The Various Medium’s of Ghorba

“Weathered and battered signpost towards Jerusalem.” Entrance to Al Ram village, West Bank. Photo by @habjouqa

In order to understand ghorba—exile and/or foreignness—in a manner that views human scars as part of a singular event, we are compelled to see those who write about their own experience in this state not as mere diarists but rather as interlocutors narrating from a person they once knew. Exile is chaotic, unflinching, exhilarating, revelatory—yet dark and suffocating—for those punctured by the shell that dislocation carves through the heart and mind. I write on exile as though I am an interlocutor for my past self and for those who have bestowed their own interpretation of their past, of what the punctured hole gaping in their bodies has done to their present. Beginning with the word ghorba was purposeful, as the foreignness explored in this photo and art essay is tied to that which professes itself in Arabic and on the Arabic-speaking world.

The condemnation to ghorba has been plentiful in the region, touching the old and the young, the political and the ignorant, the fighter and the submissive—the rich, but mostly the poor. This state, a condition that the late Edward Said deemed an “unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place,” is hard to pinpoint and articulate in a manner that maps its scope and encompassing effect on the mind and body of those entrapped in its travesty. Ghorba is beyond verbal articulation because it holds immense semantic weight; evoking the word is limiting in that it carries a discursive burden too heavy for language alone to bear.

Moroccan anthropologist Abdelmajid Hannoum writes that in his ghorba, “I have always felt my recollections of past events and experiences as acute” and that, because of this feeling, “the only home I left was in my imagination, in the form of memories of places and people in places and experiences in places that no longer exist except in recollections” (Hannoum, p. 209).

Reading Hannoum allows us to see how ghorba is difficult to interpret unless one has felt it themselves. The word and its manifestation resist definition through language alone; to capture it, we must engage with the depth of image, sound, and artistic expression to seize the rupture, longing, and dislocation that ghorba entails. For the readers of tagharrab (which literally means “went out of place”), art and imagery provide what words fail to hold. To transcribe the feeling of ghorba, one must recognize that the texture of loss, the shape of absence, and the untranslatable weight of displacement demand an expansion of mediums. It requires relinquishing the rigidity of language and allowing all possible forms of expression to act as vessels of knowledge, as legitimate and profound as words.

Below, you will find the stories and ideas of those who live in a state of foreignness. In viewing their work, let what is to come carry you beyond traditional modes of understanding—beyond language, into the space where ghorba is felt rather than simply described. For where tagharrab is placed, its spaces are peripheral, demanding that the reader dismantle rigid structures and embrace a mode of knowing that transcends conventional boundaries.

 The focus will be on Syria, Palestine, and Morocco—three distinct peoples with vastly different stories of exile.

Exile

Hannoum’s seminal work on Tangier illustrates the uniqueness of how ghorba is understood within the context of hogra, where it manifests as “a daily condition for those who are not protected by the state, who are abused by the very law that claims justice for all” (Hannoum, p. 35). Citing Maalouf, Hannoum connects the narratives of West Africans and Moroccans in exile to Les Désorientés, where the displaced affirm the power states hold over their people. The weight of exile in these stories is not simply about displacement but about citizenship itself—the burden of belonging to a state that fails to protect its own. The hoggara, those subjected to hogra, seek to detach themselves from the condition that defines them as such, and in doing so, they confront the burdens of their citizenship, questioning whether it is a privilege or a form of oppression.

In Syria, Wendy Pearlman follows the Saidian tradition of viewing exile as “like death but without death’s ultimate mercy… an unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. . . . [T]rue exile is a condition of terminal loss” (Said, quoted by Pearlman, p. 14). Yet, she complicates this perspective by revealing how, much like the Moroccan experience of being exiled while still at home, many Syrians in her interviews articulated a paradoxical sense of relief. Unlike those who wrestle with the burden of citizenship and its failures, these Syrians described never having fully known what home felt like in Syria. For them, the absence of a concrete attachment to a homeland paradoxically eased their integration into new spaces, allowing them to construct a sense of belonging beyond the constraints of nationality and statehood. In both cases, exile forces a reckoning with citizenship—not just as a legal status but as an existential condition, one that dictates who belongs, who is protected, and who remains perpetually displaced.

Hasan Murad’s passport design captures the obscurity that Ghorba brings to citizenship and one’s connection to the homeland. Murad writes, “There is no difference between country seals when printed on the Syrian passport; they all mean exile. Exile has many names and devastating fates, from which only some rare individuals may be spared. As for me, the homeland occupied me in my exile, and exile occupied me in my homeland. They both no longer make sense in the fogginess of meanings.”

