Gallery of Human Migration Literary Award
2025 Honourable Mention
Awarded to the story
Thoughts of a Distant Night
Morsal Yakuby
Total Reading Time: 13 minutes
Home, the feeling of belonging; for one to feel safe at ease, to truly be one’s known true self. To truly relax and be free of others’ judgment, the hardship of life, the drawbacks, the anxieties, the world weariness of it all, the feeling of being entirely at ease, in one’s true-blue blood and skin. The sense of being completely at ease is something I’ve believed I have lost forevermore to the loss of my beloved Mum. To be lost in the old memories of sin and the pain of man. To quote Lord Alfred Tennyson “‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all” Oh, what a time to be alive.
I need to search for a new source of comfort. Mum made everywhere feel like home. I still haven’t completely lost that sense of home since her passing. Familiar surroundings keep me at ease but they’re no comfort like a real home. Love and belonging make a home. Buildings and trees and grass and traffic can be found everywhere in the world but the whole world isn’t my home. They can’t provide the humanity I yearn for. Why do I still feel a small shred of home?
I’m being drawn back into my past due to the arrival of previously forgotten family members, distantly related to my beloved Mum, and I’m almost being lost in my memories of the past. Old wounds; previously forgotten amid various silliness, dirty jokes, underhanded comments, cute videos, various arts projects like painting and crafting, and games like hide and seek, what have you. The overall ache of it all brings me to share with you the story of my hidden thoughts, my thoughts from the distant night. What became of the quiet girl who sat in the back of the class with her books and was often forgotten by her teachers? Frequently overlooked; others unwearied of said pain she was in; the fear; the general depression that lingered over her. Did they ever wonder why the girl who was always so quiet and shy, hidden in the back of the room, was like that?
I’m beckoning to the heavens above to understand better all the prior sadness and pain we’ve had to endure; why my family? What did we do in a past life to deserve such pain? Oh, the joys of being human. “My story” doesn’t exist in isolation. I am but a chapter in the story of my family. Here’s to you, my beginning of the joys of one immigrant mom to a daughter.
My beloved Mum was born in Afghanistan in 1963, a time of great hardship and uncertainty. As the younger sibling and a female, she often found herself powerless in the face of her father’s abuse. Yet, she persevered, a testament to the resilience that runs deep in our family. He often hits her and throws things around in a rage. With her being in an abusive relationship with my father, with me being disabled, living in abject poverty, him being jailed for said abuse, and him not sending proper child support, or misspelling her name on purpose to cause issues with legal paperwork. Various health issues, such as arthritis (both bone and muscle), and later in life, ovarian cancer, ultimately took her life after a two-year battle with it.
“To know one’s own home is to know one’s true self. To figure out the mindset of your parents’ point of view and learn what they felt.”
She remembered back in the day having the lights only being on partially throughout the day, and she was lucky to have even that. Often with reading or working being done with moonlight being a necessity to see. Hearing rockets land at random times is alarming and scares the citizens in the vicinity. The various horror stories she heard of others, and those of relatives being killed by the Taliban. Tasting blood and smelling burning. And yet still friendships. Love. Family. Home.
The casualness; the playful nature of others. Whilst in university there was a group of boys who always tended to mess around in class particularly by brothering each other. For example one of the boys would take off his shoe and put his socked foot in the face of his friend in front of him. When his friend reacted, the professor would get angry at the class while everyone laughed. This happened a few times more during the lecture. The student would move to another seat and his friends would throw paper airplanes or spit balls onto him. He would get upset while everyone laughed. How hard to imagine laughter and joy in such times. The school was their home and nothing else mattered.
The fact is war couldn’t stop life. The majority of the American soldiers coming over to “help” said Afghans, could be given hot tea and biscuits as a treat and a way to show their appreciation. They were apprehensive at first, sat down with them chatting away about their life, their children, their hopes, their dreams. Offering them to come over to their house and making a grand gesture with the amount of food given; stating to them, “to please stay over; let me take care of everything.” Inviting strangers into their homes, building a sense of community. Turning the “others” into a part of “us.”
My uncle “Sam” (nickname) was born in Afghanistan in 1948. The large fifteen year age gap between him and my mom is due to the amount of abuse of her father to their mother and the lack of proper health checkups. From a young age my uncle always wanted to be an American. He lost himself in old American music records. He styled his hair like the Beatles members, his favorite being John Lennon. His nickname the fact he brought his children to be “Americanized” by his own account. When he traveled to United states as a young man to head off to university he brought along his young wife and they started a family over there.
With that, his wife’s siblings also came to the States and were Americanized, as were some of my uncles and aunts. The cultural shift was profound, marked by Westernized nicknames, new speech patterns, and a completely different mindset to learn and understand. It was a journey of discovery and adaptation, a testament to the human capacity to adapt to change. They left their old home and made a new home across the world. Or did they bring home with them?
