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“The story has not ended yet”: Home is Struggle and Achievement – A Conversation with Wendy Pearlman

Wendy Pearlman is Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University where she specializes in Middle East politics, social movements, and narrative approaches to understanding conflict and displacement. Wendy earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University, an MA from Georgetown University, and a BA from Brown University. She has studied and conducted research in Spain, Morocco, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Germany, and Palestine, and carried out hundreds of interviews with displaced Syrians around the world. She has been EUME-CNMS Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Forum Transregionale Studien during the summers of the years 2016-2018 and 2021-2022. She is the author of six books: The Home I Worked to Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora (Liveright Books, 2024); Muzoon: A Syrian Refugee Speaks Out (with Muzoon Almellehan, Knopf, 2023); Triadic Coercion: Israel’s Targeting of States that Host Nonstate Actors (with Boaz Atzili, Columbia University Press, 2018); We Crossed A Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria (HarperCollins, 2017); Violence, Nonviolence, and the Palestinian National Movement (Cambridge University Press, 2011); Occupied Voices: Stories of Everyday Life from the Second Intifada (Nation Books, 2003).

Wendy Pearlman

Georges Khalil: Dear Wendy, your new book “The Home I Worked to Make: Voices From the New Diaspora”, has recently been published. What is it about, what issues does it address?

Wendy Pearlman: The Home I Worked to Make is a collection of personal testimonials from Syrians who were forced to flee Syria after 2011 or found themselves unable to return to Syria. It shares their stories of losing home, searching for home, and ultimately rethinking the meaning of home.

Organized in seven parts, the book roughly follows the chronological arc of displacement journeys, beginning with departures from a country of origin and passing through different experiences en route to or within countries of settlement. While this sequential structure upholds homemaking as a process unfolding in time, it does not intend to communicate that it follows a predetermined teleology. In some of the testimonies that follow, speakers transition from losing old homes to gaining new ones. In others, speakers do not feel like they had a home to begin with, do not build a new home, or do not feel that they need one.

I argue that, across the collection, a new concept of home emerges: Home, for those who do not have the privilege of taking it for granted, is both a struggle and an achievement. Discovering belonging after displacement demands discovering who one is, what matters most, and what one ultimately can do without. The stories in the book trace how people come to this deep awareness, and emphasize how it does not come without adversity, soul-searching, or even pain. That is the main idea behind the title. In a context such as the post-2011 Syrian diaspora, home, takes work. And when people arrive at something they feel is home, it is a feeling that they worked to make.

GK: The Book is a sequence to “We Crossed A Bridge and it Trembled: Voices from Syria”, published in 2017.  That book, too has been a curated text, based on interviews, addressing experiences of Syrians with revolution, war, destruction and displacement. What connects the books, and what is different in 2024?

WP: Both books consist nearly entirely of excerpts from interviews that I have conducted with displaced Syrians in the Middle East, Europe, and elsewhere since 2012. But each book reflects the different priorities and spirit of the times during which I conducted the interviews. I collected the interviews for We Crossed a Bridge in 2012-2016, during which my aim was to chronicle, explain, and contextualize the Syrian revolution through a mosaic of personal testimonials. With that goal in mind, the bookbegins with individuals’ memories of life under Hafez al-Assad and then Bashar al-Assad’s first decade in power. It then moves to stories about the uprising, repression, militarization, and war. The book ends with stories of people leaving Syria and some initial experiences in countries of refuge or settlement.

The Home I Worked to Make picks up where those stories leave off. It features a completely new cast of speakers, all of whom I interviewed after 2017 and most of whom I interviewed since 2020. This book begins with stories of leaving Syria and then follows speakers’ journeys as they build new futures in places where they might previously never imagined stepping foot. Whereas the first book is about the revolution, the new book is about how people make sense of the aftermaths of revolution and move forward in the shadow of violence and loss.

GK: How did you come to focus on the idea of “home”?

WP: When I began this project, my interest was in asking people about the lived experience of authoritarian rule and protest against it. As the years passed, I adopted a more open-ended approach and collected life histories or had conversations about whatever my interlocutors wished to discuss. I followed themes that emerged repeatedly in these open conversations and, with time, more and more thoughts turned toward experiences of exile. At the same time, especially in the years after 2016, I saw the theme of exile become quite prominent in cultural production and public discourse in many countries where Syrians were settling.

I decided to center this work on “home” as the flip side of exile. The term “exile” can risk “otherizing” refugees and asylum-seekers. For example, when institutions or media refer to Syrian artists in Berlin not as artists, but as “exiled artists,” it identifies them by what distinguishes them from local artists rather than what they share as cultural producers. The experience of exile is real and significant! But in choosing instead to view Syrian experiences through the lens of home, I wanted to explore something common to those who have and have not left their countries of origin. What fascinates me about home is its universality. People’s relationship to home might be simple or complicated, but nearly everyone can personally connect to the concept in some way. I wanted to learn how revolution, war, and displacement had imprinted Syrians’ sense of home in unique ways, but also wanted to uncover what Syrians’ experiences reveal about home more broadly.

GK: Thanks, Wendy. Home as the flip side of exile is an interesting idea, also to see home as struggle and achievement, rather than something inherited that is determined somehow by the legacies and memories of the past. If home also can be understood as a struggle and achievement, does it have different temporalities? And in which ways do the experiences of the Syrians you talked to differ from country to country. I would assume that the understanding and the experience of home-making might be different in the US, the UK, Turkey or Germany?