For Murad, ghorba is chaos where the rupture of one’s roots becomes the defining link to the homeland rather than severing it. The Saidian tradition of exile is present in his work, but it coexists with the experience of those who have moved on, forging a home beyond the place that once anchored them. His use of passport stamps is powerful, transforming what is typically a bureaucratic mark into a visual of movement, displacement, and fragmentation. In the scattered imprints of visas and border crossings, the tagharrab is urged to push forward, to carve out a home despite the travesty of Ghorba . Yet, no matter how far they go, the pattern of the stamps sketches an outline of Syria, where home lingers in the shadows—no longer fully present, but never fully gone.

About a Young Man Named Kashoosh

Photographer Jaber Al-Azmeh writes that the figure in his photo “was faint and mute and seemed like a small running river. I was trying to feel his shape in that bitter roar. On the roads, between those sore throats, I felt like he was a loud waterfall for the first time. I touched his borders across the sky; he represents me.”

Al-Azmeh’s work captures the revelatory yet dark and suffocating inscription of the ghorba imposed on those seeking to burn into a space and time where they and their community can be free, where the law that governs does so not as an instrument of oppression but as a symbolic representation of the people and their desire to be free. Encountering Al-Azmeh’s work, I was struck by the soul-ripping weight of estrangement, the way the fight for freedom fractures not only the body but the very essence of being. In this photo, the blurred figure dissolves into layers of motion, a ghost caught between worlds, where the longing to burn into a free existence dislodges one from their roots and the very soil that once anchored them. The red haze swallows the form, a suffocating reminder of both fire and blood—of revolutions waged and lives uprooted, of the price paid in ghorba’s relentless erosion of self.

Hannoum writes in his epilogue that “no matter what they say about migration and exile, the condition of the migrant is perhaps often not only one of inner conflict but also one of constant pain—a life of otherness, foreignness, and depending on the context, it can also be one of constant suspicion and even sporadic acts of hostility—overt and covert.” Al-Azmeh’s capture of Kashoosh can be read as a desire to free oneself from this weight—to break through the suffocating haze, even if that breaking comes at the cost of becoming unmoored from all that was once known.

"Unfairy Tales: The story of Ivine and Pillow" By: UNICEF. Creation Date: Mar 28, 2016. Source:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3scOr_d9Dwo&t=149s

In 2016, the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) released a mini-series titled Unfairy Tales, documenting real stories of Syrian children who had been stripped of their right to live a peaceful and safe life. One episode follows the story of Ivine and her pillow’s journey during the Assad regime’s bombing campaign on her hometown. Much of Ivine’s testimony echoes Khosravi’s description of refugeeness, where “pain and suffering have become the hallmarks of refugeeness.”

A glance at the UNICEF video raises the question: What is the organization’s intended goal in propagating Ivine’s story? Khosravi argues that “the term ‘refugee’ generally signifies deprived and underprivileged people. A ‘real’ refugee is thus supposed to be a ‘profound,’ ‘poor,’ ‘traumatized,’ ‘serious,’ and of course, ‘sad’ person.” Through Unfairy Tales, Ivine embodies this sadness—not as a fleeting emotion but as an enduring state of being, one that seeps into her dreams and sorrows, marking trauma as the defining characteristic of her displacement. UNICEF’s production may be for fundraising purposes, to showcase an example that hits deep into the hearts and mind of those watching Syria’s vivisection in real time.

What the watchful eye is able to discern from Ivine’s recollections are the details she chooses to emphasize, which illustrate how ghorba is far more than nostalgia for home or longing for a past stability. It is the horror and struggle the mind and body endure, even in the briefest of moments—the way ghorba carves itself into memory, shaping perception, suffocating agency, and defining existence through loss. Ivine’s story does not merely recount the moment of dislocation but rather exposes how ghorba lingers, how exile is not just about leaving but about the inescapable weight of being unrooted, the persistent ache of belonging nowhere. Khosravi writes, “A life in exile is like being condemned to purgatory, a state between life and death, a limbo between here and there… Exile can therefore be felt bodily. I feel it in my agoraphobia. In exile, not even time follows its normal rhythm. In exile, the past exists side by side with the present. Exilic life is the constant presence of the absent” (p. 74). For many like Ivine, a life in Ghorba embodies a suspended state, where trauma and memory exist in the physical and psychological residue of displacement. For the Tagharrab, Ghorba is not merely a geographical rupture but a temporal and existential one, where the past and present collapse into a singular burden, where home remains both vividly present and impossibly distant.

