Inheriting freedom

May 4, 2026

Inheriting freedom

I sign up for a workshop offered by Yasmeen Kanaan after reading a magazine article about her work and meeting her at a conference. It’s an opportunity to give my partner time to work on her final thesis corrections, so I take my 3 ½ year old son on a metro ride to Concordia. We walk into the space with several arms offering to help with the pram up the stairs. I recognize folks from the conference a few days prior, someone who had come to a drop-in space that I had offered with Helem on the theme of grief and suicide, and two new faces. I grab my son’s blocks and sit him on my lap at the round table.

My son understands the ask and he begins to color with the pencils at the table right away. Yasmeen welcomes us and points to a large piece of canvas at the center of the table. She explains that the topic of the workshop is how we can carry home with us wherever we go. The center canvas piece is intended to be a suitcase. By the end of the workshop, we will each paint something on it, and Yasmeen will take it to be sown at the tailor after.

I must hold onto my son, the chair, myself, to stop from running out of the room.

The suitcase is the symbol of my mother’s anxieties.

“Kil hayati 3ayishta bil shanta” – she used to say her whole life was lived in a suitcase. She was the one who taught me to always have a go-bag, a runaway bag, and what to put in it to keep it as light as possible. In order of importance:

• Passports, governmental ID cards, and birth certificate

• Gold jewelry and coins, because when you can’t have land or citizenship, and your currency fluctuates wildly, and governments can freeze bank accounts and bankrupt countries, you invest in gold.

• US Dollars, whatever you can afford, or equivalent if/when world order changes

• Container of key medications (anti-anxiety, pain, gastrointestinal, antibiotics, small bottle of hydrogen peroxide + any illness related meds) and band aids

• For each family member:

  • Two pairs each of: clean underwear, socks, tank tops- rolled up tight in a cloth bag (the cloth bag can be used as a first-aid wrap if needed)

  • Travel raincoat that folds up tiny

  • Toothbrush

• One package of wet wipes, in a Ziplock to keep from drying out

• Small bar of soap and tube of toothpaste, in a Ziplock

• One large refillable water bottle

• Couple of granola bars or packet of biscuits

The rest is on your person (comfortable sneakers or light boots, elastic waist pants, tank top, long-sleeve t-shirt, zip-up hoodie, medium coat, a large pashmina scarf that can function as a scarf/shawl/hoodie/wrap-around skirt, wear your sentimental jewelry – and never leave without a hand of Fatima). Anything else is extra and dependent on the context of the need-to-escape situation.

Mama’s rule was to have just one child. You grab her with one hand and the bag with another, and you run.

What if I have a son

All the more reason to only have one and not shoot yourself in the foot with a second.

#ifykyk

As an adult, I have often wondered why not the image of two children with two parents, especially since her and my father were always so in love until and beyond the end, and she was so close to my younger sibling. But then I remember the times my father was a political prisoner with no certainty about release, and that those may have been the times she would have had to run. Alone. With only two hands, not four.

Seven months after my father died- her rock, her soulmate- she came to visit me in Canada. Her cancer indicator was through the roof. She wanted to see my new home, to rummage in the kitchen, to have a visual image of where I had landed. I told her that if she wanted to die in Lebanon, with her community, we needed to get on a plane the next morning. She was quiet, not answering. Then I said it out loud. That if she died in my home, I could cremate her and bring her back to be buried (illegally) with my father (that’s a different story than this one). She agreed.

And.

She said her whole life was lived in a suitcase, it made sense to also die in one.

So, when I sat at that table facing Yasmeen’s proposed activity, I wanted to scream. I had been taking planes on my own since I was 7 years old. Suitcases for me were always exciting adventures. I was an expert at packing. Then with time, the suitcase became the see-saw between all my homes. Then it became the symbol of not being able to go home because of war and illegal Israeli invasion and genocide and ethnic cleansing. When I’d packed a small bag for the weekend conference in Quebec City, my anxiety had reached the edge of derealization. We are not traveling outside of Canada this summer, and I’m relieved.

Maybe I can use my son as an excuse to leave early or play on the floor instead of participating in the activity. He is focused on coloring. He’s not moving from the table.