My parents are Afghani immigrants who escaped war time from the Russian’s during the 1970s and Taliban to have myself and my older sister in a small town in Germany. We slowly learned the language to better understand the culture, to raise their children in safe quiet environment, an environment in which we spent the better part of three years in before moving to Canada. Those were very poor years in Canada due to my mother’s various illnesses and my father’s abuse. I was delighted with my sister and my Mum. She, being a very friendly immigrant woman quickly made connections with other Afghan women and established a good rapport with the neighbours in our hall.
Even though we didn’t have much in terms of money, we were delighted. My mother has many friends in the building, and my sister and I often hung out at our neighbors’ houses to play or socialize. It helped me to see the candid nature of being an immigrant. The world weariness. The general anxiety of other families. The need to have the children be multiple translators to help the parents with navigating their new world. The children being exposed to mature media that would shock their sensibilities such as my cousins watching horror movies or media with vulgar language such as South Park or playing violent games such Mortal Kombat for children under the age of 12. We all lived in a small two-bedroom apartment before my sister went off to study at med school, and my beloved mother has passed.
This broke the dam and my entire extended family suddenly flooded into our lives. The feeling of seeing the newcomers was upsetting for me due to the great distance between us; how they escaped the war, the terror, the fear, the pain, and I’ve been completely safe and able to be myself. They, with their limited English-speaking skills, and I, with my poor speech pattern and limited Farsi skills, struggle with a lack of clear understanding and difficulty in learning quickly. This causes me to be almost left behind while my sister becomes closer to them and my uncles and aunts. For I knew that my (on both sides) family did care for me; the lack of proper communication with them, the general discontent due to the two wildly different mindsets from other cultures, and their lifestyles.
With them always talking about the old aches of the past; losing loved ones, the fear of the Taliban, the fear of being raped, being kidnapped, being caught in a missile or land mine. With me having almost a child-like sense of the same concerns, the fears of not being respected among my family members. They’ll never being able to truly understand me the general depression that comes with my experiences. Sometimes I envy the horrors they went through. It bonded them in a way that I felt isolated from. It gave them real reasons to be depressed. Their pain somehow more justified than my own. Their sense of home coming from within while I was searching for home from outside.
I was left alone in the world for a couple of years. Forevermore waiting for her to come back. To be accepted for me not just for being my mother’s daughter. Taught not to listen to negative comments from others, to “know who I am inside.” To know and to better understand the facts of life, the nature of it all, the overall heaviness of it, and to overcome the hardships. To know one’s true home is to know one’s true self. To figure out the mindset of your parents’ point of view and learn what they felt. The feeling of wandering around in a place where everyone looks the same and speaks the same language and has the general same mindset and attitude about life; but not being a part of it.
These are the feelings I felt while surrounded by “my people.” The fact that my family always teased me for being “white washed” due to my having lots of white friends instead of immigrants/non-white people/BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color). Afghans who show their smiles and niceness to your face but inside are quick to make snide comments behind your back. They’ll gleefully insult you to your face if they believe you don’t understand them. It’s difficult for me to speak Farsi properly due to crowded teeth and speech impairment. I can understand it complete fine, which causes them to speak in broken English to me and I respond in broken Farsi back to them. There was a gap between us.
With them being very, very conservative and I being more liberal and tend to have a more “let live to let live” set of mindsets we had little in common. Thankfully my Mum has always supported me, being a more liberal woman opposed to our relatives. For example others would force their daughters into wearing the hijab or niqab completely covering up while my sister and I only wore it to the mosque. She allowed us to stay out late; to have male friends; to have friends come over and stay over at their place, have a decent sense of privacy, and live our own lives. In the Afghan community many of these things are still unheard of. They were my family but they weren’t “my people.” My Mum was somehow the great unifier between our worlds.
To know one’s own home, to know oneself. To me Canada has always been my home. I don’t remember Frankastault, Germany. I’ve never been to Afghanistan and due to war and conflict there I don’t ever think I can go there in my life. Canada has helped me to be a better person. With kindness and understanding, it has helped me better cope with the shortcomings of life and its hardships. I’m forever grateful to my Mum for bringing us here so we could be closer to my uncle, his family, and be safe and understood. Canadian values were what I had before I could even articulate them.
For my Mum to have her children in a safe, calm, quiet environment to improve not only her own life but that of her children. Her eldest daughter became a pediatric doctor. What an achievement for an immigrant’s daughter with no established connections or favours to draw upon. I have the ability learn at my own pace; to be understood; to be heard, be seen and respected and not to be judged, hurt or beaten or just abandoned; left in the streets, left to my devices due to my various illness and disability. I have the privilege to be an artist and express myself in ways that would never be allowed or supported in other places. I am so grateful to be able to do what I do.
