white curtains billowing like ghosts above a city that kept talking. A brief stop in Montreal before our final destination: London, Ontario. A new country. A new identity. A new life.
But the siren never left me. I still hear it sometimes, carried on the wind in quiet moments. When I do, I see that boy in the alley, in the heat, waiting for the world to make sense. Part of me is still waiting. I didn’t know it then, standing in the shadow of war, holding my mother’s hand as the siren cried louder than my breath, but this was the beginning of everything. The beginning of my flight. The search for faith. The long road toward home. This is not just the story of where I came from. It is the story that beckoned me, of what I carried, and what carried me.
Before the sirens. Before the darkness swept in like smoke. There was light. Music
poured from balconies, perfume hung in the air, and the soft laughter of children skipped down
boulevards lined with oleander and orange blossom. Beirut was not just a city. She was breath,
rhythm, pulse.
They called her the Paris of the Middle East, but that was never quite right. Beirut didn’t need another name to shine. She had her rhythm, wild, untamed, full of contradictions, where the adhan floated alongside the clink of cups of qahwa, where poets and revolutionaries shared cafés with businessmen and drifters, where the sea kissed the cliffs while the mountains held
their secrets. She didn’t imitate. She defied. And that was her magic.
Streets moved with elegance and rhythm, wide boulevards shimmering under the Mediterranean sun, beauty worn like a silk scarf tossed over the shoulder. Sidewalk shops spilled onto cobblestones; old men played backgammon under striped awnings; women strolled arm in arm in French perfume and Italian shoes. On the Corniche, families walked to the music of waves. There was theatre and poetry, cinema and politics, prayer and debate. There was room for everyone.
Beirut, then, was a mosaic of memory: perfume, rain, sea spray, fresh bread, jasmine, music. My mother stirred lentils to the voice of Fairouz; we sat on balconies at dusk as lights blinked on across the city. Arabic, French, Armenian, and English threaded the air. Church bells and the adhan called in harmony. Children played soccer in alleyways; elders debated politics and poetry in cafés.
Our diversity was a beauty that needed tending. Left unheld, it became a fault line. Those who feared unity learned to weaponize difference; outside hands pressed on the cracks. The mosaic shattered, but not the love that made it.
And there I was, a child of this dream, the baby of nine, adored by a constellation of siblings who slipped me sweets and surprises, everyone’s petit prince. My earliest memories are full of light and sound: my mother holding my hand as we walked through Hamra in the rain, her black coat brushing my shoulder, her heels clicking softly, the warm smell of roasted chestnuts drifting from a vendor’s cart. The reel plays in sepia, always slow motion.
This was the Beirut I knew. The Beirut I loved. The Beirut that remembered me, even when I had to forget her. Because when the war began, everything changed. But before that, there was beauty. Even now, decades later, when I close my eyes, I return to those streets. And still, the streets remember our names, even when we have forgotten them.
New Beginnings
London, Canada (1976)
We landed at night, August 26, 1976, at London International Airport. The air was cooler than Beirut’s, but no less heavy. Tarmac lights glowed like distant stars through the fog of exhaustion and hope. We were seven newcomers joining the three who had settled ahead of us. My mother wept, not from grief but relief, her Avon perfume, Timeless or Moonwind, threading safety through the terminal. My father’s shoulders lowered; my sister’s laughter cut through the announcements like a small light.
We drove to our new home in two, maybe three, cramped cars. Darkness pressed against the windows; the outside silence felt impossible after Beirut, where even midnight had a heartbeat. My brother’s house waited at the end of a quiet street, a modest place that felt like a palace: two bedrooms, a kitchen, a basement that smelled of paint. Ten of us under one roof, mattresses unrolled, fresh blankets spread with care. This hush was different, not fear, but order, the tick of a clock, the hum of a refrigerator, floors that carried no memory of fleeing footsteps.
Morning revealed a world we had only seen in catalogues: streets wide and smooth, hedges trimmed to the same polite length, houses standing apart like courteous strangers. Sears pages and cereal boxes became my quiet English teachers; I sounded out the words, decoding a life that liked its edges rounded. People smiled, but their questions arrived with a weight. Did you have fridges? Running water? Camels? The questions came lightly, with chuckles or friendly tones, but they revealed something heavier: we weren’t just new, we were foreign. Strange. Other. Their smiles tried to bridge the gap, but their words reminded us of the distance they imagined between our lives and theirs.