The first prompt comes. I won’t give it the poetic justice it deserves in how Yasmeen offers it. What would you put in your suitcase? It can be objects, images, metaphors, ideas.

And the first thing that comes unexpectedly is scent. The scent of so many of the homes my family has lived in. Salt first. Saltiness off the Mediterranean Sea, mixed with car exhaust, croissants and za’atar. The inhalation of salt in the back of your throat during high humidity summers by the Arabian sea. My grandmother’s lavender sachets in European closets so they remain moth-free should you not be able to return for a while (because even Europe is subject to suspicion when it takes 30 years to be granted citizenship there). The heady – almost blue cheese sickening - waves of white gardenias in Mount Lebanon mixed with Turkish coffee. The gentle sensuality of jasmine that opens at night to welcome you to one of your homes (another one where you don’t have citizenship) when your plane lands at 1am. The clean crisp scent of the soil, olive trees, seafood, orange blossoms, and more sea salt on a side of the Mediterranean that feels like home because of the Arabian crusades and because it is, without borders, the same soil.

I don’t know what Haifa smells like, but I imagine the salinity is the binding thread.

More things come to me, and we all share and build off each other’s memories, stories, seemingly random images. The prompts are layered, deepening. My anxiety is gone. I am sharing a Syrian family recipe that would go in my suitcase that the others have not heard of before. Yasmeen asks how heavy or light our suitcase is. Mine is a helium balloon, to make it easy to run with my son, or in case I need to let it go to carry my child. It would float off and not be left for whatever, whoever, is coming after us.

The prompt that releases something deep comes towards the end.

What is one permanent thing about your home

War.

that you want to bring with you?

The answer is too fast in my mindheart. War. But I quickly tell myself that it was outside of my home, so what was permanently inside?

The anxiety.

The anxiety represented by the suitcase. The anxiety of both my grandmothers who I lived with at different times. One single, widowed in her 40s, her anxiety of constraint. The other, co-dependent with her husband, the anxiety of loss, passed to my mother, passed to me.

I do not want to bring the anxiety in my suitcase. Other things come to me, like my father promising me that my greatest inheritance will be my education, and he was not referring to my university degrees. But that is so embodied, it is me, it doesn’t need a suitcase. What was a permanent part of my home that I still need to practice and carry intentionally with me?

The anxiety feels omnipresent. I’m getting annoyed with myself. I hold my son’s warm body. I breathe in his scent. His softness. And the memory slams into me.

Coming home from school, I’m 7 years old. I’ve already taken international flights on my own because there was no choice. I walk into the garden, slam the gate behind me, and start stripping off my school uniform that I will hate while wearing it for 14 years. I’m dropping clothes onto the ground down to my underwear. My mother is at the front door moving fast.

What are you doing? Can’t you wait to get into the house to undress???

And I stop her dead in her tracks with just one question:  Can’t I be free for just one minute?

She is standing still, looking at me, but she is clearly somewhere else. I see the flash of worry mixed with fear begin to shift. As an adult, looking back, I could guess the fear was about a willful daughter, a queer daughter, a constantly questioning daughter, a daughter much darker in skin and hair than her. But back then, I just registered fear. Then curiosity entered her eyes, and she suddenly looked so much younger. The woman my father fell for, perhaps. Then her shoulders straightened out from under her triggers. I saw the resolve that I will learn to recognize over and over and over throughout our time together. The resolve that shows up at border gates and military check points, in offices with bureaucratic made-up problems, and in cancer diagnoses. She walks over, hugs me, takes all my clothes.

Go. Play.

I tell the story at the workshop. Or the sketch of the story, and another memory joins in, from three decades later. I’m driving my mother home after an oncologist visit, up the winding, narrow roads of Mount Lebanon. I tell her that my partner and I have decided to have a child.

How?

Alternative reproduction.

But that’s unnatural?

Mama, if you want natural, I can pull over and you can ride the rest of the way home on a donkey.

Right. Ok. When can I expect my grandchild?

By the time I’m in my early 40s, my mother has perfected the art of not letting her anxieties rule anything.

In Arabic, liberation and freedom share the same etymological root: tahrir and houriyeh. Like hope, freedom is a constant practice in the present*, not some future legitimated state. That is what is in my suitcase. That is why it is so light.

* Formulation courtesy of Samera Esmeir