This legacy continues as my sister has two baby sons. The old-world Afghani ideals are almost completely lost. The children of mixed race of Afghani and Romanian combined in a perfect example of the great melting pot of being wholly Canadian. The legacy of the two cultures come together beautifully to create a new set of values. They were so close in some ways and yet so different in others. Now there is a collaboration of child raising that brings together the best of so many cultures in the prime example of what Canada is all about.
With them they will never experience the old fears that we have faced. The fear of being evicted from their home. The lack of food and resources from poverty. Their parents being lonely in a world they didn’t grow up in. Their parents not receiving proper medical treatment due to a language barrier or due to potential xenophobia. The general lack of caring of their health because “that’s life” or “it’s just God’s plan” when healthy alternatives are easily available. Being dismissed or not understanding mental health issues such as myself harming my mother not understanding that I do it due the depression and not as an act to bring harm to others. These children will always have a home.
There is a lingering thought in my mind, if other immigrants share my thoughts of the night. If they feel the fact that they’re losing their culture in the midst of just living naturally in a new place. The tug of war between the past and future while trying to understand where home is in the present. Is it best to be an Afghan living in Canada, an Afghan-Canadian, or just a Canadian? Where does an immigrant belong? Where can I call home?
With other immigrant children, particularly with a Vietnamese family friend of my sister, her mother wouldn’t let her and her sisters stay out late, watch any adult content in front of her (with vulgarity, violence, etc.), always calling her to check up on them; no privacy among the sisters at all. Their experience was so different from how my sister and I were raised. Yetshe turned out almost the same as us. Her upbringing and family history didn’t change who she would become. Perhaps this is the goal of immigration. No matter who you are, where you come from, or what you believe, you can be a Canadian and call Canada your home.
There seems to be a universal immigrant experience. For the base of being of two different races, two different cultures, the similarities are interesting. The use of various idiosyncrasies of our mothers and grandmothers that transcend cultures and backgrounds. A slight sound of disapproval or mild shock that is unmistakable to a fellow immigrant from any part of the world. The tweaks to the use of English words. The use of the word of “Cafa” instead of “Cafe” despite living here for decades. I was shocked to learn that saying “King Burger” instead of “Burger King” in which I thought was just an adorable moment of my Mum’s English skills but to my delight it’s something that both my sister’s husband’s parents and my husband’s parents have both said and done. The casualness of talking about disturbing facts of the said “old country”, albeit about the war, war flashbacks, scary situations, the fear of sexual assault, and their children not being either mentally or physically appropriately developed.
There were also so many things I thought only my Mum did; which I learned are very common. Such as getting other immigrants to give me discounts on various things due to them being “neighbors” because the countries of origin are close. Calling close people “my friend” or “my brother/my sister” as a sign of affection to others. The fact she always went to the store for “one thing” and left with a buggy full of items. The use of multiple non-English words in English conversations to the confusion of others. The casual affection between children in public frequently involving a cheek pinch or a parent telling the child how cute they are. On how the two different styles of speaking on two sides of the world, with other religions, cultures, and governments, differ. The fact that all the mentioned parties above share the same idiosyncrasies and almost identical ones is interesting to me. The set of families is so different yet so close in thoughts and mannerisms.
No matter where we come from there is a core human connection that binds us all together. Immigrating to a country is a sign that the new country has values that allow it to become home. Assimilating doesn’t mean abandoning our old cultures, it means integrating the best part of it into the new culture. Canada’s identity is a beacon of the best parts of immigration to the rest of the world and makes it possible for everyone to call it home.
Those we left behind; never forgotten. Forever in our hearts, in our minds, the thoughts of you, the past, the present of the unknown future. The joy of being your daughter, the pride I have of being yours. I may be disabled but I’m am proud of be yours. A disabled Afghani woman, the power of you brought me and my sister to this particular country. This beautiful accepting country. I hold both countries in my heart forevermore. I could not be myself without my Afghan heritage and Canadian upbringing. To be my true-blooded self, the disabled, bisexual, Afghan artist woman that I am. Canada gave me the freedom to finish my education, the treatment of illness, to better my mental health, and for that I’m forever grateful to be a Canadian.
This is where the feeling of home comes from. That last shred of home left in my soul after my mother’s passing was a gift she gave me many years ago. A permanent home that will be forever with me. Not based on physical walls or even the people around me. This home is based on values and ideals that are core to my being. They transcend anything physical and provide a source of comfort that I can draw upon any time I need. Immigrating here to experience this is a gift I can’t thank enough for.
For being there for me; for letting me properly grow up in a safe environment; for letting me learn at my own pace; for giving me safety, an education, a family, a marriage, and the joys of being an aunt to my precious nephews. The joys that this country has brought me are immeasurable by any units because I’m able to be what I am. I am able to be happy in my skin; to be completely free and safe in this country is something I can never thank enough. Thank you to my Mum and this country for letting me be me. Canada is my home. I am Canadian.