We traded the outdoor sūq for fluorescent malls where the air never paused. Grocery aisles dazzled, colours stacked like candy, choices without end. My mother turned cans in her hands searching for halal, asking strangers with broken English and a generous smile. Every outing was an obstacle course of small bravery.
Autumn set the trees on fire, gold and amber letters drifting to the sidewalks. Canada asked for a new silence, not the hush of hiding but the restraint of space. Then winter came without apology. Snowbanks rose like walls; the first touch stung. We learned to dress in layers, to walk like penguins on ice, to listen for school closures the way we once listened for the adhan. We built snowmen with mismatched mittens and drank hot chocolate that burned our hands. In learning cold, we learned from one another.
Community thickened. More families arrived; sponsorship papers fluttered on kitchen tables. Basements fogged with Fairuz on cassette and winter breath; mothers set out tabbouleh, hummus, and bread; fathers leaned shoulder to shoulder over cards; children skated between folding chairs. These weren’t simply parties; they were repairs. At parks, we grilled kebab and played barefoot soccer under maple shade. We were refugees becoming residents, guests becoming neighbours.
Even school registration turned the ordinary sacred. We lined our pencils like rails toward a future. When the Catholic system refused us, we were simply Muslims, we enrolled in public school. A few nights before class, my oldest sister stood in our living room like a teacher and handed out names with the notebooks.
“Nada, you’ll be Nancy. Abdullah, you’re Allen.” She placed a sky-blue notebook on my lap. “And you, you’ll be Mike.”
It felt like dress-up, crisp, easy, a clean slate. But beneath the game, something tore. Mike opened doors and asked a price. Teachers smiled; introductions smoothed. Inside, a thread tugged. At home, I was still Hamoudi, each name a thread to meaning. Outside, survival asked for a mask.
The sky had changed, but my name kept calling from beneath its quiet. Between Mike and Mohamed, I learned to live with both, and to long for one.
On Becoming
I started Grade 3 just days after we arrived in Canada, in the fall of 1976. They dressed me like the other kids, jeans with patched knees, T-shirts with cartoon prints, leather Kodiak boots two sizes too big so I could grow into them and not out of them too soon. I carried the same kind of lunchbox, one with plastic latches and a faded superhero on the lid. I looked like them. But I wasn’t them. Not really.
The difference didn’t take long to surface. It was in the way they said my name, short, sharp, clipped, like it was too heavy on their tongues. It was in the questions: “Are you Christian or something else?” “Why does your mom wear that thing on her head?” “Why do you smell like garlic?”
I learned quickly to laugh at myself before they could. To pretend not to care. To offer up jokes that made them laugh, even when they scraped against my pride. But the laughter only bought me moments. It never bought me safety.
At lunchtime, I’d sit at the edge of the table, peeling open aluminum foil to reveal a pita sandwich with labneh and cucumbers. Sometimes za’atar. Sometimes leftover falafel. Always homemade. Always fragrant. Almost always unwelcome.
The other kids had juice boxes, ham sandwiches, chocolate chip cookies, shiny wrappers, and plastic containers I’d never seen before. When they traded snacks, no one looked my way. My sandwich sat untouched unless I ate it fast, before the teasing began.
“Ew! What’s that?” I once offered to trade half of it for a cookie. The boy wrinkled his nose. “No thanks. I don’t eat weird food.”
I told myself I didn’t care. But I did. So much more than I let on. I cared when the boys picked teams, and I was always last. I cared when they pushed me in the hall or whispered things just loud enough for me to hear. I cared when they laughed at my clothes, or the way I said “thank you” too formally, like I was trying too hard. And I was. Trying too hard. I remember standing in front of the bathroom mirror at school, tugging at my clothes, wondering if I could just fit in, perhaps today would be the day I’d make a friend. I never wanted to stop being who I was. I just didn’t want to be different. I wanted to belong.
At recess, I drifted to the edge of the playground, watching the others while pretending not to. Some days, I sat on the swings and closed my eyes, trying to imagine I was somewhere else.
And sometimes, I was. In my mind, I was back in the sunbaked hills, in Tebnine, where summer stretched wide and unbroken, shielded by pine groves and mountain breezes. In those moments, I was not an outsider. I was home.