The Agonies of Death

Graffiti is a powerful assertion of existence. Those who take up the spray can leave an imprint of their presence, trapping their emotions onto a public canvas—for all to see, for all to interpret, and for all to acknowledge the bravery of the one who dared to write.

On a wall in Idlib, Syria, graffiti captures the agony of displacement and the life it entails. The sprayer, as the story goes, tries to hide their tears, determined to remain strong in front of their family, to conceal their vulnerability as they journey from home toward the unknown. Someone warns them, Do not show your weakness; people rely on you. They respond:

“Displacement causes agonies similar to the agonies of death.”

Reflecting on the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, Khosravi writes that his “displacement endures even in death.” For Benjamin—and for many in the Arabic-speaking world—ghorba has cast them as the perpetual other, the one whose death and destitution hold little weight in the eyes of hegemonic power. The apparatuses that dictate who gets to live, who gets to die, who is mourned, and who must be ignored extend beyond life itself, shaping the very conditions of remembrance.

For those engulfed in ghorba, exile is not just an individual burden but a systemic erasure. The displaced are denied not only a home but the dignity of recognition, their suffering rendered invisible except for the traces they carve into walls, the words they leave behind in defiance. The graffiti in Idlib can be seen inscription of pain and a final stand against disappearance, affirming the insistence that even in exile, even in death, the tagharrab will not be forgotten.

The immigrant, 2017

I include Sliman Mansour’s paintings whenever I get the chance. As I write, The Immigrant hangs before me, staring back as I try to make sense of the caricature that, as I grow older, has become a mirror of my own feelings in public spaces. The strangeness of seeing a traditionally dressed woman in a city as modernized as New York—the quiet dissonance of belonging yet not—has always reminded me of the tagharrab experience. No matter how much effort is made to blend in, to move with the current, displacement lingers. It is a shadow that follows, a presence that resists assimilation, a reminder that some bodies will always feel out of place.

Hannoum, in his work, highlights those very bodies—those who look out of place, who feel out of place—in Tangier, a city long known for housing a multitude of nationalities. Despite the internationalism that Tangier has been celebrated for, West Africans remain pushed to the gates, excluded from the city's cosmopolitan promise, left in the margins where they are reduced to what Hannoum describes as “a painting of black heads” (p. 136). Their presence, though undeniable, is flattened into an aesthetic of foreignness—visible yet unrecognized, existing yet peripheral.

And so, there is Hell. This image encapsulates both the obscurity and purity of the ghorba experience. It demands the viewer’s full attention, to observe every character, every detail, to grasp the chaotic, unflinching, exhilarating, and revelatory nature of ghorba—a state that is, at once, dark and suffocating.

Working Bibliography

Al-Issa, Bashar. 2022. “Hell - Creative Memory.” Creative Memory - Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution (blog). October 19, 2022. https://creativememory.org/hell/.

Azmeh, Jaber al-. 2011. “About a Young Man Named Kashoosh - Creative Memory.” Creative Memory - Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution (blog). November 24, 2011. https://creativememory.org/about-a-young-man-named-kashoosh/.

Bakkur, Muhammad al-. 2020. “The Agonies of Death - Creative Memory.” Creative Memory - Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution (blog). February 11, 2020. https://creativememory.org/the-agonies-of-death/.

Hannoum, Abdelmajid. 2020. Living Tangier: Migration, Race, and Illegality in a Moroccan City. University of Pennsylvania Press.

Khosravi, S. 2010. “Illegal” Traveller: An Auto-Ethnography of Borders. Springer.

Murad, Hasan. 2013. “Exile - Creative Memory.” Creative Memory - Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution (blog). March 12, 2013. https://creativememory.org/exile-2/.

Pearlman, Windy. 2024. The Home I Worked to Make. Liveright.

Said, Edward W. 2001. Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays. https://ci.nii.ac.jp/ncid/BA54417960.

Sliman Mansour - Palestinian posters and art prints. 2024. “The Immigrant, 2017 - Palestine Art by Sliman Mansour.” Palestinian Art by Sliman Mansour - Palestinian Art Prints and Posters by Sliman Mansour. January 5, 2024. https://slimanmansour.com/product/the-immigrant-2017/.