Potted Life
Life of a child refugee.
Over the many years of interviews, both professional and getting-to-know-you personal ones, I’ve struggled to verbalize my experience of being a child refugee.
In their effort to empathize, people would equate it to that of an immigrant, but, in the words of my aunt Biljana (herself a refugee to Denmark), immigrants choose to leave and go somewhere else. Refugees do not. The only choice refugees are given is to stay and die, or flee with nothing and, hopefully, live.
The philosopher in me would say that’s still a choice.
The common human me would disagree. What choice is that, really? Of course, we want to live, so of course we flee. A refugee arrives in a new land, sans choice. And a child refugee without even an awareness of choice, her decisions still in the hands of the adults in her life, for better or worse.
Would I have chosen differently, had I been given an option to stay in the war zone? Probably. I was too young to understand the horrors happening all around me, and the threat of death (or worse) at every corner. I would have wanted to stay with my family and my best friends, for that to me was safety. Being pulled out of there, overnight, without a chance to say goodbye to anyone, and never seeing some of those people who meant the world to me again, has been a hard thing to process. To accept. To heal.
At one point, many years into that self-healing journey, during one of those probing conversations, an image popped into my head: a full-grown tree stuck in a pot too small for its size. And just like that, the words came. As a poem, for that was my form of expression back then, and one I’ve been revisiting lately. An homage to that, perhaps most scarred, part of me.
What’s it like to be a child refugee, 30 years on? Well, for me, like this…
POTTED LIFE
Once upon a time
in a country far far away
a sapling started to sprout,
its seed planted years before
with love
and excitement.
She was surrounded by
Family
Friends
Community.
Their roots providing
Nutrients
Connection
Grounding.
Their canopies
Protection
and Support.
The sapling was happy.
Showered with love.
Basking in the light of belonging.
But one day,
suddenly,
without warning,
a parasite
descended upon their happy little world.
Attacking all trees in sight.
In panic that followed,
the sapling
and her fellow not-quite-trees-yet
were pulled out of the earth,
ripped from their ancestral roots,
and smuggled out.
To safety,
she was told.
But the world she arrived into
was anything
but safe.
In the foreign land,
alone,
confused,
her roots stuffed
in a plastic checkered bag,
No protection
No nutrients
No support
She tried to find her footing.
Afraid she would be recognized
by the parasites
that turned out to be there too,
(and everywhere else,
it seemed)
she did her best to blend in.
What kind of a tree
she was meant to be
was much less important
than
what kind of a tree
the world wanted her to be.
She shook off her flowers
if the trees around her
had none.
She bent back down
if surrounded
by shorter companions.
She survived.
Years passed.
She kept repotting
herself
into bigger
and bigger
pots
as she grew.
But all proved to be
Too small.
She tried planting herself
in many a foreign soil too
but none quite fit.
Too dry
too humid
too acidic
too… wrong.
At one point
she even tried
returning to the land
she came from.
But there
she found
a whole new world.
Her family
Friends
Community
long gone.
Struggling
to replant themselves,
in their own foreign soils,
far far away.
Her Homeland
full of other,
different
species.
So the little sapling,
now a full-grown tree,
remains in a pot.
She can feel her roots aching
Wanting
Trying
to be repotted
yet again.
But there is no
bigger pot.
This is the largest there is.
So for now
she stays where she is.
Wondering
instead
what kind of a tree is she?
She’s not quite sure
yet.
Her canopy camouflage
that kept her safe
all these years,
still too thick
too solid
too complex
for her to see herself
beyond.
Something evergreen
she thinks.
Definitely with flowers.
Purple or red
seems right.
Fragrant too.
For those are all qualities
that make her perk up
when spotted
elsewhere.
A sign of recognition,
perhaps?
She hopes, too,
once she’s fully emerged
from behind those camo-greens,
she will know
The land
The soil
The world
where she belongs.
And where she can
repot
herself
for good,
as she is now.
Weathered,
Twisted,
Scarred,
and yet alive.
Oh so alive.
And finally
fully
Herself.
Parasites be damned.