But then the bell would ring, and I would be back in Canada, in my too-white classroom with tidy cubbies and maps of a country I didn’t yet understand. Back to the quiet judgment of boys who didn’t need to understand me to know I didn’t belong.
On Belonging
I had grown accustomed to living in the in-between, not by choice, but by the force of silence. Lebanon had never left me. It pulsed in the back of my throat whenever I tried to pronounce English words that didn’t sit right on my tongue. It lived in the smell of olive oil on my mother’s hands, in the lullabies she hummed while folding our laundry, in the sigh she let out whenever the news mentioned Beirut.
And Canada had never fully embraced me. It smiled politely, but never let me in. The welcome was conditional, the belonging performative. Neighbours waved but never invited us past the porch. Classmates nodded but never called after school. No one asked where I came from, not because they didn’t know, but because they didn’t want to know.
War didn’t end when we fled. It simply changed form, from air raids to lunchroom silence, from rubble to the sharp sound of mispronounced names. It followed me across oceans, embedded in the way teachers paused before taking attendance, in the way my mother’s body flinched at loud noises, in the way I learned to fold in on myself to stay small, to stay safe.
Belonging, too, was a door that never opened, even when I knocked with both hands. Even when I learned the anthem. When I said the Lord’s Prayer. When I laughed at jokes I didn’t understand. Even when I tucked away my other self, the one with Arabic vowels and sandal-worn feet. Neighbours never really became friends. And friends and family in Lebanon became a list of names spoken less and less, written on a scroll I had hurriedly folded away. Or maybe it was folded for me when they put me on that plane, when they gave me a new name, when they took my real one away. Which is why, even beneath a new sky, carrying a name that wasn’t mine, I still wandered between worlds, never fully arriving, never truly returning.
I had perfected another language, not English, not Arabic, but the quiet code of survival, the one you speak with your eyes lowered, your lunch uneaten, your laughter borrowed. The one you speak when you’re trying to fit into a world that has already decided you don’t.
Silence was not just the absence of speech. It was the presence of fear. It weighed on me in every classroom, every hallway, every conversation where I counted my words like coins. I learned early that speaking could cost you, that asking questions could mark you, that being yourself might provoke the wrong kind of attention.
Canada said it welcomed us, celebrated multiculturalism, embraced diversity. But that welcome came with conditions. Be different, but not too different. Keep your food, your music, your holidays, but tuck away your language, your prayers, your politics. Blend in. Smile. Don’t correct the mispronunciations of your name. Don’t explain why your mother wears a hijab or your father prays at odd hours. Don’t talk too much about where you come from; it makes people uncomfortable.
In this culture, silence was rewarded. Silence was mistaken for gratitude. And so, like many of us, I became fluent in it. I shrank my voice, folded it neatly behind “Mike.” I nodded when they joked about terrorists, laughed politely at questions about camels and deserts, erased the parts of myself that didn’t fit the frame.
But silence is not the same as belonging. Belonging means showing up as your full self, name intact, history honoured, faith respected. Silence asked me to fragment myself, to leave pieces behind so I could be accepted.
From a young age I knew that this silence was not neutral. It was political, racial, about power. Reclaiming your voice was labelled resistance; insisting on your real name was branded defiance; pride in where you came from was treated as suspicion.
They called it multiculturalism, but what they meant was assimilation. Erasure.
And so I wore names like armour. Each mask became a shield, a way to stay invisible, to survive. With every borrowed name, I washed away more of my identity, like waves erasing footprints in sand, pulling me from the shoreline of Mohamed, of home, of heritage.
I walked that tightrope, too Arab to be Canadian, too Canadian to be Arab, too quiet to be a problem, too silent to be free. I belonged nowhere fully. And yet, deep down, something in me was beginning to stir.
Because even silence, over time, begins to hum with the ache of what’s unsaid. I wasn’t trying to become someone else; I was trying to return to myself. To Mohamed. A name may fall silent, but the soul keeps speaking. Even beneath the mask, even through the quiet, it waits for the day you finally listen.
Buried beneath the quiet, a whisper remained, not in the name they gave me, but in the one spoken in my mother’s prayers, rooted in generations, still calling me home.