WP: Yes, in everyday speech, we typically refer to “home” as a location, be it a town, country, or house. But I think it is helpful to see home as connected to time as much as place. It is the experience of comfort and connection; of feeling valued and free to be oneself. Paying attention to the temporality of home also shows how it is linked to the future — and having a future of possibility — as much as it is to one’s past or what one has inherited from others.

Because home is a dynamic process, it also unfolds in context. For refugees, migrants, and asylum-seekers, this means that prospects for home-making differ dramatically given different legal, political, economic, and social circumstances in the countries of refuge or settlement. In another work, for example, I compare Syrians’ experiences in Germany and Turkey as a study of how different state policies, and especially the extent of legal protections and social welfare benefits, create very different trajectories for refugees’ socio-economic mobility. That has major implications for newcomers’ abilities to build secure and satisfying lives and ultimately a sense of home. At the same time, migration scholars sometimes focus exclusively on conditions in host states, as if that is the only thing that matters for home-making. My book, like another article I wrote on this topic, questions that approach. Refugees’ lives do not begin when they cross an international border and neither do their sometimes complex relationships to home. Home as a process of struggle and achievement can begin prior to displacement, infuse people’s reasons for displacement, and inform their frames of reference for belonging long thereafter. Those feelings imbue who displaced people are and what they seek from home.

GK: Exile, too is a notion that has been understood and used in different contexts and by different people in different ways. Some may see Exile as the privilege of the intellectual or artist in relation to the status as refugee, or – as  Yassin Al-Hajj Saleh wrote, as a condition of being outside history. What kind of Exile do your interlocutors refer to? And how do they relate Exile to other concepts, terms and conditions, such as refugee, migrant or diaspora?

WP: Many intellectual and cultural works on the Syrian experience invoke the term “exile” (manfa), but this is a word that my interlocutors practically never used. I remember once asking about exile during an interview with a Syrian woman in Berlin. She laughed, saying “Manfa? Sa’ad Zaghlul was in manfa. I’m living in the heart of Berlin. What kind of manfa is that?” Rather, my interlocutors were more likely to invoke the term ghurba, in the sense of homesickness or being a stranger or foreigner in a land far from home. Some invoked this with a lot of nostalgia, looking back to the towns and villages that they left behind and articulating cherished recollections of childhood innocence, familial wholeness, and communities where everyone knew everyone. But others distanced themselves from that nostalgia. In one passage in the book, a woman says “I’m critical of nostalgia sometimes because I’ve seen how the idea of a golden age can be employed politically. I don’t like looking back and staying there.”

It has also been very interesting to trace the concept of home itself in how people talk about their lives. Arabic does not have an exact equivalent of the English word “home.” Often, people used the word watan, which translates to “homeland.” That expresses the emotional weight of a native land, but is often with heavy connotations of national identity. Moving from the national to the domestic, people typically referred to bayt. That term conveys the private and familial intimacy that watan does not, but in everyday practice tends to be synonymous with a physical residence. Most frequently, however, people used the term intima’ or “belonging.” That captures the personal and social dimensions of home as a lived experience, and helps us move from home as a single defined location to home as a continually-evolving process.

GK: Home and Exile then have varieties of meaning, a home as a house seems to be easier to achieve than home as belonging, and different to the place where one can be who she or he is. How do the experiences of home-making, the notions of home as belonging change over time among the Syrians you interviewed? How do they cope with the changing contexts they live in. In 2016/17 for example, when you started your research on The Home I Worked to Make, societies like the German or the Turkish may have been more welcoming than in 2024.

WP: Yes, this is absolutely the case. For example, the book includes an interview that I did with a Syrian young man in Lebanon in 2020 and a Syrian young woman in Istanbul in 2021. At that time, they both spoke very positively about the sense of belonging they had built in those places, despite the difficulties for Syrian refugees. By summer 2023, when I was finalizing the manuscript, conditions in both countries had become significantly more difficult. I got back in touch with them to do follow-up interviews, and their words in the final chapter of the book discuss how they are coping with myriad challenges and its implications for their sense of home. I submitted the book to the publisher in August 2023. It is unfortunately not able to capture Syrians’ experiences in Germany since that time, but I know that developments are also giving people new perspectives on prospects for feeling at home there. All of this reinforces the idea of home as an experience that change over time. But for the same reason, it can point to reasons for hope: just as new barriers to belonging can form, so might new opportunities emerge that we cannot now foresee. The story has not ended yet.


Georges Khalil is Managing Director at the Forum Transregionale Studien and forms part of the TRAFO Blog’s Editorial Team.


Citation: “The story has not ended yet”: Home is Struggle and Achievement – A Conversation with Wendy Pearlman, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 25.07.2024, https://doi.org/10.58079/1236g


OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Forum Transregionale Studien (25. Juli 2024). “The story has not ended yet”: Home is Struggle and Achievement – A Conversation with Wendy Pearlman. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Abgerufen am 3. November 2024 von https://doi.org/10.58079/1236g


Forum Transregionale Studien

The Berlin-based Forum Transregionale Studien promotes the internationalization of research in the humanities and social sciences. It provides scope for collaboration among researchers with different regional and disciplinary perspectives and appoints researchers from all over the world as Fellows. More...

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