A story that touches – Sonia
In the neighborhood newspaper I read a story that touched me deeply. It was written by Sonia Azatyar, who has been living in the Netherlands for four years now. She was born in Afghanistan and came to the Netherlands alone at theage of 27, without family, in a completely new world for her. She described how lonely those first years were for her.
In the article, Sonia also told how she decided to walk the Four Days Marches. During that journey, she felt carried and taken in by the people around her for the first time. That touched me. I contacted her and gave her a starter pack as a gift, so that she could also walk the Walk of Wisdom.
Not much later she was sitting at my table. The elections had been held the night before; Sonia told how difficult she found that and was afraid of the results. That same evening she had written a text. She read it aloud. As she read, tears rolled down her cheeks, but she read on.
Her words were intense, pure and honest. Sonia gave me permission to share her story. In the hope that it will be read, and that we realize how much loss and inner struggle are hidden behind the word flight.
Nightly Confession A Song for My Country
By Sonia Azatyar
Sometimes the night is friendlier than the people.
In her silence I hear the beating of my own heart,
the same heart that was silent for years
between nameless streets,
foreign languages
and the thin line between existence and disappearing.
In exile I found my voice again,
not to shout,
but to continue to exist.
Here, survival has become a form of poetry.
The longer the days last, the better I understand
that without hope nothing remains.
Maybe it’s just those little moments of light,
who flash of joy in the midst of pain,
that madness of continuing to breathe,
that connect us to life itself.
After my forced departure from my country
the migration crisis forced me to look for meaning again.
In books, in the faces of passers-by,
in a language that still doesn’t fit in my mouth.
But nothing could fill the silent hole in me.
I work, I learn, I travel,
I surround myself with good people,
But deep down, something has come to a standstill for good.
As if many women have lived in me:
one who choked her voice out of fear and fled,
one who left everything behind her work, her pride, her past without looking back,
and one who learned to survive alone
in a city without a name, without a family,
and to forge a new meaning out of darkness.
Pain became my silent teacher.
Softly, but incessantly.
Every wound a lesson,
a class every night.
We, migrants, did not learn life from books,
but of cold sidewalks,
long queues at the IND,
and nights without light.
While others slept,
we stayed awake in the school of loss.
Our parents never really lived in their country.
They only held out,
with the constant fear
to lose their children.
We are the heirs of their fatigue.
The children of unrest,
lost between two worlds.
Here they call us ‘foreigners’,
Nobody knows our names there anymore.
But those words are not labels
they are scars,
deep in the soul,
between two silent borders: home and exile.
And yet we continue.
We have learned to live without ground under our feet,
without certainty about tomorrow.
We build order from scratch:
we get up, wash our faces,
buy bread, drink coffee,
and smiling
Even when our heart trembles with fatigue.
We learned to smile out of fear,
to reassure others,
not ourselves.
But now, in this silent exile,
I sometimes smile just for myself
for the moments when no one sees
what moves in me,
for the moments when only the mirror is listening.
I live in a city
where I have no past.
The sounds of doors and bicycles wake me up,
not my mother’s voice.
Everything is strange,
But it is precisely this strangeness that teaches me
how to build a home in the unknown.
Sometimes I think I’ve fallen out of the system of life
from the endless cycle of success and failure,
the race of happiness.
But it is precisely in that disorder that
I discovered a new way of being.
I learn to make meaning, every morning,
with every step, every look, every breath.
Maybe that’s what power really is:
the ability to create your own rhythm
in a world that is constantly falling apart.
We, the generation of exile,
are still standing
with hearts full of cracks,
but still light.
With memories that have fled,
but hope has remained.
We are still alive.
And deep in our wounds something is throbbing
a light that does not come from the fatherland,
not from borders,
but from the pain itself.
We are the generation of survival,
who learned to take root in foreign soil:
with roots in the past
and branches that reach for an invisible future.
And perhaps that is the true meaning of life:
do not touch it,
but keep going
in the midst of chaos,
in the midst of exile,
in the midst of all that did not break us,
but slowly,
has made us.
Sonia Azatyar
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